arXiv AI

Reference Wording Shapes Retrieval of Robot Task Instructions

arXiv AI
Oct 9

SkillContrast: Difference-Guided Text Selection for Agent Skill Reranking

SkillContrast is a training‑free selector that compares retrieved agent skills and keeps only the text that differs between them, preserving local context for a pretrained reranker. In experiments on 1,235 requests from SameCapRisk‑Bench, it improves clean‑hit rates by 54–72 over TF‑IDF query selection while using 51.1–58.8% fewer input tokens. The method shows that retaining differing text, rather than full skill bodies, is the key factor for better reranking performance.

By Jiandong Ding, Honglei Ji, Ming Liu, Tao Duan
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Hierarchical Skill Retrieval for Data-Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces Hierarchical Skill Retrieval (HSR), a framework that decomposes a target manipulation task into candidate skill sequences and evaluates each plan for semantic plausibility and skill reliability. HSR combines subtask-level language retrieval with behavior-feature reranking to select demonstrations that are both relevant and compatible with the target task, followed by a two-stage pretraining and finetuning pipeline for policy adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world robot tasks show that HSR improves average success rates by 10.3% and 21.3% over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured skill-level retrieval for data-efficient Vision‑Language‑Action adaptation.

By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeff Schneider, Jeffrey Ichnowski
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FineART: Fine-grained Annotated Robotic Trajectory Dataset and Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Manipulation

arXiv:2609.36416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots operating in real-world environments must execute complex, multi-step bimanual tasks over long horizons rather than single, isolated actions....

By Jade Choghari, Pepijn Kooijmans, Mansi Agarwal, Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Aseem Doriwala, Catherine Weaver, Mouli Sivapurapu, Kai Yang, Jackson Lee, Thomas Wolf, Pragna Mannam
arXiv AI
Oct 5

SyntaxBench: A Statistical Diagnostic Framework for Character-Level Reasoning in Large Language Models

SyntaxBench is a diagnostic benchmark and statistical evaluation framework for character‑level reasoning in large language models, comprising five core tasks—character counting, letter containment, palindrome detection, edit distance, and longest‑string selection—and a harder substring‑extraction stress test called index_to_span. The benchmark uses paired English and random‑string inputs, zero‑, one‑, and four‑shot prompts, and evaluates models from 2B to 32B parameters across multiple reasoning modes. It reports a wide range of metrics, including exact‑match and relaxed accuracy, Cohen’s kappa, McNemar tests, bootstrap confidence intervals, Kendall’s tau, class‑conditional metrics, tokenization analysis, and multiple‑comparison‑corrected tests.

By Mohsen Larni (Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Sobhan Ebrahimi Azar (Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Pouyan Nahed (Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Kazem Taghva (Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Writerslogic at the CLEF 2026 SimpleText Track: Multi-Candidate LLM Simplification and Stacked Complexity Spotting

The Writerslogic team participated in the CLEF 2026 SimpleText shared task, tackling both text simplification (Task 1) and complexity spotting (Task 2). For simplification, they built a multi‑candidate pipeline with GPT‑4o‑mini, selecting the best candidate via a reference‑free heuristic, and their Claude Sonnet 4 submission achieved a SARI of 47.43 and BLEU of 14.21, ranking third overall on the Task 1 leaderboard. For complexity spotting, they fine‑tuned a DeBERTa‑v3‑large NLI model on 350 K labeled pairs, achieving a macro F1 of 0.8081 (0.8085 in an ensemble) on binary over‑generation identification and 0.804 accuracy on multi‑class error classification, placing them second among unique teams.

By David L. Condrey
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Wontopos Tablet 2: Measuring Multilingual and Multimodal Memory Retrieval Without Lexical Matching

The paper evaluates the tablet‑2 long‑term memory engine on multilingual text benchmarks and cross‑lingual photo retrieval without lexical matching. Tablet‑2 achieves high accuracy on LongMemEval‑S (95.7%) and moderate accuracy on BEAM‑1M (67.5%), with minimal variance across runs. In multimodal tests, it outperforms BM25 on image‑cell recall and shows significant language‑dependent performance gaps, especially for low‑resource languages.

By Sunwoo Kim