arXiv subjects

Sachin Konan

Publications and source records attributed to Sachin Konan.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Scientist World: Grow a Research World for AI-Scientists

AI-Scientists arrived, but a world for them to grow in did not. Human scientists take theirs for granted $-$ centuries of open problems and shared ideas, waiting in the scientific literature. To AI-Scientists, that world is readable but not runnable, so we build Scientist World for them: every research paper becomes an executable environment. Our autonomous pipeline extracts each paper's open-ended research question and reproduces its proposed method as the baseline; an AI-Scientist entering the environment is evaluated against what the human authors achieved. We release the first 1,000 verified environments. With the world as an evaluation, we found that frontier AI-Scientists can already surpass the human researchers 74% of the time. As a record of how AI does science, it contains 6,400 hours of research traces, with every idea, experiment, failure, and success. As a training ground, we are able to raise (+158%) a small model to match frontier models in research ideation. At last, AI-Scientists' own world has arrived, grown from and growing with science itself.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AgentVQA: A Unified Benchmark for Agentic Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can perform a broad range of tasks across diverse settings, yet their performance in agentic contexts remains poorly understood. Although online evaluations in simulators and real-world environments are essential for measuring interactive agent performance, they are costly and challenging to scale. Complementary offline VQA benchmarks can enable faster and more reliable comparisons across agentic domains, yet existing benchmarks remain limited and fragmented. To address this gap, we introduce AgentVQA, an offline benchmark for evaluating VLMs on realistic agentic scenarios across five agent domains: Web Agents, Robotics, Egocentric Videos, Games, and Spatial Planning. We build AgentVQA by manually selecting 1000 challenging, real-world agent examples from 23 source datasets and adapting them for reliable offline evaluation. The resulting benchmark preserves realistic scenarios from interactive environments across diverse domains, and its model rankings track those from corresponding online evaluations. Across the 22 evaluated models, the best achieves only 58.5% accuracy. Our cross-domain analysis shows that errors are driven primarily by failures to ground and maintain accurate representations of the current and evolving visual state, including localizing relevant UI elements, interpreting motion, tracking state changes over time, and inferring 3D spatial relationships, rather than by task misinterpretation or downstream logical reasoning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PaperScorer: How Predictable Is Paper Acceptance?

Automated research is largely evaluated by benchmark performance, but the value of research rarely reduces to a single score. Humans judge a work's holistic contribution through peer review, which is hard to model because it is noisy and depends on many factors. However, what if, given only the paper, we could predict its peer-review decision directly? We introduce PaperScorer, a family of models that predict a paper's accept or reject decision from its extracted text or page screenshots, training only on the decision after removing author identity and formatting shortcuts. Vision models are the most predictive (68% accuracy on ICLR papers and 77% on ML papers from arXiv), beating text-only and frontier reasoning models. Unlike plain text, page images retain figures, layout, and presentation. This signal is robust, surviving smaller models and even compressing the whole paper into a single image. But accurate predictions are not evenly spread. PaperScorer is strongest on the lowest and highest rated papers, while papers rated in the middle stay unpredictable for our models and frontier systems alike. Additionally, its confidence is calibrated, so its most confident predictions are also its most accurate. Overall, PaperScorer shows how much of the decision a paper carries on its own, marking a first step toward AI-driven research evaluation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Iterated Reasoning with Mutual Information in Cooperative and Byzantine Decentralized Teaming

Information sharing is key in building team cognition and enables coordination and cooperation. High-performing human teams also benefit from acting strategically with hierarchical levels of iterated communication and rationalizability, meaning a human agent can reason about the actions of their teammates in their decision-making. Yet, the majority of prior work in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) does not support iterated rationalizability and only encourage inter-agent communication, resulting in a suboptimal equilibrium cooperation strategy. In this work, we show that reformulating an agent's policy to be conditional on the policies of its neighboring teammates inherently maximizes Mutual Information (MI) lower-bound when optimizing under Policy Gradient (PG). Building on the idea of decision-making under bounded rationality and cognitive hierarchy theory, we show that our modified PG approach not only maximizes local agent rewards but also implicitly reasons about MI between agents without the need for any explicit ad-hoc regularization terms. Our approach, InfoPG, outperforms baselines in learning emergent collaborative behaviors and sets the state-of-the-art in decentralized cooperative MARL tasks. Our experiments validate the utility of InfoPG by achieving higher sample efficiency and significantly larger cumulative reward in several complex cooperative multi-agent domains.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2022

Extending One-Stage Detection with Open-World Proposals

In many applications, such as autonomous driving, hand manipulation, or robot navigation, object detection methods must be able to detect objects unseen in the training set. Open World Detection(OWD) seeks to tackle this problem by generalizing detection performance to seen and unseen class categories. Recent works have seen success in the generation of class-agnostic proposals, which we call Open-World Proposals(OWP), but this comes at the cost of a big drop on the classification task when both tasks are considered in the detection model. These works have investigated two-stage Region Proposal Networks (RPN) by taking advantage of objectness scoring cues; however, for its simplicity, run-time, and decoupling of localization and classification, we investigate OWP through the lens of fully convolutional one-stage detection network, such as FCOS. We show that our architectural and sampling optimizations on FCOS can increase OWP performance by as much as 6% in recall on novel classes, marking the first proposal-free one-stage detection network to achieve comparable performance to RPN-based two-stage networks. Furthermore, we show that the inherent, decoupled architecture of FCOS has benefits to retaining classification performance. While two-stage methods worsen by 6% in recall on novel classes, we show that FCOS only drops 2% when jointly optimizing for OWP and classification.

cs.CV↗