Boyu Gou | The Ohio State University (OSU)

Hi, I’m Boyu, a Ph.D. student at The Ohio State University. I’m fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Yu Su and Prof. Huan Sun at the OSU NLP Group.

My research interests lie in Language Agents, with a specific focus on autonomous GUI agents that can use computers or browse the web.

We built the first multimodal web agent with all code open-sourced (SeeAct, Multimodal-Mind2Web). After that, we proposed building purely vision-based GUI agents that can operate as humans do and demonstrated their power despite their minimal design (UGround). We also built benchmarks to better assess cutting-edge web agents in short- to medium-horizon web agent tasks (Online-Mind2Web) and long-horizon agentic web search tasks (Mind2Web 2), introducing novel LLM-as-a-Judge and rubric-based Agent-as-a-Judge methods.

If you are interested in a research internship/collaboration, or just a short chat, feel free to email me or reach out on LinkedIn/Twitter to discuss ideas and potential collaborations.

News

[June 2025] Mind2Web 2 is released! A benchmark designed specifically for agentic search systems (e.g., web agents, Deep Research systems) on realistic, long-horizon, and time-varying tasks.
[Feb 2025] UGround is accepted to ICLR 2025 as an Oral!
[Aug 2024] Released UGround, where we propose building entirely vision-only GUI agents under a generic framework SeeAct-V with a new SOTA GUI visual grounding model.
[Jan 2024] Released SeeAct, a generalist web agent powered by GPT-4V. (Accepted at ICML 2024)
[Aug 2023] Joined OSU and am honored to work in the OSU NLP Group.

Selected Publications

arXiv

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, Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Yiheng Shu, Chan Hee Song, Jiaman Wu, Shijie Chen, Hanane Nour Moussa, Tianshu Zhang, Jian Xie, Yifei Li, Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Kai Zhang, Boyuan Zheng, Zhaowei Cai, Viktor Rozgic, Morteza Ziyadi, Huan Sun, Yu Su (Collaboration with Amazon AGI)

PDF Code Project Page

COLM 2025

An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents

Tianci Xue, Weijian Qi, Tianneng Shi, Chan Hee Song, Boyu Gou, Dawn Song, Huan Sun, Yu Su

PDF Code

arXiv

Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agents

Yu Gu*, Kai Zhang*, Yuting Ning*, Boyuan Zheng*, Boyu Gou, Tianci Xue, Cheng Chang, Sanjari Srivastava, Yanan Xie, Peng Qi, Huan Sun, Yu Su (Collaboration with Orby AI)

PDF Code

ICLR 2025

Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents

Boyu Gou, Ruohan Wang, Boyuan Zheng, Yanan Xie, Cheng Chang, Yiheng Shu, Huan Sun, Yu Su(Collaboration with Orby AI)

PDF Code Project Page Oral (1.8%)

ICML 2024

GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent,if Grounded

Boyuan Zheng, Boyu Gou, Jihyung Kil, Huan Sun, Yu Su

PDF Code Project Page

Misc

SeeAct: An easy-to-use codebase and Python package designed for autonomous web agents. You can freely test it with any task on any live website with just one click! It is also useful for other agent work as a convenient web browsing implementation.
GUI Agent Paper List: A comprehensive and up-to-date GUI Agent paper list.

Academic Services

Reviewer:
- Main Conferences: ICLR’25, UIST’25, ACL Rolling Review
- Workshops: LLMAgents @ ICLR’24, Computer Use Agents & Multi-Agent Systems @ ICML’25, AI Agents @ COLM’25

Education

The Ohio State University, US
- Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
- 2023.08 – Present
ShanghaiTech University, China
- B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology
- 2019.08 – 2023.06

Teaching

Teaching Assistant at ShanghaiTech University:

SI152 Numerical Optimization, Fall 2022
- Instructor: Prof. Hao Wang
- Theories, algorithms, and convergence analysis of linear and nonlinear optimization.
CS110 & CS110P Computer Architecture I & Computer Architecture I Project, Spring 2022
- Instructors: Prof. Chundong Wang & Prof. Sören Schwertfeger
- Similar to UC Berkeley CS61C Great Ideas in Computer Architecture. The course homepage is here.
CLPS1001 Intimacy Psychology, Spring 2023
- Instructor: Dr. Yaqi Cai