arXiv Machine Learning

Perspective Latents as an Architectural Condition for Causal Emergence in Active Inference Agents

arXiv:2607. 20708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A recent line of work measures causal emergence in reinforcement learning agents through Integrated Information Decomposition, reporting that $\Phi_r$ grows with training and tracks reward improvement.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

Quo Vadis, World Modeling?

arXiv:2608. 02713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continually improving agents require dynamic interaction feedback beyond static supervision, yet direct real-environment interaction is costly, slow, unsafe, and hard to parallelize.

By Yu Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Lingdong Kong, Xiaobin Hu, Dongyue Lu, Wei Chow, Xiyan Huang, Yuxiang Feng, Yue Liao, Jianbiao Mei, Daocheng Fu, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Ran Yi, Ying Tai, Jiangning Zhang, Botian Shi, Yong Liu, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

I Act Therefore I Am: When Is JEPA's Action-Conditioning Enough to Learn Causal Mechanisms?

The paper studies when joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) can recover underlying causal states from high‑dimensional observations. It introduces a latent variable model where observations arise from causal states with action‑conditioned dynamics, and proposes an information‑theoretic objective that maximizes conditional likelihood while preserving state entropy. The authors prove identifiability conditions—particularly sufficient action‑induced variation—and instantiate the objective as an action‑modulated Gaussian additive‑noise model (A‑JEPA), demonstrating theoretical and empirical success in synthetic and visual benchmarks.

By Yuhang Liu, Zhuo Huang, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Quo Vadis, World Modeling?

Continually improving agents require dynamic interaction feedback beyond static supervision, yet direct real-environment interaction is costly, slow, unsafe, and hard to parallelize. World modeling offers a natural intermediate proxy that allows agents to query lower-cost, more controllable feedback before committing to real actions.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Beyond Prediction: Steering VLM Agents with Retrospective World Modeling

The paper introduces Retrospective World Modeling, a new paradigm for vision‑language‑model (VLM) agents that allows them to reason backward by estimating which action most likely caused a state transition. It proposes the Self‑Consistency Reward (SCR), an intrinsic signal that measures how well a policy action aligns with this retrospective explanation, providing dense transition‑level feedback. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating SCR improves policy robustness and generalization compared to purely prospective world‑modeling approaches.

By Yongjiang Liu, Jie Zhang, Haoyue Zhang, Jingcai Guo, Deze Zeng, Song Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.

By Liming Pu, Xiaoxia Li, Yifu Liu, Teng Cao, Bin Yang