#01Oct 19, 2026
cs.AI
ProteinGeoBench: Frontier Structural-Biology Agents Are Fluent at Lookup but Lost in Geometry
Matt Turk, Brandon L. Neel, Diana M. Lopez and 3 more
Frontier agents retrieve structural metadata well and compute geometry from coordinates less reliably. We ask how much of a benchmark score reflects that gap and how much reflects the evaluation configuration around the model. We study ProteinGeoBench, a suite of 131 protein-structure tasks, using 4,249 rollouts from four frontier models and 4,486 further trials across 26 models. Three of the four frontier models fall within 0.031 of one another (0.785 to 0.816) with no difference between them resolved, while the fourth scores 0.707 and all three gaps to it exclude zero. Three of the four do better on metadata lookup than on numeric calculation. The fourth is slightly better on numeric. Numeric tasks are 28 of the 131 but half of the twelve tasks that all four models fail. The ranking also depends on the evaluation budget: with one run per task, 23.9% of bootstrap replicates put a different model first. On a selected 15-task slice, removing network access lowers scores more than blocking eight structural-database domains, but the two contrasts were graded in different passes and cannot be cleanly decomposed. Swapping in each model's own command-line agent changes scores by -0.071 to +0.086, a comparison too small to rule out moderate harness effects. Across 26 models, numeric performance rises with non-numeric performance rather than staying flat. The experiments use different task subsets, so they cannot rank model, harness, access and task composition against one another. Evaluations should report results by task family, along with the number of runs, the harness and the access conditions.
#02Oct 19, 2026
cs.CL
ASTOR: Benchmarking and Improving Autoformulation for Soft-Constraint Optimization with a Formal Grammar
Amer Goel, Yeganeh Alimohammadi, Andrew Daw
Real-world decision problems combine two qualitatively different kinds of constraints: requirements that must be satisfied, called hard constraints, and preferences that can be violated, called soft constraints. Because these problems are often posed to decision-makers in natural language, large language models offer a natural tool for assisting with their solution. This has given rise to autoformulation, which focuses on using LLMs to translate natural-language descriptions of decision problems into executable mathematical optimization models. However, this research often neglects soft constraints like those proposed by consumers, managers, and planners, despite the fact that many practical problems require modeling them explicitly. We introduce ASTOR, an inference-time framework that maps a natural-language decision problem to a grammar-guided abstract syntax tree (AST) before deterministically compiling the resulting representation into executable optimization code. We also introduce SoftOR, a unified benchmark of natural language problems which focuses on soft constraint formulations. On SoftOR, ASTOR achieves the best aggregate accuracy among comparable single-request and multi-agent LLM methods while remaining competitive on standard autoformulation benchmarks that include only hard constraints. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/astor-softor-iclr-E34C/README.md.
#03Oct 19, 2026
cs.LG
Next Best Action: Causal Constrained Offline RL for Business Action Targeting
Surya Ramachandiran, Yiming Li, Juan Mancilla-Caceres and 2 more
Next Best Action (NBA) systems must select among customer interventions (e.g., discounts, promotions, and lifecycle actions), maximize long-term economic value, satisfy complex operational constraints, and remain causally grounded. Existing approaches lack a rigorous framework for meeting these requirements jointly. We address this gap by formulating NBA as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We then integrate off-policy causal correction of the estimated customer dynamics directly into the Linear Programming (LP) formulation of the CMDP. The resulting policy selects actions based on customer states to maximize long-term value while explicitly enforcing business guardrails. Furthermore, the LP formulation yields shadow prices that quantify the economic trade-offs of operational constraints (e.g., fairness and user welfare), enhancing policy interpretability. We validate our proposed offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework on an industry case study involving rideshare coupon targeting, where customer states are defined by Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) stages. We evaluate performance using model-based off-policy evaluation, with causal dynamics estimated from a temporal holdout. Under the observed coupon budget and RFM state representation, our optimized policy improves customer lifetime value (LTV) by 19% over the estimated behavior policy and 8% over a myopic baseline. Although the demonstrated action space is binary, the proposed framework is action-agnostic, yielding a general-purpose decision module for targeting systems that manage multiple interventions.
#04Oct 19, 2026
cs.AI
SOMA: Continuous Monitoring and Intervention for System Two Reasoning with System One Models
Ruizhi Qian, Lei Shi, Tianyu Hu and 3 more
Reasoning models often run into problems without noticing them, even when symptoms are visible in their own text. In humans, metacognition separates monitoring from control: fast, intuitive signals keep watch while slow, deliberate reasoning unfolds and help decide whether to continue, change course, or stop. System One (S1) decision models, such as Jev, are a natural candidate for this role: they return a calibrated probability for a natural-language question about a text in one fast call, yet they are used only as gates before reasoning. We introduce SOMA (System One Metacognitive Awareness), in which an S1 model continuously monitors a System Two (S2) reasoning model and intervenes when needed. SOMA has three layers: a scenario layer states each objective in natural language with predefined actions, an awareness layer lets S1 judge whether the described behavior appears, and a control layer accumulates these judgments, first reminds S2, and takes over only if the behavior persists. Sharing one S1 model and one controller across tasks, without training, SOMA addresses two different failures on two reasoning models: on overthinking, it cuts reasoning tokens by up to 36\% while improving average accuracy, and on unanswerable questions, it raises abstention from 70.5\% to 87.2\%.
#05Oct 19, 2026
cs.RO
Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policy
Zekai Li, Jiayi Yu, Jinlu Zhang and 8 more
In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms, scaling behavior, and generalization of physical Recursive self-improvement. We introduce PhysRSI-eval to quantify physical RSI through a five-axis metric: First-Attempt Performance, Efficiency, Success, Budget and Improvement from failure. Different VLMs are evaluated on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. The analysis of experimental results motivates the Physical Barrel Hypothesis: different capabilities may constrain different parts of improvement. The five-axis metrics also distinguish systems with close public benchmark averages and show that high scores need not come with early or efficient gains. We study observational scaling from two perspectives: predicting the relative performance of VLM agents from their public capabilities, and forecasting later progress from early physical feedback. Together, these analyses ask how quickly and how far an agent can improve. Moreover, we conduct workspace interventions and then analyze what improvement leaves behind. Removing history reduces late-round success, frozen workspaces remain useful on unseen layouts, and three cross-task cases achieve success earlier. The results suggest that scene-specific adaptation and reusable experience can coexist.