πŸ“„ Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

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πŸ“„ Price of Anarchy of First-Price Auctions in Agentic Markets
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20587v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Shubhendu Trivedi, Jacob Eisenstein (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Alekh Agarwal, Ian Gemp, Michael Kaisers, Adam Fisch (possible past University Of Washington affiliation)
Abstract

An agentic market is a decentralized serving-time market where AI agents bid to claim each user prompt. An agent's bid is based on its expected value for the prompt, which is the expectation of the reward for its response minus its inference costs. First-price auctions (FPAs), in which the highest bidder pays its bid and receives the prompt, are a natural way to allocate prompts in such a market, since they are simple and transparent to run, and do not require central knowledge of private capabi...

πŸ“„ Player-1: Learning to Play from Synthetic Experience
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20584v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Mingyu Ouyang, Yiran Wang, Siyuan Hu, Xingyilang Yin, Huiqiang Sun, Guangzhi Wang, Junfu Pu, Cheng Cheng, Honghao Chen, Ying Shan (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Mike Zheng Shou (possible past National University Of Singapore affiliation), Hwee Tou Ng
Abstract

Computer-use agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting screens and executing keyboard and mouse actions. However, games, with their visually rich worlds and diverse mechanics, remain challenging and offer a demanding next step toward general digital control. Current game-agent learning pipelines often rely on large-scale demonstrations with limited coverage of dynamic game states, while scalable environments for interactive training remain difficult to obtain. We introduce Pla...

πŸ“„ Scaling Discovery Requires Forgetting
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20563v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Shangyin Tan, Ben Zhou, Lakshya A Agrawal, Jialin Zhang, Yilin Chen, Qiuyang Mang, Donghyun Lee, Dennis Jacob, Koushik Sen (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Alex Dimakis, Matei Zaharia (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation)
Abstract

Automated research with LLM agents has shown promising results in various domains. Through iterative refinement and scored verifiers, LLM agents are capable of discovering new ideas. There are different ways to scale automated research: let one agent iterate for longer, run several agents in parallel, or further let the parallel agents communicate and build on one another's candidates. However, we find that all three strategies eventually plateau as the agents accumulate history. Each agent beco...

πŸ“„ PrismaCoder: Pushing the Boundaries of Open Multimodal Code Intelligence through Decomposed Rubric Synthesis
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20538v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Qiushi Sun, Jingyang Gong, Yang Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Qiaosheng Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Zixian Huang, Hanxu Hu, Jing Xiong, Fangzhi Xu, Haochen Tan, Haoli Bai, Lifeng Shang, Xiaoguang Li, Ben Kao, Qipeng Guo, Lingpeng Kong (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jiahui Gao
Abstract

Multimodal code intelligence connects the symbolic world of programs with the visual world their execution creates. Interest in this capability is burgeoning, as models are increasingly asked to produce charts, webpages, animations, and semi-structured documents. Recently, proprietary models have pushed far ahead, producing interactive artifacts even from a text description or a screenshot alone. Yet their data and training remain closed, and open progress is held back by the quantity and qualit...

πŸ“„ Reflect After Failure: Brain-Inspired Self-Evolving Agents for Embodied Spatial Intelligence
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20312v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xin Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Xiaohuan Gu, Yifan Wang (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Shaobin Ling, Tianli Shi, Jingao Xu, Zhimeng Yin, Dapeng Wu, Yun Wang
Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in spatial reasoning, and self-evolving agents further extend these capabilities to embodied environments by learning from interactions. However, current self-evolution remains particularly challenging in embodied spatial tasks, complex and multi-step decisions from partial visual evidence making it difficult to determine why an execution fails. The failure may stem from misperception, insufficient exploration, or incorrect planning, y...

πŸ“„ PAWA: Panoramic Action-conditioned World Modeling for Multiple Agents
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20240v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Siqi Yang, Yimu Wang, Ziqi Cai, Chengxuan Zhu, Shuchen Weng, Erwin Wu, Zhaofei Yu, Kaipeng Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Boxin Shi (possible past Peking University affiliation)
Abstract

A multiplayer world model must predict how the independent actions of several players change a shared environment, including changes outside a player's current field of view. A point-of-view (POV) video captures such changes only after they enter its field of view, whereas panoramic video records the surroundings in every viewing direction and has served as an intermediate representation of the world state in recent world models. Learning this task therefore requires synchronized POV and panoram...

πŸ“„ SWE-Stream: Scaling Executable Training Data for SWE Agents via Progressive Construction and Elastic Streaming
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20193v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Chengyang Liu, Wen Yang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Shifeng Chen, Delai Qiu, Ji Yang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Junnan Zhu, Yining Wang, Shengping Liu
Abstract

Software engineering agents have advanced rapidly, but scaling their training remains constrained by the limited availability of high-quality executable tasks. Development histories contain valuable signals for constructing such tasks, yet they often require substantial reconstruction due to incomplete environments, missing tests, and inconsistent artifacts. We present SWE-Stream, a system for scaling executable SWE training data through progressive construction and elastic streaming execution. ...

πŸ“„ Which Knowledge Should LLMs Trust? Uncovering a Generalizable Steering Direction Across Knowledge Conflicts
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20067v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yibin Lou, Yi Hu, Jianhui Chen (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Chenpeng Wang, Muhan Zhang (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Liangming Pan
Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently encounter conflicts between internal parametric knowledge and external contextual knowledge, yet the mechanisms governing this selection remain unclear. We show that the choice between context and parametric knowledge is linearly represented and can be controlled along a single direction in the model's residual stream. We first demonstrate that this direction generalizes across factual-conflict settings, including context formats, knowledge categories, and...

πŸ“„ Memorizing Who, Knowing How: Benchmarking Personal and Procedural Memory for Persistent Assistants
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20022v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Maosheng Qin, Qi Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Mingxuan Xia, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang
Abstract

Memory systems for persistent personal agents must move beyond isolated memories, maintaining both personal memory about whom they serve and procedural memory about how to act. Crucially, in harness-based personal assistance, procedures or skills are inherently user-conditioned: personal context determines which procedures apply, how they are instantiated, and when they should change. Existing benchmarks typically emphasize either personal or procedural memory, leaving their interaction underexp...

πŸ“„ MorphAct: Robot Policies Morphing with the Worlds They Act In
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20019v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Ziyan Liu, Jiting Liu, Weihong Zhong, Wenda Yu, Yeqiu Chen, Jason Li (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Xiaojiang Peng, Shuyuan Hu, Kai Wang, Bo Zhao (possible past National University Of Singapore affiliation)
Abstract

Progress toward general intelligence in the physical world requires scaling robot learning across diverse environments and interactions. However, existing robot policies use shared parameters that remain fixed across interaction contexts. When different operations favor competing parameter adjustments, fitting their mixture can leave individual operations insufficiently adapted. Our atomic-task diagnostics reveal competing update directions in both vision-language and action parameters, with sou...

πŸ“„ ActionOPD: Distilling Decisions, Not Tokens
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19820v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Huining Yuan, Xiangmin Yi, Zelai Xu, Zixu Wang, Xinlei Chen (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yu Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Chao Yu
Abstract

Distilling capable language-model agents into smaller models requires aligning the student's behavior with the teacher's. This raises a fundamental question: at which states and at what granularity should this alignment be performed? Offline imitation provides dense but token-specific supervision and can suffer from state-distribution mismatch. Token-level on-policy distillation (OPD) addresses this mismatch but typically requires teacher token probabilities and compatible tokenization. We argue...

πŸ“„ StateCraft: Augmenting Video World Models with Abstract-State Reasoning
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19795v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Lorenzo Venturoli, Nedko Savov, Xi Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Marc Pollefeys (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Luc Van Gool (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Video world models aim to simulate complex environments with realistic appearance and dynamics. Maintaining consistency over long interactions requires tracking past actions and understanding how those actions affect the environment. Video world models can only generate partial observations of the entire world at a time. Remembering past observations alone may not be sufficient in every scenario, as they may no longer reflect the world after a sequence of actions. We introduce a paradigm that de...

πŸ“„ LabOPBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Laboratory Decision Making
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19780v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Jingyuan Li, Yujie Liu, Yijie Dai, Xiaoyu Yuan, Nian Ran, Huajie Niu, Ming Zhu, Shuwen Zhao, Chenxi Li, Fenghao Lu, Jiahao Li, Xinyu Gu, Zhe Liu, Long Xu, Wenlong Zhang, Bo Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Lei Bai, Peiyu Zhang, Minting Pan, Weinan Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Dongzhan Zhou
Abstract

Laboratory experiments involve more than following predefined protocols; they require adaptive decision-making as the experimental state changes. Existing scientific benchmarks rarely assess such evidence-based decisions in laboratory settings. Here we present LabOPBench, a multimodal benchmark of 756 expert-authored, independently reviewed questions in organic synthesis and materials science. Each item pairs laboratory evidence with procedural context and an open-ended judgment, evaluated using...

πŸ“„ Learning Individual Scientific Taste with Privileged Hindsight Distillation
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19719v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Hanwei Fan, Yanqiao Wang, Yiqi Zhu, Xuanyu Lei, Peng Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Yang Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation)
Abstract

Scientific taste shapes which research directions researchers pursue, and it varies across individuals. Existing work evaluates research directions along multiple evaluation criteria or models scientific taste using community feedback signals such as citations and reviews, but neither directly captures how individuals translate assessments under the same criteria into different preferences. We model scientific taste as a researcher-specific mapping from criterion-level assessments in a shared, e...

πŸ“„ MCAIR: Monitoring and Correcting Agent Unfaithfulness via Internal Representations
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19679v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yan Xu (possible past Peking University affiliation), Dandan Song, Luan Zhang, Jun Yang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Ke Duan, Yuhang Tian, Yading Li, Xudong Li, Xing Pei, Guangyuan Feng, Chenhao Li
Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in completing complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and tool interactions. However, recent studies have revealed that LLM-based agents can exhibit unfaithful behaviors, where their final reports fail to faithfully reflect their actual execution trajectories. Specifically, when agents fail to accomplish tasks through the intended sources or procedures, they may resort to alternative sources or strategies while ...

πŸ“„ Sparse Autoencoders Are a Shared Coordinate System for Symbolic Matching
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19636v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xiaocong Yang, Xuanyu Meng, Yuji Zhang, Jiawei Han (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Chengxiang Zhai (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) hold broad knowledge in one set of weights, but lack interpretability and trustworthy reasoning, especially in high-stakes use cases. A neuro-symbolic model, with its interpretable architecture and System 2 reasoning capacity, is a promising alternative if built at the scale of LLMs; however, its symbolic backbone is usually constructed with human effort, so existing neuro-symbolic models are bottlenecked by the scope of the symbol component and usually domain-specif...

πŸ“„ LabCompiler: A Framework for Verifiable Human-Machine Laboratory Execution from Imperfect Protocols
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19550v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Jingyuan Li, Dongzhan Zhou, Minting Pan, Yujie Liu, Yuan Gao (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yankai Jiang, Xinyu Gu, Zhe Liu, Yang Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Bo Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Lei Bai, Tong Si, Weinan Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation)
Abstract

Closing the loop of AI-driven science requires reliably translating natural-language protocols into executable laboratory workflows despite protocol defects and heterogeneous hardware. Existing approaches often couple scientific interpretation with device-specific code generation, making errors difficult to localize and limiting reuse across laboratory platforms. We introduce LabCompiler, a robust protocol-to-execution framework that transforms imperfect natural-language protocols into verifiabl...

πŸ“„ Retrieve What Helps, Only When It Helps: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Selective Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19528v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Shijun Li, Yang Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Najmeh Sadoughi, Dongmei Wang, Xinjie Li, Zhu Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Rohith Mysore Vijaya Kumar, Yuzong Liu
Abstract

Retrieving external knowledge can improve large language model (LLM) translation by providing supplementary information such as idiom interpretations and terminology. However, existing retrieval-augmented machine translation systems typically apply predefined retrieval strategies uniformly across all inputs. We argue that translation operates in a partial-evidence regime: LLM's parametric knowledge suffices for many inputs, while external evidence benefits a subset and usually supports rather th...

πŸ“„ MemCode: Discrete Semantic Representations for Long-Term Agent Memory
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19472v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xin Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Liang Hu, Duoqian Miao, Ming Peng, Qi Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Long-term memory remains a fundamental bottleneck for large language model (LLM) agents across sessions. Existing systems typically adopt a write-then-retrieve paradigm, storing context-dependent dialogue fragments and retrieving them via nearest-neighbor search in a continuous embedding space. This design yields unstable access units and systematically misses logically related but lexically distant evidence. We propose MemCode, a long-term agent memory framework that couples retrieval-oriented ...

πŸ“„ Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Before Post-Training: An End-to-End Approach
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19425v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Jiarui Qin, Junjie Huang, Yunjia Xi, Di Yin, Yong Yu (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Weinan Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Xing Sun (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Weiwen Liu
Abstract

Agentic capabilities are increasingly important for modern LLMs, yet remain difficult to evaluate during pretraining. Existing approaches typically rely on static trajectory-derived tasks or likelihood-based proxies, which are lightweight but provide limited visibility into how base models behave in interactive environments. We introduce ASAP (Agent Scaffold Adaptation for Pretraining Evaluation), a lightweight framework for eliciting and evaluating agentic behavior from pretrained base models o...

πŸ“„ VideoHarness-SRSI: Structured Recursive Self-Improvement for Video Understanding Harness
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19424v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zihao Lin, Haoyu Dong, Haobo Xu, Chi-Chih Chang, Xuying Ning, Yinglong Xia, Shuang Yang, Zhuokai Zhao, Xinying Song (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Dongfang Liu, Lifu Huang, Yang Song (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Qifan Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

LLM system capabilities depend not only on model parameters but also on the executable harnesses that organize information acquisition, tool use, reasoning, and memory. Recursive harness evolution can automate their design, but how it can reliably discover generalizable systems from limited, noisy, and repeatedly reused feedback remains unclear. We study this question in agentic video understanding, where rich multimodal evidence and coupled mechanisms make harness optimization challenging. We f...

πŸ“„ Generative Representation Learning for Scalable Latent Tokenization
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20533v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Alan Baade, Kyle Sargent, Vincent Sitzmann (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Eric Ryan Chan, Justin Johnson (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Li Fei-Fei (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Gordon Wetzstein (possible past Stanford University affiliation)
Abstract

We introduce an approach for self-supervised representation learning designed to be used as a tokenizer for generative modeling. Our objective supervises a representation loss by factorizing the pointwise mutual information of the data, which we estimate by taking information differences between conditional predictions from a learned generative model. We justify our algorithm theoretically and empirically, demonstrating that our generative approach to representation learning avoids dimensional c...

πŸ“„ ReAl: Refine neural operators via aligning dynamical flow
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20369v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Jing Xu (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Zenglin Xu, Li Yi (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Ruoxi Jiang, Yuan Qi
Abstract

Neural partial differential equation (PDE) surrogates trained with mean squared error (MSE) can capture dominant dynamics but often lose high-frequency information and fine-scale structures. Generative models (e.g., Flow Matching) can capture the distribution of fine-scale details, yet stochastic errors may accumulate during autoregressive rollouts and compromise long-term stability. To address these limitations, we introduce Refine and Align(ReAl), a model-agnostic plug-in that augments pretrai...

πŸ“„ NeuroDETR: Multiscale Discrete Spatiotemporal Tokenization for Asynchronous EEG Event Detection
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20349v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yaozhi Wen, Kun Zhao, Wei Wei (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Haoyang Chen, Kangning Wang, Yi Sun (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Shaowei Gu, Dingkun Liu, Shuang Qiu, Huiguang He
Abstract

Asynchronous EEG event detection supports practical brain-computer interfaces by identifying event classes and temporal boundaries directly from continuous recordings without predefined event boundaries at inference time. The primary challenge lies in extracting event-related patterns embedded in ongoing background activity. To address this, we propose \textbf{NeuroDETR}, a discrete spatiotemporal multiscale framework that combines structured tokenization with event-aware feature refinement. Mul...

πŸ“„ Are We Overthinking One-Step Generation?
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20331v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Woobin Park, Jaeyeon Kim, Yilun Du (possible past Massachusetts Institute Of Technology affiliation), Sitan Chen (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Bohyung Han (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Diffusion and flow matching are now dominant frameworks for generative modeling in continuous domains, but they typically require multiple network evaluations at inference. This has motivated extensive research on one-step generative modeling primarily built on diffusion and flow, though existing approaches often rely on complex training machinery. In this work, we introduce Priming Models, a simple two-stage framework for training one-step generators. Motivated by the difficulty of distribution...

πŸ“„ From Plato to Aristotle: Toward a General Theory of Representation Hypotheses
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20286v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Dai Shi, Andi Han, Xiaoyu Li (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Luke Thompson, JosΓ© Miguel HernΓ‘ndez-Lobato (possible past University Of Cambridge affiliation)
Abstract

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) holds that increasingly capable models converge toward a common representation. However, recent studies have shown different views on aligning representations via their neighborhoods, spanning trees, and distances. We show that these views can differ because the alignment criteria behind them sit at different points of one lattice, and we formalize this explanation as the Lattice Representation Hypothesis (LRH). Under the LRH, the convergence claimed ...

πŸ“„ LatentLoop: Scaling Looped MoE Models with Asymmetric Compute Allocation
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19975v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zefeng He, Yunkai Chai, Xiaoyang Chen, Tong Zhu (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Zongliang Wu, Yun Luo, Yafu Li, Yu Cheng (possible past National University Of Singapore affiliation)
Abstract

Looped Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models combine parameter reuse with sparse computation to improve performance under matched budgets. Prior work demonstrates that different loop visits can play different roles even when they share parameters. To probe the contributions of different loop visits, we learn separate residual coefficients in a model that applies a shared block twice, observing a smaller scale in the first visit. Fixed coefficient experiments show that reducing the first visit's scale ...

πŸ“„ When Non-Adversarial Noise Hurts Learning: Benchmarking Skill Self-Evolution in Agents
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19910v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Tao Yu (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Zhongtian Luo, Yuchen Long, Yiheng Lu, Yuxuan Zhou, Yanpei Gong, Siyi Cao, Yuqing Wu, Haopeng Jin, Zhenghao Zhang, Yujia Yang, Jingmin Zhu, Yunyun Hou, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Jiachen Liu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Sirui Wang, Nan Duan, Yan Huang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Liang Wang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Tianjin Huang, Yanyan Zou
Abstract

Large language model agents increasingly improve by distilling experience into reusable skills, but errors in that experience can persist in learned rules and affect later tasks. Existing evaluations largely examine clean learning or perturbations encountered after skills are frozen, leaving robustness during self-evolution insufficiently understood. We introduce RSE-Bench, to our knowledge the first benchmark for evaluating skill self-evolution under ordinary, non-adversarial noise. It spans fo...

πŸ“„ When Does Depth Help? Understanding Layerwise Inference in Tabular Foundation Models
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19814v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Wenwen Gong, Haotian Gu, Zhen Yang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Jiaying Ma, Hanqing Zhang, Zhongshen Wang, Jingjun Wang, Shouyi Xu, Wei Wang (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation)
Abstract

Transformer-based tabular foundation models (TFMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on small to medium-sized tabular prediction tasks while processing diverse inputs through a shared stack of layers. Recent layerwise analyses identify strong predictive performance in early TFM representations and substantial overlap in computation across layers. However, early predictive accessibility alone does not establish whether later layers are dispensable for every input, and aggregate accuracy can ob...

πŸ“„ Learning to Compute Is Not Learning to Retain or Reuse in Looped Transformers
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19768v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Peilong Zhou, Hongtao Zhang, Yulong Huang, Cangyuan Li, Mingyu Chen (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Ying Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation)
Abstract

Looped transformers compute by applying one block repeatedly, so they can run for more loops than they were trained with. Recurrent reasoners are known to overthink: iterating past the trained depth can turn a correct answer into a wrong one. Such a late error can reflect failed computation, loss of retention, or a state that later computation cannot reuse. We separate these cases in in-context Mealy-machine execution, where a simulator supplies intermediate targets and exact counterfactuals for...

πŸ“„ Beyond Distribution Matching: Selective Margin Preservation for Supervised Fine-Tuning
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 10/14/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19685v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yuxuan Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Guangxiang Zhao, Xinyu Tan, Yahui Han, Xinxiang Yin, Zhonghai Wu, Xiangzheng Zhang, Lin Sun, Tong Yang (possible past Peking University affiliation)
Abstract

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) changes logit margins among non-target tokens at teacher-forced prefixes. Matching a local reference distribution keeps those probabilities and also penalizes margin expansions. We ask whether a soft auxiliary can preserve selected local non-target margin relations without freezing that distribution. We introduce \textbf{Selective Rank-Preserving SFT (SRP-SFT)}, a soft margin target: a hinge on reference-scaled lower bounds for pairs from the reference's top-$K$ non-...

*Notable papers are those with at least two authors from a "big" AI/ML lab.