Kai Jia
Author directory2026
UniBrowse: A Data-to-Agent Framework for Multimodal BrowseComp
Xiyu Wei | Qingwei Zong | Zhuocheng Yu | Feng Zhang | Kai Jia | Sujian Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiyu Wei | Qingwei Zong | Zhuocheng Yu | Feng Zhang | Kai Jia | Sujian Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multimodal BrowseComp tasks require agents to combine perception, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning over dynamic web content, challenging their ability to handle compositional structure, open-world uncertainty, and multimodal integration across extended interactions. Crucially, real-world multimodal browsing involves three distinct information-flow patterns: text-only, image-to-text, and text-to-image, yet existing data construction methods cover only the text-only and image-to-text patterns, leaving text-to-image largely unaddressed and limiting agent generality and robustness. We introduce UniBrowse, a unified data pipeline that for the first time simultaneously generates training data covering all three patterns, augments curated knowledge graphs with live web retrieval for improved fidelity, and introduces a novel metric of exploration degree to filter low-signal instances for efficient reinforcement learning. Through this pipeline, we produce high-quality cold-start tool-use trajectories and exploration-rich QA pairs, and train a 35B-scale agent via supervised fine-tuning and exploration-aware RL. The resulting UniBrowse agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on multimodal BrowseComp benchmarks, attaining an average accuracy of 54.4 across five diverse benchmarks—an improvement of 10.5 points over its base model Qwen3.5-35B-A3B—and surpassing serveral closed-source agent workflows such as GPT-5 (42.9), Gemini-2.5 Pro (44.8), and Gemini-2.5 Flash (41.3).
Toward Autonomous Long-Horizon Engineering for ML Research
Guoxin Chen | Jie Chen | Lei Chen | Zhao Jiale | Fanzhe Meng | Xin Zhao | Ruihua Song | Cheng Chen | Ji-Rong Wen | Kai Jia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Guoxin Chen | Jie Chen | Lei Chen | Zhao Jiale | Fanzhe Meng | Xin Zhao | Ruihua Song | Cheng Chen | Ji-Rong Wen | Kai Jia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Agentic systems increasingly automate pieces of AI research. Yet turning underspecified research objectives into runnable, experimentally validated ML systems remains a central bottleneck. We study this operational setting as long-horizon ML research engineering: converting a research specification into a runnable ML system through repeated implementation, experimentation, and refinement. The central challenge is to sustain cumulative project progress across heterogeneous stages under delayed, confounded feedback. We introduce AiScientist, a multi-agent system built around thin control over thick state: a lightweight hierarchical research team coordinates through a File-as-Bus workspace that preserves decision-relevant artifacts across roles and invocations. On PaperBench, AiScientist improves over the strongest matched baselines by 9.92 and 11.15 points with Gemini-3-Flash and GLM-5, respectively. On MLE-Bench Lite, it reaches 81.82 Any Medal% under both backbones, improving over the strongest matched baselines by 4.55 and 16.67 points, and exceeding a Codex/GPT-5.5 xhigh frontier harness reference by 13.64 Any Medal points. Ablations and process analyses show that durable project state is central to later-round refinement: removing File-as-Bus lowers PaperBench score by 6.41 points and MLE-Bench Lite Any Medal% by 31.82 points. These results suggest that long-horizon AI research is not only a problem of stronger local reasoning, but a systems problem of maintaining cumulative, inspectable project progress.
Immersion in the GitHub Universe: Scaling Coding Agents to Mastery
Zhao Jiale | Guoxin Chen | Fanzhe Meng | Minghao Li | Jie Chen | Hui Xu | Yongshuai Sun | Xin Zhao | Ruihua Song | Yuan Zhang | Peng Wang | Cheng Chen | Ji-Rong Wen | Kai Jia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhao Jiale | Guoxin Chen | Fanzhe Meng | Minghao Li | Jie Chen | Hui Xu | Yongshuai Sun | Xin Zhao | Ruihua Song | Yuan Zhang | Peng Wang | Cheng Chen | Ji-Rong Wen | Kai Jia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Achieving mastery in real-world software engineering tasks is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality training data. Scaling such data has been limited by the complexity of environment setup, unit-test generation, and problem statement curation. In this paper, we propose Scale-SWE, an automated, sandboxed multi-agent workflow designed to construct high-quality SWE data at scale. The system coordinates three specialized agents—for environment setup, test creation, and problem description synthesis—to process 6 million pull requests across 5.2k repositories, producing Scale-SWE-Data: 100k verified SWE instances, the largest such dataset to date. It substantially surpasses existing real-world datasets in repository diversity and reflects realistic task complexity. We further demonstrate the dataset’s utility for training by distilling 71,498 high-quality trajectories and fine-tuning Qwen-30B-A3B-Instruct to produce Scale-SWE-Agent. Our agent achieves a 64% resolve rate on SWE-Bench-Verified—a nearly three-fold improvement over the base model. Scale-SWE provides a scalable, reproducible approach for data construction to advance LLM-based software engineering.
SelfBudgeter: Adaptive Token Allocation for Efficient LLM Reasoning
Zheng Li | Qingxiu Dong | Jingyuan Ma | Di Zhang | Kai Jia | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zheng Li | Qingxiu Dong | Jingyuan Ma | Di Zhang | Kai Jia | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recently, large reasoning models demonstrate exceptional performance on various tasks. However, reasoning models always consume excessive tokens even for simple queries, leading to resource waste and prolonged user latency. To address this challenge, we propose SelfBudgeter - a self-adaptive reasoning strategy for efficient and controllable reasoning. Specifically, we first train the model to self-estimate the required reasoning budget based on the query. We then introduce budget-guided GRPO for reinforcement learning, which effectively maintains accuracy while reducing output length. Experimental results demonstrate that SelfBudgeter dynamically allocates budgets according to problem complexity, achieving an average response length compression of 61% on math reasoning tasks while maintaining accuracy. Furthermore, SelfBudgeter allows users to see how long generation will take and decide whether to continue or stop. Additionally, users can directly control the reasoning length by setting token budgets upfront.