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5 papers

#01Nov 5, 2026

cs.AI

The Power of Meta Access in the Software of the Future --- Demonstrated on LLM Chat UIs and Chat AI

Julian Kunkel, Ali Doosthosseini

Chat remains the default surface for many large language model (LLM) tasks, even as agentic tools such as OpenCode excel at coding and automation. Yet the model sees the current dialogue but not the workspace around it. We explore meta access---giving the assistant a structured, permissioned view of the interface itself and propose a ladder of levels: feature tutoring; metadata, settings, and preference access; retrieval over summaries and messages, confirmed mutation, and full orchestration. Meta access can turn a chat client from many screens into one entry point for finding, navigating, organising, and operating it, while raising risks around grounding, privacy, prompt injection, and trust. General-purpose agentic harnesses are runtimes; because they can change their own settings, meta access becomes reflexive and needs a separate control-plane boundary. We ground this in the Meta Chat prototype of the Chat AI client. It builds bounded context from, e.g., summaries, settings, and relevant messages; links references to conversations, topics, and personas; supports confirmed, reversible changes; offers a browsable tutorial library; and recommends personas as user-started conversations. By exposing application state in structured form, meta access can extend screen readers from widget descriptions to semantic workspace operations. Meta access thus turns chat from a window onto one conversation into a control layer for the whole workspace, extending chat toward agentic capability without surrendering user control. As assistants become embedded in IDEs, dashboards, office suites, and operating systems, AI-era interfaces should expose a structured, permissioned model of their state and capabilities, ideally by opening their existing metamodels through a debugger-like interface.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

T3R: Training-Free Two-Stage Token Refinement Towards Efficient and Robust VLA Models

Mohammed Hassan, Zhenyang Chen, Zheng Wang and 5 more

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable end-to-end robot control, but inference is increasingly expensive. Each decision processes hundreds of visual tokens, often across multiple cameras, leading to substantial computation while allowing irrelevant background content to distract action prediction under distribution shift. We argue that these issues stem from two complementary forms of redundancy: many visual tokens are spatially irrelevant, while attention over the remaining tokens is often misallocated. Based on this observation, we propose T3R, a Training-Free Two-Stage Token Refinement framework. In the first stage, segmentation-guided token pruning removes irrelevant visual patches to reduce computation and eliminate distracting context. In the second stage, saliency-guided attention biasing reallocates attention toward action-critical visual regions and language instructions within the retained tokens. Together, pruning produces a cleaner candidate set, while attention biasing further emphasizes the most decision-relevant evidence, yielding a better accuracy-efficiency frontier than either stage alone. On LIBERO-Spatial, T3R removes 85% of scene-camera visual tokens while essentially matching the unpruned success rate, and improves success by up to 7 percentage points under out-of-distribution object-placement perturbations. The timing comparison attributes 7.8 ms per inference call to pruning and attention-bias application. As input resolution increases, LLM-forward profiling shows up to a 3.3x speedup over the unpruned baseline. Evaluations across LIBERO, SIMPLER, and RoboTwin with three VLA backbones show the strongest accuracy-efficiency benefits in multi-camera settings. These results demonstrate that training-free token refinement is a practical approach to efficient and robust VLA inference.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.CL

MedGraph: Maintaining Patient State with Graph Memory for Long-Term Medical Dialogue

Donghua Zhang, Zizheng Wang, Ze Dong and 2 more

LLM-based medical assistants that follow a patient across visits need a memory that keeps the patient's clinical state correct as it changes. We examine the errors of five memory systems on longitudinal medical dialogue and find three recurring causes: the retrieved evidence gives an outdated state, includes another person's health facts, or lacks a safety fact the answer depends on. We present MedGraph, a graph memory built for these three cases. Construction extracts dated facts from each session, attributes each fact to the person it describes, and links medication, diagnosis, and measurement records into chains that keep earlier states. Retrieval ranks the patient's chains as units, reads each chain at the time the question asks about, and adds the original dialogue text; a patient profile lists every recorded safety fact with every question. On MedMemoryBench, MedGraph has the highest overall accuracy with both a GPT and a Qwen backbone, 10.5 and 10.4 points above the strongest of five baselines, with efficient memory construction and answering in the GPT setting.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.AI

Benchmarks as Software: Terminal-Bench and the Case for Continuous Benchmarks

E. Kelly Buchanan, Crystal Zhou, Scott W. Linderman and 1 more

Coding agents are among the most economically consequential deployments of LLMs to date, making reliable evaluation increasingly important. Yet even benchmarks that are carefully validated at release can become stale. As models improve, they can discover valid solutions that existing verifiers reject, while changes to evaluation infrastructure can invalidate assumptions embedded in tasks and tests. We call the resulting accumulation of defects benchmark maintenance debt: a growing gap between benchmark scores and the capabilities they are intended to measure. We introduce a continuous-validation workflow for agentic benchmarks that combines community reports, task artifacts, agent traces, automated oracle checks, and human-gated repairs. We apply this workflow to Terminal-Bench 2.0, a benchmark that underwent extensive human and LM-assisted review and red-teaming before release. Our audit identifies issues in roughly 30% of the benchmark, and we release the resulting repairs as Terminal-Bench 2.1. These repairs change evaluation results: accuracy increased by over 10 percentage points and leaderboard positions move by up to three ranks, even as the overall ranking remains highly correlated (Spearman rho = 0.958). We evaluate how resource allocation shapes benchmark conclusions. We show that fixed wall-clock can materially change agent performance: For example, extending the time limit closes a 20pp harness gap on GPT 5.4 and shrinks a 30 pp gap on GPT 5.4 mini to 5 pp. Benchmark maintenance is therefore not only about repairing task artifacts: resource budgets are part of the measurement specification and must be validated alongside the tasks themselves. More broadly, benchmark maintenance debt is not just accumulated implementation bugs: our results show that as models improve, both evaluation assumptions and resource settings may need to be revalidated.

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

Social Humanoid: Socially Responsive Human-Humanoid Interaction

Vongani H. Maluleke, James Ni, Kie Horiuchi and 7 more

Humanoid robots are typically trained as solitary agents, leaving them unable to coordinate physically with human partners who naturally anticipate and adjust to one another. To bridge this gap, we present Social Humanoid, a hierarchical system that generates and executes socially responsive whole-body motion on a 29-DoF Unitree G1 conditioned on a human partner's motion. Its high-level policy performs flexible sequence modeling of human and humanoid motion through a shared tokenized representation, generating reactive humanoid motion and anticipating the partner's motion when they are occluded, while a low-level whole-body tracking controller executes the generated motion on the robot. To train the system, we introduce a two-phase adaptive retargeting procedure that retargets one interaction partner to the robot while morphing the other partner to preserve contact dynamics, reachability, and relative body scale. We apply this procedure across five motion-capture datasets to produce a new Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI) benchmark of 260 hours of human-humanoid interactions. Our results demonstrate that Social Humanoid produces coordinated, human-aligned behavior across diverse interaction types in simulation and the real world. Project page: https://von31.github.io/social-humanoid/