Agentic Reasoning

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12 papers in the last 28 days · 0.3% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-14

6 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Reasoning.

Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Agentic Reasoning.

152 papers

Latest in Agentic Reasoning

Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Autonomous Chemical Mechanistic Discovery through Agentic Reasoning and Validation

Unraveling reaction mechanisms is central to modern chemistry, yet automating these investigations remains challenging because computational workflows still rely heavily on expert intervention. Here we introduce ARCHE, an autonomous agentic system that integrates a general-purpose reasoning model, a domain-specialized computational chemistry model, and a structured tool registry to transform mechanistic inquiry into a scalable, self-validating process. ARCHE interprets scientific questions, generates and prioritizes mechanistic hypotheses, orchestrates computational workflows, and iteratively refines conclusions based on computed evidence within a closed loop. We validate its capabilities across three increasingly demanding scenarios: reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states and validating the corresponding reaction mechanism in a previously reported asymmetric catalytic reaction; proposing and validating a plausible radical pathway through iterative hypothesis refinement for a recently discovered but unpublished α\alpha-iodoboronate C-I cleavage reaction; and identifying a chemically interpretable descriptor that governs selectivity in nickel-catalysed migratory cross-coupling reactions. By coupling agentic reasoning with rigorous computational validation, ARCHE advances autonomous mechanistic discovery and establishes a foundation for broader machine-assisted chemical research. The code for ARCHE is publicly available at https://github.com/JetAstra/Arche-Harness.
Dong Li, Sixuan Mi, Zihao Ye +10
Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Magenta: Closing the Loop Between Mathematical Reasoning and Lean Verification

Most of mathematical knowledge has been communicated through so-called informal use of mathematics and natural language. With large language models (LLMs) being highly adept in using natural language, they achieve strong performance, yet not perfect, in informal mathematical reasoning. Restraining LLMs to informal reasoning misses out on the opportunity to use the discrete verification abilities that machines offer through machine-checkable proofs. In this paper, we bridge the gap between informal and formal reasoning by integrating Lean signals into the informal reasoning process. We introduce Magenta, a training-free agentic pipeline that, given only a natural-language problem, produces an answer, expresses it as a Lean 4 statement, and constructs a machine-checked proof. A statement judge verifies whether the formalisation preserves the original problem, while an error-attribution judge routes failed attempts either to mathematical re-derivation or local Lean repair. Magenta achieves 100% accuracy across all evaluated olympiad benchmarks, including AIME 2025, AIME 2026, and HMMT February 2026. When paired with the open-weight K2-Horizon-7B reasoner, it solves all six IMO 2026 problems. Our analysis shows that statement adjudication is essential for preventing false certificates and that feedback-guided correction outperforms independent resampling on difficult problems.
Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Haonan Li, Zheng Zhao +6
Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

VLX-VR: An Agentic-Aware Video Reasoning Model

Real-world video understanding requires integrating visual, audio, textual, and temporal evidence distributed across a video. Yet many pipelines use a fixed video context and single-pass inference, limiting adaptive evidence acquisition when observations are incomplete, ambiguous, or conflicting. We present VLX-VR, an agentic-aware video reasoning model trained within a video reasoning framework defined by a Think--Memory--Observation loop. At each step, VLX-VR determines the needed evidence, invokes read_memory or write_memory, incorporates the returned Observation, and decides whether to continue or produce the task output. We train VLX-VR with multimodal data, including videos and agent trajectories, using reinforcement learning to learn evidence acquisition, memory use, and termination. On MINERVA, VLX-VR achieves state-of-the-art performance among the models included in our comparison, with 78.79% accuracy. Under the original three duration groups, its accuracies are 76.70%, 78.73%, and 80.92%, with a cross-duration accuracy variance of 2.97~pp2\mathrm{pp}^2. On correctly answered samples, 96.20% of VLX-VR's reasoning traces are consistent with the MINERVA reference reasoning traces and the evidence described by them, while approximately 75.80% of all evaluated samples satisfy both answer correctness and this evidence-grounded trace criterion. These results show strong performance and broadly stable behavior across durations, while counting, state changes, causal reasoning, and spatial perception remain challenging.
Sheng Li, Peng Liu, Qianqian Zhang +1
Sep 9, 2026cs.RO

CT-SAFR: Safe and Interpretable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Robots: A Multi-Layered Verification Framework for Trustworthy AI-Driven Robotic Decision Making

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables LLMs to perform explicit, step-by-step reasoning, creating opportunities for sophisticated autonomous robots. However, recent research reveals that reasoning models verbalize their actual decision processes only 25-39% of the time, with faithfulness degrading 44% on complex tasks. This paper presents CT-SAFR (Chain-of-Thought Safety and Faithfulness for Robotics), a multi-layered verification framework achieving 94.2% hallucination detection (n = 500, 95% CI: 91.8-95.9%) with sub-500ms latency. Through a warehouse robot case study, this work demonstrates 87% reduction in unsafe reasoning outputs (p < 0.001) and provides recommendations for responsible deployment of reasoning-capable autonomous robots.
Cagri Temel
Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation

Accurate citations are the foundation of academic writing, tracing intellectual origins and substantiating core claims. However, manually navigating the growing volume of scientific literature is increasingly difficult, prompting reliance on automatic citation recommendation. While modern retrieval-augmented architectures have largely mitigated the fabrication of non-existent papers, current systems relying on semantic similarity struggle with misattribution, often citing authentic papers that fail to logically support the author's claim. To address this challenge, we argue that accurate citation requires a shift from similarity-based search to active, claim-level reasoning. We propose ReCite, a decoupled agentic framework that orchestrates location perception, intent-aware query planning, and reflective verification. Trained on synthesized reasoning trajectories, our agent verifies claim-evidence consistency and triggers self-correction loops when retrieved candidates lack logical support. Experiments demonstrate that our lightweight framework outperforms state-of-the-art massive generative models in strict citation accuracy. By grounding literature matching in verifiable logic rather than semantic overlap, ReCite establishes a reliable foundation for automated academic writing.
Yuyang Huang, Bobo Li, Jiajia Song +4
Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

Eliciting Self-Verification in Multimodal Reasoning Agents with Reinforcement Learning

Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms such as GRPO have improved long-form reasoning in text-only language models, particularly for coding and mathematics. Reliable tool use in multimodal agents, however, remains challenging because models must interpret text and images while integrating noisy retrieved evidence, often under sparse outcome-level supervision without explicit verification signals. We present Self-Verification via Reinforcement Learning (SVRL), an RL-only finetuning framework that trains multimodal agents to verify and filter retrieved evidence within their own reasoning traces, reducing reliance on external verifiers at inference time. SVRL also introduces a search-aware penalty that discourages unnecessary tool calls and a query-diversity reward that encourages diverse, well-formed search queries, providing fine-grained feedback on when and what to search. Finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with SVRL on only 5{,}000 visual question answering examples yields consistent gains in multi-hop VQA generalization and tool efficiency across benchmarks. Overall, SVRL narrows the gap between compact agents and much larger proprietary models while requiring substantially lower training and inference cost.
Vishwas Sathish, Viresh Ranjan, Xinliang Zhu +2
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

Visual fluency in generated video does not imply physical reliability, and a scalar quality score alone is incapable of indicating the obligation a clip violates or the moment it fails. We present VeriPhy, an auditable physical-verification system in which a text-only planner compiles the prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any frame is observed. During execution, observations gate and scope only declared calls to frozen low-level experts (e.g., segmentation and tracking, counting, eleven typed physical measurements over the resulting tracks, depth, OCR, and audio-event detection). Each action returns a provenance-carrying evidence record whose payload, when usable, is either a typed measurement or an explicitly tagged learned state. Typed resolvers and fixed composition map usable records to a three-valued state (supported, contradicted, or unknown, surfaced as plausible, implausible, or abstain) with full provenance, so that every verdict is traceable to the evidence that produced it. We anchor evaluation in a 1,500-clip corpus of human-annotated flaw records that localize real generation failures in prompt reference, space, and time. On a 149-clip core carrying 304 such records, VeriPhy accounts for 228, against 164 for a published question-decomposition evaluator given the same clips and the same claims. Recall alone does not separate it from prompting the same backbone monolithically, which reaches 222; what separates them is that each decision retains its evidence record and provenance, making the traces auditable one verdict at a time and usable as the interface through which a critic verdict could be written back into generation.
Wenzhuo Xu, Yuchen Zhu, Chongjian Ge +8
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

InSight: A Benchmark for Agentic Claim Verification in Interactive Visualizations

Vision Language Models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in interpreting static visual artifacts, but modern data analysis is inherently dynamic, requiring the active interrogation of interactive environments. Existing benchmarks are predominantly constrained to static imagery and one-shot question answering and fail to capture the epistemic demands of this domain, where evidence is frequently occluded, distributed across linked views, or conditionally revealed through user agency. In this paper, we introduce InSight, a benchmark for agentic claim verification over interactive visualizations. The dataset consists of 21,349 claims derived from human-authored analytical narratives and grounded in fully interactive web-based environments. Agents must navigate these environments to determine whether a natural language claim is supported, refuted or not verifiable given the available evidence. Unlike traditional evaluations, InSight treats interaction traces as intrinsic proxies for reasoning, enabling a rigorous audit of how models seek and synthesize visual evidence. We evaluate state-of-the-art models, revealing that interactive verification remains a non-trivial challenge. We release InSight at https://github.com/maevehutch/insight.
Maeve Hutchinson, Syed Mahbubul Huq, Mohammad Albinhassan +3
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Token-Efficient Data Reasoning Agents via Adaptive Structuring of Unstructured Data

Valuable data remains embedded in unstructured sources: web pages, reports, contracts, filings, earnings calls, and PDFs. The big bet in enterprise AI is deploying LLM agents that reason over this data to answer complex questions for every knowledge worker. Agents can do this today, but at prohibitive cost. Each question repeatedly opens large documents to recover scattered evidence, consuming up to a million tokens. However, if the data were already structured, the same question would reduce to a cheap database lookup. For example, on FanOutQA benchmark, reasoning over an ideal pre-structured store is 28X cheaper, and the gap grows to orders of magnitude as questions fan out over more documents. Yet structuring everything in advance is not viable: documents hold vastly more possible structure than any workload will use, and the useful structure and documents are unknown until queries arrive. We propose agentic data cracking, a method that structures unstructured data adaptively and speculatively as a byproduct of reasoning itself. Structuring is adaptive because observed queries decide when it happens and what matters, and speculative because it goes beyond the current question. Whenever the agent opens a document to answer, a cracking sub-agent forks from the already-loaded context at marginal cost and extracts grounded structure likely to serve related future queries. Over time, an increasing share of queries is fully covered by structured data and answered without opening a document, keeping agentic accuracy at close to RAG cost. On FanOutQA, extended with merely one related question per test question, cracking cuts cost by 53% while preserving accuracy. Agentic data cracking is a first step toward next-generation data infrastructure for agentic reasoning over unstructured data: a shared substrate beneath the model where knowledge that reasoning already paid to uncover accumulates.
Milad Rezaei Hajidehi, Qitong Wang, Stratos Idreos
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

MedAgent-R1: Faithfulness-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Evidence-Grounded Medical Reasoning

When medical AI systems hallucinate clinical reasoning, the consequences extend beyond incorrect answers: fabricated justifications that superficially reference retrieved evidence can mislead clinicians into unsafe treatment decisions. Medical reasoning agents must therefore produce not only correct answers but also faithful justifications that clinicians can verify against cited evidence. We identify a systematic failure mode in RL-trained retrieval agents: outcome-only rewards improve accuracy while degrading faithfulness, a phenomenon we term confident hallucination. The agent learns to answer from parametric memory and backfill plausible but unsupported justifications; citation fabrication rates rise from 16.5% to 31.8% even as accuracy improves by 5 points over the supervised baseline. We address this with a faithfulness-gated reward design: accuracy credit is conditioned on evidence grounding via a hard gate, complemented by retrieval validity and conciseness signals that close exploitation paths unique to agentic retrieval. The resulting system, MedAgent-R1, reduces citation fabrication from 31.8% to 4.7% and raises evidence completeness from 58.7 to 82.6 while maintaining 75.1% accuracy, with 13.2-point gains on HealthBench Safety. Under the same agentic retrieval setup, MedAgent-R1 outscores GPT-4o on faithfulness-specific dimensions (Factual Support 4.55 vs. 4.25; Overclaiming 4.40 vs. 4.15) while remaining below GPT-4o in overall accuracy, suggesting that explicit faithfulness training yields evidence-grounding gains not achieved by scaling alone.
Jiangwang Chen, Chenghao Zhang, Hengxing Cai
Aug 30, 2026cs.AI

Perceive to Hypothesize, Verify to Ground: An Agentic Reasoning Framework for Open-World Geo-Localization

Open-world geo-localization requires models to reason over ambiguous visual cues through multi-step reasoning and external knowledge grounding. While recent large vision-language models exhibit strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, existing approaches still suffer from perceptual hallucination and context drift due to the lack of explicit evidence-grounded verification. In this work, we reformulate geo-localization as a human-like perceive-then-verify reasoning problem and propose GeoPAVE (Geo-localization Perception-and-Verification-Engine), a bi-level agentic framework that contains perception-based hypothesis generation via single-pass rollouts and verification-based evidence grounding for decision actions: support, refute, and refine. To support rigorous evaluation, we further introduce PAVED, a novel dataset derived from real-world user check-in data, equipped with comprehensive reasoning trajectories featuring multi-hop queries, multi-round tool invocations, and structured perception-verification traces. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Arandinglv/GeoPAVE.
Yutian Jiang, Ruijie Li, Sisuo Lyu +4
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

SkillForge: Compositional Skill Synthesis with Verification-in-the-Loop for Generating Formally Verified Dafny Programs

Generating formally verified programs from natural language remains challenging: existing approaches either produce code in a single pass without recourse when verification fails, or rely on open-ended agentic reasoning that is non-deterministic and opaque. We introduce SKILLFORGE, a framework that decomposes formal code synthesis into a library of atomic, reusable skills, each targeting a specific subtask such as specification inference, body synthesis, invariant generation, error diagnosis, or targeted repair, and defined by a prompt template, tool binding, and decidable success criterion. A verification-driven harness orchestrates these skills: it submits candidates to the Dafny verifier, diagnoses failures into structured categories, deterministically routes to the appropriate repair skill, and iterates until formal correctness is proved or a budget is exhausted. On a curated benchmark of natural language to Dafny specification pairs, SKILLFORGE substantially outperforms both state-of-the-art agentic approaches (including ReAct-style agents, MCTS-based repair, and RL-guided verification) and traditional iterative baselines, while requiring fewer tokens and lower latency. Ablation studies confirm that every skill contributes measurably, and the harness converges rapidly with the majority of programs verified on the first attempt.
Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Jiannan Cao +2
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

CEAA: A Cognitive Embodied Agents Architecture for Interactive Computing Systems

The development of embodied Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) that have cognitive capabilities in real-time interactive virtual environments remains a challenge, even with today's advancements in technology. Existing architectures are often focused on either the implementation of low-level reactive control systems that are constrained by commercial game engines, or high-level representations of reasoning models that can be difficult to implement in virtual worlds. This paper builds on that notion and proposes a modular cognitive architecture for deploying embodied IVAs. This architecture builds on existing, pre-established frameworks such as the Sense-Think-Act paradigm and the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model, among others, and aims to provide a reusable implementation-oriented framework as a template for deploying IVA "brains" in interactive 3D computing systems. The proposed architecture contributes by providing a modular, implementation-oriented framework for the deployment of embodied, cognitive-capable IVAs and bridges the gap between high-level agent reasoning models with real-time embodied execution, for scalable, adaptive, and explainable agents in complex interactive virtual environments.
Aimilios Hadjiliasi, Louis Nisiotis
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

QuantumMind: Constraint-Grounded Agentic Reasoning for Speedup Analysis in Quantum Computing

Identifying a meaningful quantum speedup requires more than matching a classical problem to a familiar quantum primitive: the claim must preserve the task, respect access and output models, expose required promises, and remain within a defensible complexity scope. We present QuantumMind, an auditable agentic workflow for generating and conservatively screening quantum-acceleration hypotheses. A fixed sequence of typed, role-specialized actions formalizes the public task, analyzes structure and classical bottlenecks, matches a source-linked registry of quantum primitives and barriers, and constructs a scoped candidate scheme. A deterministic ten-check validator assigns the authoritative verdict; completed states are compiled into a Quantum Acceleration Evidence Graph and passed through a downward-only research screen that cannot strengthen the decision. We evaluate QuantumMind against seven task-adapted prompting and agentic controls on 582 identical open-discovery tasks. Under the frozen Open-Discovery Score (ODS), QuantumMind obtains 53.1 mean ODS, exceeding the strongest baseline by 17.3 points (48.2% relative), and wins 355 of 582 paired tasks against that baseline. It passes the graph audit on 99.8% of tasks, compared with 43.6% for the strongest baseline, and ranks first in all seven task families. The results indicate that typed state transitions and deterministic evidence control contribute beyond fluent generation alone.
Yijing Zuo, Zhe Fu, Zihan Nie +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Towards Researcher Agents for Knowledge-Graph Question Answering

Translating a natural-language question into a SPARQL query that can be executed against a large knowledge graph requires resolving lexical ambiguity, grounding surface terms in the target ontology, and producing graph patterns that are both syntactically valid and semantically faithful. We present an agentic text-to-SPARQL system that goes one step beyond static tool-using agents: a researcher agent that, after each round of inference on a validation set, proposes and tests changes to its own prompts, rules, and tool-orchestration code. We instantiate the loop on DBpedia, evolve nine successive versions of the agent driven by a low-cost reasoning model, and deploy the best-performing configuration with two stronger backbone models. The study yields three observations: (i) self-improvement converges quickly and then achieves 0.22 overall accuracy on the 2025 DBpedia validation set; (ii) the bottleneck is consistently in basic-graph-pattern predicate selection, not in SPARQL syntax or modifiers; and (iii) several benchmark items appear to penalise correct queries due to property ambiguity in DBpedia, suggesting that future Text-to-SPARQL benchmarks should be scored using a combination of machine translation and information retrieval metrics.
Tommaso Soru, Abdulsobur Oyewale
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Glance, Scrutinize, and Think: Advancing Video Anomaly Detection from Training-Free to Agentic Reasoning

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify anomalous events and localize their temporal intervals. Existing approaches exhibit a "when-what" dissociation: traditional DNN-based methods localize when anomalies occur but lack semantic understanding, whereas LLM-based methods explain what happens but neglect precise temporal grounding. We attribute this to the absence of a unified reasoning paradigm. Inspired by how humans inspect surveillance videos - glancing globally to form temporal hypotheses, scrutinizing suspicious segments, and thinking iteratively to correct errors - we study this global-to-local paradigm from two perspectives. We first propose Glance then Scrutinize (GtS), a training-free framework using static and dynamic textual guidance for coarse-to-fine anomaly grounding and understanding, balancing accuracy and speed. To break the ceiling imposed by frozen external modules, we further propose a tool-augmented agentic VAD method, where a multimodal large language model learns to invoke a video cropping tool, inspect densely resampled frames, and self-correct mislocalized hypotheses, via cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning with a joint answer-grounding reward. For training and evaluation, we extend our prior VAGU benchmark into VAGU-T (Video Anomaly Grounding, Understanding, and Thinking), comprising 7,567 real-world videos over 21 anomaly categories with human-validated grounding, explanations, QA pairs, and chain-of-thought tool-calling traces. We further introduce JeAUG, a metric jointly evaluating semantic interpretability and temporal precision. Experiments show that GtS substantially surpasses training-free baselines, while the agentic model delivers both higher accuracy and faster inference.
Shibo Gao, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang +1
Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

Argus: A General-Purpose Agentic Reasoning Runtime for Long-Horizon Tasks

Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective. We present Argus, a persistent, self-evolving runtime in which Manager, Planner, Engineer, and Reviewer execute bounded missions over durable project state. Argus separates stable user intent from operational objectives, constraints, and verification criteria, and admits memories, skills, procedures, verifiers, routing decisions, and rejected routes only after role-owned review and, when available, task-native verification. Model weights remain fixed; self-evolution occurs through persistent runtime state and control policy, with autonomous execution between operator-owned escalation points. Across seven GPT-5.5 benchmark arenas, Argus achieves about 78% on SWE-Bench Pro versus 59% for Direct Copilot while using 1.41 times the aggregate tokens. After verification-gated self-evolution, mature SWE-Bench waves use 21% fewer solve-input tokens and 15% less active workflow time per task than startup waves, while recording 34 verifier recoveries and 22 strict review-loop rescues. Argus also reaches 76.8% on AARRI-Bench and a 28.0-point gap on mathematical data synthesis, with competitive GPU-kernel and language-model-training results. Beyond benchmarks, an optimized RWKV6 kernel was merged upstream; a multi-day mathematics campaign retained falsified routes and proof-backed frontier updates; and six paper pipelines completed 254 missions with 16 stage rollbacks. These results show that a fixed-weight, self-evolving harness can revise, recover, and accumulate verified approaches while producing structured trajectories for future supervised and reinforcement learning.
Boxiu Li, Zimo Wen, Yijia Fan +24
Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

InsightEmb: Learning Action-Intent Embeddings for Agentic Insight Retrieval

Self-improving agents accumulate reusable insights from prior trajectories, making retrieval increasingly important for turning accumulated experience into actionable guidance. At each decision step, retrieving the right insight can help the agent progress toward its goal, a setting we refer to as agentic insight retrieval. However, existing retrieval methods primarily model semantic similarity, while overlooking whether a retrieved insight resolves the agent's current decision bottleneck. We propose InsightEmb, a contrastive embedding framework that learns transferable progress-oriented retrieval geometry using only mathematical reasoning data. InsightEmb jointly learns to align concrete situations with abstract heuristic rules and to cluster reasoning trajectories with similar progress structures. We evaluate InsightEmb on dynamic agent tasks and a static skill-retrieval benchmark. Without any environment-specific training, InsightEmb improves over all these evaluations, surpassing the performance of existing reasoning embedding models. These results suggest that the geometry of state-insight matching can transfer across domains, enabling effective training from publicly available reasoning data without expensive environment-specific supervision.
Tsz Ting Chung, Jiangnan Li, Jie Zhou +1
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

PhysMind: From Video to Executable Worlds for Training-Free Physical Reasoning

Reliable physical reasoning from video requires understanding how objects move, interact, and respond to interventions. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle to interpret these dynamics and reason reliably about future and counterfactual outcomes. We introduce PhysMind, a training-free agentic framework that constructs one reusable, question-agnostic executable world per video. PhysMind recovers a temporally consistent dynamic scene through object segmentation, mesh reconstruction, and 6D pose tracking, then fits analytic continuous-time dynamics and latent physical parameters without unrolling a time-stepped simulator. Given a question, it inspects, continues, or edits the world and answers from the resulting trajectories and interactions. Relative to direct chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with the same VLM, PhysMind improves accuracy by 38.23 points on CLEVRER and 8.08 points on Physion++. On counterfactual questions, it exceeds the strongest evaluated VLM baseline, GPT-5.5, by 19.25 points.
Chen Yang, Shenxiang Zeng, Haoyang Zhao +6
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Local verification cannot detect non-transportability: a cohomological theory of context preservation in agentic reasoning

Agentic AI systems routinely transport conclusions across biological, clinical and financial contexts, and the emerging safeguard is local verification: checking at each step that the entity is representable in the chosen tool, that parameters are compatible, and that outputs cohere with the plan. We prove this class of safeguard is structurally incomplete. Modelling a covering of context space by its nerve and evidence by a real-valued 1-cochain, an agent chaining evidence performs path integration: its conclusion is path-independent if and only if the cochain is exact, and disagreement between valid reasoning paths is exactly the holonomy of a first Cech cohomology class. Hodge decomposition partitions evidence conflict into a gradient part (calibration), a curl part (local inconsistency, visible at triple overlaps) and a harmonic part. Our central result is that no family of simplex-supported consistency checks can distinguish omega from omega+h for harmonic h, which nonetheless generates non-zero disagreement between valid paths; detection requires a statistic on a cycle basis. The resulting procedure, Ksetra, estimates by coboundary projection and gates abstention on the harmonic component, which we give a mechanism: it arises from effect modification combined with overlap-specific population composition, and vanishes to machine precision when effect modification is absent. The degrees of freedom of an evidence network partition into calibration, coherence and transport, yielding an exact F-test for the existence of a global claim; we quantify its distortion under unequal precision and supply the precision-whitened form that restores exactness. Foreign exchange, where the arbitrage-free null makes the cochain exactly a coboundary, serves as a calibration bench: the test is correctly sized, fires on loop arbitrage, and ignores triangular arbitrage.
Suyash Mishra
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

PACE: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Time-Efficient Embodied Planning

Reasoning-enhanced large language models have achieved remarkable improvements in planning tasks, yet their deployment in embodied systems remains impractical due to prohibitive inference delays-often exceeding minutes per planning instance. The fundamental bottleneck stems from the serial nature of existing paradigms: models must complete all reasoning before any action execution, leaving execution time windows entirely unexploited. We introduce PACE (Planning with Adaptive Cognitive Effort), a framework that enables interleaved reasoning and execution through two key innovations: an Interleaved Think-Act architecture that pipelines cognitive processing with action execution, and a Dynamic Budget Allocator that adapts reasoning token budgets to available execution time windows. On the Robotouille benchmark using Qwen3-8B-AWQ, PACE achieves a 10% success rate-representing a 67% improvement over the ReAct+Think baseline-while delivering 6.9 times acceleration in thinking time compared to unconstrained reasoning. The framework hides 66.8% of thinking time within execution windows, demonstrating that strategic cognitive effort allocation can simultaneously improve both planning quality and time efficiency. These results provide evidence that time-aware architectural innovations enable reasoning models to operate in latency-sensitive embodied domains where they were previously impractical.
Yuchen Huang, Xijiang Ying, Zhenhua Ma +14
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

CastFSR: A Fast--Slow--Reflect Agentic Reasoning Framework for Context-Aware Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is fundamental to decision-making in complex systems, where future dynamics are influenced not only by historical observations but also by evolving contextual features. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have extended forecasting beyond numerical extrapolation toward context-aware reasoning. However, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to identify relevant contexts, reason about their impacts, and validate forecasts against temporal and domain constraints. In this work, we propose CastFSR, an agentic framework that formulates context-aware forecasting as a Fast--Slow--Reflect workflow. In fast thinking, CastFSR profiles observations and selects lightweight forecasters to construct a data-driven forecast prior. In slow deliberation, it retrieves contextual evidence, adaptively determines informative look-back windows, and reasons about how contexts reshape future dynamics. In reflection, it iteratively refines forecasts to ensure temporal, contextual, and domain consistency. CastFSR supports both training-free inference with off-the-shelf LLMs and efficient deployment through a two-stage SFT and reinforcement learning strategy that transfers its orchestration capability to compact LLMs. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that CastFSR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/CastFSR.
Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Bokai Pan +6
Aug 1, 2026cs.LG

Agentic Graph Token Reasoning

Graphs model relational data throughout science and industry, from citation networks to product co-purchase graphs. Because the nodes of many such graphs carry rich text, a growing line of work applies large language models (LLMs) to graph analysis. The most graph-native of these methods use graph tokens: a graph encoder compresses a graph view, such as a node, its k-hop neighbourhood, or a cluster, into a short block of continuous tokens that jointly encodes node attributes and topology and is read directly by the model. Existing methods, however, use graph tokens in a static single-shot manner: they encode one predefined graph view before the model has even seen the target and never revise it, leaving the model's step-by-step reasoning ability unused. We introduce agentic graph token reasoning, which recasts graph tokenization as part of the reasoning process itself. At each step, the model chooses which graph view to encode and at what granularity; a graph encoder is invoked on demand to materialise the corresponding graph tokens; and the resulting block is spliced into the running context. The model thus reasons step by step in the graph token space, and the tokens it reads are trajectory-dependent. We realise this with a three-stage training pipeline: (i) self-supervised tasks that teach the model to read heterogeneous graph tokens, (ii) a token-robust trajectory stage with a graph-token consistency regulariser, and (iii) preference optimisation that rewards trajectories in which the graph-token evidence and the node-text evidence agree. Across evaluations spanning seven graph domains, our models outperform a broad set of baselines by a large margin and transfer zero-shot to unseen domains without any per-target fine-tuning. More broadly, this work pushes LLM-based graph analysis from static graph-token encoders towards a graph-native agent paradigm.
Zhuoyi Peng, Yi Yang
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

DungeonBench: A Benchmark for Rules-Rich Tactical Reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons Combat

Games and simulators make valuable benchmarks by turning decisions into measurable outcomes, but many current suites under-test rules-rich tactical reasoning: the ability to choose well when geometry, timing, resources, objectives, and rule interactions all matter at once. We introduce DungeonBench, a benchmark for tactical reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons combat, built to cover the vast majority of combat-relevant 2014 System Reference Document content whose effects can be resolved by the simulator while retaining mechanics that simplified combat simulators often abstract away. At each step, DungeonBench exposes a complete tactical observation, a pending decision, and an indexed list of executable options spanning movement, attacks, spells, reactions, objectives, preparation, and scarce resources. The task is to value legal choices whose consequences depend on action economy, creature traits, battlefield geometry, timing windows, and future encounters. DungeonBench has two tracks: Encounter, which evaluates local tactical play in single fights, and Day, which links encounters through persistent hit points, spell slots, consumables, preparation, and short-rest timing, forcing policies to trade off immediate tactical advantage against future survivability. The same engine-generated decision stream supports heuristic controllers, language-model policies, learned option rankers, and masked-action reinforcement-learning agents. We evaluate frontier language-model policies on this shared decision stream. Results show that full tactical observations do not saturate the benchmark: frontier policies often win direct encounters, but linked encounter days expose failures in resource budgeting, rest timing, and rule-aware tactical discipline.
Ismayil Ismayilov, Atakan Kara, Kaan Oktay
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoning

The fundamental goal of agentic visual reasoning is to improve the success rate of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on complex tasks, rather than merely equipping them with a sophisticated yet inefficient reasoning paradigm. In this work, we rethink agentic visual reasoning through two key dimensions of tool use: Mode Adaptiveness (MA) and Tool Effect (TE). Mode Adaptiveness characterizes whether an MLLM can recognize when tools are truly necessary and invoke them accordingly, thereby avoiding unnecessary computational overhead while improving performance on challenging problems that require tool assistance. Tool Effect characterizes the actual impact of tool use: tools should extend the model's capabilities on problems unsolvable through text-only reasoning, while avoiding additional errors on problems that the model can already solve without tools. We conduct a comprehensive analysis to quantify these two properties and empirically reveal that existing agentic visual reasoning models exhibit limited Mode Adaptiveness, while the gains produced by tool use on hard examples are largely offset by the harm introduced on easy examples that the models can already solve. Motivated by these observations, we propose Beacon, a novel agentic visual reasoning model that achieves stronger overall performance, improved Mode Adaptiveness, and genuine tool-induced performance gains. At the core of Beacon are the Necessity-Aware Adaptive Reward and the Hint-Guided Capability Expansion mechanism in the reinforcement learning stage, which respectively encourage adaptive tool invocation based on task necessity and strengthen the model's tool-use capability on the most challenging problems. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate the strong overall performance of Beacon and its substantial improvements in both Mode Adaptiveness and Tool Effect.
Qixun Wang, Yang Shi, Letian Cheng +11
Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

Skill Use or Skill Theater? Evaluating the Reasoning Backroom in Skill-Augmented Language Agents

Reusable skills are becoming a standard interface for extending language agents with task procedures. Yet evaluators usually infer skill use from visible reasoning or the agent's own attribution. These signals show what the agent appears to use, not whether the skill changed its decision. We ask whether skill-augmented agents exhibit a \textbf{Reasoning Backroom}, a systematic gap between stated skill use and intervention-measured influence. We introduce BACKTRACE, an evaluation framework that pairs each skill-conditioned answer with a matched no-skill counterfactual, intervenes on skill meaning, wording, identity, content, and assignment, and elicits attribution only after the answer is committed. We instantiate the framework as BACKROOMBench, a verified testbed spanning controlled logic and competition mathematics, multiple skill conditions, single-agent and multi-agent settings, and diverse model families. Our evaluation reveals a pervasive provenance failure. Across models and domains, stated skill use often remains stable while causal reliance and signed utility vary, producing both silent uptake and performative use. Behavioral effects follow procedural content more reliably than displayed skill identity, whereas stated attributions respond strongly to artifact availability. Observational detectors based on direct skill-use claims, text mentions, trace similarity, and an LLM judge do not identify which decisions actually depend on the skill. In multi-agent systems, skill influence can survive communication even after its source is lost, while no-skill teams still name skills and sources that were never supplied. These findings establish the Reasoning Backroom as a general AI provenance problem whose audit requires intervention.
Jinwei Hu, Yi Qi, Xinmiao Huang +3
Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

PIE-APT: Abductive Planning over Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs via Incremental Reasoning

Planning over Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs (TDKGs) presents theoretical challenges in open-world environments with incomplete information. Existing action formalisms often face decidability issues and the Ramification Problem, while structural abduction requires expansive combinatorial search spaces. We introduce a unified framework with two modules--PIE-Abducer (incremental direct-derivation abduction) and PIE-APT (Abductive Planning for TDKGs)--operating natively on the expressive SROIQ Description Logic. Modeling state transitions as non-monotonic updates to deductively closed DL theories, we represent actions natively in OWL. This leverages an incremental reasoner to preserve decidability and natively bypass the Ramification Problem. To address incomplete knowledge, PIE-Abducer circumvents Minimal Hitting Set (MHS) enumeration. Instead of combinatorial search, it injects the logical negation of a goal into a consistent DL branch and synthesizes missing premises via direct refutation consequences. PIE-APT employs a recursive Generate-and-Test architecture, interleaving backward-chaining A* search with PIE-Abducer to synthesize both action sequences and abductive assumptions. Candidates undergo strict validation via forward-chaining Temporal Projection to evaluate logical trajectories. We evaluate four OWL benchmarks targeting semantic abilities missing from classical planning: parameterized goals with witness search, mid-search DL entailment, open-world assumption injection, and adversarial plan synthesis. Results show qualitative superiority over classical planners and prove our direct-derivation approach significantly outperforms an MHS-faithful baseline in abductive enrichment.
Amir Hossein Sharafi, Alireza Shahbazi
Jul 28, 2026cs.AI

ODYSSE: Episode-wise Policy Optimization for Personalized Agentic Reasoning

Agentic systems have rapidly advanced in their ability to interact with real-world environments, leverage external tools, and provide services for users. However, unlike natural-world tasks that assume well-defined instructions, human-centered scenarios are characterized by ambiguous requests that lead to large, open-ended solution spaces. Decoding users' personalized preferences is therefore essential for narrowing the candidate solution space. This introduces a new challenge, personalized agentic reasoning, which requires agents to jointly interact with both users and environments to deliver personalized services. In this paper, we present ODYSSE, a Reinforced Fine-Tuning (RFT) framework for personalized agentic reasoning. At its core, ODYSSE proposes Episode-wise GRPO (ESPO), a novel extension of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) designed to address long action horizons and strong cross-step dependencies in personalized agentic reasoning. Rather than optimizing individual steps independently, ESPO introduces an episode-level reward mechanism together with episodic advantage estimation, enabling upstream evidence to effectively guide downstream personalized decisions and allowing agents to progressively resolve ambiguous user requests across multiple interaction steps. We further propose an episodic batch sampler that groups actions from the same episode into unified training batches, facilitating coherent optimization under ESPO. We evaluate ODYSSE on realistic long-horizon personalized GUI reasoning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ODYSSE consistently outperforms both specialist and general-purpose LVLMs, highlighting its effectiveness for personalized agentic reasoning.
Jiaqi Zhang, Tong Chen, Junliang Yu +2
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

Agentic Root Cause Analysis through Evidence-Grounded Reasoning

Diagnosing the root cause of anomalies is essential for safe industrial operation. Despite extensive sensor instrumentation, formulating hypotheses and gathering evidence remains a manual process, creating a major operational bottleneck. While existing data-driven approaches aim to automate this, two critical limitations restrict their deployment: their operate as black boxes unable to justify their diagnosis, and they require scarce labeled examples of faulty operation. To address this gap, we introduce AgentRCA, a zero-shot agentic framework for evidence-grounded root cause analysis. Rather than learning fault-specific mappings, AgentRCA performs inference-time reasoning by combining a data-driven digital twin (modeling normal system dynamics) with a tool-augmented large language model. The agent iteratively gathers statistical evidence, evaluates competing hypotheses, and identifies the physical fault that best explains the observed behavior. Evaluated on a real-world multiphase-flow facility and a large-scale chemical plant, AgentRCA achieves diagnostic performance competitive with fully supervised baselines without relying on fault-specific training. Crucially, it produces transparent reasoning traces that explicitly link observed symptoms to their underlying physical causes. These results establish autonomous hypothesis-driven reasoning as a practical foundation for scalable industrial root cause analysis.
Amaury Wei, Olga Fink
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

Nanbeige4.2-3B: Unlocking Agentic Capabilities in a Compact Model

We present Nanbeige4.2-3B, a compact general agentic model with 3B non-embedding parameters. It delivers strong performance across code-agent, office-agent, and complex tool-use tasks while maintaining highly competitive reasoning capabilities in mathematics, coding, and science. Nanbeige4.2-3B is pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens with a Looped Transformer that reuses the layer stack to increase capacity without adding parameters. For SFT data and trajectory construction, we expand the diversity of executable environments, task assets, and agentic scaffolds through real-world deployment and large-scale synthesis. Our RL pipeline applies mixed-mode RLHF over Think and Non-Think responses to improve overall model quality and reduce failure cases, length-controlled reasoning RL to balance accuracy and reasoning efficiency, and agentic RL with outcome and process rewards to stabilize long-horizon training. Extensive evaluations show that Nanbeige4.2-3B outperforms larger models, including Qwen3.5-9B and Gemma4-12B, across diverse agentic benchmarks while remaining competitive on reasoning and alignment tasks. Performance with OpenClaw further supports its use as a compact local personal assistant.
Nanbeige Lab, :, Chen Yang +23
Jul 23, 2026cs.AI

Logical Regression for Planning with Axioms

In automated planning, logical regression is an operation that returns the most general condition necessary for an action to achieve a particular formula. It has many applications, such as allowing for more robust plan execution and providing compact policies for non-deterministic planning. Although relatively simple to calculate in basic planning settings, logical regression becomes significantly more complex when additional factors, such as axioms, are present. We introduce a methodology for approximating the logical regression of an action in a domain that includes axioms; an approximation that limits conditions to partial states. Our method produces minimal partial states while avoiding the recalculation of axioms. To demonstrate the impact of our methods, we embed our form of regression in an execution monitoring context, a well-established setting that can benefit greatly from logical regression. Our results show that this form of regression can dramatically generalize partial states across multiple domains, reducing the number of variables considered for execution monitoring by up to 70%, and demonstrate that the resulting execution monitor is robust enough to recover frequently in an environment with unexpected changes: several domains recover over 50% of the time in our tests.
Connor Little, Christian Muise
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

Perspective Latents as an Architectural Condition for Causal Emergence in Active Inference Agents

A recent line of work measures causal emergence in reinforcement learning agents through Integrated Information Decomposition, reporting that ΦrΦ_r grows with training and tracks reward improvement. For active inference, this raises the question of how reward-free predictive organization relates to such information-theoretic signatures. I test this within an active inference agent whose architecture separates a fast perception latent zz from a slow global latent gg, where gg is driven by prediction error and structurally decoupled from policy gradients. In a reward-free environmental regime-switching protocol, ΦrΦ_r concentrates in gg; its aggregate magnitude is largely architectural and decreases with training. The substantive effect of learning becomes legible only at the atom-compositional level: decoupling flips sign from negative to positive and becomes regime-invariant under environmental change, while downward causation carries the regime-dependent adjustment. These results identify gg as the architectural locus of ΦrΦ_r-relevant temporal organization in an active inference agent, and argue against reading scalar ΦrΦ_r as a direct index of learned integration.
Hongju Pae
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Evidence-Grounded Verified Agentic Reasoning: A Path Toward Eliminating LLM Hallucination in Empirical Inference via Tool-Attested Kernel Proofs

Tool access alone does not make LLM empirical reasoning governable: accepted outputs need not descend from attested evidence, and accepted deductions need not hold up under formal scrutiny. We present EG-VAR (Evidence-Grounded Verified Agentic Reasoning), a Lean 4-based tool-calling architecture in which the Lean kernel is the sole minter of Verified claims via tool-attestation axioms and declared source lifts. Every verified output structurally descends from an attested tool call (Thm. 3.1) and a kernel-checked chain of valid inference (Thm. 3.2); residual outputs are honest Abstain with a replayable audit trail. On a subcollection of TableBench numerical reasoning (n=120), EG-VAR attains 120/120 versus a 95% same-tool baseline; on counterfactual stress tests (5 domains x 2 models), EG-VAR stays 100% source-faithful while same-tool drops to 80-90% (no-tool 50-80%). With the LLM as deployment-time formalizer, residual semantic-formalization error is 3.3% on Sonnet and 1.7% on Opus. We position EG-VAR as a technical-governance interface for high-stakes empirical claims: a formal sidecar makes the target proposition, source scope, evidence boundary, proof obligation, and abstention condition auditable, eliminating unsupported Verified outputs today while turning formalization errors, lift and source-authority disputes, ambiguities, and abstentions into explicit audit targets. Over time, typed sidecars in datasets, APIs, public records, and AI-generated documents can amortize this formalization burden into reusable infrastructure.
Junyu Ren
Jul 14, 2026cs.CV

TerraLogic: A Benchmark for Hierarchical Geospatial Reasoning in Earth Observation

Beyond perception, reasoning is essential in remote sensing for advanced interpretation, inference, and decision-making. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled tool-augmented agents that leverage external tools to perform complex analytical tasks. However, existing studies in remote sensing primarily focus on perception-oriented tasks, leaving cognitive geospatial reasoning largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce TerraLogic, a benchmark for geospatial reasoning. TerraLogic comprises 545 scenario-driven, hierarchy-aware tasks, such as hazard vulnerability assessment, urban heat island analysis, and forest fragmentation dynamics, spanning optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and infrared (IR) imagery. It advances evaluation beyond recognition and monitoring toward cognitive-level geospatial analysis. To facilitate evaluation on TerraLogic, we further propose HieraPlan, a tool-augmented agent that organizes toolkits into functional hierarchies and performs fault-tolerant reasoning. HieraPlan enables structured abstraction, robust recovery from tool failures, and stable long-horizon planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that current approaches struggle with hierarchical geospatial reasoning, while HieraPlan provides a strong baseline with improved reasoning, cross-modal generalization, and error handling. The dataset and agent code are publicly available at https://github.com/Ireliya/TerraLogic.
Yuhang Yan, Linchao Mou, Bokang Yang +1
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

The Emerging Paradigm of Geospatial Foundation Models: From Pre-Training to Agentic Reasoning

The analysis of satellite and aerial imagery has entered a new era with the advent of foundation models. This paper describes the concept of Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs), which are artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) models pre-trained on massive geospatial datasets through varied methodologies. We first articulate the core paradigm shift that GeoFMs enable: a separation of duties, where large-scale model providers perform the computationally intensive pretraining, allowing domain experts to rapidly fine-tune or prompt these models for specific, mission-critical tasks. This approach democratizes access to state-of-the-art AI/ML while maintaining the security and confidentiality of the downstream task. We then explore the novel capabilities unlocked by different types of GeoFMs, distinguishing between the finetunable vision models produced by self-supervised techniques like masked auto-encoding, and the vision-language models produced by contrastive learning which enable zero-shot tasks like open-vocabulary image analysis. Next, we discuss the practical considerations for operationalizing GeoFMs, from performance-cost analysis to the broader MLOps ecosystem. To that end, we introduce a taxonomy of model adaptation strategies and propose a framework for domain experts to select the most cost-effective adaptation approach for their particular mission set. Finally, we present a forward-looking vision of Agentic Geospatial Reasoning, where Large Language Models act as intelligent orchestrators, leveraging GeoFMs as tools to answer high-level user queries in natural language and automate complex analytical workflows, moving the field from perception to cognition.
Shelley Cazares
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

A Glimpse into Long-term Physical Coexistence with Intelligent Robots

Long-term physical coexistence with intelligent robots requires more than capable robot policies. A persistent robotic assistant must support diverse user-facing interfaces, maintain long-horizon memory of people and preferences, coordinate across robot embodiments, and translate human intent into safe physical execution. We introduce PHILIA, a multi-robot agent built around a robot gateway abstraction. PHILIA retains the rich interaction and tool ecosystem of OpenClaw while exposing robot-local runtimes, onboard perception, navigation, speaker, and robot policies through a unified capability interface. This design decouples low-frequency, high-semantic agent reasoning from high-frequency, low-level robot execution, enabling plug-and-play integration of user interfaces, robot embodiments, and policy backends. As a result, the user experience becomes compositional: advances in user interfaces, robot embodiments, robot policies, navigation, or interaction algorithms can improve the overall experience without redesigning the system. We validate the architecture on Astribot S1 robots while designing the robot gateway contract to support future heterogeneous robot platforms through a shared capability interface for observation, task execution, navigation, speech playback, status monitoring, and task cancellation. We present representative use cases in which agent memory and scene understanding are grounded in robot actions. These span interactive household scenarios, ranging from simple organization to challenging long-horizon and dexterous service tasks, such as packing a backpack and lifting a garbage bag. We highlight the human-robot interaction flow, where contextual understanding of user intent and preferences, together with human-in-the-loop confirmation or adjustment during execution, is essential for effective assistance.
Weiqi Jin, Peijun Tang, Kuncheng Luo +5
Jul 10, 2026cs.AI

Agora: Enhancing LLM Agent Reasoning Via Auction-Based Task Allocation

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language model (LLM) agents requires effective orchestration of diverse expert models and tools. However, existing frameworks typically call APIs, based on coarse-grained matching between tasks and the functions of expert models or tools, while overlooking critical factors such as performance variability and cost efficiency among functionally similar alternatives. To address this, we propose Agora, a framework that uses a confidence-calibrated auction to dynamically allocate tasks to expert models and tools. By treating reasoning steps as tradeable items, Agora bases allocation on calibrated competence rather than raw confidence. Across five main benchmarks, Agora improves or remains competitive with single-model, routing, and cascade baselines under matched candidate pools.
Kaiji Zhou, Aleš Leonardis, Yue Feng
Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

CausalDS: Benchmarking Causal Reasoning in Data-Science Agents

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as integrated data-science agents, combining abstract reasoning with advanced tool use. Yet the relevant benchmark landscape largely divides into symbolic causal reasoning benchmarks without realistic data analysis or data analysis benchmarks without a principled causal data-generating structure. Furthermore, existing causal evaluation datasets are often restricted to curated examples from existing sources, with diversity coming from limited templatized variations rather than from systematic generation of novel synthetic causal structures. We introduce CausalDS, a benchmark for evaluating causal reasoning in agentic data-science workflows. Each benchmark instance is a scene consisting of a sampled structural causal model (SCM) with generated observational data and an accompanying synthetic natural-language story grounded in a realistic domain. We optionally ground the composition of the benchmark components in empirical distributions obtained from real-world datasets, thus retaining empirical structure while reducing the "causal parrot" risk through completely synthetic generation. From each scene, we then derive tasks spanning all three of Pearl's rungs, with typical data-science prediction tasks appearing as Rung 1. Most tasks include a data science coding component, where the model typically needs to use several tools to arrive at the final answer due to the frequent presence of imperfect observations, which are generated by an observation model. Additionally, recognizing when a question admits no warranted answer and abstaining is treated as a first-class scored outcome. The benchmark thus jointly evaluates symbolic causal reasoning, data science, uncertainty quantification, abstention, and tool use/coding.
Andrej Leban, Yuekai Sun
Jul 7, 2026cs.AI

Bridging Physical Reasoning and Task Generalization via Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment

Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to generalize in interactive physical reasoning, particularly under unseen tasks and environments. Two key failure modes are prominent: hallucinated chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that contradicts physical reality, and misalignment between the model's reasoning and actions. We present VAORA (Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment), a novel reward design that directly addresses both issues. VAORA introduces two complementary rewards: Visual Alignment Reward, which anchors VLM reasoning to the visual context independent of the agent action itself, and Visual-Action Alignment Reward, which grounds reasoning in the visual outcome induced by the model's action. Together, these rewards suppress hallucinated CoT and reduce the gap between reasoning and behavior. To improve training stability, we further employ smooth, dense rewards by estimating success probabilities using a pre-trained in-domain expert agent. Experiments on PHYRE and Virtual Tool support our performances across novel-task and unseen-environment settings, confirming that grounded and generalizable physical intelligence can be induced through VAORA.
Han-Jun Ko, Jr-Jen Chen, Haobo Yuan +4
Jul 5, 2026cs.AI

Forethought: Verifiable Reasoning from Neurosymbolic Primitive Programming

Current agentic workflows usually involve decomposing user requests into sequences of tool calls with correctly resolved parameters, the results of which are processed through reasoning traces in the language model's context window. The prevailing route to improve such reasoning is test-time scaling, which trains models to search over long chains of thought; but the resulting capability is entangled in model weights, is not verifiable step-by-step, and is costly at inference. We present Forethought, a neurosymbolic reasoning system that instead treats reasoning as an explicit, verifiable program, that builds from a library of symbolic and neural primitives which are composed through a domain-specific language. The result are reasoning programs, which are concrete representations of the model's work, and as such can be inspected and modified before deployment. Instantiated as a tool-calling execution kernel and evaluated across five benchmarks, Forethought improves base-model accuracy by about 30% relative and outperforms vanilla prompting, reinforcement learning scaffolds, and prompt-evolution methods, enabling small models to match or exceed frontier models capabilities. In a direct comparison, a non-reasoning model augmented with Forethought competes with a dedicated reasoning model while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude less post-training investment, and remains model-agnostic and auditable.
Vishvesh Bhat, Jay Vaghasiya, Emmanuel Anaya Gonzalez
Jul 3, 2026cs.CV

VideoSearcher: Empowering Video Deep Research with Multi-Tool Agentic Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR). However, existing multimodal search agents primarily target static images, and the current VDR benchmark relies on text-centric retrieval that discards crucial visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearcher, a closed-loop agentic framework that empowers Vision-Language Models with multi-tool reasoning for VDR. VideoSearcher unifies temporal localization, spatial focusing, and multimodal search within a single reasoning trajectory, enabling agents to progressively ground visual clues, retrieve relevant evidence, and synthesize answers. To optimize knowledge-intensive reasoning trajectories, we propose Bi-branch Sequence Policy Optimization (BiSPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples tool-invocation optimization from answer-accuracy optimization. This design provides stable learning signals for both evidence-grounded reasoning and purposeful tool use. Furthermore, we construct VideoSearch-QA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate open-world video information grounding and multimodal search-based reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoSearcher significantly outperforms prior open-source agentic baselines across various search-oriented and multimodal understanding benchmarks.
Zhenkun Gao, Yicheng Bao, Jinlong Peng +13
Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

Bayesian Uncertainty Propagation for Agentic RAG Pipelines: A Proof-of-Concept Study on Multi-Hop Question Answering

Trustworthy deployment of Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems requires mechanisms for estimating when multi-stage reasoning pipelines may fail. This paper presents an uncertainty-aware Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework in which planner, evaluator and generator stages produce uncertainty signals derived from semantic divergence and generator self-evaluation. These signals are propagated through a Bayesian Network (BN) to estimate system-level uncertainty and provide node-level indicators of potential failure points across the workflow. The approach is evaluated on StrategyQA and HotpotQA using GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4.1-Nano, with Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC), Area Under the Accuracy-Rejection Curve (AUARC), Expected Calibration Error (ECE), and Brier Score used to assess discrimination, selective prediction and calibration. Results show that Bayesian propagation is more effective on HotpotQA, where uncertainty accumulates across multi-hop reasoning stages, while StrategyQA exposes limitations caused by miscalibration and unreliable upstream signals. The study positions Bayesian uncertainty propagation as a promising but preliminary mechanism for monitoring Agentic RAG systems, with future validation required in industrial domains such as Offshore Wind (OSW) maintenance decision support.
Louis Donaldson, Connor Walker, Koorosh Aslansefat +1
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

GEAR-Seg: A Grounded Explainable Agent for Reasoning Segmentation and Data Engine

Reasoning segmentation requires localizing targets based on complex, implicit queries. Current end-to-end models typically entangle perception and deduction into an opaque black box, severely limiting interpretability and scalability. To address this, we propose GEAR-Seg (Grounded Explainable Agent for Reasoning Segmentation), an explicitly decoupled agent that shifts the paradigm by translating visual pixels into dense, attribute-rich text. By decoupling class-agnostic segmentation, semantic description, and Large Language Model (LLM) deduction, GEAR-Seg transforms implicit reasoning into an explicit, trackable logic chain. As a zero-shot inference framework, it achieves highly competitive performance across diverse reasoning and fine-grained referring segmentation benchmarks. Furthermore, GEAR-Seg inherently functions as a highly scalable data engine. Utilizing this engine, we construct GEAR-131K, a massive benchmark (over 38k images, 656k QA-mask pairs) introducing a multifaceted taxonomy tailored for complex real-world manipulation-oriented reasoning. Finally, distillation experiments demonstrate that lightweight models supervised exclusively by our automated pipeline closely match the upper-bound performance of costly human-annotated baselines.
Yanan Wang, Wen Li, Yibin Ying +1
Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Homer: Understanding Long-form Videos with Hierarchical Memory and Agentic Reasoning

Multimodal large language models excel on short clips but struggle on hour-long videos in an online setting, where frames are processed incrementally under limited memory. Existing online methods either retain compact visual representations that lack semantic structure, or build higher-level memory stores organized around temporal proximity rather than explicit causal links, leaving multi-hop narrative reasoning to be reconstructed by the LLM at every query. We bridge this gap with \textsc{Homer}, a Hierarchical Online Memory Exploration and Reasoning framework. \textsc{Homer}'s memory mirrors the multi-scale structure of long videos, ranging from raw perception, to recurring entities, to events connected by explicit temporal and causal relations. Its agentic reasoner then explores this memory the way humans do, locating the relevant scene, looking up details, and composing the answer through multi-round memory retrieval, with a harness that verifies and corrects each step. \textsc{Homer} outperforms the previous best agent method by +5.5+5.5, +10.8+10.8, and +4.4+4.4 points on M3-Bench-robot, M3-Bench-web, and Video-MME-Long, and consistently lifts three various LLM backbones, indicating a model-agnostic structural capability for grounded retrieval over long videos.
Yixin Ji, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li +5
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Ask the World Before Acting: Environment Probing for Calibrated Agent World Models

Language agents acting over long horizons must maintain beliefs about tool states, object locations, graph edges, and subgoal dependencies. When these beliefs drift, failures can be fixed neither by longer reasoning traces nor by ordinary self-reflection, since the missing evidence lies in the environment. We formulate environment probing as a budgeted decision problem for structured agent world models: before acting, the agent may query the current value of one belief field, update its table, and pay one interaction step. We introduce EnvProbe, a simple scoring policy that combines task criticality, staleness, verbalized uncertainty, and dependency role. A type-stratified analysis separates the benefit of belief repair from the cost of displaced task actions and predicts different behavior for procedural and spatial beliefs. In three controlled environments with gold belief states, EnvProbe improves terminal world-state accuracy over periodic probing by 11.76 percentage points on procedural tool-dependency tasks, 3.79 points on spatial tasks, and 6.45 points overall. Ablations show that task-structural terms are the main source of the gains, while self-reported uncertainty is unreliable under confident wrong beliefs. The results suggest that agent calibration should be treated as an action-selection problem over environment evidence, not only as a model-internal reasoning problem.
Xinyuan Song, Zekun Cai
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

Plan Right, Then Plan Tight: Symbolic RL for Efficient Embodied Reasoning

Embodied task planning asks an agent to turn a natural-language instruction into an executable sequence of actions in a physical scene, and is a building block for household, assistive, and service robots. Recent prompting-based and reinforcement-learning planners generate fluent action text but lack a cheap deterministic check that the produced plan is valid in the target world, while high-fidelity simulation is too slow to serve as an inner-loop training signal. The general problem is therefore how to obtain verifiable supervision and rewards for embodied planners without relying on string-level matching or full simulation. Here we show that a single BDDL specification, automatically constructed from open-world video evidence or curated tasks, can serve as a shared interface for data construction, plan verification, and reward design. A video-to-BDDL parser, an LLM verifier, and a lightweight symbolic engine together supply dense feedback at millisecond latency. We further introduce GroupAdapt, a difficulty-aware length schedule that uses the in-batch group pass rate as a zero-cost signal so that hard prompts get wider length tolerance and automatically tighten as their pass rate improves. Under the guidance of the proposed verifier and GroupAdapt schedule, the 8B planner attains a Strict-Pass score of 97.3 on BEHAVIOR-1000, yielding a 25.9 percent relative improvement over the Qwen3-8B baseline. This result exceeds the strongest large-model baseline by 3.5 percent, while simultaneously compressing the response length by 79 percent to 207 tokens, demonstrating both effectiveness and efficiency.
Xiangli Shi, Xiaomeng Zhu, Ye Tian +5
Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

Improving General Role-Playing Agents via Psychology-Grounded Reasoning and Role-Aware Policy Optimization

Building general-purpose role-playing agents that faithfully portray any character from a natural-language profile remains challenging. The dominant paradigm -- supervised fine-tuning -- encourages behavioral mimicry without deep, human-like internal thought processes, resulting in poor out-of-distribution generalization. Therefore, we propose \textbf{Psy-CoT}, a psychology-grounded chain-of-thought framework that decomposes pre-response reasoning into three role-specific steps -- \emph{Interaction Perception}, \emph{Psychological Empathy}, and \emph{Logical Construction} -- so that the model \emph{thinks dynamically} from the profile rather than merely mimicking surface patterns. While structured reasoning provides a foundation, it alone is insufficient; reinforcement learning is essential to further align the model with character fidelity. However, we observe that under LLM-based reward models, both generic phrases that hack the reward model and genuinely role-specific phrases receive identical gradient signals -- this hacking accumulates over training, misleading the model into treating both as equally optimal choices. To address this, we propose \textbf{Role-Aware Policy Optimization (RAPO)}, which uses profile--token mutual information to weight gradients asymmetrically -- amplifying role-specific tokens under positive advantage while attenuating them under negative advantage. Experiments on CoSER, CharacterBench, and CharacterEval demonstrate that Psy-CoT outperforms existing role-playing CoT methods, and RAPO consistently surpasses GRPO across multiple model scales.
Zhenhua Xu, Dongsheng Chen, Jian Li +7
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Do Thinking Tokens Help with Safety?

Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts. It is also generally believed that this more "deliberative" mode should improve alignment and safety, by providing the model a safe space to consider whether its planned answer to a request violates its safety principles. We present evidence that this intuition is not always correct. Across frontier open-weight reasoning models spanning GPT-OSS, Qwen, Olmo, and Phi families, we find that the eventual refusal/compliance outcome is already strongly predictable via a trained head on the first token's hidden representation (0.840.84-0.950.95 AUROC and 88%\sim88\% balanced accuracy for predicting refusal/compliance) before any visible thinking. The thinking process turns out to be more akin to prefix completion than to deliberative revision, with the final outcome rarely changing after the first 20%\sim20\% of thinking, despite giving the appearance of deliberation at the text level (74%\sim74\% of text-level deliberations occur when the response distribution is already locked to one refusal/compliance side). We also find that existing inference-time and training-based safety interventions, despite being motivated by the goal of inducing deliberation, largely shift model behavior toward over-refusal while suppressing already-scarce deliberation signals. Our results suggest that safety behavior in current reasoning models is much less deliberative than commonly assumed, and highlight the need for methods that induce real safety deliberation.
Narutatsu Ri, Abhishek Panigrahi, Sanjeev Arora
Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

AGORA: An Archive-Grounded Benchmark for Agentic Workplace Document Reasoning

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study archive-grounded reasoning: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce Agora, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model's context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.
Honglin Guo, Qi Zhang, Yu Zhang +7
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

SP-Mind: An Autonomous Reasoning Agent for Spatial Proteomics Analysis

Spatial proteomics enables single-cell-resolution characterization of protein expression within tissue architecture, playing a critical role in understanding tumor microenvironments and guiding precision medicine. However, current analysis workflows remain fragmented, requiring expert manual orchestration of heterogeneous tools and limiting research scalability and reproducibility. We present SP-Mind, the first autonomous AI agent designed to unify the spatial proteomics analysis pipeline, from raw multiplexed tissue imaging to downstream phenotype discovery. Equipped with expert-curated biological analysis skills and specialized computational tools, SP-Mind converts natural-language queries into end-to-end analytical workflows without task-specific fine-tuning. To rigorously evaluate its capabilities, we introduce SP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse tissue types, comprising 102 tasks across 18 distinct categories. Through extensive evaluation on SP-Bench and established downstream tasks, SP-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing open-source biomedical agent baselines.
Yucheng Yuan, Yuanfeng Ji, Zhongxiao Li +1
Jun 20, 2026cs.AI

Learning the ARTS of Search for Automated Discovery

Scientific discovery can be formulated as an iterative search process over the space of hypotheses and experiments. Contemporary methods navigate this space using heuristics such as MCTS. These algorithms conflate the merit of a hypothesis with the quality of its experimental execution. A promising hypothesis with preliminary execution is therefore ranked below a modest hypothesis whose execution is refined. Moreover, prior methods prune the search logs as the search progresses because the accumulated history outgrows the context window. We propose Agentic Reasoning for Tree Search (ARTS), where we deploy a reasoning language model to navigate this space. The model inspects prior execution logs, diagnoses whether earlier failures arose from faulty implementations or bad hypotheses, and selects the hypothesis to build on next. To mitigate challenges with context length, ARTS uses test-time training to instill the knowledge of search tree in the model weights. Across 22 tasks from MLGym and MLEBench, we show that ARTS outperforms leading algorithms, with over 15.3% relative improvement in the normalized score. With test-time training we show that a Qwen3-4B agent can match performance with closed-source frontier models like Gemini-3 Pro and GPT o3-reasoning with upto 5x lower inference cost. We further observe that on partially observable RL tasks, the test-time trained Qwen3-4B scientist surpasses ARTS with the o3 scientist by rediscovering the human-best recurrent-memory solution that heuristic methods prune away.
Gurusha Juneja, Arnav Kumar Jain, Deepak Nathani +2
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

S-Agent: Spatial Tool-Use Elicits Reasoning for Spatial Intelligence

Real-world spatial intelligence requires reasoning over a continuous and evolving 3D world, yet existing VLMs and tool-augmented agents largely remain tied to static, stateless inference from isolated visual observations. We introduce \textbf{\textsc{S-Agent}}, a spatial tool-use agentic paradigm for understanding and reasoning over continuous multi-view images and videos. By formulating spatial reasoning as spatio-temporal evidence accumulation rather than isolated frame-level prediction, \textsc{S-Agent} reshapes spatial perception into scene-centric understanding beyond frame-centric recognition. Specifically, \textsc{S-Agent} casts the VLM as a semantic planner that decides what evidence is needed, while a hierarchy of spatial tools and experts grounds objects in 2D, lifts them into 3D geometric evidence, and aggregates this evidence into high-level spatial knowledge (\textit{e.g.}, counting, measurement, orientation, and relative position). Additionally, a temporal memory mechanism, including Scene Memory for maintaining the evolving scene state and Agent Memory for accumulating reasoning context, enables evidence integration across frames and reasoning steps. Comprehensive experiments on multi-view and video spatial reasoning benchmarks show that \textsc{S-Agent} consistently improves both open-source and closed-source VLMs in a training-free manner. Beyond inference-time augmentation, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on \textsc{S-Agent}-generated spatial trajectories \textsc{S-300K} yields \textsc{S-Agent-8B}, a compact spatial agent that significantly surpasses similar-scale baselines (e.g., Qwen3-VL-8B) and performs comparably to advanced closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3).
Yalun Dai, Hao Li, Shulin Tian +10
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

WEQA: Wearable hEalth Question Answering with Query-Adaptive Agentic Reasoning

Language models are remarkably capable at medical question answering, in some cases surpassing the accuracy of general physicians. However, answering questions about wearable health data remains challenging and understudied, as these ubiquitous sensors produce continuous, high-dimensional, and longitudinal data, which is non-trivial to align with text-centric distributions in LLM pretraining. The diversity of sensor modalities and user intents cannot be effectively handled by a fixed reasoning workflow or a single pretrained foundation model. To address these challenges, we propose WEQA, a query-adaptive agent framework that unifies LLM reasoning with specialized wearable analytical and modeling tools. An LLM controller is employed to synthesize execution plans and dynamically route each query to the appropriate combination of sensor analysis and pretrained models, and perform grounded response auditing with external knowledge. We also curate a benchmark spanning four open wearable datasets comprising analytic and predictive tasks in three different health domains. Experiments show that our framework is 24% more accurate than LLM and agentic baselines, and a blinded study with 12 medical experts and 8 users shows substantial gains in usefulness and clinical soundness.
Yuwei Zhang, Tong Xia, Bianca Emmerich +5
Jun 16, 2026cs.NI

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.
Seyed Morteza Ahmadian, Paolo Monti, Carlos Natalino
Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.
Hong Yang, Basura Fernando
Jun 15, 2026cs.CL

VeriGraph: Towards Verifiable Data-Analytic Agents

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.
Jiajie Jin, Zhao Yang, Wenle Liao +5
Jun 15, 2026cs.AI

Teaching agentic AI to generalize expert diagnostic reasoning in rare diseases

Rare disease diagnosis depends on expert reasoning that is scarce and difficult to transfer. Large language models rank the correct disease first in only 35.4% of benchmark cases and often rely on learned phenotype-disease associations rather than reusable diagnostic reasoning strategies. We developed liteOdyssey through Policy Iteration with Human Feedback, a process in which model failures and expert corrections are iteratively consolidated into a clinician-gated, natural-language policy executed by a language model. Across 1,243 public benchmark cases spanning 722 rare diseases, liteOdyssey ranked the correct disease first in 59.3% of cases versus 26.5% without the policy, with comparable gains in cases involving diseases excluded from policy development. The same policy transferred across model families and sizes without retraining. Adaptation of the policy to the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) improved diagnostic accuracy among 515 UDN patients, with gains confirmed by blinded physician adjudication. These results show that expert reasoning can be externalized into an inspectable and revisable natural-language policy that generalizes across rare diseases, transfers across model backbones, and adapts to a real-world patient cohort.
Minh-Ha Nguyen, Erica Gray, Bryce A. Schuler +16
Jun 12, 2026cs.CL

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.
NVIDIA, :, Aaron Blakeman +571
Jun 12, 2026cs.AI

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.
Agnieszka Mensfelt, Adarsh Prabhakaran, Adrian Haret +2
Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.
Taewoo Park, Kyeonghyun Yoo, Seunghyun Yoo +1