Authors

Wenhao Chai

Publications 4

Preprint Open access

From Evidence to Action: How Tool-Using Agents Fail

Tool-using agents make consequential changes to external state, yet correct outcomes do not guarantee that their actions were supported by evidence established beforehand. We study where this evidence-to-action chain breaks as agents move from deciding whether to act to executing single actions and dependent workflows. …

Preprint Open access

Video-Index: A Curated Meta-Benchmark for Video Understanding

Enxin Song, Yinuo Xu, Shusheng Yang et al. · 2026

A video benchmark should reward the capability it claims to measure, yet models can exploit answer options, question text, or partial visual evidence. We introduce the attack pyramid, five levels of shortcut attacks with increasing access to each item, and audit 115 video benchmarks with it. On 35 benchmarks, attackers …

Preprint Open access

EasyPPO: Stabilizing the Critic Is Key

A key strength of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is its learned critic, which uses historical trajectories collected during reinforcement learning to estimate expected returns and reduce policy-gradient variance. However, we find that the critic is also a major source of instability in reinforcement learning for la …

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