Researcher profile

Yilei Zhao

Yilei Zhao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Advancing ESG Intelligence: An Expert-level Agent and Comprehensive Benchmark for Sustainable Finance

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are essential for evaluating corporate sustainability and ethical performance. However, professional ESG analysis is hindered by data fragmentation across unstructured sources, and existing large language models (LLMs) often struggle with the complex, multi-step workflows required for rigorous auditing. To address these limitations, we introduce ESGAgent, a hierarchical multi-agent system empowered by a specialized toolset, including retrieval augmentation, web search and domain-specific functions, to generate in-depth ESG analysis. Complementing this agentic system, we present a comprehensive three-level benchmark derived from 310 corporate sustainability reports, designed to evaluate capabilities ranging from atomic common-sense questions to the generation of integrated, in-depth analysis. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ESGAgent outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs with an average accuracy of 84.15% on atomic question-answering tasks, and excels in professional report generation by integrating rich charts and verifiable references. These findings confirm the diagnostic value of our benchmark, establishing it as a vital testbed for assessing general and advanced agentic capabilities in high-stakes vertical domains.

preprint2026arXiv

AgentOrchestra: Orchestrating Multi-Agent Intelligence with the Tool-Environment-Agent(TEA) Protocol

Recent advances in LLM-based agent systems have shown promise in tackling complex, long-horizon tasks. However, existing LLM-based agentprotocols (e.g., A2A and MCP) under-specify cross-entity lifecycle and context management, version tracking, and ad-hoc environment integration, which in turn encourages fixed, monolithic agent compositions and brittle glue code. To address these limitations, we introduce the Tool-Environment-Agent (TEA) protocol, a unified abstraction that models environments, agents, and tools as first-class resources with explicit lifecycles and versioned interfaces. TEA provides a principled foundation for end-to-end lifecycle and version management, and for associating each run with its context and outputs across components, improving traceability and reproducibility. Moreover, TEA enables continual self-evolution of agent-associated components through a closed feedback loop, producing improved versions while supporting version selection and rollback. Building on TEA, we present AgentOrchestra, a hierarchical multi-agent framework in which a central planner orchestrates specialized sub-agents for web navigation, data analysis, and file operations, and supports continual adaptation by dynamically instantiating, retrieving, and refining tools online during execution. We evaluate AgentOrchestra on three challenging benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves 89.04% on GAIA, establishing state-of-the-art performance to the best of our knowledge. Overall, our results provide evidence that TEA and hierarchical orchestration improve scalability and generality in multi-agent systems.

preprint2026arXiv

FraudBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Fraudulent Refund Evidence

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated images have become increasingly realistic and readily adaptable to concrete real-world claims, creating new challenges for verifying visual evidence. A concrete emerging risk is AI-generated refund fraud, in which manipulated or synthetic images are used to support claims about damaged products, poor delivery conditions, or service-related defects. Existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks mainly evaluate standalone authenticity classification, cross-generator transfer, or forensic localization, leaving claim-conditioned fraudulent evidence detection underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce FraudBench, a multimodal benchmark for detecting AI-generated fraudulent refund evidence. FraudBench is constructed from real-world user-review evidence across e-commerce, food delivery, and travel-service scenarios. We curate real evidence images together with their associated review and product metadata, identify genuine damaged and undamaged evidence through MLLM-assisted filtering and human annotation, and synthesize fake-damaged evidence from genuine undamaged reference images using six state-of-the-art image editing and generation models. Using FraudBench, we evaluate MLLMs, specialized AI-generated image detectors, and human participants under the same settings. Experiments show that current MLLMs often recognize real-damaged evidence but fail on many fake-damaged subsets, with fake-damage detection rates (TPR) far below the 50% baseline on most generator subsets. Specialized detectors generally perform better but remain inconsistent across generators and can produce false positives on real-damaged samples, revealing a clear gap between generic AI image detection and reliable claim-conditioned refund-evidence verification.

preprint2026arXiv

STORM: A Spatio-Temporal Factor Model Based on Dual Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders for Financial Trading

In financial trading, factor models are widely used to price assets and capture excess returns from mispricing. Recently, we have witnessed the rise of variational autoencoder-based latent factor models, which learn latent factors self-adaptively. While these models focus on modeling overall market conditions, they often fail to effectively capture the temporal patterns of individual stocks. Additionally, representing multiple factors as single values simplifies the model but limits its ability to capture complex relationships and dependencies. As a result, the learned factors are of low quality and lack diversity, reducing their effectiveness and robustness across different trading periods. To address these issues, we propose a Spatio-Temporal factOR Model based on dual vector quantized variational autoencoders, named STORM, which extracts features of stocks from temporal and spatial perspectives, then fuses and aligns these features at the fine-grained and semantic level, and represents the factors as multi-dimensional embeddings. The discrete codebooks cluster similar factor embeddings, ensuring orthogonality and diversity, which helps distinguish between different factors and enables factor selection in financial trading. To show the performance of the proposed factor model, we apply it to two downstream experiments: portfolio management on two stock datasets and individual trading tasks on six specific stocks. The extensive experiments demonstrate STORM's flexibility in adapting to downstream tasks and superior performance over baseline models.

preprint2026arXiv

XDomainBench: Diagnosing Reasoning Collapse in High-Dimensional Scientific Knowledge Composition

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for knowledge synthesis, yet their capacity for compositional generalization in scientific knowledge remains under-characterized. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on single-turn restricted scenarios, failing to capture the capability boundaries exposed by real-world interactive scientific workflows. To address this, we introduce XDomainBench, a diagnostic benchmark for interactive interdisciplinary scientific reasoning. We formalize the composition order and mixture structure to enable systematic stress-testing from single-discipline to inter-disciplinary, comprising 8,598 interactive sessions across 20 domains and 4 task categories, with 8 realistic trajectory patterns covering difficulty and domain-mixture dynamics, simulating real AI4S scenarios. Large-scale evaluation of LLMs reveals a systematic reasoning collapse as composition order increases, stemming from two root causes: (i) direct difficulty increases induced by domain composition, and (ii) indirect interaction-amplified failures where trajectory patterns trigger error accumulation, reasoning breaks, and domain confusion, ultimately leading to session collapse.