Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.20474

AdaRSI: On-Demand Recursive Self-Improvement for Embodied Agents

Abstract

Pretrained vision-language-action models (VLAs) often fail midway through unseen long-horizon tasks. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a remedy, but embodied RSI methods either refine the harness around a frozen executor and so cannot add a missing motion, or train the executor on persistent failures without asking whether a failure lies in how the executor is called or in what it can do. We ask when a self-improving embodied system should change the weights of its executor, and propose AdaRSI, an on-demand RSI framework for embodied agents. A coding agent first improves its skills and harness, then attributes persistent failures by retrying failing sub-steps from saved states, and fine-tunes only the sub-steps that remain unreliable, with demonstrations it collects itself and experience carried over from earlier tasks. On all 50 target tasks of RoboCasa365, with GR00T N1.5 as the executor and no human demonstrations, AdaRSI improves the VLA on all three suites and raises its success on unseen composite tasks from 4.6% to 13.8%. Compared with fine-tuning every sub-step, it reaches slightly higher success while using only 28% of the GPU time and 22% of the self-collected demonstrations, and fine-tuning without a harness trains more yet gains far less.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Peidong Wang, Ying Chang, Zhiming Ma, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Daqi Liu, Yuzhe Yang, Xu Cao, Chuang Wang, Jian Su, Daling Wang. 2026-10-14. AdaRSI: On-Demand Recursive Self-Improvement for Embodied Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20474

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Beyond Size: How Gradients Shape Pruning Decisions in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters are prime targets for network pruning, which removes some model weights without hurting performance. Prior approaches such as magnitude pruning, SparseGPT, and Wanda either concentrated solely on weights or integrated weights with activations for sparsity. However, they overlooked the informative gradients derived from pretrained LLMs. In this paper, we present a novel sparsity-centric pruning method for pretrained LLMs, termed Gradient-based Language Model Pruner (GBLM-Pruner). GBLM-Pruner leverages the first-order term of the Taylor expansion, operating in a training-free manner by harnessing properly normalized gradients from a few calibration samples to determine the pruning metric, and substantially outperforms competitive counterparts like SparseGPT and Wanda in multiple benchmarks. Intriguingly, by incorporating gradients, unstructured pruning with our method tends to reveal some structural patterns, which mirrors the geometric interdependence inherent in the LLMs' parameter structure. Additionally, GBLM-Pruner functions without any subsequent retraining or weight updates to maintain its simplicity as other counterparts. Extensive evaluations on LLaMA-series, Qwen-Series and Deepseek models across zero-shot, STEM-Reasoning and Coding benchmarks show that GBLM-Pruner surpasses magnitude pruning and Wanda by significant margins and performs competitively against SparseGPT which involves intensive weight updates. We further extend our approach on Vision Transformer and Vision Language Models. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/GBLM-Pruner.

cs.CL↗

$π$-CoT: Prolog-Initialized Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multi-Hop Question-Answering

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances large language models' (LLMs) problem-solving capabilities, but still struggles with complex multi-hop questions, often falling into circular reasoning patterns or deviating from the logical path entirely. This limitation is particularly acute in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings, where obtaining the right context is critical. We introduce Prolog-Initialized Chain-of-Thought ($π$-CoT), a novel prompting strategy that combines logic programming's structural rigor with language models' flexibility. $π$-CoT reformulates multi-hop questions into Prolog queries decomposed as single-hop sub-queries. These are resolved sequentially, producing intermediate artifacts, with which we initialize the subsequent CoT reasoning procedure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $π$-CoT matches or outperforms standard RAG and in-context CoT on multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, with the largest gains on questions for which retrieval surfaces the necessary evidence.

cs.CL↗

Scaling Personality Control in LLMs with Big Five Scaler Prompts

We present Big5-Scaler, a prompt-based framework for conditioning large language models (LLMs) with controllable Big Five personality traits. By embedding numeric trait values into natural language prompts, our method enables fine-grained personality control without additional training. We evaluate Big5-Scaler across trait expression, dialogue generation, and human trait imitation tasks. Results show that it induces consistent and distinguishable personality traits across models, with performance varying by prompt type and scale. Our analysis highlights the effectiveness of concise prompts and lower trait intensities, providing a efficient approach for building personality-aware dialogue agents.

cs.CL↗