Archived
2026-10-03VISTA: A Visual Harness for Reasoning in an Interactive World
Qiushi Han, Keya Hu, Linlu Qiu, Cathy Wu, Kaiming He
arXiv:2610.02200v1Today’s standout paper is VISTA, a visual harness for reasoning in interactive worlds. The problem it tackles is that strong multimodal models often underperform in games, puzzles, and other environments not because they lack reasoning, but because they can’t keep track of what they’ve seen over long horizons. VISTA gives the model a better interface: it can directly observe the world through images, store a lossless visual memory of past observations, and retrieve and reorganize those observations as it plans its next move. In other words, instead of forcing the model to reason from a thin text summary, it lets the model think with the full visual record. That matters because it unlocks existing model capability without retraining the model itself. On ARC-AGI-3, the system dramatically improves performance and uses far fewer actions than humans. More broadly, this suggests that better scaffolding, not just bigger models, may be key to building capable visual agents.
Also spotted that day
One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time AvatarsKaliBench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Cybersecurity Tool Use on Kali Linux with Runtime-Free Verifiable RewardsReconstruct, Practice, Go Real: Guided Self-Improvement for Embodied AgentsEmbedding Prediction Helps Image GenerationScholarCatalyst: A Benchmark for Retrieving Papers That Inspire New ResearchSILSA: Sliding-Window Slice Latents for Topology-Preserving High-Resolution 3D GenerationTACO: Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse Optimizer for LLM Fine-TuningFERPO: Forward Entropy-Regularized Policy OptimizationCost-augmented Schrödinger bridges on graphs are exactly solvable: a Feynman-Kac tilt replaces learned controlHierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language ModelsThe Missing Primitive: Diagnosing and Repairing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language ModelsTrust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-TuningGenerative modeling of intrinsically disordered protein regions by reinforcing sparse autoencoder featuresDMAD: Distribution Matching as Adversarial Distillation for Fast Visual Generation
Previous daily papers
2026-10-15Latent Compaction with Test-Time Training2026-10-14Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards2026-10-14The Last Remote Sensing Model Built by Humans? Casting Any Earth Observation Task as Recursive Self-Improvement2026-10-14Hybrid Reasoning Agents2026-10-13AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities2026-10-13RATED: Reliability-Aware AI Agent Tool Retrieval via Execution Dynamics2026-10-13Designing Protein Structures from Natural Language2026-10-12RSI-Anything: Unlocking Recursive Self-Improvement with World Models2026-10-11A Balanced Data Diet: Addressing the Exploration Bottleneck in Mega-Scale RL for Robot Control2026-10-11FAITH: Feasibility-Aware Safety-Filtered RL for High-Dimensional Systems2026-10-11VioLA: Learning Generalist Humanoid Control Policies from Human Data2026-10-10FastBench: Can Streaming VLMs Perceive High-Dynamic Real-World Streams?2026-10-10Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoff2026-10-08Long-WAM: Scaling the Context of World-Action Models2026-10-08SciExam for ENSO: Can AI Agents Build Climate Models?2026-10-08RoboJEPA: Scaling Robotic Latent World Models2026-10-08RECAST: Learning to Compute the Right Context through Adaptive Evidence Routing2026-10-07WorldSonus: Bringing Sound to Worlds2026-10-07IdeaAnchor: Teaching LLMs to Turn Literature into Research Ideas2026-10-07Agent in a Bottle: Can LLM Agents Turn Their Capabilities Into Cheap, Scalable Artifacts?2026-10-06CLIFT: Conformal Self-Verification for Web Agent Training and Test-Time Scaling2026-10-06PlotGround: Grounding Plot Digitization in Real Scientific Figures and Their Source Data2026-10-06Base Models Can Reason By Taking a Cue From Training Data2026-10-05LESSER: Post-Training Data Selection with Output-Layer Gradients2026-10-05Language Models that Play Chess and Explain Their Moves2026-10-05Less Decoder is More Encoder: Geometric Representation Learning from Novel View Synthesis2026-10-04One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time Avatars2026-10-04The Missing Primitive: Diagnosing and Repairing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models2026-10-04DMAD: Distribution Matching as Adversarial Distillation for Fast Visual Generation2026-10-01Looped Diffusion Transformer2026-10-01Scaling Laws for Looped Mixture of Experts2026-10-01EvoDuet: Bilevel Co-Evolution of Web Searching and Task Solving for Scientific Discovery2026-09-30Beyond the Timeline: Augmenting Long-Video Memory with Grounded Entity Biographies2026-09-30Thinking Before Thinking: Scaling Agentic Inference Through Meta-Reasoning2026-09-30Pretraining Latent Information Feedback Transformers with Teacher Supervision2026-09-29Unifying Distributional Training for One-Step Visual Generation2026-09-29Improving Test-Time Scaling with Adaptive Looped Transformers2026-09-29Telescopic Language Models2026-09-28Statistical attribute alignment for black-box generative AI via output post-processing2026-09-28User Model Extraction via Belief Self-Distillation2026-09-28Learning to Stop without Learning to Stop: Self-Supervised Confidence Training Improves Reasoning Efficiency2026-09-27TrackEverything: Long Horizon Dense Tracking via De-Duplicating 3D Scene Representations2026-09-27LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper With Their Own Traces2026-09-27Instrumental Monitor Evasion Emerges Under Ordinary Task Pressure2026-09-26PoEM: Predicting RL Outcomes from Existing Policies2026-09-24Frozen Flows Forget: Diagnosing and Restoring Lost Motion in a Latent-flow World Model2026-09-24StudentBench: AI and human tutoring yield equivalent GRE learning gains2026-09-24Agent-Editing World Model: Rethinking World Modeling for LLM Agents2026-09-23Grow the Harness, Not the Context: From Strategy-Free Scaffolds to Reusable Specialist Agents2026-09-23FleXray: Universal Clinical X-ray Segmentation2026-09-23SWE-Serve: Benchmarking Agentic Engineering For Production Inference Serving2026-09-22GameHorizon Suite: Multi-Horizon Data and Evaluation in Gameplay2026-09-22Emergent Collusion in Long-Horizon LLM Agent Interaction2026-09-22WorldCrafter: Consistent Video World Model with Implicit 3D-aware Memory2026-09-21Value-Sensitive Delegation in Everyday AI Agent Use: Evidence from OpenClaw2026-09-21Designer-RSI: Evolving Procedural Memory from User Traffic for Agentic Graphic Design2026-09-21CodeMidas: Scaling Agentic Coding RL Environments from Code Itself2026-09-20RetireOPD: Self-Retiring On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning2026-09-20Quantifying Overclaiming Propensity in Frontier LLM Agents