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Pinlong Cai

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Preprint Aug 2026

Quo Vadis, World Modeling?

Continually improving agents require dynamic interaction feedback beyond static supervision, yet direct real-environment interaction is costly, slow, unsafe, and hard to parallelize. World modeling offers a natural intermediate proxy that allows agents to query lower-cost, more controllable feedback before committing to real actions. Classical world models instantiate this proxy primarily through future physical-state prediction, a formulation useful yet narrow for agents that require actionable feedback beyond raw state transitions. In this work, we conceptualize Agent-Centric Interactive World Proxies, shifting the fundamental paradigm from physical state transitions to agent-usable information transitions, such as execution outcomes, retrieved experiences or skills, and verification signals, broadening the scope of world modeling to provide versatile feedback for continually improving agents. To systematically map this design space, we organize world proxies into six functional forms based on their feedback modalities: dynamics, spatial, execution, memory/experience, skill, and reward/verification proxies, which together characterize the primary ways world modeling serves agent improvement. We further analyze how these proxies empower agents across three progressive levels: L.1 Inference-Time Guidance, where proxy outputs enrich in-context information for superior decisions; L.2 Training-Time Optimization, where proxy outputs yield rewards, critiques, or synthetic rollouts for policy learning; and L.3 Agent-Proxy Co-Evolution, where real-environment evidence continuously updates both the proxy and the agent for co-evolution. Ultimately, this work recasts world modeling into an agent-centric paradigm, establishing a roadmap for building world proxies that empower agents to plan better, learn faster, and evolve continually.

Yu Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

REOPD: Reliability-Adaptive Reward Extrapolation for On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under dense token-level supervision from a teacher. Reward-extrapolation methods such as ExOPD amplify the teacher-reference log-likelihood ratio to move beyond direct imitation, but apply a single global coefficient $\lambda$ to every token. This can drive the student to fit extreme peaks in the implicit reward, causing reward hacking and unstable training, and the optimal $\lambda$ varies across domains, requiring costly sweeps. We propose REOPD, a reliability-adaptive reward extrapolation framework for OPD. REOPD combines a token-level compatibility weight with a batch-level adaptive budget, yielding a token-wise coefficient $\lambda_{b,t}=1+\gamma_b q_t$ that preserves teacher alignment while selectively extrapolating along reliable teacher-reference directions. It requires no verifier, reward model, value model, or extra rollout beyond standard OPD. REOPD outperforms G-OPD on single-teacher mathematics and on both domains in the multi-teacher setting, while matching G-OPD on single-teacher code, demonstrating effective fine-grained reliability adaptation across domains and teacher configurations.

Yang Sun, Lichao Ma, Houyuan Qin et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

TransMem: Transforming Hidden States into Memory for Large Language Models

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long interaction histories, where effective reasoning requires identifying and exploiting task-relevant evidence distributed across past observations and actions. However, useful information encoded in previously computed representations is often underutilized during subsequent generation. We propose \textbf{TransMem}, a lightweight inference-time parametric memory module that transforms sparse historical hidden states from a frozen LLM backbone into reusable memory representations. TransMem uses a lightweight gating network to dynamically apply the latent intervention to the current hidden states, without repeatedly encoding the preceding context. To learn transferable memory utilization rather than task-specific knowledge, we introduce evidence-conditioned self-distillation. A memory-augmented student processes the full context and matches the predictive distribution of an evidence-only teacher that shares the same frozen backbone. Experiments on LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate consistent improvements across different model architectures and scales. TransMem yields gains of 11.58--29.25 $F_1$ on LoCoMo and 10.20--13.03 $F_1$ on HotpotQA, while improving the average MemoryAgentBench accuracy from 29.54\% to 40.00\%. These results establish sparse historical hidden states as an effective and efficient memory substrate for long-context LLM agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/Haodong-Lei-Ray/TransMem.

Haodong Lei, Junming Liu, Yirong Chen et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

ASSEMCAD: Production-Ready CAD Assembly Generation from Natural Language

Recent advances in large language models and programmatic CAD have significantly improved Text-to-CAD generation for individual parts. However, production-ready mechanical assembly generation remains largely unsolved. Unlike single-part modeling, assemblies require coordinated reasoning over multiple components, functional interfaces, assembly relations, engineering principles, and physical consistency. Consequently, directly generating executable CAD code is insufficient for constructing mechanically valid and reusable assemblies. We present AssemCAD, an axiom-grounded framework for production-ready CAD assembly generation from natural language. Instead of representing an assembly as monolithic CAD code, AssemCAD first constructs an axiomatic Assembly Specification consisting of typed parts, geometry-backed ports, executable mates, and engineering axioms. Each assembly relation is explicitly grounded in one or more engineering principles, making the resulting specification interpretable, reusable, and verifiable. To realize this specification, AssemCAD introduces a port- and mate-based CAD assembly library that executes symbolic assembly relations through deterministic mate transformations and validates declared interfaces using concrete B-Rep geometric evidence. Built on this representation and library, AssemCAD further supports on-demand synthesis of reusable parametric component factories for both standard and open-world geometries. Experiments on AssemBench show that AssemCAD substantially improves assembly preservation and physical validity over code-centric CAD generation baselines, while generalizing across different foundation-model backbones. By combining axiom-grounded assembly reasoning with deterministic geometric execution, AssemCAD extends Text-to-CAD from isolated part generation toward production-ready mechanical assembly design.

Yurui Dong, Shu Zou, Siqi Li et al. · 0 citations
Conference Open access 2026

Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement

Large Language Models often struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. To address this, we propose MUSE, a framework that enables iterative self-improvement through a hierarchical Memory Module. MUSE organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate the orchestration of long-horizon workflows. The core of our approach is an autonomous post-execution critique mechanism: after completing each sub-task, the system analyzes its operational logs and distills raw execution data into structured, reusable knowledge. This allows the agent to evolve dynamically rather than relying on fixed parameters. Evaluated on the rigorous TAC productivity benchmark, MUSE achieves new state-of-the-art results, significantly out-performing previous methods using only the streamlined Gemini-2.5 Flash model. Our analysis demonstrates that MUSE’s performance scales with the accumulation of insights and exhibits strong cross-task transferability, marking a key step toward autonomous systems capable of lifelong learning in professional environments. Demo videos can be found in our supplementary materials.

Cheng Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen et al. · 2 citations · ⚡1