PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Exp-Force: Experience-Conditioned Pre-Grasp Force Selection with Vision-Language Models

Accurate pre-contact grasp force selection is critical for safe and reliable robotic manipulation. Adaptive controllers regulate force after contact but still require a reasonable initial estimate. Starting a grasp with too little force requires reactive adjustment, while starting a grasp with too high a force risks damaging fragile objects. This trade-off is particularly challenging for compliant grippers, whose contact mechanics are difficult to model analytically. We propose Exp-Force, an experience-conditioned framework that predicts the minimum feasible grasping force from a single RGB image. The method retrieves a small set of relevant prior grasping experiences and conditions a vision-language model on these examples for in-context inference, without analytic contact models or manually designed heuristics. On 129 object instances, ExpForce achieves a best-case MAE of 0.43 N, reducing error by 72% over zero-shot inference. In real-world tests on 30 unseen objects, it improves appropriate force selection rate from 63% to 87%. These results demonstrate that Exp-Force enables reliable and generalizable pre-grasp force selection by leveraging prior interaction experiences. http://expforcesubmission.github.io/Exp-Force-Website/