Fewer Tokens, Smaller Cache: Reward-Coordinated Efficient Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel on complex tasks through long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their lengthy intermediate steps cause severe overthinking that inflates inference cost. KV-cache compression is a common solution, yet existing reasoning-oriented methods apply a uniform policy across the trajectory and judge compression only by what it removes from the cache. Two observations point the other way. First, a reasoning state's tolerance to context loss varies along the trajectory, and process reward tracks it: deleting tokens at high-reward steps preserves accuracy far better than deleting the same budget at random. Second, compression is not free on the generation side, since a smaller cache leads the model to generate more tokens, partly canceling the saving. Together these motivate coordinating both sides under a single process reward. We propose ReCo (Reward-Coordinated Compression), a step-wise framework in which a lightweight process-reward estimator scores each completed step and drives three components: (1) reward-adaptive KV-cache compression that shrinks the retained cache harder at high-reward steps and less at low-reward ones, (2) a reward-banded penalty on reflection tokens that curbs redundant generation, and (3) confidence-based early stopping that triggers when the reasoning is reliable. Across three reasoning models and six benchmarks, ReCo reduces generated tokens by 37%-65% and end-to-end latency by 2.08x-2.35x over Full CoT, all while largely preserving accuracy.

Learning What to Remember and What to Internalize in LLM Self-Evolution via Adaptive Memory-Parameter Coordination

Large language model agents increasingly operate in dynamic environments where tool interfaces, APIs, and user requirements change after deployment. Existing self-evolution methods mainly follow two paradigms: harness-based approaches, which externalize feedback into editable memories or skills for rapid adaptation, and parameter-based approaches, which internalize experience into model parameters for deeper capability improvement. However, using either mechanism alone creates a trade-off between flexibility and performance. This paper asks how an agent can coordinate both channels to achieve robust self-evolution. We present COVE, a unified agent self-evolution framework that combines harness-based and parameter-based learning through task-aware routing, stage-aware scheduling, and knowledge optimization. Through this design, COVE treats self-evolution not as indiscriminate accumulation of experience, but as a coordinated process that matches tasks and knowledge types to appropriate learning mechanisms. Experiments across multiple task categories show that COVE outperforms single-channel evolution strategies, demonstrating more robust and efficient improvement under changing environments.

TouchWorld: A Predictive and Reactive Tactile Foundation Model for Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation in everyday environments requires both anticipation and reaction: a robot must predict how contact should evolve while rapidly correcting local errors caused by slip, misalignment, unstable grasping, or force mismatch. Vision and language provide semantic and geometric guidance, but they cannot reliably reveal hidden contact states such as force, slip, and contact stability. Although tactile sensing exposes these physical cues, most existing policies treat touch as a low-frequency observation stream within a monolithic action model, coupling slow task reasoning, action generation, and fast contact feedback in a single loop. We introduce TouchWorld, a predictive-and-reactive tactile foundation model for dexterous manipulation. TouchWorld uses a hierarchical policy that separates vision-language subtask planning, tactile world-model prediction, visuo-tactile goal-conditioned action generation, and high-frequency tactile residual refinement. A High-Level Planning Layer produces executable subtasks and predicts tactile subgoals; a Visuo-Tactile Goal-Conditioned Policy generates nominal action chunks; and a Tactile-Conditioned Refinement Policy performs online residual correction using recent tactile and proprioceptive feedback. By using touch as both a predictive contact reference and a fast feedback signal, TouchWorld preserves the semantic generalization of vision-language-action policies while improving local contact adaptation. Across six long-horizon and contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks, TouchWorld achieves 65.0% success in the clean setting and 53.7% success under human perturbations, outperforming the strongest baseline by 15.7 and 18.5 percentage points, respectively.

DynamicMem: A Long-Horizon Memory Benchmark in Real-World Settings

LLM agents increasingly act as personal assistants that must remember a user's profile over months: who they are (attributes), what they routinely do (habits), and what they prefer (preferences), and keep it updated as jobs, routines, and tastes drift. Existing benchmarks evaluate this "memory" ability through short, simplified interactions, missing three core properties of real behavior: the profile is heterogeneous, with attributes, habits, and preferences evolving on different timelines; changes are driven by external context such as seasons and life events; and evidence is rarely stated explicitly, instead scattered across many small actions in different apps that a memory system must infer from. We introduce DynamicMem, a synthetic benchmark that constructs 15 months of activity per user, providing long-term multi-app data that real users' privacy keeps out of reach. It provides user-consistent trajectories averaging 2.2M tokens and 1,772 grounded events per user across 16 applications such as e-commerce, fitness, and social platforms. The profile evolves over this period and is never given explicitly: each attribute, habit, or preference must be inferred from small signals scattered across apps. We evaluate at five quarterly checkpoints to track how systems scale as history grows. Benchmarking five representative systems exposes problems a single accuracy score hides: (i) profile reconstruction degrades with history length while service-task accuracy stays flat, despite both drawing on the same memory; (ii) no system both keeps facts that stay true and replaces facts that change, with errors clustering on preferences and on naming the exact referent; and (iii) over 93% of failures trace to what the memory retrieves, not to the model writing the answer, so the largest room for improvement lies in memory itself. Code: https://wenyaxie023.github.io/DynamicMem/

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories. Beyond static heuristic filtering, advanced data selection methods for LLM training largely follow two paradigms, each with fundamental limitations. Influence-based methods provide principled bi-level objectives but require intractable inverse-Hessian computations, while excess-loss methods are computationally efficient but rely on a static reference model that becomes misaligned with the evolving proxy model during training. We propose BLADE (Bi-Level Adaptive Data sElection), a Hessian-free framework for data selection. BLADE reformulates the bi-level optimization problem underlying influence-based methods as a penalized single-level objective via Lagrange multipliers, avoiding inverse-Hessian computation while revealing a principled connection to excess-loss based data selection. The resulting objective recovers an excess-loss form but replaces the static reference model with a dynamic one that stays synchronized with training. Theoretically, we prove that this penalized formulation guarantees first-order convergence. For efficient online batch selection, we instantiate BLADE as a memoryless randomized block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Extensive experiments show that BLADE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines, providing a practical recipe for LLM training.

SocraticPO: Policy Optimization via Interactive Guidance

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness. Such rewards provide an optimization direction but rarely explain how a model should revise its mistaken reasoning, which can encourage shortcut learning and brittle policies. We propose \textbf{SocraticPO} (Socratic Policy Optimization), a policy-optimization framework that augments RL rollouts with Socratic-style natural-language guidance. During rollout, the student first answers independently; if the answer is incorrect, a teacher diagnoses the attempt and provides concise corrective guidance, after which the student continues under the expanded context. Crucially, this guidance is paired with reward decay: correct answers obtained after teacher intervention only receive decayed rewards, preventing the policy from treating teacher help as a free path to reward. Since SocraticPO only modifies the rollout process while leaving the standard expected-reward objective intact, it can be plugged into existing policy-gradient backends such as Reinforce++. Moreover, because the teacher provides only text-level guidance, SocraticPO can leverage stronger black-box teacher models without requiring access to logits or distribution matching. On undergraduate-level scientific reasoning benchmarks from SciKnowEval, SocraticPO improves over strong RL and self-distillation baselines. Ablations show that both targeted guidance and reward decay are necessary, with reward decay mitigating reliance on assisted correction.

From Agent Traces to Trust: Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks by interacting with external tools, retrieval systems, memory modules, environments, and other agents. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where execution failures originated. Evidence tracing and execution provenance address this gap by modeling how retrieved evidence, tool outputs, memory items, environment observations, intermediate claims, actions, and final answers are connected throughout agent execution. This survey provides a systematic review and conceptual framework for evidence tracing and execution provenance in LLM agents. We organize related work around a unified provenance perspective that connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, trace-based observability, and failure diagnosis. We also map existing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation metrics to provenance-related capabilities, and discuss how evaluation can move from final-answer correctness toward process-level accountability. Finally, we outline open challenges, including unified trace schemas, claim-level and semantic provenance, provenance-aware safety mechanisms, realistic execution-trace benchmarks, recovery-oriented evaluation, and privacy-aware audit infrastructure.

MemEye: A Visual-Centric Evaluation Framework for Multimodal Agent Memory

Long-term agent memory is increasingly multimodal, yet existing evaluations rarely test whether agents preserve the visual evidence needed for later reasoning. In prior work, many visually grounded questions can be answered using only captions or textual traces, allowing answers to be inferred without preserving the fine-grained visual evidence. Meanwhile, harder cases that require reasoning over changing visual states are largely absent. Therefore, we introduce MemEye, a framework that evaluates memory capabilities from two dimensions: one measures the granularity of decisive visual evidence (from scene-level to pixel-level evidence), and the other measures how retrieved evidence must be used (from single evidence to evolutionary synthesis). Under this framework, we construct a new benchmark across 8 life-scenario tasks, with ablation-driven validation gates for assessing answerability, shortcut resistance, visual necessity, and reasoning structure. By evaluating 13 memory methods across 4 VLM backbones, we show that current architectures still struggle to preserve fine-grained visual details and reason about state changes over time. Our findings show that long-term multimodal memory depends on evidence routing, temporal tracking, and detail extraction.

TouchAnything: A Dataset and Framework for Bimanual Tactile Estimation from Egocentric Video

Egocentric human video data, which captures rich human-environment interactions and can be collected at scale, has become a key driver of embodied intelligence research. However, existing egocentric datasets typically lack tactile sensing, a critical modality that provides direct cues about contact, force, and pressure in human-object interaction. Without such signals, models struggle to learn physically grounded representations of real-world interaction dynamics. While tactile sensors provide these cues, deploying high-quality tactile hardware at scale remains expensive and cumbersome. This raises a central question: can tactile feedback be inferred directly from visual observations, enabling scalable tactile supervision for egocentric video data and supporting physically grounded embodied learning? To enable research in this direction, we introduce EgoTouch, a large-scale multi-view egocentric dataset with dense tactile supervision for bimanual hand-object interaction. EgoTouch comprises 208 manipulation tasks spanning 1,891 episodes in diverse indoor and outdoor environments, with synchronized multi-view RGB (head-mounted egocentric and dual wrist-mounted cameras), bimanual 3D hand pose, and continuous pressure maps from wearable tactile sensors. Building on EgoTouch, we introduce TouchAnything, a baseline multi-view vision-to-touch prediction framework that uses the egocentric view as the primary input and flexibly leverages available wrist-mounted views at inference time. Experiments show that incorporating wrist-mounted views generally improves tactile prediction over egocentric-only input, achieving up to 5.0% relative improvement in Contact IoU and 6.1% relative improvement in Volumetric IoU. We will publicly release the dataset, code, and benchmark.

EgoTL: Egocentric Think-Aloud Chains for Long-Horizon Tasks

Large foundation models have made significant advances in embodied intelligence, enabling synthesis and reasoning over egocentric input for household tasks. However, VLM-based auto-labeling is often noisy because the primary data sources lack accurate human action labels, chain-of-thought (CoT), and spatial annotations; these errors are amplified during long-horizon spatial instruction following. These issues stem from insufficient coverage of minute-long, daily household planning tasks and from inaccurate spatial grounding. As a result, VLM reasoning chains and world-model synthesis can hallucinate objects, skip steps, or fail to respect real-world physical attributes. To address these gaps, we introduce EgoTL. EgoTL builds a think-aloud capture pipeline for egocentric data. It uses a say-before-act protocol to record step-by-step goals and spoken reasoning with word-level timestamps, then calibrates physical properties with metric-scale spatial estimators, a memory-bank walkthrough for scene context, and clip-level tags for navigation instructions and detailed manipulation actions. With EgoTL, we are able to benchmark VLMs and World Models on six task dimensions from three layers and long-horizon generation over minute-long sequences across over 100 daily household tasks. We find that foundation models still fall short as egocentric assistants or open-world simulators. Finally, we finetune foundation models with human CoT aligned with metric labels on the training split of EgoTL, which improves long-horizon planning and reasoning, step-wise reasoning, instruction following, and spatial grounding.