arXiv Machine Learning

SoftModel: A Neural Model That Grows Its Own Topology -- Governed Structural Growth for Continual In-Service Learning

arXiv:2608. 16409v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Today, a neural system is almost always used in two phases -- trained, then deployed -- and in that regime it freezes twice: training ends, and the topology itself was never a degree of freedom.

arXiv AI
Aug 7

Continual Learning in Transition

arXiv:2608. 06216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classical continual learning (CL) has primarily focused on enabling models to update and retain knowledge through parameter-centric mechanisms, e.

By Zhiyan Hou, Dan Zhang, Tao Feng, Liyuan Wang, Wei Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Hongyan An, Junfeng Fang, Haokai Ma, Zhaohui Xu, Haiyun Guo, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Sep 18

An Architecture for Long-Horizon Agents: Levels, Ticks and Cascaded Intelligence

The paper proposes a hierarchical architecture for long-horizon language‑model agents that must operate over days or weeks without forgetting. It introduces three key components: time‑scale levels that store bounded summaries, a clocked tick as the basic action unit, and cascaded intelligence that escalates tasks to more capable models only after review failures. A ten‑day experiment demonstrated that the agent maintained continuity across context resets, adapted its behavior based on early knowledge, and identified where learned components could be integrated.

By Erik Nijkamp, Anurag Koul, Egor Pakhomov, Bo Pang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Think Like a World Model, Act Like a VLA: Distilling World-Model Representations into Compact Robot Policies

The paper proposes a method to distill world‑model representations into compact Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. By adding a single feature‑alignment term during VLA training, a frozen world model’s internal features are cached and the student policy learns to match them, eliminating the need for a generative future‑rolling component. The resulting lightweight policy runs in 32 ms on an RTX 5090, achieving high performance on LIBERO and RoboCasa‑GR1, and transfers effectively to real robotic hardware.

By Trung Dao, Sankalp Yamsani, Jaden Park, Joohyung Kim, Yong Jae Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters

The paper introduces Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a paradigm where an agent’s state evolves through prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules while keeping the underlying foundation model frozen. HCL defines harness-level forgetting and proposes a guarded evolution process involving a Continual Optimizer and Evaluator to ensure improvements without losing prior behavior. Experiments across textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open‑world interaction show over 10% performance gains and demonstrate how the stability–plasticity trade‑off can be explicitly tuned.

By Borui Kang, Jinrui Gu, Junhan Lv, Wenbin Li, Lei Wang, Yang Gao