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Received — 10 September 2026 ⏭

ROTATE: Regret-driven Open-ended Training for Ad Hoc Teamwork

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Caroline Wang · Arrasy Rahman · Benjamin Nativi · Jiaxun Cui · Yoonchang Sung · Peter Stone
10 September 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2505.23686v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to collaborate with previously unseen partners is a fundamental generalization challenge, known as Ad Hoc Teamwork (AHT). Existing methods often adopt a two-stage pipeline: first, a fixed population of teammates is generated, and second, an AHT agent is trained to collaborate with them. This separation limits coverage of behaviors and ignores whether the generated teammates are informative for the AHT agent to learn from. On the other hand, AHT agents are typically trained under the assumption that the training teammate set is uncontrollable, despite the fact that its composition strongly influences generalization. This paper presents a unified framework for AHT by reformulating the problem as an open-ended learning process between an AHT agent and an adversarial teammate generator. We introduce ROTATE, a regret-driven, open-ended training algorithm that alternates between improving the AHT agent and generating teammates that probe its collaboration deficiencies. Experiments across Overcooked and Level-Based Foraging tasks demonstrate that ROTATE substantially outperforms baselines on an unseen set of teammates, establishing a new standard for robust, generalizable teamwork.
Received — 27 May 2026 ⏭

The Path Matters: Learning a Token-Commitment Policy for Diffusion Language Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Bohang Sun · Max Zhu · Francesco Caso · Jindong Gu · Junchi Yu · Philip Torr · Pietro Li\`o · Jialin Yu
26 May 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2605.24697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models promise faster generation by refining many token positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a hidden control problem: which proposed tokens should be transferred into the partially decoded sequence at each step? We refer to this decision as token commitment. Existing frozen-generator decoders largely rely on hand-designed confidence rules or block-specific acceptance filters. We argue that token commitment can instead be learned as a reusable trace-state policy. We introduce TraceLock, a lightweight plug-in controller that instantiates this policy for a frozen diffusion language model. Since oracle commitment times are unavailable, TraceLock derives self-supervision from future stability: at decoding step t, a proposed token for position i is labeled stable if it matches the final token at position i after the full decoding trace completes. The controller scores variable-length trace states and decides which active token proposals should be committed to the partially decoded sequence. Once trained for a given frozen backbone, the controller can be deployed across local-window widths, generation lengths, and step budgets without retraining or per-setting calibration. Experiments on question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation show that TraceLock improves the quality-step tradeoff over heuristic and learned baselines, with particularly stable behavior under cross-setting deployment. Diagnostic analyses show that its decisions are not reducible to scalar confidence, suggesting that frozen diffusion language models expose a learnable space of commitment trajectories beyond confidence-based decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/BobSun98/TraceLock.

Pulmonary-Intestinal Axis: Shared Genetic Basis and Mediating Factors Identified Through Multi-Omics Analysis

✇Omics In Lung
By: Zhenzhu Zhang · Haoyue Liu · Yihang Su · Chengwen Wang · Wei Wang · Yinglin Li · Xiaobao Zhang · Chenguang Gao · Xue Tian · Chunqing Zhao
14 April 2026 at 18:00

Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2026 Apr 7;21:561645. doi: 10.2147/COPD.S561645. eCollection 2026.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a systemic condition with comorbidities beyond the lung (eg, cardiovascular and metabolic disorders), and gastrointestinal (GI) disorders are also common. The shared genetic basis of COPD-GI comorbidity and its mediating factors remain unclear. We hypothesized that COPD and GI diseases share pleiotropic genetic architecture implicating lipid-metabolic pathways, with smoking mediating part of the association.

METHODS: We analyzed publicly available European-ancestry GWAS summary statistics for COPD (Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative), 15 GI diseases (FinnGen), and smoking phenotypes (UK Biobank). Genetic correlation was estimated using linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) and high-definition likelihood (HDL). Multi-trait analysis of GWAS (MTAG) boosted COPD discovery by leveraging genetically correlated GI traits. We integrated locus-to-gene mapping with multi-tissue expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) and plasma protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) evidence to prioritize shared loci, genes, and proteins. Bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) tested causal directions, and two-step mediation MR evaluated smoking.

RESULTS: COPD showed significant genetic correlation with nine GI diseases. We identified six comorbidity-associated loci (three with CADD > 12.37) and 13 unique candidate pleiotropic genes; APOE was supported by proteomic evidence. Enrichment analyses highlighted lipid-metabolism pathways. MR suggested COPD increases risk of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), acute appendicitis, and gastric ulcer, while diverticular disease showed reverse causality toward COPD. Smoking partially mediated the COPD effect on GERD, acute appendicitis, and gastric ulcer.

CONCLUSION: COPD and multiple GI disorders share a distributed pleiotropic genetic basis within the broader systemic comorbidity spectrum of COPD. Multi-omics evidence supports a genomic pulmonary-intestinal axis in which lipid metabolism and smoking-related mechanisms contribute to COPD and GI comorbidity, providing targets for risk stratification and potential intervention.

PMID:41978582 | PMC:PMC13070119 | DOI:10.2147/COPD.S561645

Received — 5 March 2026 ⏭

Large-Language-Model-Guided State Estimation for Partially Observable Task and Motion Planning

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yoonwoo Kim · Raghav Arora · Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in · Peter Stone · Ben Abbatematteo · Yoonchang Sung
5 March 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2603.03704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot planning in partially observable environments, where not all objects are known or visible, is a challenging problem, as it requires reasoning under uncertainty through partially observable Markov decision processes. During the execution of a computed plan, a robot may unexpectedly observe task-irrelevant objects, which are typically ignored by naive planners. In this work, we propose incorporating two types of common-sense knowledge: (1) certain objects are more likely to be found in specific locations; and (2) similar objects are likely to be co-located, while dissimilar objects are less likely to be found together. Manually engineering such knowledge is complex, so we explore leveraging the powerful common-sense reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our planning and execution framework, CoCo-TAMP, introduces a hierarchical state estimation that uses LLM-guided information to shape the belief over task-relevant objects, enabling efficient solutions to long-horizon task and motion planning problems. In experiments, CoCo-TAMP achieves an average reduction of 62.7 in planning and execution time in simulation, and 72.6 in real-world demonstrations, compared to a baseline that does not incorporate either type of common-sense knowledge.

MASPOB: Bandit-Based Prompt Optimization for Multi-Agent Systems with Graph Neural Networks

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zhi Hong · Qian Zhang · Jiahang Sun · Zhiwei Shang · Mingze Kong · Xiangyi Wang · Yao Shu · Zhongxiang Dai
4 March 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2603.02630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved great success in many real-world applications, especially the one serving as the cognitive backbone of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to orchestrate complex workflows in practice. Since many deployment scenarios preclude MAS workflow modifications and its performance is highly sensitive to the input prompts, prompt optimization emerges as a more natural approach to improve its performance. However, real-world prompt optimization for MAS is impeded by three key challenges: (1) the need of sample efficiency due to prohibitive evaluation costs, (2) topology-induced coupling among prompts, and (3) the combinatorial explosion of the search space. To address these challenges, we introduce MASPOB (Multi-Agent System Prompt Optimization via Bandits), a novel sample-efficient framework based on bandits. By leveraging Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) to quantify uncertainty, the bandit framework balances exploration and exploitation, maximizing gains within a strictly limited budget. To handle topology-induced coupling, MASPOB integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture structural priors, learning topology-aware representations of prompt semantics. Furthermore, it employs coordinate ascent to decompose the optimization into univariate sub-problems, reducing search complexity from exponential to linear. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that MASPOB achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming existing baselines.
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭

Step 3.5 Flash: Open Frontier-Level Intelligence with 11B Active Parameters

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Ailin Huang · Ang Li · Aobo Kong · Bin Wang · Binxing Jiao · Bo Dong · Bojun Wang · Boyu Chen · Brian Li · Buyun Ma · Chang Su · Changxin Miao · Changyi Wan · Chao Lou · Chen Hu · Chen Xu · Chenfeng Yu · Chengting Feng · Chengyuan Yao · Chunrui Han · Dan Ma · Dapeng Shi · Daxin Jiang · Dehua Ma · Deshan Sun · Di Qi · Enle Liu · Fajie Zhang · Fanqi Wan · Guanzhe Huang · Gulin Yan · Guoliang Cao · Guopeng Li · Han Cheng · Hangyu Guo · Hanshan Zhang · Hao Nie · Haonan Jia · Haoran Lv · Hebin Zhou · Hekun Lv · Heng Wang · Heung-Yeung Shum · Hongbo Huang · Hongbo Peng · Hongyu Zhou · Hongyuan Wang · Houyong Chen · Huangxi Zhu · Huimin Wu · Huiyong Guo · Jia Wang · Jian Zhou · Jianjian Sun · Jiaoren Wu · Jiaran Zhang · Jiashu Lv · Jiashuo Liu · Jiayi Fu · Jiayu Liu · Jie Cheng · Jie Luo · Jie Yang · Jie Zhou · Jieyi Hou · Jing Bai · Jingcheng Hu · Jingjing Xie · Jingwei Wu · Jingyang Zhang · Jishi Zhou · Junfeng Liu · Junzhe Lin · Ka Man Lo · Kai Liang · Kaibo Liu · Kaijun Tan · Kaiwen Yan · Kaixiang Li · Kang An · Kangheng Lin · Lei Yang · Liang Lv · Liang Zhao · Liangyu Chen · Lieyu Shi · Liguo T
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.10604v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.
Received — 17 February 2026 ⏭

DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Process

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Kaiwen Zheng · Huayu Chen · Haotian Ye · Haoxiang Wang · Qinsheng Zhang · Kai Jiang · Hang Su · Stefano Ermon · Jun Zhu · Ming-Yu Liu
17 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2509.16117v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable GRPO-style training, yet they inherit fundamental drawbacks, including solver restrictions, forward-reverse inconsistency, and complicated integration with classifier-free guidance (CFG). We introduce Diffusion Negative-aware FineTuning (DiffusionNFT), a new online RL paradigm that optimizes diffusion models directly on the forward process via flow matching. DiffusionNFT contrasts positive and negative generations to define an implicit policy improvement direction, naturally incorporating reinforcement signals into the supervised learning objective. This formulation enables training with arbitrary black-box solvers, eliminates the need for likelihood estimation, and requires only clean images rather than sampling trajectories for policy optimization. DiffusionNFT is up to $25\times$ more efficient than FlowGRPO in head-to-head comparisons, while being CFG-free. For instance, DiffusionNFT improves the GenEval score from 0.24 to 0.98 within 1k steps, while FlowGRPO achieves 0.95 with over 5k steps and additional CFG employment. By leveraging multiple reward models, DiffusionNFT significantly boosts the performance of SD3.5-Medium in every benchmark tested.
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