Gong Zhi
Author directoryAlso published as: Zhi Gong
2026
UI-Oceanus: Scaling GUI Agents with Synthetic Environmental Dynamics
Mengzhou Wu | Yuzhe Guo | Yuan Cao | Haochuan Lu | Songhe Zhu | Pingzhe Qu | Xin Chen | Kang Qin | Zhongpu Wang | Xiaode Zhang | Xinyi Wang | Wei Dai | Gang Cao | Yuetang Deng | Zhi Gong | Dezhi Ran | Linyi Li | Wei Yang | Tao Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mengzhou Wu | Yuzhe Guo | Yuan Cao | Haochuan Lu | Songhe Zhu | Pingzhe Qu | Xin Chen | Kang Qin | Zhongpu Wang | Xiaode Zhang | Xinyi Wang | Wei Dai | Gang Cao | Yuetang Deng | Zhi Gong | Dezhi Ran | Linyi Li | Wei Yang | Tao Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Scaling generalist GUI agents is hindered by the data scalability bottleneck of expensive human demonstrations and reliance on ungrounded synthetic teacher supervision. To transcend these limitations, we propose , a framework that shifts the learning focus from mimicking high-level trajectories to learning interaction dynamics from executed transitions. Through a systematic investigation of self-supervised objectives, we identify that forward dynamics, defined as the generative prediction of future interface states, acts as the primary driver for scalability and outperforms inverse and backward objectives. leverages this insight by converting low-cost autonomous exploration into high-density generative supervision to learn a semantic transition world model from executed transitions. Experimental evaluations across a series of models demonstrate consistent gains from our approach: models utilizing Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on synthetic dynamics outperform non-CPT baselines with an average success rate improvement of 7% on offline benchmarks, which amplifies to a 16.8% gain in real-world online navigation. Furthermore, we observe that navigation performance scales with synthetic data volume. These results suggest that grounding agents in forward predictive modeling offers a promising pathway to scalable GUI automation with cross-domain adaptability and compositional generalization.
CoBRA: Learning Tool-Use Boundaries via Counterfactual Margins
Wenhao Zou | Xianglong Liu | Wendong Bi | Hanjie Wang | Simin Zhao | Gong Zhi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Wenhao Zou | Xianglong Liu | Wendong Bi | Hanjie Wang | Simin Zhao | Gong Zhi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As large language models increasingly act through external tools, deciding when to call a tool has become a central problem alongside deciding how to use it. Unnecessary tool calls introduce latency, cost, retrieval noise, and error propagation, while missed calls hurt knowledge-intensive queries or questions requiring up-to-date evidence. Existing methods typically trigger tools from absolute query or generation signals, such as difficulty, confidence, or final task reward, and therefore lack an explicit estimate of the instance-level marginal benefit of tool use. We propose CoBRA, a counterfactual boundary-learning framework for tool-augmented language models. CoBRA first constructs internal and external experts from the same base model, collects paired trajectories, and estimates the reward margin between answering with and without tools. This margin partitions data into internal-favored, external-favored, and ambiguous cases. CoBRA then uses clear-margin samples for Boundary-Aware Cold-Start SFT, followed by MARS-RL with reference-split rollouts and counterfactual marginal advantages to optimize boundary decisions. Experiments with retrieval as the main tool on Qwen3-4B show that CoBRA improves tool-use efficiency and boundary-sensitive answer accuracy while maintaining strong performance on tool-dependent out-of-distribution questions.
GUI0: Self-Evolving Foundational GUI Agents in Super App Ecosystems
Xinyi Wang | Wei Dai | Kyle Qiao | Ke Wang | Peng Chen | Gang Cao | Kang Qin | Zhongpu Wang | Xiaode Zhang | Yanming Liu | Jihao Gu | Jingtao Xu | Gong Zhi
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xinyi Wang | Wei Dai | Kyle Qiao | Ke Wang | Peng Chen | Gang Cao | Kang Qin | Zhongpu Wang | Xiaode Zhang | Yanming Liu | Jihao Gu | Jingtao Xu | Gong Zhi
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automated interaction with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is central to General Artificial Intelligence yet remains challenging within Super App ecosystems, characterized by non-standard rendering and absent accessibility metadata. While GUI agents often rely on explicit accessibility trees or static imitation, they are less explored for dynamic environments marked by sparse feedback and implicit visual cues. We present GUI0, a framework synergizing autonomous data synthesis with dual-agent co-evolution. GUI0 establishes a domain-aware foundation model via synthesized corpora and employs curriculum-driven reinforcement learning, where a curriculum agent generates boundary tasks to optimize an actor agent.Empirical results demonstrate three key advantages: (1) State-of-the-art performance on the SuperAPP benchmark, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-4-Sonnet; (2) universal efficacy across diverse base models, consistently yielding substantial improvements on both Qwen2.5-VL and GUI-Owl variants; and (3) robust zero-shot generalization to standard GUIs (e.g., +62.7% on ScreenSpot Pro).
2025
KAPA: A Deliberative Agent Framework with Tree-Structured Knowledge Base for Multi-Domain User Intent Understanding
Jiakai Tang | Shiqi Shen | Zhipeng Wang | Gong Zhi | Xueyang Feng | Zexu Sun | Haoran Tan | Xu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Jiakai Tang | Shiqi Shen | Zhipeng Wang | Gong Zhi | Xueyang Feng | Zexu Sun | Haoran Tan | Xu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Dialogue assistants have become ubiquitous in modern applications, fundamentally reshaping human daily communication patterns and information access behaviors. In real-world conversational interactions, however, user queries are often volatile, ambiguous, and diverse, making it difficult accurately and efficiently grasp the user’s underlying intentions. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective deliberative agent framework that leverages human thought process to build high-level domain knowledge. To further achieve efficient knowledge accumulation and retrieval, we design a tree-structured knowledge base to store refined experience and data. Moreover, we construct a new benchmark, User-Intent-Understanding (UIU), which covers multi-domain, multi-tone, and sequential multi-turn personalized user queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method across multi-step evaluations.
2024
Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models
Zhi-Yuan Chen | Shiqi Shen | Guangyao Shen | Gong Zhi | Xu Chen | Yankai Lin
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhi-Yuan Chen | Shiqi Shen | Guangyao Shen | Gong Zhi | Xu Chen | Yankai Lin
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recently, tool use with LLMs has become one of the primary research topics as it can help LLM generate truthful and helpful responses. Existing studies on tool use with LLMs primarily focus on enhancing the tool-calling ability of LLMs. In practice, like chat assistants, LLMs are also required to align with human values in the context of tool use. Specifically, LLMs should refuse to answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions and insecure tool responses to ensure their reliability and harmlessness. At the same time, LLMs should demonstrate autonomy in tool use to reduce the costs associated with tool calling. To tackle this issue, we first introduce the principle that LLMs should follow in tool use scenarios: H2A. The goal of H2A is to align LLMs with helpfulness, harmlessness, and autonomy. In addition, we propose ToolAlign, a dataset comprising instruction-tuning data and preference data to align LLMs with the H2A principle for tool use. Based on ToolAlign, we develop LLMs by supervised fine-tuning and preference learning, and experimental results demonstrate that the LLMs exhibit remarkable tool-calling capabilities, while also refusing to engage with harmful content, and displaying a high degree of autonomy in tool utilization. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zhiyuanc2001/ToolAlign.
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Co-authors
- Gang Cao 2
- Xu Chen 2
- Wei Dai 2
- Kang Qin 2
- Shiqi Shen 2
- Xinyi Wang 2
- Zhongpu Wang 2
- Xiaode Zhang 2
- Wendong Bi 1
- Yuan Cao 1
- Peng Chen 1
- Xin Chen 1
- Zhi-Yuan Chen 1
- Yuetang Deng 1
- Xueyang Feng 1
- Jihao Gu 1
- Yuzhe Guo 1
- Linyi Li 1
- Yankai Lin (林衍凯) 1
- Xianglong Liu 1
- Yanming Liu 1
- Haochuan Lu 1
- Kyle Qiao 1
- Pingzhe Qu 1
- Dezhi Ran 1
- Guangyao Shen 1
- Zexu Sun 1
- Haoran Tan 1
- Jiakai Tang 1
- Hanjie Wang 1
- Ke Wang 1
- Zhipeng Wang 1
- Mengzhou Wu 1
- Tao Xie 1
- Jingtao Xu 1
- Wei Yang 1
- Simin Zhao 1
- Songhe Zhu 1
- Wenhao Zou 1