arXiv AI

LiteSearch-VL: Small Multimodal Search Agents via Trajectory Distillation and Synthetic Step-DPO

LiteSearch‑VL demonstrates that distilling released agent trajectories into small vision‑language backbones can transfer the agent’s behavioral contract, enabling a 2B model to produce usable answers in 28.4% of cases on multimodal benchmarks. The approach uses parameter‑efficient LoRA adapters and synthetic step‑level preferences derived from GPT‑5 hard negatives to refine tool use and query quality. While synthetic preference learning and tool distillation provide incremental improvements, the main bottleneck identified is answer verification rather than search depth.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

Video-DeepResearch: Towards the Next-Generation Multimodal Deepresearch Agent

arXiv:2608. 03979v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Video-DeepResearch (Video-DR), extending multimodal agents from static images to continuous video streams, a setting that demands dense spatiotemporal grounding coupled with open-web exploration.

By Zhen Fang, Yu Zeng, Wenxuan Huang, Yiming Zhao, Shiting Huang, Tianfei Ren, Qi Lu, Qingnan Ren, Qisheng Su, Lionel Z. Wang, Qingyu Yin, Shuang Chen, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Zhenfei Yin, Yao Hu, Shaohui Lin, Wanli Ouyang, Shaosheng Cao, Feng Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents

arXiv:2606. 05597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary.

By Hao Bai, Rui Yang, Chenlu Ye, Spencer Whitehead, Aviral Kumar, Tong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

RMSWeb: Reflection, Failure-Mode Mining, and Salvage-DS for Web Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 00335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compact web agents can reduce deployment cost, but training them poses challenges in both data collection and post-SFT reinforcement learning (RL).

By Chengbo Liu, Lifang Zhou, Ruijie Yan, Pei Tan, Ao Sun, Haojun Huang, Guichun Hua, Sining Wei, Yining Chen, Yingying He, Yutao Xie
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond SFT-to-RL: Pre-alignment via Black-Box On-Policy Distillation for Multimodal RL

arXiv:2604. 28123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).

By Sudong Wang, Weiquan Huang, Xiaomin Yu, Zuhao Yang, Hehai Lin, Keming Wu, Chaojun Xiao, Chen Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Beier Zhu, Yunjian Zhang, Chengwei Qin
arXiv AI
5d ago

APEX-EM: Non-Parametric Online Learning for Autonomous Agents via Structured Procedural-Episodic Experience Replay

APEX-EM is a non‑parametric experience memory that stores full procedural‑episodic traces in a typed Procedural Knowledge Graph and retrieves them via semantic search, structural‑signature matching, and graph traversal. It uses a Plan‑Retrieve‑Generate‑Iterate‑Ingest workflow to produce, quality‑gate, and commit experiences, indexing both successes and failures so the agent learns what to reuse and what to avoid. Evaluations on five benchmarks with a shared GPT‑4o backbone show significant performance gains, such as +7.6 pp on BigCodeBench transfer and +1.4 pp on Lifelong Agent Bench, demonstrating that the memory adds to model capability rather than replacing it.

By Pratyay Banerjee, Masud Moshtaghi, Ankit Chadha