Ran Xu

GUI agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in automating complex digital tasks. However, their effectiveness in real-world applications is often limited by scarce training data and the inherent complexity of these tasks, which frequently require long-tailed knowledge covering rare, unseen scenarios. We propose RAG-GUI , a lightweight VLM that leverages web tutorials at inference time. RAG-GUI is first warm-started via supervised finetuning (SFT) and further refined through self-guided rejection sampling finetuning (RSF). Designed to be model-agnostic, RAG-GUI functions as a generic plug-in that enhances any VLM-based agent. Evaluated across three distinct tasks, it consistently outperforms baseline agents and surpasses other inference baselines by 2.6% to 13.3% across two model sizes, demonstrating strong generalization and practical plug-and-play capabilities in real-world scenarios.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are important products of the semantic web, which are widely used in various application domains. Healthcare is one of such domains where KGs are intensively used, due to the high requirement for knowledge accuracy and interconnected nature of healthcare data. However, KGs storing general factual information often lack the ability to account for important contexts of the knowledge such as the status of specific patients, which are crucial in precision healthcare. Meanwhile, electronic health records (EHRs) provide rich personal data, including various diagnoses and medications, which provide natural contexts for general KGs. In this paper, we propose HypKG, a framework that integrates patient information from EHRs into KGs to generate contextualized knowledge representations for accurate healthcare predictions. Using advanced entity-linking techniques, we connect relevant knowledge from general KGs with patient information from EHRs, and then utilize a hypergraph model to "contextualize" the knowledge with the patient information. Finally, we employ hypergraph transformers guided by downstream prediction tasks to jointly learn proper contextualized representations for both KGs and patients, fully leveraging existing knowledge in KGs and patient contexts in EHRs. In experiments using a large biomedical KG and two real-world EHR datasets, HypKG demonstrates significant improvements in healthcare prediction tasks across multiple evaluation metrics. Additionally, by integrating external contexts, HypKG can learn to adjust the representations of entities and relations in KG, potentially improving the quality and real-world utility of knowledge.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. While RAG demonstrates strong performance on benchmarks largely derived from general-domain corpora like Wikipedia, its effectiveness under realistic, diverse retrieval scenarios remains underexplored. We evaluated RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge, and identified critical limitations: retrieval mainly benefits smaller models, rerankers add minimal value, and no single retrieval source consistently excels. Moreover, current LLMs struggle to route queries across heterogeneous knowledge sources. These findings highlight the need for adaptive retrieval strategies before deploying RAG in real-world settings. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/ritaranx/RAG_in_the_Wild.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle to handle multi-hop question-answering tasks accurately due to irrelevant context retrieval and limited complex reasoning capabilities. We introduce Collab-RAG, a collaborative training framework that leverages mutual enhancement between a white-box small language model (SLM) and a blackbox large language model (LLM) for RAG. Specifically, the SLM decomposes complex queries into simpler sub-questions, thus enhancing the accuracy of the retrieval and facilitating more effective reasoning by the black-box LLM. Concurrently, the black-box LLM provides feedback signals to improve the SLM's decomposition capability. We observe that Collab-RAG relies solely on supervision from an affordable black-box LLM without additional distillation from frontier LLMs, yet demonstrates strong generalization across multiple black-box LLMs. Experimental evaluations across five multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Collab-RAG substantially outperforms existing black-box-only and SLM fine-tuning baselines by 1.8%-14.2% on average. In particular, our fine-tuned 3B SLM surpasses a frozen 32B LLM in question decomposition, highlighting the efficiency of Collab-RAG in improving reasoning and retrieval for complex questions. The code of Collab-RAG is available on https://github.com/ritaranx/Collab-RAG/.

Ran Xu, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Dong Yu. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Tianci Liu, Haoxiang Jiang, Tianze Wang, Ran Xu, Yue Yu, Linjun Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoyu Wang. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.

Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich patient information and are crucial for clinical research and practice. In recent years, deep learning models have been applied to EHRs, but they often rely on massive features, which may not be readily available for all patients. We propose HTP–Star¹, which leverages hypergraph structures with a pretrain-then-finetune framework for modeling EHR data, enabling seamless integration of additional features. Additionally, we design two techniques, namely (1) Smoothness-inducing Regularization and (2) Group-balanced Reweighting, to enhance the model’s robustness during finetuning. Through experiments conducted on two real EHR datasets, we demonstrate that HTP–Star consistently outperforms various baselines while striking a balance between patients with basic and extra features.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have become increasingly popular to support clinical decision-making and healthcare in recent decades. EHRs usually contain heterogeneous information, such as structural data in tabular form and unstructured data in textual notes. Different types of information in EHRs can complement each other and provide a more complete picture of the health status of a patient. While there has been a lot of research on representation learning of structured EHR data, the fusion of different types of EHR data (multimodal fusion) is not well studied. This is mostly because of the complex medical coding systems used and the noise and redundancy present in the written notes. In this work, we propose a new framework called MINGLE, which integrates both structures and semantics in EHR effectively. Our framework uses a two-level infusion strategy to combine medical concept semantics and clinical note semantics into hypergraph neural networks, which learn the complex interactions between different types of data to generate visit representations for downstream prediction. Experiment results on two EHR datasets, the public MIMIC-III and private CRADLE, show that MINGLE can effectively improve predictive performance by 11.83% relatively, enhancing semantic integration as well as multimodal fusion for structural and textual EHR data.