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Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

PAR$^2$-RAG: Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

arXiv:2603.29085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain brittle on multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where answering requires combining evidence across documents through retrieval and reasoning. Iterative retrieval systems can fail by locking onto an early low-recall trajectory and amplifying downstream errors, while planning-only approaches may produce static query sets that cannot adapt when intermediate evidence changes. We propose \textbf{Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning RAG (PAR$^2$-RAG)}, a two-stage framework that separates \emph{coverage} from \emph{commitment}. PAR$^2$-RAG first performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier, then applies depth-first refinement with evidence sufficiency control in an iterative loop. Across four MHQA benchmarks, PAR$^2$-RAG consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, compared with IRCoT, PAR$^2$-RAG achieves up to \textbf{23.5\%} higher accuracy, with retrieval gains of up to \textbf{10.5\%} in NDCG.

PSPA-Bench: A Personalized Benchmark for Smartphone GUI Agent

arXiv:2603.29318v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Smartphone GUI agents execute tasks by operating directly on app interfaces, offering a path to broad capability without deep system integration. However, real-world smartphone use is highly personalized: users adopt diverse workflows and preferences, challenging agents to deliver customized assistance rather than generic solutions. Existing GUI agent benchmarks cannot adequately capture this personalization dimension due to sparse user-specific data and the lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. To address this gap, we present PSPA-Bench, the benchmark dedicated to evaluating personalization in smartphone GUI agents. PSPA-Bench comprises over 12,855 personalized instructions aligned with real-world user behaviors across 10 representative daily-use scenarios and 22 mobile apps, and introduces a structure-aware process evaluation method that measures agents' personalized capabilities at a fine-grained level. Through PSPA-Bench, we benchmark 11 state-of-the-art GUI agents. Results reveal that current methods perform poorly under personalized settings, with even the strongest agent achieving limited success. Our analysis further highlights three directions for advancing personalized GUI agents: (1) reasoning-oriented models consistently outperform general LLMs, (2) perception remains a simple yet critical capability, and (3) reflection and long-term memory mechanisms are key to improving adaptation. Together, these findings establish PSPA-Bench as a foundation for systematic study and future progress in personalized GUI agents.

Owl-AuraID 1.0: An Intelligent System for Autonomous Scientific Instrumentation and Scientific Data Analysis

arXiv:2603.29828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery increasingly depends on high-throughput characterization, yet automation is hindered by proprietary GUIs and the limited generalizability of existing API-based systems. We present Owl-AuraID, a software-hardware collaborative embodied agent system that adopts a GUI-native paradigm to operate instruments through the same interfaces as human experts. Its skill-centric framework integrates Type-1 (GUI operation) and Type-2 (data analysis) skills into end-to-end workflows, connecting physical sample handling with scientific interpretation. Owl-AuraID demonstrates broad coverage across ten categories of precision instruments and diverse workflows, including multimodal spectral analysis, microscopic imaging, and crystallographic analysis, supporting modalities such as FTIR, NMR, AFM, and TGA. Overall, Owl-AuraID provides a practical, extensible foundation for autonomous laboratories and illustrates a path toward evolving laboratory intelligence through reusable operational and analytical skills. The code are available at https://github.com/OpenOwlab/AuraID.

RAAP: Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction with Cross-Image Action Alignment

arXiv:2603.29419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding object affordances is essential for enabling robots to perform purposeful and fine-grained interactions in diverse and unstructured environments. However, existing approaches either rely on retrieval, which is fragile due to sparsity and coverage gaps, or on large-scale models, which frequently mislocalize contact points and mispredict post-contact actions when applied to unseen categories, thereby hindering robust generalization. We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction (RAAP), a framework that unifies affordance retrieval with alignment-based learning. By decoupling static contact localization and dynamic action direction, RAAP transfers contact points via dense correspondence and predicts action directions through a retrieval-augmented alignment model that consolidates multiple references with dual-weighted attention. Trained on compact subsets of DROID and HOI4D with as few as tens of samples per task, RAAP achieves consistent performance across unseen objects and categories, and enables zero-shot robotic manipulation in both simulation and the real world. Project website: https://github.com/SEU-VIPGroup/RAAP.

An Empirical Study of Multi-Agent Collaboration for Automated Research

arXiv:2603.29632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI agents evolve, the community is rapidly shifting from single Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to overcome cognitive bottlenecks in automated research. However, the optimal multi-agent coordination framework for these autonomous agents remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical study investigating the comparative efficacy of distinct multi-agent structures for automated machine learning optimization. Utilizing a rigorously controlled, execution-based testbed equipped with Git worktree isolation and explicit global memory, we benchmark a single-agent baseline against two multi-agent paradigms: a subagent architecture (parallel exploration with post-hoc consolidation) and an agent team architecture (experts with pre-execution handoffs). By evaluating these systems under strictly fixed computational time budgets, our findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between operational stability and theoretical deliberation. The subagent mode functions as a highly resilient, high-throughput search engine optimal for broad, shallow optimizations under strict time constraints. Conversely, the agent team topology exhibits higher operational fragility due to multi-author code generation but achieves the deep theoretical alignment necessary for complex architectural refactoring given extended compute budgets. These empirical insights provide actionable guidelines for designing future autoresearch systems, advocating for dynamically routed architectures that adapt their collaborative structures to real-time task complexity.

A Semi-amortized Lifted Learning-to-Optimize Masked (SALLO-M) Transformer Model for Scalable and Generalizable Beamforming

arXiv:2510.13077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop an unsupervised deep learning framework for real-time scalable and generalizable downlink beamforming in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. The proposed semi-amortized lifted learning-to-optimize (SALLO) framework employs a multi-layer Transformer to iteratively refine an auxiliary variable and the beamformer solution, with a few projected gradient ascent steps at each layer. A key feature of our SALLO Transformer model is that it can handle varying numbers of users and antennas, enabled by a user-antenna dual tokenization and a structured sample/attention masking scheme, leading to generalization across different configurations without retraining. To improve convergence and robustness, we introduce three training strategies: (a) sliding-window training to stabilize gradient propagation, (b) curriculum learning with random masking to enable user-antenna configuration generalization and prevent poor early-stage convergence, and (c) sample replay to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during multi-stage training. Ablation studies validate several key architecture designs and show that the enhanced training scheme improves both generalizability and solution quality. Simulation results over both Gaussian and sparse channels show that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms existing deep learning baselines across diverse system configurations and channel conditions. The performance gain becomes more pronounced in overloaded regimes, highlighting improved robustness under challenging scenarios. Furthermore, our scheme surpasses the WMMSE benchmark in underloaded systems and even in overloaded systems when the overloading factor is below certain threshold. These gains are achieved with fast inference and a substantially more lightweight model than wireless foundation models.
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