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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

Computer-Use Agents Are Embodied Generalists

Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck

In many areas of AI, general-purpose models have increasingly replaced handcrafted methods and specialized architectures. We argue that embodied AI is poised for a similar shift. Our key claim is that embodied tasks can be formulated as interaction with digital software. Specifically, we build software that renders an agent's view of a physical environment on a screen and provides controls for acting in it. A computer-use agent (CUA) can then perform embodied tasks through the same screenshots and keyboard and mouse actions that it uses to operate ordinary software. Using a single CUA design and changing only the software, our entries win first-, second-, third-, and sixth-place prizes across four ECCV workshop competitions, without any competition-specific agent tuning. These results suggest that the skills CUAs learn on software, such as visual grounding, precise clicking, and exploration, already carry over to embodied tasks, giving CUAs a far broader scope in embodied AI than previously realized. We therefore advocate that computer-use agents can be embodied generalists. Further, we advocate that, by following the training strategy that made computer-use agents general, embodied AI can converge on a single general model as well, ushering in a new era of general embodied AI. Website: https://pranjal2041.github.io/cua-embodied

#02Nov 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.

#03Nov 6, 2026

cs.CL

Compaction, decay and reinforcement in a two-tier conversational memory: a paired evaluation against retrieval-augmented generation

Osamudiamen Edogun, Joshua Obigwe, Irfan Mehmood

A conversational agent that remembers has to decide what to keep. Retrieval-augmented generation keeps the transcript and searches it; the alternative is to compact each turn into atomic facts and search those. We compare the two on LoCoMo, with both arms answering all 1,985 questions in one window, against the same stores, with the same generator and judge, and both predictions on one row, which licenses McNemar's exact test on the 512 questions where they disagree. On the four categories comparable work reports, compaction scores 71.4 per cent against 64.6, a lead of 6.8 points (p = 5.5e-08) at 34 per cent fewer prompt tokens. On all five, including the adversarial set comparable work drops, the lead falls to 2.0 and stops being significant, because the baseline leads adversarial by 14.6. That loss has a structure. Our lead falls as the reference answer demands more source wording, 9.6 points ahead at one or two reference words and 3.1 behind past eight, with token overlap moving the same way, so the judge is not the cause. Compaction keeps what a fact asserts and discards how it was said, so it wins where the answer is a value and loses where it is a phrasing. We also report four negative results with their power calculations.

#04Nov 6, 2026

cs.CV

BEV3SR: Evidence-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning from Video

Fan Zhu, Rui Yu

3D spatial reasoning from video remains challenging for VLMs because videos provide sequential, view-local observations rather than persistent metric scene records. Many questions must be answered in a query-specified perspective rather than the observed camera viewpoint, and prompting with a fixed set of RGB views may miss sparse or occluded visual cues. To address these gaps, we introduce BEV3SR, a training-free and backbone-agnostic framework for RGB-D videos with camera parameters. BEV3SR turns video observations into queryable metric bird's-eye-view (BEV) scene memory and formalizes each query into an evidence-aware spatial task. The Spatial Task Formalizer specifies the query's reference frame, spatial constraints, objective, and evidence requirement. The evidence requirement determines the appropriate reasoning pathway. A query treated as requiring geometric evidence is handled by the Geometric Reasoner, which deterministically computes the answer using the metric BEV records in the query-specified reference frame. Otherwise, a query treated as requiring visual evidence is passed to the Visual Evidence Aligner, which uses BEV-indexed object records and their associated supporting views to retrieve object-consistent and scene-context RGB frames for VLM grounding. Within a standard 16-frame budget, BEV3SR consistently improves different VLM backbones across multiple 3D scene QA benchmarks, delivering large gains on spatially intensive questions and significant improvements on open-ended scene QA. These results demonstrate that BEV3SR offers an effective, efficient, and interpretable framework for explicit 3D spatial reasoning from video.

#05Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

Scaling Graph Similarity Learning with Graph Neural Networks

Ahmet Tüzen, Helge Langseth, Kjetil Nørvåg

Graph similarity computation is an important task in graph mining with many real-world applications, such as chemical compound analysis, program dependence comparison, and social network analysis. The problem is computationally challenging: Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS), which quantify the distance between graphs and identify their largest shared subgraph, respectively, are NP-hard to compute exactly. To address these computational challenges, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied to this problem. However, existing GNN-based approaches have primarily focused on small-scale graph datasets, while scalability to larger scales remains underexplored. In this work, we propose FiLSim, a scalable GNN-based framework, and investigate whether a simplified GNN pipeline can maintain competitive performance on standard benchmarks while scaling to large graphs. We additionally propose a sequential graph-editing strategy to construct large-scale graph datasets with reliable GED labels to evaluate scalability. The proposed framework is evaluated on four benchmark datasets and four newly created large-scale datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability. FiLSim remains accurate on graphs with more than 150{,}000 nodes, where the baseline methods run out of memory or fail to learn, and scores all test pairs within seconds on a single GPU.