Researcher profile

Haoxiang Ma

Haoxiang Ma contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

HeavySkill: Heavy Thinking as the Inner Skill in Agentic Harness

Recent advances in agentic harness with orchestration frameworks that coordinate multiple agents with memory, skills, and tool use have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks. However, the underlying mechanism that truly drives performance remains obscured behind intricate system designs. In this paper, we propose HeavySkill, a perspective that views heavy thinking not only as a minimal execution unit in orchestration harness but also as an inner skill internalized within the model's parameters that drives the orchestrator to solve complex tasks. We identify this skill as a two-stage pipeline, i.e., parallel reasoning then summarization, which can operate beneath any agentic harness. We present a systematic empirical study of HeavySkill across diverse domains. Our results show that this inner skill consistently outperforms traditional Best-of-N (BoN) strategies; notably, stronger LLMs can even approach Pass@N performance. Crucially, we demonstrate that the depth and width of heavy thinking, as a learnable skill, can be further scaled via reinforcement learning, offering a promising path toward self-evolving LLMs that internalize complex reasoning without relying on brittle orchestration layers.

preprint2023arXiv

Optimal Decoy Resource Allocation for Proactive Defense in Probabilistic Attack Graphs

This paper investigates the problem of synthesizing proactive defense systems in which the defender can allocate deceptive targets and modify the cost of actions for the attacker who aims to compromise security assets in this system. We model the interaction of the attacker and the system using a formal security model -- a probabilistic attack graph. By allocating fake targets/decoys, the defender aims to distract the attacker from compromising true targets. By increasing the cost of some attack actions, the defender aims to discourage the attacker from committing to certain policies and thereby improve the defense. To optimize the defense given limited decoy resources and operational constraints, we formulate the synthesis problem as a bi-level optimization problem, while the defender designs the system, in anticipation of the attacker's best response given that the attacker has disinformation about the system due to the use of deception. Though the general formulation with bi-level optimization is NP-hard, we show that under certain assumptions, the problem can be transformed into a constrained optimization problem. We proposed an algorithm to approximately solve this constrained optimization problem using a novel incentive-design method for projected gradient ascent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using extensive numerical experiments.

preprint2020arXiv

Dynamic Hypergames for Synthesis of Deceptive Strategies with Temporal Logic Objectives

In this paper, we study the use of deception for strategic planning in adversarial environments. We model the interaction between the agent (player 1) and the adversary (player 2) as a two-player concurrent game in which the adversary has incomplete information about the agent's task specification in temporal logic. During the online interaction, the adversary can infer the agent's intention from observations and adapt its strategy so as to prevent the agent from satisfying the task. To plan against such an adaptive opponent, the agent must leverage its knowledge about the adversary's incomplete information to influence the behavior of the opponent, and thereby being deceptive. To synthesize a deceptive strategy, we introduce a class of hypergame models that capture the interaction between the agent and its adversary given asymmetric, incomplete information. A hypergame is a hierarchy of games, perceived differently by the agent and its adversary. We develop the solution concept of this class of hypergames and show that the subjectively rationalizable strategy for the agent is deceptive and maximizes the probability of satisfying the task in temporal logic. This deceptive strategy is obtained by modeling the opponent evolving perception of the interaction and integrating the opponent model into proactive planning. Following the deceptive strategy, the agent chooses actions to influence the game history as well as to manipulate the adversary's perception so that it takes actions that benefit the goal of the agent. We demonstrate the correctness of our deceptive planning algorithm using robot motion planning examples with temporal logic objectives and design a detection mechanism to notify the agent of potential errors in modeling of the adversary's behavior.