#01Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
GRAC: Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Captioning for Surgical Scene Description
Rochak Dhakal, Chen Zhao, Soup Cobb and 3 more
Purpose: Surgical operative reports support procedural documentation, surgical training, performance assessment, and workflow review. However, extracting meaningful information often requires extensive manual review and clinical expertise. Automated surgical scene descriptions could reduce this burden by leveraging recurring surgical activities and prior knowledge. Methods: We propose GRAC (Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Captioning), a framework that represents surgical scenes as graphs capturing relationships among instruments, actions, and anatomical structures. Given an input scene graph, GRAC learns to retrieve relevant graph-caption pairs from training data. It compares instrument-tissue interactions between retrieved examples and the input scene, using comparison features to condition retrieved-caption representations during generation. Results: On the EndoVis-18 benchmark, GRAC achieved a CIDEr-D of 5.88, compared with 4.23 for SGT and 3.36 for the strongest conventional Transformer baseline. Exact instrument-action-target triplet-set accuracy reached 52.6%, compared with 32.7% for SGT and 26.2% for the strongest conventional baseline. These results demonstrate improvements in language quality and factual agreement. On TORS, GRAC achieved a CIDEr-D of 5.06, compared with 3.80 for the strongest baseline. Conclusion: GRAC demonstrates that combining structured surgical scene representations with retrieved examples improves surgical scene captioning and produces more contextually meaningful descriptions.
#02Nov 6, 2026
cs.RO
On Agentic Manipulation Policies
Chen Chen, Omid Bagherieh, Naveen Nikamanth Appiah Balaji and 10 more
Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoboLab-120 and CaP-Gym benchmarks, with no demonstrations or task-specific training. On RoboLab-120, AMP1 reaches an 85.6\% success rate zero-shot, compared to 49.2\% and 42.9\% for leading VLA and WAM policies. The agent succeeds zero-shot in 104 of 108 real-world trials spanning twelve tasks and three robot instances, reducing failure rates by 20x and 15x relative to strong VLA and WAM baselines. The basic harness supplies no grasping, pushing, or placing skills; the agent develops its own strategies, such as searching for hidden objects, using objects as tools, and calibrating its cameras. With the addition of a persistent memory store, the agent can also learn from experience: an augmented harness with a memory representation that is carried across episodes lowers the failure rate on RoboDojo bimanual manipulation tasks by 4.6x relative to zero-shot deployment. Our analysis suggests that AMPs are substantially more general and robust than specialist manipulation policies, providing a promising foundation for robot manipulation.
#03Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
FlowMoP: Stochastic Multi-Person Motion Prediction
Aadya Agrawal, Ho Kei Cheng, Alexander Schwing
Predicting the future motion of multiple people is inherently stochastic: the same observed history admits many plausible continuations depending on intent, coordination, and social context. Yet the dominant paradigm in multi-person 3D motion prediction remains deterministic, with existing methods producing a fixed number of outputs per agent. In contrast, we present a conditional flow matching framework that jointly generates diverse future motions for multiple agents, modeling both global trajectories and root-relative poses. A B-spline reparameterization compresses the generative state space while enforcing temporal smoothness, and a dual-stream transformer conditions each agent's predictions on observed neighbor motion for interaction-aware forecasting. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CMU-Mocap (UMPM) and 3DPW, outperforming deterministic baselines on joint position error, pose error, and final displacement error despite producing a full predictive distribution. We additionally establish the first motion prediction baseline on WorldPose, a large-scale professional soccer dataset, where social conditioning demonstrably concentrates predictive uncertainty along interaction-constrained directions.
#04Nov 6, 2026
cs.AI
Knowing When to Intervene: Causal Evaluation of AI Agents
Ayush Sawarni, Wenqian Xing, Tijana Zrnic and 2 more
Current evaluations of agentic AI systems primarily rely on benchmarks. However, the static nature of benchmarks makes them uninformative about the value of auditing interventions at deployment time. For reliable deployment, we often need to determine within an agent's trajectory whether or not to intervene, e.g., by verifying the agent's current output or steering it toward different behavior, using either human review or more costly models or time-consuming agentic supervision. The value of such interventions is fundamentally a causal inference question, asking whether the causal effect of such an intervention is beneficial for the final outcome. Estimating this causal effect is particularly challenging due to the dynamic nature of the problem: the impact of an intervention depends on the current context and environment, as well as the agent's future behavior. We develop the first methodologically grounded framework for evaluating the causal effects of randomized interventions within agent trajectories. By leveraging a relatively small dataset of agent trajectories collected under randomized interventions such as verification or screening, we can estimate the dynamic causal effect of a rich class of (contextual) intervention policies. The structural parameters that we estimate can also be used to construct safety leaderboards that capture the risk of various agentic actions, which can be used by practitioners for audit prioritization. Applying our methods to tau-bench Retail, ToolSandbox, and ImpossibleBench, we find that intervention effects vary substantially across agent actions and states. More broadly, our work suggests a rich research agenda at the intersection of causal inference and agentic evaluation, which we believe is essential for the reliable and safe deployment of AI agents in the real world.
#05Nov 6, 2026
cs.SE
When Instruction Files Go Stale: Documentation Debt and Hidden Cost in Coding Agents
Tural Mehtiyev, Biruk Tadesse, Lawrence Arkoh and 1 more
LLM-based coding agents such as Claude Code are guided by repository instruction files (also called context files or agent configuration files) like AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, which are read in every agent session. As any documentation artifact, these files can fall behind the code and become stale (e.g., a test folder moves, but the file still points to the old one). In technical debt terms, such a stale instruction is documentation debt, and its interest is the cost it adds to every later agent session. Evaluations that check only task success can miss this cost, and the stale file can persist. In this study, we ask what leads agents to act on a stale instruction, how it affects their behavior and at what cost, and how they recover. We study three real-world stale instructions from active open-source repositories in depth, each a different kind of guidance: a test command, a code location, and a procedure for adding a component. Agents fix 22 maintenance tasks under three versions of each instruction (left stale, corrected to the current path, and removed), with the code and the task held fixed, and we analyze 732 trajectories of two models at the level of individual tool calls. We find that agents follow stale guidance when it is relevant to their tasks, sometimes even when correct information is available elsewhere. On the stale test command, Claude Sonnet 5.5 needed about two extra tool calls per run, a third more than with the corrected command; in the other cases, we could not detect a difference. Although agents generally recovered from the immediate failures, none repaired the underlying instruction file. Correcting the instructions eliminated operations on obsolete paths, while removing them prevented most. Our findings show that task success alone can hide the costs of documentation debt, highlighting the need to evaluate agent behavior beyond final outcomes.