Meng Ding
Author directory2026
SCAFFOLD: Self-Improving Web Agents via Recursive Parametric Skill Abstraction
Bowei He | Xiaokun Zhang | Meng Ding | Xue Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Bowei He | Xiaokun Zhang | Meng Ding | Xue Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Web agents need to navigate visually rich, long-horizon interfaces that change across sites, yet most previous agents still learn each task in isolation and discard the procedural knowledge they accumulate. Recent skill-augmented frameworks take an important first step, but they treat the skill library as a flat or two-tier prompt-side cache and offer no principled mechanism for compressing redundancy or composing skills recursively. We introduce Scaffold, a self-improving framework for visual web agents that (i) induces parametric, executable skills from successful trajectories under a multi-instance abstraction constraint, (ii) maintains a recursively composed hierarchy in which higher-level skills invoke lower-level ones, (iii) compacts the library via a minimum-description-length (MDL) criterion and behavioral equivalence checking, and (iv) periodically distills skill-augmented trajectories back into model weights to internalize the abstractions. Across WebArena, VisualWebArena, and a held-out split of Online-Mind2Web, Scaffold improves success rate by 11.1–17.2 absolute points over the strongest skill-augmented baseline and shows monotonic gains across five self-improvement iterations without library collapse. We release the code and documents in the Github [repository](https://github.com/BokwaiHo/SCAFFOLD).
Understanding and Mitigating Cross-lingual Privacy Leakage via Language-specific and Universal Privacy Neurons
Wenshuo Dong | Qingsong Yang | Shu Yang | Lijie Hu | Meng Ding | Wanyu Lin | Tianhang Zheng | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenshuo Dong | Qingsong Yang | Shu Yang | Lijie Hu | Meng Ding | Wanyu Lin | Tianhang Zheng | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive data capture rich information embedded in the training data. However, this also introduces the risk of privacy leakage, particularly involving personally identifiable information (PII). Although previous studies have shown that this risk can be mitigated through methods such as privacy neurons, they all assume that both the (sensitive) training data and user queries are in English. We show that they cannot defend against the privacy leakage in cross-lingual contexts: even if the training data is exclusively in one language, these (private) models may still reveal private information when queried in another language. In this work, we first investigate the information flow of cross-lingual privacy leakage to give a better understanding. We find that LLMs process private information in the middle layers, where representations are largely shared across languages. The risk of leakage peaks when converted to a language-specific space in later layers. Based on this, we identify privacy-universal neurons and language-specific privacy neurons. Privacy-universal neurons influence privacy leakage across all languages, while language-specific privacy neurons are only related to specific languages. By deactivating these neurons, the cross-lingual privacy leakage risk is reduced by 23.3%-31.6%.