Papers for

robotics programmers

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.

Video model improves understanding by adaptive evidence gathering

VLX-VR: An Agentic-Aware Video Reasoning Model

Abstract: Real-world video understanding requires integrating visual, audio, textual, and temporal evidence distributed across a video. Yet many pipelines use a fixed video context and single-pass inference, limiting adaptive evidence acquisition when observations are incomplete, ambiguous, or conflicting. We present VLX-VR, an agentic-aware video reasoning model trained within a video reasoning framework defined by a Think--Memory--Observation loop. At each step, VLX-VR determines the needed evidence, invokes read_memory or write_memory, incorporates the returned Observation, and decides whether to continue or produce the task output. We train VLX-VR with multimodal data, including videos and agent trajectories, using reinforcement learning to learn evidence acquisition, memory use, and termination. On MINERVA, VLX-VR achieves state-of-the-art performance among the models included in our comparison, with 78.79% accuracy. Under the original three duration groups, its accuracies are 76.70%, 78.73%, and 80.92%, with a cross-duration accuracy variance of 2.97~$\mathrm{pp}^2$. On correctly answered samples, 96.20% of VLX-VR's reasoning traces are consistent with the MINERVA reference reasoning traces and the evidence described by them, while approximately 75.80% of all evaluated samples satisfy both answer correctness and this evidence-grounded trace criterion. These results show strong performance and broadly stable behavior across durations, while counting, state changes, causal reasoning, and spatial perception remain challenging.

Wed 9 SeptComputation and LanguageComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding videos needs looking at pictures, sounds, words, and time clues together. Many video systems look at fixed parts once, missing important details when things are unclear. The authors created VLX-VR, a system that decides what information to check next and remembers what it learned, improving how it understands videos. It uses trial and error learning and works well on a video reasoning test with good accuracy and consistent reasoning.
Open 2609.09985v1

Experience funnel combines fast states and slow policies for evolving agents

Experience Funnel: A State-Policy Alternating Loop for Self-Evolving Agents

Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) continuously accumulate experience through interaction, creating an opportunity to improve future behavior through self-evolution. A fundamental challenge is how to transform abundant, task-specific interaction experience into reusable model competence without sacrificing the ability to adapt rapidly to newly observed evidence. Explicit textual states, such as skills and agent harnesses, provide fast, human-readable and editable adaptation, but incur persistent dependence on external context; parametric policies provide compact and reusable competence, but are substantially slower to update. We present \textit{Experience Funnel}, a self-evolving framework that couples fast state adaptation with slow policy consolidation in an alternating loop. Interaction trajectories are first distilled into an explicit textual state, where newly acquired experience can be rapidly incorporated and validated. The framework then selectively identifies state-enabled behavior that remains useful across state revisions and consolidates it into the policy through transition-aware distillation. The updated state--policy pair subsequently generates new rollouts, providing fresh evidence for the next round of state adaptation and policy consolidation. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that \textit{Experience Funnel} consistently improves agent capability over state-only evolution and policy-internalization approaches, while progressively converting useful explicit experience into autonomous policy competence.

Tue 8 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Autonomous AI agents learn by interacting with their environment, but it’s hard to turn what they learn into lasting skills while staying flexible. The authors propose a system called Experience Funnel that alternates between quick, easy-to-change states and slower, deeper policy updates. This way, agents can quickly try new behaviors and later keep the best ones as internal skills. Tests show this method improves agent abilities better than just changing states or policies alone.
Open 2609.08919v1