Autonomous
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Learning to Orchestrate Evolutionary Search: Progression-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic DE-CMA-ES Coordination in Optimization and Structural Model Updating
2026-10-08 09:12:13Lechen Li (State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau, Macau 519000, China, College of Water Conservancy and Hydropower Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China), Rongye Shi (School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China), Wanhuan Zhou (State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau, Macau 519000, China)Abstract
Solving high-dimensional structural model updating problems requires an algorithm capable of navigating complex, non-convex landscapes with correlated parameters. Existing hybrid evolutionary algorithms typically rely on static architectures or fixed switching rules, resulting in disjointed search phases. To address this, this study proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning-governed dynamic DE-CMAES Orchestration (DRL-DCO) algorithm, in which a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)-based actor-critic agent continuously governs the evolutionary process as a single, unified system rather than a mechanical concatenation of algorithms. Guided by a progression-aware state representation and a diversity-informed reward, the agent fluidly reallocates computational resources between the differencevector-based exploration of Differential Evolution (DE) and the covariance-guided exploitation of CMA-ES, while jointly regulating population size, elite preservation, and a restart mechanism to escape local optima. This allows DRL-DCO to autonomously transition between exploration-dominant, exploitation-dominant, and mixed-strategy regimes across generations. Beyond the training phase, the trained actor can operate in a supervision-free inference mode, where the internalized policy autonomously orchestrates DE and CMA-ES control from observed search states through forward inference alone, without critic evaluation or weight updates, enabling faster deployment while retaining full effectiveness. Validated on high-dimensional single-objective optimization benchmarks and the IASC-ASCE structural health monitoring benchmark, DRL-DCO achieves superior convergence accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art adaptive and hybrid evolutionary algorithms, as well as single-operator DRL-governed baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11546
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AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?
2026-10-08 09:06:36Michael Ofengenden, Maksym AndriushchenkoAbstract
An essential control of AI agents is their ability to manage runtime. This ability requires a sense of time-awareness, to predict and estimate wall-clock time and to control their own actions. Prior work has focused on time-awareness, but duration-following and control in native agent harnesses remain unexplored. We present AgentTime, a benchmark for testing whether agents can work for a requested duration, predict their runtime, and estimate elapsed time afterward. It comprises 222 tasks from 18 sources spanning coding, computer use, agentic work, and automated research. Duration-following experiments append a single instruction specifying how long to work, with requests ranging from about a minute to multiple days. Accuracy on these instructions varies substantially: Fable 5.1 in Claude Code deviates from requested runtimes by a typical factor of 2.9$\times$, compared with only 1.2$\times$ for GPT-6 Astra in Codex. However, matching the requested runtime does not, by itself, establish continued work on the task. Among 158 reviewed Astra runs with classifiable transcripts, 14 explicitly slept after appearing to finish. In forecasting experiments, predictions tend to overestimate natural runtimes. In retrospective experiments, removing temporal information more than doubles deviation for Sol and Astra and nearly doubles it for Fable. An agent's ability to complete a task does not guarantee that it can control its own time or work for the whole requested duration. For agents to run reliably, safely, and autonomously over long horizons, we require the evaluation of both.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09944
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The Operator Mismatch Problem: Deploying BEV Perception with Portable GPU Compute
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Modern autonomous driving systems rely on bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models that fuse camera and LiDAR inputs to detect objects in 3D space. These models are accurate, but they cannot be deployed through standard inference runtimes. The reason is an operator mismatch between dense convolutions (which runtimes handle well), sparse 3D convolutions (which runtimes cannot represent), and geometric scatter operations (which runtimes have no vocabulary for). Today, every sparse convolution library is CUDA-only and PyTorch-coupled, locking BEV deployment to a single vendor's hardware and a single execution framework. We present BEVPIPE, a framework for deploying multimodal BEV perception pipelines using portable GPU compute APIs and integrating them with production inference runtimes. BEVPIPE partitions the model into runtime-managed dense subgraphs and three external operator extensions (voxelizer, sparse encoder, BEV projector), connected through a shared GPU memory space. BEVPIPE achieves a 19.5x end-to-end speedup over conventional deployments while retaining 98.5% of reference mAP. We also showcase that BEVPIPE is portable across different GPU backends.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11504
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BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Driving
2026-10-08 08:26:52Zhenjun Qiu, Jianing Huang, Dongang Liu, Baiyu Du, Yixun Niu, Hao Yang, Xinyu Huang, Chuan Hu, Shu LiuAbstract
Diffusion-based driving planners capture diverse behaviors but can generate unsafe trajectories under distribution shift. We propose BridgeGuard, a safety-constrained diffusion planning method that progressively strengthens a constraint term during denoising to drive intermediate trajectories toward a scene-dependent safety domain. Corrections operate in a low-dimensional curve space, promoting geometric coherence. A learned module, DistanceFieldNet, predicts a time-dependent distance field from bird's-eye-view features. Value and spatial-gradient supervision at queries sampled beyond expert trajectories teaches this field about both safe and unsafe regions. The learned field supplies the constraint term through safety injection while the pretrained perception backbone and planner remain frozen. We further establish sufficient conditions for terminal safety in an idealized continuous-time bridge. On Bench2Drive, BridgeGuard improves driving score/success rate from 87.99/74.99% to 90.88/76.36% for BridgeDrive and from 80.79/58.18% to 90.46/74.09% for $\text{DiffusionDrive}^{\text{geo}}$, demonstrating cross-model generalization.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11483
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GROB: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Public-Trace Investigation of Candidate Agentic Activity
2026-10-08 08:17:45Chiara Bonfanti, Cataldo BasileAbstract
We present GROB, a multi-agent architecture for investigating candidate autonomous-agent activity through public Internet traces when privileged telemetry is unavailable. The system performs controlled, read-only collection of public traces and preserves selected observations for later resolution. In a frozen September 2026 corpus, several collected traces became more informative as additional public evidence emerged. The strongest result concerns Census-labelled identifiers captured on 9 September. Public revision records later resolved these identifiers to specific Census requests from 16 - 17 June. Other results show weaker links between traces collected by GROB and evidence reconstructed or reported later. These links vary in strength, and only some can be tied to specific public records. The results show that sparse public traces can remain useful even before their significance is fully understood. Such evidence can support later reconstruction, but public traces alone do not establish organizational attribution. Execution identity presents a separate problem, as continuity of agent identity remains an active research question for autonomous language-model agents.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11467
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Generative Adversarial Loops
2026-10-08 08:11:37Kislay Aditya Oj, Nidhi Jain, Sri Surya Varma Datla, Priyanka Jayaswal, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Aditya DesaiAbstract
AI research progress can be viewed as the interaction between two processes: benchmark creation and method discovery. Historically, both were driven by human intelligence. However, recent advances in AI have accelerated automated method discovery, while automated benchmark creation has received comparatively less attention. To enable self-advancing systems, we propose Generative Adversarial Loop (GAL), a generator-discriminator framework alternating between two agentic searches: (1) a discriminator that generates adversarial data to expose weaknesses in current systems, and (2) a generator that discovers algorithms to overcome them. We apply this framework to approximation algorithms for efficient inference. Unlike existing auto research systems, which primarily focus on algorithm discovery, GAL introduces a discriminator agent that automates goalpost setting by continually searching for weaknesses in the current algorithm. We demonstrate adversarial data generation across four tasks: KV compression, sparse video generation, sparse attention, and context extension, where the discriminator identifies weaknesses in state of the art techniques. We further show that GAL enables autonomous improvement, with newly discovered algorithms improving not only on adversarially generated data, but also on established benchmarks. Specifically, GAL improves CompactorPress on KV compression with Qwen3-4B at 4x, raising performance on the discriminator dataset from 0.35 to 0.97, while also outperforming RULER-HARD (+0.77 pts). For context extension, GAL boosts Dual Chunk Attention from 0.20 to 0.90 on the discriminator dataset, while yielding gains on standard benchmarks(ScienceFiction (+6 pts) and PG19 32K (-0.33 PPL)). GAL thus provides a path toward autonomous goalpost setting and algorithmic improvement, where AI systems continually discover their own weaknesses and develop methods to overcome them.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11458
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PlanWAM: Planning-Shaped Future Representations for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
2026-10-08 07:13:10Jinchang Xu, Hongda Yu, Fengwei Dong, Wenhui Huang, Xi Wei, Yongzhi Liu, Sunan Zhang, Jirao Wang, Chen Lv, Bingbing Li, Guodong Yin, Weichao ZhuangAbstract
World models in end-to-end autonomous driving predict future scene evolution to provide foresight for trajectory planning. Existing methods mainly study how to predict the future and how to use it, but less often ask which future representation is actually most useful for planning. To this end, we propose PlanWAM, a Planning-Shaped World Action Model. The key idea is to let the planning task shape the future-state representation, so that it retains the information most useful for planning. A latent world model then predicts this planning-shaped future latent representation from historical observations and uses it for planning, enabling foresighted planning. Specifically, we first use a Temporal Register Pyramid to compress multi-frame historical information in a recency-aware manner, learning a compact history representation oriented toward future reasoning and planning. We then introduce a privileged future posterior branch that observes ground-truth future frames, and shape its future latent representation with trajectory-planning objectives to obtain a planning-shaped future latent representation. Hindsight-to-Foresight Distillation trains a prior branch that depends only on history to predict this future latent representation. The predicted future latent representation serves as planning context and guides trajectory generation and selection. PlanWAM achieves 93.8 PDMS / 90.9 EPDMS on NAVSIM-v1/v2 navtest and reaches 38.7 HD-Score on closed-loop HUGSIM in a zero-shot setting, demonstrating leading planning performance across both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that planning-shaped future representations provide an effective and deployable form of foresight for world-action models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11382
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SynCo: Data Synthesis Co-Training for Self-Evolving LLMs via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
2026-10-08 06:40:18Wei Yang, Shawn Li, Yuehan Qin, Yawei Wang, Mingxi Wang, Shixuan Li, Tiankai Yang, Jiate Li, Jesse Thomason, Xuezhe Ma, Yue ZhaoAbstract
Self-evolving LLM agents promise to improve autonomously through continual interaction and learning, reducing their dependence on manually curated supervision. Realizing this promise requires not only updating the agent, but also evolving its training experience as its capabilities change. However, most existing pipelines rely on static datasets or separately updated synthesis models, causing previously useful tasks to become trivial while overly difficult tasks remain uninformative. This growing mismatch between agent capability and training experience limits sustained self-improvement. To address this problem, we propose SynCo, an agentic data synthesis co-training framework for self-evolving LLMs based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. SynCo jointly optimizes two independently parameterized agents: a Synthesizer that constructs training tasks from the Reasoner's evolving capability state, and a Reasoner that learns from the resulting experience. Each synthesized task induces multiple Reasoner rollouts whose outcomes provide complementary rewards to both agents. Correctness feedback improves the Reasoner, while task quality, answer reliability, and outcome-grounded teachability guide the Synthesizer. Their updates are fed back into subsequent synthesis rounds, allowing the task-solving policy and its training distribution to evolve together. Extensive experiments across eight mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SynCo substantially outperforms a broad range of existing synthetic-data methods and controlled baselines, achieving the strongest overall performance while deriving most of its gains from previously unsolved problems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11345
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EvoSim: Learning to Model, Modeling to Learn
2026-10-08 06:39:07Yun-Wei Song, Jinkai Tao, Jun-Dong Zhang, Rui Zhang, Yi-Min Wu, Qiang ZhangAbstract
Physics-based models connect scientific explanation with quantitative prediction. Constructing them requires selecting physical processes, defining states and governing equations, specifying couplings, and identifying parameters from experiments. Existing AI systems remain limited in making these model structure decisions autonomously. We introduce EvoSim, a self-evolving AI scientist for physical modeling. It uses experimental discrepancies to drive mechanism and equation revisions and held-out experimental data to test physical plausibility. Exploration traces make updates to knowledge, skills, and multi-agent orchestration. This co-evolution improves physics-based models and EvoSim's ability to select mechanisms, diagnose failures, and coordinate research. We evaluate EvoSim on two industrial battery modeling tasks. It predicts lithium-metal-plating onset from 25 to 45 degrees Celsius and 2 C to 6 C with a mean absolute error of 1.79% in state of charge. Dynamic voltage prediction under vehicle driving conditions achieves a root mean square error of 7.62 mV, surpassing the reported accuracy of models developed by human experts. Self-evolution reduces model and physics errors by approximately 36% relative to baseline, demonstrating improved scientific modeling capability. EvoSim turns experimental observations into validated models and cumulative research expertise.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11344
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Open-ended Scientific Discovery with Possibilistic Reasoning
2026-10-08 05:52:14Anita Yang, Siu Lun Chau, Tomoya Wakayama, Krikamol Muandet, Masaki AdachiAbstract
Autonomous scientific discovery with LLMs requires generating and testing hypotheses adaptively as evidence accumulates while maintaining statistical validity. Existing anytime-valid methods can handle data-dependent hypotheses, but open-ended discovery poses a deeper challenge: the best discovered hypothesis may still be the best of a bad lot, with better explanations yet undiscovered, while even background knowledge such as physical laws may require revision in light of new findings. In response, we formalize the problem as Abductive Autonomous Scientific Discovery (AASD) using possibility theory. We introduce abductive utility, a computable measure of discovery progress, and possibility frontier search, the first algorithm for AASD, which maintains anytime validity and achieves $\varepsilon$-optimal abductive utility asymptotically under suitable conditions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world scientific-discovery tasks show strong performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11289
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LLM-IDEA: Identifiability-Driven Experimental Agent for Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic World Models
2026-10-08 05:01:30Surya Shetty, Ulisses Braga-NetoAbstract
Large language model agents are being increasingly deployed as autonomous scientists, designing experiments and inferring mechanistic world models with minimal human oversight. Yet identifiability is often overlooked: when a plateau is reached, the agent needs to know whether it is not yet capable enough or the model simply is not identifiable from the data, in which case no amount of further experimentation of the same kind can help. We propose the Identifiability-Driven Experimental Agent (LLM-IDEA) for closed-loop discovery with an identifiability engine that returns a three-way plateau verdict: capability limit, resolvable within the design class, or certified exhausted. On ODEBench, 60 of the 62 systems with free constants are identifiable at round 0; the RC circuit is certified exhausted for every experiment that protocol can run, and a harvesting model is resolvable by one added initial condition. The identifiability engine reproduces known verdicts on Lotka-Volterra, Van der Pol, Lorenz, and a pharmacokinetic model, where it recommends the intravenous arm pharmacologists use, and it ranks the depth scorer of our own benchmark last among four observation designs. On the DiscoverPhysics benchmark, it finds two public worlds whose explanation rubric rewards a distinction no legal experiment can make, and every model there with accurate trajectories failed the explanation grade (15 of 15, against 5 of 9 in identifiable worlds, p = 0.012). On the Alien Universe, a two-body testbed we propose in which a force law switches between a provably non-identifiable and an identifiable protocol, LLM-IDEA on the identifiable protocol reaches discovery depth at least three on 8/8 seeds versus 1/8 without it. An autonomous discovery agent can thus compute, rather than guess, whether a plateau calls for more search, a better experiment of the same kind, or a different kind of experiment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11253
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Neuro-Memory Fuzzy Inference System for Mimicking Human-like Car Following Behavior
2026-10-08 04:56:10Nazmul Haque, Md Asif Raihan. Md. HadiuzzamanAbstract
This study presents the Neuro-Memory Fuzzy Inference System (NeMeFIS), a hierarchical machine learning architecture that asymmetrically models acceleration and deceleration in car following behavior by integrating five human memory types procedural, working, episodic, semantic, and declarative. By linking external variables to memory functions via metaheuristics and validating them through factor and p-value analyses, NeMeFIS uncovers latent cognitive influences across Arterial, Collector, and Rural Highway corridors for different types of vehicles. Results from 54 different trained models emphasize cognitive thresholds shaped by driver perception limits and cognitive load. The trained NeMeFIS models outperform traditional statistical and conventional machine learning models in replicating realistic driving behavior, including comparisons with Linear Regression, ANFIS, and LSTM architectures. Fuzzy rule analysis reveals that declarative memory demands the highest rule, especially during deceleration, indicating complex braking decisions. Procedural memory drives acceleration, while semantic and declarative memory guide deceleration. Risk perception also emerges as a key factor, particularly on urban roads. Validated on both heterogeneous and homogeneous datasets, NeMeFIS offers a robust framework for modeling driver cognition. The findings support psychotherapeutic applications and the development of adaptive, human-like decision systems in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) to enhance traffic safety.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11252
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Higher-Order Action Supervision Makes A Strong Policy Class
2026-10-08 03:32:42Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Xianyuan ZhanAbstract
Modern data-driven decision-making methods, such as imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved great success in solving many complex tasks. However, these methods often suffer from serious control instability and robustness issues when applied in real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous driving, posing notable challenges for their practical deployment. We argue that this instability issue stems largely from their limitations in solely supervising and optimizing zeroth-order actions (i.e., the action labels), failing to account for higher-order action dynamics and temporal consistency. In this paper, we show that simultaneously supervising both zeroth- and first-order actions can dramatically enhance policies' performance and control robustness. To achieve this, we introduce a novel and elegant loss scheme supported by formal theoretical guarantees that can equip any off-the-shelf policy model (e.g., deterministic, stochastic, or flow policies) with the capability for higher-order action supervision, without requiring any structural modifications. Moreover, our proposed method can serve as a lightweight plug-and-play module that seamlessly integrates with a broad spectrum of existing offline RL frameworks. Extensive evaluations on OGBench and D4RL demonstrate that our approach yields substantial performance and robustness improvements across a wide range of continuous control environments. Notably, our method can also enhance policies' out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization capability in the challenging low-data regime, making it an ideal tool in tackling many real-world control problems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11175
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VGGTWorld-VLA: Intent-Conditioned 3D World Evolution for Autonomous Driving
2026-10-08 03:20:48Zhaoyang Liu, Kun Jiang, Ziying Song, Diange YangAbstract
VGGT provides a strong foundation for geometry-centric world models by recovering unified 3D scene geometry from visual observations. Although recent extensions enable temporal 3D prediction, their future evolution remains weakly conditioned on driving intentions and actions, limiting their ability to model alternative action-dependent futures. We propose VGGTWorld-VLA, an intention-conditioned extension of VGGT-World for controllable 3D world evolution in autonomous driving. First, we introduce an action--semantic conditioning mechanism that injects complementary driving semantics and ego-motion representations into the future-token stream, enabling different future geometry predictions for the same observed scene under alternative ego actions. Second, we develop a geometry--language--action bridge that adapts historical geometry, VLA semantic features, and maneuver and trajectory representations for joint conditioning of future geometry prediction. We evaluate future geometry prediction on NAVSIM, while conditioning ablations further examine the contributions of semantic and action information. Compared with the baseline, our method demonstrates competitive geometry prediction performance. Ablation studies further support the effectiveness of semantic and action conditioning. These results demonstrate the potential of semantic and action conditioning for controllable VGGT-based world prediction in autonomous driving.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11161
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Towards Path-Creative Navigation: Robot Navigation through Embodied Interaction
2026-10-08 01:30:53Haoyu Xi, Siwei Cheng, Xiangyuan Liu, Brenda Li, Wei ZhangAbstract
Autonomous navigation in cluttered and constrained environments typically assumes a fixed environment and searches only for paths within existing free space. However, a route can be blocked by an articulated structure, a movable object, or a pedestrian, and reaching the goal may therefore require appropriate embodied interaction with the environment. This paper formulates Path-Creative Navigation (PCN), a navigation paradigm in which the robot recovers free space by coordinating locomotion and embodied interaction, and addresses one class of PCN tasks with a mapless framework. The vision-LiDAR-odometry framework integrates local observations, obstacle geometry, and robot-state estimates through a unified navigation system, providing stable semantic and geometric information for navigation and interaction. The traversability-aware decision method utilizes visual and LiDAR distance information to determine whether a blockage is actionable and whether it can be safely bypassed, enabling the robot to interact only when necessary while supporting articulated structure pushing, movable object pushing, obstacle avoidance, and pedestrian requests. We design simulation scenarios and evaluate different methods in both simulation and two real-world tasks that cannot be completed by conventional navigation alone without embodied interaction. These results demonstrate that our framework achieves higher task completion than the baseline methods by coordinating navigation and interaction in cluttered and constrained environments. Code is available at:{this https URL}.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11072
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AffordDrive3D: Affordance-Aware World-Action Modeling with Spatial Understanding
2026-10-08 01:16:38Tianhui Cai, Xinglong Sun, Chao Fang, Zhenxin Li, Rui Song, Jose M. Alvarez, Yunxiang Mao, Jiaqi Ma, Langechuan LiuAbstract
World-action models have recently improved autonomous driving by jointly learning future scene prediction and trajectory generation. Most existing approaches model the future primarily through RGB appearance, and recent works have begun to incorporate geometric prediction to improve spatial understanding. However, dense geometry describes the spatial layout of the entire scene without indicating which parts are most relevant to the ego vehicle's action. For driving, the model must also identify and anticipate where it can safely move and which regions may pose collision risks. Jointly modeling action-relevant regions and future geometry can provide the policy with both driving-relevant cues and their corresponding spatial structure. We therefore propose AffordDrive3D, an affordance- and geometry-aware world-action model that jointly learns future action-relevant regions and spatial structure. In order to capture the scene semantics and driving context needed for driving affordance prediction, we build AffordDrive3D on a VLM backbone to forecast drivable areas and collision-critical regions that directly affect ego motion, while predicting future geometry from RGB world-model latents. On NAVSIM, AffordDrive3D achieves state-of-the-art performance with 91.3 PDMS and 89.9 EPDMS, demonstrating the effectiveness of jointly modeling future affordances and geometry for trajectory planning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11060
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Refine Connections, Close the Gap: A Reliable Enhancement Framework for Driving Scene Topology
2026-10-08 01:15:14Xiaoqi Wang, Dingyi Zhaung, David Paz, Wenbin He, Yucai Bai, Peng Zhou, Rui Zhang, Jinhua Zhao, Liu RenAbstract
In autonomous driving, understanding scene topology - the connectivity between lanes and traffic elements - is critical for safe path planning and motion control. While current methods excel at detecting individual map elements, their connectivity reasoning often falls short of its theoretical potential, leaving a significant performance gap relative to the theoretical upper-bound achievable given the underlying detections. Furthermore, the decision-ready topology graphs passed to downstream tasks often remain unreliable. Current approaches typically derive connectivity by thresholding continuous topology scores; however, these scores often fail to reflect the true logical likelihood of connectivity, resulting in false positives or missing connections. Existing benchmarks further overlook this issue by primarily evaluating continuous metrics, rather than assessing the discrete connectivity required for decision-making. To bridge these gaps, we propose TopoEnhance, a novel topology enhancement framework designed to unlock the latent potential of existing methods and improve the reliability of decision-ready topology. We formulate topology enhancement as a denoising-based reconstruction process, where the model learns to recover structural consistency from stochastically corrupted ground-truth graphs. This formulation enables the model to resolve logical inconsistencies and rectify unreliable connections, producing robust discrete topology graphs that closely approach theoretical maximum performance. Extensive experiments across different baselines show that TopoEnhance consistently improves both continuous topology metrics (TOP score), and discrete connectivity measured by our adapted Topology Jaccard Similarity (TJS) metric. As a flexible, source-agnostic framework, TopoEnhance delivers substantial gains across diverse state-of-the-art baselines without requiring retraining.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11058
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iAm.md: Robot Skill Self-Assessment through Agentic Introspection for Unknown Open-Vocabulary Domains
2026-10-07 22:28:28Vincenzo Guarino, Emanuele Musumeci, Vincenzo Suriani, Daniele NardiAbstract
Agentic AI based on Large Language Model generalization capabilities offers a wide range of potential applications, including planning for embodied tasks. For example, embodied agents based on Foundation models can generate plausible plans in autonomous robotics scenarios. Due to limited context windows or hallucinatory phenomena in the next-token prediction formulation, behaviors may be generated without establishing whether the deployed robot and the observed environment actually support the requested operation, in what we call a "grounding failure". Thanks to the recent improvements in reasoning capabilities of foundation models, autonomous robot behavior generation problem can be formulated as a code generation problem. We present this http URL, a Markdown standard and generation framework, that allows anchoring this process in complementary forms of deployment evidence. Through open-vocabulary semantic mapping, we combine local vision-language detections and object segmentation and refer them to persistent object records in this intermediate standardized representation, allowing agentic introspection. We then study this new technique on a simulated TIAGo, on navigation-and-manipulation tasks, showing how this standardized representation jointly supports skill self-assessment and executable task generalization.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10962
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StoreBench: A Live-Commerce Environment for Evaluating and Training Autonomous Operator Agents
2026-10-07 21:46:10Daksh Raghuvanshi, Ved Vedere, Yifan WangAbstract
Reinforcement learning environments are now a primary lever for improving large language model (LLM) capabilities in post-training, yet most agentic benchmarks remain static: the world moves only when the agent acts, the reward is a terminal verdict, and the pass bar is set arbitrarily. We introduce StoreBench, a live-commerce environment in which an agent runs a mid-size online apparel store on a production-grade commerce backend, testing long-horizon planning and economic judgment under uncertainty. Customers order around the clock, suppliers reprice and fail, and market shocks arrive with partial or no warning. The agent acts through the same 29 merchant tools a human operator would use, under a windowed operation budget that makes simulated time a function of actions taken, so model latency cannot influence simulated time. Pass thresholds are calibrated against scripted anchor policies, the reward is hardened against a catalogue of reward hacks, and every episode replays identically given a sequence of actions. We evaluate seven frontier LLMs on 11 scenarios of 30 to 45 days and a full simulated year, over three world seeds at matched reasoning effort. No model matches the scripted smart-triage policy on average: the best, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, passes 49% of task-seed cells against the heuristic's 97%. Human experts working through the same tools and budgets outscore every model (mean composite 0.708 vs. 0.700). Over a full simulated year under the Claude Code harness, most models show dramatic performance improvement. In a GRPO post-training run, Qwen3.5-27B trained on only five disjoint tasks raises its mean composite on the held-out evaluation tasks from 0.136 to 0.373. We release five example training-split tasks, ten sample trajectories, and the scoring and verification tooling; the full environment and evaluation suite are withheld to keep the benchmark uncontaminated.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10942
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Reading the Room: Foundations, Design, and Challenges of Normative Competence in LLMs
2026-10-07 21:02:52Andrea Wynn (Nathan), Harsh Satija (Nathan), Seokhyun (Nathan), Baek, Anqi Liu, Eric Nalisnick, Gillian K. HadfieldAbstract
Human communities are governed by normative systems: shared standards that produce \textit{norms} dictating acceptable behavior, enforced through community sanctioning. Aligning increasingly autonomous AI systems with these norms is a central alignment challenge, complicated by the fact that norms are vast in number, change quickly, and are often arbitrary (e.g., dress or language conventions). Thus, alignment requires \textit{normative competence}: the ability to discern from interaction alone what norms a community enforces without relying on static pretrained knowledge. We introduce a multi-agent community debate setting, where access to debate is governed by synthetic norms, to study normative competence in isolation from pretraining exposure. We show that baseline LLM agents fail to learn norms even when doing so would improve their accuracy. We then experiment with various \textit{normative modules} -- architectural components for norm inference -- finding that norm-following is highly sensitive to both the style of norm and the model powering the normative module, suggesting a lack of generalizability. Furthermore, when idiosyncratic, non-normative behaviors accompany the true norm, LLM agents exhibit an unselective attribution failure: they indiscriminately copy idiosyncratic noise alongside enforced rules, a pattern that persists even when imitating unnecessary behaviors is explicitly penalized. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to operationalize and evaluate normative competence in LLMs, demonstrating that current AI systems excel at behavioral mimicry but lack the capacity to discern socially enforced order.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10906
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