Daily Papers

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system formed by agents and their environment through active perception, embodied cognition, and action interaction. Existing embodied AI remains confined to human-crafted setting, in which agents are trained on given memory and construct models for given tasks, enabling fixed embodiments to interact with relatively static environments. Such methods fail in in-the-wild setting characterized by variable embodiments and dynamic open environments. This paper introduces self-evolving embodied AI, a new paradigm in which agents operate based on their changing state and environment with memory self-updating, task self-switching, environment self-prediction, embodiment self-adaptation, and model self-evolution, aiming to achieve continually adaptive intelligence with autonomous evolution. Specifically, we present the definition, framework, components, and mechanisms of self-evolving embodied AI, systematically review state-of-the-art works for realized components, discuss practical applications, and point out future research directions. We believe that self-evolving embodied AI enables agents to autonomously learn and interact with environments in a human-like manner and provide a new perspective toward general artificial intelligence.

For multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretrained language models (multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs), e.g. mBART, the self-supervised pretraining task is trained on a wide range of monolingual languages, e.g. 25 languages from CommonCrawl, while the downstream cross-lingual tasks generally progress on a bilingual language subset, e.g. English-German, making there exists the data discrepancy, namely domain discrepancy, and cross-lingual learning objective discrepancy, namely task discrepancy, between the pretraining and finetuning stages. To bridge the above cross-lingual domain and task gaps, we extend the vanilla pretrain-finetune pipeline with extra code-switching restore task. Specifically, the first stage employs the self-supervised code-switching restore task as a pretext task, allowing the multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs to acquire some in-domain alignment information. And for the second stage, we fine-tune the model on downstream data normally. Experiments on both NLG evaluation (12 bilingual translation tasks, 30 zero-shot translation tasks, and 2 cross-lingual summarization tasks) and NLU evaluation (7 cross-lingual natural language inference tasks) show our model outperforms the strong baseline mBART with standard finetuning strategy, consistently. Analyses indicate our approach could narrow the Euclidean distance of cross-lingual sentence representations, and improve the model generalization with trivial computational cost. We release the code at: https://github.com/zanchangtong/CSR4mBART.

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task learning and instruction following, they typically assume static task intent, failing to respond when new instructions arrive during ongoing execution. This limitation hinders natural and robust interaction in dynamic settings, such as retail or household environments, where real-time intent changes are common. We propose SwitchVLA, a unified, execution-aware framework that enables smooth and reactive task switching without external planners or additional switch-specific data. We model task switching as a behavior modulation problem conditioned on execution state and instruction context. Expert demonstrations are segmented into temporally grounded contact phases, allowing the policy to infer task progress and adjust its behavior accordingly. A multi-behavior conditional policy is then trained to generate flexible action chunks under varying behavior modes through conditioned trajectory modeling. Experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that SwitchVLA enables robust instruction adherence, fluid task switching, and strong generalization-outperforming prior VLA baselines in both task success rate and interaction naturalness.

The goal of lifelong learning is to continuously learn from non-stationary distributions, where the non-stationarity is typically imposed by a sequence of distinct tasks. Prior works have mostly considered idealistic settings, where the identity of tasks is known at least at training. In this paper we focus on a fundamentally harder, so-called task-agnostic setting where the task identities are not known and the learning machine needs to infer them from the observations. Our algorithm, which we call TAME (Task-Agnostic continual learning using Multiple Experts), automatically detects the shift in data distributions and switches between task expert networks in an online manner. At training, the strategy for switching between tasks hinges on an extremely simple observation that for each new coming task there occurs a statistically-significant deviation in the value of the loss function that marks the onset of this new task. At inference, the switching between experts is governed by the selector network that forwards the test sample to its relevant expert network. The selector network is trained on a small subset of data drawn uniformly at random. We control the growth of the task expert networks as well as selector network by employing online pruning. Our experimental results show the efficacy of our approach on benchmark continual learning data sets, outperforming the previous task-agnostic methods and even the techniques that admit task identities at both training and testing, while at the same time using a comparable model size.

Progress in many task domains emerges from repeated revisions to previous solution attempts. Training agents that can reliably self-improve over such sequences at inference-time is a natural target for reinforcement learning (RL), yet the naive approach assumes a fixed maximum iteration depth, which can be both costly and arbitrary. We present Exploratory Iteration (ExIt), a family of autocurriculum RL methods that directly exploits the recurrent structure of self-improvement tasks to train LLMs to perform multi-step self-improvement at inference-time while only training on the most informative single-step iterations. ExIt grows a task space by selectively sampling the most informative intermediate, partial histories encountered during an episode for continued iteration, treating these starting points as new self-iteration task instances to train a self-improvement policy. ExIt can further pair with explicit exploration mechanisms to sustain greater task diversity. Across several domains, encompassing competition math, multi-turn tool-use, and machine learning engineering, we demonstrate that ExIt strategies, starting from either a single or many task instances, can produce policies exhibiting strong inference-time self-improvement on held-out task instances, and the ability to iterate towards higher performance over a step budget extending beyond the average iteration depth encountered during training.

Advances in the coding capabilities of LLM agents allow them to inspect and modify their own instructions, tools, and execution procedures. Existing approaches use this ability to search for improved agents through repeated downstream evaluation, which incurs substantial costs and ties the search to the evaluated tasks. We introduce SelfSearch, a reward-free search procedure in which agents modify themselves using records of previous self-improvement episodes. These records capture the reasoning, tool actions, and outcomes of earlier modification attempts, providing concrete experience for improving both task solving and self-modification. Without downstream reward signals during search, SelfSearch improves population-mean success over the initial agent in all six model--benchmark settings, with individual agents gaining up to 11.2 percentage points on Terminal-Bench 2.1. On SWE-bench Multilingual, an agent improves success by 5.0 percentage points while reducing execution cost by 38.5\% on tasks solved by both the initial and evolved agents. SelfSearch achieves competitive task success with evaluation-guided search baselines at lower search cost. With only \$4.03 in search cost, it produces a harness that solves 82.0\% of Terminal-Bench 2.1 tasks with DeepSeek V4 Flash under the settings of a public nine-harness comparison, matching the top-scoring harness, Codex. These results suggest that experience gained through self-modification can improve agents' downstream capabilities and efficiency.

This study explores the interference in temporal processing within a dual-task paradigm from an artificial intelligence (AI) perspective. In this context, the dual-task setup is implemented as a simplified version of the Overcooked environment with two variations, single task (T) and dual task (T+N). Both variations involve an embedded time production task, but the dual task (T+N) additionally involves a concurrent number comparison task. Two deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents were separately trained for each of these tasks. These agents exhibited emergent behavior consistent with human timing research. Specifically, the dual task (T+N) agent exhibited significant overproduction of time relative to its single task (T) counterpart. This result was consistent across four target durations. Preliminary analysis of neural dynamics in the agents' LSTM layers did not reveal any clear evidence of a dedicated or intrinsic timer. Hence, further investigation is needed to better understand the underlying time-keeping mechanisms of the agents and to provide insights into the observed behavioral patterns. This study is a small step towards exploring parallels between emergent DRL behavior and behavior observed in biological systems in order to facilitate a better understanding of both.

With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.

As the application space of language models continues to evolve, a natural question to ask is how we can quickly adapt models to new tasks. We approach this classic question from a continual learning perspective, in which we aim to continue fine-tuning models trained on past tasks on new tasks, with the goal of "transferring" relevant knowledge. However, this strategy also runs the risk of doing more harm than good, i.e., negative transfer. In this paper, we construct a new benchmark of task sequences that target different possible transfer scenarios one might face, such as a sequence of tasks with high potential of positive transfer, high potential for negative transfer, no expected effect, or a mixture of each. An ideal learner should be able to maximally exploit information from all tasks that have any potential for positive transfer, while also avoiding the negative effects of any distracting tasks that may confuse it. We then propose a simple, yet effective, learner that satisfies many of our desiderata simply by leveraging a selective strategy for initializing new models from past task checkpoints. Still, limitations remain, and we hope this benchmark can help the community to further build and analyze such learners.

Large language models have recently demonstrated remarkable abilities to self-correct their responses through iterative refinement, often referred to as self-consistency or self-reflection. However, the dynamics of this self-correction mechanism may differ substantially depending on whether the model is tasked with open-ended text generation or with selecting the most appropriate response from multiple predefined options. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of these two paradigms by comparing performance trends and error-correction behaviors across various natural language understanding and reasoning tasks, covering language models of different scales and families. Our experimental results reveal distinct patterns of improvement and failure modes: While open-ended generation often benefits from the flexibility of re-interpretation and compositional refinement, multiple-choice selection can leverage clearer solution boundaries but may be limited by the provided options. This contrast also reflects the dual demands faced by emerging agentic LLM applications: effective agents must not only generate and refine open-ended plans or explanations, but also make reliable discrete choices when operating within constrained action spaces. Our findings, therefore, highlight that the design of self-correction mechanisms should take into account the interaction between task structure and output space, with implications for both knowledge-intensive reasoning and decision-oriented applications of LLMs.

Large language model agents increasingly operate in dynamic environments where tool interfaces, APIs, and user requirements change after deployment. Existing self-evolution methods mainly follow two paradigms: harness-based approaches, which externalize feedback into editable memories or skills for rapid adaptation, and parameter-based approaches, which internalize experience into model parameters for deeper capability improvement. However, using either mechanism alone creates a trade-off between flexibility and performance. This paper asks how an agent can coordinate both channels to achieve robust self-evolution. We present COVE, a unified agent self-evolution framework that combines harness-based and parameter-based learning through task-aware routing, stage-aware scheduling, and knowledge optimization. Through this design, COVE treats self-evolution not as indiscriminate accumulation of experience, but as a coordinated process that matches tasks and knowledge types to appropriate learning mechanisms. Experiments across multiple task categories show that COVE outperforms single-channel evolution strategies, demonstrating more robust and efficient improvement under changing environments.

Language Agent could be endowed with different mechanisms for autonomous task accomplishment. Current agents typically rely on fixed mechanisms or a set of mechanisms activated in a predefined order, limiting their adaptation to varied potential task solution structures. To this end, this paper proposes Adaptive Language Agent Mechanism Activation Learning with Self-Exploration (ALAMA), which focuses on optimizing mechanism activation adaptability without reliance on expert models. Initially, it builds a harmonized agent framework (UniAct) to Unify different mechanisms via Actions. Then it leverages a training-efficient optimization method based on self-exploration to enable the UniAct to adaptively activate the appropriate mechanisms according to the potential characteristics of the task. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in downstream agent tasks, affirming the effectiveness of our approach in facilitating more dynamic and context-sensitive mechanism activation.

Model merging has attracted attention as an effective path toward multi-task adaptation by integrating knowledge from multiple task-specific models. Among existing approaches, dynamic merging mitigates performance degradation caused by conflicting parameter updates across tasks by flexibly combining task-specific parameters at inference time, thereby maintaining high performance. However, these methods require storing independent parameters for each task, resulting in prohibitive storage overhead. To address this issue, we first experimentally demonstrate that the fine-tuned weight increments (referred to as task vectors) exhibit an impulse-like activation pattern and high robustness to low-bit representations. Driven by this insight, we propose T-Switch, which decomposes task vectors into three compact components: a binary sparse mask, a sign vector, and a scalar scaling factor, achieving high-fidelity approximation at high compression ratios. We then introduce Auto-Switch, a training-free merging scheme that automatically composes task vectors via feature similarity retrieval. Building on this, we develop Auto-Switch, a training-free merging scheme that automatically assembles task vectors through feature similarity retrieval. Furthermore, to transform task vector sparsification and quantization from static rules to adaptive learning, we propose FlexSwitch, a learnable framework which jointly optimizes the compression strategy for each model unit via Learnable Gating Sparsification (LGS) and Bit-width Adaptive Selection (BAS), while employing the Sparsity-Aware Storage Strategy (SASS) to select the optimal storage encoding structure. Finally, by incorporating a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) inference scheme with a learnable low-rank metric, we present Auto-FlexSwitch, a dynamic model merging approach that supports highly efficient task vector compression.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown remarkable capabilities in autonomous decision-making by generating sequential trajectories of states, actions, and observations. However, in complex, long-horizon tasks, these agents frequently suffer from compounding errors and struggle to recover from failures. Existing self-correction mechanisms rely on prompt-based reflection, which is inherently brittle, incurs heavy time and API costs due to iterative trial-and-error loops, and produces task-specific memory that may be hard to generalize to new scenarios. To address this, we propose Experience Memory Graph (EMG), a framework that reformulates agent failure recovery as a graph matching problem. At training time, we convert both failed exploration trajectories and successful expert trajectories into directed action decision graphs. By matching these graphs, we extract common subgraphs (successful workflows) and graph edit paths that explicitly indicate how to correct failures (e.g., which actions to add, delete, or relabel under a given observation), and store them in a memory graph with intra-task nodes and cross-task edges. At test time, EMG retrieves relevant insights and guides the agent in a single, loop-free execution. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that EMG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reflection baselines in success rate and average reward, while requiring no test-time trial-and-error.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved strong performance in embodied manipulation, but still lack a clear mechanism to balance behavioral stability with task-semantic sensitivity. We identify two complementary failure modes. Under task-preserving changes, where task semantics remain unchanged but scene appearance varies (e.g., style, illumination, clutter, or paraphrasing), policies often exhibit unnecessary action drift. Conversely, under semantic-breaking changes, where key task semantics such as the target object or constraint are altered, policies frequently fail to produce sufficiently distinct behaviors and instead follow the original trajectory. To address this gap, we propose BAS-VLA, a task-semantic action calibration framework built on top of a frozen base VLA. BAS-VLA adopts a breaking-centered calibration core as the default path, and introduces a selective evidence-gated preserving auxiliary that activates only when nuisance variation is detected while task semantics remain consistent. On the OpenPI-pi0.5 / LIBERO-Object Milk-Swap benchmark, BAS-VLA maintains high success on clean (98.0%) and semantics-preserving conditions (97.5%), while reducing clean-criterion success to 0.0% under deliberate target-object swaps, demonstrating strong stale-task suppression and task-semantic separation. On validated style-preserving shifts, it improves success from 42% to 70% without degrading clean performance. These results highlight that reliable VLA behavior requires moving beyond appearance robustness toward explicit task-semantic action calibration.

Changing how pre-trained models behave -- e.g., improving their performance on a downstream task or mitigating biases learned during pre-training -- is a common practice when developing machine learning systems. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for steering the behavior of neural networks, centered around task vectors. A task vector specifies a direction in the weight space of a pre-trained model, such that movement in that direction improves performance on the task. We build task vectors by subtracting the weights of a pre-trained model from the weights of the same model after fine-tuning on a task. We show that these task vectors can be modified and combined together through arithmetic operations such as negation and addition, and the behavior of the resulting model is steered accordingly. Negating a task vector decreases performance on the target task, with little change in model behavior on control tasks. Moreover, adding task vectors together can improve performance on multiple tasks at once. Finally, when tasks are linked by an analogy relationship of the form ``A is to B as C is to D", combining task vectors from three of the tasks can improve performance on the fourth, even when no data from the fourth task is used for training. Overall, our experiments with several models, modalities and tasks show that task arithmetic is a simple, efficient and effective way of editing models.

Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the objective adapts to reward new areas, many behaviours emerge only to disappear due to being overwritten by the constantly shifting objective. We argue that merely using curiosity for fast environment exploration or as a bonus reward for a specific task does not harness the full potential of this technique and misses useful skills. Instead, we propose to shift the focus towards retaining the behaviours which emerge during curiosity-based learning. We posit that these self-discovered behaviours serve as valuable skills in an agent's repertoire to solve related tasks. Our experiments demonstrate the continuous shift in behaviour throughout training and the benefits of a simple policy snapshot method to reuse discovered behaviour for transfer tasks.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success across a range of generative tasks. Recent efforts to enhance diffusion model architectures have reimagined them as a form of multi-task learning, where each task corresponds to a denoising task at a specific noise level. While these efforts have focused on parameter isolation and task routing, they fall short of capturing detailed inter-task relationships and risk losing semantic information, respectively. In response, we introduce Switch Diffusion Transformer (Switch-DiT), which establishes inter-task relationships between conflicting tasks without compromising semantic information. To achieve this, we employ a sparse mixture-of-experts within each transformer block to utilize semantic information and facilitate handling conflicts in tasks through parameter isolation. Additionally, we propose a diffusion prior loss, encouraging similar tasks to share their denoising paths while isolating conflicting ones. Through these, each transformer block contains a shared expert across all tasks, where the common and task-specific denoising paths enable the diffusion model to construct its beneficial way of synergizing denoising tasks. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in improving both image quality and convergence rate, and further analysis demonstrates that Switch-DiT constructs tailored denoising paths across various generation scenarios.

The modeling of turn-taking in dialog can be viewed as the modeling of the dynamics of voice activity of the interlocutors. We extend prior work and define the predictive task of Voice Activity Projection, a general, self-supervised objective, as a way to train turn-taking models without the need of labeled data. We highlight a theoretical weakness with prior approaches, arguing for the need of modeling the dependency of voice activity events in the projection window. We propose four zero-shot tasks, related to the prediction of upcoming turn-shifts and backchannels, and show that the proposed model outperforms prior work.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems facilitate users in executing various activities via multi-turn dialogues, but Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to comprehend these intricate contexts. In this study, we propose a novel "Self-Explanation" prompting strategy to enhance the comprehension abilities of LLMs in multi-turn dialogues. This task-agnostic approach requires the model to analyze each dialogue utterance before task execution, thereby improving performance across various dialogue-centric tasks. Experimental results from six benchmark datasets confirm that our method consistently outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds the efficacy of few-shot prompts, demonstrating its potential as a powerful tool in enhancing LLMs' comprehension in complex dialogue tasks.

We investigate how self-referential inputs alter the internal matrix dynamics of large language models. Measuring 106 scalar metrics across up to 7 analysis passes on four models from three architecture families -- Qwen3-VL-8B, Llama-3.2-11B, Llama-3.3-70B, and Gemma-2-9B -- over 300 prompts in a 14-level hierarchy at three temperatures (T in {0.0, 0.3, 0.7}), we find that self-reference alone is not destabilizing: grounded self-referential statements and meta-cognitive prompts are markedly more stable than paradoxical self-reference on key collapse-related metrics, and on several such metrics can be as stable as factual controls. Instability concentrates in prompts inducing non-closing truth recursion (NCTR) -- truth-value computations with no finite-depth resolution. NCTR prompts produce anomalously elevated attention effective rank -- indicating attention reorganization with global dispersion rather than simple concentration collapse -- and key metrics reach Cohen's d = 3.14 (attention effective rank) to 3.52 (variance kurtosis) vs. stable self-reference in the 70B model; 281/397 metric-model combinations differentiate NCTR from stable self-reference after FDR correction (q < 0.05), 198 with |d| > 0.8. Per-layer SVD confirms disruption at every sampled layer (d > +1.0 in all three models analyzed), ruling out aggregation artifacts. A classifier achieves AUC 0.81-0.90; 30 minimal pairs yield 42/387 significant combinations; 43/106 metrics replicate across all four models. We connect these observations to three classical matrix-semigroup problems and propose, as a conjecture, that NCTR forces finite-depth transformers toward dynamical regimes where these problems concentrate. NCTR prompts also produce elevated contradictory output (+34-56 percentage points vs. controls), suggesting practical relevance for understanding self-referential failure modes.

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Existing approaches for training self-correction either require multiple models or rely on a more capable model or other forms of supervision. To this end, we develop a multi-turn online reinforcement learning (RL) approach, SCoRe, that significantly improves an LLM's self-correction ability using entirely self-generated data. To build SCoRe, we first show that variants of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on offline model-generated correction traces are insufficient for instilling self-correction behavior. In particular, we observe that training via SFT either suffers from a distribution mismatch between the training data and the model's own responses or implicitly prefers only a certain mode of correction behavior that is often not effective at test time. SCoRe addresses these challenges by training under the model's own distribution of self-generated correction traces and using appropriate regularization to steer the learning process into learning a self-correction strategy that is effective at test time as opposed to simply fitting high-reward responses for a given prompt. This regularization prescribes running a first phase of RL on a base model to generate a policy initialization that is less susceptible to collapse and then using a reward bonus to amplify self-correction during training. When applied to Gemini 1.0 Pro and 1.5 Flash models, we find that SCoRe achieves state-of-the-art self-correction performance, improving the base models' self-correction by 15.6% and 9.1% respectively on the MATH and HumanEval benchmarks.

Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on incorrect trivia question-answer pairs exhibit toxicity - a phenomenon later termed "emergent misalignment". Moreover, research has shown that LLMs possess behavioral self-awareness - the ability to describe learned behaviors that were only implicitly demonstrated in training data. Here, we investigate the intersection of these phenomena. We fine-tune GPT-4.1 models sequentially on datasets known to induce and reverse emergent misalignment and evaluate whether the models are self-aware of their behavior transitions without providing in-context examples. Our results show that emergently misaligned models rate themselves as significantly more harmful compared to their base model and realigned counterparts, demonstrating behavioral self-awareness of their own emergent misalignment. Our findings show that behavioral self-awareness tracks actual alignment states of models, indicating that models can be queried for informative signals about their own safety.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising self-correction abilities, where iterative refinement improves the quality of generated responses. However, most existing approaches operate at the level of output critique, patching surface errors while often failing to correct deeper reasoning flaws. We propose SELF-THOUGHT, a framework that introduces an intermediate step of task abstraction before solution refinement. Given an input and an initial response, the model first distills the task into a structured template that captures key variables, constraints, and problem structure. This abstraction then guides solution instantiation, grounding subsequent responses in a clearer understanding of the task and reducing error propagation. Crucially, we show that these abstractions can be transferred across models: templates generated by larger models can serve as structured guides for smaller LLMs, which typically struggle with intrinsic self-correction. By reusing distilled task structures, smaller models achieve more reliable refinements without heavy fine-tuning or reliance on external verifiers. Experiments across diverse reasoning tasks demonstrate that SELF-THOUGHT improves accuracy, robustness, and generalization for both large and small models, offering a scalable path toward more reliable self-correcting language systems.

As systems trend toward superintelligence, a natural modeling premise is that agents can self-improve along every facet of their own design. We formalize this with a five-axis decomposition and a decision layer, separating incentives from learning behavior and analyzing axes in isolation. Our central result identifies and introduces a sharp utility--learning tension, the structural conflict in self-modifying systems whereby utility-driven changes that improve immediate or expected performance can also erode the statistical preconditions for reliable learning and generalization. Our findings show that distribution-free guarantees are preserved iff the policy-reachable model family is uniformly capacity-bounded; when capacity can grow without limit, utility-rational self-changes can render learnable tasks unlearnable. Under standard assumptions common in practice, these axes reduce to the same capacity criterion, yielding a single boundary for safe self-modification. Numerical experiments across several axes validate the theory by comparing destructive utility policies against our proposed two-gate policies that preserve learnability.

Recent work in NLP has shown promising results in training models on large amounts of tasks to achieve better generalization. However, it is not well-understood how tasks are related, and how helpful training tasks can be chosen for a new task. In this work, we investigate whether knowing task relationships via pairwise task transfer improves choosing one or more source tasks that help to learn a new target task. We provide TaskWeb, a large-scale benchmark of pairwise task transfers for 22 NLP tasks using three different model types, sizes, and adaptation methods, spanning about 25,000 experiments. Then, we design a new method TaskShop based on our analysis of TaskWeb. TaskShop uses TaskWeb to estimate the benefit of using a source task for learning a new target task, and to choose a subset of helpful training tasks for multi-task training. Our method improves overall rankings and top-k precision of source tasks by 10% and 38%, respectively. We also use TaskShop to build much smaller multi-task training sets that improve zero-shot performances across 11 different target tasks by at least 4.3%.

Large language models are quickly becoming the foundation for intelligent agents that are capable of using tools. However, training such agents is challenging because it requires human creation and annotation of a diverse set of tasks, tools, and evaluation criteria. In this paper, we propose the Self-Challenging framework for training an agent on high-quality tasks that are generated by itself. The agent first plays the role of challenger and generates a task after interacting with the given tools. The tasks take the form of a novel general class of problems termed Code-as-Task, which are defined by an instruction, a verification function and solution and failure cases which serve as tests, allowing to filter only for high-quality tasks. The agent then takes an executor role and trains on those tasks with reinforcement learning using the evaluation feedback as a reward. Evaluation on two existing multi-turn tool-use agent benchmarks, M3ToolEval and TauBench, shows the Self-Challenging framework achieves over a two-fold improvement in Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, despite using only self-generated training data.

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this study, we investigated the effects of self-reflection in large language models (LLMs) on problem-solving performance. We instructed nine popular LLMs to answer a series of multiple-choice questions to provide a performance baseline. For each incorrectly answered question, we instructed eight types of self-reflecting LLM agents to reflect on their mistakes and provide themselves with guidance to improve problem-solving. Then, using this guidance, each self-reflecting agent attempted to re-answer the same questions. Our results indicate that LLM agents are able to significantly improve their problem-solving performance through self-reflection (p < 0.001). In addition, we compared the various types of self-reflection to determine their individual contribution to performance. All code and data are available on GitHub at https://github.com/matthewrenze/self-reflection

Agent harness evolution improves frozen language-model agents by modifying the executable structures around them. We study this paradigm as a form of sample-efficient fast adaptation: instead of updating model weights, an agent can acquire task-specific competence by changing its external harness, while leaving the base model's general capabilities intact. Prior work shows that self-generated rollouts can support harness search, suggesting that agents may acquire new task competence through practice. Yet in long-horizon stochastic environments, self-practice becomes fragile: rewards are sparse, outcomes are high-variance, and failures are hard to attribute to concrete harness mechanisms. We introduce DemoEvolve, a demonstration-bootstrapped approach to harness evolution. When reward-only search is too broad and noisy, competent human trajectories serve as expert reference experience for the coding proposer, guiding harness-level diagnosis and editing. Experiments on Liar's Dice show that self-rollout evolution can work when episodes are short and failures are attributable. In contrast, Balatro exposes a harder long-horizon stochastic regime, where self-rollout evolution is misled by sparse feedback and candidate-selection noise, while tutorial-like textual knowledge alone does not yield stable improvement. Under the same limited budget, DemoEvolve produces more effective and auditable harness edits and achieves better performance. Overall, demonstrations make sparse-feedback harness evolution more diagnosable, localizable, and stable.

We study self-rewarding reasoning large language models (LLMs), which can simultaneously generate step-by-step reasoning and evaluate the correctness of their outputs during the inference time-without external feedback. This integrated approach allows a single model to independently guide its reasoning process, offering computational advantages for model deployment. We particularly focus on the representative task of self-correction, where models autonomously detect errors in their responses, revise outputs, and decide when to terminate iterative refinement loops. To enable this, we propose a two-staged algorithmic framework for constructing self-rewarding reasoning models using only self-generated data. In the first stage, we employ sequential rejection sampling to synthesize long chain-of-thought trajectories that incorporate both self-rewarding and self-correction mechanisms. Fine-tuning models on these curated data allows them to learn the patterns of self-rewarding and self-correction. In the second stage, we further enhance the models' ability to assess response accuracy and refine outputs through reinforcement learning with rule-based signals. Experiments with Llama-3 and Qwen-2.5 demonstrate that our approach surpasses intrinsic self-correction capabilities and achieves performance comparable to systems that rely on external reward models.

Self-play agents can generate training problems without questions from target benchmarks, but their curricula lack persistent state: failures affect gradients yet do not explicitly shape future practice. External skill memories preserve procedural experience but are typically learned from fixed task distributions. We introduce SESA (Self-Evolving Skill-Augmented Agent), which makes procedural memory an evolving state of tool-augmented search self-play. A challenger poses problems, while a separately parameterized solver alone retrieves skills. Informative failures are distilled into reusable skills and written back to memory. The updated memory changes solver behavior and success, which changes the challenger's reward and the distribution of future problems; the resulting frontier produces new failures that rewrite memory. This bidirectional loop makes task generation and skill memory co-evolve. Because retrieved skills shape on-policy training trajectories, their benefits can enter the model parameters as well as remain in the external bank, enabling memory-free deployment and optional inference-time retrieval. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, SESA improves average accuracy over SSP by 1.2--3.2 points across multiple backbones and surpasses the skill-augmented SkillRL baseline by 0.9 points under a unified evaluation protocol. On Qwen3 models, SESA-Off retains 1.8--2.2 points of improvement over SSP, while the final skill bank adds a further 0.5--1.0 points. These results show that evolving skill memory is not merely an inference-time plug-in: it changes policy learning and the future training distribution while retaining value as optional external memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zenghuang-Fu/SESA-Self-Evolving-Search-Agents.

Recent self-supervised pre-training methods for electroencephalogram (EEG) have shown promising results. However, the pre-trained models typically require full fine-tuning on each downstream task individually to achieve good performance. In practical applications involving multiple tasks, utilizing a separate model for each task is not ideal regarding computational and spatial cost. In this study, we go one step further and explore the simultaneous adaptation of a pre-trained model to multiple different tasks. The EEG signals exhibit significant heterogeneity due to their collection from various subjects using diverse devices and experimental setups, resulting in potential conflicts among different tasks that impede joint optimization. To tackle this challenge, we propose MTEEG, a multi-task EEG analysis framework which incorporates task-specific low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules to disentangle the parameter space and alleviate task conflicts. To investigate the trade-off between task specification and interaction, we propose three variants of MTEEG that integrate the LoRA modules in different ways and evaluate them on six downstream tasks, demonstrating that MTEEG can surpass state-of-the-art single-task methods on the majority of metrics. MTEEG shows the potential of multi-task EEG analysis and promotes the development of general-purpose brain-computer interfaces in the future.

Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly valuable as decision-making tools in domains such as gaming and programming. However, these agents often face challenges in achieving high-level goals without detailed instructions and in adapting to environments where feedback is delayed. In this paper, we present SelfGoal, a novel automatic approach designed to enhance agents' capabilities to achieve high-level goals with limited human prior and environmental feedback. The core concept of SelfGoal involves adaptively breaking down a high-level goal into a tree structure of more practical subgoals during the interaction with environments while identifying the most useful subgoals and progressively updating this structure. Experimental results demonstrate that SelfGoal significantly enhances the performance of language agents across various tasks, including competitive, cooperative, and deferred feedback environments. Project page: https://selfgoal-agent.github.io.

Deliberative tree search is a cornerstone of modern Large Language Model (LLM) research, driving the pivot from brute-force scaling toward algorithmic efficiency. This single paradigm unifies two critical frontiers: Test-Time Scaling (TTS), which deploys on-demand computation to solve hard problems, and Self-Improvement, which uses search-generated data to durably enhance model parameters. However, this burgeoning field is fragmented and lacks a common formalism, particularly concerning the ambiguous role of the reward signal -- is it a transient heuristic or a durable learning target? This paper resolves this ambiguity by introducing a unified framework that deconstructs search algorithms into three core components: the Search Mechanism, Reward Formulation, and Transition Function. We establish a formal distinction between transient Search Guidance for TTS and durable Parametric Reward Modeling for Self-Improvement. Building on this formalism, we introduce a component-centric taxonomy, synthesize the state-of-the-art, and chart a research roadmap toward more systematic progress in creating autonomous, self-improving agents.

We explore a method for improving the performance of large language models through self-reflection and reinforcement learning. By incentivizing the model to generate better self-reflections when it answers incorrectly, we demonstrate that a model's ability to solve complex, verifiable tasks can be enhanced even when generating synthetic data is infeasible and only binary feedback is available. Our framework operates in two stages: first, upon failing a given task, the model generates a self-reflective commentary analyzing its previous attempt; second, the model is given another attempt at the task with the self-reflection in context. If the subsequent attempt succeeds, the tokens generated during the self-reflection phase are rewarded. Our experimental results show substantial performance gains across a variety of model architectures, as high as 34.7% improvement at math equation writing and 18.1% improvement at function calling. Notably, smaller fine-tuned models (1.5 billion to 7 billion parameters) outperform models in the same family that are 10 times larger. Our novel paradigm is thus an exciting pathway to more useful and reliable language models that can self-improve on challenging tasks with limited external feedback.

The rise of personal assistant agents, e.g., OpenClaw, highlights the growing potential of large language models to support users across everyday life and work. A core challenge in these settings is proactive assistance, since users often begin with underspecified requests and leave important needs, constraints, or preferences unstated. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can identify and act on such hidden intents before they are explicitly stated, especially in sustained multi-turn interactions where user needs emerge gradually. To address this gap, we introduce π-Bench, a benchmark for proactive assistance comprising 100 multi-turn tasks across 5 domain-specific user personas. By incorporating hidden user intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity, π-Bench evaluates agents' ability to anticipate and address user needs over extended interactions, jointly measuring proactivity and task completion in long-horizon trajectories that better reflect real-world use. Experiments show (1) proactive assistance remains challenging, (2) a clear distinction between task completion and proactivity, and (3) the value of prior interaction for proactive intent resolution in later tasks.

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.

Prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have shed new light on enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and researchers have extensively explored the generation process of rationales and answers. However, they have overlooked the potential challenges posed by the poor quality of reasoning problems, which may influence the reasoning performance significantly. In this work, we propose Self-Polish (SP), a novel method that facilitates the model's problem-solving process by prompting them to progressively refine the given problems to be more comprehensible and solvable. Specifically, the method teaches models to eliminate irrelevant information, rearrange the logic structure and organize local conditions into new ones parallelly. SP is orthogonal to all other prompting methods, making it convenient to integrate with state-of-the-art techniques for further improvement. We conduct thorough experiments on five benchmarks to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, with Text-davinci-003, our method boosts the performance of standard few-shot prompting by 8.0% on GSM8K and 17.8% on MultiArith; it also improves the performance of CoT by 6.0% on GSM8K and 6.0% on MathQA, respectively. Furthermore, our method also showcases impressive performance on robustness evaluation.

What happens to an LLM agent's tool choice when the reliable tool silently changes within an ongoing session? We borrow set-shifting from cognitive psychology to study how well agents adapt to hidden reliability shifts. Our benchmark mounts tool-skill libraries with redundancies, where many tools solve the same task but differ in hidden reliability. In our evaluation framework, a branched schedule shifts the reliable tool group at hidden boundaries and pairs every shift with a no-shift control. We find that agents, by default, settle on a small recurring routine within a few turns of each boundary, with call shares concentrating on a few discrete values after each reliability shift. We score the set-shifting accuracy for each agent trajectory: the joint probability of routing to the target tool group in every post-shift window. We test open-weight LLMs in an open-source agentic harness and find qualitatively distinct failure modes across the same set of routines. We also find that set framing, how the toolset presents the alternatives as competing or complementary, shifts the routing dynamics.

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) promise to break the sequential latency bottleneck of autoregressive agents through parallel decoding, but recent evaluations show this efficiency does not transfer to embodied agentic competence: dLLM-backed agents repeatedly fall into retry loops, re-issuing an action long after it has failed. We give a mechanistic account of this failure and a training-free remedy. We trace the retry loop to the adaptivity of masked decoding: the sampler commits the positions it is most confident about and defers the uncertain ones, and at a failure state the context already offers a confident fill for the deferred decision, i.e. the failed action itself, so the retry is committed without the failure feedback ever being confronted. We model the resulting distortion of the action distribution as a task-blind corruption: contextually salient actions (e.g., the action just taken) receive inflated probability by a factor that depends on the state and the action but not on the task. Under this model, we analyse an invariance proposition: the task-blind factor cancels exactly from the reverse conditional, i.e. the likelihood of the task given the state and a candidate action, which coincides with the task posterior of an idealized uncorrupted model. Masked dLLMs evaluate the reverse conditional natively, unlike autoregressive models, by masking the task tokens and denoising, at the cost of a few parallel passes per candidate. We instantiate the rule as Reflect Reverse and evaluate it on four multi-turn embodied benchmarks, where it improves task success and progression rates over forward-scoring baselines.

Reasoning-specialized language models show large performance gains over base models, yet the internal changes responsible for improved multi-step reasoning remain poorly understood. It is unclear whether reasoning fine-tuning improves local token-level competence or globally reorganizes how models structure inference over time. We address this question by modeling Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a switching dynamical system (SDS), in which internal representations evolve under discrete latent policy states. Our framework combines time-aware contrastive representation learning with discrete regime discovery to recover latent policies from activation trajectories. Across four benchmarks and model scales from 1.5B to 32B parameters, reasoning-fine-tuned models exhibit richer latent-policy organization than their base counterparts, characterized by more differentiated transition structure and model-dependent changes in state utilization, persistence, and mixing. The recovered regimes exhibit functional specialization aligned with distinct reasoning stages, and extensive controls confirm that their structure is not explained by correctness, representation learning, or modeling priors, but depends on the coherent temporal organization of reasoning trajectories. Causal interventions further show that the regimes are functionally meaningful: state-swap ablations reduce one-step predictive fit, while transplanting reasoning dynamics into base models improves performance on challenging reasoning problems. Finally, SDS-guided pruning of failure-prone reasoning prefixes outperforms self-consistency in 11 of 12 model-dataset settings, with gains of up to 12.5 percentage points. Together, our results suggest that reasoning fine-tuning globally reorganizes latent dynamics, offering a new lens for mechanistic analysis and process-level control of reasoning models.

Multi-task learning has the potential to improve generalization by maximizing positive transfer between tasks while reducing task interference. Fully achieving this potential is hindered by manually designed architectures that remain static throughout training. On the contrary, learning in the brain occurs through structural changes that are in tandem with changes in synaptic strength. Thus, we propose Multi-Task Structural Learning (MTSL) that simultaneously learns the multi-task architecture and its parameters. MTSL begins with an identical single-task network for each task and alternates between a task-learning phase and a structural-learning phase. In the task learning phase, each network specializes in the corresponding task. In each of the structural learning phases, starting from the earliest layer, locally similar task layers first transfer their knowledge to a newly created group layer before being removed. MTSL then uses the group layer in place of the corresponding removed task layers and moves on to the next layers. Our empirical results show that MTSL achieves competitive generalization with various baselines and improves robustness to out-of-distribution data.

While long-horizon mobile GUI agents typically rely on thought-action-observation loops, they struggle to separate persistent task states from transient screen observations. As execution histories grow, this entanglement imposes a severe context burden, causing agents to forget initial requirements, hallucinate progress, or repeatedly interact with stale interfaces. To address this, we introduce Task-State Representation (TSR), a training-free framework that explicitly decouples task state from sensory input. Acting as a lightweight external wrapper, TSR maintains three structured components: a global instruction summary, a dynamic progress tracker for subgoals, and a transition-aware action verifier. By continuously updating through pre- and post-action visual comparisons, TSR effectively guides the agent's reasoning without requiring architectural modifications. Experiments across four mobile GUI benchmarks validate TSR's effectiveness, yielding up to a 12 absolute point increase in success rate on complex cross-application and memory-intensive tasks.

Graphical user interfaces (GUI) automation agents are emerging as powerful tools, enabling humans to accomplish increasingly complex tasks on smart devices. However, users often inadvertently omit key information when conveying tasks, which hinders agent performance in the current agent paradigm that does not support immediate user intervention. To address this issue, we introduce a Self-Correction GUI Navigation task that incorporates interactive information completion capabilities within GUI agents. We developed the Navi-plus dataset with GUI follow-up question-answer pairs, alongside a Dual-Stream Trajectory Evaluation method to benchmark this new capability. Our results show that agents equipped with the ability to ask GUI follow-up questions can fully recover their performance when faced with ambiguous user tasks.

Transferring learned patterns from pretrained neural language models has been shown to significantly improve effectiveness across a variety of language-based tasks, meanwhile further tuning on intermediate tasks has been demonstrated to provide additional performance benefits, provided the intermediate task is sufficiently related to the target task. However, how to identify related tasks is an open problem, and brute-force searching effective task combinations is prohibitively expensive. Hence, the question arises, are we able to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of tasks with no training examples through selective fine-tuning? In this paper, we explore statistical measures that approximate the divergence between domain representations as a means to estimate whether tuning using one task pair will exhibit performance benefits over tuning another. This estimation can then be used to reduce the number of task pairs that need to be tested by eliminating pairs that are unlikely to provide benefits. Through experimentation over 58 tasks and over 6,600 task pair combinations, we demonstrate that statistical measures can distinguish effective task pairs, and the resulting estimates can reduce end-to-end runtime by up to 40%.

A language model's ability to reflect on its own reasoning provides a key advantage for solving complex problems. While most recent research has focused on how this ability develops during reinforcement learning, we show that it actually begins to emerge much earlier - during the model's pre-training. To study this, we introduce deliberate errors into chains-of-thought and test whether the model can still arrive at the correct answer by recognizing and correcting these mistakes. By tracking performance across different stages of pre-training, we observe that this self-correcting ability appears early and improves steadily over time. For instance, an OLMo2-7B model pre-trained on 4 trillion tokens displays self-correction on our six self-reflection tasks.

Self-adaptive large language models (LLMs) aim to solve the challenges posed by traditional fine-tuning methods, which are often computationally intensive and static in their ability to handle diverse tasks. We introduce \implname, a novel self-adaptation framework that adapts LLMs for unseen tasks in real-time by selectively adjusting only the singular components of their weight matrices. During inference, \implname employs a two-pass mechanism: first, a dispatch system identifies the task properties, and then task-specific "expert" vectors, trained using reinforcement learning, are dynamically mixed to obtain targeted behavior for the incoming prompt. Our method outperforms ubiquitous approaches such as LoRA, with fewer parameters and greater efficiency. \implname demonstrates versatility across different LLM architectures and modalities, including vision-language tasks. \implname represents a significant leap forward, offering a scalable, efficient solution for enhancing the adaptability and task-specific performance of LLMs, paving the way for truly dynamic, self-organizing AI systems.

While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023; Madaan et al., 2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we break down the self-correction process into two core components: mistake finding and output correction. For mistake finding, we release BIG-Bench Mistake, a dataset of logical mistakes in Chain-of-Thought reasoning traces. We provide benchmark numbers for several state-of-the-art LLMs, and demonstrate that LLMs generally struggle with finding logical mistakes. For output correction, we propose a backtracking method which provides large improvements when given information on mistake location. We construe backtracking as a lightweight alternative to reinforcement learning methods, and show that it remains effective with a reward model at 60-70% accuracy.

Game-playing agents like AlphaGo have achieved superhuman performance through self-play, which is theoretically guaranteed to yield optimal policies in competitive games. However, most language tasks are partially or fully cooperative, so it is an open question whether techniques like self-play can effectively be used to improve language models. We empirically investigate this question in a negotiation game setting known as Deal or No Deal (DoND). Crucially, the objective in DoND can be modified to produce a fully cooperative game, a strictly competitive one, or anything in between. We finetune language models in self-play over multiple rounds of filtered behavior cloning in DoND for each of these objectives. Contrary to expectations, we find that language model self-play leads to significant performance gains in both cooperation and competition with humans, suggesting that self-play and related techniques have promise despite a lack of theoretical guarantees.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capacity at planning and executing a high-level goal in a live computer environment (e.g. MiniWoB++). To perform a task, recent works often require a model to learn from trace examples of the task via either supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. Without these trace examples, it remains a challenge how an agent can autonomously learn and improve its control on a computer, which limits the ability of an agent to perform a new task. We approach this problem with a zero-shot agent that requires no given expert traces. Our agent plans for executable actions on a partially observed environment, and iteratively progresses a task by identifying and learning from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. On the easy tasks of MiniWoB++, we show that our zero-shot agent often outperforms recent SoTAs, with more efficient reasoning. For tasks with more complexity, our reflective agent performs on par with prior best models, even though previous works had the advantages of accessing expert traces or additional screen information.

Compositional reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training policies to perform complex long-horizon tasks. Typically, a high-level task is decomposed into a sequence of subtasks and a separate policy is trained to perform each subtask. In this paper, we focus on the problem of training subtask policies in a way that they can be used to perform any task; here, a task is given by a sequence of subtasks. We aim to maximize the worst-case performance over all tasks as opposed to the average-case performance. We formulate the problem as a two agent zero-sum game in which the adversary picks the sequence of subtasks. We propose two RL algorithms to solve this game: one is an adaptation of existing multi-agent RL algorithms to our setting and the other is an asynchronous version which enables parallel training of subtask policies. We evaluate our approach on two multi-task environments with continuous states and actions and demonstrate that our algorithms outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a "bridging" utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we call OTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.

We study the problem of planning under model uncertainty in an online meta-reinforcement learning (RL) setting where an agent is presented with a sequence of related tasks with limited interactions per task. The agent can use its experience in each task and across tasks to estimate both the transition model and the distribution over tasks. We propose an algorithm to meta-learn the underlying structure across tasks, utilize it to plan in each task, and upper-bound the regret of the planning loss. Our bound suggests that the average regret over tasks decreases as the number of tasks increases and as the tasks are more similar. In the classical single-task setting, it is known that the planning horizon should depend on the estimated model's accuracy, that is, on the number of samples within task. We generalize this finding to meta-RL and study this dependence of planning horizons on the number of tasks. Based on our theoretical findings, we derive heuristics for selecting slowly increasing discount factors, and we validate its significance empirically.

Fine-tuning LLMs to inject new knowledge faces a critical challenge: LLMs can quickly memorize new facts, yet fail to use them for downstream reasoning tasks. We formalize this failure as the \textbf{Knowing--Using Gap}, characterized by an accuracy gap and a temporal lag between memorization and generalization. To understand this phenomenon, we fine-tune LLMs with unseen knowledge and monitor the spatial permeation dynamics of the knowledge internally using a novel intervention technique called self-patching. Self-patching identifies activation locations where relocating representations substantially improves failed generalization cases. These results are consistent with a knowledge-circuit misalignment hypothesis: memorized representations can exist internally but may not be routed to computation-effective layers. To demonstrate the practicality of this diagnostic finding, we design a simple heuristic strategy which recovers 58--75\% of the oracle headroom in generalization failure. Experiments are done cross-domain for the robustness of this finding.

We present a single attention head in GPT-2 Small that has one main role across the entire training distribution. If components in earlier layers predict a certain token, and this token appears earlier in the context, the head suppresses it: we call this copy suppression. Attention Head 10.7 (L10H7) suppresses naive copying behavior which improves overall model calibration. This explains why multiple prior works studying certain narrow tasks found negative heads that systematically favored the wrong answer. We uncover the mechanism that the Negative Heads use for copy suppression with weights-based evidence and are able to explain 76.9% of the impact of L10H7 in GPT-2 Small. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive description of the complete role of a component in a language model to date. One major effect of copy suppression is its role in self-repair. Self-repair refers to how ablating crucial model components results in downstream neural network parts compensating for this ablation. Copy suppression leads to self-repair: if an initial overconfident copier is ablated, then there is nothing to suppress. We show that self-repair is implemented by several mechanisms, one of which is copy suppression, which explains 39% of the behavior in a narrow task. Interactive visualisations of the copy suppression phenomena may be seen at our web app https://copy-suppression.streamlit.app/

Large language models have been shown to struggle with limited context memory and multi-step reasoning. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think. This allows the model to recall information and perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context, thus extending its memory and enabling multi-step reasoning. Our experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate that our method can successfully generalize to longer and more complicated instances from their training setup by taking Self-Notes at inference time.

In the absence of extensive human-annotated data for complex reasoning tasks, self-improvement -- where models are trained on their own outputs -- has emerged as a primary method for enhancing performance. However, the critical factors underlying the mechanism of these iterative self-improving methods remain poorly understood, such as under what conditions self-improvement is effective, and what are the bottlenecks in the current iterations. In this work, we identify and propose methods to monitor two pivotal factors in this iterative process: (1) the model's ability to generate sufficiently diverse responses (exploration); and (2) the effectiveness of external rewards in distinguishing high-quality candidates from lower-quality ones (exploitation). Using mathematical reasoning as a case study, we begin with a quantitative analysis to track the dynamics of exploration and exploitation, discovering that a model's exploratory capabilities rapidly deteriorate over iterations, and the effectiveness of exploiting external rewards diminishes as well. Motivated by these findings, we introduce B-STaR, a Self-Taught Reasoning framework that autonomously adjusts configurations across iterations to Balance exploration and exploitation, thereby optimizing the self-improving effectiveness based on the current policy model and available rewards. Our experiments on mathematical reasoning, coding, and commonsense reasoning demonstrate that B-STaR not only enhances the model's exploratory capabilities throughout training but also achieves a more effective balance between exploration and exploitation, leading to superior performance.

Autonomous intelligence requires not only perception and reasoning, but critically, effective interaction with the existing world and its infrastructure. Everyday environments are rich in tangible control interfaces (TCIs), e.g., light switches, appliance panels, and embedded GUIs, that demand commonsense and physics reasoning, but also causal prediction and outcome verification in time and space (e.g., delayed heating, remote lights). Moreover, failures here have potential safety implications, yet current benchmarks rarely test grounding, partial observability (video), or post-hoc verification in situated settings. We introduce SWITCH (Semantic World Interface Tasks for Control and Handling), an embodied, task-driven benchmark created through iterative releases to probe these gaps. Its first iteration, SWITCH-Basic, evaluates five complementary abilities:task-aware VQA, semantic UI grounding, action generation, state-transition prediction, and result verification, under egocentric RGB video input and device diversity. Across 351 tasks spanning 98 real devices and appliances, commercial and open LMMMs exhibit inconsistent performance even on single-step interactions, often over-relying on textual cues and under-using visual or video evidence (and high aggregate scores can mask such failures). SWITCH provides data, code, and held-out splits to enable reproducible evaluation and community contributions toward more challenging future iterations of the benchmark and the creation of training datasets. Benchmark resources are available at: https://github.com/BAAI-Agents/SWITCH.

Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.

Self-consciousness, the introspection of one's existence and thoughts, represents a high-level cognitive process. As language models advance at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: Are these models becoming self-conscious? Drawing upon insights from psychological and neural science, this work presents a practical definition of self-consciousness for language models and refines ten core concepts. Our work pioneers an investigation into self-consciousness in language models by, for the first time, leveraging causal structural games to establish the functional definitions of the ten core concepts. Based on our definitions, we conduct a comprehensive four-stage experiment: quantification (evaluation of ten leading models), representation (visualization of self-consciousness within the models), manipulation (modification of the models' representation), and acquisition (fine-tuning the models on core concepts). Our findings indicate that although models are in the early stages of developing self-consciousness, there is a discernible representation of certain concepts within their internal mechanisms. However, these representations of self-consciousness are hard to manipulate positively at the current stage, yet they can be acquired through targeted fine-tuning. Our datasets and code are at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/SelfConsciousness.

Recently, self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) has been proposed to adapt large language models to downstream applications with scarce expert-annotated data, by iteratively generating synthetic responses from the model itself. However, SPIN is designed to optimize the current reward advantages of annotated responses over synthetic responses at hand, which may gradually vanish during iterations, leading to unstable optimization. Moreover, the utilization of reference policy induces a misalignment issue between the reward formulation for training and the metric for generation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Triplet-based Self-Play fIne-tuNing (T-SPIN) method that integrates two key designs. First, beyond current advantages, T-SPIN additionally incorporates historical advantages between iteratively generated responses and proto-synthetic responses produced by the initial policy. Even if the current advantages diminish, historical advantages remain effective, stabilizing the overall optimization. Second, T-SPIN introduces the entropy constraint into the self-play framework, which is theoretically justified to support reference-free fine-tuning, eliminating the training-generation discrepancy. Empirical results on various tasks demonstrate not only the superior performance of T-SPIN over SPIN, but also its stable evolution during iterations. Remarkably, compared to supervised fine-tuning, T-SPIN achieves comparable or even better performance with only 25% samples, highlighting its effectiveness when faced with scarce annotated data.

Transfer learning approaches have shown to significantly improve performance on downstream tasks. However, it is common for prior works to only report where transfer learning was beneficial, ignoring the significant trial-and-error required to find effective settings for transfer. Indeed, not all task combinations lead to performance benefits, and brute-force searching rapidly becomes computationally infeasible. Hence the question arises, can we predict whether transfer between two tasks will be beneficial without actually performing the experiment? In this paper, we leverage explainability techniques to effectively predict whether task pairs will be complementary, through comparison of neural network activation between single-task models. In this way, we can avoid grid-searches over all task and hyperparameter combinations, dramatically reducing the time needed to find effective task pairs. Our results show that, through this approach, it is possible to reduce training time by up to 83.5% at a cost of only 0.034 reduction in positive-class F1 on the TREC-IS 2020-A dataset.

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits <swi> to enter latent mode and </swi> to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) <swi> is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

LLM training is shifting from manual design and annotation to interaction-driven self-evolution. However, existing self-evolutionary methods face a fundamental dilemma between task diversity and verification reliability: environment-bound methods obtain precise feedback but confine learning to narrow domains, while open-ended self-generation broadens the task space but lacks reliable verification, allowing misleading rewards to pollute the training loop. We identify agent skills as a powerful middle ground to reconcile this tension: each skill ensures deep, verifiable execution in a specific scenario, while dynamic routing across skills maintains open-ended task variety. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Skill Self-Play (Skill-SP), a co-evolutionary framework comprising a proposer, a solver, and a dynamic skill controller. Orchestrated via a reinforcement learning loop, these components co-evolve in a continuous self-play loop: the proposer generates challenging tasks conditioned on dynamically sampled skills; the solver explores candidate solutions to push its capability boundaries; and the skill controller collects execution feedback to update and expand the skill library. This interactive co-evolution effectively bridges the gap between structured verification and open-ended exploration. Empirical evaluations on tool-use and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Skill-SP, serving as a robust evolution engine, consistently pushes the performance ceiling of competent backbones while catalyzing striking turnarounds for initially misaligned models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/skill-self-play.

Prior interpretability research studying narrow distributions has preliminarily identified self-repair, a phenomena where if components in large language models are ablated, later components will change their behavior to compensate. Our work builds off this past literature, demonstrating that self-repair exists on a variety of models families and sizes when ablating individual attention heads on the full training distribution. We further show that on the full training distribution self-repair is imperfect, as the original direct effect of the head is not fully restored, and noisy, since the degree of self-repair varies significantly across different prompts (sometimes overcorrecting beyond the original effect). We highlight two different mechanisms that contribute to self-repair, including changes in the final LayerNorm scaling factor and sparse sets of neurons implementing Anti-Erasure. We additionally discuss the implications of these results for interpretability practitioners and close with a more speculative discussion on the mystery of why self-repair occurs in these models at all, highlighting evidence for the Iterative Inference hypothesis in language models, a framework that predicts self-repair.

When contextual information conflicts with the knowledge stored in model parameters, activation directions can be used to decode and steer which source the model follows. However, steering along a direction does not establish causality: whether the unedited model would naturally use that direction or whether the direction is reusable across tasks. We test these distinctions through counterfactual experiments in unambiguous settings. First, we estimate authority directions from agreement prompts, in which the context and parametric knowledge support the same answer. We then interchange naturally occurring coordinates along these directions between matched prompts that direct the model to prioritize either the supplied context or its parametric knowledge. Across Qwen, Llama, and OLMo models, this intervention reproduces 30-68% of the authority-induced shift in source choice, whereas matched controls reproduce almost none. To test cross-task reuse, we learn authority directions on two tasks separately and see that cross-task transferability closes only 9% of the authority gap while the local direction learned on the given task closes 57%. These results distinguish authority representation, causal use, and cross-task causal reuse, and suggest that authority computations may be task-dependent, rather than reusable across tasks.

Recently, large reasoning models demonstrate exceptional performance on various tasks. However, reasoning models inefficiently over-process both trivial and complex queries, leading to resource waste and prolonged user latency. To address this challenge, we propose SelfBudgeter - a self-adaptive controllable reasoning strategy for efficient reasoning. Our approach adopts a dual-phase training paradigm: first, the model learns to pre-estimate the reasoning cost based on the difficulty of the query. Then, we introduce budget-guided GPRO for reinforcement learning, which effectively maintains accuracy while reducing output length. SelfBudgeter allows users to anticipate generation time and make informed decisions about continuing or interrupting the process. Furthermore, our method enables direct manipulation of reasoning length via pre-filling token budget. Experimental results demonstrate that SelfBudgeter can rationally allocate budgets according to problem complexity, achieving up to 74.47% response length compression on the MATH benchmark while maintaining nearly undiminished accuracy.

In heterogeneous multi-task decision-making, tasks not only exhibit diverse observation and action spaces but also vary substantially in their underlying complexities. While conventional multi-task world models like UniZero excel in single-task settings, we find that when handling a broad and diverse suite of tasks, gradient conflicts and the loss of model plasticity often constrain their sample efficiency. In this work, we address these challenges from two complementary perspectives: the single learning iteration and the overall learning process. First, to mitigate the gradient conflicts, we systematically investigate key architectural designs for extending UniZero. Our investigation identifies a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture as the most effective approach. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that this architecture alleviates gradient conflicts by routing task-specific representations to specialized sub-networks. This finding leads to our proposed model, ScaleZero. Second, to dynamically allocate model capacity throughout the learning process, we introduce an online Dynamic Parameter Scaling (DPS) strategy. This strategy progressively integrates LoRA adapters in response to task-specific progress, enabling adaptive knowledge retention and parameter expansion. Evaluations on a diverse set of standard benchmarks (Atari, DMC, Jericho) demonstrate that ScaleZero, utilizing solely online reinforcement learning with one model, performs on par with specialized single-task agents. With the DPS strategy, it remains competitive while using just 71.5% of the environment interactions. These findings underscore the potential of ScaleZero for effective multi-task planning. Our code is available at magenta{https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero}.

It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

Self-improving systems require environmental interaction for continuous adaptation. We introduce SPICE (Self-Play In Corpus Environments), a reinforcement learning framework where a single model acts in two roles: a Challenger that mines documents from a large corpus to generate diverse reasoning tasks, and a Reasoner that solves them. Through adversarial dynamics, the Challenger creates an automatic curriculum at the frontier of the Reasoner's capability, while corpus grounding provides the rich, near-inexhaustible external signal necessary for sustained improvement. Unlike existing ungrounded self-play methods that offer more limited benefits, SPICE achieves consistent gains across mathematical (+8.9%) and general reasoning (+9.8%) benchmarks on multiple model families. Our analysis reveals how document grounding is a key ingredient in SPICE to continuously generate its own increasingly challenging goals and achieve them, enabling sustained self-improvement.

Existing benchmarks for conversational AI agents simulate single-control environments, where only the AI agent can use tools to interact with the world, while the user remains a passive information provider. This differs from real-world scenarios like technical support, where users need to actively participate in modifying the state of the (shared) world. In order to address this gap, we introduce tau^2-bench, with four key contributions: 1) A novel Telecom dual-control domain modeled as a Dec-POMDP, where both agent and user make use of tools to act in a shared, dynamic environment that tests both agent coordination and communication, 2) A compositional task generator that programmatically creates diverse, verifiable tasks from atomic components, ensuring domain coverage and controlled complexity, 3) A reliable user simulator tightly coupled with the environment, whose behavior is constrained by tools and observable states, improving simulation fidelity, 4) Fine-grained analysis of agent performance through multiple ablations including separating errors arising from reasoning vs communication/coordination. In particular, our experiments show significant performance drops when agents shift from no-user to dual-control, highlighting the challenges of guiding users. Overall, tau^2-bench provides a controlled testbed for agents that must both reason effectively and guide user actions.

Activation steering has become a widely used approach for controlling language models during explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, motivating its extension to latent CoT. However, we find that steering continuous thoughts produces substantially weaker effects on subsequent language generation than steering explicit CoT, even when the hidden representations are moved by comparable amounts. We first show that task information remains identifiable in continuous thoughts. Hence, we hypothesize a latent-to-language transition gap, in which an intervention effect in latent space fails to transfer to language generation. Two further results support this hypothesis: the output distribution changes abruptly at the transition boundary, and task-related directions exert much weaker bidirectional control in latent CoT than in explicit CoT. These findings identify the transition interface as a central target for evaluating and designing future latent-steering methods.

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from demonstrations. However, relationships between the two abilities and how such relationships affect the emergence of ICL is unclear. In this paper, we take the first step by examining the pre-training dynamics of the emergence of ICL. With carefully designed metrics, we find that these two abilities are, in fact, competitive during pre-training. Moreover, we observe a strong negative correlation between the competition and ICL performance. Further analysis of common pre-training factors (i.e., model size, dataset size, and data curriculum) demonstrates possible ways to manage the competition. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective method to better integrate these two abilities for ICL at inference time. Through adaptive ensemble learning, the performance of ICL can be significantly boosted, enabling two small models to outperform a larger one with more than twice the parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Competitive-ICL.

Large language models fine-tuned on human behavioural data have emerged as general-purpose cognitive proxies, but the scale this requires, and whether these models process task structure or exploit statistical shortcuts, remain open questions. We train fourteen models from 135M to 14B parameters across four architecture families on Psych-101, a dataset of 10.7 million trial-level choices from 160 experiments. For in-distribution simulations, scale barely matters. The models fall within a narrow band, as though against a ceiling, and 0.6B to 1B parameters suffice to match a 70B baseline on held-out participants. Out-of-distribution, that band opens into a markedly steeper scaling gradient, with larger models clearly advantaged in generalisation to novel task structure. To determine what information these models use, we run two diagnostics. We progressively strip four prompt channels -- task instructions, experimental stimuli, outcome feedback, and choice history -- across 27 experiments, and permute trial order. Masking the content of stimuli and feedback destroys 75.7% of learned information and pushes models below chance, demonstrating that choice history alone does not account for performance. Permutation reveals invariance on tasks with independent trials but sensitivity where trial order is determined by prior responses. Small cognitively fine-tuned models therefore show promise as noise ceiling estimators for psychological experiments, though their scope remains bounded by the paradigms seen in training.

Humans can flexibly switch between different modes of thinking based on task complexity: from rapid intuitive judgments to in-depth analytical understanding. However, current Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding systems which locate interface elements based on natural language instructions rely solely on immediate prediction without reasoning, struggling to understand complex interface layouts with nested structures and hierarchical relationships, limiting their effectiveness on complex interfaces. Inspired by human dual-system cognition, we present Focus, a novel GUI grounding framework that combines fast prediction with systematic analysis. The framework dynamically switches between rapid and deliberate processing through an adaptive system switching based on task complexity, optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. Focus decomposes grounding into progressive stages: interface summarization, visual focused analysis, and precise coordinate prediction. This structured decomposition enables systematic understanding of both interface layouts and visual relationships. Extensive experiments show that Focus achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 300K of the training data with a 2B parameter model compared to existing approaches. Focus demonstrates superior performance particularly in complex GUI scenarios, achieving 77.4% average accuracy on ScreenSpot and 13.3% on the more challenging ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals the effectiveness of this dual-system approach while demonstrating its potential for improving complex GUI interaction scenarios.

Continual learning (CL) seeks to adapt pretrained models while preserving prior capabilities. Yet the tasks supplied for preservation cover only part of what a model knows, while forgetting can extend beyond them. Recent work shows that language models can supplement this limited evidence by generating useful replay without access to their original training data. This raises a question about self-preservation: can a model help choose preservation targets that protect its own capabilities more broadly? To study this question, we organize task descriptions and their examples into Task Banks, whose entries can be selected and combined to guide replay generation by a frozen model. Continual instruction tuning with Qwen models of varying sizes yields three findings. First, the new task and learning rate shape which prior capabilities degrade, while tracking previously correct answers reveals losses that average accuracy can conceal. Second, generated replay reduces forgetting on tasks outside the bank. Combining partial banks strengthens this protection, improving mean retention of previously correct answers over either bank alone across the tested sizes. Third, the model can also help choose replay targets: selection informed by the new task improves mean held-out retention over random selection at 4B, with similar new-task gains, although smaller models show no corresponding advantage. Under a fixed example budget, however, replacing new-task examples with replay improves preservation at the cost of smaller new-task gains. Together, these findings show that models can support broader self-preservation by generating replay data and, in some settings, choosing which tasks to replay.

We demonstrate that large language models can effectively self-improve through self-judging without requiring reference solutions, leveraging the inherent asymmetry between generating and verifying solutions. Our experiments on Countdown puzzles and MIT Integration Bee problems show that models can provide reliable reward signals without ground truth answers, enabling reinforcement learning in domains previously not possible. By implementing self-judging, we achieve significant performance gains maintaining alignment with formal verification. When combined with synthetic question generation, we establish a complete self-improvement loop where models generate practice problems, solve them, and evaluate their own performance-achieving an 8% improvement with Qwen 2.5 7B over baseline and surpassing GPT-4o performance on integration tasks. Our findings demonstrate that LLM judges can provide effective reward signals for training models, unlocking many reinforcement learning environments previously limited by the difficulty of creating programmatic rewards. This suggests a potential paradigm shift toward AI systems that continuously improve through self-directed learning rather than human-guided training, potentially accelerating progress in domains with scarce training data or complex evaluation requirements.

In most real world scenarios, a policy trained by reinforcement learning in one environment needs to be deployed in another, potentially quite different environment. However, generalization across different environments is known to be hard. A natural solution would be to keep training after deployment in the new environment, but this cannot be done if the new environment offers no reward signal. Our work explores the use of self-supervision to allow the policy to continue training after deployment without using any rewards. While previous methods explicitly anticipate changes in the new environment, we assume no prior knowledge of those changes yet still obtain significant improvements. Empirical evaluations are performed on diverse simulation environments from DeepMind Control suite and ViZDoom, as well as real robotic manipulation tasks in continuously changing environments, taking observations from an uncalibrated camera. Our method improves generalization in 31 out of 36 environments across various tasks and outperforms domain randomization on a majority of environments.

Mental manipulation is a subtle yet pervasive form of abuse in interpersonal communication, making its detection critical for safeguarding potential victims. However, due to manipulation's nuanced and context-specific nature, identifying manipulative language in complex, multi-turn, and multi-person conversations remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiManip dataset, comprising 220 multi-turn, multi-person dialogues balanced between manipulative and non-manipulative interactions, all drawn from reality shows that mimic real-world scenarios. For manipulative interactions, it includes 11 distinct manipulations depicting real-life scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4o and Llama-3.1-8B, employing various prompting strategies. Despite their capabilities, these models often struggle to detect manipulation effectively. To overcome this limitation, we propose SELF-PERCEPT, a novel, two-stage prompting framework inspired by Self-Perception Theory, demonstrating strong performance in detecting multi-person, multi-turn mental manipulation. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/danushkhanna/self-percept .

Modern agent frameworks equip large language models with external skill libraries to solve complex tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these systems can effectively evolve their skills and whether the resulting skills improve task-solving capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce ContinualSkillBench, a dynamic evaluation framework for in-context continual skill learning. It covers five representative domains, each containing 100 interconnected subtasks ordered by increasing difficulty and opportunities for cross-task skill reuse. Our experiments show that sequential execution generally improves performance, but the gains vary substantially across models and domains. Moreover, in-context learning performs comparably to explicit skill maintenance on average, suggesting that much of the improvement arises from adaptation to prior context and feedback rather than reusable skill abstraction alone. Explicit skills nevertheless provide selective benefits for tasks requiring reusable procedures or precise outputs. We further find that less capable models tend to accumulate larger, more fragmented collections of task-specific skills. These findings show that current in-context skill evolution mechanisms can support continual adaptation, but still struggle to consistently consolidate experience into robust and transferable skills.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-step problem solving. However, these agents struggle to adapt to specialized environments and do not leverage past interactions, approaching each new task from scratch regardless of their accumulated experience. We introduce Experiential Reflective Learning (ERL), a simple self-improvement framework that enables rapid environment adaptation through experiential learning. ERL reflects on task trajectories and outcomes to generate heuristics, capturing actionable lessons that transfer across tasks. At test time, relevant heuristics are retrieved based on the current task and injected into the agent's context to guide execution. On the Gaia2 benchmark, ERL improves success rate by 7.8% over a ReAct baseline, with large gains in task completion reliability, and outperforms prior experiential learning methods. Through systematic ablations, we find that selective retrieval is essential and that heuristics provide more transferable abstractions than few-shot trajectory prompting. These results demonstrate that reflecting on single-attempt experiences to extract transferable heuristics enables effective agent self-improvement.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly solve long-horizon tasks through multi-turn interactions with users and external tools. In these settings, relevant task information often unfolds over time rather than being fully specified at the initial prompt. Service agents make this challenge especially concrete: users may clarify or revise their goals, while tool responses provide information needed for subsequent decisions. Thus, a final reward alone cannot indicate which actions contributed to resolving the task. Recent methods rely on comparative evidence from other trajectories or resampled continuations, or on separately constructed step-level learning signals, to refine credit. However, a completed rollout already records how information and errors flow between agent actions. We introduce Influence-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), which represents each rollout as a typed influence-dependency graph over trainable agent actions, with user and tool observations serving as evidence. IAPO converts support-use and failed-use structure into routing weights that redistribute the same trajectory-level advantage. Experiments with Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B demonstrate superior performance over multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) baselines across three service-agent benchmarks: {τ^2}-Bench, UserBench, and AgentChangeBench. BFCL-v4 Multi-Turn further shows that these gains do not compromise multi-turn function-calling performance. This work advances the understanding of credit assignment in multi-turn user interactions and provides a principled approach to training service agents from sparse outcome feedback.

Self-evolution is a central research topic in enabling large language model (LLM)-based agents to continually improve their capabilities after pretraining. Recent research has witnessed a transition from reinforcement learning (RL)-free to RL-based methods. Current RL-based methods either rely on dense external reward signals or extract intrinsic reward signals from LLMs themselves. However, these approaches diverge from the self-evolution mechanisms observed in human intelligence, where individuals learn and improve through mutual discussion and collaboration. In this work, we introduce Co-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems (CoMAS), a novel framework that enables agents to improve autonomously by learning from inter-agent interactions without external supervision. CoMAS generates intrinsic rewards from rich discussion dynamics, employs an LLM-as-a-judge mechanism to formulate these rewards, and optimizes each agent's policy through RL, thereby enabling decentralized and scalable co-evolution. Experimental results demonstrate that CoMAS consistently outperforms untrained agents and achieves state-of-the-art performance across most evaluation settings. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of interaction-based reward signals and reveal promising scalability as the number and diversity of agents increase. These findings establish CoMAS as a novel and effective paradigm for self-evolution in LLM-based agents.

As LLMs become more capable, they are increasingly deployed as collaborative agents, taking on user-delegated tasks through iterative interaction. Yet genuine interaction is inherently dynamic: users rarely specify their intent upfront, instead disclosing, revising, and reshaping it as the conversation unfolds. Despite this, LLMs are still predominantly evaluated or trained in single-turn, fully-specified settings, leaving open a fundamental question: how well do LLMs track and act on user intent as it evolves over the course of a conversation? To study this, we introduce a framework that transforms static, single-turn tasks into dynamic multi-turn conversations in which the user's intent evolves across turns--incrementally revealed, revised, and at times redirected mid-conversation--while preserving each task's original evaluation protocol, enabling existing benchmarks to be reused as controlled testbeds without new annotation. Across multiple tasks, we surface a consistent phenomenon: strong static-setting performance does not transfer to the evolving-intent setting, with substantial drops across model families. Our findings point to a fundamental gap: today's LLMs do not yet faithfully track and act on the user's evolving intent, a capability invisible to static evaluation yet critical for future collaborative agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in autonomous agents, yet standard evaluations remain confined to static task solving. An emerging frontier is harness evolution---the agent's capacity to autonomously optimize its own operating harness. However, systematically benchmarking this capability remains challenging, as existing evaluations fail to isolate harness improvements from base model strength, prevent task-specific overfitting, or capture long-horizon iterative research. To address these challenges, we introduce Evo-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate models' intrinsic harness-evolving capabilities across Search, Office, and General agent domains. To rigorously isolate this capability, Evo-Bench employs a novel harness-guided construction framework: it leverages auxiliary-task evolution to identify tasks genuinely sensitive to framework improvements, followed by sensitivity-aware stratified splitting to ensure robust cross-suite generalization. Extensive evaluations across nine frontier and open-weight models reveal that top models achieve massive absolute gains reaching 16.6 points, closely approaching state-of-the-art human-engineered baselines. Crucially, while autonomous evolution outpeforms artificial harness in General tasks and excels in Search tasks, it struggles in Office tasks that demand highly specific processing workflows. Furthermore, our analysis exposes critical temporal anomalies like early saturation, while demonstrating that the synthesized harnesses act as highly transferable reasoning structures, consistently boosting diverse policy models.

Creating a system that can have meaningful conversations with humans to help accomplish tasks is one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has defined the meaning of AI since the beginning. A lot has been accomplished in this area recently, with voice assistant products entering our daily lives and chat bot systems becoming commonplace in customer service. At first glance there seems to be no shortage of options for dialogue systems. However, the frequently deployed dialogue systems today seem to all struggle with a critical weakness - they are hard to build and harder to maintain. At the core of the struggle is the need to script every single turn of interactions between the bot and the human user. This makes the dialogue systems more difficult to maintain as the tasks become more complex and more tasks are added to the system. In this paper, we propose Converse, a flexible tree-based modular task-oriented dialogue system. Converse uses an and-or tree structure to represent tasks and offers powerful multi-task dialogue management. Converse supports task dependency and task switching, which are unique features compared to other open-source dialogue frameworks. At the same time, Converse aims to make the bot building process easy and simple, for both professional and non-professional software developers. The code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/Converse.

Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure across tasks, exploration--a crucial aspect of RL--has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by showing that when an agent is trained on a sufficiently diverse set of tasks, a generic policy-sharing algorithm with myopic exploration design like epsilon-greedy that are inefficient in general can be sample-efficient for MTRL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical demonstration of the "exploration benefits" of MTRL. It may also shed light on the enigmatic success of the wide applications of myopic exploration in practice. To validate the role of diversity, we conduct experiments on synthetic robotic control environments, where the diverse task set aligns with the task selection by automatic curriculum learning, which is empirically shown to improve sample-efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable versatility across diverse domains. However, the pathway toward autonomous model development, a cornerstone for achieving human-level learning and advancing autonomous AI, remains largely uncharted. We introduce an innovative approach, termed "SELF" (Self-Evolution with Language Feedback). This methodology empowers LLMs to undergo continual self-evolution. Furthermore, SELF employs language-based feedback as a versatile and comprehensive evaluative tool, pinpointing areas for response refinement and bolstering the stability of self-evolutionary training. Initiating with meta-skill learning, SELF acquires foundational meta-skills with a focus on self-feedback and self-refinement. These meta-skills are critical, guiding the model's subsequent self-evolution through a cycle of perpetual training with self-curated data, thereby enhancing its intrinsic abilities. Given unlabeled instructions, SELF equips the model with the capability to autonomously generate and interactively refine responses. This synthesized training data is subsequently filtered and utilized for iterative fine-tuning, enhancing the model's capabilities. Experimental results on representative benchmarks substantiate that SELF can progressively advance its inherent abilities without the requirement of human intervention, thereby indicating a viable pathway for autonomous model evolution. Additionally, SELF can employ online self-refinement strategy to produce responses of superior quality. In essence, the SELF framework signifies a progressive step towards autonomous LLM development, transforming the LLM from a mere passive recipient of information into an active participant in its own evolution.

Training effective Vision Language Models (VLMs) for GUI agents typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over large-scale annotated datasets, where the collection process is labor-intensive and error-prone. In this work, we propose a self-supervised inverse dynamics task to enable VLMs to learn from GUI transition pairs by inferring the action that caused that transition. This training task offers two advantages: (1) It enables VLMs to ignore variations unrelated to user actions (e.g., background refreshes, ads) and to focus on true affordances such as buttons and input fields within complex GUIs. (2) The training data can be easily obtained from existing GUI trajectories without requiring human annotation, and it can be easily scaled through automatic offline exploration. Using this training task, we propose UI-shift, a framework for enhancing VLM-based GUI agents through self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). With only 2K training samples sourced from existing datasets, two VLMs -- Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B -- trained with UI-Shift achieve competitive or superior performance on grounding tasks (ScreenSpot-series benchmarks) and GUI automation tasks (AndroidControl), compared to SFT baselines and GUI-specific models that explicitly elicit reasoning abilities during RL. Our findings suggest a potential direction for enhancing VLMs for GUI agents by leveraging more self-supervised training data in the future.

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to serve as efficient simulators for agentic search tasks in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby reducing dependence on costly interactions with external search engines. To this end, we first quantify the intrinsic search capability of LLMs via structured prompting and repeated sampling, which we term Self-Search. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit strong scaling behavior with respect to the inference budget, achieving high pass@k on question-answering benchmarks, including the challenging BrowseComp task. Building on these observations, we introduce Self-Search RL (SSRL), which enhances LLMs' Self-Search capability through format-based and rule-based rewards. SSRL enables models to iteratively refine their knowledge utilization internally, without requiring access to external tools. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SSRL-trained policy models provide a cost-effective and stable environment for search-driven RL training, reducing reliance on external search engines and facilitating robust sim-to-real transfer. We draw the following conclusions: 1) LLMs possess world knowledge that can be effectively elicited to achieve high performance; 2) SSRL demonstrates the potential of leveraging internal knowledge to reduce hallucination; 3) SSRL-trained models integrate seamlessly with external search engines without additional effort. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support more scalable RL agent training.

To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). EgoTV contains multi-step tasks with multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints, in addition to abstracted task descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task. We also propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach to enable the causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of such tasks. We demonstrate NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). Our contributions include the release of the EgoTV and CTV datasets, and the NSG model for future research on egocentric assistive agents.

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.

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e., the generation of unnecessarily verbose and redundant content), which hinders efficiency and inflates inference cost. In this work, we explore the representational and behavioral origins of this inefficiency, revealing that LRMs inherently possess the capacity for more concise reasoning. Empirical analyses show that correct reasoning paths vary significantly in length, and the shortest correct responses often suffice, indicating untapped efficiency potential. Exploiting these findings, we propose two lightweight methods to enhance LRM efficiency. First, we introduce Efficiency Steering, a training-free activation steering technique that modulates reasoning behavior via a single direction in the model's representation space. Second, we develop Self-Rewarded Efficiency RL, a reinforcement learning framework that dynamically balances task accuracy and brevity by rewarding concise correct solutions. Extensive experiments on seven LRM backbones across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our methods significantly reduce reasoning length while preserving or improving task performance. Our results highlight that reasoning efficiency can be improved by leveraging and guiding the intrinsic capabilities of existing models in a self-guided manner.

A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally. StreamMemBench is publicly available at https://github.com/landian60/StreamMemBench.

Humans possess the ability to draw on past experiences explicitly when learning new tasks and applying them accordingly. We believe this capacity for self-referencing is especially advantageous for reinforcement learning agents in the unsupervised pretrain-then-finetune setting. During pretraining, an agent's past experiences can be explicitly utilized to mitigate the nonstationarity of intrinsic rewards. In the finetuning phase, referencing historical trajectories prevents the unlearning of valuable exploratory behaviors. Motivated by these benefits, we propose the Self-Reference (SR) approach, an add-on module explicitly designed to leverage historical information and enhance agent performance within the pretrain-finetune paradigm. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of Interquartile Mean (IQM) performance and Optimality Gap reduction on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for model-free methods, recording an 86% IQM and a 16% Optimality Gap. Additionally, it improves current algorithms by up to 17% IQM and reduces the Optimality Gap by 31%. Beyond performance enhancement, the Self-Reference add-on also increases sample efficiency, a crucial attribute for real-world applications.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at solving complex tasks by leveraging long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this often leads to overthinking on simple tasks, resulting in unnecessary computational overhead. We observe that LRMs inherently possess the capability for efficient short CoT reasoning, which can be reliably elicited through prompt design. To leverage this capability, we propose ThinkSwitcher, a framework that enables a single LRM to dynamically switch between short and long CoT modes based on task complexity. ThinkSwitcher introduces a lightweight switching module trained with supervision signals derived from the relative performance of each reasoning mode across tasks. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks show that ThinkSwitcher reduces computational cost by 20-30% while maintaining high accuracy on complex tasks. This demonstrates the effectiveness of ThinkSwitcher as a scalable and efficient solution for unified LRM deployment.

Traditional multi-task learning (MTL) methods use dense networks that use the same set of shared weights across several different tasks. This often creates interference where two or more tasks compete to pull model parameters in different directions. In this work, we study whether sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) improve multi-task learning by specializing some weights for learning shared representations and using the others for learning task-specific information. To this end, we devise task-aware gating functions to route examples from different tasks to specialized experts which share subsets of network weights conditioned on the task. This results in a sparsely activated multi-task model with a large number of parameters, but with the same computational cost as that of a dense model. We demonstrate such sparse networks to improve multi-task learning along three key dimensions: (i) transfer to low-resource tasks from related tasks in the training mixture; (ii) sample-efficient generalization to tasks not seen during training by making use of task-aware routing from seen related tasks; (iii) robustness to the addition of unrelated tasks by avoiding catastrophic forgetting of existing tasks.

Standard training pipelines for large language models (LLMs) are typically unidirectional, progressing from pre-training to post-training. However, the potential for a bidirectional process--where insights from post-training retroactively improve the pre-trained foundation--remains unexplored. We aim to establish a self-reinforcing flywheel: a cycle in which reinforcement learning (RL)-tuned model strengthens the base model, which in turn enhances subsequent post-training performance, requiring no specially trained teacher or reference model. To realize this, we analyze training dynamics and identify the mid-training (annealing) phase as a critical turning point for model capabilities. This phase typically occurs at the end of pre-training, utilizing high-quality corpora under a rapidly decaying learning rate. Building upon this insight, we introduce ReMiT (Reinforcement Learning-Guided Mid-Training). Specifically, ReMiT leverages the reasoning priors of RL-tuned models to dynamically reweight tokens during the mid-training phase, prioritizing those pivotal for reasoning. Empirically, ReMiT achieves an average improvement of 3\% on 10 pre-training benchmarks, spanning math, code, and general reasoning, and sustains these gains by over 2\% throughout the post-training pipeline. These results validate an iterative feedback loop, enabling continuous and self-reinforcing evolution of LLMs.

Humans learn to master open-ended repertoires of skills by imagining and practicing their own goals. This autotelic learning process, literally the pursuit of self-generated (auto) goals (telos), becomes more and more open-ended as the goals become more diverse, abstract and creative. The resulting exploration of the space of possible skills is supported by an inter-individual exploration: goal representations are culturally evolved and transmitted across individuals, in particular using language. Current artificial agents mostly rely on predefined goal representations corresponding to goal spaces that are either bounded (e.g. list of instructions), or unbounded (e.g. the space of possible visual inputs) but are rarely endowed with the ability to reshape their goal representations, to form new abstractions or to imagine creative goals. In this paper, we introduce a language model augmented autotelic agent (LMA3) that leverages a pretrained language model (LM) to support the representation, generation and learning of diverse, abstract, human-relevant goals. The LM is used as an imperfect model of human cultural transmission; an attempt to capture aspects of humans' common-sense, intuitive physics and overall interests. Specifically, it supports three key components of the autotelic architecture: 1)~a relabeler that describes the goals achieved in the agent's trajectories, 2)~a goal generator that suggests new high-level goals along with their decomposition into subgoals the agent already masters, and 3)~reward functions for each of these goals. Without relying on any hand-coded goal representations, reward functions or curriculum, we show that LMA3 agents learn to master a large diversity of skills in a task-agnostic text-based environment.

Despite the promise of Multi-Task Learning in leveraging complementary knowledge across tasks, existing multi-task optimization (MTO) techniques remain fixated on resolving conflicts via optimizer-centric loss scaling and gradient manipulation strategies, yet fail to deliver consistent gains. In this paper, we argue that the shared representation space, where task interactions naturally occur, offers rich information and potential for operations complementary to existing optimizers, especially for facilitating the inter-task complementarity, which is rarely explored in MTO. This intuition leads to Rep-MTL, which exploits the representation-level task saliency to quantify interactions between task-specific optimization and shared representation learning. By steering these saliencies through entropy-based penalization and sample-wise cross-task alignment, Rep-MTL aims to mitigate negative transfer by maintaining the effective training of individual tasks instead pure conflict-solving, while explicitly promoting complementary information sharing. Experiments are conducted on four challenging MTL benchmarks covering both task-shift and domain-shift scenarios. The results show that Rep-MTL, even paired with the basic equal weighting policy, achieves competitive performance gains with favorable efficiency. Beyond standard performance metrics, Power Law exponent analysis demonstrates Rep-MTL's efficacy in balancing task-specific learning and cross-task sharing. The project page is available at HERE.

We propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization, focusing on task scaling and zero-shot prompting. While previous models are trained on only a few dozen tasks, we scale to 1,000 tasks for the first time using real-world data. This leads to a crucial discovery that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling; i.e., the model size has little impact on performance with an extremely large number of tasks. Our results show that task scaling can substantially improve training efficiency by 30 times in FLOPs. Moreover, we present a prompting method that incorporates a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for unseen tasks, along with a few other improvements. Empirically, ZeroPrompt substantially improves both the efficiency and the performance of zero-shot learning across a variety of academic and production datasets.

A persistent skill library allows language model agents to reuse successful strategies across tasks. Maintaining such a library requires three coupled capabilities. The agent selects a relevant skill, utilizes it during execution, and distills new skills from experience. Existing methods optimize these capabilities in isolation or with separate reward sources, resulting in partial and conflicting evolution. We propose Skill1, a framework that trains a single policy to co-evolve skill selection, utilization, and distillation toward a shared task-outcome objective. The policy generates a query to search the skill library, re-ranks candidates to select one, solves the task conditioned on it, and distills a new skill from the trajectory. All learning derives from a single task-outcome signal. Its low-frequency trend credits selection and its high-frequency variation credits distillation. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that Skill1 outperforms prior skill-based and reinforcement learning baselines. Training dynamics confirm the co-evolution of the three capabilities, and ablations show that removing any credit signal degrades the evolution.

While deep learning and deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have demonstrated impressive results in domains such as image classification, game playing, and robotic control, data efficiency remains a major challenge. Multi-task learning has emerged as a promising approach for sharing structure across multiple tasks to enable more efficient learning. However, the multi-task setting presents a number of optimization challenges, making it difficult to realize large efficiency gains compared to learning tasks independently. The reasons why multi-task learning is so challenging compared to single-task learning are not fully understood. In this work, we identify a set of three conditions of the multi-task optimization landscape that cause detrimental gradient interference, and develop a simple yet general approach for avoiding such interference between task gradients. We propose a form of gradient surgery that projects a task's gradient onto the normal plane of the gradient of any other task that has a conflicting gradient. On a series of challenging multi-task supervised and multi-task RL problems, this approach leads to substantial gains in efficiency and performance. Further, it is model-agnostic and can be combined with previously-proposed multi-task architectures for enhanced performance.

Conventional agent systems often struggle in open-ended environments where task distributions continuously drift and external supervision is scarce. Their reliance on static toolsets or offline training lags behind these dynamics, leaving the system's capability boundaries rigid and unknown. To address this, we propose the In-Situ Self-Evolving paradigm. This approach treats sequential task interactions as a continuous stream of experience, enabling the system to distill short-term execution feedback into long-term, reusable capabilities without access to ground-truth labels. Within this framework, we identify tool evolution as the critical pathway for capability expansion, which provides verifiable, binary feedback signals. Within this framework, we develop Yunjue Agent, a system that iteratively synthesizes, optimizes, and reuses tools to navigate emerging challenges. To optimize evolutionary efficiency, we further introduce a Parallel Batch Evolution strategy. Empirical evaluations across five diverse benchmarks under a zero-start setting demonstrate significant performance gains over proprietary baselines. Additionally, complementary warm-start evaluations confirm that the accumulated general knowledge can be seamlessly transferred to novel domains. Finally, we propose a novel metric to monitor evolution convergence, serving as a function analogous to training loss in conventional optimization. We open-source our codebase, system traces, and evolved tools to facilitate future research in resilient, self-evolving intelligence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this study, we explore a surprising phenomenon related to ICL: LLMs can perform multiple, computationally distinct ICL tasks simultaneously, during a single inference call, a capability we term "task superposition". We provide empirical evidence of this phenomenon across various LLM families and scales and show that this phenomenon emerges even if we train the model to in-context learn one task at a time. We offer theoretical explanations that this capability is well within the expressive power of transformers. We also explore how LLMs internally compose task vectors during superposition. Furthermore, we show that larger models can solve more ICL tasks in parallel, and better calibrate their output distribution. Our findings offer insights into the latent capabilities of LLMs, further substantiate the perspective of "LLMs as superposition of simulators", and raise questions about the mechanisms enabling simultaneous task execution.

Equipping large language models with explicit skills has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. Agent skills can be inherently divided into general skills for broad cognitive transfer and task-specific skills for dynamic execution. However, existing skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically force a rigid choice between full externalization, which incurs prohibitive context overhead, and full internalization, which risks overfitting and knowledge conflicts. To address this dilemma, we propose Skill0.5, a novel agentic RL framework that explicitly differentiates skill treatments by combining general skill internalization with task-specific skill utilization. Driven by a dynamic, difficulty-aware router, Skill0.5 streams tasks into distinct mastery tiers to apply tailored optimization strategies: it internalizes general skills via privileged distillation to build a cognitive foundation for hard tasks, while using diagnostic probing on easy tasks to penalize shortcuts and enforce specific skill utilization. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that Skill0.5 outperforms both memory-based and skill-based RL baselines, yielding performance improvements across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

Enabling large language model (LLM) agents to accumulate and reuse experience from past interactions remains a central challenge in real-world applications. A promising solution is to treat skills as trainable states and optimize them in the same way as model parameters in neural network training. However, data-driven skill optimization is prone to overfitting to the limited trajectories collected from real environments. Overexploiting these trajectories overfits the current batch, while unconstrained exploration causes regression on previously solved cases. This tension motivates a constrained search view of skill self-evolution, governed by an exploration--exploitation trade-off. We propose SkillBoost, a three-stage framework that mitigates both risks: structured exploitation localizes observed failures to editable skill components, prior-guided exploration draws on prior knowledge in the LLM to generate diverse repair candidates, and verified acceptance commits a candidate only when it improves performance within a regression bound. Experiments across 23 model--benchmark configurations show that SkillBoost achieves state-of-the-art performance while mitigating overfitting, outperforming both human-crafted and LLM-generated skills. Transfer experiments further show that optimized skills can be reused by other agents on similar tasks.

To solve complex reasoning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting-based methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. However, as reasoning chains extend, critical intermediate steps and the original prompt will be buried in the context, receiving insufficient attention and leading to errors. In this paper, we propose Self-Anchor, a novel pipeline that leverages the inherent structure of reasoning to steer LLM attention. Self-Anchor decomposes reasoning trajectories into structured plans and automatically aligns the model's attention to the most relevant inference steps, allowing the model to maintain focus throughout generation. Our experiment shows that Self-Anchor outperforms SOTA prompting methods across six benchmarks. Notably, Self-Anchor significantly reduces the performance gap between ``non-reasoning'' models and specialized reasoning models, with the potential to enable most LLMs to tackle complex reasoning tasks without retraining.

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from simpler tasks, and faster by adapting the complexity of the actions to the task. We propose a task-oriented representation of complex actions, called procedures, to learn online task relationships and unbounded sequences of action primitives to control the different observables of the environment. Combining both goal-babbling with imitation learning, and active learning with transfer of knowledge based on intrinsic motivation, our algorithm self-organises its learning process. It chooses at any given time a task to focus on; and what, how, when and from whom to transfer knowledge. We show with a simulation and a real industrial robot arm, in cross-task and cross-learner transfer settings, that task composition is key to tackle highly complex tasks. Task decomposition is also efficiently transferred across different embodied learners and by active imitation, where the robot requests just a small amount of demonstrations and the adequate type of information. The robot learns and exploits task dependencies so as to learn tasks of every complexity.

In various fields of knowledge creation, including science, new ideas often build on pre-existing information. In this work, we explore this concept within the context of language models. Specifically, we explore the potential of self-training models on their own outputs, akin to how humans learn and build on their previous thoughts and actions. While this approach is intuitively appealing, our research reveals its practical limitations. We find that extended self-training of the GPT-2 model leads to a significant degradation in performance, resulting in repetitive and collapsed token output.

Through multi-agent competition, the simple objective of hide-and-seek, and standard reinforcement learning algorithms at scale, we find that agents create a self-supervised autocurriculum inducing multiple distinct rounds of emergent strategy, many of which require sophisticated tool use and coordination. We find clear evidence of six emergent phases in agent strategy in our environment, each of which creates a new pressure for the opposing team to adapt; for instance, agents learn to build multi-object shelters using moveable boxes which in turn leads to agents discovering that they can overcome obstacles using ramps. We further provide evidence that multi-agent competition may scale better with increasing environment complexity and leads to behavior that centers around far more human-relevant skills than other self-supervised reinforcement learning methods such as intrinsic motivation. Finally, we propose transfer and fine-tuning as a way to quantitatively evaluate targeted capabilities, and we compare hide-and-seek agents to both intrinsic motivation and random initialization baselines in a suite of domain-specific intelligence tests.

We tackle real-world problems with complex structures beyond the pixel-based game or simulator. We formulate it as a few-shot reinforcement learning problem where a task is characterized by a subtask graph that defines a set of subtasks and their dependencies that are unknown to the agent. Different from the previous meta-rl methods trying to directly infer the unstructured task embedding, our multi-task subtask graph inferencer (MTSGI) first infers the common high-level task structure in terms of the subtask graph from the training tasks, and use it as a prior to improve the task inference in testing. Our experiment results on 2D grid-world and complex web navigation domains show that the proposed method can learn and leverage the common underlying structure of the tasks for faster adaptation to the unseen tasks than various existing algorithms such as meta reinforcement learning, hierarchical reinforcement learning, and other heuristic agents.

We develop information geometric techniques to understand the representations learned by deep networks when they are trained on different tasks using supervised, meta-, semi-supervised and contrastive learning. We shed light on the following phenomena that relate to the structure of the space of tasks: (1) the manifold of probabilistic models trained on different tasks using different representation learning methods is effectively low-dimensional; (2) supervised learning on one task results in a surprising amount of progress even on seemingly dissimilar tasks; progress on other tasks is larger if the training task has diverse classes; (3) the structure of the space of tasks indicated by our analysis is consistent with parts of the Wordnet phylogenetic tree; (4) episodic meta-learning algorithms and supervised learning traverse different trajectories during training but they fit similar models eventually; (5) contrastive and semi-supervised learning methods traverse trajectories similar to those of supervised learning. We use classification tasks constructed from the CIFAR-10 and Imagenet datasets to study these phenomena.

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute. Finally, we show that the self-discovered reasoning structures are universally applicable across model families: from PaLM 2-L to GPT-4, and from GPT-4 to Llama2, and share commonalities with human reasoning patterns.

Many real-world manipulation tasks consist of a series of subtasks that are significantly different from one another. Such long-horizon, complex tasks highlight the potential of dexterous hands, which possess adaptability and versatility, capable of seamlessly transitioning between different modes of functionality without the need for re-grasping or external tools. However, the challenges arise due to the high-dimensional action space of dexterous hand and complex compositional dynamics of the long-horizon tasks. We present Sequential Dexterity, a general system based on reinforcement learning (RL) that chains multiple dexterous policies for achieving long-horizon task goals. The core of the system is a transition feasibility function that progressively finetunes the sub-policies for enhancing chaining success rate, while also enables autonomous policy-switching for recovery from failures and bypassing redundant stages. Despite being trained only in simulation with a few task objects, our system demonstrates generalization capability to novel object shapes and is able to zero-shot transfer to a real-world robot equipped with a dexterous hand. More details and video results could be found at https://sequential-dexterity.github.io

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly place a multi-billion-parameter model inside the feedback loop, repeatedly recomputing task context whenever they predict a new action chunk. Yet task understanding changes far more slowly than the robot state. We introduce Fast-VLA, which invokes a frozen 4B VLM once per episode to contextualize the instruction and initial views as fixed, multi-layer key-value task memory. During execution, a lightweight online actor fuses learned time- and arm-indexed queries with current visual and proprioceptive feedback to form action queries. These queries retrieve task context from the fixed memory and predict action chunks without re-running the foundation model. Fast-VLA achieves 92.46% and 92.40% success on RoboTwin 2.0 Clean and Randomized, and 95.95% and 79.11% on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus evaluation. Against three continually conditioned baselines on the same hardware, it reduces RoboTwin amortized policy inference time by 10.9-17.1x and requires 1.22 GiB of post-prefill online resident memory. Task-memory swaps further show that the actor relies on episode-matched task memory. These results show that task context can be established once while closed-loop control remains responsive throughout execution. Project page: https://garfield-kh.github.io/FastVLA

Increasing the thinking budget of AI models can significantly improve accuracy, but not all questions warrant the same amount of reasoning. Users may prefer to allocate different amounts of reasoning effort depending on how they value output quality versus latency and cost. To leverage this tradeoff effectively, users need fine-grained control over the amount of thinking used for a particular query, but few approaches enable such control. Existing methods require users to specify the absolute number of desired tokens, but this requires knowing the difficulty of the problem beforehand to appropriately set the token budget for a query. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Effort Control, a self-adaptive reinforcement learning method that trains models to use a user-specified fraction of tokens relative to the current average chain-of-thought length for each query. This approach eliminates dataset- and phase-specific tuning while producing better cost-accuracy tradeoff curves compared to standard methods. Users can dynamically adjust the cost-accuracy trade-off through a continuous effort parameter specified at inference time. We observe that the model automatically learns to allocate resources proportionally to the task difficulty and, across model scales ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, our approach enables a 2-3x reduction in chain-of-thought length while maintaining or improving performance relative to the base model used for RL training.

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills must handle raw sensory input such as images. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that acquires such general-purpose skills by combining unsupervised representation learning and reinforcement learning of goal-conditioned policies. Since the particular goals that might be required at test-time are not known in advance, the agent performs a self-supervised "practice" phase where it imagines goals and attempts to achieve them. We learn a visual representation with three distinct purposes: sampling goals for self-supervised practice, providing a structured transformation of raw sensory inputs, and computing a reward signal for goal reaching. We also propose a retroactive goal relabeling scheme to further improve the sample-efficiency of our method. Our off-policy algorithm is efficient enough to learn policies that operate on raw image observations and goals for a real-world robotic system, and substantially outperforms prior techniques.