📄 Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

Last updated just now...

📄 Pandora's AI Model Routing Box: Efficient Allocation with Costly Value Estimation
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20316v1
👥 Authors: Adam Fisch (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Shubhendu Trivedi, Fantine Huot, William W. Cohen (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Michael Kaisers, Mirella Lapata (possible past University Of Edinburgh affiliation), Kate Larson, Jacob Eisenstein (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Heterogeneous AI systems composed of multiple models, architectures, harnesses, or inference-time settings can improve quality and efficiency by routing queries to the specialist who can answer most effectively at the lowest cost. Routing requires estimating each specialist's expected return, but this value estimation has a cost. Cheap estimators (e.g., embedding-based predictors) are fast but noisy, while accurate estimators (e.g., fine-tuned models with access to retrieval results or partial r...

📄 Rule-Compliant Visual Spatial Planning for Multimodal Large Language Models
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20237v1
👥 Authors: Yu Chen (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Ting Lei, Yaoyi Li, Jia Cai, Zhecen Wu, Yang Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation)
Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine linguistic reasoning with visual perception, yet their ability to perform visual spatial planning under explicit or previously unseen rule constraints remains underexplored. This setting requires models to jointly understand spatial layouts, interpret natural-language rules, and plan valid actions accordingly. To address this gap, we introduce RuleMaze, a controllable benchmark in which MLLMs must navigate mazes while obeying natural-language rule...

📄 Towards Professional Tennis Styles for Humanoid Robots with Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20087v1
👥 Authors: Tao Huang, Ruofei Liu, Xuchen Tang, Xinyin Zhang, Junli Ren, Huayi Wang, Feiyu Jia, Yukai Qi, Kangning Yin, Weishuai Zeng, Lipeng Chen, Xi Li, Ting Wu, Kailin Li, Ruoli Dai, Jingbo Wang, Lei Han (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Jiangmiao Pang (possible past Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory affiliation)
Abstract

Humanoid robots have recently demonstrated promising capabilities in real-world ball sports. However, achieving professional motion styles while maintaining strong task performance remains challenging. In this work, we propose AdaPT, an Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking framework that learns professional tennis serving and rally styles directly from broadcast videos. This hierarchical design is motivated by the key insight that the planner generates stylistic kinematic motions, while the tra...

📄 MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19901v1
👥 Authors: Yue Wang, Yi Liu (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Gelei Deng, Ying Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yuekang Li, Zhenyu Chen, Leo Zhang
Abstract

Agent Skills extend LLM agents with reusable instruction packages that may also include scripts, resources, and service configuration. This creates a direct distribution channel for malicious behavior, yet existing malicious-Skill datasets are fragmented across sources, artifact formats, evidence regimes, and benign coverage; duplicated and structurally related content further complicates direct aggregation and evaluation. We present MaliciousSkillBench, a comprehensive benchmark for malicious A...

📄 EXIMO: VLM Guided Exploration of VLA Policies
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19891v1
👥 Authors: Bhavya Sukhija, Oliver Groth, Mohit Shridhar (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Tim Hertweck, Michael Bloesch, Markus Wulfmeier, Abbas Abdolmaleki (possible past Deepmind (United Kingdom) affiliation), Martin Riedmiller (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

How to efficiently finetune robot policies to learn new tasks on the fly? State of the art robotic manipulation policies are based on behaviour cloning of large vision-language-action (VLA) models with billions of parameters on huge teleoperation datasets. While this simple approach has enabled significant advances for robotic manipulation, finetuning of VLA policies for learning new tasks still remains an open problem. In particular, collecting teleoperation datasets requires hundreds of hours ...

📄 EnvHarness: Awakening Static Worlds for Agent Learning
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19880v1
👥 Authors: Chengsong Huang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Zoey Cuizhu, Ke Jiang, Peng Xia, Han Yu, Yufan Zhuang, Yifei Ming, Jiaqi Pan, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra (possible past Carnegie Mellon University affiliation), Jiaxin Huang, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation), Chen-Yu Lee (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

LLM agents learn by interacting with environments, yet these environments are hand-built and static: blind to an agent's weaknesses, and quickly left behind as it improves. While recent environment generation methods attempt to address this, they require domain-specific pipelines, rely on expensive or unreliable verifiers, and still produce static environments. To alleviate the engineering burden of rebuilding environments from scratch, we propose Environment Harness (EnvHarness), a programmable...

📄 Learning to Beat: Phenotype-Guided Latent Flow with Regional Motion Priors for Biventricular Motion Synthesis
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19738v1
👥 Authors: Xuan Yang (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Xiaohan Yuan, Hao Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Lingyu Chen, Yanan Liu, Qingya Li, Lei Li (possible past Carnegie Mellon University affiliation)
Abstract

Full-cycle biventricular geometry is essential for characterizing cardiac function. However, dense and temporally consistent 3D+t biventricular meshes are not routinely available, whereas end-diastolic (ED) anatomy can often be obtained reliably. We therefore investigate full-cycle biventricular motion synthesis from a single ED mesh. This task is challenging because cardiac deformation is spatially heterogeneous and phenotype dependent, while conventional global generative models often obscure ...

📄 Scientific Data Skills: Enabling Agent-Ready Scientific Data Services at Scale
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19625v1
👥 Authors: Xiaohan Huang, Qingqing Long, Xiaolei Du, Siyu Pu, Jiawen Xu, Haotian Chen, Chenyang Zhao, Jinbiao Liu, Xuezhi Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Hao Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Hengshu Zhu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Yuanchun Zhou
Abstract

Scientific data are increasingly used by AI agents, yet existing dataset representations provide limited support for autonomous discovery, interpretation, and invocation. This limitation stems from the fragmentation of scientific data across heterogeneous repositories and from dataset representations designed primarily for human use. To address this limitation, we introduce the Scientific Data Skill (SciDSK), an agent-ready representation that packages dataset-specific knowledge and operational ...

📄 Forking Fast: Efficiently Estimating Uncertainty Dynamics in Text Generation
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19611v1
👥 Authors: Eric Bigelow, Amir Zur, Satchel Grant, Tal Haklay, Can Rager, Owen Lewis, Thomas Mcgrath (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jack Merullo, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Atticus Geiger (possible past Stanford University affiliation)
Abstract

LLM reasoning is stochastic, and so understanding a model requires grappling with the distribution of reasoning chains that it might produce for a given question, i.e., its uncertainty. Resampling-based analyses characterize this distribution, revealing which steps of a rollout determine how the model arrives at its answer. However, a major limitation of these approaches is that resampling text sequences at every token or sentence in a reasoning chain is very costly. Our work strives to make res...

📄 PEA-DPO: Perception-Enhanced Alignment Direct Preference Optimization for MLLMs Alignment
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19598v1
👥 Authors: Jiawei Feng, Jiancan Wu, Xingyu Zhu, Junkang Wu, Xiang Wang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Xiangnan He (possible past National University Of Singapore affiliation)
Abstract

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its adaptation to multimodal settings remains unexplored. Through representational analysis, we identify a key limitation in multimodal preference optimization, which we term visual insensitivity: models often fail to distinguish between images and those with critical visual context removed. Our theoretical analysis further uncovers two manifestatio...

📄 VGI-BENCH: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19583v1
👥 Authors: Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu, Penghui Du, Kai Zou, Rui Yang, Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Ping Nie, Kelsey R Allen, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley (possible past Microsoft (United States) affiliation), Jianfeng Gao (possible past Microsoft (United States) affiliation), Chengxiang Zhai (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet reliable evaluation remains challenging: benchmarks should adopt inputs aligned with the visual priors of current video models, require valid evolving processes rather than only plausible final states, and calibrate task difficulty to remain challenging yet partly feasible. To this end, we introduce VGI-bench, containing 27 tasks and 810 instances, organized b...

📄 SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19197v1
👥 Authors: Bo Liu (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Simon Yu, Yiding Jiang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Ao Qu, Andrew Zhao, Zichen Liu, Junsu Kim, Zijian Zhou, Seungone Kim, Tongzheng Ren, Mickel Liu, Hanfei Yu, Zhaorun Chen, Weiyan Shi, Paul Pu Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Yejin Choi (possible past Allen Institute For Artificial Intelligence affiliation), Natasha Jaques (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation)
Abstract

Continuous self-improvement requires an ever-expanding pool of self-generated, diverse, adaptive goals. For language agents, existing training environment pools (hand-curated, statically synthesized, or frozen-verifier) keep the goal distribution fixed as the learner scales. We introduce SPADE (Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments), a self-play RL framework in which a single LLM plays two roles: an Environment Designer that writes complete, long-horizon training environments a...

📄 ADEPT: Accelerating Dexterity via Pre-Training and Post-Training using Reinforcement Learning
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19182v1
👥 Authors: Jayjun Lee, Jessica Yin, Asif Rana, Nicholas Blauch, Sam Mady, Mohak Bhardwaj, Nima Fazeli, Nathan Ratliff (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Karl Van Wyk (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Ankur Handa (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

We introduce Accelerating Dexterity via Pre-Training (ADEPT), a large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) framework for learning sim-to-real transferable dexterity across high degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot embodiments that can solve long-horizon tasks directly from raw visuo-tactile perception. ADEPT pretrains a dexterous policy on a generic object reposing task, then post-trains downstream policies with this pretrained behavior as a prior. ADEPT enables learning new behaviors that are otherwise d...

📄 Interpretable AI predicts a 2026 summer dry anomaly in central China
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19163v1
👥 Authors: Anran Wang, Wen Shi, Yong Luo (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Jianbin Huang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Lijuan Chen, Junhu Zhao, Weixin Jin, Huihui Yuan
Abstract

Seasonal precipitation anomalies are largely regulated by atmospheric circulation, which dynamical models predict with greater reliability than precipitation itself. Here, we employ a deep learning model that translates dynamical circulation predictions into precipitation estimates. Predictions initialized from March to May consistently indicate a dry anomaly over central China in summer 2026. Retrospective evaluations revealed higher predictive skill in the analogue years, which also tended to ...

📄 What is Missing from AI Post-Training AI: An Empirical Analysis
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19072v1
👥 Authors: Joy Jia Yin Lim, Xin Huang (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Hao Peng (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Yaxi Lu, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Maosong Sun (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Yankai Lin (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation)
Abstract

Large language model (LLM) agents can now post-train an LLM end-to-end. They can write code, launch training, evaluate checkpoints, and improve downstream performance, raising the prospect of AI-for-AI. We argue that this picture conflates two distinct capabilities: execution-level capability, iterating within a selected training strategy; and strategy-level capability, revising the high-level judgment as experimental evidence accumulates. Analyzing a large corpus of publicly released post-train...

📄 Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19013v1
👥 Authors: Borui Kang, Jinrui Gu, Junhan Lv, Wenbin Li, Lei Wang (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Yang Gao (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Continual learning has largely been model-centric, treating model parameters as the state that changes with sequential experience. Modern agents can also adapt through a harness of prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules. Because these contents jointly shape later execution, a harness update can disrupt previously reliable behavior even when the model is frozen. This raises a new question: how can an agent continually improve its state outside the model while retaining behavior acqui...

📄 MedUAG: Unified Understanding and Generation for Medical Multimodal Models
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18937v1
👥 Authors: Zijie Meng, Yuncheng Zhang, Hualiang Wang, Yitian Tang, Xiaotang Gai, Chen Shen (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Songtao Jiang, Shaosheng Cao, Jian Wu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Xian Wu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Zuozhu Liu
Abstract

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are rapidly evolving into unified understanding and generation (UAG) frameworks. However, extending these unified paradigms to the medical domain is hindered by: the absence of comprehensive training and evaluation benchmarks, and the lack of broadly validated unified medical model. To address these gaps, we present a comprehensive foundation for medical UAG. First, we construct MedUAGCorpus, the largest unified medical understanding and generation...

📄 SkillGate: Training In-Policy Skill Selection in Long-Horizon Agents
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18852v1
👥 Authors: Qingyao Li, Wenxiang Jiao, Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Yuan Lu, Yi Guo, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Yong Yu (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation)
Abstract

Agent frameworks increasingly package procedural knowledge as skills: instruction files an agent reads on demand, while public libraries now hold thousands of them. Which skill to read has thus become a decision the policy itself makes in the middle of an episode, yet no existing signal trains it. We show that the default remedy, outcome-rewarded RL over the candidate slate, cannot teach it, for a structural reason we identify and name selector credit starvation: under a broadcast, sequence-leve...

📄 Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning
🗓️ Published: 8/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19669v1
👥 Authors: Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Ed H. Chi
Abstract

Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage. First, the SFT stage typically relies on an off-the-shelf vision encoder to encode th...

📄 Learning Canonical Register Automata over Ordered Data Domains
🗓️ Published: 8/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18765v1
👥 Authors: Yong Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Qiyi Tang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Di-De Yen
Abstract

Register automata are finite automata equipped with memory that recognize data languages over infinite alphabets. In this work, we investigate active learning algorithms for deterministic register automata (DRAs) over ordered data domains--covering both dense domains, such as the rationals, and non-dense domains such as the integers. We show that the active learning problem for DRAs over both dense and non-dense ordered domains can be treated within a single unified framework. More specifically,...

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