#01Aug 25, 2026
cs.LG
BioKERN: Biological Kernel Regularization for Histology-to-Transcriptomics Neighborhood Retrieval
Seungik Cho, Betul Orcan-Ekmekci
Spatially resolved biology requires representations that preserve biological neighborhood structure rather than only exact cross-modal correspondences. Existing histology--transcriptomics objectives can emphasize instance-level matching even when non-paired spots share molecular or spatial context. We introduce BioKERN, a multimodal spatial representation-learning framework that incorporates biological structure as an explicit, learnable inductive bias. BioKERN constructs a training-time biological kernel by combining transcriptomic similarity and spatial proximity, then uses it to provide graded neighborhood supervision and regularize embedding geometry. Evaluation uses a fixed, model-independent biological neighborhood definition shared by all methods. Across Mouse Brain Visium and Human Liver GSE240429, BioKERN consistently improves biological-neighborhood retrieval over BLEEP in both single- and multi-scale settings. Controlled shared-architecture experiments show that most of the improvement arises from biological-kernel regularization rather than increased model capacity. These results support explicit biological geometry as an interpretable inductive bias for multimodal learning in spatial biology.
#02Aug 25, 2026
cs.RO
Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning
Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu and 7 more
Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on an unverified assumption: generated futures faithfully reflect arbitrary valid actions. Existing benchmarks are typically confined to expert demonstrations, leaving off-expert action following inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce WorldEcho, which probes action following over a broader action distribution using visual integrity and SE(3) trajectory alignment. Our diagnosis shows that current world models reasonably execute expert actions but struggle with diverse off-expert trajectories, either ignoring the commanded actions or producing visually invalid rollouts. We further propose WorldSync, which strengthens action following along three complementary axes: distributional coverage, representational grounding, and intervention-effect alignment. It broadens the training distribution over action consequences, grounds intermediate video representations in action-induced robot dynamics through an Action-Forcing Expert, and aligns predicted changes under action interventions with the corresponding changes in ground-truth futures. Experiments on RoboTwin benchmarks and real-robot tasks show that WorldSync improves WorldEcho metrics and serves as a more reliable simulator for iterative policy improvement, enabling policies to achieve higher success rates.
#03Aug 25, 2026
cs.LG
Improving Cross-Problem Vehicle Routing with Locally Augmented Preferences and Representation Disentanglement
Arthur Corrêa, Paulo Nascimento, Samuel Moniz
Multi-task vehicle routing problem (VRP) solvers seek to handle multiple VRP variants within a single unified model, avoiding the need to train a separate model for every variant. In spite of recent progress, current approaches remain limited on two fronts. On the training side, reinforcement learning suffers from reward-scale disparities and shrinking advantage signals as policies improve, whereas preference optimization stagnates once sampled tours become near-identical and thus fundamentally limited by the quality of the policy's own generated solutions, leaving both paradigms with weak supervision as training progresses. On the architecture side, existing fully shared encoders entangle constraint-dependent representations across heterogeneous variants, which limits generalization. We address these gaps with two model-agnostic contributions. First, we propose Preference Optimization with Locally Augmented Refinement (POLAR), a novel training algorithm that applies a local search refinement pass to the best decoded tour before forming preference pairs, yielding much more informative pairwise margins. Second, a Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE) encoder routes each encoder layer through one shared expert and a set of task-specific experts via a gating mechanism, progressively separating common routing structure from constraint-specific encodings. Through extensive experiments on various VRP variants, we show that POLAR and PLE together elevate the current state-of-the-art among neural multi-task solvers. We reduce the average gap to reference solutions by 21.3% relative to the strongest published baseline on 16 in-distribution variants, and outperform prior neural methods on 27 out of 32 unseen variants. Ablation studies confirm the efficacy of each contribution, showing that both improve cross-problem generalization across multiple backbone model architectures.
#04Aug 25, 2026
cs.AI
Recursive Experiential-Working Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses
Zhaochen Yu, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin and 5 more
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) remains hard in long-horizon tasks, where growing histories obscure the task state and misalign skill invocation. We introduce Recuris, a recursive Experiential-Working Memory architecture for long-horizon agent harnesses, in which Working Memory tracks task progress and guides skill selection from Experiential Memory, grounding skill use in current needs rather than the full history. This coupling also turns execution into structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components. Across tasks, a fixed Meta-Agent turns that evidence into localized, validation-gated updates to Skill Memory that reshape execution and yield new evidence, forming a bounded recursive memory-evolution loop. Across four long-horizon benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of the 37 completed model-benchmark pairs, carrying frontier models to SOTA-level task success: on tau-bench it adds +17.8 points to GPT-5.6 Sol and +15.6 to Claude Opus 5, taking Opus 5 to 87.9%, and +16.6/+13.5 points on Qwen3.6-27B/35B on SkillFlow. The advantage widens as the interaction horizon grows, to +32.2 points on the longest tasks, and common long-horizon failures fall by up to 80%. These results position recursively evolving memory as a scalable foundation for RSI, enabling agents to continuously transform accumulated experience into increasingly effective long-horizon behavior. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Recuris
#05Aug 25, 2026
cs.CL
BrowserForge: Scaling Web Episode via Parallel Browser Sandboxes
Fei Tang, Huawen Shen, Zhiqiong Lu and 7 more
Web agents that act from rendered pixels avoid the fragility and heavy token cost of reading a page's HTML or accessibility tree, but training them depends on large amounts of high-quality interaction trajectories, and how to produce such data at scale remains an open problem. Public datasets typically contain only a few thousand trajectories drawn from a fixed and narrow set of websites, and even recent automated synthesis pipelines stay bound to predefined site lists or tutorial sources, so the number of distinct websites the agent ever sees barely grows. We present BrowserForge, a framework that generates web interaction data at scale by driving many browser sandboxes in parallel over the open web. BrowserForge couples three components: an open-web sourcing stage that exposes the agent to hundreds of thousands of real, openly reachable websites; a sandbox cluster manager that schedules hundreds of concurrent browsers with high utilization; and a Proposer-Solver dual-agent loop that turns a raw page into an executable task and then collects a verified trajectory for it. A rule-plus-model cleaning pipeline removes failed runs and rewrites the surviving reasoning into a single unified chain-of-thought style. Page structure such as the accessibility tree is used only as a synthesis-time signal; the agent we train and release acts purely from the screenshot. The resulting corpus contains 203,238 trajectories, each collected from a distinct website, larger and more diverse than prior trajectory datasets. Fine-tuning a compact multimodal model on this corpus raises its success rate on the live Online-Mind2Web from 25.66% to 33.33% and consistently improves step accuracy on the static Multimodal-Mind2Web, with the gain growing as the corpus scales. Controlled analyses further confirm that open-web sourcing and broad website coverage are key contributors to the observed improvement.