Wei Jiang
Publications
Securing the Floor and Raising the Ceiling: A Merging-based Paradigm for Multi-modal Search Agents
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have motivated the development of multi-modal search agents that can actively invoke external search tools and integrate retrieved evidence through multi-step reasoning. While promising, existing approaches typically rely on large-scale supervised trajectories or expensive reinforcement learning (RL), leading to high training cost, instability, and a severe cold-start problem for standard VLMs. We propose a training-free paradigm to empower VLMs with autonomous search capabilities via cross-modal model merging. By fusing a text-based search agent with a base VLM, we show that multi-modal search capabilities can be effectively composed without any additional multi-modal training data. To mitigate parameter interference during cross-modal integration, we introduce Optimal Brain Merging (OBM), a saliency-aware merging algorithm that identifies task-critical parameters based on their impact on model loss using only a small set of calibration samples. Extensive experiments on search-intensive benchmarks (e.g., InfoSeek, MMSearch) reveal that: (1) Model merging secures a reasonable performance floor as a zero-shot agent, with OBM achieving superior search rates; (2) OBM significantly raises the performance ceiling as a warm-start strategy, achieving faster convergence and higher peak accuracy than standard VLM initialization.
GraphScout: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Exploration Ability for Agentic Graph Reasoning
Knowledge graphs provide structured and reliable information for many real-world applications, motivating increasing interest in combining large language models (LLMs) with graph-based retrieval to improve factual grounding. Recent Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) methods therefore introduce iterative interaction between LLMs and knowledge graphs to enhance reasoning capability. However, existing approaches typically depend on manually designed guidance and interact with knowledge graphs through a limited set of predefined tools, which substantially constrains graph exploration. To address these limitations, we propose GraphScout, a training-centric agentic graph reasoning framework equipped with more flexible graph exploration tools. GraphScout enables models to autonomously interact with knowledge graphs to synthesize structured training data which are then used to post-train LLMs, thereby internalizing agentic graph reasoning ability without laborious manual annotation or task curation. Extensive experiments across five knowledge-graph domains show that a small model (e.g., Qwen3-4B) augmented with GraphScout outperforms baseline methods built on leading LLMs (e.g., Qwen-Max) by an average of 16.7\% while requiring significantly fewer inference tokens. Moreover, GraphScout exhibits robust cross-domain transfer performance. Our code will be made publicly available~\footnote{https://github.com/Ying-Yuchen/_GraphScout_}.
SVRepair: Structured Visual Reasoning for Automated Program Repair
Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for Automated Program Repair (APR), yet most existing approaches remain unimodal and fail to leverage the rich diagnostic signals contained in visual artifacts such as screenshots and control-flow graphs. In practice, many bug reports convey critical information visually (e.g., layout breakage or missing widgets), but directly using such dense visual inputs often causes context loss and noise, making it difficult for MLLMs to ground visual observations into precise fault localization and executable patches. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose \textbf{SVRepair}, a multimodal APR framework with structured visual representation. SVRepair first fine-tunes a vision-language model, \textbf{Structured Visual Representation (SVR)}, to uniformly transform heterogeneous visual artifacts into a \emph{semantic scene graph} that captures GUI elements and their structural relations (e.g., hierarchy), providing normalized, code-relevant context for downstream repair. Building on the graph, SVRepair drives a coding agent to localize faults and synthesize patches, and further introduces an iterative visual-artifact segmentation strategy that progressively narrows the input to bug-centered regions to suppress irrelevant context and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: SVRepair achieves \textbf{36.47\%} accuracy on SWE-Bench M, \textbf{38.02\%} on MMCode, and \textbf{95.12\%} on CodeVision, validating the effectiveness of SVRepair for multimodal program repair.
EGSS: Entropy-guided Stepwise Scaling for Reliable Software Engineering
Agentic Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has delivered state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on complex software engineering tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, its practical adoption remains limited due to significant computational overhead, primarily driven by two key challenges: (1) the high cost associated with deploying excessively large ensembles, and (2) the lack of a reliable mechanism for selecting the optimal candidate solution, ultimately constraining the performance gains that can be realized. To address these challenges, we propose Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS), a novel TTS framework that dynamically balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropy-guided adaptive search and robust test-suite augmentation. Extensive experiments on SWE-Bench-Verified demonstrate that EGSS consistently boosts performance by 5-10% across all evaluated models. Specifically, it increases the resolved ratio of Kimi-K2-Intruct from 63.2% to 72.2%, and GLM-4.6 from 65.8% to 74.6%. Furthermore, when paired with GLM-4.6, EGSS achieves a new state-of-the-art among open-source large language models. In addition to these accuracy improvements, EGSS reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% compared to existing TTS methods, achieving simultaneous gains in both effectiveness and computational efficiency.
Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization
Code localization constitutes a key bottleneck in automated software development pipelines. While concurrent tool execution can enhance discovery speed, current agents demonstrate a 34.9\% redundant invocation rate, which negates parallelism benefits. We propose \textbf{FuseSearch}, reformulating parallel code localization as a \textbf{joint quality-efficiency optimization} task. Through defining \textbf{tool efficiency} -- the ratio of unique information gain to invocation count -- we utilize a two-phase SFT and RL training approach for learning adaptive parallel strategies. Different from fixed-breadth approaches, FuseSearch dynamically modulates search breadth according to task context, evolving from exploration phases to refinement stages. Evaluated on SWE-bench Verified, FuseSearch-4B achieves SOTA-level performance (84.7\% file-level and 56.4\% function-level $F_1$ scores) with 93.6\% speedup, utilizing 67.7\% fewer turns and 68.9\% fewer tokens. Results indicate that efficiency-aware training naturally improves quality through eliminating noisy redundant signals, enabling high-performance cost-effective localization agents.