Yuan Xie
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Yuan Xie
2026
Auto-Stega: An Agent-Driven System for Lifelong Strategy Evolution in LLM-Based Text Steganography
Jiuan Zhou | Yu Cheng | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jiuan Zhou | Yu Cheng | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
With the rapid progress of LLMs, high quality generative text has become widely available as a cover for text steganography. However, prevailing methods rely on hand-crafted or pre-specified strategies and struggle to balance efficiency, imperceptibility, and security, particularly at high embedding rates. Accordingly, we propose Auto-Stega, an agent-driven self-evolving framework that is the first to realize self-evolving steganographic strategies by automatically discovering, composing, and adapting strategies at inference time; the framework operates as a closed loop of generating, evaluating, summarizing, and updating that continually curates a structured strategy library and adapts across corpora, styles, and task constraints. A decoding LLM recovers the information under the shared strategy. To handle high embedding rates, we introduce PC-DNTE, a plug-and-play algorithm that maintains alignment with the base model’s conditional distribution at high embedding rates, preserving imperceptibility while enhancing security. Experimental results demonstrate that at higher embedding rates Auto-Stega achieves superior performance with gains of 42.2% in perplexity and 1.6% in anti-steganalysis performance over SOTA methods.
TAME: A Trustworthy Test-Time Evolution of Agent Memory with Systematic Benchmarking
Yu Cheng | Yongkang Hu | Jiuan Zhou | Yushuo Zhang | Yihang Chen | Huichi Zhou | Mingang Chen | Zhizhong Zhang | Kun Shao | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yu Cheng | Yongkang Hu | Jiuan Zhou | Yushuo Zhang | Yihang Chen | Huichi Zhou | Mingang Chen | Zhizhong Zhang | Kun Shao | Yuan Xie | Zhaoxia Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Test-time evolution of agent memory represents a pivotal paradigm for advancing AGI, as it strengthens complex reasoning through experience accumulation without requiring parameter updates. However, even during benign task evolution, agent safety alignment remains vulnerable—a phenomenon known as Agent Memory Misevolution. To evaluate this phenomenon, we construct the Trust-Memevo benchmark and find that agents exhibit an overall decline in trustworthiness across multiple tasks during benign task evolution. To address this issue, we propose TAME, a trust-aware memory evolution framework in which a shared memory bank is jointly governed by an Executor and an Evaluator. The Executor retrieves and applies transferable experiences to support task solving, while the Evaluator assesses the contribution of each utilized experience to the outcome and produces trust-aware feedback to guide subsequent memory use. This executor–evaluator loop enables memory to be selectively reinforced, cautiously reused, and continuously expanded over time. Experiments show that TAME mitigates memory misevolution while achieving strong task performance. In particular, on the GPT-5.2 AIME benchmark, TAME improves accuracy by 14.6 percentage points over the strongest existing method and maintains competitive trustworthiness.
VideoSearcher: Empowering Video Deep Research with Multi-Tool Agentic Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
Zhenkun Gao | Yicheng Bao | Jinlong Peng | Xueheng Li | Suyuan Huang | Bangwei Liu | Kunquan Li | Zhenye Gan | Tao Hu | Chengjun Xie | Xuanhua He | Zhizhong Zhang | Xin Tan | Chengjie Wang | Yuan Xie
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhenkun Gao | Yicheng Bao | Jinlong Peng | Xueheng Li | Suyuan Huang | Bangwei Liu | Kunquan Li | Zhenye Gan | Tao Hu | Chengjun Xie | Xuanhua He | Zhizhong Zhang | Xin Tan | Chengjie Wang | Yuan Xie
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR). However, existing multimodal search agents primarily target static images, and the current VDR benchmark relies on text-centric retrieval that discards crucial visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearcher, a closed-loop agentic framework that empowers Vision-Language Models with multi-tool reasoning for VDR. VideoSearcher unifies temporal localization, spatial focusing, and multimodal search within a single reasoning trajectory, enabling agents to progressively ground visual anchors, retrieve relevant evidence, and synthesize answers. To optimize knowledge-intensive reasoning trajectories, we propose Bi-branch Sequence Policy Optimization (BiSPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples tool-invocation optimization from answer-accuracy optimization. This design provides stable learning signals for both evidence-grounded reasoning and purposeful tool use. Furthermore, we construct VideoSearch-QA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate open-world video information grounding and multimodal search-based reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoSearcher significantly outperforms prior open-source agentic baselines across various search-oriented and multimodal understanding benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Stephen-gzk/VideoSearcher.
NaviMaster: Learning a Unified Policy for GUI and Embodied Navigation Tasks
Zhihao Luo | Wentao Yan | Jingyu Gong | Min Wang | Zhizhong Zhang | Xuhong Wang | Yuan Xie | Xin Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhihao Luo | Wentao Yan | Jingyu Gong | Min Wang | Zhizhong Zhang | Xuhong Wang | Yuan Xie | Xin Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and embodied navigation have driven progress, yet these domains have largely evolved in isolation, with disparate datasets and training paradigms. In this paper, we observe that both tasks can be formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), suggesting a foundational principle for their unification. Hence, we present NaviMaster, the first unified agent capable of unifying GUI navigation and embodied navigation within a single framework. Specifically, NaviMaster (i) proposes a visual-target trajectory collection pipeline that generates trajectories for both GUI and embodied tasks using a single formulation. (ii) employs a unified reinforcement learning framework on the mix data to improve generalization. (iii) designs a novel distance-aware reward to ensure efficient learning from the trajectories. Through extensive experiments on out-of-domain benchmarks, NaviMaster is shown to outperform state-of-the-art agents in GUI navigation, spatial affordance prediction, and embodied navigation. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our unified training strategy, data mixing strategy, and reward design. Resources will be released to the community.