arXiv AI

A Systematic Study of Behavioral Cloning for Scientific Data Annotation

arXiv:2606. 07568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific data annotation, such as tracking animals in video or proofreading neural reconstructions, remains bottlenecked by the "last mile" problem: even with strong automation, verification and correction consume substantial human effort.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

SciDataSailor: Deep Scientific Data Exploring

Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

arXiv:2606. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback.

By Feiyang Kang, Hanze Li, Adam Nguyen, Mahavir Dabas, Jiaqi W. Ma, Frederic Sala, Dawn Song, Ruoxi Jia
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Self-Supervised Scaling of Terminal Environments for Scientific Domains

The paper introduces a self‑supervised framework called software‑in‑the‑loop reconstruction (SWR) that automatically generates reference outputs and verification targets for terminal agents by leveraging existing scientific software workflows. SWR executes multiple input configurations, partitions cases into public observations and hidden evaluations, and uses a hierarchical verifier to assess agent‑generated programs against hidden workflow outputs. The authors demonstrate the approach on 500 workflows across six domains, achieving significant performance gains on the Terminal‑Bench 2 benchmark with the Qwen3.8‑Max and Qwen3.8‑27B models.

By Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Junyao Yang, Ruhan Wang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Huang, Jichao Yu, Ninghao Liu, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

DENSE: Distilling Agent Trajectories into Evidence-Grounded Shortcut Trees for Self-Refinement

arXiv:2609.21423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online agent deployments produce abundant execution traces, while task-specific verification and expert annotation are costly to scale. We study how to...

By Siyuan Liu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Fan Yu (Fudan University, Meituan Longcat Team), Dongyu Ru (Meituan Longcat Team), Yizhu Liu (Meituan Longcat Team), Yifan Yang (Meituan Longcat Team), Xuezhi Cao (Meituan Longcat Team), Xunliang Cai (Meituan Longcat Team), Yixin Cao (Fudan University)
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2511. 07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements.

By Aarash Feizi, Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Kaixin Li, Rabiul Awal, Xing Han L\`u, Johan Obando-Ceron, Juan A. Rodriguez, Nicolas Chapados, David Vazquez, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Reihaneh Rabbany, Perouz Taslakian, Christopher Pal, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Spurious Tool Use: When RL Agents Learn the Wrong Reason to Act

The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.

By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CAST: Critique-Aware Supervision for Training Reliable Long-Horizon Tool-Calling Agents

CAST is a critique‑aware training framework that transforms sparse task outcomes into action‑level supervision for both critique learning and policy optimization. By analyzing agent trajectories, CAST synthesizes structured rationales that explain action validity under partial observability, enabling the creation of richer training data. Fine‑tuned Qwen3‑family models trained with CAST show significant reliability gains, outperforming GPT‑OSS‑120B by over 10% on Retail tasks and improving Telehealth performance by 9% in an out‑of‑domain setting.

By Amir Saeidi, Zehua Zhang, Rishitosh Singh, Naman Ahuja, Vivek Gupta, Ali Payani, Gaowen Liu, Jayanth Srinivasa, Chitta Baral