1 citations · 1 across the 15 of their papers we have counts for
5 papers · 2 filters
Taming CoT Obfuscation in VLMs: From Mechanistic Evidence to Activation-Level Enforcement
Xutao Mao, Jianing Zhu, Jinman Zhao +4
Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), yet it can induce chain-of-thought (CoT) obfuscation, an operati…
Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents
Xutao Mao, Liangjie Zhao, Xiang Zheng +1
LLM agents increasingly save experience from past tasks as reusable skills through skill evolution. When an agent completes an unsafe task, skill evolution can keep the unsafe proc…
Agents Don't Just Agree, They Remember: Benchmarking Persistent Sycophancy in Self-Improving Personal Agents
Xutao Mao, Liangjie Zhao, Leyao Wang +6
Self-improving personal agents write profiles, memories, and reusable skills that carry over from one chat to the next. Prior works ask whether a model agrees with the user in its…
What Happens Inside Agent Memory? Circuit Analysis from Emergence to Diagnosis
Xutao Mao, Jinman Zhao, Gerald Penn +1
Agent memory failures are silent: an LLM-based agent can produce a fluent response even when it fails to extract, retain, or retrieve the information needed across sessions. The wr…
Just Ask: Curious Code Agents Reveal System Prompts in Frontier LLMs
Xiang Zheng, Yutao Wu, Hanxun Huang +5
Autonomous code agents built on large language models are reshaping software and AI development through tool use, long-horizon reasoning, and self-directed interaction. However, th…