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Zhaowei Cai

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3 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge

Boyu Gou
Zanming Huang
Yuting Ning
Yu Gu
Michael Lin
Weijian Qi
Andrei Kopanev
Botao Yu

Agentic search such as Deep Research systems-where agents autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers-represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ten frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, highlighting its great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Masked Vision and Language Modeling for Multi-modal Representation Learning

Gukyeong Kwon
Zhaowei Cai
Avinash Ravichandran
Erhan Bas
Rahul Bhotika
Stefano Soatto

In this paper, we study how to use masked signal modeling in vision and language (V+L) representation learning. Instead of developing masked language modeling (MLM) and masked image modeling (MIM) independently, we propose to build joint masked vision and language modeling, where the masked signal of one modality is reconstructed with the help from another modality. This is motivated by the nature of image-text paired data that both of the image and the text convey almost the same information but in different formats. The masked signal reconstruction of one modality conditioned on another modality can also implicitly learn cross-modal alignment between language tokens and image patches. Our experiments on various V+L tasks show that the proposed method, along with common V+L alignment losses, not only achieves state-of-the-art performance by using a large amount of data but also outperforms the other competitors by a significant margin in the regimes of limited training data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Semi-supervised Vision Transformers at Scale

Zhaowei Cai
Avinash Ravichandran
Paolo Favaro
Manchen Wang
Davide Modolo
Rahul Bhotika
Zhuowen Tu
Stefano Soatto

We study semi-supervised learning (SSL) for vision transformers (ViT), an under-explored topic despite the wide adoption of the ViT architectures to different tasks. To tackle this problem, we use a SSL pipeline, consisting of first un/self-supervised pre-training, followed by supervised fine-tuning, and finally semi-supervised fine-tuning. At the semi-supervised fine-tuning stage, we adopt an exponential moving average (EMA)-Teacher framework instead of the popular FixMatch, since the former is more stable and delivers higher accuracy for semi-supervised vision transformers. In addition, we propose a probabilistic pseudo mixup mechanism to interpolate unlabeled samples and their pseudo labels for improved regularization, which is important for training ViTs with weak inductive bias. Our proposed method, dubbed Semi-ViT, achieves comparable or better performance than the CNN counterparts in the semi-supervised classification setting. Semi-ViT also enjoys the scalability benefits of ViTs that can be readily scaled up to large-size models with increasing accuracy. For example, Semi-ViT-Huge achieves an impressive 80\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet using only 1\% labels, which is comparable with Inception-v4 using 100\% ImageNet labels. The code is available at https: //github. com/amazon-science/semi-vit.

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