📄 Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

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📄 GameHorizon Suite: Multi-Horizon Data and Evaluation in Gameplay
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25001v1
👥 Authors: Yiran Wang, Xingyilang Yin, Junfu Pu, Guangzhi Wang, Kaifeng Li, Mingyu Ouyang, Huiqiang Sun, Lingen Li, Cheng Cheng, Wangbo Yu, Honghao Chen, Xiaodong Cun (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Chi-Man Pun, Zhiguo Cao, Ying Shan (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Modern video games provide a measurable testbed for AI models, combining abilities of visual understanding, instruction decomposition, goal planning, and precise action control over multiple temporal horizons. Existing datasets and benchmarks, however, either cover a narrow range of games, lack language instructions, or rely on high-variance online rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GameHorizon, a unified data and evaluation suite that measures gameplay capabilities at different...

📄 DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24976v1
👥 Authors: Haoran Yuan, Zekai Wang, Boning Shao, Haoran Lu, Trevor Darrell (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Ismini Lourentzou, Wei Zhan (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation)
Abstract

Dexterous manipulation depends on contact dynamics that are often only partially observable from vision. Recent World-Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive video world modeling with action generation, but remain largely vision-centric and therefore cannot directly model these contact dynamics. We present DexTacWAM, a visuo-tactile WAM that encodes each fingertip independently, aggregates the resulting features through a finger- and pose-aware tactile compressor, and injects the tactile latent i...

📄 RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24972v1
👥 Authors: Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying Cuizhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation), Chen-Yu Lee (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

An LLM agent's capability is largely magnified by its harness, namely the prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management surrounding the frozen backbone model. Recent methods increasingly automate this process by iteratively proposing and selecting component-wise edits of an agent harness, practically establishing a form of recursive self-improvement (RSI) at the agent-system level. However, such recursive evolution may overfit by memorizing the training tasks, showing large in-d...

📄 OSWorld-Pro: Process-based Evaluation for Computer Use Agents
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24890v1
👥 Authors: Zhilin Wang, Shaokun Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Hao Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Jin Xu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Binfeng Xu, Jian Hu, Yunheng Zou, Karan Sapra (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Andrew Tao (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Jan Kautz (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Yi Dong
Abstract

Evaluation of Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) is often limited to the final deliverables they create (at the end of hundreds of steps) and assessed with functional verifiers, as seen in OSWorld. However, such evaluation of end-state performance lacks transparency into how and why agents fail in various tasks, obfuscating critical insight for subsequent improvement. For instance, agents that err during keyboard inputs would require a different mitigation strategy from those that fail to precisely prov...

📄 Pinocchio: Fast Uncertainty Estimates for Black-Box Language Models
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24881v1
👥 Authors: Kevin David Hayes, Arka Pal (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Haosong Zhang, Tom Goldstein (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Micah Goldblum
Abstract

In high-stakes decision-making applications of large language models (LLMs), practitioners require not only accurate LLMs but also uncertainty estimates for their predictions. Existing approaches to uncertainty estimation for LLMs require access to log-probabilities output by the model or require fine-tuning access. However, many industrial LLM products use closed-source API models, and many such API models like GPT do not return log-probabilities and may not allow fine-tuning. We introduce Pino...

📄 MedRSI: Recursive Self-Improvement for Medical Agents via Clinically Aligned Self-Evolution
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24838v1
👥 Authors: Junde Wu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Jiayuan Zhu, Minghao Hu, Fenglin Liu (possible past Peking University affiliation), Jiazhen Pan
Abstract

Medical agents increasingly combine general reasoning models with specialized clinical tools, yet their capabilities remain largely fixed by what clinicians and engineers design before deployment. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a different paradigm in which agents learn from their own failures and autonomously expand their capabilities, but directly applying RSI to medicine introduces fundamental safety challenges. We introduce MedRSI, the first recursive self-improvement framework for ...

📄 Information-Time Proximal Policy Optimization
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24380v1
👥 Authors: Yongcheng Zeng, Xinyu Cui, Yan Song (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Guoqing Liu, Hongsheng Xin, Kaike Zhang, Cheng Deng (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Kun Zhan, Jian Ying, Jian Zhao, Haifeng Zhang, Jun Wang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

RLVR has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, existing methods typically parameterize temporal progression in the Markov Decision Process by token-by-token generation, despite the highly non-uniform information flow along autoregressive trajectories. In this paper, we propose InfoPPO, which reparameterizes temporal progression using information density rather than raw token count. This reparameterization induces a common state-dependent structure for both temporal ...

📄 ACLArena: Agent Continue Learning in Multi-stage Post-training
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23989v1
👥 Authors: Haixin Wang, Xiaoxuan Wang, Junkai Zhang, Han Zhang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Renliang Sun, Alexander K Taylor, Yidan Shi, Haoran Deng, Chenguang Wang (possible past Amazon (United States) affiliation), Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation)
Abstract

Building general-purpose agents for industrial deployment requires integrating multiple capabilities, each typically acquired at a distinct stage of training. Yet there is currently no well-established recipe for Agent Continual Learning (ACL), with little understanding of the trade-offs among existing integration paradigms. To address this gap, we introduce ACLArena, a framework for comprehensively studying, analyzing, and evaluating ACL. We first build a sequential training pipeline and conduc...

📄 MobileCybench: Evaluating Agent Vulnerability Discovery via Executable Probes
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23980v1
👥 Authors: Andy K. Zhang, Ava Huang, Joey Ji, Wai Han, Thomas Qin, Nardos Demilew, Michael Tian-Yue Liu, Brian Song, Riya Dulepet, Brian Wang, Kyleen Liao, Cuiyuanxiu Chen, Nishka Kacheria, Andrew Wu, Pratham Rangwala, Xinjie Wang, Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez, Anita Ding, Benjamin Yi, Daniel E. Ho, Dan Boneh (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Dawn Song (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Ion Stoica (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Percy Liang (possible past Stanford University affiliation)
Abstract

AI agents now report vulnerabilities faster than maintainers can review them. Reports often depend on security properties specific to the application, and require considerable human labor to process. To mitigate this, we introduce a framework for evaluating vulnerability reports via probes, executable checks of security properties. A reported exploit is evaluated by replaying it against the application and running the probes: a triggered probe indicates both that the exploit succeeded and which ...

📄 ScholarStack: Layered Research Asset Orchestration and Cross-Task Reuse for Scientific Agents
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23735v1
👥 Authors: Scholarseed Ai Team, Ao Zhang, Caoqinwei Gong, Guanglei Wang, Haifan Zhang, Hanwei Zhang, Jiayi Sheng, Jihai Zhang, Kai Ying, Liyun Dai, Tingyu Zhu, Wei Chen, Wei Luo (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Wenkai Fang, Xiaoyu Qiu, Xue Jiang, Yi Wang, Yuan Cao (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Zheng Yu, Wotao Yin
Abstract

Scientific agents support a range of literature-based research tasks, such as retrieval, question answering, evidence-grounded generation, and claim assessment. Most existing systems, however, are organized around individual tasks: the same papers are repeatedly retrieved, segmented, and interpreted, and the understanding built in one task is difficult to reuse in the next. We present ScholarStack, a layered research asset framework that compiles a paper collection into reusable, versioned, and ...

📄 STEVE: Stabilizing Textual Gradient-Based Prompt Optimization via Error-Driven Refinement and Regularized Verification
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23716v1
👥 Authors: Yifan Xu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yixuan Li (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Xinzhuo Li, Yixin Gu, Yifan Shen, Lijun Yu, Haohan Wang
Abstract

Textual-gradient methods automate prompt optimization through natural-language feedback, but their iterative updates can be unstable. We identify two sources of this instability: noisy gradients produced from already-correct examples and over-specialization to hard cases that degrades performance on simpler inputs. We introduce STEVE, a stabilization framework with two coupled mechanisms. Error-Driven Refinement generates gradients only from incorrectly handled examples, concentrating updates on...

📄 MaskVLA: Visual Masking Against Trajectory Overfitting of Vision-Language-Action Model
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23565v1
👥 Authors: Yuxuan Jiang, Jiaying Huang, Ge Wang, Shenhao Yan, Jiahao Yang, Chengsi Yao, Qi Liu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Qing Zhao, Shuguang Cui, Yiming Zhao, Yatong Han, Zhen Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models integrate vision-language understanding with executable robot actions, enabling end-to-end learning for robot control. However, our empirical analysis reveals that existing models exhibit severe trajectory overfitting when finetuned on limited datasets. To guide the model in effectively utilizing wrist camera information, we propose MaskVLA, a masking-based fine-tuning strategy. By randomly masking a small portion of the main camera's visual information, the m...

📄 Modeling Clinical Workflow for SYNTAX Scoring from Coronary Angiography Videos
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23553v1
👥 Authors: Suzhong Fu, Jingqi Dong, Xuan Ding, Rui Sun, Yiming Yang (possible past Microsoft (United States) affiliation), Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

The SYNTAX score is a clinically established tool for assessing anatomical lesion complexity in coronary artery disease and guiding subsequent treatment. However, automated SYNTAX scoring is commonly formulated as a direct regression problem from coronary angiography videos to patient-level scores. In this work, we reformulate SYNTAX scoring as a vessel segment identity-preserving anatomical reasoning problem and propose a hierarchical modeling framework that explicitly aligns learning with the ...

📄 RLVR$^{2}$: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rubric-based Ranking
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23457v1
👥 Authors: Hao Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Zhengkun Zhang, Gangqiang Hu, Zhen Zhang, Yude Gao, Dai Dai (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Jing Liu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is expanding from tasks with well-defined correctness signals, such as mathematics and code, toward multifaceted quality requirements specified by multi-dimensional rubrics. Since policy optimization consumes one scalar per rollout, rubric-based pipelines must map multiple criterion scores into a scalar reward. This aggregation is often treated as score scaling, but it implicitly determines how quality dimensions trade off during training. Th...

📄 OmniEcho: Spatial Audio Understanding for Embodied Agents
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23407v1
👥 Authors: Ruixun Liu, Yuxuan Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jiacheng Xie, Yuhuan You, Donghua Cai, Junming Lin, Xiong-Hui Chen, Zhifang Guo, Yunfei Chu, Qize Yang, Xize Cheng, Jin Xu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yiwu Zhong
Abstract

Humans can effortlessly localize the direction of a sound source and integrate it with visual cues for reasoning, yet this remains challenging for embodied agents. In particular, it is still unclear how to effectively evaluate and model spatial audio understanding in embodied settings. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{OmniEchoBench}, a unified benchmark for spatial audio-visual perception and audio-vision-language navigation. OmniEchoBench comprises six tasks over 197 real-world spatial...

📄 onPanda: Efficient Annotation of On-Policy Alignment Data for LLMs and Agents via Token-Level Correction
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24983v1
👥 Authors: Lei Yang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Mengyin Liu, Jia Wang, Hangyu Guo, Liang Zhao (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Zheng Ge, Kang An, Binxing Jiao, Qi Han, Daxin Jiang, Siqi Shen, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract

We present onPanda, an interactive tool for efficiently annotating LLM alignment data and agent trajectories. onPanda adopts token-level correction as its core interaction: while reading a model response, the annotator locates the first inappropriate token and either picks a substitute from the model's candidate tokens or types the correct text via free-form editing. The system then truncates everything after that position and continues generation from the corrected prefix, repeating this locate...

📄 LoRA-generating hypernetworks for efficient on-device LLM generative personalization
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24979v1
👥 Authors: Sean Augenstein, Li Ding, Jihwan Lee, Keith Rush (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Andrey Zhmoginov (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

On-device large language models (`LLMs'), e.g. running on mobile phones, are ripe for improvement via personalization. The limited compute resources of mobile devices impose limits on model scale and thus model quality, making any realizable quality gains highly impactful. At the same time, their personal nature (i.e., the close coupling to a particular user) means that a given on-device LLM tends to be used in similar, predictable patterns over the course of time. This paper presents a novel me...

📄 PredActor: Predictive Action Diffusion for Steerable Onboard Humanoid Control
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24840v1
👥 Authors: Lei Ye, Haibo Gao, Yitang Li, Peng Xu (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Zetong Jing, Junhan Sun, Fanrong Dong, Ziqi Han, Xue Wang, Jianhua Sun, Cewu Lu (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Hao Zhao, Liang Ding
Abstract

Diffusion models offer flexible motion generation, but translating this flexibility into feedback-responsive humanoid control remains challenging. Hierarchical systems steer motion through references that may exceed a separate tracker's capabilities, leaving recovery and physical execution largely to the tracker. Action-only diffusion generates actions directly but lacks an explicit future-state trajectory for test-time motion objectives. Joint state-action diffusion provides this representation...

📄 Mind or Message? Auditing Theory of Mind in Multi-Agent Social Simulation
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24146v1
👥 Authors: Cong Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Cheng Chen (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Thomas Fung, Alex Rossi, Yi Li (possible past University Of Washington affiliation)
Abstract

Language model agents are increasingly used to simulate social interaction, and the resulting transcripts read as though the agents understand one another. We ask whether that appearance rests on a model of the partner's mind or on the surface record of what the partner said. We build a social simulation in which both questions have exact answers: 40 multi-issue negotiations whose hidden preference weights and whose full Pareto frontier are known by construction. Two model families negotiate acr...

📄 CLOOPD: Closing the Learner Loop in On-Policy Distillation
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24141v1
👥 Authors: Keye Zheng, Hanyu Li (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Zhan Cheng, Yuan Gao (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

On-policy distillation (OPD) pays twice for each fresh batch: the student generates trajectories and a stronger teacher scores them. Existing methods improve which trajectories are scored and how the teacher signal is constructed, but usually consume it with one actor update. We introduce CLOOPD, a closed-loop framework separating teacher-signal acquisition from student-side realization. CLOOPD selects an adaptive $α$ waypoint inside a KL envelope, freezes the scored batch and its advantages, re...

📄 Tool-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Domain Adaptation in Sequence-Based Omics Tasks
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23435v1
👥 Authors: Jie Ying, Zhefan Wang, Zihong Chen, Zhengqing Li, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Jian Liu, Fang Hu, Tao Luo, Zhonghang Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Stan Z. Li, Fan Yang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Nanqing Dong
Abstract

Multi-omics sequences contain complex biological patterns, yet deciphering their mechanisms for automated scientific discovery remains challenging. As large language models (LLMs) interpret these sequences, evaluating both predictions and scientific reasoning is critical. However, existing benchmarks for multi-omics sequence tasks rely on classification and regression metrics, neglecting whether models grasp the underlying biological evidence. We introduce OmicsBench, the first reasoning benchma...

📄 Machine-Interpretable Information: Compiling Documents into Searchable and Readable Protocol States
🗓️ Published: 9/20/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23371v1
👥 Authors: Yifan Wang (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Dejing Dou (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Long-context language models interface with external knowledge through raw natural language. In retrieval-augmented systems, this creates a persistent index-payload schism: dense vectors enable searchable routing, but models must re-ingest lengthy text payloads for reasoning at O(N^2) attention cost. Existing compression methods further produce private states tied to specific architectures. We introduce Machine-Interpretable Information (MII), the first agent-to-agent (A2A) document-to-state pro...

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