Papers for
interactive ai system engineers
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.
Multimodal agents remember entities and changes using hypergraph memory
Remembering Through Change: Provenance-Preserving Hypergraph Memory for Multimodal Agents
Abstract: Long-term memory for multimodal agents remains challenging, as it must preserve fine-grained visual evidence while tracking entity evolution across sessions. Existing abstraction-based memories compress images into text, often discarding visually discriminative details, whereas pixel-preserving memories retain raw observations but struggle to reliably associate diverse observations with persistent entity identities and track their evolving states. To address these limitations, we propose MHG-Mem, a multimodal hypergraph memory that jointly organizes entity identity, state evolution, and provenance to visual evidence. Specifically, MHG-Mem represents distinct entity mentions and their observed facts as individual nodes, grouping identity-consistent mentions and facts through occurrence hyperedges. It then synthesizes aspect-specific evolution states from these grouped observations and links them to supporting entities, facts, and source evidence through evolutionary and evidential hyperedges. To navigate this structured memory, we introduce hypergraph-based agentic search, which adaptively selects an entry layer, traverses typed hyperedges across memory levels, and inspects source observations when fine-grained verification is required. These designs support both detailed visual verification and reasoning over cross-session state changes. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of MHG-Mem, improving performance by 8.20-9.98% over the strongest baseline.
Reinforcement learning improved by on-policy self-teaching representation alignment
PR-OPD: Privileged Representation On-policy Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: Language-model agents are usually trained by reinforcement learning from one reward per episode, and privileged self-distillation enriches it by letting the same policy, given a skill, teach its skill-free self through token probabilities. However, we identify two phenomena that question this channel. Invisible Advantage: a skill in context lifts WebShop success from 42.2% to 56.2%, yet changes the probabilities of fewer than a quarter of the sampled tokens. Much to Align: a skill changes the hidden states of over 80% of response tokens, in a way that linear probes can trace back to the specific skill. To exploit this, we propose Privileged Representation On-policy Self-Distillation (PR-OPD). After a GRPO warm start, the policy writes a hindsight skill for each trajectory, re-reads its own responses with that skill as a stop-gradient teacher, and aligns its projected hidden states to the teacher's at every layer alongside the reward objective, with no external skill library, separate teacher, or inference overhead. On ALFWorld and WebShop with two backbones, PR-OPD achieves the best overall results in every setting, improving over GRPO by up to 4.7 points in ALFWorld success and 14.0 points in WebShop accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/balibata/PR-OPD.