Papers for

automation tool builders

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Validated skill optimization enables long-term agent code improvements

Certified Long-Horizon Code Agent Evolution via Validation-Gated Skill Optimization

Abstract: Long horizon agent self-evolution without model weight updates is essential for enabling deployed agents to accumulate reusable skills and improve over time. Prior self-evolution work has focused primarily on short-horizon tasks, while repository-level software engineering remains unexplored despite being an ideal testbed for long-horizon adaptation. In this setting, agents are required to solve streams of sequential tasks, navigate complex dependencies with evolving repositories and persistently store and reuse experience. Text-based skill optimization offers an efficient, non-parametric approach for such adaptation. However, existing methods often suffer from unstable updates, performance drawdown, and agent collapse over extended deployments. In this paper, we formalize the concept of in-context self-evolution and introduce VALVE, a validated-gated framework for long-horizon skill optimization. We establish finite convergence, provide theoretical guarantees for future-task gain and drawdown, and derive the validation and evaluation holdout sizes required for a prescribed tolerance, with leading-order scaling Empirically, our pipeline, VALVE achieves stable self-improvement over evolution horizon spanning more than 1,000 SWE tasks, with average final and peak gains of $14.9$ and $16.5$ points across three frontier models (GPT-5.5, Claude-4.6 and MiniMax-M2.7). The validation gate reduces average drawdown by 75% and produces an 11x more compact skill bank than ungated evolution. We further present extensive ablations identifying the design choices most critical to long-horizon skill evolution.

Sat 26 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
It can be hard for computer programs that help with software tasks to keep learning and getting better over a long time, especially without changing their core code. This work focuses on teaching these programs to improve by reusing skills safely while working through many software tasks in order. The researchers created a method called VALVE that checks if new skills are good before keeping them, which helps the program avoid getting worse or losing abilities. They tested VALVE on over a thousand software tasks and showed it steadily improved performance while keeping a smaller, more efficient set of skills.
Open → 2609.32990v1

Large dataset trains agents to solve interactive captchas accurately

CaptchaArena: A Large-Scale, Fine-Grained Dataset for Training Computer-Use Agents on Interactive CAPTCHAs

Abstract: Interactive CAPTCHAs remain challenging for computer-use agents, while existing datasets face trade-offs among type coverage, interaction fidelity, and trajectory supervision. To address these gaps, we present CaptchaArena, the first large-scale, fine-grained training dataset for interactive CAPTCHA solving. It contains 50K puzzles across 20 CAPTCHA types and 5 interaction modes, with every solution verified through execution. CaptchaArena provides 50K screenshot-action trajectories, including 46K with step-by-step reasoning annotations. It also includes fine-grained pixel-mask annotations for irregular targets. Using CaptchaArena, we train CaptchaAgent, a single 9B policy for all 20 CAPTCHA types, with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. The environment verifier directly provides the RL reward. Supervised fine-tuning reaches 70.5 Pass@1, and reinforcement learning further improves it to 71.7, while also improving performance on two external benchmarks. These results demonstrate the value of large-scale, fine-grained computer-use supervision for training interactive CAPTCHA agents. We release CaptchaArena and CaptchaAgent at https://github.com/X0X0X00/CaptchaArena.

Fri 25 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Interactive CAPTCHAs are puzzles designed to stop bots, but computers still struggle to solve many types well. The authors created CaptchaArena, a huge collection of 50,000 different CAPTCHA puzzles with detailed step-by-step solution data. Using this data, they trained an agent called CaptchaAgent that can solve 20 different CAPTCHA types with high accuracy. This work shows that having many examples and detailed computer actions helps improve CAPTCHA-solving programs. Both the dataset and agent are publicly available for further use.
Open → 2609.31957v1