ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 15, 2026

cs.RO

CoDA: Co-Evolution of Data Engines and Action Policies

Tianjiao Yu, Zhilin Ou, Yifan Shen and 5 more

Generative simulation can automate robot environment construction, but physically valid environments are not necessarily useful for training. The challenge is to identify environments that address a policy's failures and supervision that helps it overcome them. We introduce CoDA, a framework in which a simulation data engine and an action policy co-evolve through a shared heterogeneous memory of environment construction, policy failures, and learning progress. The memory compiles validated diagnoses from a vision-language critic into generation programs that recreate difficulties and training programs that help the policy overcome them. We further propose Text2potential to convert these diagnoses into staged potentials for action-chunk value learning, providing dense supervision for policy updates while preserving the task's optimal policy under standard shaping assumptions. Measured learning progress guides further generation and program refinement. Across four manipulation task families, CoDA improves out-of-distribution success from 5.3% after supervised fine-tuning to 27.6%, exceeding the strongest closed-loop baseline by 9.5 percentage points with the same generation budget. On LIBERO-Pro, 15 rounds of generation and training raise success from 25% to 84% under position perturbations and from 1% to 76% under instruction perturbations.

#02Oct 15, 2026

cs.MA

Learning Self-Orchestration in Decentralized Agent Swarms

Guowei Xu, Zhenting Qi, Amani Kiruga and 2 more

The capabilities of an agent swarm depend on both its individual members and how they coordinate. Yet existing multi-agent systems often train agents within fixed orchestration structures, separating the learning of individual capabilities from the organization of collective behavior. We introduce market-based post-training (MPT), a framework for jointly learning action policies and self-orchestration in decentralized agent swarms. Agents express their willingness to participate through bids, which determine who acts and how collective outcomes provide local training credit. Learning both action and bidding behavior allows individual capabilities and patterns of participation to adapt together without a central coordinating agent. We evaluate MPT on embodied crafting, robot navigation, and deep research. Results show gains over monolithic post-training and confirm that agent participation indeed evolves with learning. With the same post-trained action policies, learned self-orchestration outperforms alternative coordination strategies. Ablations show that both action and bidding benefit from learning, and that learned bids provide more effective action-training signals. Beyond the original training objectives, trained swarms adapt faster to related tasks and achieve better performance with larger populations at inference time. Larger populations also suffer smaller performance losses under agent dropout, demonstrating that learned self-orchestration supports reuse, scaling, and robustness in decentralized agent swarms. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Embodied-Minds-Lab/MPT.

#03Oct 15, 2026

cs.LG

CAT-alyzing Honesty: Continuous Adversarial Training for Transferable LLM Honesty

Yuan-Chen Chang, Niklas Herbster, Gauthier Gidel and 1 more

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming prevalent in scenarios where honesty is critical. However, despite alignment training, these models still exhibit dishonest behaviour, such as outputting claims that contradict some knowledge or are not supported by what is accessible in context. We introduce Continuous Adversarial Training for Consistent Honesty (CATCH), inspired by a method originally developed to robustly refuse harmful queries. CATCH trains the model towards an honest answer and away from a dishonest one while maintaining the model's capabilities. We evaluate two architectures (Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and Qwen3-3.6-27B). We show that trained with only hundreds of targets built from self-reporting scenarios, CATCH learns an honest behaviour that robustly generalizes and transfers across distinct benchmarks. It consistently reduces dishonesty under pressure on MASK, increases confessions in the multi-agent game of Among Us, and improves the discovery rates of the model's hidden behaviours in AuditBench. We show that CATCH outperforms prompting and supervised fine-tuning in improving honesty, and it is on par with state-of-the-art honesty activation steering. However, CATCH surpasses honesty steering in maintaining utility, thanks to a novel choice of utility data.

#04Oct 15, 2026

cs.RO

LIBERO-PeRM: Benchmarking Personalized Robotic Manipulation

Zhixu Li, Keqian Tang, Litian Gong and 7 more

Personalization is essential for general-purpose robots to transition into household environments and achieve true practicality. While general robotic manipulation has been extensively studied, personalized robotic manipulation (PeRM) lacks a controlled benchmark for separating task completion from preference satisfaction. We introduce LIBERO-PeRM, a benchmark for preference learning in embodied agents. LIBERO-PeRM studies five questions: 1) how policies follow preferences in zero-shot settings; 2) how they learn single preferences from demonstrations; 3) how efficiently they acquire preferences as demonstrations increase; 4) how learned preferences generalize across layouts and tasks; and 5) how policies compose preferences and behave under conflicts. We propose a controlled formulation and taxonomy of observable preferences in simulation, covering motion, skill, and user-profile choices. This formulation is restricted to language-expressible preferences that can be instantiated in LIBERO without changing the task goal, evaluated automatically, and reused across tasks. Building on LIBERO, our procedural pipeline generates paired demonstrations with and without preferences. We create five task suites (312 tasks) with high-quality demonstrations, rich metadata, and preference-satisfaction metrics. Experiments show that current VLA policies struggle with zero-shot personalization, while SFT makes preferences learnable. Mixed training achieves better no-preference retention than sequential adaptation and improves performance with contextual prompts compared with preference-only training, but can weaken motion-preference learning; preference generalization, decomposition, and conflict handling remain difficult. The code, datasets, and demos can be found on the project website: https://libero-perm.github.io/.

#05Oct 15, 2026

cs.AI

KnowGPO: Knowledge-Grouped Policy Optimization for Search Agents

Siqi Chen, Zhengxi Lu, Yuchen Yan and 10 more

Deep search agents solve knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon, multi-turn interactions, where assigning credit to individual search decisions is fundamentally difficult. Outcome-based reinforcement learning provides only a single terminal reward shared across an entire trajectory. Recent process-supervision methods aim to assign credit at finer granularity, but they typically anchor credit to either surface-level trajectory states or model-internal signals, both of which become unreliable in deep search where observations are heterogeneous and retrieved contexts are long and noisy. We propose KnowGPO, a reinforcement learning framework that aligns trajectories by the task-relevant knowledge they have acquired rather than by their surface observations. For each query, KnowGPO decomposes the information required to derive the answer into atomic knowledge conditions, and represents the state of a trajectory at each step by the subset of conditions it has satisfied. Trajectories sharing the same knowledge state are grouped for within-group comparison, and the incremental knowledge gain between consecutive steps serves as an environment-grounded process reward. Experiments on Xbench, BrowseComp-ZH, and GAIA show KnowGPO consistently outperforms outcome-only (GRPO) and process-supervision baselines (GiGPO, IGPO) by 3.8 to 4.2 points, with our 8B model rivaling or exceeding most 32B open-source systems.