arXiv AI

The Sim-to-Real Gap of Foundation Model Agents: A Unified MDP Perspective

arXiv:2606. 07017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation model agents are increasingly deployed for real-world decision-making, but suffer from the sim-to-real gap.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

SUN: Agentic Robot Policy Learning with Persistent Task Programs

The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.

By Weiqi Wang, Zhi Li, Yudong Lei, David Martinez, Xiaofeng Gao, Yuxin Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yingnian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ran Gong
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Exploring Agentic Tool-Calling Decisions via Uncertainty-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 06976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents often make suboptimal tool-use decisions, including unsupported tool invocation and hallucinated direct responses, which may accumulate errors throughout multi-step interactions.

By Yijin Zhou, Linqian Zeng, Xiaoya Lu, Wenyuan Xie, Dongrui Liu, Junchi Yan, Jing Shao
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents

Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.

By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation

The paper introduces NavMCP, a scaffolding framework that couples vision‑language models (VLMs) with navigation foundation models (NFMs) to enable long‑horizon physical‑world agents. NavMCP orchestrates three communication channels—intent, observation, and memory—to allow the VLM to decide what evidence to seek and the NFM to ground semantic sub‑goals into closed‑loop navigation, without retraining either model. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on several embodied question‑answering benchmarks and significantly outperforms episodic interfaces on the Unitree Go2 robot as task horizons lengthen.

By Zixing Lei, Gengze Zhou, Xiong-Hui Chen, Jiazhao Zhang, Yiyang Huang, Hang Yin, Haoqi Yuan, Qi Wu, Weixin Li, Siheng Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 20

ToolVerse: Unlocking Massive Environments and Long-Horizon Tasks for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 15660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While LLM agents demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in compact and well-defined scenarios, they struggle to maintain robustness and effectiveness when faced with large-scale, diverse, and dynamic real-world environments that demand seamless tool integration.

By Shuaiyu Zhou, Fengpeng Yue, Zengjie Hu, Yuanzhe Shen, Chenyang Zhang, feng hong, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Agentic Physical AI toward a Domain-Specific Foundation Model for Energy Systems: A Case Study on Nuclear Reactor Control

arXiv:2512. 23292v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in AI for physical systems: scaling general-purpose foundation models toward universal multimodal reasoning, confronts a barrier at the control interface.

By Yoon Pyo Lee, Samrendra Roy, Kazuma Kobayashi, Sajedul Talukder, Diab Abueidda, Seid Koric, Souvik Chakraborty, Syed Bahauddin Alam