#01Oct 21, 2026
cs.RO
Multimodal Embodied Agents: A Unified Capability-centric Perspective from Computer-Use to Robot-Use
Yanzhe Chen, Ziyi Yang, Jifeng Zhu and 14 more
Multimodal agents (MMAs) sustain interaction through reasoning, memory, tools, and feedback, most visibly as computer-use agents, while robotic systems (RSs) couple sensing and actuation under physical dynamics. We define multimodal embodied agents (MMEAs) as goal-directed systems that couple multimodal task reasoning with physical action and revise decisions from the resulting feedback. This raises a central question: what changes when a multimodal agent moves from computer-use to robot-use? We introduce PAPAV, a unified capability-centric framework of five recurring functions: Perceive the current state, Anticipate action effects, Plan a feasible course, Act through an interface or body, and Verify the outcome. Defined by function rather than architecture, these capabilities let PAPAV identify what all three share and then compare MMEAs with MMAs and with RSs. Five physical constraints, from partial observability to unverifiable outcomes, leave fewer choices fixed in advance and less room to reverse errors. Across 64 benchmarks, explicit evaluation centers on Act; only 5 assess Anticipate and 3 assess Verify, leaving both largely hidden behind task success. These constraints also frame the open challenges we identify. PAPAV therefore provides a common basis for designing reliable physical agents and measuring progress across all five capabilities rather than task success alone.
#02Oct 21, 2026
cs.AI
GuideEvolve: Self-Evolving Agent Framework with Expert Guidance and 3Ts Mechanisms
Meihong Jia, Yasemin Timar, Jonathan Taws
This study introduces GuideEvolve, a self-evolving agent framework incorporating expert guidance and three autonomous regulatory mechanisms, collectively termed the 3Ts: Think Fast and Slow, Throwback, and Termination by choice. The framework addresses critical limitations in extant self-evolving agent paradigms through dual innovations: (1) a task-specific expert-evaluation-driven evolutionary pipeline, and (2) the integration of 3Ts mechanisms to facilitate cognitive optimization, performance recovery via temporal rollback, and adaptive termination protocols. Empirical validation across the MGSM and MMLU benchmarks demonstrates that GuideEvolve attains performance metrics comparable to current state-of-the-art models (89.8% accuracy versus Gödel Agent's 90.6% on MGSM; 89.1% versus 87.9% on MMLU), while exhibiting notably reduced variance (25-59%) and enhanced robustness. Furthermore, the framework achieves a 100% evolution success rate, superior to the baseline's 82%, diminishes required optimization iterations by approximately 50% (from 30 iterations in baseline to 15.1 and 13.4 across tasks), and provides improved stability for production deployment.
#03Oct 21, 2026
cs.CL
What the Author Wrote, What the Agent Reads: Silent Cue Loss in Enterprise Document Ingestion
Yikai Zhao, Saurabh Pandey, Pradeep Kumar Misra
Enterprise agents act on documents. Before an agent can follow a policy, answer a compliance question or file a ticket, some ingestion layer must turn a Word file or PDF into tokens - and that layer is where an agent deployed in the wild silently loses information. We show that one layer is lost by every mainstream converter - the meaning an author encodes in how text looks - and that the loss makes agents confidently wrong rather than visibly incomplete. We build a task from 76 real policy documents: recover the requirements the author singled out, scored against the file's own OOXML properties by a deterministic matcher with no LLM judge. Formatting-blind ingestion collapses from micro F1 0.690 to 0.150 (docling) and 0.075 (plain text), a gap that replicates across six answering models from two vendors - five Claude models spanning the Opus, Sonnet and Haiku tiers, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6. An agent that cannot see the cue guesses, and docling's false-positive rate on requirements the author did not flag is four times ours. A span-level leave-one-out localises the loss to two cues - highlight (+0.302) and colour (+0.262), both Holm-adjusted p < 1e-4 - while bold, italic, monospace and strikethrough each sit within +/-0.003 of zero. The same asymmetry appears in PDF. Colour is also the cue no mainstream converter preserves and no parsing benchmark scores, and it is common: 32.8% of 6,460 documents carry a deliberate colour or highlight, 10.3% on an obligation. A pre-registered test shows that typing a cue for the agent adds +0.085 beyond merely preserving it (Holm-adjusted p = 0.049). We validate the labels against rendered page images through an independent modality (kappa = 0.72) and bound what wording alone can achieve (AUC 0.664). For agent builders the practical finding is that ingestion, not reasoning, is where this reliability is won or lost, and that the fix is cheap and measurable.
#04Oct 21, 2026
cs.AI
HGM-Dual: Lineage-Aware Guided Agent Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Planning
Sudipta Paul, Pengrui Quan, Aounon Kumar and 3 more
Harness optimization, which improves an agent's prompts, tools, and workflows, is an increasingly effective way to enhance agents built on frozen or closed-source LLMs. Leading approaches such as the Darwin--Godel Machine and the Huxley--Godel Machine (HGM) rely on recursive self-improvement and were developed mainly for coding, where the competence needed to improve the agent coincides with the competence being improved. Planning tasks, in which an agent must produce a sequence of tool calls that jointly satisfies interacting constraints, break this alignment. There, open-ended self-modification repeatedly explores ineffective changes and consumes substantial evaluation budgets. We introduce HGM-Dual, a diagnostic-guided framework for budget-efficient harness evolution for planning agents. First, HGM-Dual represents agent evolution as lineage-aware context. This context records what each ancestor changed, which behaviors improved or regressed, and which modifications were ineffective, giving the editor explicit edit-outcome attribution instead of an unstructured archive of past agents. Second, HGM-Dual introduces error-conditioned dual-path child generation. For each selected parent, it generates a general child that preserves open-ended exploration and specialized children that target the harness components most likely responsible for the parent's highest-ranked constraint violations. HGM-Dual outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 14.45% relative improvement in case accuracy while matching HGM variants' final performance with 2x-4x fewer evaluation budget.
#05Oct 21, 2026
cs.CR
VX-One: Typed, Calibrated Decision Heads for Real-Time Perimeter Triage - An empirical study of unknown-attack honesty, cascade gray zones, and calibration under drift
Juan S. Santillana
Perimeter triage faces a latency/semantics trade-off: signature engines are fast and format-safe but blind to unseen attacks, while generative models are semantic but slow and produce unparseable output. In late 2026 a class of commercial System One decision models (TypeSafe Jev; Microsoft-Decision-1) began selling typed decision primitives - binary gates, closed-set choices, ordinal scores - as product APIs, with no academic treatment. We present VX-One: a small multi-head network (100K-10M parameters) whose outputs are these primitives - a calibrated gate, a choice over a closed candidate set that always includes an explicit unknown option, and an ordinal score, trained multi-task, temperature-calibrated per head (~0.7-1.7 ms p50 on CPU). We evaluate it on UNSW-NB15, CIC-IDS2017, EMBER2024 against calibrated XGBoost, Random-Forest, MLP, Kitsune, and measure a two-phase cascade (Suricata with 52,674 Emerging-Threats rules -> VX-One) over five days of CIC-IDS2017. Findings: (i) VX-One wins detection (AUROC/FPR@95%TPR) on UNSW-NB15 and under temporal drift on CIC-IDS2017 (0.711 vs 0.637), but XGBoost wins multi-class attribution on all three benchmarks; (ii) leave-one-family-out gate detects never-seen families on 9/9 UNSW folds yet drops below chance on CIC recon family, and abstention threshold transfers poorly across benchmarks; (iii) on payload-less reconstructions signature engines resolve ~0.1% of flows - gray zone ~99.9% of traffic, recovered by Phase 2 (combined recall >=0.978); (iv) calibration collapses under temporal drift (ECE 0.04->0.40) for every method while ranking partially survives. We provide a measured account of where typed calibrated decisions help perimeter triage, and where they fail.