AI agents

Tool use, function calling, orchestration and the protocols that let models act rather than only answer.

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arXiv AI
Sep 30

State Trace Rationale As Auxiliary Task in Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces STRAT, an auxiliary task for deep reinforcement learning that trains agents to generate a short textual trace describing their state. This trace, produced online by environment rules, includes landmark, route, and survey information such as position, inventory, goals, and progress. Adding a single auxiliary head to a standard policy, STRAT improves performance on 60 sparse-reward XLand-MiniGrid tasks, compacting state representations, preventing rank collapse, and offering a readable account of agent beliefs at no extra cost.

By Muhammad U. Nasir, Alex Vogt, Steven D. James, Julian Togelius
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

CAR-VLA: Complexity-Aware and Risk-Adaptive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving

CAR‑VLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action model for autonomous driving that jointly considers scene complexity and dynamic risk to determine reasoning depth, urgency, and focus. It maps four complexity‑risk categories to three reasoning modes—Fast Intuition, Slow Thinking, and Reflex Response—each tailored to different driving scenarios. The model is trained via progressive supervised learning and reinforcement learning, achieving competitive performance on NAVSIM and Navhard benchmarks and demonstrating risk‑aware reasoning in high‑risk scenarios.

By Xiaolei Chen, Zhuolin He, Yuxuan Liang, Xu Li, Haotian Chen, Fan Shi, Mengyang Zhao, Wenjuan Meng, Zisheng Chen, Zhihao Zhu, Zhounan Jin, Hengli Wang, Qingfan Wang, Jiamei Liang, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoning

Beacon is a new agentic visual reasoning model that improves multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by better deciding when to use tools and how to use them. It introduces two key concepts—Mode Adaptiveness, which ensures tools are invoked only when necessary, and Tool Effect, which measures the net benefit of tool use— and trains the model with supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning that rewards necessity-aware decisions and expands capability through expert hints. Across 13 benchmarks, Beacon outperforms other open‑source models, achieving the highest average score and the largest net tool‑gain on diagnostic tests.

By Qixun Wang, Yang Shi, Letian Cheng, Zhuoran Zhang, Yan He, Yuqi Tang, Qi Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Ruizhe Chen, Tianrun Xu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Haotian Wang, Xianghua Ying
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving

PhysWAM is a unified world-action model for autonomous driving that jointly denoises multiview video, metric depth, and ego motion using a flow‑matching transformer. It introduces Coupled Point Projection (CPP), a geometric constraint that aligns generated depth points with LiDAR data after applying the predicted SE(3) ego motion, thereby enforcing physical consistency. At inference, trajectory selection uses a simple label‑free consensus rule, and the model demonstrates strong planning performance, zero‑shot transfer to unseen environments, and accurate, temporally coherent depth and video predictions.

By Dhruv Parikh, Fengcheng Yu, Quankai Gao, Jiawei Yang, Junjie Ye, Maulik Bhatt, Thang Vu, Charles Ochoa, Rowan McAllister, Igor Vasiljevic, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

StateTape: Action-Conditioned Evidence Lifecycle Modeling for Long-Horizon Coding Agents

StateTape introduces a new framework for long‑horizon coding agents that rewrites the agent’s context as the code repository changes, rather than letting the context grow with every observation. It models the repository as a symbol‑level code graph, using a tape to mark symbols altered by each write and a manager model to resolve stale records. The authors provide theoretical analysis, a new benchmark called TraceBench, and empirical results showing higher resolve rates across six agents and three edit‑heavy benchmarks with minimal computational overhead.

By Ziyang Yu, Liang Zhao, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning to Harvest Without Collapse in a Regenerative Commons: A Lagrangian Framework

The paper introduces a Lagrangian framework for managing a regenerative commons, framing the problem as a constrained Markov game with a specified depletion budget. It constructs policy sequences from unconstrained solutions, extending time‑average concepts to reset episodes with discounted rewards and terminal costs, and provides theoretical guarantees such as reward‑independent feasibility, cooperative feasibility, and approximate optimality. Experiments on a fishery model using constrained IPPO and MAPPO illustrate how depletion budgets influence stock retention, harvest rewards, and price adaptation.

By Jose Tupayachi, Xueping Li, Soham Das
arXiv AI
Sep 30

OmniVCBench: Benchmarking Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning Towards AI Virtual Cells

OmniVCBench is a figure‑centric, source‑traceable benchmark designed to evaluate the interpretation component of Artificial Intelligence Virtual Cells (AIVCs). It comprises 6,077 curated question–answer pairs drawn from scientific figures and experimental contexts, organized into three scientific reasoning tasks that mirror the AIVC Predict–Explain–Discover agenda. The benchmark also introduces AIVC‑Judge, a task‑conditioned MLLM‑as‑a‑judge framework with reference‑aware rubrics, and a Model‑Derived Hard‑Negative Mining strategy to generate multiple‑choice distractors for efficient evaluation.

By Manyu Li, Xunkai Li, Yongfu Xiong, Yi Liu, Rong-Hua Li, Guoren Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

ProgressCompass: Embodied Progress Reward Models Are Lost Without the Right Context

The paper introduces ProgressCompass, a framework that enhances Embodied Progress Reward Models (PRMs) by providing the necessary contextual information for accurate progress estimation in long manipulation tasks. It presents ContextProgress-Bench, a benchmark with 24 tasks that tests PRMs under three context-dependent scenarios—State Recall, Sequence Tracking, and Recurrence Disambiguation—showing that even history-aware PRMs struggle without proper context. By integrating a context-aware loop that leverages general-purpose vision‑language models, ProgressCompass reduces PRM progress error by up to 82% and improves rank agreement by 76%.

By Jianshu Zhang, Keliang Wu, Chengxuan Qian, Xiyuan Yang, Ce Zhang, Ariel Tian, Anbang Liu, Haoran Lu, Han Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

VISTA: Internalizing Collective Visual Experience via On-Policy Distillation for Active Multimodal Agents

VISTA is a method for active multimodal agents that internalizes collective visual experience via on‑policy distillation. It turns observations from multiple rollouts of the same input into shared supervision, using Collective Visual Experience Distillation (CVED) to organize observations with context and Heterogeneity‑Aware Policy Improvement (HAPI) to reinforce successful trajectories and guide learning from unsuccessful ones. The approach lets an experience‑conditioned teacher evaluate a student’s partial responses, enabling discoveries from one trajectory to inform others without altering the student’s original history, and achieves superior performance on fine‑grained perception and general reasoning tasks compared to comparable agents.

By Zheng Jiang, Houde Qian, Yiming Chen, Ling Li, Chaoyang Li, Yueqi Li, Yuxuan Liu, Lifeng Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 30

LongCat-DeepResearch Technical Report

LongCat-DeepResearch is a deep research system that merges an enhanced LongCat model with a multi‑agent workflow to produce comprehensive, evidence‑grounded reports. The workflow separates global planning from detailed investigation, using planning agents to create a ResearchSpec and research agents to draft sections in parallel, followed by targeted local revisions guided by global review. The system achieves strong benchmark scores, including 55.25 on DeepResearchBench and 79.83 on ResearchRubrics, and shows benefits from combining planning perspectives and additional editing for readability.

By Meituan LongCat Team, He Zhu, Yue Xu, Wanli Wu, Haolin Ren, Yuxin Bian, Jiarui Zhao, Rongzhi Zhang, Quanchi Weng, Jinghao Cui, Yu Fan, Yuhan Liu, Yunhu Ye, Jiyuan Ren, Fengcheng Yuan, Zhao Yang, Jiacheng Zhang, Yuchuan Dai, Ruixuan Xiao, Haozhe Sun, Xiangyuan Liu, Cheng Sun, Yao Du, Yiming Hao, Hongbo Guo, Shuo He, Lei Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yan Chen, Fan Yang, Lingchuan Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Provable Benefits of Regularization: Fast Rates for Adversarial Imitation Learning

The paper introduces Dually Regularized AIL, a model‑free algorithm for adversarial imitation learning that jointly applies KL policy regularization and a quadratic reward penalty based on expert and learner occupancies. It proves fast convergence rates, achieving a ×O(1/K+1/N) bound on the regularized imitation gap in finite‑horizon MDPs with general function approximation, and establishes the first algorithm to attain ×O(1/ε) sample complexity in both expert demonstrations and online interactions for this regularized objective.

By Hanbin Zhou, Shangzhe Li, Alexander Braverman, Weitong Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Right Words, Wrong Moment: A Clinician-Grounded Analysis of Distress in 19,930 Conversations between Young People and ChatGPT

arXiv:2609.35953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Young people increasingly turn to General-Purpose Conversational Agents (GPCAs), such as ChatGPT, in moments of distress. We examine young adults' (age...

By Marx Wang, Ella Zhang, Cameron Tan, Andrea Mock, Songling Ngo, Zijing Wang, Robert Wolfe, Shirin Amouei, Rachel A. Hanebutt, Desmond C. Ong, Caroline Figueroa, Katie Davis, Anind K. Dey, Alexis Hiniker
arXiv AI
Sep 30

KV-streams for Efficient Compaction in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.35750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling the horizon of agentic LLMs is bottlenecked by the need to fit ever longer context traces in GPU memory. Context compaction has been...

By Emiliano Penaloza, Dane Malenfant, Dheeraj Vattikonda, Roger Creus Castanyer, Siddarth Venkatraman, Abhay Puri, Jonathan Light, Matthew James Sargent, Augustine N. Mavor-Parker, Massimo Caccia, Lucas Caccia, Glen Berseth, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Alessandro Sordoni, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Laurent Charlin, Guillaume Lajoie