#01Oct 19, 2026
cs.AI
ProteinGeoBench: Frontier Structural-Biology Agents Are Fluent at Lookup but Lost in Geometry
Matt Turk, Brandon L. Neel, Diana M. Lopez and 3 more
Frontier agents retrieve structural metadata well and compute geometry from coordinates less reliably. We ask how much of a benchmark score reflects that gap and how much reflects the evaluation configuration around the model. We study ProteinGeoBench, a suite of 131 protein-structure tasks, using 4,249 rollouts from four frontier models and 4,486 further trials across 26 models. Three of the four frontier models fall within 0.031 of one another (0.785 to 0.816) with no difference between them resolved, while the fourth scores 0.707 and all three gaps to it exclude zero. Three of the four do better on metadata lookup than on numeric calculation. The fourth is slightly better on numeric. Numeric tasks are 28 of the 131 but half of the twelve tasks that all four models fail. The ranking also depends on the evaluation budget: with one run per task, 23.9% of bootstrap replicates put a different model first. On a selected 15-task slice, removing network access lowers scores more than blocking eight structural-database domains, but the two contrasts were graded in different passes and cannot be cleanly decomposed. Swapping in each model's own command-line agent changes scores by -0.071 to +0.086, a comparison too small to rule out moderate harness effects. Across 26 models, numeric performance rises with non-numeric performance rather than staying flat. The experiments use different task subsets, so they cannot rank model, harness, access and task composition against one another. Evaluations should report results by task family, along with the number of runs, the harness and the access conditions.
#02Oct 19, 2026
cs.RO
Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policy
Zekai Li, Jiayi Yu, Jinlu Zhang and 8 more
In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms, scaling behavior, and generalization of physical Recursive self-improvement. We introduce PhysRSI-eval to quantify physical RSI through a five-axis metric: First-Attempt Performance, Efficiency, Success, Budget and Improvement from failure. Different VLMs are evaluated on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. The analysis of experimental results motivates the Physical Barrel Hypothesis: different capabilities may constrain different parts of improvement. The five-axis metrics also distinguish systems with close public benchmark averages and show that high scores need not come with early or efficient gains. We study observational scaling from two perspectives: predicting the relative performance of VLM agents from their public capabilities, and forecasting later progress from early physical feedback. Together, these analyses ask how quickly and how far an agent can improve. Moreover, we conduct workspace interventions and then analyze what improvement leaves behind. Removing history reduces late-round success, frozen workspaces remain useful on unseen layouts, and three cross-task cases achieve success earlier. The results suggest that scene-specific adaptation and reusable experience can coexist.
#03Oct 19, 2026
cs.LG
Next Best Action: Causal Constrained Offline RL for Business Action Targeting
Surya Ramachandiran, Yiming Li, Juan Mancilla-Caceres and 2 more
Next Best Action (NBA) systems must select among customer interventions (e.g., discounts, promotions, and lifecycle actions), maximize long-term economic value, satisfy complex operational constraints, and remain causally grounded. Existing approaches lack a rigorous framework for meeting these requirements jointly. We address this gap by formulating NBA as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We then integrate off-policy causal correction of the estimated customer dynamics directly into the Linear Programming (LP) formulation of the CMDP. The resulting policy selects actions based on customer states to maximize long-term value while explicitly enforcing business guardrails. Furthermore, the LP formulation yields shadow prices that quantify the economic trade-offs of operational constraints (e.g., fairness and user welfare), enhancing policy interpretability. We validate our proposed offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework on an industry case study involving rideshare coupon targeting, where customer states are defined by Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) stages. We evaluate performance using model-based off-policy evaluation, with causal dynamics estimated from a temporal holdout. Under the observed coupon budget and RFM state representation, our optimized policy improves customer lifetime value (LTV) by 19% over the estimated behavior policy and 8% over a myopic baseline. Although the demonstrated action space is binary, the proposed framework is action-agnostic, yielding a general-purpose decision module for targeting systems that manage multiple interventions.
#04Oct 19, 2026
cs.AI
AnyGoal: On World Model Generalization Beyond Expert Rollouts
Heejeong Nam, Divyat Mahajan, Quentin Le Lidec and 2 more
The goal of a world model is to capture the dynamics of an environment. This has the great appeal that it allows agents to plan and simulate a course of actions with the help of a world model. For these uses to be reliable, however, the learned dynamics must behave well beyond the specific state-action combinations observed in expert rollouts. Despite this, the relationship between data coverage, dynamics generalization, and downstream planning performance remains underexplored. We study this relationship through the lens of compositional generalization: can a world model recombine familiar state and action factors into valid dynamics? To answer this, we introduce AnyGoal, a benchmark of goal-shifted task variants built from widely used world-model environments, together with an open-source library. Each task is designed to be within reach of a world model that has learned the underlying dynamics: individual state factors and actions remain within their training support, but their combinations are underrepresented in expert trajectories. Across multiple environments and world model families, we find that current models consistently exhibit failures under these recombinations. By examining dynamics and representation failures across model families, interaction regimes, and evaluation metrics, we study where current world models generalize and where challenges remain for goal-shifted prediction and planning. Together, this framework, benchmark, and analysis provide a basis for evaluating progress toward world models that generalize to new planning tasks.
#05Oct 19, 2026
cs.CV
Mise-en-Video: Fine-Grained 3D Control for Multi-Shot Video Generation
Yingshuang Zou, Xiaoyu Shi, Yawen Luo and 8 more
Recent advances in text-to-video generation have enabled high-fidelity single-shot synthesis, yet practical storytelling creation requires multi-shot videos with both strong inter-shot consistency and fine-grained controllability. Existing multi-shot video generation approaches achieve strong consistency but still fall short in controllability. In this paper, we propose Mise-en-Video (MeV), a highly controllable multi-shot video generation framework that allows video creators to conduct staging the multi-shot in the 3D space and then generate the corresponding multi-shot video. To achieve this, our framework combines a hierarchical attention mechanism for multi-level narrative consistency with 3D-aware layout guidance for precise, per-shot spatial control. To support training and evaluation, we develop standardized annotation pipelines and construct a 160K-video dataset with hierarchical multi-shot texts and oriented 3D bounding boxes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeV consistently outperforms strong baselines in video quality, inter-shot consistency, and subject-level controllability.