📄 Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

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📄 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...

📄 PINNForge: Execution-Grounded Evolutionary Design of Physics-Informed Neural Networks for PDE Solving via Large Language Models
🗓️ Published: 9/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23023v1
👥 Authors: Mingyang Yu, Xu Yang, Jun Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Xiaolong Wang (possible past Carnegie Mellon University affiliation), Jing Xu (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Keqian Li
Abstract

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) require coordinated choices over network representation, sampling, loss construction, and optimization, while effective configurations often vary substantially across partial differential equations (PDEs). Existing automated PINN design methods can search candidate configurations, but information revealed during actual training is still used mainly for evaluation rather than to improve subsequent design, leading to repeated trial-and-error and inefficient...

📄 RewardVerse: Rubric-Guided Policy Optimization for Video Reward Modeling
🗓️ Published: 9/19/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22947v1
👥 Authors: Zhenchen Tang, Yang Li (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Songlin Yang, Bo Peng, Xiaotong Zhao, Shuai Li, Haotian Fan, Alan Zhao, Jing Dong (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, existing video reward models often produce unstable scalar scores because they directly map complex, subjective video quality into a single score without explicit evaluation criteria. This leads to scalar drift, where the scoring scale collapses or shifts across different prompts, making the reward unreliable for RL. Drawing inspiration from profession...

📄 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.