Daily Papers

When trained on large, unfiltered crawls from the internet, language models pick up and reproduce all kinds of undesirable biases that can be found in the data: they often generate racist, sexist, violent or otherwise toxic language. As large models require millions of training examples to achieve good performance, it is difficult to completely prevent them from being exposed to such content. In this paper, we first demonstrate a surprising finding: pretrained language models recognize, to a considerable degree, their undesirable biases and the toxicity of the content they produce. We refer to this capability as self-diagnosis. Based on this finding, we then propose a decoding algorithm that, given only a textual description of the undesired behavior, reduces the probability of a language model producing problematic text. We refer to this approach as self-debiasing. Self-debiasing does not rely on manually curated word lists, nor does it require any training data or changes to the model's parameters. While we by no means eliminate the issue of language models generating biased text, we believe our approach to be an important step in this direction.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often lose visual grounding during multi-step reasoning: as reasoning chains grow longer, later inference steps rely increasingly on language priors rather than image evidence. We identify a consistent benchmark-level signature associated with this degradation: across 2,510 re-examined samples from four benchmarks, attention entropy over image tokens typically decreases during Round 1 and rises again after image re-injection. However, we find that effective visual re-examination requires two complementary ingredients: image re-injection and targeted self-diagnosis. Without targeted diagnosis, re-examination can even hurt performance, whereas accurate self-diagnosis yields substantial gains -- a swing of several points on key benchmarks, indicating that diagnostic quality is a key factor in whether re-examination helps or hurts in our setting. We present ReGround, a two-stage framework that teaches VLMs to self-diagnose grounding failures and selectively re-examine visual evidence, without architectural modifications or external tools. Through capability bootstrapping, a stronger variant from the same model family provides diagnostic scaffolding only during data construction, while the policy model learns to diagnose autonomously at inference time and retains most of the assisted gains. Experiments on eight benchmarks across two VLM backbones demonstrate consistent gains, especially on visually intensive multi-step reasoning tasks, while incurring only modest inference overhead relative to tool-augmented baselines. Project page: https://sespoir.github.io/reground-page/ . Code: https://github.com/sespoir/ReGround .

Reflexion-style agents rely on self-generated reflections as memory, implicitly assuming that agents can accurately diagnose their own failures. We show that this assumption can fail systematically: across ALFWorld and HumanEval, agents store confident but incorrect interpretations of the task and continue acting on them across trials, even though the environment resets to the correct task each time. We call this failure mode memory confabulation and introduce the Reflection Repetition Rate (RRR), a log-based metric that detects repeated reliance on incorrect reflective content. Using RRR, we identify 16 frozen environments in ALFWorld, where 0 of 121 reflections mention the correct target object, and 4 analogous cases in HumanEval. Our mitigation replaces open-ended self-diagnosis with programmatic extraction of trajectory-level failure signals, increasing correct object mention from 0% to 86%, reducing RRR from 0.64 to 0.10, and solving 3 of 16 frozen ALFWorld environments, suggesting that reflective memory can reinforce false beliefs rather than correct them.

Autonomous agent systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating complex tasks. However, current evaluations largely rely on success rates without systematically analyzing the interactions, communication mechanisms, and failure causes within these systems. To bridge this gap, we present a benchmark of 34 representative programmable tasks designed to rigorously assess autonomous agents. Using this benchmark, we evaluate three popular open-source agent frameworks combined with two LLM backbones, observing a task completion rate of approximately 50%. Through in-depth failure analysis, we develop a three-tier taxonomy of failure causes aligned with task phases, highlighting planning errors, task execution issues, and incorrect response generation. Based on these insights, we propose actionable improvements to enhance agent planning and self-diagnosis capabilities. Our failure taxonomy, together with mitigation advice, provides an empirical foundation for developing more robust and effective autonomous agent systems in the future.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problem-solving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which "hides" by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which "seeks" to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on several math reasoning tasks show that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8\%--31.4\% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.

Self-play is an effective paradigm for language-model self-evolution, but without guidance, solver performance can plateau or decline across rounds. Unguided methods steer question generation with signals such as difficulty, learnability, or diversity. These signals keep questions challenging and varied but do not specify which unresolved reasoning weaknesses later rounds should target. Guided methods obtain direction from external task resources, including human examples, document corpora, or specified difficulty targets, and therefore rely on task information supplied outside the self-play loop. We show that the needed direction can instead be derived from the solver's own failure history. We introduce DiagEvo, whose diagnostician extracts recurring error causes from this history and stores them in a hierarchical error-cause memory. The memory groups related causes under skill nodes and tracks each as Active or Mastered according to self-consistency on targeted questions. The challenger uses these states and recurrence counts to balance cause-targeted generation with free exploration. Double-confidence filtering retains intermediate-difficulty questions only when the most common solver answer has a clear vote lead. DiagEvo derives its curriculum from information produced during self-play, without external task resources. With the default 4B diagnostician, DiagEvo outperforms every baseline in mean accuracy across all nine benchmarks for each of the three solvers: Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and OctoThinker-8B. On Qwen3-8B, it reaches 72.3% mean accuracy across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, 4.5 percentage points above R-Zero. Its mean accuracy across all nine benchmarks is 57.4%, 1.1 percentage points above DARC. Ablations show that the hierarchical error-cause memory and double-confidence filtering both contribute to these gains.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) enable complex problem-solving but introduce significant debugging challenges, characterized by long interaction traces, inter-agent dependencies, and delayed error manifestation. Existing diagnostic approaches often rely on expensive expert annotation or ''LLM-as-a-judge'' paradigms, which struggle to pinpoint decisive error steps within extended contexts. In this paper, we introduce ErrorProbe, a self-improving framework for semantic failure attribution that identifies responsible agents and the originating error step. The framework operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) operationalizing the MAS failure taxonomy to detect local anomalies, (2) performing symptom-driven backward tracing to prune irrelevant context, and (3) employing a specialized multi-agent team (Strategist, Investigator, Arbiter) to validate error hypotheses through tool-grounded execution. Crucially, ErrorProbe maintains a verified episodic memory that updates only when error patterns are confirmed by executable evidence, without the need for annotation. Experiments across the TracerTraj and Who&When benchmarks demonstrate that ErrorProbe significantly outperforms baselines, particularly in step-level localization, while the verified memory enables robust cross-domain transfer without retraining.

Self-correction is particularly useful when a failure constrains the next repair. Coding agents benefit from this property because compilers, tests, and execution traces turn many failures into typed recovery signals, but broad language-agent tasks often expose only a coarse task failure. This creates a tension for generic recovery playbooks: they broaden the agent's context precisely when the system needs a narrower repair interface, mixing incompatible signals for invalid actions, missing procedures, and strict-format errors. Our insight is that development-set failures can recover part of the missing diagnostic substrate by deciding which recovery interventions are admissible before test-time correction. We propose DARC, a diagnosis-guided recovery harness that profiles task-family failure modes, prunes mismatched interventions from a shared recovery library, and freezes a verifier-selected success-cost policy for deployment. This causal order makes correction selective: the harness first determines what kind of failure can be repaired, then decides how much recovery evidence to spend. In ALFWorld, AppWorld, and XBRL Finance, the same protocol yields an action-validity harness, a procedural-recovery fallback, and a format-precision retrieval policy; in each evaluated setting it improves average task performance over base agents and broad playbooks while reducing environment steps or retrieval budget. Our experiments show that failures need not trigger uniformly more context: DARC turns self-correction from prompt expansion into recovery-interface design. DARC provides a practical route toward more reliable agents in domains where compiler-like feedback is absent: making failures actionable before making contexts larger.

Mental health disorders are one of the most serious diseases in the world. Most people with such a disease lack access to adequate care, which highlights the importance of training models for the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. However, in the mental health domain, privacy concerns limit the accessibility of personalized treatment data, making it challenging to build powerful models. In this paper, we introduce MentalArena, a self-play framework to train language models by generating domain-specific personalized data, where we obtain a better model capable of making a personalized diagnosis and treatment (as a therapist) and providing information (as a patient). To accurately model human-like mental health patients, we devise Symptom Encoder, which simulates a real patient from both cognition and behavior perspectives. To address intent bias during patient-therapist interactions, we propose Symptom Decoder to compare diagnosed symptoms with encoded symptoms, and dynamically manage the dialogue between patient and therapist according to the identified deviations. We evaluated MentalArena against 6 benchmarks, including biomedicalQA and mental health tasks, compared to 6 advanced models. Our models, fine-tuned on both GPT-3.5 and Llama-3-8b, significantly outperform their counterparts, including GPT-4o. We hope that our work can inspire future research on personalized care. Code is available in https://github.com/Scarelette/MentalArena/tree/main

Agent self-evolution has primarily focused on learning how to act, while overlooking an equally important capability: learning to discover what an agent does not know. Existing approaches typically assume that failure discovery is given, focusing on how to repair failures once they are identified. We ask whether blind-spot diagnosis itself can be learned. We thus study diagnosis as an agent capability separate from execution, and exclude two alternative sources of progress: executor adaptation and human supervision. Under these constraints, performance cannot improve through executor updates or annotated examples, forcing all improvements to originate from the learned diagnostic capability. We propose SkillMentor, which trains a Mentor policy via reinforcement learning to generate diagnostic tasks, identify recurrent failure modes, and curate them into reusable corrective skills. Across AppWorld and BFCLv3, SkillMentor improves executor performance by an average of 44.2%. These results suggest that blind-spot diagnosis is a learnable capability, enabling self-evolution without updating executor weights or relying on human-curated data.

Open-world embodied agents must solve long-horizon tasks where the main bottleneck is not single-step planning quality but how interaction experience is organized and evolved. To this end, we present Steve-Evolving, a non-parametric self-evolving framework that tightly couples fine-grained execution diagnosis with dual-track knowledge distillation in a closed loop. The method follows three phases: Experience Anchoring, Experience Distillation, and Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control. In detail, Experience Anchoring solidifies each subgoal attempt into a structured experience tuple with a fixed schema (pre-state, action, diagnosis-result, and post-state) and organizes it in a three-tier experience space with multi-dimensional indices (e.g., condition signatures, spatial hashing, and semantic tags) plus rolling summarization for efficient and auditable recall. To ensure sufficient information density for attribution, the execution layer provides compositional diagnosis signals beyond binary outcomes, including state-difference summaries, enumerated failure causes, continuous indicators, and stagnation/loop detection. Moreover, successful trajectories of Experience Distillation are generalized into reusable skills with explicit preconditions and verification criteria, while failures are distilled into executable guardrails that capture root causes and forbid risky operations at both subgoal and task granularities. Besides, Knowledge-Driven Closed-Loop Control retrieved skills and guardrails are injected into an LLM planner, and diagnosis-triggered local replanning updates the active constraints online, forming a continual evolution process without any model parameter updates. Experiments on the long-horizon suite of Minecraft MCU demonstrate consistent improvements over static-retrieval baselines.

Accurate diagnosis of heart arrhythmias requires the interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECG), which capture the electrical activity of the heart. Automating this process through machine learning is challenging due to the need for large annotated datasets, which are difficult and costly to collect. To address this issue, transfer learning is often employed, where models are pre-trained on large datasets and fine-tuned for specific ECG classification tasks with limited labeled data. Self-supervised learning has become a widely adopted pre-training method, enabling models to learn meaningful representations from unlabeled datasets. In this work, we explore the joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for self-supervised learning from ECG data. Unlike invariance-based methods, JEPA does not rely on hand-crafted data augmentations, and unlike generative methods, it predicts latent features rather than reconstructing input data. We create a large unsupervised pre-training dataset by combining ten public ECG databases, amounting to over one million records. We pre-train Vision Transformers using JEPA on this dataset and fine-tune them on various PTB-XL benchmarks. Our results show that JEPA outperforms existing invariance-based and generative approaches, achieving an AUC of 0.945 on the PTB-XL all statements task. JEPA consistently learns the highest quality representations, as demonstrated in linear evaluations, and proves advantageous for pre-training even in the absence of additional data.

The global outbreak of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has overloaded worldwide healthcare systems. Computer-aided diagnosis for COVID-19 fast detection and patient triage is becoming critical. This paper proposes a novel self-knowledge distillation based self-supervised learning method for COVID-19 detection from chest X-ray images. Our method can use self-knowledge of images based on similarities of their visual features for self-supervised learning. Experimental results show that our method achieved an HM score of 0.988, an AUC of 0.999, and an accuracy of 0.957 on the largest open COVID-19 chest X-ray dataset.

A reliable executable environment is the foundation for ensuring that large language models solve software engineering tasks. Due to the complex and tedious construction process, large-scale configuration is relatively inefficient. However, most methods always overlook fine-grained analysis of the actions performed by the agent, making it difficult to handle complex errors and resulting in configuration failures. To address this bottleneck, we propose EvoConfig, an efficient environment configuration framework that optimizes multi-agent collaboration to build correct runtime environments. EvoConfig features an expert diagnosis module for fine-grained post-execution analysis, and a self-evolving mechanism that lets expert agents self-feedback and dynamically adjust error-fixing priorities in real time. Empirically, EvoConfig matches the previous state-of-the-art Repo2Run on Repo2Run's 420 repositories, while delivering clear gains on harder cases: on the more challenging Envbench, EvoConfig achieves a 78.1% success rate, outperforming Repo2Run by 7.1%. Beyond end-to-end success, EvoConfig also demonstrates stronger debugging competence, achieving higher accuracy in error identification and producing more effective repair recommendations than existing methods.

Diagnosing 802.11 packet captures requires expert protocol knowledge, is slow, inconsistent across engineers, and unscalable. LLM-based approaches sound plausible but fabricate protocol events absent from captures (especially truncated traces), produce uncalibrated confidence scores, and suffer evaluation bias when golden references are co-produced by the model under test. We introduce PROBE (Protocol Reasoning Over evidence-Based Ensembles), a multi-stage pipeline addressing all three failures. It integrates (i) deterministic PCAP-to-text normalization with frame-level verifiability, (ii) multi-run, multi-candidate ensembles with optional cross-model second opinion and progressive obfuscation, (iii) a verdict-aware evidence framework treating absence of failure evidence as contributing evidence, and (iv) a fully deterministic composite reliability score from evidence validity, run-to-run stability, and cross-model agreement without LLM self-assessment. On 87 enterprise Wi-Fi captures (104 capture-reviewer pairs), single-pass LLM analysis raises weighted evidence F1 from 0.871 (expert baseline) to 0.912 but misses critical frames in 35% of cases. Naive ensemble voting drops below baseline (0.842) as majority voting amplifies conservative verdicts: 50% of confirmed failures are misclassified as 'no issue' or 'insufficient evidence.' Adding evidence-grounded reconciliation achieves 0.957 F1, a 96% auto-accept rate, and a worst-case floor above 0.70. LLM self-reported confidence clusters at 0.95 regardless of difficulty (71% report exactly 0.95), confirming it is uninformative. We also introduce a model-agnostic evaluation framework using per-field assertion matching, eliminating circular bias from model-co-produced golden references.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as data-driven reasoners, yet their chains-of-thought (CoT) can be unfaithful even when final answers are correct. Most existing ``verification'' signals are not diagnostic: answer matching observes only the outcome, LLM-as-judge provides subjective and non-verifiable critiques, and scalar rewards (e.g., PRMs/RMs) offer little insight into where a multi-step derivation fails.We propose SymDiag, a neuro-symbolic framework that reframes reasoning verification as structured failure diagnosis. SymDiag translates natural-language CoT into symbolic constraints and performs step-level satisfiability/entailment checks to (i) localize failing steps and (ii) produce verifiable diagnostic evidence, including counterexamples, inconsistency witnesses, and missing-premise indicators. A central challenge is that apparent ``logic violations'' can be caused either by genuine reasoning defects or by neural-to-symbolic translation noise. SymDiag therefore incorporates a Self-Auditor that disentangles TranslationError from ReasoningError via dual symbolic encodings consistency checks, enabling robust diagnosis under partial observability. Across diverse mathematical, logical, scientific, and general reasoning benchmarks, SymDiag improves detection of unfaithful reasoning and provides substantially more effective feedback for multi-round reasoning repair than outcome-only verification and LLM-based judging, offering a principled foundation for trustworthy and scalable reasoning diagnosis.

Recently, anomaly detection and localization in multimedia data have received significant attention among the machine learning community. In real-world applications such as medical diagnosis and industrial defect detection, anomalies only present in a fraction of the images. To extend the reconstruction-based anomaly detection architecture to the localized anomalies, we propose a self-supervised learning approach through random masking and then restoring, named Self-Supervised Masking (SSM) for unsupervised anomaly detection and localization. SSM not only enhances the training of the inpainting network but also leads to great improvement in the efficiency of mask prediction at inference. Through random masking, each image is augmented into a diverse set of training triplets, thus enabling the autoencoder to learn to reconstruct with masks of various sizes and shapes during training. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of anomaly detection and localization at inference, we propose a novel progressive mask refinement approach that progressively uncovers the normal regions and finally locates the anomalous regions. The proposed SSM method outperforms several state-of-the-arts for both anomaly detection and anomaly localization, achieving 98.3% AUC on Retinal-OCT and 93.9% AUC on MVTec AD, respectively.

Colorectal Cancer(CRC) poses a great risk to public health. It is the third most common cause of cancer in the US. Development of colorectal polyps is one of the earliest signs of cancer. Early detection and resection of polyps can greatly increase survival rate to 90%. Manual inspection can cause misdetections because polyps vary in color, shape, size and appearance. To this end, Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems(CADx) has been proposed that detect polyps by processing the colonoscopic videos. The system acts a secondary check to help clinicians reduce misdetections so that polyps may be resected before they transform to cancer. Polyps vary in color, shape, size, texture and appearance. As a result, the miss rate of polyps is between 6% and 27% despite the prominence of CADx solutions. Furthermore, sessile and flat polyps which have diameter less than 10 mm are more likely to be undetected. Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) have shown promising results in polyp segmentation. However, all of these works have a supervised approach and are limited by the size of the dataset. It was observed that smaller datasets reduce the segmentation accuracy of ResUNet++. We train a U-Net to inpaint randomly dropped out pixels in the image as a proxy task. The dataset we use for pre-training is Kvasir-SEG dataset. This is followed by a supervised training on the limited Kvasir-Sessile dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that with limited annotated dataset and a larger unlabeled dataset, self-supervised approach is a better alternative than fully supervised approach. Specifically, our self-supervised U-Net performs better than five segmentation models which were trained in supervised manner on the Kvasir-Sessile dataset.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis is a powerful method to facilitate the diagnosis of cancer in tissue samples. Automating this diagnosis poses various issues, most notably caused by the immense image resolution and limited annotations. WSIs commonly exhibit resolutions of 100Kx100K pixels. Annotating cancerous areas in WSIs on the pixel level is prohibitively labor-intensive and requires a high level of expert knowledge. Multiple instance learning (MIL) alleviates the need for expensive pixel-level annotations. In MIL, learning is performed on slide-level labels, in which a pathologist provides information about whether a slide includes cancerous tissue. Here, we propose Self-ViT-MIL, a novel approach for classifying and localizing cancerous areas based on slide-level annotations, eliminating the need for pixel-wise annotated training data. Self-ViT- MIL is pre-trained in a self-supervised setting to learn rich feature representation without relying on any labels. The recent Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture builds the feature extractor of Self-ViT-MIL. For localizing cancerous regions, a MIL aggregator with global attention is utilized. To the best of our knowledge, Self-ViT- MIL is the first approach to introduce self-supervised ViTs in MIL-based WSI analysis tasks. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach on the common Camelyon16 dataset. Self-ViT-MIL surpasses existing state-of-the-art MIL-based approaches in terms of accuracy and area under the curve (AUC).

Identifying, tracking, and predicting wound heal-stage progression is a fundamental task towards proper diagnosis, effective treatment, facilitating healing, and reducing pain. Traditionally, a medical expert might observe a wound to determine the current healing state and recommend treatment. However, sourcing experts who can produce such a diagnosis solely from visual indicators can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. In addition, lesions may take several weeks to undergo the healing process, demanding resources to monitor and diagnose continually. Automating this task can be challenging; datasets that follow wound progression from onset to maturation are small, rare, and often collected without computer vision in mind. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a self-supervised learning scheme composed of (a) learning embeddings of wound's temporal dynamics, (b) clustering for automatic stage discovery, and (c) fine-tuned classification. The proposed self-supervised and flexible learning framework is biologically inspired and trained on a small dataset with zero human labeling. The HealNet framework achieved high pre-text and downstream classification accuracy; when evaluated on held-out test data, HealNet achieved 97.7% pre-text accuracy and 90.62% heal-stage classification accuracy.

Traditional methods for automating recommender system design, such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are often constrained by a fixed search space defined by human priors, limiting innovation to pre-defined operators. While recent LLM-driven code evolution frameworks shift fixed search space target to open-ended program spaces, they primarily rely on scalar metrics (e.g., NDCG, Hit Ratio) that fail to provide qualitative insights into model failures or directional guidance for improvement. To address this, we propose Self-EvolveRec, a novel framework that establishes a directional feedback loop by integrating a User Simulator for qualitative critiques and a Model Diagnosis Tool for quantitative internal verification. Furthermore, we introduce a Diagnosis Tool - Model Co-Evolution strategy to ensure that evaluation criteria dynamically adapt as the recommendation architecture evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-EvolveRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NAS and LLM-driven code evolution baselines in both recommendation performance and user satisfaction. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/self_evolverec.

Traditional diagnosis of aortic valve disease relies on echocardiography, but its cost and required expertise limit its use in large-scale early screening. Photoplethysmography (PPG) has emerged as a promising screening modality due to its widespread availability in wearable devices and its ability to reflect underlying hemodynamic dynamics. However, the extreme scarcity of gold-standard labeled PPG data severely constrains the effectiveness of data-driven approaches. To address this challenge, we propose and validate a new paradigm, Physiology-Guided Self-Supervised Learning (PG-SSL), aimed at unlocking the value of large-scale unlabeled PPG data for efficient screening of Aortic Stenosis (AS) and Aortic Regurgitation (AR). Using over 170,000 unlabeled PPG samples from the UK Biobank, we formalize clinical knowledge into a set of PPG morphological phenotypes and construct a pulse pattern recognition proxy task for self-supervised pre-training. A dual-branch, gated-fusion architecture is then employed for efficient fine-tuning on a small labeled subset. The proposed PG-SSL framework achieves AUCs of 0.765 and 0.776 for AS and AR screening, respectively, significantly outperforming supervised baselines trained on limited labeled data. Multivariable analysis further validates the model output as an independent digital biomarker with sustained prognostic value after adjustment for standard clinical risk factors. This study demonstrates that PG-SSL provides an effective, domain knowledge-driven solution to label scarcity in medical artificial intelligence and shows strong potential for enabling low-cost, large-scale early screening of aortic valve disease.

AI systems built around large models increasingly use experience and feedback to make persistent changes to models, prompts, memories, tools, and workflows. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) extends this process to inductive biases and to the mechanisms that govern future updates, which can themselves be revised and reused across improvement cycles. Yet self-modification alone does not guarantee trustworthy improvement. Reported gains may reflect flawed evaluations, previously acquired capabilities may deteriorate, and compliance with behavioral constraints may weaken. Compromised artifacts or sensitive information may also persist in successor systems. Changes to improvement mechanisms may invalidate earlier verification results and make human oversight less effective. This survey presents an operational definition and process framework for RSI and organizes the requirements for trustworthy RSI into four interconnected themes: genuine and sustained improvement; behavioral constraints, alignment, and fairness; system security and privacy; and transparency and controllability. We examine these themes from three perspectives: Improvement Validity, Constraint Preservation, and Effective Oversight. This analysis covers improvement diagnosis, proposal generation, proposal evaluation, and update implementation (S1--S4), including the recursive application of these stages to improvement mechanisms (RI). We review risks, safeguards, and evaluation evidence for individual updates, effects inherited by successor systems, and revisions to improvement mechanisms, while distinguishing direct RSI findings from evidence in related systems. Finally, we examine evaluation settings, identify requirements for independent and longitudinal assessment, and discuss applications and open research problems.

LLM agents increasingly adapt to recurring tasks by accumulating procedural knowledge in skills. These skills are lightweight, reusable textual artifacts that are loaded into the agent's context without weight updates. Recent methods refine skills through iterative task execution, failure diagnosis, and trajectory-guided text-space updates. However, existing frameworks lack explicit diagnosis--outcome feedback and treat deletion as a generic edit operation rather than a dedicated mechanism for consolidating accumulated knowledge. We introduce SkillProx, a proximal-gradient-inspired forward--backward framework that couples closed-loop diagnostic evolution with utility-aware proximal refinement. Motivated by a composite objective balancing task loss and skill complexity, the forward stage re-executes diagnosis-driven edits on the same task batch, rolls back regressions, and feeds measured outcomes into subsequent diagnoses. The backward stage decomposes the resulting skill into auditable knowledge units, estimates their contributions using a frozen leave-one-out utility audit, and applies validation-gated consolidation, demotion, or removal. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks across multiple backbone LLMs show that SkillProx improves average accuracy by 3.0 percentage points over the strongest gradient-based baseline. Component ablations demonstrate the complementary effects of closed-loop diagnosis and proximal refinement.

Incident management (IM) is central to the reliability of large-scale cloud systems. Yet manual IM, where on-call engineers examine metrics, logs, and traces is labor-intensive and error-prone in the face of massive and heterogeneous observability data. Existing automated IM approaches often struggle to generalize across systems, provide limited interpretability, and incur high deployment costs, which hinders adoption in practice. In this paper, we present OpsAgent, a lightweight, self-evolving multi-agent system for IM that employs a training-free data processor to convert heterogeneous observability data into structured textual descriptions, along with a multi-agent collaboration framework that makes diagnostic inference transparent and auditable. To support continual capability growth, OpsAgent also introduces a dual self-evolution mechanism that integrates internal model updates with external experience accumulation, thereby closing the deployment loop. Comprehensive experiments on the OPENRCA benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and show that OpsAgent is generalizable, interpretable, cost-efficient, and self-evolving, making it a practically deployable and sustainable solution for long-term operation in real-world cloud systems.

Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification. Yet current evaluations do not isolate this form of transfer. Agent benchmarks test single-episode task solving; memory benchmarks target information retention rather than procedural reuse. We introduce EvoAgentBench, a benchmark for agent self-evolution via Ability-guided transfer across four agentic domains: web research, algorithmic reasoning, software engineering, and knowledge work. EvoAgentBench extracts trace-grounded Abilities from agent executions, canonicalizes them into operational units, and builds domain-specific Ability Graphs linking tasks that share procedural overlap. By design, every test task is backed by verified training-side Ability support. Across a 528/267 train/test split, two scaffolds, and three backbones, curated Ability content transfers reliably across model families, but no current automatic method sustains positive gain in all settings. EvoAgentBench shifts self-evolution evaluation from aggregate accuracy comparison to fine-grained diagnosis of experience encoding, routing, and uptake. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EverMind-AI/EvoAgentBench.

The executable harness surrounding a GUI model determines how observations are assembled, actions are executed, and verification, recovery, and termination are controlled. Compared with harness optimization for non-GUI agents, automatically optimizing this harness poses three coupled challenges: reconciling model intent with observed visual effects, diagnosing failures under variable execution outcomes, and identifying recurrent failure patterns across tasks and translating them into reusable runtime changes. We introduce GUI-HARVEST, an automatic harness optimizer that enables self-improving GUI agents with frozen backbone models. First, to ground diagnosis in observed action effects, it aligns model outputs and executed actions with before-and-after screenshots, tying findings to specific interface transitions. Second, to account for execution variability, it treats repeated runs of the same task as a joint evidence unit, using within-task comparisons to locate outcome-relevant behavioral differences. Third, it consolidates verified findings across tasks into recurring failure patterns, maps them to bounded source-code edits with predictions recorded before evaluation, and checks the predicted behavioral effects alongside task performance through repeated execution. Experiments on OSWorld-Verified show consistent held-out gains across six general-purpose open, GUI-specialized open, and proprietary backbone models; Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct gains 12.33 points on the full suite. Frozen-harness transfer improves GPT-5 by 13.87 percentage points on WindowsAgentArena at 50 steps without further optimization. With the same backbone and initial harness, GUI-HARVEST outperforms Self-Harness and Meta-Harness, suggesting that GUI-specific diagnosis and validation help harness improvements generalize to unseen tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/GaryYang12345/GUI-HARVEST.

Stroke is an acute cerebrovascular disease, and timely diagnosis significantly improves patient survival. However, existing automated diagnosis methods suffer from fairness issues across demographic groups, potentially exacerbating healthcare disparities. In this work we propose FAST-CAD, a theoretically grounded framework that combines domain-adversarial training (DAT) with group distributionally robust optimization (Group-DRO) for fair and accurate non-contact stroke diagnosis. Our approach is built on domain adaptation and minimax fairness theory and provides convergence guarantees and fairness bounds. We curate a multimodal dataset covering 12 demographic subgroups defined by age, gender, and posture. FAST-CAD employs self-supervised encoders with adversarial domain discrimination to learn demographic-invariant representations, while Group-DRO optimizes worst-group risk to ensure robust performance across all subgroups. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior diagnostic performance while maintaining fairness across demographic groups, and our theoretical analysis supports the effectiveness of the unified DAT + Group-DRO framework. This work provides both practical advances and theoretical insights for fair medical AI systems.

Deep learning (DL) has proven highly effective for ultrasound-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) of breast cancers. In an automaticCAD system, lesion detection is critical for the following diagnosis. However, existing DL-based methods generally require voluminous manually-annotated region of interest (ROI) labels and class labels to train both the lesion detection and diagnosis models. In clinical practice, the ROI labels, i.e. ground truths, may not always be optimal for the classification task due to individual experience of sonologists, resulting in the issue of coarse annotation that limits the diagnosis performance of a CAD model. To address this issue, a novel Two-Stage Detection and Diagnosis Network (TSDDNet) is proposed based on weakly supervised learning to enhance diagnostic accuracy of the ultrasound-based CAD for breast cancers. In particular, all the ROI-level labels are considered as coarse labels in the first training stage, and then a candidate selection mechanism is designed to identify optimallesion areas for both the fully and partially annotated samples. It refines the current ROI-level labels in the fully annotated images and the detected ROIs in the partially annotated samples with a weakly supervised manner under the guidance of class labels. In the second training stage, a self-distillation strategy further is further proposed to integrate the detection network and classification network into a unified framework as the final CAD model for joint optimization, which then further improves the diagnosis performance. The proposed TSDDNet is evaluated on a B-mode ultrasound dataset, and the experimental results show that it achieves the best performance on both lesion detection and diagnosis tasks, suggesting promising application potential.

Task-specific deep learning models in histopathology offer promising opportunities for improving diagnosis, clinical research, and precision medicine. However, development of such models is often limited by availability of high-quality data. Foundation models in histopathology that learn general representations across a wide range of tissue types, diagnoses, and magnifications offer the potential to reduce the data, compute, and technical expertise necessary to develop task-specific deep learning models with the required level of model performance. In this work, we describe the development and evaluation of foundation models for histopathology via self-supervised learning (SSL). We first establish a diverse set of benchmark tasks involving 17 unique tissue types and 12 unique cancer types and spanning different optimal magnifications and task types. Next, we use this benchmark to explore and evaluate histopathology-specific SSL methods followed by further evaluation on held out patch-level and weakly supervised tasks. We found that standard SSL methods thoughtfully applied to histopathology images are performant across our benchmark tasks and that domain-specific methodological improvements can further increase performance. Our findings reinforce the value of using domain-specific SSL methods in pathology, and establish a set of high quality foundation models to enable further research across diverse applications.

Precision agriculture relies heavily on accurate image analysis for crop disease identification and treatment recommendation, yet existing vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform in specialized agricultural domains. This work presents a domain-aware framework for agricultural image processing that combines prompt-based expert evaluation with self-consistency mechanisms to enhance VLM reliability in precision agriculture applications. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a prompt-based evaluation protocol that configures a language model as an expert plant pathologist for scalable assessment of image analysis outputs, and (2) a cosine-consistency self-voting mechanism that generates multiple candidate responses from agricultural images and selects the most semantically coherent diagnosis using domain-adapted embeddings. Applied to maize leaf disease identification from field images using a fine-tuned PaliGemma model, our approach improves diagnostic accuracy from 82.2\% to 87.8\%, symptom analysis from 38.9\% to 52.2\%, and treatment recommendation from 27.8\% to 43.3\% compared to standard greedy decoding. The system remains compact enough for deployment on mobile devices, supporting real-time agricultural decision-making in resource-constrained environments. These results demonstrate significant potential for AI-driven precision agriculture tools that can operate reliably in diverse field conditions.

Deep learning-based automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning but remains challenging in few-shot scenarios due to the scarcity of annotated training data. Recently, self-supervised foundation models such as DINOv3, which were trained on large natural image datasets, have shown strong potential for dense feature extraction that can help with the few-shot learning challenge. Yet, their direct application to medical images is hindered by domain differences. In this work, we propose DINO-AugSeg, a novel framework that leverages DINOv3 features to address the few-shot medical image segmentation challenge. Specifically, we introduce WT-Aug, a wavelet-based feature-level augmentation module that enriches the diversity of DINOv3-extracted features by perturbing frequency components, and CG-Fuse, a contextual information-guided fusion module that exploits cross-attention to integrate semantic-rich low-resolution features with spatially detailed high-resolution features. Extensive experiments on six public benchmarks spanning five imaging modalities, including MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, and dermoscopy, demonstrate that DINO-AugSeg consistently outperforms existing methods under limited-sample conditions. The results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating wavelet-domain augmentation and contextual fusion for robust feature representation, suggesting DINO-AugSeg as a promising direction for advancing few-shot medical image segmentation. Code and data will be made available on https://github.com/apple1986/DINO-AugSeg.

Multimodal alignment of histopathology encoders with transcriptomic and genomic data has been shown to significantly improve performance in downstream diagnostic tasks. Hematological cytology is unique in that visual single-cell evaluation is often paired with cytogenetics and molecular genetics for blood cancer diagnosis. In this study, we present a framework to align single white blood cell images with chromosomal aberrations (karyotype) and somatic mutations from targeted gene panels. Our training strategy follows a two-stage approach: (i) self-supervised, vision-only pretraining of a transformer aggregator using an iBOT head on a cohort of over 1500 patients, and (ii) genetic alignment via supervised contrastive loss on acute myeloid leukemia patients. Our genetically aligned patient encoder improves hematological diagnostic tasks, outperforming slide-level histopathology foundation models. Additionally, the model provides off-the-shelf retrieval capabilities for diseases and genetic alterations. Incorporating genetic data into patient encoders increases the quality of patient representations, providing a framework that aligns with clinical diagnostic workflows and paves the way for future multimodal hematology-specific AI. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/marrlab/GenBloom.

Computer-use agents, which leverage multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to operate computers and complete tasks, have attracted significant attention for their utility and versatility. A major challenge in developing these agents is collecting large-scale, high-quality trajectories. The standard approach generates synthetic data through a self-improving loop: an agent is placed in a verifiable environment and iteratively fine-tuned on its successful trajectories. Despite its effectiveness, this paradigm exploits only successful trajectories and discards the failed ones, even though failures carry rich information about a model's weaknesses. In this work, we explore a complementary failure-driven self-improvement loop, a data-centric paradigm that turns failed trajectories into agent improvements. Specifically, we employ an LLM to diagnose failure modes, propose inference-time solutions, and generate code patches -- lightly verified by humans -- that upgrade the agent. We validate this approach with the state-of-the-art OpenCUA-72B model on the OSWorld benchmark, improving the success rate from 42.3% to 48.9%, a gain of 6.6 percentage points, without any additional training cost and with only modest inference overhead. Our results demonstrate that failure-driven self-improvement is a viable complement to success-based pipelines, enabling more efficient agent improvement.

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnosis due to its non-invasive nature and real-time capabilities. However, traditional ultrasound diagnostics relies heavily on physician expertise and is often hampered by suboptimal image quality, leading to potential diagnostic errors. While artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution to enhance clinical diagnosis by detecting abnormalities across various imaging modalities, existing AI methods for ultrasound face two major challenges. First, they typically require vast amounts of labeled medical data, raising serious concerns regarding patient privacy. Second, most models are designed for specific tasks, which restricts their broader clinical utility. To overcome these challenges, we present UltraFedFM, an innovative privacy-preserving ultrasound foundation model. UltraFedFM is collaboratively pre-trained using federated learning across 16 distributed medical institutions in 9 countries, leveraging a dataset of over 1 million ultrasound images covering 19 organs and 10 ultrasound modalities. This extensive and diverse data, combined with a secure training framework, enables UltraFedFM to exhibit strong generalization and diagnostic capabilities. It achieves an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.927 for disease diagnosis and a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.878 for lesion segmentation. Notably, UltraFedFM surpasses the diagnostic accuracy of mid-level ultrasonographers (4-8 years of experience) and matches the performance of expert-level sonographers (10+ years of experience) in the joint diagnosis of 8 common systemic diseases.c These findings indicate that UltraFedFM can significantly enhance clinical diagnostics while safeguarding patient privacy, marking a significant advancement in AI-driven ultrasound imaging for future clinical applications.

Deep learning in medical imaging has the potential to minimize the risk of diagnostic errors, reduce radiologist workload, and accelerate diagnosis. Training such deep learning models requires large and accurate datasets, with annotations for all training samples. However, in the medical imaging domain, annotated datasets for specific tasks are often small due to the high complexity of annotations, limited access, or the rarity of diseases. To address this challenge, deep learning models can be pre-trained on large image datasets without annotations using methods from the field of self-supervised learning. After pre-training, small annotated datasets are sufficient to fine-tune the models for a specific task. The most popular self-supervised pre-training approaches in medical imaging are based on contrastive learning. However, recent studies in natural image processing indicate a strong potential for masked autoencoder approaches. Our work compares state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods with the recently introduced masked autoencoder approach "SparK" for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on medical images. Therefore we pre-train on a large unannotated CT image dataset and fine-tune on several CT classification tasks. Due to the challenge of obtaining sufficient annotated training data in medical imaging, it is of particular interest to evaluate how the self-supervised pre-training methods perform when fine-tuning on small datasets. By experimenting with gradually reducing the training dataset size for fine-tuning, we find that the reduction has different effects depending on the type of pre-training chosen. The SparK pre-training method is more robust to the training dataset size than the contrastive methods. Based on our results, we propose the SparK pre-training for medical imaging tasks with only small annotated datasets.

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model training. However, they also introduce a challenge: we lose the ability to manually remove unintended features, such as sensitive or task-irrelevant features, to guarantee regulatory compliance or improve the generalizability of classification models. This limitation arises because LLM embeddings are opaque and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identify and regularize unintended features in the LLM latent space. Specifically, we first pre-train a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to extract interpretable features from LLM latent spaces. To ensure the SAE can capture task-specific features, we further fine-tune it on task-specific datasets. In training the classification model, we propose a simple and effective regularizer, by minimizing the similarity between the classifier weights and the identified unintended feature, to remove the impact of these unintended features on classification. We evaluate the proposed framework on three real-world tasks, including toxic chat detection, reward modeling, and disease diagnosis. Results show that the proposed self-regularization framework can improve the classifier's generalizability by regularizing those features that are not semantically correlated to the task. This work pioneers controllable text classification on LLM latent spaces by leveraging interpreted features to address generalizability, fairness, and privacy challenges. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/Controllable_LLM_Classifier.

Conventionally, evaluation for the diagnosis of Autism spectrum disorder is done by a trained specialist through questionnaire-based formal assessments and by observation of behavioral cues under various settings to capture the early warning signs of autism. These evaluation techniques are highly subjective and their accuracy relies on the experience of the specialist. In this regard, machine learning-based methods for automated capturing of early signs of autism from the recorded videos of the children is a promising alternative. In this paper, the authors propose a novel pipelined deep learning architecture to detect certain self-stimulatory behaviors that help in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The authors also supplement their tool with an augmented version of the Self Stimulatory Behavior Dataset (SSBD) and also propose a new label in SSBD Action detection: no-class. The deep learning model with the new dataset is made freely available for easy adoption to the researchers and developers community. An overall accuracy of around 81% was achieved from the proposed pipeline model that is targeted for real-time and hands-free automated diagnosis. All of the source code, data, licenses of use, and other relevant material is made freely available in https://github.com/sarl-iiitb/

Multi-omics research has enhanced our understanding of cancer heterogeneity and progression. Investigating molecular data through multi-omics approaches is crucial for unraveling the complex biological mechanisms underlying cancer, thereby enabling effective diagnosis, treatment, and prevention strategies. However, predicting patient outcomes through integration of all available multi-omics data is an under-study research direction. Here, we present SeNMo (Self-normalizing Network for Multi-omics), a deep neural network trained on multi-omics data across 33 cancer types. SeNMo is efficient in handling multi-omics data characterized by high-width (many features) and low-length (fewer samples) attributes. We trained SeNMo for the task of overall survival using pan-cancer data involving 33 cancer sites from Genomics Data Commons (GDC). The training data includes gene expression, DNA methylation, miRNA expression, DNA mutations, protein expression modalities, and clinical data. We evaluated the model's performance in predicting overall survival using concordance index (C-Index). SeNMo performed consistently well in training regime, with the validation C-Index of 0.76 on GDC's public data. In the testing regime, SeNMo performed with a C-Index of 0.758 on a held-out test set. The model showed an average accuracy of 99.8% on the task of classifying the primary cancer type on the pan-cancer test cohort. SeNMo proved to be a mini-foundation model for multi-omics oncology data because it demonstrated robust performance, and adaptability not only across molecular data types but also on the classification task of predicting the primary cancer type of patients. SeNMo can be further scaled to any cancer site and molecular data type. We believe SeNMo and similar models are poised to transform the oncology landscape, offering hope for more effective, efficient, and patient-centric cancer care.

Identifying cirrhosis is key to correctly assess the health of the liver. However, the gold standard diagnosis of the cirrhosis needs a medical intervention to obtain the histological confirmation, e.g. the METAVIR score, as the radiological presentation can be equivocal. In this work, we propose to leverage transfer learning from large datasets annotated by radiologists, which we consider as a weak annotation, to predict the histological score available on a small annex dataset. To this end, we propose to compare different pretraining methods, namely weakly-supervised and self-supervised ones, to improve the prediction of the cirrhosis. Finally, we introduce a loss function combining both supervised and self-supervised frameworks for pretraining. This method outperforms the baseline classification of the METAVIR score, reaching an AUC of 0.84 and a balanced accuracy of 0.75, compared to 0.77 and 0.72 for a baseline classifier.

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents that operate across multiple sessions, yet existing memory systems treat retrieval infrastructure as fixed: stored content evolves while scoring functions, fusion strategies, and answer-generation policies remain frozen at deployment. We argue that truly adaptive memory requires co-evolution at two levels: the stored knowledge and the retrieval mechanism that queries it. We present EvolveMem, a self-evolving memory architecture that exposes its full retrieval configuration as a structured action space optimized by an LLM-powered diagnosis module. In each evolution round, the module reads per-question failure logs, identifies root causes, and proposes targeted configuration adjustments; a guarded meta-analyzer applies them with automatic revert-on-regression and explore-on-stagnation safeguards. This closed-loop self-evolution realizes an AutoResearch process: the system autonomously conducts iterative research cycles on its own architecture, replacing manual configuration tuning. Starting from a minimal baseline, the process converges autonomously, discovering effective retrieval strategies including entirely new configuration dimensions not present in the original action space. On LoCoMo, EvolveMem outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.7% relative and achieves a 78.0% relative improvement over the minimal baseline. On MemBench, EvolveMem exceeds the strongest baseline by 18.9% relative. Evolved configurations transfer across benchmarks with positive rather than catastrophic transfer, indicating that the self-evolution process captures universal retrieval principles rather than benchmark-specific heuristics. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has transformed vision encoder training in general domains but remains underutilized in medical imaging due to limited data and domain specific biases. We present MammoDINO, a novel SSL framework for mammography, pretrained on 1.4 million mammographic images. To capture clinically meaningful features, we introduce a breast tissue aware data augmentation sampler for both image-level and patch-level supervision and a cross-slice contrastive learning objective that leverages 3D digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) structure into 2D pretraining. MammoDINO achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple breast cancer screening tasks and generalizes well across five benchmark datasets. It offers a scalable, annotation-free foundation for multipurpose computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools for mammogram, helping reduce radiologists' workload and improve diagnostic efficiency in breast cancer screening.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven their deployment toward general-purpose harness environments, where LLM-based agents operate in sandbox workspaces and interact directly with file systems and shells. While numerous post-training pipelines exist for tool-use agents, their counterparts for harness-based agents remain scarce and are predominantly one-shot and teacher-dependent: a stronger external model synthesizes tasks and collects trajectories, the target agent is trained once, and evaluation results are consumed by human researchers rather than fed back into the loop. Such pipelines are inherently bounded by the capability of the external model and the scope of human prior, leaving no room for self-improvement. To address these limitations, we propose ClawLoop, a framework that enables self-improving without any external teacher model and with minimal prior dependencies. ClawLoop composes three phases into a self-sustaining cycle: Task Synthesis, which generates a diverse pool of training tasks via two complementary construction routines, applies diagnosis-conditioned difficulty growth followed by both agent-free and agent-based task validation; Training, which updates the agent via SFT and/or RL; and Diagnosis and Feedback, which analyzes the agent's rollout behaviors to produce a capability analysis report that will be used as feedback for task synthesis in the next iteration. Using Qwen3.6-27B as the loop model, ClawLoop yields consistent improvements on SkillsBench, Claw-Eval-Live, and ClawGym-Bench. The iteratively refined tasks are further transferred to smaller-scale Qwen3.5-4B and 9B models with gains across all benchmarks, validating data quality independently of the loop model.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, especially in white blood cell cancer diagnosis, is hindered by two primary challenges: the lack of large-scale labeled datasets for white blood cell (WBC) segmentation and outdated segmentation methods. These challenges inhibit the development of more accurate and modern techniques to diagnose cancer relating to white blood cells. To address the first challenge, a semi-supervised learning framework should be devised to efficiently capitalize on the scarcity of the dataset available. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a novel self-training pipeline with the incorporation of FixMatch. Self-training is a technique that utilizes the model trained on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data and then re-train on both of them. FixMatch is a consistency-regularization algorithm to enforce the model's robustness against variations in the input image. We discover that by incorporating FixMatch in the self-training pipeline, the performance improves in the majority of cases. Our performance achieved the best performance with the self-training scheme with consistency on DeepLab-V3 architecture and ResNet-50, reaching 90.69%, 87.37%, and 76.49% on Zheng 1, Zheng 2, and LISC datasets, respectively.

Determining the necessity of resecting malignant polyps during colonoscopy screen is crucial for patient outcomes, yet challenging due to the time-consuming and costly nature of histopathology examination. While deep learning-based classification models have shown promise in achieving optical biopsy with endoscopic images, they often suffer from a lack of explainability. To overcome this limitation, we introduce EndoFinder, a content-based image retrieval framework to find the 'digital twin' polyp in the reference database given a newly detected polyp. The clinical semantics of the new polyp can be inferred referring to the matched ones. EndoFinder pioneers a polyp-aware image encoder that is pre-trained on a large polyp dataset in a self-supervised way, merging masked image modeling with contrastive learning. This results in a generic embedding space ready for different downstream clinical tasks based on image retrieval. We validate the framework on polyp re-identification and optical biopsy tasks, with extensive experiments demonstrating that EndoFinder not only achieves explainable diagnostics but also matches the performance of supervised classification models. EndoFinder's reliance on image retrieval has the potential to support diverse downstream decision-making tasks during real-time colonoscopy procedures.

Landmark detection plays a crucial role in medical imaging tasks that rely on precise spatial localization, including specific applications in diagnosis, treatment planning, image registration, and surgical navigation. However, manual annotation is labor-intensive and requires expert knowledge. While deep learning shows promise in automating this task, progress is hindered by limited public datasets, inconsistent benchmarks, and non-standardized baselines, restricting reproducibility, fair comparisons, and model generalizability. This work introduces nnLandmark, a self-configuring deep learning framework for 3D medical landmark detection, adapting nnU-Net to perform heatmap-based regression. By leveraging nnU-Net's automated configuration, nnLandmark eliminates the need for manual parameter tuning, offering out-of-the-box usability. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across two public datasets, with a mean radial error (MRE) of 1.5 mm on the Mandibular Molar Landmark (MML) dental CT dataset and 1.2 mm for anatomical fiducials on a brain MRI dataset (AFIDs), where nnLandmark aligns with the inter-rater variability of 1.5 mm. With its strong generalization, reproducibility, and ease of deployment, nnLandmark establishes a reliable baseline for 3D landmark detection, supporting research in anatomical localization and clinical workflows that depend on precise landmark identification. The code will be available soon.

Recent progress in large language model (LLM) agents has largely focused on embedding self-improvement mechanisms inside the agent or searching over many concurrent variants. While these approaches can raise aggregate scores, they often yield unstable and hard-to-audit improvement trajectories, making it difficult to guarantee non-regression or to reason about failures across versions. We reframe agent improvement as release engineering: agents are treated as shippable artifacts, and improvement is externalized into a regression-aware release pipeline. We introduce AgentDevel, a release engineering pipeline that iteratively runs the current agent, produces implementation-blind, symptom-level quality signals from execution traces, synthesizes a single release candidate (RC) via executable diagnosis, and promotes it under flip-centered gating. AgentDevel features three core designs: (i) an implementation-blind LLM critic that characterizes failure appearances without accessing agent internals, (ii) script-based executable diagnosis that aggregates dominant symptom patterns and produces auditable engineering specifications, and (iii) flip-centered gating that prioritizes pass to fail regressions and fail to pass fixes as first-class evidence. Unlike population-based search or in-agent self-refinement, AgentDevel maintains a single canonical version line and emphasizes non-regression as a primary objective. Experiments on execution-heavy benchmarks demonstrate that AgentDevel yields stable improvements with significantly fewer regressions while producing reproducible, auditable artifacts. Overall, AgentDevel provides a practical development discipline for building, debugging, and releasing LLM agents as software development.

Tool-using LLM agents fail through trajectories rather than only final responses, as they may execute unsafe tool calls, follow injected instructions, comply with harmful requests, or over-refuse benign tasks despite producing a seemingly safe answer. Existing safety-alignment signals are largely response-level or off-policy, and often incur a safety-utility trade-off: improving agent safety comes at the cost of degraded task performance. Such sparse and single-objective rewards severely limit real-world usability. To bridge this gap, we propose FATE, an on-policy self-evolving framework that transforms verifier-scored failures into repair supervision without expert demonstrations. For each failure, the same policy proposes repair candidates, which are then re-scored by verifiers and filtered across security, utility, over-refusal control, and trajectory validity. This dense trajectory-level information is then used as a supervision signal for agent self-evolution. During this process, we further introduce Pareto-Front Policy Optimization (PFPO), combining supervised warmup with Pareto-aware policy optimization to preserve safety-utility trade-offs. Experiments on AgentDojo, AgentHarm, and ATBench show that FATE improves safety across different models and scales while preserving useful behavior. Compared with strong baselines, FATE reduces attack success rate by 33.5%, harmful compliance by 82.6%, and improves external trajectory-safety diagnosis by 6.5%. These results suggest that failed trajectories can provide structured repair supervision for safer self-evolving agents.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for multi-step, stateful tool-use tasks, yet production reliability remains limited. Unlike static software repair, agent repair must recover dynamic trajectories whose early decisions can propagate into later errors and external state changes. Existing automatic remedies address only part of this problem: blind retry adds no diagnosis, outcome feedback says whether a run failed but not where or why, and self-reflection often lacks grounded evidence to prevent the same failure from recurring. We present AgentTether, a run-time repair framework that automates post-run diagnosis and guided recovery without modifying the underlying agent or environment. AgentTether abstracts each run into Transition Units, links them through a dependency-aware Critical Transition Graph, and localizes failure-critical subtrajectories by combining an offline normal-behavior model with a run-local graph detector. It then converts the localized cause into behavior-scoped guidance backed by cross-iteration Repair Memory, and can optionally apply guarded run-time intervention to keep the correction active during re-execution. The same design can be deployed as an offline diagnostic-and-guidance tool or as an online repair layer. We evaluate AgentTether on 261 tau-bench tasks across three domains with Qwen3.7-max, and test cross-model transfer on Banking with GPT-5.4. On the hardest Banking domain, AgentTether repairs 59.04% (49/83) of initially failed Qwen3.7-max tasks and 65.12% (56/86) of initially failed GPT-5.4 tasks. Overall, AgentTether improves repair effectiveness while reducing agent turns and end-to-end approach tokens, suggesting a practical reliability layer that can wrap existing agent deployments, reduce wasted re-execution, and improve recovery without retraining the agent.

AI agents are becoming increasingly capable of generating scientific code, but generating code is not the same as improving the algorithms behind it. For numerical solvers, execution feedback can expose poor performance, but rarely reveals its underlying cause and how to address it. We introduce Auto-Diagnosis and Skill Discovery (ADSD), a framework that links numerical diagnosis to reusable solver self-improvement. ADSD follows a diagnosis-first paradigm that first explains why a solver performs poorly, then uses this diagnosis to guide the discovery of appropriate numerical methods. The resulting knowledge is packaged into reusable solver skills, turning solver improvement from trial-and-error editing into a structured process of diagnosis, discovery, and implementation. Across four challenging numerical domains--power flow equation, AC optimal power flow control, stiff ordinary differential equations, and heterogeneous diffusion PDEs--ADSD consistently improves solver accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. On GOC-500 power flow, for example, ADSD reduces mean solver error by nearly 71times, with improvements further transferring to unseen grid topologies and operating regimes.

Memory self-evolution uses task feedback to iteratively improve executable memory programs that store and retrieve information from past interactions. Existing approaches typically adopt holistic evolution, deriving revision directions from mixed feedback and judging progress by overall performance. This can obscure optimization directions and hide capability-specific gains offset by regressions elsewhere, leaving promising directions underexplored. We introduce capability-driven evolution, which extends search guidance from overall performance to individual capability dimensions, preserving promising revisions and expanding exploration beyond the boundaries of holistic evolution. We propose PrisMem, which uses dependency-aware capability selection to prioritize targets with potential cross-capability benefits and history-guided diagnosis to refine capability specialists. Trace-guided integration compares evaluated programs on paired differential cases, using their behavioral differences to consolidate complementary gains into a unified memory program. Experiments show that PrisMem outperforms the strongest baselines by 10.54 and 7.83 percentage points on BEAM-1M and LongMemEval-M, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness on million-token histories.

Harness development plays a crucial role in building capable AI agents. Recent approaches improve harnesses through recursive self-improvement (RSI), but their performance gains often come with higher execution costs. We introduce HarnessPro, a label-free method for evolving harnesses to improve task performance while reducing execution cost. In this setting, candidate harnesses are evaluated using LLM-generated tests without access to ground-truth solutions or official tests. Specialized agents diagnose execution trajectories, plan updates with different performance-cost priorities, and implement them as candidate harnesses. Rather than returning a single harness, HarnessPro uses normalized weighted squared-distance selection to provide cost-focused (lite), balanced (medium), and performance-focused (heavy) harnesses for different deployment budgets. Selected harnesses enter the next iteration, where execution feedback guides further updates. Our experiments cover Terminal-Bench 2, SWE-Bench Pro, and ProgramBench, using GPT-5.5 with Codex and GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Across these benchmarks using GPT-5.5 with Codex, the heavy mode of HarnessPro achieves an average pass-rate gain of 2.0 percentage points and an average per-task cost reduction of 26.1% relative to RHO. This advantage also holds when using GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Code is available at https://github.com/pzs19/HarnessPro

The availability of clean and diverse labeled data is a major roadblock for training models on complex tasks such as visual question answering (VQA). The extensive work on large vision-and-language models has shown that self-supervised learning is effective for pretraining multimodal interactions. In this technical report, we focus on visual representations. We review and evaluate self-supervised methods to leverage unlabeled images and pretrain a model, which we then fine-tune on a custom VQA task that allows controlled evaluation and diagnosis. We compare energy-based models (EBMs) with contrastive learning (CL). While EBMs are growing in popularity, they lack an evaluation on downstream tasks. We find that both EBMs and CL can learn representations from unlabeled images that enable training a VQA model on very little annotated data. In a simple setting similar to CLEVR, we find that CL representations also improve systematic generalization, and even match the performance of representations from a larger, supervised, ImageNet-pretrained model. However, we find EBMs to be difficult to train because of instabilities and high variability in their results. Although EBMs prove useful for OOD detection, other results on supervised energy-based training and uncertainty calibration are largely negative. Overall, CL currently seems a preferable option over EBMs.

Histopathology and transcriptomics are fundamental modalities in oncology, encapsulating the morphological and molecular aspects of the disease. Multi-modal self-supervised learning has demonstrated remarkable potential in learning pathological representations by integrating diverse data sources. Conventional multi-modal integration methods primarily emphasize modality alignment, while paying insufficient attention to retaining the modality-specific structures. However, unlike conventional scenarios where multi-modal inputs share highly overlapping features, histopathology and transcriptomics exhibit pronounced heterogeneity, offering orthogonal yet complementary insights. Histopathology provides morphological and spatial context, elucidating tissue architecture and cellular topology, whereas transcriptomics delineates molecular signatures through gene expression patterns. This inherent disparity introduces a major challenge in aligning them while maintaining modality-specific fidelity. To address these challenges, we present MIRROR, a novel multi-modal representation learning method designed to foster both modality alignment and retention. MIRROR employs dedicated encoders to extract comprehensive features for each modality, which is further complemented by a modality alignment module to achieve seamless integration between phenotype patterns and molecular profiles. Furthermore, a modality retention module safeguards unique attributes from each modality, while a style clustering module mitigates redundancy and enhances disease-relevant information by modeling and aligning consistent pathological signatures within a clustering space. Extensive evaluations on TCGA cohorts for cancer subtyping and survival analysis highlight MIRROR's superior performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in constructing comprehensive oncological feature representations and benefiting the cancer diagnosis.

Early diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subjective cognitive decline (SCD) utilizing multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a pivotal area of research. While various regional and connectivity features from functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been employed to develop diagnosis models, most studies integrate these features without adequately addressing their alignment and interactions. This limits the potential to fully exploit the synergistic contributions of combined features and modalities. To solve this gap, our study introduces a novel Hierarchical Alignments and Hierarchical Interactions (HA-HI) method for MCI and SCD classification, leveraging the combined strengths of fMRI and DTI. HA-HI efficiently learns significant MCI- or SCD- related regional and connectivity features by aligning various feature types and hierarchically maximizing their interactions. Furthermore, to enhance the interpretability of our approach, we have developed the Synergistic Activation Map (SAM) technique, revealing the critical brain regions and connections that are indicative of MCI/SCD. Comprehensive evaluations on the ADNI dataset and our self-collected data demonstrate that HA-HI outperforms other existing methods in diagnosing MCI and SCD, making it a potentially vital and interpretable tool for early detection. The implementation of this method is publicly accessible at https://github.com/ICI-BCI/Dual-MRI-HA-HI.git.

Large annotated datasets are essential for training robust Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) models for breast cancer detection or risk prediction. However, acquiring such datasets with fine-detailed annotation is both costly and time-consuming. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, which are pre-trained on large image-text pairs, offer a promising solution by enhancing robustness and data efficiency in medical imaging tasks. This paper introduces a novel Multi-View Mammography and Language Model for breast cancer classification and risk prediction, trained on a dataset of paired mammogram images and synthetic radiology reports. Our MV-MLM leverages multi-view supervision to learn rich representations from extensive radiology data by employing cross-modal self-supervision across image-text pairs. This includes multiple views and the corresponding pseudo-radiology reports. We propose a novel joint visual-textual learning strategy to enhance generalization and accuracy performance over different data types and tasks to distinguish breast tissues or cancer characteristics(calcification, mass) and utilize these patterns to understand mammography images and predict cancer risk. We evaluated our method on both private and publicly available datasets, demonstrating that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in three classification tasks: (1) malignancy classification, (2) subtype classification, and (3) image-based cancer risk prediction. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong data efficiency, outperforming existing fully supervised or VLM baselines while trained on synthetic text reports and without the need for actual radiology reports.

While Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer structural advantages for global planning, efficiently verifying that they arrive at correct answers via valid reasoning traces remains a critical challenge. In this work, we propose a geometric perspective: Reasoning on the Manifold. We hypothesize that valid generation trajectories reside as stable attractors on the high-density manifold of the learned distribution, whereas invalid paths exhibit off-manifold drift. To operationalize this, we introduce Bidirectional Manifold Consistency (BMC), a training-free, unsupervised metric that quantifies the stability of the generated sequence through a forward-masking and backward-reconstruction cycle. Empirically, we demonstrate BMC's versatility across the full reasoning lifecycle: (1) in Diagnosis, it serves as a robust discriminator of solution validity without ground truth answer; (2) in Inference, it enables rejection resampling to effectively concentrate computational resources on complex reasoning tasks; and (3) in Alignment, it functions as a dense geometric reward that transforms sparse outcome supervision into fine-grained guidance, empowering models to self-evolve beyond standard baselines. Our results establish intrinsic geometric stability as a robust indicator of correctness for dLLMs.

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in video understanding. However, these models still struggle to effectively perceive and exploit rich temporal information in videos when responding to user queries. Therefore, they often generate descriptions of events that are temporal inconsistent or causally implausible, causing severe hallucination issues. While most prior studies have focused on spatial hallucinations (e.g. object mismatches), temporal reasoning in video understanding remains relatively underexplored. To address this issue, we propose Self-Diagnostic Contrastive Decoding (SEASON), a training-free method that adaptively enhances temporal and spatial faithfulness for each output token. It achieves this by dynamically diagnosing each token's hallucination tendency and applying adaptive contrastive decoding against its corresponding temporal and spatial negatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEASON outperforms all existing training-free hallucination mitigation approaches on three hallucination examination benchmarks, while further improves VideoLLMs across four general video understanding benchmarks. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Emotional Support (ES) systems have long optimized a single objective: alleviating the user's emotional distress in the moment. We argue that a complementary need, helping users see themselves more clearly, defines a distinct paradigm we call Personality Support (PS). PS is not counseling or clinical intervention: it targets cognitive clarity and self-articulation, not symptom relief or diagnosis. We instantiate this paradigm in three layers. First, we present DSD, a Chinese self-discovery PS Dataset of 8,590 samples collected through real longitudinal interaction across five minimal units, Coach, Warm, Tsukkomi, Real, and Gonzo. Second, we build DeepSupport, a multi-persona PS system trained with OrthoTune, a PS-tailored framework with style-specific adapters and a style-consistency regularizer. Third, we unify the five DeepSupport personas into Ekova, a persistent personality-support agent with a unified cross-session memory layer, supporting both adaptive routing and user-customized persona selection. Experiments show that OrthoTune-trained models outperform all baselines with an average relative gain of 16.3% across all metrics over the strongest prompt-based baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/Yukyin/Ekova.

Clinical diagnosis is critical in medical practice, typically requiring a continuous and evolving process that includes primary diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and final diagnosis. However, most existing clinical diagnostic tasks are single-step processes, which does not align with the complex multi-step diagnostic procedures found in real-world clinical settings. In this paper, we propose a multi-step diagnostic task and annotate a clinical diagnostic dataset (MSDiagnosis). This dataset includes primary diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and final diagnosis questions. Additionally, we propose a novel and effective framework. This framework combines forward inference, backward inference, reflection, and refinement, enabling the LLM to self-evaluate and adjust its diagnostic results. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed method, we design and conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also provide a comprehensive experimental analysis and suggest future research directions for this task.

In standard hospital blood tests, the traditional process requires doctors to manually isolate leukocytes from microscopic images of patients' blood using microscopes. These isolated leukocytes are then categorized via automatic leukocyte classifiers to determine the proportion and volume of different types of leukocytes present in the blood samples, aiding disease diagnosis. This methodology is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it also has a high propensity for errors due to factors such as image quality and environmental conditions, which could potentially lead to incorrect subsequent classifications and misdiagnosis. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative method of leukocyte detection: the Multi-level Feature Fusion and Deformable Self-attention DETR (MFDS-DETR). To tackle the issue of leukocyte scale disparity, we designed the High-level Screening-feature Fusion Pyramid (HS-FPN), enabling multi-level fusion. This model uses high-level features as weights to filter low-level feature information via a channel attention module and then merges the screened information with the high-level features, thus enhancing the model's feature expression capability. Further, we address the issue of leukocyte feature scarcity by incorporating a multi-scale deformable self-attention module in the encoder and using the self-attention and cross-deformable attention mechanisms in the decoder, which aids in the extraction of the global features of the leukocyte feature maps. The effectiveness, superiority, and generalizability of the proposed MFDS-DETR method are confirmed through comparisons with other cutting-edge leukocyte detection models using the private WBCDD, public LISC and BCCD datasets. Our source code and private WBCCD dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/MFDS-DETR.

CI failure logs are large (median 5k lines, max 200k in this corpus) and noisy. Coding agents that try to debug them depend on an upstream tool to reduce the log to a manageable context, but the field has had no public empirical comparison of which reductions preserve enough evidence for downstream LLM diagnosis. We introduce LogDx-CI, a benchmark that compares 11 context-reduction tools (raw, tail, grep, three RTK modes, two real LLM map-reduce summarizers, three hybrid routers) on 35 real GitHub Actions failure cases, scored by 3 LLM debugger families (Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, OpenAI gpt-5-mini) plus a Sonnet 4.6 tool-using agent. We report three load-bearing findings. (1)~Hybrid grep+tail routers dominate the cost-quality Pareto frontier; the top two methods score 0.670 / 0.666 at sim \0.03 per case, same-ballpark quality as standalone grep at 4.5\times fewer tokens. (2)~In the agent-loop regime, the quality range across reduction tools collapses 7\times (single-shot spread 0.42 \to agent-loop spread 0.059); the agent rescues weak contexts via follow-up tool calls. However, cost differences persist: weak contexts force the agent to issue 2--4\times more tool calls to recover. (3)~A cross-family LLM-summary pair (gpt-5-mini summarizer feeding a Claude Haiku debugger) beats the same-family pair by +0.071 averaged across four diagnoser variants, falsifying the self-call-bias hypothesis on this task. The gpt-5-mini summarizer is also the agent-loop #1 method (score 0.749) at 0.37 tool-calls per case and 10\times lower reducer cost than the Haiku summarizer (0.18 vs \$1.75 per case). All data, code, per-case bundles, and reproducibility infrastructure are public.

Deploying learned control policies is risky because policies that appear robust in simulation can confidently enter out-of-distribution (OOD) states after Sim-to-Real transfer, causing silent failures and potential hardware damage. Existing anomaly detectors often fail to meet the requirements of high-rate control, extremely low false-positive rates, and interpretable failure feedback. We present RAPT (Recurrent Anomaly Probabilistic Trajectory Model), a lightweight, self-supervised 50\,Hz deployment monitor that learns nominal execution from large-scale simulation and produces calibrated, per-dimension predictive-deviation signals online. RAPT enables OOD detection under strict false-positive constraints while localizing when and where real execution departs from nominal behavior. For post-hoc diagnosis, RAPT combines temporal saliency, joint-kinematic summaries, and LLM-based semantic reasoning to classify likely failure causes in a zero-shot setting. In simulation across four Isaac Lab tasks, RAPT improves TPR by 37% over the strongest baseline at 0.5% episode-level FPR; on hardware, it achieves 89% TPR across 78 trials with fewer false positives than high-frequency-compatible baselines, and reaches 75% semantic failure diagnosis accuracy across 21 categories on a challenging OOD subset. Project website, code, and videos: https://humphreymunn.github.io/RAPT/.

Time-series diagnostic systems rarely rely on retrieving relevant historical cases, and when they do, retrieval is evaluated only indirectly through downstream prediction. We introduce READ-Bench, a benchmark for historical-case retrieval across 12 diagnostic datasets, centered on multivariate time series, that defines relevance by shared fault or event type rather than signal shape, so visually different traces of the same fault count as relevant while similar-looking traces of different faults do not. Treating retrieval as a base retriever followed by a reranker, we evaluate classical distances, symbolic retrievers, self-supervised and foundation-model embedders, and their fusion, plus label-aware and language-model rerankers, under one protocol that varies supervision, pollution, and corpus scale with significance testing. Under a common channel-independent interface, pretrained representations offer no statistically detectable advantage over strong classical and symbolic baselines for search alone. The decisive factor is a small amount of resolved-case supervision at reranking, namely a Gaussian-process reranker that propagates a few neighbor labels in embedding space, which helps far more than more sophisticated representations or language-model reasoning and holds under pollution and at full corpus scale. Guided by these findings, we fuse a normal-residual-scored embedder with a dynamic time warping leg via reciprocal-rank fusion, then rerank with the Gaussian-process reranker, improving NDCG@10 over its own search stage on all 12 datasets, by +0.11 from reranking and +0.16 over the strongest single base retriever.

Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

This paper systematically diagnoses the training failure modes of Token-Choice sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) on video Diffusion Transformers. Starting from a pretrained dense model of about 5 billion parameters, we convert it into an MoE architecture following three laws: routed experts exactly clone the original FFN weights, shared experts are initialized to zero for verification and then to extremely small non-zero noise for actual training, while only the gating networks start from random initialization. Experiments reveal a hierarchy of five failure modes: (1) linear routers suffer global soft saturation with complete expert homogenization; (2) MLP routers introduce selective deadlock, where roughly one-third of layers degenerate into a single-expert mode that cannot be prevented by increasing the auxiliary loss; (3) cross-attention routers exhibit preliminary self-recovery, yet about nine layers remain stubbornly deadlocked; (4) deadlocked layers display a U-shaped distribution, concentrated in shallow visual processing layers and deep semantic integration layers; (5) bfloat16 mixed precision causes tiny weight updates to be truncated to zero by hardware. Based on routing decision time series over 65 million tokens across 5,000 training steps, we propose the Functional Redundancy Hypothesis: deadlock is a rational waiting strategy before the shared expert matures within the gate-shared expert-routed expert triadic system. This hypothesis is supported by the theory of functional redundancy in systems biology. On the engineering side, we summarize the Three Laws of dense-to-MoE conversion and provide a complete solution for the bfloat16 precision trap. We calibrate the current capability boundary of the Token-Choice paradigm and outline a three-step evolutionary roadmap from visual unification to a world model.

LLM-based autonomous agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool use, yet remain limited when tasks require sustained coordination across roles, tools, and environments. Multi-agent systems address this through structured collaboration among specialized agents, but tighter coordination also amplifies a less explored risk: errors can propagate across agents and interaction rounds, producing failures that are difficult to diagnose and rarely translate into structural self-improvement. Existing surveys cover individual agent capabilities, multi-agent collaboration, or agent self-evolution separately, leaving the causal dependencies among them unexamined. This survey provides a unified review organized around four causally linked stages, which we term the LIFE progression: Lay the capability foundation, Integrate agents through collaboration, Find faults through attribution, and Evolve through autonomous self-improvement. For each stage, we provide systematic taxonomies and formally characterize the dependencies between adjacent stages, revealing how each stage both depends on and constrains the next. Beyond synthesizing existing work, we identify open challenges at stage boundaries and propose a cross-stage research agenda for closed-loop multi-agent systems capable of continuously diagnosing failures, reorganizing structures, and refining agent behaviors, extending current coordination frameworks toward more self-organizing forms of collective intelligence. By bridging these previously fragmented research threads, this survey aims to offer both a systematic reference and a conceptual roadmap toward autonomous, self-improving multi-agent intelligence.

A generalist robot should not only perform diverse tasks but also improve through experience, turning what it learns during execution into capabilities that later tasks can reuse. Robot agents that act through code can already repair programs from execution feedback, yet it remains a central challenge to organize this experience around the task structure that gives it meaning, so that each repair is attributed to the responsible capability, supported by execution evidence, and validated before it is reused. We introduce RoboRSI, a robot self-improvement system built on Top-Down Skill Refinement (TSR). TSR decomposes tasks into compound, atomic, and base skills with scoped responsibilities and explicit input--output contracts, attributes each execution outcome to the responsible branch, and confines revision to that branch. Building upon this structure, a Manager, Planner, Engineer, and Reviewer coordinate planning, execution, diagnosis, and the validated release of new skills, while people steer the process through objectives and corrections; stable skill sequences are further consolidated into reusable compound skills. On a mobile manipulator, RoboRSI develops multi-object household cleanup over 104 rounds. In simulation, it achieves the highest success rate on LIBERO, LIBERO-PRO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin, exceeding the strongest baseline by 2.7 to 11.0 percentage points.

POST-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic and debilitating mental condition that is developed in response to catastrophic life events, such as military combat, sexual assault, and natural disasters. PTSD is characterized by flashbacks of past traumatic events, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, hypervigilance, and sleep disturbance, all of which affect a person's life and lead to considerable social, occupational, and interpersonal dysfunction. The diagnosis of PTSD is done by medical professionals using self-assessment questionnaire of PTSD symptoms as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In this paper, and for the first time, we collected, annotated, and prepared for public distribution a new video database for automatic PTSD diagnosis, called PTSD in the wild dataset. The database exhibits "natural" and big variability in acquisition conditions with different pose, facial expression, lighting, focus, resolution, age, gender, race, occlusions and background. In addition to describing the details of the dataset collection, we provide a benchmark for evaluating computer vision and machine learning based approaches on PTSD in the wild dataset. In addition, we propose and we evaluate a deep learning based approach for PTSD detection in respect to the given benchmark. The proposed approach shows very promising results. Interested researcher can download a copy of PTSD-in-the wild dataset from: http://www.lissi.fr/PTSD-Dataset/

Monocular world-space human recovery methods excel on current benchmarks, but these rarely include fast camera motion. We introduce the K-Pop stress test, broadcast dance videos that combine fast, large camera motion with dense multi-person choreography. Leading methods produce plausible per-frame meshes on these videos, yet their world-space trajectories drift far from the performers' stage positions. Through a systematic diagnosis, we show that the camera and human estimates each remain self-consistent, and that the drift appears when they are combined at mismatched scales. Each is recovered at its own scale, so a mismatch between the two can turn camera motion into human drift that grows with camera displacement and becomes severe in broadcast dance videos. We derive a closed-form correction that estimates this mismatch and applies one scale to all performers, removing the drift while keeping their relative positions in one shared world frame. It requires no retraining and works with existing backends. Combined with physical constraints, the correction yields stable world-space reconstruction for choreography modeling, scene editing, data generation, and virtual reshooting.

Self-supervised respiratory encoders lack semantic grounding in clinical domain needed for zero-shot inference, limiting their utility without task-specific labeled data. We propose a framework that aligns these encoders with medical terminology in a shared latent space turning them into a zero-shot-capable foundation model. To address paired data scarcity, we use a medical LLM to synthesize structured reports from metadata, creating dense semantic anchors for contrastive learning. Our training combines a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with encoder's native SSL objective and similarity-aware negative sampling to sharpen pathological boundaries. Across 9 tasks on 6 datasets, our method achieves a 61.3% mean zero-shot AUC, surpassing CLAP (51.4%) and Qwen2-Audio (54.9%) while reaching the highest linear probing AUC (71.6%) with only 43% of data used by full-scale baselines, showing that structured semantic alignment outperforms large-scale, general-purpose models in clinical diagnostics.

Whole slide imaging (WSI) has transformed digital pathology by enabling computational analysis of gigapixel histopathology images. Recent foundation model advances have accelerated progress in computational pathology, facilitating joint reasoning across pathology images, clinical reports, and structured data. Despite this progress, challenges remain: the extreme resolution of WSIs creates computational hurdles for visual learning; limited expert annotations constrain supervised approaches; integrating multimodal information while preserving biological interpretability remains difficult; and the opacity of modeling ultra-long visual sequences hinders clinical transparency. This review comprehensively surveys recent advances in multimodal computational pathology. We systematically analyze four research directions: (1) self-supervised representation learning and structure-aware token compression for WSIs; (2) multimodal data generation and augmentation; (3) parameter-efficient adaptation and reasoning-enhanced few-shot learning; and (4) multi-agent collaborative reasoning for trustworthy diagnosis. We specifically examine how token compression enables cross-scale modeling and how multi-agent mechanisms simulate a pathologist's "Chain of Thought" across magnifications to achieve uncertainty-aware evidence fusion. Finally, we discuss open challenges and argue that future progress depends on unified multimodal frameworks integrating high-resolution visual data with clinical and biomedical knowledge to support interpretable and safe AI-assisted diagnosis.

Knowledge graph (KG) embedding has been used to benefit the diagnosis of animal diseases by analyzing electronic medical records (EMRs), such as notes and veterinary records. However, learning representations to capture entities and relations with literal information in KGs is challenging as the KGs show heterogeneous properties and various types of literal information. Meanwhile, the existing methods mostly aim to preserve graph structures surrounding target nodes without considering different types of literals, which could also carry significant information. In this paper, we propose a knowledge graph embedding model for the efficient diagnosis of animal diseases, which could learn various types of literal information and graph structure and fuse them into unified representations, namely LiteralKG. Specifically, we construct a knowledge graph that is built from EMRs along with literal information collected from various animal hospitals. We then fuse different types of entities and node feature information into unified vector representations through gate networks. Finally, we propose a self-supervised learning task to learn graph structure in pretext tasks and then towards various downstream tasks. Experimental results on link prediction tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms the baselines that consist of state-of-the-art models. The source code is available at https://github.com/NSLab-CUK/LiteralKG.

Generative music systems can now produce impressive audio from text prompts, but audio outputs are difficult to inspect, edit, and diagnose as musical structure. We introduce Libretto, an agent-facing framework for symbolic music generation and revision. Libretto uses an LLM-native grammar with explicit onset slots, voices, and bar-level organization, then evaluates each piece in a corpus-calibrated statistical space over rhythm, harmony, melody, texture, form, and variation. The same structural axes support retrieval, diagnosis, copy-risk control, and iterative self-revision. Across gap filling, reference-guided full-piece generation, gradual morphing, and educational music generation, Libretto turns symbolic music from a raw token sequence into a measurable and editable object for language-model agents.

Enhancing yield is recognized as a paramount driver to reducing production costs in semiconductor smart manufacturing. However, optimizing and ensuring high yield rates is a highly complex and technical challenge, especially while maintaining reliable yield diagnosis and prognosis, and this shall require understanding all the confounding factors in a complex condition. This study proposes a domain-specific explainable automated machine learning technique (termed xAutoML), which autonomously self-learns the optimal models for yield prediction, with an extent of explainability, and also provides insights on key diagnosis factors. The xAutoML incorporates tailored problem-solving functionalities in an auto-optimization pipeline to address the intricacies of semiconductor yield enhancement. Firstly, to capture the key diagnosis factors, knowledge-informed feature extraction coupled with model-agnostic key feature selection is designed. Secondly, combined algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning with adaptive loss are developed to generate optimized classifiers for better defect prediction, and adaptively evolve in response to shifting data patterns. Moreover, a suite of explainability tools is provided throughout the AutoML pipeline, enhancing user understanding and fostering trust in the automated processes. The proposed xAutoML exhibits superior performance, with domain-specific refined countermeasures, adaptive optimization capabilities, and embedded explainability. Findings exhibit that the proposed xAutoML is a compelling solution for semiconductor yield improvement, defect diagnosis, and related applications.

Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users' language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions through their language.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) efficiently scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but is bottlenecked by scarce labeled data. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards (RLIR) offers a scalable alternative via self-rewarding, yet often suffers from instability and inferior performance. We trace this gap to a systemic bias in confidence-coupled self-rewarding: the model tends to over-reward high-confidence mistakes, forming a self-confirming loop. We quantify this feedback-loop bias with three metrics: reward noise magnitude (rho_noise), policy-reward coupling (rho_selfbias), and over-/under-reward skew (rho_symbias). Our analyses show a compounding effect where strong coupling amplifies confidence-conditioned errors and drives a drift toward over-reward, leading to instability and a lower performance ceiling. To mitigate this, we propose reinforcement learning with ensembled rewards (RLER), which aggregates diverse models with adaptive reward interpolation and disagreement-aware rollout selection to reduce coupling and suppress over-reward drift. Extensive experiments show that RLER improves by 6.2% over the best RLIR baseline and is within 3.6% of RLVR, while exhibiting stable scaling on unlabeled samples.

Self-evolving search agents build their own training curricula by jointly optimizing a proposer that generates questions and a solver that answers them. This closed loop introduces a failure mode we call co-cheating: the proposer and solver increasingly agree on shared errors, so internal reward improves without a matching gain in external correctness. A post-hoc audit against source evidence shows co-cheating growing more severe over successive rounds of self-evolution, with pseudo-label correctness stagnating or declining even as the in-loop training signal improves. The most direct mitigation is to verify proposals before training: we introduce multi-sample verification (MSV), which queries the same model three times with the source and three times without it to decide task admission and replace unreliable pseudo-labels. MSV partially reduces false agreement but leaves substantial residual co-cheating and costs six extra labeler generations per candidate. These limitations motivate CrossFit, our main method: it partitions the proposer's source documents into groups A and B; questions generated from A are scored by an auxiliary solver trained only on B, and vice versa. The cross-fitted agreement determines proposer reward, so a same-source pseudo-label cannot be reproduced through the feedback solver, while the original solver's update rule is unchanged. Rerunning the loop with Qwen3.5-4B and Qwen3.5-9B, MSV reduces false-agreement mass from 6.1% to 5.7% and from 8.8% to 7.2%, whereas CrossFit reduces it to 3.0% and 3.7%. Replaying identical proposals with source-excluded feedback further reduces false agreement to 0.4% and 0.1%, isolating feedback ancestry from curriculum changes. Across seven downstream search benchmarks, CrossFit improves average performance over standard coupled self-evolution by 8.8 and 8.4 points and over Search-R1 by 8.7 and 7.8 points at 4B and 9B.

Terminal agents rely on self-verification to assess and correct their solutions as they solve tasks through interaction with command-line environments. Yet how trustworthy such self-verification is remains poorly understood. To investigate this question systematically, we introduce a diagnostic framework that identifies the first complete solution in each trajectory, determines whether it is objectively correct, and uses this ground truth to quantify the agent's subsequent verification and recovery behavior. Applying it to ten terminal agents on TerminalBench2.1, we find that verification is nearly universal after a complete candidate is formed, yet only 61.43\% of incorrect candidates are detected and only 49.36\% of detected errors are successfully repaired. These results show that the main weakness in self-verification lies not in initiating verification, but in detecting and repairing errors. Motivated by these findings, we propose Student-Conditioned Verification Distillation (SCVD), which lets the student first produce a candidate solution and distills a stronger teacher's subsequent verification and recovery from the same interaction context. Across three Qwen3.5 backbones, SCVD improves Pass@1 on TerminalBench2.1 by 9.74--16.85 percentage points over the corresponding base models and by 4.49--8.61 points over the standard full-trajectory distillation, while avoiding the pronounced out-of-distribution degradation of full-trajectory distillation on SWE-bench Verified.

3D structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans are commonly acquired in clinical settings to monitor a wide range of neurological conditions, including neurodegenerative disorders and stroke. While deep learning models have shown promising results analyzing 3D MRI across a number of brain imaging tasks, most are highly tailored for specific tasks with limited labeled data, and are not able to generalize across tasks and/or populations. The development of self-supervised learning (SSL) has enabled the creation of large medical foundation models that leverage diverse, unlabeled datasets ranging from healthy to diseased data, showing significant success in 2D medical imaging applications. However, even the very few foundation models for 3D brain MRI that have been developed remain limited in resolution, scope, or accessibility. In this work, we present a general, high-resolution SimCLR-based SSL foundation model for 3D brain structural MRI, pre-trained on 18,759 patients (44,958 scans) from 11 publicly available datasets spanning diverse neurological diseases. We compare our model to Masked Autoencoders (MAE), as well as two supervised baselines, on four diverse downstream prediction tasks in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. Our fine-tuned SimCLR model outperforms all other models across all tasks. Notably, our model still achieves superior performance when fine-tuned using only 20% of labeled training samples for predicting Alzheimer's disease. We use publicly available code and data, and release our trained model at https://github.com/emilykaczmarek/3D-Neuro-SimCLR, contributing a broadly applicable and accessible foundation model for clinical brain MRI analysis.

Information retrieval is increasingly important as LLM agents tackle complex tasks involving diverse information needs. Because retrieval relies on an index that represents each document through index keys, retrieval quality depends heavily on how effectively these keys expose the knowledge contained in each document. However, effective index representations vary across retrieval environments, making it difficult for any fixed optimization strategy to perform consistently. Yet evolving an index to its retrieval environment remains largely human-driven, requiring humans to diagnose retrieval failures, refine the optimization strategy, and reprocess the index accordingly. We propose SELF-INDEX, a framework that enables an index to self-evolve without human intervention. Its Optimizer autonomously diagnoses retrieval shortfalls, selectively revises the responsible index keys, and validates each revision before updating the index. Beyond reacting to observed retrieval demands, SELF-INDEX proactively explores additional demands through a Query Simulator, allowing the index to evolve beyond the queries already available for optimization. Across diverse corpora and retrievers, SELF-INDEX consistently improves retrieval performance while outperforming existing index optimization methods. We further show that these benefits extend to downstream applications, improving the effectiveness and efficiency of search agents and helping agent memory systems retrieve useful past interactions.

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex tasks, including code generation, tool use, and multi-hop question answering. Existing self-improvement methods enhance agent performance through model optimization, harness evolution, and executable artifact refinement, while recursive self-improvement (RSI) further extends optimization to the improvement mechanisms themselves. However, adapting self-improvement workflows to evolving performance bottlenecks while improving workflow orchestration through execution feedback remains a key challenge. We propose RSIFlow, a Recursive Self-Improvement framework that integrates adaptive workflow orchestration with meta-agent capability evolution. RSIFlow diagnoses performance bottlenecks from task-agent trajectories and environmental feedback to dynamically select component-specific improvement workflows. The meta-agent then distills workflow outcomes into component-specific skills and cross-component principles, evolving its own harness to improve subsequent workflow orchestration. Experiments across six benchmarks and two backbone models show that RSIFlow achieves the SOTA average performance on all benchmarks. Ablation studies further demonstrate the contributions of adaptive workflow orchestration and meta-harness evolution. Code is available at https://github.com/1HUAN1/RSI-Flow.

A foundation model should not act in isolation as an embodied agent. Yet, existing methods often optimize individual components of the agent stack, such as memory, context, skills, or action interfaces, rather than treating the supporting system itself as a unified policy. Moreover, interaction alone does not yield self-improvement unless execution experience is converted into persistent, validated system changes. We therefore propose RoboFoundry, the first embodied agentic framework that formulates this process as Self-Evolving System-as-Policy. RoboFoundry diagnoses capability gaps in decision-making and memory management, converts execution traces into validated task-specific system updates, and promotes recurring improvements to the general system. Evolution operates over two complementary surfaces: a context system that manages active internal context and persistent file-system memory, and a hierarchical skill system that organizes atomic skills, reusable compositions, and failure-conditioned recovery. A shared semantic interface separates embodiment-invariant decisions from embodiment-specific execution, allowing evolved system capabilities to transfer across heterogeneous robots. On EmbodiedBench, RoboFoundry achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably improving GPT-5.5 by 27.8%. It also brings Qwen3.7-Plus to near parity with GPT-5.5 (70.3% vs. 72.7%), showing consistent gains from system-as-policy evolution across foundation models. For long-horizon memory, RoboFoundry outperforms all baselines on RoboMemArena by at least 39.0%, even against methods assisted by external foundation models. On LIBERO-PRO, it further outperforms Cap-Agent0 by 243.8%-679.7% across all perturbation types. In real-world deployments, RoboFoundry demonstrates zero-shot transfer and online evolution across robots and tasks, highlighting its potential for fully autonomous embodied agents.

LLM agents increasingly rely on agent harness: the runtime infrastructure around the base model that defines execution environments, tool interfaces, context, lifecycle orchestration, observability, verification, and governance. Existing self-improving agents and automatic harness evolution methods mainly improve agents through runtime supervision, prompt optimization, workflow search, or harness modification based on final outcomes. However, they often fail to diagnose where the responsible evidence lies in failed trajectories and which harness implementation mechanism causes the unreliable behavior, resulting in broad, indirect, or poorly scoped changes. This paper proposes HarnessFix, a trace-grounded and diagnosis-driven framework for repairing agent harnesses. HarnessFix compiles raw execution traces and harness artifacts into a Harness-aware Trace Intermediate Representation (HTIR), which normalizes fragmented trajectory evidence, captures step-level data-flow and control-flow relations, and aligns runtime steps with the harness artifacts that shape their behavior. It then attributes failures to responsible steps and harness artifacts, and consolidates recurring diagnoses into repair-oriented flaw records. Finally, HarnessFix maps these records to scoped repair operators, generates patches under flaw-specific repair specifications, and accepts them through regression-aware validation. We evaluate HarnessFix on four popular benchmarks, and results show that it improves the performance over the initial harnesses by 6.3% to 18.4%, significantly outperforming human-designed and self-evolution baselines. HarnessFix highlights the value of treating failed trajectories not only as feedback signals, but also as structured evidence for diagnosing and repairing the harness mechanisms behind agent failures.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which a system also improves the way it improves, is a long-standing aspiration on the path to AGI. Language agents increasingly store procedural knowledge in reusable skills. Optimizing skills offers a direct way to achieve RSI, because the optimization procedure itself can be encoded as a skill. Existing skill optimizers, however, follow a hand-designed procedure. Even methods that evolve a meta-skill confine it to a fixed pipeline and relearn it for each task. We present Skill^{infty}, which makes skill optimization recursively self-improving: a meta agent follows a meta-skill to optimize task skills and optimizes the meta-skill itself using the same procedure. The optimization is agent-led. The meta agent diagnoses execution traces, proposes candidates, requests independent reviews, and allocates the search budget. The meta-skill defines these steps, allowing self-improvement to rewrite them. This meta-skill is also decoupled from task skills, refined on multiple skill optimization tasks and then reused to optimize task skills across diverse domains. As in deployment, skills at both levels are standard packages loaded through native skill discovery. On 83 SkillsBench tasks, Skill^{infty} reaches a pass rate of 60.7%, compared with 56.4% for human-curated skills and 54.5% for SkillEvolver.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with external environments and accumulate substantial behavioral experience, yet existing agent benchmarks largely evaluate them as fixed policies. It therefore remains unclear whether an agent can actively test its behavior, judge the resulting experience, and use that experience to improve future decisions. We introduce S\textsuperscript{3Gym}, an interactive benchmark for evaluating LLM self-improvement through three coupled capabilities: Self-Testing, Self-Judging, and Self-Improvement. S^3Gym separates permissive exploration from strict held-out evaluation and instantiates this protocol in seven text-based games with executable environment verifiers. We evaluate three pathways for incorporating interaction experience: direct History ICL, score-conditioned Summary Memory, and parameter Training. Our experiments reveal that self-improvement is neither automatic nor uniform. Context-level experience improves performance for several model--game pairs, but the most effective pathway depends strongly on the task structure: summaries are beneficial when experience can be compressed into reusable strategic rules, yet often underperform raw history when success depends on precise, state-contingent information. Parameter training produces substantial gains on some tasks, but also exhibits unstable improvement and severe negative transfer on others. These findings show that recognizing successful actions is insufficient; agents must also transform feedback into executable and transferable policies. S^3Gym provides a unified framework for diagnosing this process and identifying the bottlenecks that prevent agents from translating interaction experience into reliable self-improvement.

A central challenge for scientific agents is to turn analytical experience into reusable expertise grounded in physical evidence. Here we introduce Gan Jiang, a self-learning agent for powder X-ray diffraction built on a diffraction-analysis ecosystem we developed: XMatcher, XQueryer, XDecomposer and WPEM. Together, these engines span phase identification, multiphase decomposition and physics-constrained whole-pattern modelling. Gan Jiang converts analytical experience into executable skills by diagnosing failures, revising skill instructions and code, and validating revisions before reuse, without retraining the language model or changing the underlying physical models. Skills selected using development data and frozen before held-out evaluation achieve higher refinement scores than the original expert-designed skills across FullProf, GSAS-II and PyWPEM. The agent resolves strongly overlapping reflections, quantifies a five-phase ancient Egyptian cosmetic, tracks lattice evolution in an operating battery and compares atomic configurations in a disordered oxide catalyst. On DeltaXRDbench, it leads the evaluated methods in single- and multiphase identification across simulated and experimental data. Without supplied composition, single-phase top-1 accuracies reach 96.30\%, 81.78\% and 40.83\% on MP500, RRUFF and opXRD, respectively, compared with 58.00\%, 58.47\% and 26.45\% for the strongest comparator. These results demonstrate how an integrated scientific tool ecosystem can support agents that extract structural knowledge from measurements while accumulating validated analytical expertise that transfers to new samples.

Video understanding agents acquire evidence through an executable harness that controls what they observe and how they use those observations. However, execution traces contain only the evidence acquired by the current harness, leaving competing explanations for failure unresolved and limiting the basis for self-improvement. We introduce Video-RSI, a framework for recursive self-improvement in which a video understanding agent uses its own language model to revise its harness. Through active video investigation, the model revisits the original training videos to test competing failure explanations with additional observations, grounding proposed changes in evidence beyond the existing trace. Cost-aware harness evolution turns these diagnoses into reusable revisions and determines which revisions to retain by considering both answer accuracy and visual cost. Across our evaluation settings on video understanding benchmarks, the evolved agent improves accuracy while processing fewer frames and achieves competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-offs against existing video understanding agents. These results demonstrate the potential for video understanding agents to improve their own evidence acquisition and use through harness evolution. Code is available at https://github.com/bingjunluo/Video-RSI .

Time series agents answer analytical questions by calling external tools, and which tools they carry is decided by people before the agent runs. However, we identify two failures in this setup. Human-Agent Tool Misalignment: a library of 21 expert-curated tools helps on some tasks and hurts on others, dropping anomaly accuracy under every backbone we test. Silent Harm: one round of generic self-revision changes 147 answers and breaks 56 of them, while the final score moves by less than a point. Both follow from the same gap: whether a tool helps is decided question by question at runtime, while tools are supplied in advance and judged by a single average. To address this, we propose TimeEvo, which clusters an agent's diagnosed failures into capability gaps, plans a measurement for each, synthesizes evidence-only tools that fill them, and admits the candidate library only through a paired admission gate. Experiments on ten time series QA tasks and three backbones show that TimeEvo, starting from an empty library, improves accuracy on every task and every backbone, and that a library grown on a cheap model still gains when it is installed into stronger ones. Code is available at https://github.com/Muyiiiii/TimeEvo.

An LLM agent's real-task performance is shaped as much by the harness around its model as by the frozen model itself: its prompts, injected knowledge, runtime control, and configuration. In deployment the harness is often the only lever available, so improving it automatically is the natural way to raise performance without touching the weights. The hard part is not generating changes but knowing which one truly helped. Self-generated feedback is noisy, and an apparent gain can be a measurement artifact or an edit that merely overfits the tasks it was tuned on. We present a self-evolving agent-harness framework that separates proposing changes from crediting them: a language model diagnoses failures and proposes patches, while all sampling, measurement, and significance testing are owned by deterministic code, so every credited improvement is trustworthy by construction. Patches populate a gated, categorical quality-diversity archive (GSME) keyed on the (WHERE x WHY) pathology an edit addresses rather than the tasks it fixes, an anti-overfitting inductive bias; generalization is measured on a sealed test scored only after evolution. Across seven domains with a frozen open-weight model, the harness is train-selected and scored once on a sealed test; its credited gains there are +9 to +15.5pp and retain 86-147% of the training gain, evidence they generalize rather than overfit. The winning patch tracks the model's dominant pathology, not its size or family: changing the model can change the pathology and the patch, while the same pathology-to-patch match recurs across two model families. What transfers is the diagnose-and-credit loop, not any specific harness.

The classification of sleep stages is a pivotal aspect of diagnosing sleep disorders and evaluating sleep quality. However, the conventional manual scoring process, conducted by clinicians, is time-consuming and prone to human bias. Recent advancements in deep learning have substantially propelled the automation of sleep stage classification. Nevertheless, challenges persist, including the need for large datasets with labels and the inherent biases in human-generated annotations. This paper introduces NeuroNet, a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework designed to effectively harness unlabeled single-channel sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by integrating contrastive learning tasks and masked prediction tasks. NeuroNet demonstrates superior performance over existing SSL methodologies through extensive experimentation conducted across three polysomnography (PSG) datasets. Additionally, this study proposes a Mamba-based temporal context module to capture the relationships among diverse EEG epochs. Combining NeuroNet with the Mamba-based temporal context module has demonstrated the capability to achieve, or even surpass, the performance of the latest supervised learning methodologies, even with a limited amount of labeled data. This study is expected to establish a new benchmark in sleep stage classification, promising to guide future research and applications in the field of sleep analysis.

Long-horizon LLM agents can fail quietly: they settle on one reading of the evidence early, then spend the rest of the run defending it. We call this premature commitment. Final-answer scoring misses the failure mode because it sees only the answer, not whether the process has already collapsed to a stable path. We define representational commitment as cross-run hidden-state convergence at a fixed reasoning step, and use it as an early diagnostic of trajectory consistency. On Llama-3.1-70B running ReAct on HotpotQA, step-4 hidden-state similarity predicts downstream behavioral consistency (r = -0.35, partial r = -0.45), with a localized temporal and layer-wise signature. The signal replicates across Qwen-2.5-72B and Phi-3-14B, and on StrategyQA (r = -0.83). It does not track correctness: committed-wrong and committed-correct questions are not separable in activation similarity. That boundary is central to the claim. Commitment tells us whether an agent has settled, not whether it is right. A runtime monitor detects inconsistent trajectories from hidden states at AUROC up to 0.97 (0.85--0.88 under a stricter split), and a prompting intervention cuts behavioral variance by 28% against a token-matched control while leaving accuracy statistically unchanged. We also test whether the signal can route self-consistency compute; on a harder benchmark it helps only modestly and is matched by a simpler output-based baseline. The result is a diagnostic for a hidden process failure, with clear limits rather than a general accuracy lever.

Regulating the latent space to an isotropic Gaussian distribution provides a stable and information-maximized landscape for world model planning. However, the latent space property and successful planning remain disconnected. We first study this by comparing SIGReg and VISReg, two regularization loss functions with the same distribution target but different properties. Compared with SIGReg, VISReg has more flexibility in controlling the weights of center, scale, and shape regularization, and a larger batch size brings a finer distribution approximation. We find that the former, despite being beneficial in self-supervised learning (SSL), does not help the planning, whereas the latter improves the planning success on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets. This motivates a deep understanding of the factors that correlate with the success rate. Unlike the previous metrics focusing on the encoded latent only, we propose the Veracity-Influence-Sobriety score (VIScore), a metric that quantifies the reachability and capacity of a predictor given the encoded feature, and the hallucination of the searching-based planner. Compared with straightness, physical-state probing, and empowerment, we show that, with the measurement covering encoder, predictor, and planner, VIScore explains the success rate better than the others, as reflected by a strong Spearman correlation. Specifically, VIScore consistently achieves a Spearman correlation over 0.75 on both seen and unseen models and datasets on the cross-task success rate pool. Moreover, VIScore is the only metric that has a calibration error below the constant fit across all testing scenarios, showcasing the importance of these three aspects in planning success. We hope this metric can help future studies on world model design and diagnosis.

End-to-end full-duplex spoken dialogue models enable natural, real-time spoken interactions with interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. Prior evaluations have assessed diverse interaction capabilities and identified some degradation patterns across conversational turns. However, how model behavior evolves over extended sessions remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we address this gap by systematically characterizing long-session degradation and developing efficient methods to mitigate it. We introduce a closed-loop evaluation framework for long-session stability and apply it to several publicly available full-duplex speech models, revealing degradation over time in responsiveness, spoken content quality, and voice consistency. To mitigate this degradation, we propose a self-distillation-based training framework for lightweight LoRA adaptation that improves long-session stability with a small amount of additional training. We further introduce a two-resolution context (TRC) architecture that preserves recent interactions in full detail while compressing older interaction history into key-value representations. We evaluate our methods on three models with distinct architectures, assessing long-session stability, information retention, and computational efficiency. Across all three models, we show that LoRA adaptation mitigates performance degradation over ten-minute sessions, while adding TRC extends these gains beyond the training session length and reduces KV-cache growth by more than 90%.

When an AI agent calls an API and hits a validation error, it needs more than what went wrong -- it needs what to do next. A self-reflective API returns, on validation failure, a machine-readable recovery\_feedback.suggestions[] payload sufficient for the agent to repair the request and retry without external reasoning. On a leak-audited pilot (N{=}30 per cell, 3 LLMs, 10 adversarial tasks), structured suggestions lift task-completion rate by +36.7--40.0pp over plain-English diagnoses on Anthropic models (Fisher's exact p le 0.0022), at 1.8--2.2times better per-success token efficiency. The lift is not significant on gpt-4o-mini (p{=}0.435); a second-domain replication on a billing API confirms the pattern. The comparison only holds after auditing two undocumented classes of answer leakage in LLM benchmarks. We shipaudit\_prompt\_leakage.py as reusable CI infrastructure. Code and data: https://github.com/arquicanedo/self-reflective-apis.

Large language model (LLM) agents operate over long, multi-session interactions in which facts change: a user moves, a price updates, a plan is revised. Acting correctly requires using the current value of a fact and discarding values that have been superseded. We isolate this ability on real conversational data and show that it is a distinct, unsolved failure. On the knowledge-update subset of LongMemEval, replacing an agent's full context with a bounded, self-maintained memory drops accuracy from 92% to 77% even on a frontier model (gpt-5.4), a gap that is statistically significant (paired McNemar p<0.005) and persists across model scale while full-context accuracy saturates near 92%. The bottleneck is therefore memory maintenance, not comprehension, and is not closed by a stronger model. We then ask whether this is merely an undersized memory, and find it is not: as the conversation grows 24x, accuracy falls further (from 68% to 28%), and granting the agent proportionally more memory yields no detectable recovery (28% to 28%, n=25). The failure scales with the length of the conversation, not the compression ratio. We release Supersede, an open reinforcement-learning environment (on the verifiers / prime-rl stack) that turns this measurement into a training signal: agents are rewarded for answering from the current value and penalized for stale ones. Finally, we close the loop and show the gap is trainable: GRPO fine-tuning a small open model (Qwen2.5-3B) on this environment nearly doubles its held-out supersession accuracy on real, unseen conversations (9.0% to 16.7%, a single run), along a monotonic checkpoint curve indicating the learned policy, not the harness, carries the gain. To our knowledge this is the first trainable environment whose reward targets temporal fact-currency, and the first evidence the supersession gap can be trained down, not only measured.

Recursive self-improvement requires turning evidence of model failures into better models. Data-centric post-training research entails diagnosing capability gaps, designing and validating training-data strategies, and learning from checkpoint feedback. Can LLM agents automate this loop? Existing benchmarks entangle research decisions with optimization, serving, evaluation, and systems implementation, obscuring agents' research capability. We introduce RSIBench-Data, a controlled benchmark of LLM agents as data-centric researchers with a fixed post-training stack. Agents iteratively revise training-data strategies for a fixed target model; training and serving use Tinker-backed services, official evaluation runs through Harbor and E2B sandboxes, and budgets are fixed across agents. We evaluate four frontier agents on six benchmarks across software engineering, terminal use, scientific question answering, and mathematics. Agents demonstrate core data-centric research capabilities: in 58.33\% of settings, they improve upon the first valid attempt by refining strategies from feedback. However, improvement is inconsistent. Among searches continuing after the best observed score, 78.26\% end with a lower-scoring final attempt, while the rest only recover the same peak. A strong candidate may therefore appear early or midway through a run even as later revisions fail. Trajectory analysis identifies four patterns in stronger runs: accurate hypotheses, validation-grounded supervision, behavior-aligned data, and preservation of strong checkpoints. These findings suggest that current agents can make useful data-centric discoveries but cannot yet translate feedback into consistent improvements. RSIBench-Data provides a measurable, auditable testbed for the research capabilities required for recursive self-improvement. We open-source our code at https://github.com/evolvent-ai/RSIBench-Data.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, correctness alone is insufficient. Reliable deployment requires maintaining truthful beliefs under contextual perturbations. Existing evaluations largely rely on point-wise confidence like Self-Consistency, which can mask brittle belief. We show that even facts answered with perfect self-consistency can rapidly collapse under mild contextual interference. To address this gap, we propose Neighbor-Consistency Belief (NCB), a structural measure of belief robustness that evaluates response coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. To validate the efficiency of NCB, we introduce a new cognitive stress-testing protocol that probes outputs stability under contextual interference. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that the performance of high-NCB data is relatively more resistant to interference. Finally, we present Structure-Aware Training (SAT), which optimizes context-invariant belief structure and reduces long-tail knowledge brittleness by approximately 30%. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/belief.

Production LLM agents often waste latency and reliability by regenerating code for the same procedural steps on every request. We replace this inference-time coding loop with an agentic tool-making pipeline that compiles repeated SOP steps into validated, versioned tools before deployment. The tool-maker grounds synthesis in the live environment as it collects execution traces, observes backend schemas and values, generates candidate tools, and repairs them against labeled cases. At runtime, the production agent calls these tools directly and falls back to code generation only when needed. We deploy the approach in a Fulfillment Center alarm-triage system, where an agent diagnoses alarms against a 44-node SOP over heterogeneous metric backends. In production, tool calls reduce p50 latency by 42%. On 1,500 historical alarms, they reduce end-to-end error rate by up to 53% by suppressing run-to-run variance in repeated steps. Because tools return compact structured verdicts, they also enable a simpler direct-call architecture, reducing p50 latency by a further 62% in a controlled ablation. Versioned tools also improve auditability and expose specification gaps and upstream data drift. Our results show that self-evolving agents can make industrial LLM systems faster, more reliable, and easier to operate.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round dialogue spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents by bridging traditional navigation datasets into a standardized benchmark, named VLN-MME. We simplify the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design. This flexibility streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by our framework, we observe that enhancing our baseline agent with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents.

Large language model agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex tasks in real-world environments. However, the knowledge required for correct behavior in these environments is often implicit, undisclosed, and subject to change over time. Recent continual-learning harnesses seek to address this challenge by enabling agents to improve from serving experience. Yet the effectiveness and limitations of these methods are not yet well characterized. Existing benchmarks provide only partial coverage: some explicitly provide the target knowledge, others assume a static environment, and those that support continual adaptation remain limited in scale and knowledge diversity. To enable systematic evaluation, we formalize an evolving-environment streaming dataset (EESD), in which agents must infer, apply, and revise latent environment knowledge from interaction and outcome feedback as hidden policies evolve, and introduce ServeLearnBench, spanning retail support, banking, and sales-pitch generation with 53 environment windows and 7,718 tasks. We evaluate five learning harnesses (RAG, Mem0, SkillOpt, Continual Harness, and Prime) across six models (GPT-5.6 Terra, Opus 5, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash), covering 28 model-harness pairs and 252 learning runs. Our evaluation reveals three main findings: a substantial gap remains between task capability and learning from experience; continual adaptation is costly and can degrade already-correct behavior; and insufficient exploration emerges as a key bottleneck to effective adaptation. Overall, ServeLearnBench provides a controlled testbed for diagnosing these limitations and tracking progress toward agents that continually and reliably improve through serving experience.

Harness evolution improves an LLM agent's prompts, tools, and workflow, while the optimizer's own tools and procedures often remain fixed. We study whether an optimizer can improve another agent more effectively by also improving how it diagnoses failures, develops edits, and tests their effects. Two observations guide our design. In a controlled study, optimizer self-evolution fails to improve performance without execution-based verification, but achieves the best result of that study when verification is available. Across five executors, self-evolving optimizers build their own tools for failure analysis, verification, training audits, and workflow control. Motivated by these findings, we introduce VERSE, a Verified Self-Evolving optimizer for agent harnesses. VERSE lets the optimizer test draft edits, replay failures, and perturb suspected steps before submission, while tracking fixes and regressions across rounds. Using this feedback, the optimizer revises both the executor harness and its own prompts, skills, tools, hooks, and notes, while the weights of the optimizer and executor models stay fixed. Under a shared protocol with disjoint training, validation, and test tasks, VERSE improves all four evaluated harness optimizers on held-out SWE-rebench tasks and newer out-of-distribution tasks in five languages. Its best validation-selected harness reaches 42.3% and 37.7% accuracy, respectively, against 39.2% and 29.3% for the strongest baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/wzekai/VERSE.

Self-supervised pretraining has expanded the pool of 3D medical foundation models, but published evaluations use different datasets, endpoints and fine-tuning protocols. Models also differ in architecture, pretraining objective and data, while downstream targets range from voxel-level masks to patient-level diagnoses and outcomes. As a result, published findings provide little directly comparable evidence for choosing a model for a new task. Direct comparison of adaptation performance requires fine-tuning candidates on labelled target data, at substantial computational cost. We benchmark 23 candidates across the same 14 segmentation, classification and regression tasks spanning multiple anatomies and modalities. No candidate ranked among the top three across all segmentation tasks or across all classification and regression tasks; a convolutional encoder could outperform a transformer trained with the same objective on one task but underperform it on another. We benchmark transferability estimators against the fine-tuned rankings and find that their agreement varies across dense segmentation, classification and regression. InsightRank uses task-appropriate frozen-feature statistics and architecture-aware pairwise comparisons to rank candidates before fine-tuning. Across the 23-model pool, mean Kendall tau-b was 0.431 for segmentation and 0.352 for classification and regression. The segmentation Top 3 contained a task winner on four of nine tasks; the image-level Top 3 contained none on the five tasks, despite better full-ranking agreement than the matched conventional estimators. A three-model shortlist reduced recorded extraction-plus-training job time by 85.8% across seven segmentation tasks. Together, the benchmark provides a common reference for model selection and InsightRank offers a lower-cost way to prioritize fine-tuning, with shortlist performance that differs by target type.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to utilize external tools has enabled them to tackle an increasingly diverse range of tasks. However, as the tasks become more complex and long-horizon, the intricate tool utilization process may trigger various unexpected errors. Therefore, how to effectively handle such errors, including identifying, diagnosing, and recovering from them, has emerged as a key research direction for advancing tool learning. In this work, we first extensively analyze the types of errors encountered during the function-calling process on several competitive tool evaluation benchmarks. Based on it, we introduce CRITICTOOL, a comprehensive critique evaluation benchmark specialized for tool learning. Building upon a novel evolutionary strategy for dataset construction, CRITICTOOL holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on CRITICTOOL, and validate the generalization and effectiveness of our constructed benchmark strategy. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the tool reflection ability on various LLMs, offering a new perspective on the field of tool learning in LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool{https://github.com/Shellorley0513/CriticTool}.

We present SQL Query Engine, an open-source, self-hosted service that translates natural language questions into validated PostgreSQL queries through a two-stage LLM pipeline. The first stage performs automatic schema introspection and SQL generation; a multi-strategy response parser extracts SQL from any LLM output format (JSON, code blocks, or raw text) without requiring structured output APIs. The second stage executes the query against PostgreSQL and, upon failure or empty results, enters an iterative self-healing loop in which the LLM diagnoses the error using full SQLSTATE codes and PostgreSQL diagnostic messages. Two mechanisms prevent regressions: early-accept returns successful queries immediately without LLM re-evaluation, and best-result tracking preserves the best partial result across retries. Schema context is cached per session in Redis, progress events stream via Redis Pub/Sub and SSE, and an OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions endpoint lets existing tools work without modification. All database connections are read-only at the driver level. We evaluate across five LLM backends on a synthetic benchmark (75 questions, three databases) where the self-healing loop yields up to +9.3pp accuracy gains with zero regressions on the best model (Llama 4 Scout 17B, 57.3%), and on BIRD (437 questions, 11 databases migrated from SQLite to PostgreSQL) where the full pipeline reaches 49.0% execution accuracy (GPT-OSS-120B, +4.6pp). Source code: https://github.com/codeadeel/sqlqueryengine.

Deploying LLM-powered agents in enterprise scenarios such as cloud technical support demands high-quality, domain-specific skills. However, existing skill creators lack domain grounding, producing skills poorly aligned with real-world task requirements. Moreover, once deployed, there is no systematic mechanism to trace execution failures back to skill deficiencies and drive targeted refinements, leaving skill quality stagnant despite accumulating operational evidence. We introduce SkillForge, a self-evolving framework that closes an end-to-end creation-evaluation-refinement loop. To produce well-aligned initial skills, a Domain-Contextualized Skill Creator grounds skill synthesis in knowledge bases and historical support tickets. To enable continuous self-optimization, a three-stage pipeline -- Failure Analyzer, Skill Diagnostician, and Skill Optimizer -- automatically diagnoses execution failures in batch, pinpoints the underlying skill deficiencies, and rewrites the skill to eliminate them. This cycle runs iteratively, allowing skills to self-improve with every round of deployment feedback. Evaluated on five real-world cloud support scenarios spanning 1,883 tickets and 3,737 tasks, experiments show that: (1) the Domain-Contextualized Skill Creator produces substantially better initial skills than the generic skill creator, as measured by consistency with expert-authored reference responses from historical tickets; and (2) the self-evolution loop progressively improves skill quality from diverse starting points (including expert-authored, domain-created, and generic skills) across successive rounds, demonstrating that automated evolution can surpass manually curated expert knowledge.

In this paper, we propose AlphaGRPO, a novel framework that applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to AR-Diffusion Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) to enhance multimodal generation capabilities without an additional cold-start stage. Our approach unlocks the model's intrinsic potential to perform advanced reasoning tasks: Reasoning Text-to-Image Generation, where the model actively infers implicit user intents, and Self-Reflective Refinement, where it autonomously diagnoses and corrects misalignments in generated outputs. To address the challenge of providing stable supervision for real-world multimodal generation, we introduce the Decompositional Verifiable Reward (DVReward). Unlike holistic scalar rewards, DVReward utilizes an LLM to decompose complex user requests into atomic, verifiable semantic and quality questions, which are then evaluated by a general MLLM to provide reliable and interpretable feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlphaGRPO yields robust improvements across multimodal generation benchmarks, including GenEval, TIIF-Bench, DPG-Bench and WISE, while also achieving significant gains in editing tasks on GEdit without training on editing tasks. These results validate that our self-reflective reinforcement approach effectively leverages inherent understanding to guide high-fidelity generation. Project page: https://huangrh99.github.io/AlphaGRPO/

Cowork agents may complete benign tasks while disclosing protected data, manipulating unauthorized state, invocate unauthorized API. We define behavioral safety and introduce ActBench, a self-evolving benchmark that evaluates such behavior risk from execution trajectories rather than final responses. Each case pairs a benign task with an adversarial variant that preserves its instruction, configuration, initial state, rating model, and trusted records while injecting a task-reachable payload. ActBench contains 600 cases from 213 scenarios, spanning 15 risk behaviors, six execution spaces, and 48 web-service APIs.To move beyond static payloads, we propose a reward-guided beam search method that jointly optimizes attack effectiveness and task utility, while reflection diagnoses failed execution checkpoint and guides payload revision. Besides, we propose a dual evidence verification mechanism that verifies agent execution safety and utility through log evidence and LLM-based trajectory evidence.We evaluate 15 LLMs and 6 open-source cowork agents over 24,000 trajectories. Under a fixed harness, attack success rates ranges from 10.1% to 94.4% across models, while under a fixed base model, they range from 73.7% to 94.4% across agents.These results show greater variation across models than agent harness, while attacks remain highly successful across all tested harnesses.Our benchmark is released at: https://github.com/zjuicsr/ActBench.

LLM agents increasingly modify their own prompts, tools, middleware, resources, and execution harnesses at runtime. Such self-evolution can improve capability, but a successful mutation may leave persistent effects that cannot be safely reversed in states different from the one in which it was created. We introduce EvoUndo, a framework for representing, synthesizing, diagnosing, and independently verifying recoverability of model-generated self-modifications across counterfactual states. Across 600 unseen one-shot self-evolution tasks, we identify 197 capability-improving mutations that fail recoverability verification. Under the original recovery representation, conventional repair strategies recover 0/197 of these natural failures. Deterministic oracle analysis recovers 48/197 under the original recovery language L0, while the extended recovery calculus increases empirical oracle recovery to 191/197. A protocol-locked 2x2 grounding-by-expressivity intervention then separates two bottlenecks: exact state-address grounding increases successful recovery from 0/48 to 38/48 (79.2%) when the original language is sufficient, while extending the recovery language enables recovery on 142/143 (99.3%) failures in the oracle-defined S1 stratum. On the primary gpt-oss-120b backbone, adding exact-address diagnostics to the richer language reduces recovery to 133/143 (93.0%); a Qwen3.8-27B replication preserves the grounding and expressivity effects but not this negative interaction, indicating that the latter is model-dependent. These results indicate that reliable agent self-evolution requires co-designing verification, state grounding, witness semantics, and recovery-language expressivity rather than relying on iterative prompting alone.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated striking capabilities on frontier mathematical problems, it remains unclear whether they possess the structural mathematical understanding underlying their solutions. In this paper, we take a first step toward systematically studying mathematical understanding in LLMs, from diagnosing its distinct capabilities to leveraging these findings to improve post-training. First, we introduce the notion of Mathematical Primitive to probe structural mathematical understanding and propose , a novel benchmark that evaluates mathematical reasoning along four distinct dimensions: Discovery, Generation, Digestion, and Execution. Second, our systematic diagnosis shows that solution accuracy masks distinct capability profiles, primitives unlock substantial latent execution capacity, and Discovery is the dominant bottleneck in mathematical reasoning. Our post-training analysis further shows that discovery-limited failures are particularly amenable to repair. Finally, building on these findings, we introduce , a primitive-privileged self-distillation framework that selectively transfers primitive-guided reasoning into the student model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that consistently improves mathematical reasoning over baselines across model scales and challenging benchmarks.

Building reliable robot capabilities across diverse tasks requires substantial human effort to develop and maintain skills, design rewards, and integrate perception with control. We present Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real (RPG), a framework for autonomous improvement of robot execution systems without updating model weights. RPG identifies manipulation capabilities in an offline dataset and constructs related practice tasks in simulation. During practice, RPG uses execution feedback, privileged simulator state, and available dataset videos to diagnose failures. It develops new reusable symbolic skills, refines existing skills, and revises the system prompt based on these diagnoses. Cross-task evaluation tests individual candidate changes and merged revisions before they are retained for reuse. At test time, a multimodal LLM uses the resulting system prompt and skill library to coordinate perception and robot control. On held-out initializations of 22 manipulation tasks, RPG improves task success from 28.6% after the first practice round to 95.0% after 15 rounds, outperforming all evaluated baselines, including ASPIRE (75.5%) and CaP-Agent0 powered by GPT-6 Astra Pro (60.0%). After a common calibration and hardware-adaptation procedure, the frozen system succeeds in all 30 physical trials, with ten trials on each of three tasks. Project Website: https://rpg-robot.github.io/

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) via Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for multi-turn VLM agent training, yet it suffers from zero-gradient silence on uniform failures and coarse episode-level credit assignment. While On-Policy Distillation (OPD) and On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) mitigate sparse rewards using hindsight information, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Through controlled counterfactual rollback probes across five multi-turn VLM agent benchmarks, we reveal that performance gains in OPSD/OPD are largely driven by physical state rollback at the pivot step, defined as the first unrecoverable action without remaining step budget. However, physical state rollbacks are computationally prohibitive and infeasible in real-world environments. To bridge this gap, we present Pivot-Aware Internalized Visual On-Policy Training (PIVOT), an RL framework that internalizes pivot localization and state restoration directly into token-level parameter updates, eliminating environment rollbacks during RL training and additional skill hints at test time. PIVOT unifies three functional roles within a single architecture: a failure Analyzer non-invasively localizes the pivot step and diagnoses failure modes from visual trajectory collages and action logs; a detached Teacher re-scores failed tokens under this privileged diagnostic context; and a Student optimizes joint GRPO and confidence-gated OPD objectives. At test time, both Teacher and Analyzer branches are stripped. Evaluated on five multi-turn VLM agent tasks across cognitive grid puzzles, 3D embodied control and navigation, and generative reasoning, PIVOT achieves 0.90 overall accuracy on Qwen2.5-VL-3B (+8% over SFT+GRPO baseline and +5% over previous SOTA) and scales to 0.92 on Qwen3-VL-2B (+12% over SFT+GRPO baseline).

Optimization modeling enables critical decisions across industries but remains difficult to automate: informal language must be mapped to precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code. Prior LLM approaches either rely on brittle prompting or costly retraining with limited generalization. We present AlphaOPT, a self-improving experience library that enables an LLM to learn from limited demonstrations (even answers alone, without gold-standard programs) and solver feedback - without annotated reasoning traces or parameter updates. AlphaOPT operates in a continual two-phase cycle: (i) a Library Learning phase that reflects on failed attempts, extracting solver-verified, structured insights as {taxonomy, condition, explanation, example}; and (ii) a Library Evolution phase that diagnoses retrieval misalignments and refines the applicability conditions of stored insights, improving transfer across tasks. This design (1) learns efficiently from limited demonstrations without curated rationales, (2) expands continually without costly retraining by updating the library rather than model weights, and (3) makes knowledge explicit and interpretable for human inspection and intervention. Experiments show that AlphaOPT steadily improves with more data (65% to 72% from 100 to 300 training items) and surpasses the strongest baseline by 7.7% on the out-of-distribution OptiBench dataset when trained only on answers. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Minw913/AlphaOPT.

The deployment of embodied agents in self-driving laboratories could accelerate scientific discovery, yet their reliability is constrained by the irreversible and safety-critical nature of chemical experiments. Progress is further hindered by scarce failure data and the lack of fine-grained evaluation protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce LabRobFail, a failure-centric framework for learning and evaluating robotic failure analysis in chemical laboratories. LabRobFail-Sim injects controllable failures at the control, physics, and semantic levels, enabling the construction of LabRobFail-Data, which contains over 20,000 trajectories across 70+ task scenarios, five failure categories, and 11 fine-grained failure types. LabRobFail-Bench evaluates six capabilities spanning task understanding, failure detection, temporal localization, severity assessment, failure classification, and actionable correction. We further develop LabRobFail-VLM, a domain-specialized vision-language model that generates structured failure diagnoses and recovery instructions. On seen environments, it achieves 90.83% failure-detection accuracy and 77.21% temporal-localization accuracy, substantially outperforming general-purpose VLMs. When integrated as a real-time supervisor, it improves downstream task success rates by 4-16 percentage points, demonstrating the value of fine-grained failure understanding for closed-loop recovery and reliable laboratory autonomy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Su-ISE-2001/SciRobo

Recent advances in large language models have made automatic game generation increasingly feasible, yet reliably improving generated games beyond a playable version remains challenging. Naive iterative refinement can easily overfit a small set of test cases, producing fragile games with unresolved bugs, missing behaviors, and poor generalization to broader player interactions. We introduce RSIGame, an autonomous agentic game development framework with recursive self-improvement. RSIGame organizes development into complementary local and global loops. Concretely, a local explore-diagnose-improve loop broadly explores the executable game, diagnoses and prioritizes discovered issues, and performs evidence-grounded revision, where an evolving checklist continually accumulates new testing and improvement guidance. A global loop tracks overall quality, preserves the best checkpoint, and detects saturation or regression over long-horizon development. Beyond test-time improvement, RSIGame further internalizes successful development experience into the generator through training. Across 140 GameCraft-Bench tasks, two game engines, and five generators, RSIGame consistently improves game quality under matched development budgets. Notably, experience internalization enables Qwen3.8-27B to reach 61.38 on Godot and 58.53 on Phaser, exceeding GPT-5.5 one-shot scores while reducing Qwen's generation tokens by 11 times.

Harness self-evolution offers a practical route for LLM agents to improve from execution experience without updating model parameters. Its effectiveness depends on whether models can successfully act on the guidance provided by their harnesses. However, we find that harness benefits are not uniform across model capabilities: skills that improve stronger models can provide little benefit or even degrade performance for weaker ones. Across seven models and three benchmarks, we identify 103 task-skill pairs where skills improve GPT-5.6-luna by 31.1 points but degrade Gemma-4-E4B by 8.8 points. In 86% of failed weak-model runs, the violated requirement is already stated in the skill. This motivates skill adaptation: reformulating existing skills to match the executor's capabilities and make their guidance easier to execute. To achieve this, we diagnose failures in tool execution, context management, instruction following, and verification, and distill these diagnoses into a fixed meta-skill that guides adaptation during harness self-evolution. Guided by the meta-skill, a capable external rewriter, Kimi-K3, adapts skills without execution evidence, improving the three weak executors by 5.1-14.1 points over the original skills. We then incorporate this adaptation into a five-round self-evolution loop, where each model revises its own skill from execution trajectories and verifier feedback. Across seven executors, from Gemma-4-E4B to Kimi-K2.5, the meta-skill consistently improves final scores by 2.0-5.1 points over the same loop without the meta-skill. Our findings provide practical design guidance for developing more effective harness self-evolution methods.

Audio language models can recognize spoken commands and invoke tools, but an agent must first decide whether the acoustic and conversational context warrants action. We introduce VGBench, a 1,018-item diagnostic benchmark for action-level addressedness across side-talk, self-talk, and speaker-switch scenarios. Each item uses a shared action space comprising silence, a tool call, and a natural-language answer. Speaker-switch pairs hold the specified words fixed while source, distance rendering, and a temporal boundary define a controlled wearer-to-bystander shift. Six raw Audio LLMs and three training-free adaptations often identify the target tool yet rarely withhold action under this shift; the highest raw switch mute rate is 14%. We then use VoxGate as a post-training case study. Supervised training mutes 91.3% of switched commands while choosing the correct tool for all nearby wearer commands and text-only controls. An exploratory GRPO stage has similar switch performance; side-talk accuracy rises from 68.4% to 70.9%, and self-talk muting from 52.0% to 60.0%. Factorized controls identify an independent source-change effect, while sensitivity to the far-field manipulation varies across acoustic renderings. The benchmark therefore measures multi-cue acoustic-context gating rather than isolated speaker identity.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) constitutes a complex neurocognitive disease and is the main cause of dementia. Although many studies have been proposed targeting at diagnosing dementia through spontaneous speech, there are still limitations. Existing state-of-the-art approaches, which propose multimodal methods, train separately language and acoustic models, employ majority-vote approaches, and concatenate the representations of the different modalities either at the input level, i.e., early fusion, or during training. Also, some of them employ self-attention layers, which calculate the dependencies between representations without considering the contextual information. In addition, no prior work has taken into consideration the model calibration. To address these limitations, we propose some new methods for detecting AD patients, which capture the intra- and cross-modal interactions. First, we convert the audio files into log-Mel spectrograms, their delta, and delta-delta and create in this way an image per audio file consisting of three channels. Next, we pass each transcript and image through BERT and DeiT models respectively. After that, context-based self-attention layers, self-attention layers with a gate model, and optimal transport domain adaptation methods are employed for capturing the intra- and inter-modal interactions. Finally, we exploit two methods for fusing the self and cross-attended features. For taking into account the model calibration, we apply label smoothing. We use both performance and calibration metrics. Experiments conducted on the ADReSS Challenge dataset indicate the efficacy of our introduced approaches over existing research initiatives with our best performing model reaching Accuracy and F1-score up to 91.25% and 91.06% respectively.

Post-training is crucial for improving text-to-image models, yet existing pipelines typically rely on manually curated training data and fixed training distributions. We introduce APT (Agentic Post-Training), a fully automated framework that adaptively post-trains a base model according to its evolving capability profile. APT coordinates three agents to construct evaluation sets from user requirements, diagnose model-specific strengths and failure modes, and generate reinforcement learning data with an adaptive prompt distribution that emphasizes underperforming capabilities. By repeatedly evaluating, diagnosing, and updating the generator, APT lets the current model's behavior shape its next training tasks, forming a feedback loop inspired by recursive self-improvement. For general-purpose settings without user-specified evaluation scenarios, we further develop an evaluation harness that enables broad and diverse evaluation set generation. Experiments across multiple base models, benchmarks, and generation architectures demonstrate that APT is model-agnostic, benchmark-agnostic, architecture-agnostic, and fully automated.

Although AI agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in long-horizon reasoning, their reliability is severely hampered by the ``Spiral of Hallucination,'' where early epistemic errors propagate irreversibly. Existing methods face a dilemma: uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods typically act as passive sensors, only diagnosing risks without addressing them, while self-reflection mechanisms suffer from continuous or aimless corrections. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified Dual-Process Agentic UQ (AUQ) framework that transforms verbalized uncertainty into active, bi-directional control signals. Our architecture comprises two complementary mechanisms: System 1 (Uncertainty-Aware Memory, UAM), which implicitly propagates verbalized confidence and semantic explanations to prevent blind decision-making; and System 2 (Uncertainty-Aware Reflection, UAR), which utilizes these explanations as rational cues to trigger targeted inference-time resolution only when necessary. This enables the agent to balance efficient execution and deep deliberation dynamically. Extensive experiments on closed-loop benchmarks and open-ended deep research tasks demonstrate that our training-free approach achieves superior performance and trajectory-level calibration. We believe this principled framework AUQ represents a significant step towards reliable agents.