Papers for

interactive ai system 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.

Language models struggle to track opponents beliefs in repeated games

Beyond Successful Play: Diagnosing Opponent Modeling in Large Language Models

Abstract: Language-model agents are expected to adapt to others whose behavior changes through interaction. Yet adaptation may rely on learned behavioral patterns rather than theory of mind (ToM): the ability to infer others' mental states, including beliefs and intentions. We introduce a benchmark and diagnostic framework for repeated hide-and-seek against algorithmic opponents with explicitly defined recursive belief updates. Their ground-truth beliefs and action probabilities let us distinguish adaptive play, action prediction, and belief tracking through live interaction, fixed-history evaluation, and controlled information interventions. With structured elicitation and behavioral supervised fine-tuning (SFT), we find improved play in several tested settings, but diagnostics reveal limitations in opponent prediction and belief tracking. We test whether supervising opponent action probabilities can address this predictive deficit in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Predictions improve when the model is told the opponent's type and parameter settings, but become less accurate when it must infer the opponent from history without this information. Training on examples that also omit these details reduces the gap, although improvements vary across opponents. Is this limitation specific to smaller open-weight models, or does it also appear in a frontier model? GPT-5.4 also benefits from correct opponent beliefs: supplying them improves its predictions and choices, whereas deeper explicit belief reports and self-generated memory do not consistently improve forecasting from interaction history. This contrast suggests that using useful belief information is easier than inferring it autonomously, even for a frontier model. Together, our findings distinguish improved play and action prediction from reliable belief tracking, providing a framework for evaluating mentalizing and testing targeted improvements.

Mon 12 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When language models play games against others, they may seem to adapt but often rely on learned patterns instead of truly understanding what the other is thinking. The authors created tests to check if models can predict opponents' moves by understanding their beliefs and intentions. They found models improve when given extra info about the opponent but still have trouble figuring out opponents' thoughts just from the game history. Even leading models like GPT-5.4 find it easier to use given beliefs than to discover them on their own.
Open → 2610.17310v1

Graph memory helps multiple agents solve complex multimodal problems

GraMRAG: Orchestrating Multi-Agent Multi-Step Reasoning via Graph Memory with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Although existing multi-agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have demonstrated promise on complex multimodal reasoning tasks, they remain fundamentally limited in reasoning depth and memory structure, suffering from inadequate retrieval and state blindness when answering knowledge-intensive questions. To address these limitations, we propose GraMRAG, a graph memory-guided multi-agent RAG framework that integrates a dynamic multimodal memory graph to enable stable, multi-step multimodal reasoning. We introduce a vision-text bridged reasoning paradigm that unifies multi-scale entity cropping with a ReAct-style visual toolchain, enhancing the long-horizon cross-modal reasoning capability. We further construct a multimodal memory graph that formalizes agent reasoning as a dynamic directed acyclic graph (DAG), explicitly modeling action-observation dependencies to mitigate state blindness and suppress redundant retrieval. Moreover, we propose Topology-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO) that leverages graph topology for critical path identification and targeted node pruning, enabling fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on challenging multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex long-horizon reasoning tasks.

Sat 12 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Answering complex questions that need many steps and combine images and text can be hard because machines forget what they saw or looked up earlier. The authors propose a new way to help multiple 'agents' share knowledge using a graph that records their actions and observations, so they don’t repeat work or get confused. They also teach the agents to focus on the most important parts of this graph, improving their reasoning across multiple steps. Tests show this method works better than older ones on hard tasks involving images and text.
Open → 2609.14066v1