Long-Horizon

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15 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

6 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Long-Horizon.

Period ending 2026-09-14

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Long-Horizon.

Period ending 2026-09-07

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Long-Horizon.

118 papers

Latest in Long-Horizon

Sep 17, 2026quant-ph

Long-horizon autoformalization of a core theorem underlying MIP* = RE

Landmark mathematical formalizations have taken specialist teams years to complete. We present FormalFlow, a system that coordinates AI proving agents under human supervision to address statement drift and proof composition in long-horizon formalization. Drawing on software engineering principles and practices, it uses a shared blueprint to guide nested planning, proving and review loops. Agents strengthen verification and review throughout formalization. We completed a machine-checked Lean 4 proof of the quantum soundness of the classical low individual-degree test, a core theorem underlying MIP* = RE. Developing the proof took 63 days; greater parallelism could further reduce this time. The final library contains 126,367 lines of Lean code, all generated by agents. The formalization corrects side conditions and intermediate errors while preserving the published final error bound under corrected assumptions. This work provides a verified foundation for quantum complexity and demonstrates a route to affordable verification of major research proofs by small teams.
Sirui Lu, Ruixuan Deng, Yanqiao Zhu +1
Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Memory Has Geometry: Non-Uniform Geometric Memory for Long-Horizon Personalized AI

Long-term memory is becoming a core substrate for personalized AI, yet most systems still represent personalization as discrete records in a largely static latent space, accessed under one global similarity notion. For data mining, this creates a mismatch: the evidence is a temporal event stream, while the dominant abstraction is a searchable record set. We argue that long-horizon personalization should instead model memory as a user-specific dynamical state space with locally heterogeneous geometry. Geometry here is a computational language, not a literal claim about cognition: it captures stable versus volatile regions, variable-rate drift, heterogeneous neighborhoods, and uncertainty about current user state. Profiles and isolated events remain useful as points, but interaction, feedback, and elapsed time induce trajectories. Memory access then becomes trajectory-conditioned reconstruction of the relevant user state, not only nearest-neighbor lookup.
Jiahong Liu, Wenhao Yu, Zexuan Qiu +2
Sep 15, 2026cs.MA

Emergence World: Adversarial Stress-Testing of Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

As AI agents move from bounded tasks to persistent deployments, failures can propagate through memory, tools, other agents, and environmental state long after their interactions. This creates a safety regime that cannot be characterized by evaluating model responses in isolation. Emergence World, is a continuously running multi-agent environment for adversarial stress testing of long horizon autonomous systems. We ran eight parallel worlds of ten agents from identical starting conditions: seven homogeneous worlds powered by distinct frontier models and one mixed-model world. Across 16 days, the agents generated more than 850,000 LLM calls and nearly 50 billion tokens while pursuing goals, using/creating tools, maintaining persistent memory, and governing shared institutions. After operational state had accumulated, we delivered three controlled stress events through ordinary interaction surfaces: indirect prompt injection, misinformation, and exposure of private agent memories. No evaluated world achieved full resilience across all three events. Detection did not ensure containment: systems could recognize threats while still interacting with adversarial content, writing it into their own persistent memory, and acting on it up to 46 hours later. Persistent operation also exposed recurring tool errors, goal drift, language opacity, conformity despite private disagreement, and coordinated refusal of assigned work. The same model-persona pairing behaved substantially different in mixed and homogeneous populations. Our results suggest that model-level alignment is not compositional: individually capable and apparently safe agents can form systems with qualitatively different failure modes. As AI becomes persistent and interconnected, the frontier of safety therefore shifts from aligning models to engineering resilient autonomous systems.
Deepak Akkil, Tamer Abuelsaad, Karthik Vikram +5
Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

Stable by Construction: Variational Latent Markov Operators for Long-Horizon PDE Prediction

Neural PDE solvers provide efficient surrogates for time-dependent physical systems, but autoregressive prediction over long horizons remains challenging because local errors can induce distribution shift and accumulate under recursive deployment. We develop a variational approach to this problem by introducing latent Markov dynamics in which physical states are represented by latent distributions and evolved through probabilistic transitions. The framework is formulated directly on function spaces and specialized to functional Gaussian models, where structured latent perturbations induce a spectral geometry and variational transition alignment regularizes the learned dynamics. We further analyze how these mechanisms affect autoregressive error propagation, providing a theoretical connection between variational training and long-horizon prediction. We instantiate the framework as the Variational Autoencoding Markov Operator (VAMO), which combines spatially resolved latent fields, structured Gaussian perturbations, and a neural-operator transition. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of VAMO on several fluid-dynamics benchmarks with prediction horizons extending substantially beyond those represented during training, where it consistently reduces error accumulation and improves rollout stability over several deterministic and noise-injection baselines. Overall, these results highlight variational modeling as a complementary approach to robust long-horizon neural PDE dynamics.
Junyi Liao, Johann Guilleminot, Vahid Tarokh
Sep 15, 2026cs.CL

RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue

Speech-to-speech dialogue models increasingly support persona control, yet existing spoken role-playing benchmarks remain largely character-centric and short-horizon. This leaves open whether spoken dialogue models can sustain diverse roles over extended interactions, especially beyond predefined fictional characters. We introduce RoleBreak, an open benchmark for long-horizon role-playing robustness in spoken dialogue. RoleBreak contains 310 character-based and user-centered roles, 6,688 human-verified dialogue turns, and 11,743 fine-grained evaluation criteria, with 1,856 turns carrying expressive emotion targets for evaluating vocal emotion. Its scenarios are designed to stress role consistency, interaction quality, safety, and affect over extended conversations. We evaluate nine configurations spanning full-duplex, omni-modal, and cascaded ASR--LLM--TTS paradigms. We find four key patterns. First, current systems are substantially stronger at semantic role adherence than at vocal emotion. Second, semantic robustness remains brittle over long interactions: even the strongest evaluated system encounters its first persona and safety failures after only 10.4 and 11.6 turns on average. Third, scaling the LLM substantially improves semantic robustness and delays failure, but yields little improvement in vocal emotion. Finally, user vocal emotion affects role-playing behavior even when linguistic content is fixed. These findings highlight persistent gaps in both long-horizon robustness and vocal expressiveness in spoken role-playing systems.
Yuqi Wang, Fengyuan Liu, Haochen Luo +2
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Large Distant Gradients Need Not Be Reliable: reliability-weighted credit assignment for long-horizon autoregressive forecasting

In autoregressive forecasting, long prediction rollouts provide distant supervision, but backpropagation through time (BPTT) carries gradients from those losses through many autoregressive steps. Repeated Jacobian products can make distant gradients dominate the update while amplifying predictable signal and unpredictable noise together; a large distant gradient therefore need not carry reliable learning signal. Motivated by this observation, we introduce Internal Dual-Wiener routing (Internal-DW), a principled backward-only intervention that preserves the full forward rollout and all horizon losses while reliability-weighting internal gradient routes. At each residual block, we derive bounded Wiener gains for the identity and nonlinear routes that balance preserving predictable learning signal against suppressing unpredictable variation, and estimate them from route-level gradient statistics and an explicit noise model. In a controlled system with known gradient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we show that distant gradients can grow even as their SNR falls, and that Internal-DW reduces held-out error in recovering predictable gradient signals and improves forecasting. On four history-dominated, weak-drive testbeds, Internal-DW reduces forecast error by 5.2%-13.8% relative to full BPTT, outperforms gradient clipping and Jacobian regularization on all four, and outperforms validation-selected truncated BPTT (TBPTT) on three. It also extends or preserves the fitted optimal training-horizon range across these four testbeds. Across the full benchmark suite, the current Internal-DW estimator has a clear applicability boundary: its benefit diminishes or reverses when usable history is limited or when the selected sampler fails to represent dominant drive-dependent variation. The results show that retaining long-horizon supervision does not require trusting every backward contribution equally.
Junhao Zhao, David Michael Simberg, Jacob Kang +2
Sep 13, 2026cs.AI

Safety Signals to Verify NetOps Agents with Action-Level Granularity

Agentic Network Operations (NetOps) are an emerging paradigm promising to enable workload-aware, self-adjustable, and reliable autonomous networks. While agents have proven their value in incident summarization and telemetry signal extraction, their effectiveness as autonomous control-loop engines heavily relies on their long-horizon reliability. One such setting is the datacenter fabric, where an agent must respond to alarms and operator intents while abstaining from high-risk actions that may cause or extend downtime. Abstention, however, presupposes that an action's impact is known pre-execution, which necessitates a per-action ground truth that NetOps agent benchmarks do not provide. We construct such a ground truth for the network repair task of NetArena. A symbolic replay of the emulated network, validated against the environment at every turn, yields the exact value of every action. From the action-level value, we derive two pre-execution targets, namely whether an action reduces the repair distance (progress) and whether it increases it (harm). We show across 10 agent models, that agent verifiers leveraging internal signals predict both harm and progress more reliably than a baseline using observable signals only. Perspectively, we aim to use these signals as safety feedback to an agent harness to abstain from risky actions and protect the target system.
Tobias Labarta, Frederik Pahde, Novak Boškov +5
Sep 11, 2026cs.CV

World in World: Explore the World with World Models

Autoregressive video world models enable interactive, long-horizon exploration, but flexible control remains challenging. Exploring a source video from new viewpoints requires the generated rollout to remain synchronised with the recorded event, place observed content in the requested view, plausibly complete newly exposed regions, and recover previously generated appearance on revisits. Existing methods typically address these requirements through task-specific modules or additional training. We present World in World, a training-free inference-time interface that converts heterogeneous control evidence into camera- and time-labelled clean visual states, which are read through the native self attention of a frozen causal video model. The evidence comprises source-video observations, target-view scene projections, geometry renderings that guide completion of newly exposed subject regions, and retrieved generated states beyond the rolling cache. Each evidence source carries token-level support and its own availability schedule. A correspondence router combines persistent point identities with geometry to establish token correspondences, guiding supported queries towards matching source-video tokens. Evidence-wise attention CFG (EWA) then independently regulates each auxiliary channel's additional contribution using attention responses from the same denoising forward pass. The shared interface supports camera-controlled rerendering, long-horizon revisiting, and human-motion transfer with the same frozen backbone. We evaluate World in World on camera-controlled video rerendering under diverse viewpoint changes, assessing perceptual quality, temporal consistency, and camera-following accuracy.
Chenxi Song, Yanming Yang, Chi Zhang
Sep 3, 2026cs.RO

Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has increasingly adopted world model-based reinforcement learning frameworks to improve learning efficiency through \textit{imagined rollouts}. However, existing world models suffer from three key limitations: temporal inconsistency in long-horizon imagined rollouts, inadequate modeling of ego-environment interactions, and limited adaptability to diverse driving styles. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{StyleDrive}, a world-model-based learning framework that jointly enforces long-horizon consistency, explicitly disentangles interactive traffic states, and supports multi-style policy optimization within a unified learning paradigm. First, we introduce a temporal consistency regularization that integrates historical latent states through gated cross-attention, stabilizing long-horizon imagined rollouts and mitigating error accumulation. Second, we design an explicit state disentanglement module that separates ego-relevant from ego-irrelevant interactive states, enabling more interpretable and efficient decision-making in complex traffic scenarios. Third, we enable multi-style driving behaviors through Group Relative Policy Optimization, which replaces per-step reward optimization with trajectory-wise relative advantages, reducing reward variance and supporting diverse driving styles without retraining. We evaluate StyleDrive on the Bench2Drive closed-loop driving benchmark, achieving a driving score of 88.44 (+17.08 over the previous best world model-based method) and a success rate of 66.82 (+16.58). Furthermore, we deploy StyleDrive on a real automated guided vehicle platform and demonstrate promising sim-to-real transfer capability in dynamic driving scenarios.
Yuxuan Han, Kunyuan Wu, Liyunong Yang +4
Sep 1, 2026cs.MA

ArcticSwarm: Deferring Early Consensus in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Research

Multi-agent systems have shown strong performance in domains with reliable verifiers such as coding, where multi-parallel candidate generation selected by a verifier is effective. However, such pipelines would not generalize to open-ended, long-horizon research tasks without a verifier. While majority voting or self-consistency is often used to reach consensus as a proxy verifier, parallel agents repeatedly explore the same evidence, while access to peers' partial findings cause search to converge on an early candidate before alternatives are tested. We present ArcticSwarm, a multi-agent research architecture that separates evidence gathering from evidence integration. Subagents publish findings to a shared bulletin board, while gated isolation lets selected search tasks maintain their own prior, preventing early consensus. Structured review at three commitment boundaries enforce only confident candidates to be propagated. As a result, ArcticSwarm reaches 82.6% on the full BrowseComp-Plus set with the open-weight Qwen 3.5-27B model, compared with 78.8% without gated isolation and 74.5% additionally with structured review disabled, outperforming aligned baseline MiroFlow runs (70.6%). Extending to live-web BrowseComp, ArcticSwarm reaches 73.6% with GPT-5, which is well above the reported provider system (54.9%) and MiroFlow (63.4%). Overall, the results show that restricting peer reads during evidence gathering and strengthening commitment boundaries before a hypothesis is shared can broaden search and improve long-horizon multi-agent deep research.
Soyoung Yoon, Boyi Liu, Yite Wang +6
Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

ContextPipe: Database-Inspired Context Assembly for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents require context assembly: the runtime must decide what to include in each prompt, in what order, and when to compact history under a hard context-window budget and a byte-sensitive prompt cache. In production agentic systems, this logic is scattered across prompt builders, ad hoc compaction routines, cache-break workarounds, and per-provider shims. We argue that context assembly is structurally isomorphic to query execution in a relational database: both execute under a hard budget, exploit a tiered cache, and leverage statistics. We adopt this discipline in ContextPipe: a five-phase pipeline (Plan Bind Optimize Execute Feedback) backed by a structured data-source catalog, a deterministic cache-aware optimizer, and an EXPLAIN ANALYZE trace. We show that context in ContextPipe is auditable, replayable, and failure-isolated. A preliminary evaluation using the SWE-bench Pro Qutebrowser subset shows that, compared with the append-only context construction policy, ContextPipe reduces total token volume by 31%, LLM calls by 23%, and response time by 9%, at the cost of a lower KV cache-hit ratio.
Peng Xu, Zuyu Zhang, Yuze Sun +3
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

E-Commerce Bench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Autonomous Business Operation

Long-horizon agentic tasks go beyond chaining short tasks over more interaction turns. Their evolving dynamic environments and long-range dependencies require Large Language Models (LLMs) to continually explore, learn from experience, and adapt their policies over thousands of steps. We introduce E-Commerce Bench, the first open-source benchmark that integrates multi-round counterpart negotiation and dynamic events into a year-long business operation. Over a 365-day year, an LLM agent concurrently runs multiple online stores, researching the market, negotiating with suppliers to source inventory, optimizing sales strategies, fulfilling orders, handling returns, and managing cash flow to maximize its end-of-year total assets. To construct a realistic merchant-side operating environment, the product and supplier data are derived from a real e-commerce platform, while a year-long calendar of promotions, natural disasters, and supply-chain shocks continually reshapes demand. For reproducibility, both sides of the market are deterministic: customer purchases and returns follow a fixed demand model, while a negotiation kernel determines supplier pricing, concessions, and decisions, with an LLM used only to verbalize them. We evaluate 18 frontier models across seven dimensions, including year-end assets, and find that no single model dominates. GPT-5.6 Sol earns the most, growing the 100,000 opening stake into 1,431,425, yet it ranks 16th of 18 on fraud avoidance and trails Fable5 in operational efficiency. Among open-weight models, Qwen3.8-Max-Preview leads with 416,252, 38% above GLM 5.2 (high), and achieves the strongest learning over the horizon, progressively bargaining down prices across repeated orders. Our code is available at https://github.com/QwenLM/E-CommerceBench.
Wei Fan, Xinjie Shen, Xudong Guo +8
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation

Long-horizon physical-world agents must reason over distant goals while grounding decisions in reliable closed-loop behavior. Today's foundation models split these capabilities: vision-language models (VLMs) infer missing information and adapt high-level plans but remain brittle and inefficient at repeated navigation grounding, while navigation foundation models (NFMs) robustly execute semantic goals but operate as bounded episodes without persistent task-level reasoning. We introduce NavMCP, an agentic scaffolding framework that couples a VLM reasoning agent with an NFM executor for long-horizon exploration. The VLM decides what evidence to seek, where to search, and when to stop, while the NFM grounds each semantic sub-goal into closed-loop navigation. Three channels structure their collaboration: intent translates evidence needs into navigation calls, observation converts rollouts into source-grounded trajectory evidence, and memory accumulates findings, negative evidence, and unresolved goals across calls. This design turns isolated navigation rollouts into persistent embodied interaction without retraining either model. On Embodied Question Answering, NavMCP achieves state-of-the-art results on HM-EQA, MT-HM3D, and EXPRESS-Bench. Under matched agent and executor backbones, it outperforms an episodic interface by 14.9 percentage points on HM-EQA. On a Unitree Go2, NavMCP reaches 78.3% success, with its margin over the strongest baseline growing from 10 to 45 points as the task horizon increases. These results demonstrate the potential of scaffolding complementary foundation models into long-horizon physical-world agents.
Zixing Lei, Gengze Zhou, Xiong-Hui Chen +7
Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

CineForge: Self-Improving Agents for Long-Horizon Video Generation

Long-horizon story-driven video generation requires a production agent to coordinate narrative decomposition, state tracking, shot design, prompt construction, rendering, and revision across interdependent scenes. Existing adaptive video systems primarily refine requests or reusable skills, leaving recurring production failures disconnected from persistent, stage-targeted improvements across stories. We introduce CineForge, a self-evolving video-production agent framework that couples CineForge-Produce for video generation with CineForge-Evolve for cross-story policy evolution. CineForge-Produce organizes each source story into typed narrative, character, spatial, and cinematic states, uses them to coordinate asset and clip generation, and records the process as a canonical production trajectory. CineForge-Evolve applies Case-to-Pattern-to-Policy Evolution (CPPE) to review trajectory evidence, consolidate recurrent findings into bounded stage-local patches, and deploy validated updates through structural replay and confidence-controlled paired evaluation. To measure complete story realization, we introduce CineScope, which combines a 100-script CineScope-Data suite with a human-aligned, multiscale CineScope-Metric spanning causal state, directorial orchestration, pacing and resource allocation, and character arc. Across CineScope-Data and two public benchmarks, the evolved CineForge policy improves CineScope-Metric from 4.024 to 4.380, outperforms three long-video baselines with consistent gains under ScriptAgent, and reduces review LLM calls by 37.0% on new stories. These results establish production trajectories as actionable experience for video agents that improve cumulatively across long-form storytelling tasks.
Junxiang Liu, Lin Wang, Haiyu Shi +10
Aug 27, 2026cs.RO

SOLO: Stable Omni-terrain Long-Horizon Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion

Humans traverse complex terrain over long distances without losing balance, whereas perceptive humanoid policies become fragile as perception and control errors accumulate. We present SOLO, a unified framework addressing two compounding causes of this long-horizon fragility: dense terrain reconstruction smooths action-critical details, and pointwise imitation lacks temporal credit assignment. Its Query Reconstructor (QR) uses Fourier-encoded cell queries to retrieve spatially specific evidence from depth-proprioception tokens, preserving sharp terrain boundaries. Trajectory-Aware MSE (TA-MSE) Distillation adds next-state teacher-student disagreement to the PPO reward, enabling Generalized Advantage Estimation to propagate future disagreement penalties to preceding actions. In simulation, QR reduces height-map L1 error by factors of 3.3-4.0, while TA-MSE surpasses PPO and MSE+PPO in curriculum progression. On stress-test terrains, SOLO achieves 97.5% mean traversal success and 96% stepping-stone success, versus 75.0-75.6% and 0-3% for dense-reconstructor variants. Deployed zero-shot with only a chest-mounted depth camera and proprioception, SOLO completes a continuous 1.5-km outdoor route and an indoor mixed-terrain course. Project page: https://sunpihai-up.github.io/solo/
Pihai Sun, Gang Han, Jingkai Sun +17
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

EgoCITE: Context-Augmented Indexing and Time-Aware Retrieval for Long-Horizon Egocentric Memory

Long-horizon egocentric memory transforms continuous first-person video and audio into a searchable record of past experiences. We demonstrate two bottlenecks in existing systems: indices built from context-poor captions are unreliable for agentic search, while retrieval ignores a question's temporal intent. To address both bottlenecks, we introduce EgoCITE (Egocentric Context-augmented Indexing and Time-aware Evidence retrieval), a long-horizon agentic memory framework for egocentric QA. EgoCITE comprises three components. EgoScheme uses local multimodal context to turn fragmentary video captions and speech transcripts into self-contained atomic memory indices. EgoIndex organizes complementary action, activity, utterance, and conversation representations into searchable multi-view memory indices at multiple granularities. EgoRetrv combines semantic search with question-conditioned temporal relevance scoring and curation of retrieved evidence. We evaluate EgoCITE on EgoLifeQA, EgoMem, and EgoR1-Bench in terms of answer accuracy and target-event retrieval alignment. EgoCITE improves accuracy over agentic memory baselines by at least 4.4--14.2% while achieving 36×\times lower cost than long-context LLM agents.
Le Zhang, Ke Sun
Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

Governed Persistent Memory: Source-Bound State Semantics and Fail-Closed Release for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim. We introduce Governed Persistent Memory (GPM), an auditable bitemporal state-transition model with source-bound admission, derived lifecycle state, current public barriers, and fail-closed structured release. Five executable clauses cover ledger integrity, source binding, conflict isolation, non-revival after retraction or deletion, and exact claim closure over a fresh view at one verified head. On a prespecified hash-frozen 3,600-case GPM-ReleaseBench, GPM matches all complete outcomes; the strongest of three intentionally simple complete policies matches 1,800/3,600 and makes unmatched releases on 50% of violation cases. A separate sealed end-to-end service evaluation exercises real ingestion and release across eight query families. In its publicly disclosed V3 arm, the governed lane is correct on 2,400/2,400 clusters versus 600/2,400 for ungoverned local Qwen2.5-7B; it repairs all 1,800 baseline failures with no regression (one-sided 95% lower bounds 99.875% and 99.834%). A later V5 reseal over Chinese- and English-command arms, with generation-date pinning and no post-freeze reducer amendment, again obtains 2,400/2,400 per arm. A production-code-independent finite model explores 331,776 semantic and 1,990,656 query states without a full-contract counterexample, and a 100,000-trace three-engine differential yields zero mismatches. These are bounded contract and implementation results, not open-world model accuracy or evidence of world truth. Governed answers in the sealed service evaluation are deterministic service outputs; the 7B result is the ungoverned comparison, not a claim that a language model itself became perfectly accurate.
Guodong Xu
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

LoongReflect: Boosting Long-Horizon Reflection in Search Agents via Global Perspective Distillation

Large language model agents increasingly rely on long-horizon reasoning to solve complex tasks involving planning, tool use, and memory. A critical capability in such settings is reflection: assessing trajectory progress, identifying missing evidence and unreliable intermediate states, and deciding whether to continue, revise, or abandon the current branch. Learning effective reflection, however, is challenging because reflection is performed locally within the current branch, whereas its utility can only be determined by its contribution to the final trajectory outcome. This local-global mismatch makes outcome-based reinforcement learning provide only local, sparse and delayed supervision for reflective decisions. To solve these, we propose LoongReflect, a training framework that formulates reflection as a memory-control policy. The agent operates over a reversible trajectory tree using explicit reflect and backtrack actions. Reflection consolidates verified facts, missing evidence, and branch-specific risks into working memory, while backtracking removes an unreliable branch from the active context and preserves a concise corrective lesson. To learn this policy, LoongReflect combines two complementary signals through a look-ahead, extragradient-style coordination mechanism. A fast channel distills globally informed reflective behavior from a privileged teacher, with supervision restricted to reflection and backtracking tokens. A slow channel optimizes complete trajectories using outcome-based GRPO, aligning local control decisions with final task success. Experiments on multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over outcome-only reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.
Zhixin Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Zhibang Yang +5
Aug 11, 2026cs.RO

PBD-AG: Persistent Baseline-Delta Active Graphs with Uncertainty-Aware Inspection for Long-Horizon Service Robots

Long-horizon service robots require persistent world models that can be built autonomously in unseen environments and revised as task-relevant objects change. Existing methods rely on online mapping, which accumulates localization and observation errors, static scene representations that cannot capture persistent object changes, or holistic vision-language predictions that lack verifiable 3D geometric evidence. We present PBD-AG, a persistent baseline-delta active graph framework that decouples robot-verified stable fixtures from revisable dynamic object events. Under our framework, the robot autonomously bootstraps the structural baseline from onboard exploration and inspects discovered fixtures to ground hierarchical object beliefs. PBD-AG maintains reliability-weighted object states over geometry, semantics, identity, existence, and support relations, utilizing a geometric visibility gate to mitigate false deletions under occlusion. Inspection viewpoints are selected by a graph-conditioned policy that balances target coverage, travel cost, collision risk, and redundant observation. Simulation experiments in multiple environments and under controlled dynamic evaluation show higher aggregate coarse-fixture F1 than capability-matched controls, as well as stronger identity continuity and event recall. A qualitative physical-robot demonstration further illustrates integration with onboard sensing, providing a traceable world model for long-horizon robotic perception. The project page of PBD-AG is available at https://shuobao214.github.io/PBD-AG/
Shuo Bao, Wei Dong, Shuyue Zhang +8
Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agentic Tasks

Long-horizon tool-using agents must reason over user goals, domain policies, tool calls, simulator state, and delayed verifiable rewards. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for this setting, but multi-turn on-policy rollouts create long contexts, while model-specific attention layers may require custom masks and learned sink normalization. We present SINKFLEX-RL, a modular training system for RL in dual-control tool-use environments. The system combines a Gymnasium-compatible environment wrapper, a VERL-style rollout dataflow, group-relative policy optimization without a separate value model, and a sink-aware FlexAttention path designed to preserve model-specific sink scaling under causal and sliding-window masks. In a preliminary Tau2Bench retail run, validation reward (mean@1) rises from 0.25 early in training to 0.440.44 later in the observed training window, while training-score and trajectory-reward proxies also trend upward. In a fixed-configuration memory benchmark, the optimized attention path reduces peak VRAM from 28.06GB to 22.52GB at 4096 tokens, a 19.7%19.7\% reduction, and runs the measured 8192-token configuration using 25.5325.53~GB where the eager baseline runs out of memory. These results illustrate the value of integrating environment interfaces, RL dataflow, and attention-kernel design for memory-feasible long-horizon agent training.
Zelei Cheng, Amritansh Mishra, Sambit Sahu +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

CircuitReason-1k: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Visual-to-Symbolic Reasoning inElectrical Circuits

Electrical circuit analysis requires more than recognizing components in an image. A solver must ground symbols and labels, recover latent topology, select a physical model, formulate coupled equations, propagate intermediate quantities, and preserve units, signs, directions, and phase conventions. We introduce \benchmark, a benchmark of 1,000 authentic textbook problems for evaluating this complete long-horizon visual-to-symbolic reasoning process. Each problem pairs one or more circuit diagrams with a self-contained question, a typed or semantically specified answer, and a reference worked solution. An evidence-first construction pipeline aligns questions, figures, and solutions, while a reasoning-oriented taxonomy organizes problems by circuit type and dependency depth. Evaluation combines conservative typed scoring with identity-blinded multi-model semantic consensus, retaining every problem in the denominator. Across three commercial chatbot systems and six open-source multimodal large language models, the highest-scoring system reaches 84.8% accuracy. However, performance consistently deteriorates on long-horizon problems, and qualitative analysis exposes persistent failures in topology-to-target binding, physical conventions, and late-stage output propagation. \benchmark{} provides a focused testbed for measuring whether multimodal models can transform technical visual evidence into sustained, physically valid symbolic reasoning. Code are available at GitHub - CircuitReason/CircuitReason1K.
Xinqi Yang, Kang An, Tengyue Wang +8
Aug 10, 2026cs.LG

UserToolBench: A User-Profile-Hidden Benchmark for Personalized Decision Making in Tool-Use LLMs

Tool-use LLMs are increasingly asked to act on users' behalf, but existing benchmarks usually focus on profile recall, style imitation, generic tool use, or response-level personalization. We introduce UserToolBench , a benchmark for personalized decision making in tool-use LLMs. UserToolBench tests whether a model can infer latent user preferences from interaction history, recognize when clarification is needed, and produce user-aligned tool-call trajectories under incomplete information. The benchmark is built from privacy-sanitized real interaction traces and combines structured persona profiles, public API-style tool ecosystems, and long-horizon multi-turn trajectories. It includes 10 user profiles, 36 tool sets, 1,065 turns, 170 unique tools, and evaluation-focused task types covering lack-of-information, single-tool, and multi-tool settings. Experiments with strong tool-use LLMs show that current models still have difficulty with personalized delegation. Multi-tool coordination, missing-constraint inference, and long-horizon behavioral consistency remain major bottlenecks. These results suggest that personalization evaluation should move beyond asking whether outputs sound user-specific and instead ask whether LLMs make correct decisions for the users they represent.
Xuexiong Yin, Zechuan Chen, Yongsen Zheng +5
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

LUCID: Latent-Skill Unified Control via Imagined Dynamics for Long-Horizon Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Long-horizon humanoid loco-manipulation requires composing versatile whole-body skills and reliable high-level decision making. Existing methods often coordinate pretrained skills with scripted planners, finite-state machines or task-specific model-free policies, restricting their ability to handle complex task sequences. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{LUCID}, a hierarchical model-based reinforcement learning framework that plans over reusable skills through imagined rollouts of a learned dynamics model. LUCID first trains a structured latent-conditioned low-level policy via adversarial imitation and then freezes it while jointly learning a high-level policy and macro-dynamics world model. The world model predicts the temporally extended state transitions induced by latent decisions, enabling high-level policy optimization through imagined rollouts. We evaluate our framework across various simulated multi-object rearrangement scenarios. Experimental results show that LUCID improves the full-task success and partial-completion rates compared to prior baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex sequential loco-manipulation tasks.
Cheng Guo, Mingzhe Ni, Angelo Cangelosi +1
Aug 7, 2026cs.LG

Beyond Myopic World Models: Long-Horizon End-to-End Training for Direct Future Prediction

World models are expected to support imagination over extended temporal horizons, yet most are still trained through local few-step prediction objectives and deployed by recursively rolling out their own predictions. This creates a fundamental mismatch: few-step losses optimize local transition fidelity, while long-horizon prediction depends on how errors and gradients propagate through the entire trajectory. As a result, transitions with different downstream influence on the endpoint are treated uniformly during training, and small local errors are amplified through recursive inference. We argue that long-horizon accuracy is better achieved by optimizing directly, through an end-to-end endpoint prediction objective. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce the Direct Prediction World Model (DPWM), a non-recursive architecture that compresses an action sequence of arbitrary length into a single embedding and predicts the endpoint observation in a single forward pass. This design avoids recurrent rollout in both prediction and gradient propagation, making long-horizon end-to-end training practical at horizons where unrolled autoregressive training becomes unstable. Empirically, DPWM substantially improves long-horizon endpoint prediction over recursive world-model baselines on continuous-control and pixel-based benchmarks, with larger gains as the prediction horizon increases. We further show that recurrent baselines benefit similarly when retrained with the same long-horizon endpoint objective, supporting our central claim that the training objective, rather than the particular backbone choice, is the main driver of long-horizon prediction accuracy. Our results suggest that world models can benefit from being trained and evaluated at the temporal scales where they are ultimately used, shifting the focus from local transition modeling toward long-horizon predictive accuracy.
Xinyi Li, Zaishuo Xia, Chenjie Hao +1
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

MemOPD: On-Policy Distillation through Memory State Alignment for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents accumulate growing contexts during interaction, impairing performance and stability. Compact memory mitigates this problem by compressing and rewriting the history retained between model invocations. Learning what to retain typically relies on proximal policy optimization (PPO) with final task rewards, but sparse rewards provide little guidance for individual memory updates. This limitation motivates on-policy distillation (OPD), which supplies dense teacher supervision on student rollouts. For such supervision to be valid, the teacher must evaluate each sampled action under the same state in which it was generated. However, the context rewriting performed during memory compression can break this alignment. When sampled responses are retained and re-encoded for later invocations, flattening the interaction into a persistent history may cause the teacher to score the action under a state that the student never visited during rollout. The action therefore remains on-policy by provenance, but not necessarily by state. We therefore propose Memory-Aligned On-Policy Distillation (MemOPD). MemOPD records the inputs and sampled outputs of each model invocation, restores its original token positions and causal visibility, and packs the reconstructed invocations for efficient teacher scoring. The teacher provides full-vocabulary supervision at the sampled action positions, while PPO preserves the final task objective. Experiments verify state alignment across several context updates and show that it improves F1 by 7.0% over persistent-history teacher scoring in a matched control. Overall, MemOPD-3B improves F1 over PPO by up to 416.2%, while packing yields up to a 1.63x speedup in actor computation during training. The code for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/TPssp/MemOPD.
Zhiyuan Liu, Tinghong Ye, Chenghao Liu +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

PHASE-Tree: Modeling Character-State Evolution in Long-Horizon Role-Playing Dialogue

Long-horizon role-playing demands that characters remain recognizable as they evolve with the narrative. Yet existing work falls short on two fronts: representations are typically static profiles that cannot be updated locally without destabilizing unchanged traits, and benchmarks mainly test persona preservation and memory recall rather than whether a model speaks from a character's currently evolved state. We address both. PHASE-Tree is a multi-timescale character-state tree with an immutable identity root and mutable persona, session, and moment layers, making each mutable field an addressable target for localized within- and cross-episode updates. It conditions generation through explicit textual provision or implicit parametric adaptation. To measure evolved-state generation, we introduce LongEvoRoleBench, which pairs four long-dialogue corpora for cross-episode evolution with four short-dialogue corpora as within-scene state-tracking checks, under a unified next-utterance protocol. On the long-dialogue core, textual PHASE-Tree ranks first in 11 of 12 dataset-metric cells against internal variants and all 12 cells against external textual baselines, improving character-level, semantic, and embedding scores by 19.7%, 12.4%, and 15.1% respectively. In a blinded 200-response study, human ratings correlate with the GPT-4.1 judge (Pearson r= 0.65); on descriptive n= 10 PT and NR prompt subsets, the Overall difference is +0.20. The long-dialogue Sem advantage persists across LLM judges and generation backbones.
Bo Tang, Jianan Yang, Junyi Zhu +7
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

MemPrism: Task-Conditioned Relational Memory Views for Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory to reuse experiences, yet existing memory systems often assume that evidence can be directly consumed through a fixed representation. This leads to representation mismatch, where relevant information is available but not organized for the current decision. To this end, we propose MemPrism, a task-conditioned relational memory framework that separates persistent experience storage from decision-time working memory. MemPrism records interactions as the event stream and dynamically constructs relational views according to the current task context. A lightweight view policy selects the relation structure, evidence range, outcome condition, and granularity, while a deterministic composer and render transform historical facts into a temporary optical working-memory view for a frozen task policy. Experiments on long-horizon embodied and web-agent benchmarks show that MemPrism consistently improves the task performance, especially as trajectories become longer, while reducing memory token consumption. Furthermore, the learned view policy transfers across different VLMs without additional adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of task-conditioned relational views as a general memory interface for agents.
Zhisheng Chen, Bingfan Zeng, Bangde Cao +8
Aug 7, 2026cs.MA

Scalable Long-Horizon Planning with Staggered Updates for Lifelong MAPF

Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires generating collision-free paths for large agent fleets under strict real-time constraints. Reactive frameworks such as PIBT and Enhanced PIBT (EPIBT) scale effortlessly to thousands of agents through rule-based, step-by-step coordination but suffer from severe temporal myopia, making them ineffective in scenarios where long-horizon reasoning is essential. RHCR plans windowed paths over multi-step horizons but incurs substantial planning overheads that hinder scalability. TP tackles both challenges by planning only subsets of agents at each timestep, yet its applicability is restricted to highly structured maps. To achieve long-horizon planning at scale across general maps, we propose Path Updates over Staggered Horizons (PUSH), a LMAPF planner capable of coordinating thousands of agents in under a second while planning over multi-step horizons. PUSH combines the key advantages of PIBT, RHCR, and TP. Like TP, PUSH reduces computational complexity by planning only a subset of agents at each timestep using staggered planning windows. Unlike TP, however, PUSH plans RHCR-style windowed paths in general maps without relying on restrictive map assumptions. To maintain high throughput in congested environments, PUSH further integrates EPIBT-inspired priority inheritance, backtracking, and anytime improvements into its windowed planning. Empirical evaluations across two realistic MAPF scenarios requiring long-horizon reasoning show that PUSH scales to the same massive agent loads as EPIBT (e.g., 10k agents) while achieving significantly higher system throughput than all baselines.
Vaibhav Sanjay, Jiaoyang Li
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

The Horizon Gap: Planning, Memory, Execution, Training, and Evaluation for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Frontier language models solve reasoning problems in a single forward pass that would have been research contributions years ago, yet fail at multi-hour tasks: losing track of earlier decisions, declaring half-finished work done, or drifting from goals. We call this the horizon gap and survey 1,547 arXiv papers (2024-2026) collected via systematic seed harvest with a disclosed 26.8% bleed filter, extended by targeted supplementation. We disambiguate three routinely conflated properties: long-horizon (task property: required steps), long-context (model property: token capacity), and long-term memory (system property: persistence across steps/sessions). We organize the corpus into six categories tracking a long-horizon task's lifecycle -- planning, memory, execution, training, evaluation, and foundations/safety -- crossed with an axis capturing where horizons are carried (within-context, within-task-beyond-context, or cross-task-persistent). Across all categories, we find the same pattern: outcome-only signals grow uninformative as horizons lengthen, and the field's response -- whether process reward models, credit assignment, or trajectory-level diagnostics -- manufactures denser step-level signals. We treat critical and diagnostic literature as first-class threads throughout, arguing that segregating critique from method would routinely split single papers across chapters. We close by naming open measurement problems: decomposing model versus harness capability, managing correlated bias in process-level signals used for both training and evaluation, and whether long-horizon reliability admits general predictive theory.
Mingguang Chen, Licheng Wang, Bo Qu
Aug 6, 2026cs.LG

Predicting Task Difficulty Without Rollouts

Task difficulty dictates an agent's likelihood of success, and estimating it without rollouts means forecasting this directly from a task description before executing costly simulations in stateful environments. Reliable estimates would therefore allow environment designers to calibrate evaluation benchmarks and construct progressive training curricula. This becomes increasingly important as agents move into long-horizon domains, where empirical trial-and-error is a severe computational bottleneck. Prior work on early prediction is limited to static tasks or isolated coding environments, often relying on narrow features and inaccurate evaluation metrics. We study \textit{ex ante} difficulty prediction across 17 agentic benchmarks spanning coding, mathematics, machine learning, web navigation, function calling, and other domains. We show that AUC can mask poor difficulty estimates, identify token-level entropy as a useful predictive signal, and show how residuals between expected and observed difficulty can expose hidden environment flaws such as contamination and infeasibility.
Stefan Krsteski, Charlotte Meyer
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Pivot-Centric Trajectory Prediction: Bridging Long Horizons via Dynamical Guidance

Forecasting precise future motion of surrounding agents is essential for reliable autonomous vehicles. However, as the demand for longer prediction horizons increases, existing endpoint-completion or iterative-refine methods increasingly struggle with weak guidance and compounding errors. To tackle the long-horizon prediction challenge, we propose Pivot-Centric Trajectory Prediction (PCTP). By introducing pivots'' and focusing on predicting pivot points along extended trajectories, we divide the long-term prediction task into short-term sub-tasks at various scales. Specifically, PCTP decouples the long-term trajectory predicting process into two processes: pivot prediction and pivot-based trajectory refinement. The pivot prediction process aims to utilize global map context and agent-to-agent interactions to identify these pivot points'', while the pivot-based trajectory refinement process focuses on local map details and refines the short-term trajectory based on predicted ``pivot points''. Compared with existing methods, PCTP provides more intermediate guidance while reducing compounding errors. Moreover, PCTP is a flexible approach that can be integrated into most state-of-the-art trajectory prediction models. Experimental results show that PCTP improves the prediction accuracy of leading models on both Argoverse I and Argoverse II datasets with minimal impact on model size. Specifically, PCTP combined with QCNet outperforms all published ensemble-free methods on the Argoverse II leaderboard at submission.
Xiucong Zhao, Jindong Tian, Hao Miao
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly undertake long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning, tool use, and revision across many interdependent steps. However, existing agent harnesses maintain task execution, task state, and completion assessment within a growing context, making the state difficult to track and allowing incorrect self-assessments to propagate into later decisions. We reformulate long-horizon execution as a task-state management problem and propose LongHorizon-Harness, which maintains the task state explicitly outside execution and updates it only with facts independently verified from the environment. Its Manage-Execute-Audit(MEA) loop uses a manager to maintain the task state and determine the next subtask, a fresh-context executor to perform it, and a read-only auditor to verify the resulting environment state before the next round. A lightweight AgentAdapter supports interchangeable model and harness backends without modifying their native agent loops. LongHorizon-Harness improves Qwen3.7-Plus from 51.8% to 80.7% on WeaveBench, from 69.7% to 77.2% on Terminal-Bench2.1, and from 2.8% to 8.3% on OSWorld2.0. It also raises Claude Opus4.7 from 20.0% to 34.3% on an OSWorld2.0 subset, demonstrating consistent gains across models, harnesses, and interaction domains.
Ziyu Ma, Hailang Huang, Shun Zou +5
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

ProWorld: Progress-Aware Hyperbolic World Models for Long-Horizon Visual Goal Reaching

JEPA-style visual world models offer an effective paradigm for visual goal planning by predicting future latent representations. Existing methods typically learn local transition consistency through next-step representation prediction. However, in long-horizon tasks, accurate local prediction alone need not ensure sustained progress toward the goal. First, multi-step rollouts can remain locally plausible while drifting away from goal-relevant trajectories. Second, locally similar future states can correspond to substantially different long-term progress, making them difficult to distinguish in a latent space optimized mainly for local consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce goal-conditioned progress order, a relative ordering of states according to how they advance toward a given goal. This order exhibits an asymmetric, coarse-to-fine structure: early states retain broader future possibilities, while later states concentrate on more specific goal-relevant regions. Such a structure is well suited to hyperbolic geometry. Motivated by this observation, we propose ProWorld, a progress-aware hyperbolic visual world model. ProWorld leverages goal-conditioned progress order to organize visual latent-space dynamics, maintains directional progress within trajectories via hyperbolic entailment learning, and mitigates progress ambiguity among locally similar future states via hyperbolic future discrimination. Furthermore, we design a progress-aware planning objective that scores candidate rollouts by jointly considering proximity to the goal and sustained progress across intermediate states. Experiments on four visual goal-reaching tasks demonstrate that ProWorld achieves an average absolute success-rate gain of 9.67 over LeWM. The code will be released after the paper is accepted.
Zihan Liu, Yuzhe Zhuang, Yuanzu Li +4
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

Diagnosing Search Behavior and Failure Modes in Long-Horizon Search Agents

Deep search agents answer difficult information-seeking questions by iteratively issuing search queries to gather supporting evidence, but it remains unclear whether and how greater search effort leads to better answers. We study these questions through a trajectory-level diagnosis of long-horizon search agents. Using human-annotated document-level relevance judgments, we evaluate the evidence retrieved at each search step and separate two stages of agent behavior: what evidence an agent retrieves and how effectively it uses that evidence. This distinction further allows us to decompose failures into retrieval gaps, where the necessary evidence is never found, and utilization gaps, where relevant evidence is retrieved but not used correctly. With the retrieval model and evaluation harness held fixed, we compare six agents on BrowseComp-Plus and further validate our findings on BrowseComp with an open-web search API. Across settings, we find that search effort and answer quality are only weakly aligned. Answer accuracy is better correlated with the quality of retrieved evidence, especially cumulative retrieval recall, than with the number of searches or the amount of context consumed. Useful evidence often appears early in the trajectory, yet agents tend to continue searching, producing a long tail of low-yield retrieval steps. At the query level, exploratory reformulations remain useful, but the best-performing agents issue far fewer redundant queries. Overall, by systematically characterizing the search behavior and failure modes of long-horizon search agents, this work points to practical directions for building better deep research systems, including stronger query formulation, more effective evidence selection and context management, and stopping criteria based on whether sufficient supporting evidence has been retrieved.
Qi Liu, Jiaxin Mao, Fengbin Zhu +1
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

DeepVoyager-VL: Incentivizing Vision-in-the-Loop Search for Long-Horizon Multimodal Agents

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced visual understanding and reasoning, yet their static parametric knowledge limits their ability to address knowledge-intensive and dynamically evolving open-world problems. To move beyond this limitation, multimodal deep search has emerged as a key direction for open-world information access, evolving from single-turn factual retrieval toward long-horizon, multi-turn search guided by visual evidence. However, existing methods typically confine vision to the input or answer stage, overlooking its role in intermediate reasoning, and lack designs tailored to long-horizon interaction. Consequently, visual evidence rarely drives continued retrieval, constraining both interaction depth and reasoning span. To address these limitations, we propose DeepVoyager-VL, a long-horizon multimodal deep-search framework for vision-in-the-loop search. Specifically, we construct a multimodal event graph to drive data synthesis, yielding problems with intermediate visual dependencies and long reasoning chains. We then design an agent framework for active visual acquisition and on-demand image loading. Finally, we fine-tune models on the synthesized data without reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across ten multimodal search benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Huanyao Zhang, Jiepeng Zhou, Runhao Zhao +12
Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Long-Horizon Embodied Decision-Making via Multimodal Memory Compression

Agents are increasingly expected to act not only as task executors, but also as decision-makers on behalf of human users. This shift requires agents to accumulate evidence over long horizons, interpret implicit user preferences, and compare multiple candidates under partial observations. In this work, we propose DunphyBench, a new benchmark for evaluating agents on long-horizon human-centered embodied decision-making, where the agent must navigate through multiple embodied housing environments and make decisions that align with multi-dimensional human preferences. Unlike standard embodied reasoning tasks that often focus on procedural planning or immediate goal completion, our setting requires agents to integrate multimodal, multi-source input into coherent knowledge that supports complex reasoning across long horizon. The evaluation results reveal that there is a substantial gap between current agents and human performance. Furthermore, our diagnosis of state-of-the-art VLM-driven agents reveals that memory management is one of the bottlenecks, where raw multimodal history introduces noise that hinders decision quality. Motivated by this finding, we design MeMento, a preference-conditioned multimodal memory compressor that selectively compresses decision-relevant information from long-horizon history based on user preferences with a fixed set of memory tokens. Experiments show that MeMento helps VLM-driven agents improve accuracy by 7.18%, while reducing memory usage by 85.38% compared to the strongest baseline.
Bingxuan Li, Rui Yang, Cheng Qian +6
Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Routing Saturation: A Long-Horizon Class-Incremental Perspective on Expert Routing in Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning

Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) enables multimodal large language models to acquire new tasks sequentially while retaining previously learned capabilities. Many recent methods maintain task-specific LoRA experts and route each input to one or more experts at inference. Yet the task-identification problem underlying expert routing remains under-explored. We show that routing is nearly saturated on widely used MCIT benchmarks. Textual fingerprints that leak task identity and short 4--10-task sequences with few competing experts jointly obscure the long-horizon routing problem. To expose this challenge, we introduce FLEX (Fingerprint-reduced Long-horizon Expert eXamination), a 34-task long-horizon MCIT benchmark with weakened textual fingerprints. FLEX groups tasks with similar instruction and answer formats but diverse visual and knowledge domains, normalizes their outer templates, and evaluates routing over a substantially larger expert pool. Crucially, we formulate progressive-LoRA routing as soft task-as-class Multimodal Class-Incremental Learning (MCIL): each task defines an incremental routing class, whose complete score distribution supplies the LoRA mixture weights, with hard routing as a discrete special case. FLEX exposes this expanding task-identification challenge, while the MCIL formulation provides a principled interface for transferring CIL methods to expert routing. We instantiate PureLoRA as a controlled baseline and adapt four CIL methods to four MCIT frameworks without modifying their LoRA experts or generation pipelines. Our plug-in routers improve strict LoRA matching by up to 16.3 percentage points and overall MacroScore by up to 4.6 points. Code is available at: https://github.com/RINC-CL/FLEX
Huiyu Yi, Yongqi Xu, Bogang Zhang +5
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

MOT-SR: Multi-Objective Tool-Augmented Scientific Equation Discovery with Large Language Models

Symbolic Regression (SR) aims to discover analytical equations from observational data and plays a central role in scientific modeling. While recent Large Language Model (LLM) based approaches show promise, they face two limitations. First, they lack data analysis mechanisms for uncovering variable dependencies, which reduces the efficiency of equation discovery. Second, most methods rely on single-objective evaluation focused solely on fitting error. This neglect of structural complexity and generalization often causes models to converge prematurely to local optima, limiting their ability to explore the broader equation space. We propose Multi-Objective Tool-augmented Symbolic Regression (MOT-SR), a unified framework that integrates external analytical tools to extract structural priors and guide equation generation, while jointly optimizing for accuracy, complexity, and generalization via a multi-objective evaluation module that maintains a dynamic Pareto front. MOT-SR employs two collaborative LLM modules: a Meta Strategy Generator, which selects tools and synthesizes structural optimization strategies based on Pareto-optimal equations, and an Equation Generator, which produces new candidate equations accordingly. The system operates in a closed-loop manner, continuously refining both strategies and equation structures. Across 40 standard tasks, MOT-SR outperforms existing SR methods in accuracy, generalization, and efficiency. We further validate MOT-SR on extreme mass-ratio inspiral (EMRI) orbital modeling, an important problem in space-based gravitational-wave astronomy where small local errors can accumulate substantially over long-term evolution. The discovered interpretable correction achieves the lowest trajectory-level integration error on held-out configurations. These results demonstrate the potential of MOT-SR to enable reliable modeling of long-horizon scientific dynamics.
Boxiao Wang, Runxiang Wang, Kai Li +4
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

HERO: History-Enriched Rollout Training for Long-Horizon Autoregressive Neural Operators

Neural operators provide fast surrogates for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by applying a learned evolution operator recursively to its own predictions, but this autoregressive rollout feeds every prediction error back as input, so local errors accumulate. Existing rollout-training strategies reduce the mismatch between training inputs and self-generated states, yet their supervision still measures only the absolute discrepancy from the ground-truth trajectory. Such supervision is therefore uninformative about whether the operator has overcome the long-horizon failure behaviors it exhibited earlier during optimization. We propose history-enriched rollout training (HERO), which augments conventional absolute trajectory supervision with relative supervision derived from the model's optimization history. HERO ranks detached candidate rollouts from a periodically refreshed lagged operator, the current model, and a perturbed input by rollout error, spectral discrepancy, energy drift, and error growth, and selects the strongest failure trajectory as reference. This reference enters a margin-based objective as a fixed comparison baseline, inducing a bounded, sample-dependent reweighting of the ground-truth rollout gradient rather than an independent gradient direction, which we further analyze theoretically. Experiments on nine PDE benchmarks with spectral and attention-based backbones show that HERO consistently improves long-horizon accuracy, stable rollout length, and out-of-distribution robustness at no inference-time cost. These results indicate that history-enriched relative supervision is effective for stabilizing long-horizon autoregressive prediction.
Jiaquan Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Haifan Meng +6
Jul 31, 2026cs.AI

Geometry-aware Incremental Neural Operator for Long-Horizon PDE prediction

Neural operators have shown strong potential for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, long-horizon autoregressive prediction remains challenging: local errors accumulate as spectral inconsistency, phase misalignment, or mean drift. Existing methods mainly improve state representations and operator backbones, while leaving the repeatedly applied latent transition increment weakly structured, allowing spectral errors and unstable channel couplings to accumulate during rollout. To address these issues, we propose a geometry-aware incremental neural operator (GeoIncNO) for stable long-horizon PDE prediction. GeoIncNO predicts latent increments for residual advancement and uses lightweight low-rank projectors to regulate channel coupling within active frequency bands derived from the increment spectral energy distribution. To reduce physical-space reconstruction errors, GeoIncNO further introduces a mean--fluctuation decoupled reconstruction mechanism, where stable mean structures and dynamic fluctuations are fused separately, and phase correction is applied only to the zero-mean fluctuation component. Extensive experiments on six PDE benchmarks, covering 1D, 2D, and 3D dynamical systems, show that GeoIncNO achieves consistently strong prediction accuracy, improved rollout stability, and better spectral fidelity compared with competitive neural-operator baselines.
Jiaquan Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Haifan Meng +6
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Best Friends, Not Forever: Evaluating Long-Horizon Persona Collapse and Behavioral Drift in AI Companions

As AI companions increasingly mediate repeated social interaction, users may rely on a stable role and shared history, yet locally acceptable replies do not ensure that either persists. We study two observable long-horizon failures: 'persona collapse', the loss of a deployed role, boundaries, values, or style, and 'behavioral drift', the gradual or recurrent erosion of those properties. We introduce ANCHOR, a controlled synthetic audit that separately measures persona enactment and trajectory recall. The study contains 2,008 conversations spanning 27 personas, nine interaction schedules, three generated memory settings, and four evaluated models. The Identity Probe combines a sealed 102-item questionnaire with turn-level judgments, while the Trajectory Probe scores 110 calibrated counterfactual questions from 35 conversation banks. Our results show that no evaluated model and configuration reliably preserves either dimensions: trajectory accuracy averages only 44.4%, user-state recall remains near four-option chance, and no tested context condition or memory consistently resolves these failures. Questionnaire retention also varies by model and persona facet, disagrees with turn-level behavior, and is sensitive to evaluator choice. These results indicate that current systems do not yet reliably support long-horizon companion continuity and that audits must distinguish persona enactment, trajectory recall, evaluator provenance, and deployment context rather than collapse them into a single trust or stability score.
Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Akshara Prabhakar, Yu Li +2
Jul 30, 2026cs.MA

AgentRadio: Passive Awareness for Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Collaboration

Understanding large codebases is a long-horizon task for Large Language Model (LLM) agents: answering a single question can require building and running the software, tracing execution across files, and synthesizing evidence over tens of minutes. On SWE-Atlas QnA, a benchmark of long-horizon questions over production repositories, a single Claude Code agent (Opus 4.6) resolves only 32.3% of tasks. Dividing the work among agents with clean contexts mitigates this limitation. However, the subtasks of code comprehension are interdependent. One agent's findings can rewrite another's task, so agents must coordinate during execution, not only at phase boundaries. Existing multi-agent systems support such exchange only between phases, through staged handoffs or synchronized rounds. Communication and work remain mutually exclusive. A discovery made mid-execution cannot be shared until the next boundary. We present AgentRadio, an asynchronous message-passing layer that equips coding-agent harnesses with three primitives: threads, messages, and waiting for mentions. The last runs as a background task, surfacing teammates' messages without interrupting foreground work, so each agent remains passively aware of its peers and folds new findings into its ongoing task. Under a five-phase protocol of division of labor and negotiation, four agents organized by AgentRadio resolve 62.1% of tasks, 29.8 points above a single agent and above Claude Code with the newer Opus 4.8 (57.2%). Rubric-level analysis shows the gain growing with task difficulty, consistent with mid-course correction as the underlying mechanism. Our code is available at https://github.com/Coral-Protocol/AgentRadio.
Xinxing Ren, Qianbo Zang, Ziyan Wang +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

ConMem: Contribution-Aware Memory for Long-Horizon Manufacturing Inspection Logs

Long-horizon steel-equipment inspection requires reasoning over heterogeneous records accumulated across repeated inspection cycles. Existing retrieval-augmented generation systems treat historical logs as a static corpus and retain records without estimating their diagnostic value, failing to report early risk. To this end, we propose ConMem, a contribution-aware memory framework for LLM-assisted equipment inspection, supporting a human-in-the-loop early-risk screening system. Specifically, our ConMem first segments inspection logs into functional evidence units, then estimates each memory unit's contribution to downstream diagnosis through a Shapley-style estimation, and finally retains high-value evidence under a constrained memory budget. In experiments, we evaluate ConMem on real-world dataset and ConMem achieves 76.0% QA accuracy, exceeding the strongest directly comparable baseline. Relative to the naive 8K-context LLM baselines, it reduces the average number of input tokens by 88.2% and response time by 86.6%. Ablation studies also show that the functional-role-aware segmentation and contribution-based valuation are helping prioritize weak degradation signals for targeted field inspection. Practical deployments further confirm that ConMem retains the weak early signal across three inspection cycles, providing an early-stage seal-wear alert targeted for on-site inspectors.
Bingchen Liu, Yuanyuan Fang, Lei Liu +6
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Albilich: Steerable Proof-State Orchestration for LLM-Based Mathematical Research with CAS Integration

Large language models can contribute useful ideas to mathematical research, yet long-horizon proof attempts remain difficult to coordinate, evaluate, and reproduce. We present Albilich, an open-source agentic harness for autoresearch in mathematics that combines long-horizon reasoning, computer algebra systems (CAS), literature retrieval, and persistent SQLite-based context management. We evaluate Albilich on the RealMath benchmark (Zhang et al. 2025) and on open problems in group theory from the Kourovka Notebook (Khukhro and Mazurov 2026). It solved 10/10 problems on RealMath with CAS and 9/10 with no CAS. On the Kourovka problems, Albilich produced a counterexample to Problem 21.142 and a proof of a strengthening of Problem20.2. Anablation on Problem 17.91 demonstrates 32.0% token reduction when CAS is enabled. An ablation on Problem 21.142 demonstrates higher verifier-rejection rate and failure to synthesize proof routes in the absence of the advisor agent. These results support Albilich as a human-steerable, CAS-boosted environment for scalable AI-assisted mathematical research.
Ting Gong, Michael Ruofan Zeng, Yong Yang
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Benchmarking the Residual: What Long-Horizon Evaluations Add Beyond Matched Short-Task Performance

Long-horizon benchmarks often show that agents fail more as tasks become longer. This observation is useful for deployment, but it does not by itself explain why failure occurs. More stages create more opportunities for ordinary errors to compound; longer tasks may also contain harder individual decisions or become harder as conversation history, tool outputs, and environment changes accumulate. We use trajectory-induced degradation to mean this last possibility: earlier execution makes later work harder. When the harmful accumulation is specifically the text visible to the model, it is often called context rot. In this position paper, we argue that to claim a "long-horizon failure", benchmarks must compare actual full-task success against a baseline prediction built from short, individual stages. We call the log-ratio between this prediction and actual success the horizon residual. The comparison must use the same agent configuration and specify in advance how stages, checkpoints, information, and budgets will be chosen. The residual shows that the full rollout differs from the chosen baseline; targeted experiments are still needed to explain why.
Chao Peng, Zhiheng Lyu, Peijie Dong +2
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Identity from the Outside: A Conceptual Framework and Research Program for AI Personality Clones

AI "personality clones" force a re-examination of personal identity in operational terms. Setting aside the hard problem of consciousness, we approach identity through the indiscernibility of manifestations, as assessed by an observer over a duration. We distinguish three criteria that "identity" conflates: fidelity to a target person, generic human-likeness, and individuality. We propose a six-term factorization of observed identity (substrate, dispositions, memory, update dynamics, context, exogenous contingencies), with a state-space formulation. Indiscernibility is defined as one minus a judge's distinguishing advantage, and the factorization's coefficients become local sensitivities estimable by randomized ablation. The central claim is a conditional conjecture: given hypotheses about the agent's information on its own persistence and about consequences bearing on its own stakes, versionability tends to degrade long-horizon indiscernibility. An analogy with lambda-calculus, linear typing, and bisimulation clarifies what linearity does and does not establish. Between product-clone and individual we identify a third object, the delegate: a task-limited, bounded-lifespan partial clone ending in a bandwidth-limited testament. We map the empirical literature onto the three criteria, propose an experimental program, and argue that the correct long-horizon criterion is not trajectory fidelity but climate fidelity: matching the conditional distribution of a person's possible responses. The best clone is the one that diverges from the original as the original would have diverged from itself.
Luc E. Brunet
Jul 26, 2026cs.RO

Hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

Exploration in sparse-reward long-horizon tasks poses significant challenges for reinforcement learning. To address these challenges, we propose a two-level Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework. The first level handles high-level strategic planning, while the low-level uses the continuous-control Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, and they utilize entropy-regularized policy optimization. The proposed framework was trained and evaluated using the Search-and-Rescue-2 (SAR-2) dataset. HRL-SAC effectively addresses sparse-reward long-horizon search problems characterized by delayed rewards and continuous control, and its outperforming the flat SAC baseline reinforcement learning in terms of success rates, coverage efficiency, and convergence. These findings indicate that hierarchical entropy-regularized policies are a promising solution to tackle long-horizon sparse-reward reinforcement learning tasks.
Zahra Abdalla Elashaal, Afef Hfaiedh, Nahla Khraief +2
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

CALMRec: Causally Aligned Language Memory for Long-Horizon Recommendation

Large language models (LLMs) can summarize heterogeneous user evidence in natural language, but current LLM recommenders often collapse enduring preferences, transient intent, and exposure-induced behavior into one profile. This makes recommendation vulnerable to feedback loops: repeated exposure is mistaken for preference, immediate clicks dominate delayed satisfaction, and fluent explanations need not reflect the ranking decision. We propose our method, a model-agnostic framework for long-horizon recommendation. Our method uses a frozen multimodal language model to convert item content and feedback into evidence-grounded semantic atoms, then maintains separate short-term, long-term, and exposure memories. Propensity-weighted updates reduce policy-induced exposure bias, while a conservative offline critic reranks candidates for delayed satisfaction under a behavior-support constraint. Explanations use only influential evidence atoms and are checked by counterfactual deletion. We provide an identification result and evaluate the framework in e-commerce-like, news-like, and short-video-like environments. Across ten seeds, our method improves discounted long-term value over the strongest alternative by 6.1%, 7.6%, and 6.7%, respectively. Twenty-seed paired ablations show significant value drops after removing propensity correction (0.739 +/- 0.191) or conservative support regularization (0.523 +/- 0.234). A frozen instruction language model also more than doubles semantic-atom NDCG over TF-IDF on a held-out paraphrase benchmark.
Gengyu Zhan
Jul 23, 2026cs.RO

VoLN: Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation---Paradigm, Benchmark, and Method

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions. However, route-level instructions commonly encode spatial priors, such as orientation, distance, and layout, that are not explicitly available from onboard sensing at deployment in open, GPS-denied environments. Benchmark performance under such interfaces therefore jointly reflects visual navigation ability and the use of route structure explicitly supplied by the task description. As a complementary formulation, we propose Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation (VoLN), which shifts route-relevant information from externally supplied instructions and global guidance to locally observable in-scene cues. In VoLN, goal views specify the destination, while route-relevant information is available only through locally observable in-scene cues that the agent must detect, interpret, and select online. We instantiate VoLN for aerial navigation through VoLN-UAV, a 7,210-episode benchmark that combines long-horizon goal-directed flight, continuous 3D motion, large viewpoint changes, and context-dependent beacon selection. We further provide VoLN-MLLM as an initial reference baseline. It aligns self-supervised visual features with a structured semantic space and predicts short-horizon waypoint segments from observation history, goal views, retrieved visual--semantic tokens, and proprioception. On the five-environment Test-Unseen split, it obtains success rates of 7.4%, 4.5%, and 1.8% on Easy, Normal, and Hard episodes, respectively. These results provide an initial evaluation of VoLN and reveal substantial remaining challenges in long-horizon evidence integration, cross-view goal matching, and closed-loop stability. Project page: https://admire-ljb.github.io/VoLN-UAV/
Jiabin Lou, Haopeng Wang, Yuanshuai Wang +6
Jul 22, 2026cs.AI

PRO-LONG: Programmatic Memory Enables Long-Horizon Reasoning

Long-horizon tasks require sustained perception, reasoning, and exploration, and are a persistent challenge for large language model (LLM) agents. This gap is reflected in their limited performance on continual learning benchmarks such as ARC-AGI-3, especially when models are evaluated out of the box. Various agent harnesses have been proposed to close this gap, and each commits to a strategy for handling long sequences of observations, i.e., what information to save from the environment and how to load it into model context, a choice we argue is particularly consequential. Existing methods for context management face a significant tradeoff, as preserving more information makes retrieving relevant details less tractable. We propose PRO-LONG, a minimal context management framework built around programmatic memory for LLM agents in long-horizon, exploratory settings. PRO-LONG addresses the tradeoff by keeping a complete, structured interaction log and capitalizing on recent progress in coding agents to search this history efficiently. On the full ARC-AGI-3 public game set, PRO-LONG improves over a base coding agent by an average of 18.0 percentage points across frontier models, and matches or exceeds state-of-the-art specialized harnesses (up to 76.1% pass@1) while using 4.2-5.8x fewer tokens. With Fable 5, PRO-LONG achieves 97.4% best@2 at a total cost of $1,750. Relevant code and logs are available at https://github.com/alexisfox7/PRO-LONG.
Alexis Fox, Junlin Wang, Paul Rosu +1
Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

Are the Financial Reasoning from LLMs Credible? A Real World Test over Long-Horizon Statements

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess genuine structural reasoning, or merely rely on surface-level pattern matching? The financial domain, demanding numerical precision and multi-step logic over long contexts, is an ideal testbed. Existing benchmarks fail to capture real-world industrial complexity, predominantly relying on multiple-choice questions or single-hop QA over cropped tables while ignoring intricate cross-statement dynamics and temporal de-cumulation. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinIndices, a large-scale benchmark evaluating data-processing fidelity over uncropped financial statements (up to 32K tokens). Utilizing an automated synthesis pipeline with adversarial traps, FinIndices encompasses Single-Index computation and Table-Index tabulation to test complex domain, temporal, and caliber reasoning. Our evaluation reveals two severe LLM vulnerabilities. First, a "Knowledge Bottleneck": despite memorizing formulas during pre-training, models demonstrate fragile pattern matching. Removing explicit formula hints causes performance to collapse (e.g., Gemini-3.1-Pro drops from 70.70% to 38.22% on table tasks), exposing fatal flaws in temporal de-cumulation and stock-flow caliber mismatch. Second, a "Structural Bottleneck": the intense cognitive load of generating multi-metric, multi-period tables actively drains reasoning capacity. Under structural pressure, LLMs that flawlessly execute isolated derivations regress to shallow heuristics, such as fetching incorrect adjacent columns or substituting deep accounting adjustments with lazy literal arithmetic. Finally, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) yields substantial zero-hint gains (+8.54% Single, +3.82% Table), validating that structured logic can be partially restored via data-centric alignment.
Xinke Tong, Xuanming Zhang, Tianyi Tang +10
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

MemOps: Benchmarking Lifecycle Memory Operations in Long-Horizon Conversations

Long-term memory has become a foundational capability for LLM-based agents that accompany users across extended, multi-session interactions. Existing benchmarks, however, evaluate such memory almost exclusively through downstream question answering, scoring only the correctness of a final answer. This black-box formulation conflates the heterogeneous causes of memory failure, such as missing the introduction of a relevant fact, binding an operation to the wrong target, or relying on stale values after a correction. As a result, it can credit correct answers despite their reliance on inconsistent or unsafe memory states. In this paper, we argue that, in dynamic long-horizon interactions, memory is not a static collection of facts but a lifecycle of explicit operations, including remembering, forgetting, updating, reflecting, and their compositions. We introduce MemOps, a benchmark that reformulates conversational memory as a sequence of lifecycle operations and represents each memory event with a structured trace specifying its trigger, target, scope, state transition, and supporting evidence. A controllable generation pipeline embeds these operations into long, task-oriented conversations and produces gold operation traces together with six categories of operation-level probes, evaluated under both adjacent-evidence and long-context settings. Across long-context, retrieval-based, parametric and managed-memory systems, MemOps disentangles failure modes that final-answer accuracy alone conceals, revealing that current systems remain far from uniformly reliable. For instance, session-level retrieval outperforms turn-level retrieval, and long-context models remain notably weak at reconstructing ordered memory-state trajectories. These results move long-term memory evaluation from final-answer scoring toward interpretable, operation-level diagnosis.
Xixuan Hao, Zeyu Zhang, Zehao Lin +6
Jul 10, 2026cs.AI

LongMedBench: Benchmarking Medical Agents for Long-Horizon Clinical Decision-Making

In this work, we introduce LongMedBench, a real-world EHR-based benchmark for long-horizon clinical decision-making. Prior evaluations of LLM-based medical agents have largely emphasized short-context knowledge QA and tool use. However, real-world medical care is inherently longitudinal, and clinicians must aggregate evidence across repeated visits, tests, and evolving treatments. Therefore, long-horizon interaction is essential for realistic assessment. LongMedBench is constructed via a reproducible pipeline that integrates MIMIC-IV admission records and clinical notes into time-series event streams and long-context memory datasets, enabling long-horizon, multi-session interactions between agents and a clinical environment. It comprises 335 patients, with 19.72 inpatient visits per patient on average and 44.91 medical events per visit. Guided by the long-horizon decision process, we propose an evaluation taxonomy with three suites: fact-based QA, temporal reasoning, and long-horizon decision-making. This taxonomy measures how agents understand and leverage historical patient information over extended horizons. Our experiments show that while recent LLMs can make good use of explicit timestamps, they have challenges in implicit time inference; The RAG and agent memory system can improve the performance of information retrieval tasks, but the performance of decision-making tasks is highly dependent on the model's immediate context.
Zihan Xu, Yanzhen Chen, Xiaocheng Zhang +4
Jul 9, 2026cs.CV

LongE2V: Long-Horizon Event-based Video Reconstruction, Prediction, and Frame Interpolation with Video Diffusion Models

Recovering high-quality video from sparse event streams is a challenging task. Regression methods often blur textures, while existing generative models struggle with long-term stability. We propose LongE2V, a novel approach that leverages pre-trained video diffusion priors to jointly handle event-based video reconstruction, prediction, and frame interpolation. By fine-tuning a foundational video model, our approach achieves high data efficiency and superior perceptual quality. We introduce Autoregressive Unrolling and Adaptive Context Switching to mitigate temporal drift in extremely long sequences. We also propose Reencoding Alignment with Cross Residual Correction to ensure precise bidirectional consistency during frame interpolation. Furthermore, Event Voxel Density Augmentation ensures robustness across varying sensor resolutions. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that LongE2V outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks, exhibiting exceptional temporal coherence and zero-shot generalization. Project page: https://cdfan0627.github.io/LongE2V-page/
Cheng-De Fan, Chun-Wei Tuan Mu, Chen-Wei Chang +4
Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

Remember When It Matters: Proactive Memory Agent for Long-Horizon Agents

In long-horizon tasks, decision-relevant state is often scattered across an expanding trajectory, while the action agent must surface it and act. As trajectories grow, task requirements, environment facts, prior attempts, diagnoses, and open subgoals can be buried in the context window or pushed beyond it, failing to influence decisions when needed. We call this failure mode "behavioral state decay". We study memory as an active intervention mechanism rather than passive retrieval. A separate memory agent runs alongside an unmodified action agent, updating a structured memory bank from the recent trajectory and deciding whether to inject a memory-grounded reminder or remain silent. The module is plug-and-play with frontier action agents and existing agent harnesses. Across Terminal-Bench 2.0 and τ2τ^2-Bench, it improves pass@1 for both weaker and stronger action agents, with gains of +8.3 pp on Terminal-Bench and +6.8 pp on τ2τ^2-Bench. Ablations show that selective intervention outperforms passive bank exposure, always-on injection, advisor-only guidance, and general retrieval. As an early step toward open-weight memory policies, we train Qwen3.5-27B on SETA using SFT and GRPO, improving validation reward and achieving partial transfer to Terminal-Bench.
Yifan Wu, Lizhu Zhang, Yuhang Zhou +5
Jul 8, 2026q-bio.QM

A hierarchical memory architecture overcomes context limits in long-horizon multi-agent computational modeling

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet their stateless architecture fundamentally limits deployment in long-horizon research workflows requiring multi-session continuity and quantitative rigor. Here we present Ensemble QSP, a multi-agent framework featuring a three-layer hierarchical memory architecture that keeps injected context bounded and constant in project duration (mid-term project state: median 301 tokens, max 4,050, across 104 runs) by capping each state category and evicting completed work, enabling continuous autonomous operation without context degradation. The system orchestrates five specialist worker agents under domain-expert principal investigators, enforcing physical constraints through physics-based checklists and structured-domain knowledge. Comprehensive benchmarking demonstrates robust autonomous pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model selection without human intervention, consistent result quality across both lower-cost and frontier LLMs, improved PK parameter recovery relative to single-agent baselines, and stable model selection across linguistically diverse prompts of the same task. Feature-level ablation across physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models spanning a broad complexity range shows that PI-agent oversight improves debugging efficiency while preserving final accuracy across conditions. The architecture is structurally domain-agnostic, adding a new scientific domain requires only a new PI agent configuration.
Shivendra G. Tewari, Holly Kimko
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

Efficient Long-Horizon Learning for Learned Optimization

Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.g., Adam and Muon) by meta-learning small neural network optimizers over a distribution of tasks. While recent work has greatly advanced the architectural design and inductive biases of learned optimizers (LOs), their meta-training remains biased toward short-unroll learning on particular tasks, resulting in redundant computation and leaving LOs often unable to compete with hand-designed optimizers. We introduce Efficient Long-hOrizon (ELO) learning, an efficient meta-training algorithm that (1) reallocates wasted meta-training compute to longer failure regimes, achieving efficient long-horizon learning, and (2) enforces decoupled progressive expert supervision, providing stable meta-learning signals that additionally improve the generalization of LOs. Our empirical study evaluates ELO for meta-training both element-wise and matrix-based LOs. Across downstream language modeling (GPT-2-124M/350M on FineWeb) and image classification (ViT-B/16, ResNet-50 on ImageNet-1K) tasks, ELO substantially improves the long-unroll performance and out-of-distribution generalization of the base LOs. In particular, ELO-Celo2 consistently outperforms well-tuned AdamW across all evaluated tasks, while remaining competitive with Muon on language modeling. \textit{Notably, all ELO baselines require less than 7 H100 GPU-hours for meta-training.}
Xiaolong Huang, Benjamin Thérien, James Harrison +1
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

AlayaWorld: Long-Horizon and Playable Video World Generation

Game worlds have traditionally been built through labor-intensive production pipelines, making them costly to develop, difficult to customization, and expensive to modify after deployment. Recent advances in video world models offer a fundamentally different paradigm. Rather than explicitly authoring every component of a virtual environment, these models autoregressively synthesize future observations conditioned on the current world state and user interactions, enabling playable worlds to be generated online. Trained on both gameplay recordings and real-world videos, they can capture diverse visual appearances and physical dynamics, opening new opportunities for interactive applications beyond gaming, including embodied intelligence. In this paper, we present \textbf{AlayaWorld}, a full-stack open-source framework for building interactive generative worlds. AlayaWorld enables open-ended real-time interaction, allowing users to freely navigate and perform diverse actions such as combat, spell casting, and monster summoning. The framework unifies the complete development-from data preparation model architecture, model training, inference acceleration, and deployment-within a modular and extensible architecture. Alongside the framework, we release reproducible pipelines, reference implementations, evaluation tools, and comprehensive documentation, establishing a practical foundation for future research and real-time applications of generative world models.
AlayaWorld Team, Kaipeng Zhang, Chuanhao Li +14
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

Imagined Rollouts are Kinematic, Not Dynamic: A Diagnosis of Long-Horizon World-Model Failure

Long-horizon failure in world models is conventionally attributed to compounding error, a generic framing that does not distinguish what kind of error compounds. We propose a kinematic-vs-dynamic reframing: world models tend to imagine kinematically rather than dynamically. We operationalize this as the imagined Kinematic-Consistency Error, a per-step diagnostic that measures how far a rollout departs from a closed-form kinematic null, paired with a perturbation protocol that tests whether iKCE responds when physical conditions cross a regime boundary. We instantiate the diagnostic on a released DreamerV3 checkpoint trained on DMC walker-walk, where imagined iKCE runs roughly two orders of magnitude above that of matched real-physics rollouts. Across a friction sweep that crosses the gait-collapse boundary, the model's iKCE stays statistically flat even as the trained policy's reward collapses through the same range, providing the kinematic-not-dynamic signature. The diagnostic distinguishes kinematic from dynamic imagination at horizons longer than the embodiment's gait period.
Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Korbinian Moller, Yuan Gao +3
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

QuantFlow: A Federated Mamba-Based Post-Transformer Foundation Model for Time-Series Forecasting

Time-series forecasting supports decisions in finance, en-ergy, transportation, public health, and industrial monitoring. Recent foundation models improve transfer across forecast-ing tasks, but many depend on centralized data and Trans-former attention, which restricts their use for long, high-di-mensional, and privacy-sensitive signals. This paper presents QuantFlow, a probabilistic forecasting framework that com-bines inverted sequence embedding, bidirectional Mamba state-space decoders, quantile regression, and federated learning. Each variable is embedded over the complete ob-servation window, processed in forward and reverse direc-tions, and projected to five conditional quantiles. TSMixup expands temporal diversity through Dirichlet-weighted inter-polation while preserving sequence structure. Experiments cover cryptocurrency, traffic, electricity, Electricity Trans-former Temperature, influenza, and weather data. QuantFlow obtains mean squared errors of 0.2834 on ETTm1 and 0.2218 on Weather, and a 20-client non-IID deployment retains use-ful accuracy after three communication rounds without cen-tralizing raw records. The results indicate that selective state-space modelling is a promising basis for scalable, uncer-tainty-aware, and privacy-conscious time-series prediction, while also revealing limitations on irregular epidemiological signals and long-horizon generalization.
Shah Nawaz Haider, Steve Austin, Arnab Barua +2