AI Research Papers

AllLarge Language Models (LLMs)Computer Vision & Image GenerationAudio & Speech SynthesisPrompt Engineering & InferenceAI Agents & ReasoningModel Optimization & QuantizationOther
AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

Search, Fail, Recover: A Training Framework for Correction-Aware Reasoning

Many reasoning tasks are not well described by a single left-to-right chain: a solver may need to pursue a plausible branch, observe delayed failure, and return to the latest prefix that can still be completed. We introduce Pyligent, a training and inference framework inspired by the Diligent Learner formulation that represents reasoning as validated search over partial solution chains. A task validator labels generated continuations and failures, and the resulting search trees are converted into supervised targets for three actions: continue, finish, and backtrack, with optional traces that summarize abandoned branches. We evaluate Pyligent on a hidden directed graph task designed to isolate delayed-failure recovery, and on structured reasoning domains with exact validators, including $4{\times}4$ Sudoku, Sudoku with reasoning traces, and Blocksworld. Compared with gold-only supervised fine-tuning, Pyligent improves solve rate by $72.7$ percentage points on hidden graphs, by $17$ and $18$ points on mixed and expert Sudoku, by $27$ and $14$ points on mixed and expert Sudoku with reasoning traces, and by $13$ points on Blocksworld. These results suggest that explicit failed-branch supervision can teach useful recovery behavior beyond imitation of polished solution chains.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

Beyond Attack-Success Rate: Action-Graded Severity Scale for Tool-Using AI Agents

Agentic red-teaming benchmarks report whether an injected agent was compromised as a single bit: the attack succeeded, or it did not. We argue that this binary attack-success rate discards the information a defender most needs, namely how harmful the resulting action was. We introduce an action-graded harm rubric that scores an agent's tool-call trajectory on a seven-level ordinal scale (L0 to L6) according to whether the executed action was reversible, whether it crossed scope to reach another party, and whether it expanded privilege. We compute the scale two ways: a deterministic oracle that reads the trajectory and the attacker's stated goal, and a panel of three frontier language-model judges that read a tag-free account of the same trajectory. Across four victim models and two defenses on the AgentDojo workspace suite, severity grading exposes three cases the binary metric hides, including a defense that reports a zero attack-success rate while still permitting an externally visible cross-scope leak through an unfiltered tool. The judge panel reproduces the oracle with high ordinal agreement (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.91) but shares systematic blind spots that we characterize, most notably a failure to recognize escalation chains. Unlike prior work that provides harm taxonomies, harmful-task completion tests, execution-level safety benchmarks, or severity-aware simulation, our contribution is a reusable, trace-grounded severity instrument applied to the actual actions recorded in existing red-team logs. All code, prompts, and per-episode logs are released.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

SpaCellAgent: A Self-Evolving LLM-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Trajectory Analysis

Spatial and Single-cell transcriptomics are transformative in deciphering cellular dynamics. As the fundamental paradigm for reconstructing cell developmental paths, trajectory inference (TI) is critical. However, existing methods require extensive manual intervention and proficiency in heterogeneous tools, posing a significant barrier to efficient TI analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose SpaCellAgent, an autonomous large language model (LLM) multi-agent framework that automates end-to-end spatiotemporal analysis and narrative generation. SpaCellAgent utilizes a multi-agent architecture for strategic workflow planning, a dynamic tool-orchestration engine for adaptive algorithm selection, and a self-evolution module that iteratively refines performance through feedback. We evaluate SpaCellAgent on six heterogeneous datasets encompassing complex temporal developmental trajectories, diverse sequencing platforms, and spatially-resolved tissue architectures. SpaCellAgent consistently demonstrates over 40\% improvement in analytical efficiency while maintaining expert-aligned performance. By converting natural language specifications into optimized analytical workflows and fully automating the pipeline, SpaCellAgent democratizes advanced spatiotemporal modeling and establishes a scalable, agent-driven paradigm for computational biology. The code and materials are available at https://github.com/LittleXH-shw/SpaCellAgent.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

EmbodiedGen V2: An Agentic, Simulation-Ready 3D World Engine for Embodied AI

We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable sim-ready environments for embodied intelligence. Sim-ready 3D asset generation has advanced rapidly, yet assembling such assets into policy-ready task environments remains largely manual, limiting scalable closed-loop learning. EmbodiedGen V2 addresses this gap through a unified sim-ready representation that connects cross-simulator assets, interaction affordances, task-driven worlds, large-scale multi-room scenes, and stateful Vibe Coding into a generative, editable, and reusable simulation pipeline. The generated environments support manipulation, navigation, mobile manipulation, cross-simulator deployment, and embodied policy training. In evaluation, the asset pipeline achieves 96.5% human acceptance and 98.6% collision success, and 83.3% of task-driven worlds are directly usable for downstream simulation without manual modification. Online reinforcement learning with generated environments further improves simulation success from 9.7% to 79.8%, and transfers to real robots with task success increasing from 21.7% to 75.0%. These results establish EmbodiedGen V2 as scalable simulation infrastructure for training, evaluating, and deploying embodied policies.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents

A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it \emph{silently switches off the curator}. We make this precise with a corrupted-reward analysis and, isolating the causal channel by injecting corruption on top of a deterministic reward, a behavioral study on a reference-free report-writing testbed with a code-generation cross-check. Symmetric noise leaves retirement intact, but \emph{false-pass} bias (failures slipping through as passes) disables contribution-based retirement past a sharp threshold that no amount of data can cross. Separating genuine retirement from cap-eviction churn shows this \emph{mechanism} failure is universal, holding across domains and failure rates and sparing only near-zero-false-pass, verifier-like graders. The downstream \emph{outcome}, though, is regime-dependent: eval quality degrades only where the same corruption also starves skill synthesis, and otherwise holds steady, so the disabled curator is \emph{silent}, surfacing in no aggregate metric. The contribution is a behavioral safety result, not a performance one. A cheap defect-injection audit then tells an operator, before deployment, which side of the threshold their judge occupies.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

RLVP: Penalize the Path, Reward the Outcome

Agents acting on our behalf in the real world (e.g. placing phone calls) must learn online from costly, often irreversible interactions rather than cheap simulator steps. Two things follow. First, deployability depends on the path, not only the outcome. An agent must respect outcome-neutral constraints such as not repeatedly calling an unresponsive user, respecting business hours, or completing required authentication constraints that outcome-based rewards cannot express, since violating them frequently improves apparent success. Second, because each interaction is expensive, the agent must learn efficiently from very few examples. Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is blind to both challenges: it optimizes solely on the outcome and wastes expensive rollouts on all-fail groups where group-relative advantage collapses to zero. Attempts to densify supervision by rewarding progress target the hard-to-verify direction. In contrast, real agentic environments can cheaply detect bad moves. Since group-relative advantage is equivalent to within-group variance, a dense signal helps only when it supplies variance the outcome lacks. A verifiable penalty on the path meets this condition reliably, while a progress potential helps only where partial progress is reachable. The resulting recipe "penalize the path, reward the outcome" achieves high task success with near-zero violations, where outcome-only training violates constraints on nearly every episode. We provide four design rules for effective penalties, including avoidance of the inaction trap that arises when a penalty is used in isolation.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

InductWave: Inductive Multi-Hop Logical Query Answering on Knowledge Graphs

Logical Multi-Hop Query Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can be formulated as querying, with an implicit completeness assumption. Current works mainly focus on Existential First Order Logic (EFO) queries. These EFO queries contain conjunction, disjunction, and negation operators. Most existing works employ transductive reasoning, meaning they are not capable of reasoning over entities unseen during training. In the real world, there is a resource scarcity, and we cannot train a model with all the nodes of a large KG. Hence, we propose InductWave, a wavelet-based inductive embedding method for logical query answering on large KGs. Here, the training graph consists of fewer nodes than the test graph. Our model performs on par with the baseline models while having half the number of message-passing layers. It outperforms all of them in most cases, with 75% of the layers. These fewer resource requirements enable us to evaluate InductWave on massive graphs, such as Wiki-KG. We test our model using extensive experiments across varying train-test graph proportions of the FB15k-(237) dataset, comparing it with the state-of-the-art models. The code and datasets for the model are available at https://github.com/kracr/inductwave/.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

Reason Less, Verify More: Deterministic Gates Recover a Silent Policy-Violation Failure Mode in Tool-Using LLM Agents

Tool-using LLM agents can violate the very policies they are deployed to enforce while appearing to complete the task successfully. In policy-permissive environments, a tool may execute any well-formed call even when the corresponding state transition is forbidden by domain policy. The result is a silent wrong state (a booking cancelled, a passenger count changed, a claim acted on without verification) that neither the tool nor the agent's self-report exposes. We study this failure mode in the $τ^2$-bench airline domain. On a budget agent, 78% of observed failures are silent wrong-state failures with no tool error, and the aggregate failure rate is reproducible across disjoint seeds, not sampling noise. We then evaluate a lightweight intervention: deterministic, read-only pre-execution gates that inspect the proposed call and current state before allowing a write. A four-gate suite raises full-benchmark success from 29.6% to 42.0% on gpt-4o-mini (+12.4pp; paired task-level bootstrap P=0.0012), and the lift reproduces on a disjoint 15-seed set (+12.3pp; P=0.0008). The effect is concentrated where the gates fire: on the 26/50 firing tasks, success rises by +19.2pp, while movement on the 24 non-firing tasks does not exclude zero. Two negative controls (a self-enforcing retail domain and BFCL) bound the mechanism: gates help when tools are policy-permissive and add little where tools already self-enforce. As suggestive evidence, not a central claim, the same failure mode persists at the frontier: gpt-5.2 at default reasoning still attempts policy-violating writes, and the same suite improves success from 61.2% to 71.6% (+10.4pp; P=0.020; n=5, no replication). The contribution is a bounded evaluation and reliability result: deterministic gates do not guarantee task success, but they can deterministically prevent a known class of silent policy-violating writes at the action boundary.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

Agentic Data Environments

Autonomous agents promise substantial gains in speed, scale, and labor efficiency, but their failures can impose abrupt and often irreversible costs. The central challenge for agentic automation is therefore to increase the benefits of automation while bounding the consequences of failure. While databases remain central to modern computing, agents operate over a broader data environment spanning files, APIs, applications, and system state. In this talk, I will outline early work on Agentic Data Environments -- the execution substrate in which agents operate -- that both amplify agent capabilities and enforce safety guarantees. This perspective reframes data systems from passive stores of state into active substrates for safe, reliable execution.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

When Prompts Ignore Structure: Graph-Based Attribute Reasoning for Calibrated VLMs

Reliable confidence estimation remains a key limitation of test-time adaptation in vision-language models (VLMs), where prompt tuning improves zero-shot accuracy but often degrades calibration due to entropy-driven overconfidence. Prior approaches mitigate this using LLM-derived class attributes and contrastive regularization, yet treat attributes independently, ignoring their relational structure. We propose ARGTCA, which represents (class, attribute) pairs as nodes in a Symbolic Attribute Graph and trains a Graph Attention Network (GAT) using contrastive objectives to produce structurally informed embeddings that capture inter-attribute dependencies. We introduce two attribute selection strategies: ARGTCA-DIV for intra-class diversity and ARGTCA-DISC for inter-class discrimination. Experiments across nine benchmarks show that ARGTCA-DIV reduces average Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by approximately ~37% over baselines, while ARGTCA-DISC consistently performs as the second-best variant, reducing average ECE by approximately ~17% over baselines. These results suggest that modeling symbolic attribute interactions provides a principled approach for reliable test-time adaptation in VLMs.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

MIRA-Math: A Benchmark for Minimal Information Requesting and Mathematical Reasoning

Mathematical reasoning benchmarks typically provide all facts needed to solve each problem, while interactive benchmarks often mix reasoning with tools, retrieval, and long-horizon dialogue. We introduce MIRA-Math, a benchmark for a narrower diagnostic capability: solving mathematical problems whose full latent state has a unique answer, but whose solver-facing view is missing exactly one necessary atomic fact. The solver must request the missing information in natural language under a strict budget and then integrate the returned fact into an exact final answer. A fixed constrained LLM responder sees only the dataset-provided atomic fact and must either offer the quoted fact when the request matches it, or decline otherwise. Thus, instance generation, typed hint specifications, validation, and final-answer verification are deterministic, while request metrics are measured under a fixed LLM-mediated responder channel. MIRA-Math contains 2{,}310 generated instances from 22 typed mathematical families spanning algebra, probability, linear systems, discrete structures, signal processing, Markov chains, circuits, interpolation, and numerical boundary-value problems. Experiments across frontier and small models show that request success and final-answer accuracy are separable: models may ask for the right fact yet fail the downstream computation, or fail before obtaining the canonical hint. We release generators, verifiers, prompts, run metadata, and dataset documentation to support reproducible evaluation of minimal information requesting in mathematical reasoning.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/8/2026

MMAgent-R$^2$: Learning to Rerank and Reject for Agentic mRAG

Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to retrieve visual entities matching the query image from large-scale encyclopedic knowledge bases and answer related questions. Existing multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (mRAG) methods rely on global visual features to match candidate entities, yet when the knowledge base contains numerous visually similar entities, the retriever struggles to distinguish them, populating the candidate set with visually similar but factually mismatched distractors. Since subsequent processing steps such as noise filtering are also confined to this fixed candidate set, errors from failed retrieval inevitably propagate to the final answer. To address these challenges, we propose MMAgent-R$^2$, an agentic mRAG framework that integrates visual reranking and active rejection as its internal verification mechanism. Visual reranking directly compares query and candidate images, capturing discriminative details beyond textual descriptions to precisely identify the target entity among similar candidates; active rejection discards unreliable results and retrieves additional candidates when no confident match is found, moving beyond the fixed candidate pool. We design a composite reward function with step-level verification rewards and achieve joint optimization of external retrieval, internal verification, and answer generation via GRPO training. Experiments on InfoSeek, E-VQA, and MMhops demonstrate that \ours{} achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable advantages in challenging retrieval scenarios and complex multi-image multi-hop reasoning tasks.

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