Action Expert

Software engineering agents (SWE agents) increasingly work through tool-mediated trajectories in real repositories, yet their behavior remains difficult to characterize in concrete, observable terms. These trajectories record tool use, intermediate reasoning, evidence selection, and self-directed stopping, but they do not by themselves explain why particular moves were chosen, what evidence was trusted, or when understanding was judged sufficient. This tension makes trajectory data both limited and valuable: faithful, replayable traces can become an empirical substrate for studying agent behavior when interpreted through disciplined observation. We introduce Ada, a scoped apparatus for repository-level code understanding. Ada enters real codebases through a bounded tool interface, allowing open-ended exploration to remain recordable as finite trajectories. Across this wild-but-bounded setting, Ada chooses where to look, what to read closely, when to consolidate partial understanding, and when to close its account of the repository. We project Ada's think-action chains through observation lenses that make navigation, evidence selection, synthesis, grounding, and stopping visible without reducing behavior to raw tool counts or speculating about hidden intent. Read together, these lenses produce behavioral profiles grounded in recorded movement through software worlds. Across 408 trajectories, spanning multiple models, repositories, task families, and launch conditions, the study shows how faithful digital traces can be transformed into disciplined, comparable projections of emerging SWE-agent mindset. The results expose differences in efficiency, trajectory diversity, epistemic grounding, and the limits of intervention, while providing a methodological foundation for observing SWE agent behavior in real codebases.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly across backbones, training recipes, and data scale, yet the action decoder, which converts the backbone's hidden state into a continuous control signal, has barely changed and remains a single-point predictor across the majority of current VLAs. Whether implemented via autoregressive token bins, L1 regression, or flow-matching denoising, the resulting decoder treats the action space as unstructured, leaving the geometric proximity of neighboring actions unexploited during training. To advance this, we introduce ActionMap, a voxel heatmap action head that drops into an existing VLA in place of its native action decoder. For each new action, the head predicts a voxel heatmap over the action space, where each voxel directly stores the probability of the corresponding action. Across LIBERO simulation and real-world Franka manipulation, our heatmap head surpasses two architecturally distinct backbones at matched training steps (e.g., +8.2% over OpenVLA-OFT's L1 regression head on the LIBERO four-suite average), converges at comparable or faster rates on both backbones, and remains markedly more data-efficient at low training data. The cross-backbone consistency indicates that action representation is a real lever for VLA performance, distinct from further backbone or recipe scaling. Project Page: https://showlab.github.io/ActionMap/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies remain brittle in long-horizon control, where one-pass action decoding offers limited inference-time deliberation. Explicit chain-of-thought adds reasoning depth but incurs token-generation latency and an indirect text-to-action interface. We propose MPCoT, a reward-guided multi-path latent reasoning framework with configurable depth K and width M. MPCoT initializes M latent hypotheses, refines them for K weight-tied steps, and softly aggregates them before action decoding. A training-only path-preference objective combines expert-trajectory consistency, frozen Qwen3-VL progress scores, and endpoint-consistency feedback to supervise the path scorer. Under matched protocols on LIBERO and CALVIN, MPCoT improves long-horizon performance; ablations support the contributions of depth, width, soft aggregation, and reward supervision. On five real-world ALOHA Mini bimanual tasks, average success increases from 71.3% to 82.0% over the matched OpenVLA-OFT baseline. These results support latent deliberation as a means of improving execution while preserving the action interface and generating no reasoning tokens.

This paper presents a distributed conversational framework for human-robot collaborative manipulation that integrates local language and vision-language models (VLMs) with a Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2)-based execution stack. Language understanding, visual grounding, orchestration, and motion execution run as separate ROS 2 nodes, enabling flexible deployment across distributed hardware while maintaining a responsive control loop. From free-form user commands, the system generates structured action requests for pick, place, and handover. It uses a VLM to return image-space targets, which are converted into metric robot-frame goals using depth and calibration. A web dashboard exposes intermediate intent and grounding overlays (pixel, depth, and robot-frame) and requires explicit operator confirmation before any motion is executed. Experiments on a Franka FR3 platform evaluate end-to-end task reliability and latency under increasing working table scene ambiguity and compare alternative LLM/VLM configurations in the same pipeline. Code and full documentation are available at github.com/cogrob-tuni/franka-llm.

Video-Action Models (VAMs) leverage the broad visual dynamics captured by pre-trained video diffusion models, offering a promising path toward generalizable robot manipulation. However, RGB-only video rollouts are not directly actionable: they leave metric 3D motion, contact geometry, and fine-grained spatial constraints under-specified, making action grounding ambiguous. Meanwhile, scaling action supervision across diverse tasks and embodiments remains costly. We present PointAction, a framework that bridges video predictions to robot actions through explicit point-based 4D modeling. PointAction fine-tunes a foundation video generation model to jointly predict future RGB frames and dynamic 3D pointmaps, producing temporally consistent 3D motion of task-relevant scene geometry. These point dynamics serve as a structured, embodiment-agnostic action interface, which a diffusion-based action decoder maps to executable robot actions. By using metric 3D point dynamics as the interface between video prediction and control, PointAction reduces the ambiguity of RGB-only action grounding and supports transfer across tasks and embodiments with limited action supervision. Experiments show that PointAction achieves state-of-the-art 4D generation quality on robot scenes, outperforms existing baselines in simulation, and generalizes to two real robot arms unseen during pretraining.

Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) aim to use language to improve end-to-end planning, but the language-action gap limits this promise. We propose DriveMA, a Driving VLA framework built on verifiable meta-actions, which summarize future ego motion into compact language-domain intentions and can be constructed from expert trajectories with a trajectory-grounded annotation pipeline and can be verified against generated trajectories through rule-based projection. DriveMA exploits this verifiability with action-centric supervised training and a data-efficient turn-level credit assignment reinforcement learning framework, explicitly aligning high-level decisions with low-level trajectory planning through dense rewards and precise credit assignment. DriveMA sets a new state of the art on the Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, achieving a Rater Feedback Score of 8.060 with a 2B model and further improving it to 8.079 with a 4B model; it also obtains competitive closed-loop planning performance on NAVSIM. These results show that even a simple meta-action interface can achieve state-of-the-art planning when made verifiable and optimized for language-action alignment. Code, data, and models are available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/DriveMA.

Tool-using language agents turn model decisions into external side effects: they read files, run scripts, call APIs, send messages, and invoke Model Context Protocol tools. This makes agent attacks different from jailbreaks. The harmful step is often not an obviously forbidden output, but an ordinary executable action that becomes unsafe because attacker-controlled context steers authorized access against the user's interest. We identify this failure mode as authority confusion: untrusted resources may inform reasoning, but they must not authorize side effects. We present AIRGuard, a runtime guard that operationalizes least privilege as action-time authorization. AIRGuard normalizes heterogeneous tool calls, derives task authority into step-level authority, tracks source and target trust, simulates sensitive side effects, audits cross-step risk, and enforces decisions before actions execute. On AgentTrap, AIRGuard reduces Sonnet 4.6 attack success from 36.3% without defense to 5.5%. On DTAP-150, AIRGuard preserves 76.0% benign utility with Haiku 4.5, compared with 52.0% for ARGUS and 42.0% for MELON. An ablation further shows that prompt-only policy helps only modestly, whereas a dedicated runtime authority-control layer gives the agent system direct control over tool-mediated side effects. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Sophie508/AIRGuard.

LLM agents increasingly act by writing code, yet a split persists between the runtime that drives the agent and the code the model writes. The runtime owns the loop, context, and control flow, and the model has little say over any of them. Letting model-written code shape the runtime itself would make agents more expressive, but it would also sharpen safety problems. A model can be diverted by a prompt injection, call the wrong tool, or fail partway and leave an inconsistent state, and each such failure reaches further when the code shapes the runtime than when it expresses a single action. We present LACUNA, a programming model for agents that closes this split while preserving safety. Each agent action is a typed call $\texttt{agent[T](task)}$ that the LLM fills with code when execution reaches it, and the code is type-checked against the surrounding program before it runs. Because each action is accepted or rejected as a whole, a rejected one leaves the environment untouched, and its compiler diagnostics drive a retry. The same check also bounds which tools and data an action may use and how they flow. Our primitive expresses ReAct loops, sub-agents, skills, parallel decomposition, and multi-model planning as ordinary control flow. We evaluate LACUNA on a collection of test cases, BrowseComp-Plus, and $τ^2$-bench. On BrowseComp-Plus, $8.6\%$ of generations are rejected before execution, with 0.7 retries per query on average, and the agent reaches $27.1\%$ accuracy. On $τ^2$-bench, LACUNA solves $76.0\%$ of $392$ tasks across four domains with a capable model, on par with the baseline agent.

Vision--language--action (VLA) policies are trained to imitate actions; their loss never asks them to estimate reward, progress, or future success. Their frozen representations nevertheless carry such information, and it can be read out and used to guide action choice without retraining the policy. From mixed successful and failed manipulation trajectories on LIBERO-Goal, we recover Monte-Carlo outcome targets using lightweight linear probes on frozen features. The targets are consistently predictable from OpenVLA, Pi0.5, DINOv2, and CLIP features, and substantially less so from baselines built on progress, time-to-go, task identity, or proprioception. To rule out task and temporal shortcuts, we evaluate the probes under same-task, same-timestep matched comparisons: Pi0.5 probes still reach roughly 92% pairwise ordering accuracy, while label-shuffled controls stay at chance. Used as a test-time selector over sampled Pi0.5 action prefixes, the same probe turns this offline finding into behavior: on push-plate, success rises from 26.7% under greedy decoding to 44.3%, with a second positive case on wine-rack. The gains are not universal and require additional inference compute, but the underlying finding is clean: frozen VLAs already encode information about success that their imitation objective never explicitly demands.

A key goal in stochastic contextual linear bandits is to efficiently learn a near-optimal policy. Prior algorithms for this problem learn a policy by strategically sampling actions but naively (passively) sampling contexts from the underlying context distribution. However, in many practical scenarios -- including online content recommendation, survey research, and clinical trials -- practitioners can actively sample or recruit contexts based on prior knowledge of the context distribution. Despite this potential for active learning, the role of strategic context sampling in stochastic contextual linear bandits is underexplored. We propose an algorithm that learns a near-optimal policy by strategically sampling rewards of context-action pairs. We prove instance-dependent theoretical guarantees demonstrating that our active context sampling strategy can improve over the minimax rate by up to a factor of $\sqrt{d}$, where $d$ is the linear dimension. We show empirically that our algorithm reduces the number of samples needed to learn a near-optimal policy, in tasks such as warfarin dose prediction and joke recommendation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) commonly introduce natural-language reasoning as an intermediate interface for end-to-end planning, but reasoning-centric interfaces face three practical bottlenecks: obtaining high-quality reasoning annotations is difficult, generating and understanding long reasoning chains is challenging for compact models, and inference latency is substantially increased. In this paper, we rethink the design of language interfaces in Driving VLAs and show that concise one-step meta-actions are a simple yet effective alternative to verbose reasoning. Meta-actions provide semantic decision grounding while remaining low-entropy, and being automatically derivable from expert trajectories, enabling scalable supervision and reliable trajectory conditioning. Building on this interface, we propose DriveMA, which combines action-centric supervised training with a turn-level credit-assignment reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes meta-action correctness, trajectory quality, and trajectory--meta-action consistency. Experiments show that DriveMA already achieves a new state of the art on the Waymo End-to-End Driving Challenge with a 2B model, reaching a Rater Feedback Score (RFS) of 8.060, while its 4B version further improves the state of the art to 8.079; DriveMA also obtains competitive performance on NAVSIM. Ablations demonstrate that one-step meta-actions offer a better practical trade-off between expressiveness, predictability, and inference efficiency than natural-language reasoning or finer-grained action sequences. Code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

Reinforcement learning often produces high-frequency oscillatory control signals that undermine the safety and stability required for physical deployment. Explicit action chunking addresses this by predicting fixed-horizon trajectories but scales the policy output dimension proportionally with the horizon length, leading to optimization difficulties and incompatibility with standard step-wise interaction. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes Dual-Window Smoothing (DWS), an implicit action chunking framework for smooth continuous control. Unlike explicit methods, DWS enforces temporal coherence without expanding the action space. It uses a dual-window design: an execution window that ensures physical smoothness through deterministic modulation, and a value window that aligns temporal-difference targets over the horizon to correct critic bias caused by open-loop execution. DWS also includes a lightweight actor-side temporal regularizer based on first-order action differences to promote global continuity. This design effectively bridges the gap between temporal abstraction and reactive step-wise control. Experiments on benchmarks including the DeepMind Control Suite and industrial energy management tasks show that DWS outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. In complex vision-based autonomous driving tasks, DWS achieves smoother control, safer behavior with reduced jitter, and attains a 100% success rate.

Modern interactive video world models have achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet lack fine-grained multi-entity control and cross-entity, cross-world generalization. We trace this gap to the action interface: standard control protocols (e.g. animation IDs, device inputs, scene-level captions) bind action semantics to specific entities or engines at design time. We propose natural language as the interface to unlock expressiveness that no prior interface can achieve, and we present Incantation, the first interactive video world model with per-latent-frame (0.25 s) natural-language conditioning that supports simultaneous multi-entity control and concept-level cross-entity transfer beyond any fixed rendering pipeline. We pair a pretrained bidirectional video backbone with frame-local text cross-attention, and enable real-time long-horizon streaming through ODE-initialized Self-Forcing distillation with a RoPE-decoupled sliding KV-cache. We surpass the Action-Index baseline on cross-entity transfer (89% vs. 43%) and out-of-vocabulary prompts (90% vs. 0%), and our 2-step student sustains 19.7 FPS at 480p with stable FVD over 2-hour rollouts. We further apply the same architecture and training recipe to The King of Fighters, changing only the per-entity action vocabulary slots. We have released a preview subset of the Incantation dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhush/incantation-elden-ring-scenes, containing manually collected Elden Ring player-boss combat clips with structured action-oriented metadata. Larger-scale Elden Ring and KOF data will be released with the full project.

Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental interaction, the objects of learning are often fixed in advance, such as input features, recognition outputs, network structures, task goals, or action sequences. This limits their ability to adapt when new features, new categories, or more efficient task routines appear during long-term operation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a thinking-learning interaction model for autonomous robots. The core idea is that thinking guides learning by identifying potential changes, selecting useful evidence, organizing training materials, and planning verification actions, while learning promotes thinking by updating task knowledge, feature-selection experience, action strategies, and future reasoning processes. Based on this bidirectional mechanism, the robot can gradually move beyond predefined learning settings and adapt its recognition relations and action relations through continuous interaction with the environment. Specifically, the proposed model supports adaptive input feature discovery, output category expansion, learning model update, and action routine reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed model improves the final recognition accuracy from 0.419 to 0.845 in feature adaptation, achieves higher new-category formation accuracy and model-update success rate, and reduces the average action length from 13.0 to 4.0 in action routine reconstruction. In learning-enhanced thinking, the useful evidence selection rate increases from 0.272 to 0.965, indicating that learning results can effectively improve future evidence selection and reasoning.

We study the minimax sample complexity of $\varepsilon$-best arm identification in linear bandits. Given a compact action set $\mathcal{X}$ that spans $\mathbb{R}^d$ and an unknown reward vector $θ\in\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to output an arm $\widehat{x}\in\mathcal{X}$ such that $\langle \widehat{x},θ\rangle \ge \max_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \langle x,θ\rangle - \varepsilon$ with probability at least $1-δ$, using as few samples as possible. First, we present a non-adaptive fixed-design method with sample complexity $\mathcal{O}\!\left(\frac{d\log(1/δ)}{\varepsilon^2}+\frac{w(\mathcal{X})^2}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$, where $w(\mathcal{X})$ is a Gaussian width term dependent on $\mathcal{X}$, and we prove a matching lower bound $Ω\!\left(\frac{d\log(1/δ)}{\varepsilon^2}+\frac{w(\mathcal{X})^2}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ for all non-adaptive fixed-design methods. We then turn to adaptive sampling. We raise an important structural question: beyond the canonical basis, are there structured action sets for which adaptivity yields only logarithmic-factor improvements over the optimal non-adaptive rate? We answer in the affirmative for several natural action sets, namely the hypercube, the $\ell_2$ ball, $m$-sets, and multi-task multi-armed bandits. Finally, we provide the first construction of an action set $\mathcal{X}$ for which adaptivity yields a polynomial-factor improvement over every non-adaptive algorithm. A key ingredient behind this separation is an $\ell_2$-norm estimation subroutine: we design an adaptive algorithm that uses $\mathcal{O}\!\left(\frac{d\log(1/δ)}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ samples from the unit $\ell_2$ ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and outputs an estimate $\widehat r$ satisfying $|\widehat r-\|θ\|_2|\le \varepsilon$ with probability at least $1-δ$, where $θ$ is the unknown reward vector.

Diffusion-based vision-language-action models (dVLAs) are promising for embodied intelligence but are fundamentally limited in real-time deployment by the high latency of full inference. We propose Realtime-VLA FLASH, a speculative inference framework that eliminates most full inference calls during replanning by introducing a lightweight draft model with parallel verification via the main model's Action Expert and a phase-aware fallback mechanism that reverts to the full inference pipeline when needed. This design enables low-latency, high-frequency replanning without sacrificing reliability. Experiments show that on LIBERO, FLASH largely preserves task performance by replacing many 58.0 ms full-inference rounds with speculative rounds as fast as 7.8 ms, lowering task-level average inference latency to 19.1 ms (3.04x speedup). We additionally demonstrate effectiveness on real-world conveyor-belt sorting, highlighting its practical impact for latency-critical embodied tasks.

In this paper, we propose GTA-VLA(Guide, Think, Act), an interactive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that enables spatially steerable embodied reasoning by allowing users to guide robot policies with explicit visual cues. Existing VLA models learn a direct "Sense-to-Act" mapping from multimodal observations to robot actions. While effective within the training distribution, such tightly coupled policies are brittle under out-of-domain (OOD) shifts and difficult to correct when failures occur. Although recent embodied Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches expose intermediate reasoning, they still lack a mechanism for incorporating human spatial guidance, limiting their ability to resolve visual ambiguities or recover from mistakes. To address this gap, our framework allows users to optionally guide the policy with spatial priors, such as affordance points, boxes, and traces, which the subsequent reasoning process can directly condition on. Based on these inputs, the model generates a unified spatial-visual Chain-of-Thought that integrates external guidance with internal task planning, aligning human visual intent with autonomous decision-making. For practical deployment, we further couple the reasoning module with a lightweight reactive action head for efficient action execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the in-domain SimplerEnv WidowX benchmark, our framework achieves a state-of-the-art 81.2% success rate. Under OOD visual shifts and spatial ambiguities, a single visual interaction substantially improves task success over existing methods, highlighting the value of interactive reasoning for failure recovery in embodied control. More details of the project can be found here: https://github.com/FutianLabs/GTA-VLA.

Progression, the task of updating a knowledge base to reflect action effects, generally requires second-order logic. Identifying first-order special cases, by restricting either the knowledge base or action effects, has long been a central topic in reasoning about actions. It is known that local-effect, normal, and acyclic actions, three increasingly expressive classes, admit first-order progression. However, a systematic analysis of the size of such progressions, crucial for practical applications, has been missing. In this paper, using the framework of Situation Calculus, we show that under reasonable assumptions, first-order progression for these action classes grows only polynomially. Moreover, we show that when the KB belongs to decidable fragments such as two-variable first-order logic or universal theories with constants, the progression remains within the same fragment, ensuring decidability and practical applicability.

Video generation models offer a promising imagination mechanism for robot manipulation by predicting long-horizon future observations, but effectively exploiting these imagined futures for action execution remains challenging. Existing approaches either condition policies on predicted frames or directly decode generated videos into actions, both suffering from a mismatch between visual realism and control relevance. As a result, predicted observations emphasize perceptual fidelity rather than action-centric causes of state transitions, leading to indirect and unstable control. To address this gap, we propose MoLA (Mixture of Latent Actions), a control-oriented interface that transforms imagined future videos into executable representations. Instead of passing predicted frames directly to the policy, MoLA leverages a mixture of pretrained inverse dynamics models to infer a mixture of latent actions implied by generated visual transitions. These modality-aware inverse dynamics models capture complementary semantic, depth, and flow cues, providing a structured and physically grounded action representation that bridges video imagination and policy execution. We evaluate our approach on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO, CALVIN, and LIBERO-Plus) and real-world robot manipulation tasks, achieving consistent gains in task success, temporal consistency, and generalization.

Command line interface (CLI) agents are emerging as a practical paradigm for agent-computer interaction over evolving filesystems, executable command line programs, and online execution feedback. Recent work has used reinforcement learning (RL) to learn these interaction abilities from verifiable task feedback, yet few methods exploit the native structured attributes of CLI actions as learning signals. Beyond this underused action structure, CLI learning also couples two bottlenecks for coding agents. First, the agent must identify task-relevant evidence in a large codebase from partial observations. Second, sparse terminal rewards must be assigned to the actions that shape a long multi-turn trajectory. We study these bottlenecks through shell-driven information extraction and file editing tasks. For selective observation, we introduce $σ$-Reveal, an inference-time mechanism that selects token-budgeted context for the same CLI. For credit assignment, we propose Action Advantage Assignment ($\mathrm{A}^3$), a native agentic RL method that preserves the algorithmic complexity of standard agentic RL. $\mathrm{A}^3$ constructs turn-level advantages from episode-level relative feedback, abstract syntax tree (AST) based action sub-chain residuals, and tree-level trajectory margins. To further evaluate this problem setting, we construct ShellOps, a verifiable dataset suite covering CLI tasks in repository environments.

In model-based learning, the agent learns behaviors by simulating trajectories based on world model predictions. Standard world models typically learn a stationary transition function that maps states and actions to next states, when an action and an outcome frequently co-occur in training data, the model tends to internalize this correlation as a general causal rule while ignoring action preconditions. In interactive environments, however, agent actions can reshape the future affordance space. At each timestep, an action may becomes executable only after its prerequisites are met, or non-executable when they are destroyed. We term such events structure-changing events (SC events). As a result, a conventional world model often fails to determine whether a given action is executable in the current state, especially in multi-step predictions. Each imagined step is conditioned on an incorrect affordance state, and therefore the prediction error compounds over the rollout horizon. In this paper, we propose AGWM (Affordance-Grounded World Model), which learns an abstract affordance structure represented as a DAG of prerequisite dependencies to explicitly track the dynamic executability of actions. Experiments on game-based simulated environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving lower multi-step prediction error, better generalization to novel configurations, and improved interpretability.

Patent examination is a complex, multi-stage process requiring both technical expertise and legal reasoning, increasingly challenged by rising application volumes. Prior benchmarks predominantly view patent examination as discriminative classification or static extraction, failing to capture its inherently interactive and iterative nature, similar to the peer review and rebuttal process in academic publishing. In this paper, we introduce PatRe, the first benchmark that models the full patent examination lifecycle, including Office Action generation and applicant rebuttal. PatRe comprises 480 real-world cases and supports both oracle and retrieval-simulated evaluation settings. Our benchmark reframes patent examination as a dynamic, multi-turn process of justification and response. Extensive experiments across various LLMs reveal critical insights into model performance, including differences between proprietary and open-source models, as well as task asymmetries between examiner analysis and applicant-side rebuttal. These findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of LLMs in modeling complex, real-world legal reasoning and technical novelty judgment in patent examination. We release our code and dataset to facilitate future research on patent examination modeling.

A key challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) lies in designing learning signals that effectively promote coordination among agents. Designing such signals requires estimating how one agent's current action affects its teammates over future interaction steps. To address this, we introduce Multi-step Advantage-Gated Interventional Causal MARL (MAGIC), a framework that estimates multi-step action effects between agents and selectively converts them into intrinsic rewards. MAGIC uses counterfactual action interventions to compare teammate futures under factual and counterfactual branches, and introduces a gate based on advantage to direct exploration toward beneficial behaviors aligned with the task goal. Experiments on Multi-Agent Particle Environments (MPE) and StarCraft micromanagement benchmarks (SMAC and SMACv2) show that MAGIC consistently outperforms leading prior methods, with average relative final performance improvements of 26.9% and 10.1%, respectively.

Efficient construction of models capturing the preconditions and effects of actions is essential for applying AI planning in real-world domains. Extensive prior work has explored learning such models from high-level descriptions of state and/or action sequences. In this paper, we tackle a more challenging setting: learning lifted action models from sequences of state images, without action observation. We propose a deep learning framework that jointly learns state prediction, action prediction, and a lifted action model. We also introduce a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to prevent prediction collapse and self-reinforcing errors among predictions. The MILP takes the predicted states, actions, and action model over a subset of traces and solves for logically consistent states, actions, and action model that are as close as possible to the original predictions. Pseudo-labels extracted from the MILP solution are then used to guide further training. Experiments across multiple domains show that integrating MILP-based correction helps the model escape local optima and converge toward globally consistent solutions.

Autonomous agents operating in dynamic environments increasingly demand decision-making systems that are both efficient and interpretable. Hence we propose the Event-Retrieve-Action (ERA) framework, an alternative formulation for embodied decision-making that bridges the gap between black-box imitation and interpretable memory retrieval while enabling online refinement without retraining. The environment is represented as structured semantic events encoded into an interpretable latent representation, and decisions are generated by retrieving relevant prior experiences from a knowledge bank of event-action pairs. Final actions are produced through weighted aggregation of retrieved maneuvers, enabling transparent and physically consistent decision-making. Experiments in UAV navigation demonstrate real-time performance and adaptive behavior in dynamic environments as a representative embodied decision-making application scenario.

Personalization in emotion recognition (ER) is essential for accurate interpretation of subtle and subject-specific expressive patterns. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, demonstrate strong potential for leveraging joint image-text representations in ER. However, existing CLIP-based methods either rely on CLIP's contrastive pretraining or use LLMs to generate descriptive text prompts, which can be noisy, computationally expensive, and often fail to capture fine-grained expressions, leading to degraded performance. In this work, Action Units (AUs) are leveraged as structured textual prompts within CLIP to model fine-grained facial expressions. AUs encode the subtle muscle activations underlying expressions, providing localized and interpretable semantic cues for more robust facial expression recognition (FER). We introduce CLIP-AU, a lightweight AU-guided temporal learning method that integrates interpretable AU semantics into CLIP. It learns generic, subject-agnostic representations by aligning AU prompts with facial dynamics, enabling fine-grained FER without CLIP fine-tuning or LLM-generated text supervision. Although CLIP-AU models fine-grained AU semantics, it does not adapt to subject-specific variability in subtle expressions. To address this limitation, we propose CLIP-AUTT, a video-based test-time personalization method that dynamically adapts AU prompts to videos from unseen subjects. By combining entropy-guided temporal window selection with prompt tuning, CLIP-AUTT enables subject-specific adaptation while preserving temporal consistency. Our experiments on three challenging video-based datasets, BioVid, StressID, and BAH, indicate that CLIP-AU and CLIP-AUTT outperform state-of-the-art CLIP-based FER and TTA methods.

Current mobile manipulation research predominantly follows an instruction-driven paradigm, where robots rely on predefined textual commands to execute tasks. However, this setting confines robots to a passive role, limiting robotic autonomy and the ability to react to dynamic environmental events. To address these limitations, we introduce Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation (STMM), where robots must actively perceive and interact with sound-emitting objects without explicit action instructions. To support STMM, we develop Habitat-Echo, a simulation platform that integrates sound rendering with physical interaction. We further propose a hierarchical baseline that translates high-level planning into low-level executions, where a task planner predicts a skill chain for policy models to execute sequentially. Experiments indicate the feasibility of perceiving auditory events and executing corresponding physical interactions without explicit instructions. Notably, in challenging multi-event scenarios, the robot successfully isolates the primary sources from overlapping acoustic interference to execute the first interactions, and subsequently proceeds to manipulate the secondary objects. These new challenges of planning-to-execution position STMM as a measurable research direction.The code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced GUI agents' capabilities in parsing textual instructions, interpreting screen content, and executing tasks, a critical challenge persists: the irreversibility of agent operations-where a single erroneous action can trigger catastrophic deviations. To address this, we propose the \textbf{G}UI \textbf{A}ction Cr\textbf{i}tic's Dat\textbf{a} Flywheel System (GAIA), a training framework that enables the models to have iterative critic capabilities, which are used to improve the Test-Time Scaling (TTS) of basic GUI agents' performance. Specifically, we train an \textbf{Intuitive Critic Model} (ICM) using positive and negative action examples from a base agent first. This critic evaluates the immediate correctness of the agent's intended actions, thereby selecting operations with higher success probability. Then, the initial critic guides agent actions to collect refined positive/negative samples, initiating the self-improving cycle. The augmented data then trains a second-round critic with enhanced discernment capability. We conduct experiments on various datasets and demonstrate that the proposed ICM can improve the test-time performance of various closed-source and open-source models, and the performance can be gradually improved as the data is recycled. The code, dataset, and accompanying datasheet will be publicly released at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/GAIA.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at single-image understanding, they exhibit significantly degraded performance in multi-image reasoning scenarios. Multi-image reasoning presents fundamental challenges including complex inter-relationships between images and scattered critical information across image sets. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose a Cognition-Inspired Meta-Action Framework (CINEMA), which decomposes multi-image reasoning into five structured meta-actions: Global, Focus, Hint, Think, and Answer, explicitly modeling the sequential cognitive steps humans naturally employ. For cold-start training, we introduce a Retrieval-Based Tree Sampling strategy that generates high-quality meta-action trajectories to bootstrap the model with reasoning patterns. During reinforcement learning, we adopt a two-stage paradigm: an exploration phase with Diversity-Preserving Strategy to avoid entropy collapse, followed by an annealed exploitation phase with DAPO to gradually strengthen exploitation. To train our model, we construct a dataset of 56k cold-start and 58k reinforcement learning instances spanning multi-image, multi-frame, and single-image tasks. We conduct extensive evaluations on multi-image reasoning benchmarks, video understanding benchmarks, and single-image benchmarks, achieving competitive state-of-the-art performance on several key benchmarks. Our model surpasses GPT-4o on the MUIR and MVMath benchmarks and notably outperforms specialized video reasoning models on video understanding benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our human cognition-inspired reasoning framework.

In standard reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects an action without delay, and executes it immediately. In real-world dynamic environments, such as cyber-physical systems, this assumption often breaks down due to delays in the interaction between the agent and the system. These delays can vary stochastically over time and are typically unobservable when deciding on an action. Existing methods deal with this uncertainty conservatively by assuming a known fixed upper bound on the delay, even if the delay is often much lower. In this work, we introduce the interaction layer, a general framework that enables agents to adaptively handle unobservable and time-varying delays. Specifically, the agent generates a matrix of possible future actions, anticipating a horizon of potential delays, to handle both unpredictable delays and lost action packets sent over networks. Building on this framework, we develop a model-based algorithm, Actor-Critic with Delay Adaptation (ACDA), which dynamically adjusts to delay patterns. Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across a wide range of locomotion benchmark environments, including real-world measured delays.

Inspired by the impressive success of image-text foundation models, recent works have proposed to adapt these foundation models to video data, leading to efficient and effective video models for open-vocabulary action recognition. However, through a comprehensive evaluation, our work finds that state-of-the-art open-vocabulary action recognition models still struggle with generalization to video domains that they have not encountered. To address this limitation, we introduce \textit{generalizable open-vocabulary action recognition}, which aims to develop action recognition models capable of generalizing to both novel action categories and unseen video domains. Our work contributes a novel model named XOV-Action to overcome two critical challenges: (1) understanding novel action concepts of open-set categories, and (2) mitigating the scenario discrepancy between training and test datasets. Specifically, XOV-Action first proposes to capture diverse action-related concepts by learning diversified elaboration representations, which enables better generalization to open-set action categories. Second, XOV-Action learns scene-agnostic video representations to overcome the scene bias, which improves the generalization in unseen video domains. Additionally, to evaluate models in generalizable open-vocabulary action recognition, we contribute a new cross-domain action benchmark named XOVABench, which covers multiple video domains with varying degrees of gaps and consists of both closed-set and open-set action categories. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed XOV-Action can effectively improve action recognition performance for both closed-set and open-set categories across video domains. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/KunyuLin/XOV-Action/.