arXiv:2608.20784v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Imitation learning for robotics depends on human demonstrations, some of which people may later ask to remove. Retraining without them is the natural...
By Jiazhuo Li, Yu Zhang, Yiming Fei, Kangkang Dong, Xiaojun Zhu, Houde Liu, Jinze Tao
arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.
By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai
arXiv:2608. 03222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates.
By Chenyu Wang, Yunbo Lyu, Junda He, Zhou Yang, Chenxing Zhong, Yaniv Harel, David Lo
Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion.
The paper introduces StepLearn, a nonparametric framework for prequential test‑time learning in large language model agents. StepLearn separates immediate use of informative transitions from persistent trust, turning each transition into a hypothesis that guides the next step and only reusing it after prospective validation across episodes. Experiments on WebArena‑Lite and ALFWorld show StepLearn improves success rates by 2.2–12.7 percentage points over the strongest baseline, with benefits evident from the first task attempts.
By Tong Zhao, Reed Li, Yuyang Hu, Yutao Zhu, Haijin Liang, Haibo Shi, Yu Lu, Zhicheng Dou
The paper introduces the concept of causal retention in interactive agents, examining whether a frozen learned state can correctly answer a mechanism‑probe map that is fixed independently of training. It shows that for finite structural causal models the optimal probe error is a Bayes decision risk, vanishing only when each learning‑interface fiber lies within a single probe‑answer fiber, and provides theoretical results such as a posterior‑coverage theorem and an exact edit decomposition. Experiments on finite causal systems, continuous simulators, TD‑MPC2, and Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct demonstrate that causal retention can be achieved with high accuracy, outperforming task‑performance‑based approaches.
By Shengjun Zhang, Tingyi Liu, Dong Xie, Yunlong Dong, Xiang Wang, Cheng Zeng
The Agent Error Dataset (AED) presents 50,228 error–diagnosis pairs collected from 9,961 source tasks across 33 environments, 19 harness families, and 23 policy models in text‑based agent systems. A five‑stage Agentic Error‑to‑Training (AET) pipeline generates diagnoses and proposed corrections, verifies them against recorded evidence, and creates separate training views for diagnosis and actor recovery. Experiments show that first‑proposal corrections improve verifier pass rates from 18.4% to 51.1%, and fine‑tuning with full‑diagnosis data raises Qwen3‑8B’s exact‑step agreement from 47.2% to 63.6% on a holdout set.
By Kunlun Zhu, Xuyan Ye, Yibo Li, Cheng Qian, Beibin Li, Heng Ji
arXiv:2608.29685v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Early failure prediction is important for long-horizon agents, as it enables timely intervention and can reduce inference and tool-use costs. Uncertain...
By Zongyue Li, Chengyue Yu, Lei Zang, Chenyi Zhuang, Linjian Mo, Leilei Gan
Changepoint-Aware World Models (CAWM) is a DreamerV3 agent that detects abrupt dynamics shifts in a robot’s environment using an online CUSUM test on internal prediction error. Upon detection, CAWM selectively forgets stale replay data while preserving the learned representation, enabling rapid recovery from shifts such as doubled gravity or halved actuator gain. Experiments on simulated locomotion show CAWM recovers faster than passive retraining and outperforms a baseline that respawns a fresh dynamics model, achieving significant return gains in the first 30k post‑shift frames.
By Everest Yang
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
The paper introduces a framework for intrinsic‑extrinsic coupling in learning dynamics, where a learner’s current observations do not solely dictate its future training responses. It formalizes this coupling through a continuation‑conditioned value of a constrained learning‑state intervention and employs an executable finite‑frame classifier‑head to protect current logits while adjusting historical margins. Experiments across CLINC‑derived class‑incremental settings, output distillation with RoBERTa, and SGDW dynamics reveal that coupling can produce both positive and negative interactions, and that coordinated interventions can match or exceed development gains while reducing cross‑entropy loss compared to standard replay.
arXiv:2609.00874v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As agentic systems become compound systems, increasingly important decisions move above task execution itself: when should a higher-level controller pr...
By Ayushi Chadha