Continual learning has largely been model-centric, treating model parameters as the state that changes with sequential experience. Modern agents can also adapt through a harness of prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules. Because these contents jointly shape later execution, a harness update can disrupt previously reliable behavior even when the model is frozen. This raises a new question: how can an agent continually improve its state outside the model while retaining behavior acquired earlier? We formulate Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a new continual learning paradigm in which the harness evolves around a frozen foundation model, and define the resulting loss of earlier behavior as harness-level forgetting. We instantiate HCL with four execution-facing components: the Task Interface, Experience Memory, Capability Map, and Adaptive Router. We further introduce guarded harness evolution to separate update generation from state commitment. A Continual Optimizer proposes candidate harnesses from post-execution feedback, and a Continual Evaluator commits the resulting candidate harness only after checking current improvement, historical retention, and validity. Experiments on textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open-world interaction demonstrate capability accumulation and failure recovery, with relative gains exceeding 10% over corresponding baselines in multiple settings. Component ablations assess the contribution of each harness component, while controlled retention sweeps reveal measurable harness-level forgetting and show that the stability--plasticity trade-off can be explicitly adjusted.
Jin Su, Zhuofeng Zhao, Huanhuan Wang +1cs.CL cs.AI
Legal consultation questions exhibit multi-level complexity. A single retrieval strategy often leads to over-reasoning for simple questions and poor interpretability for complex ones, making it difficult to meet the requirements for both answer quality and efficiency in high-risk scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes CoAL-RAG, a complexity-aware legal retrieval-augmented generation method, which constructs a multi-dimensional evaluation mechanism based on ``question essence'' and ``retrieval consistency'' to enable adaptive routing of retrieval strategies. First, the reasoning demand is quantified according to the logical structure of the question. Then, the discrepancy between semantic retrieval and keyword retrieval is utilized to indirectly reflect problem complexity, thereby selecting the most appropriate retrieval strategy and dynamically filtering contextual information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models not only on Chinese legal benchmarks (SocialLawQA, LawBench) but also demonstrates strong cross-jurisdictional generalization on English datasets (LexGLUE, CaseHold). Specifically, on Chinese datasets, the BLEU score improves by 42.5\% and ROUGE-L reaches 3.6 times that of knowledge graph-based methods. On English benchmarks, CoAL-RAG maintains highly competitive accuracy, achieving an optimal balance between generation quality, deep logical reasoning, and system efficiency across different legal systems.
Multi-agent reasoning (MAR) improves reasoning reliability through iterative solution exchange and refinement. Existing adaptive MAR methods typically learn routing decisions from query-level labels or trajectory-level returns, but such coarse supervision cannot accurately estimate the state-conditioned utility of individual operators in multi-step collaboration. We propose TreeCredit, a shared-prefix credit assignment framework for efficient adaptive MAR. Its core insight is to estimate operator utility through state-matched downstream comparisons, rather than directly attributing trajectory-level outcomes to preceding decisions. TreeCredit constructs shared-prefix collaboration trees by expanding candidate operators from the same intermediate state and assigns each state--operator pair a correctness-prioritized suffix credit based on the terminal correctness and cumulative additional cost of its complete continuation. These structured credits are converted into state-local operator preferences to train a lightweight pairwise state router, which dynamically selects the next admissible operator during inference. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that TreeCredit modestly improves accuracy while substantially reducing inference cost, achieving a better accuracy--cost trade-off than representative MAR methods.
Time series forecasting requires models to capture diverse, often mutually exclusive, temporal dynamics, from smooth trend continuation to nonstationary drift and strict phase-aligned recurrence. While recent deep learning models have improved accuracy, they typically force these diverse patterns through a single computational backbone governed by fixed algorithmic inductive biases (e.g., self-attention or spectral filtering). This single-mechanism approach often struggles with the profound heterogeneity of real-world series, where different variables and forecast horizons necessitate fundamentally different predictive treatments. To address this, we propose GatedLinear: a lightweight framework that frames forecasting as the adaptive routing of complementary linear bases. GatedLinear leverages a pool of three specialized mechanisms: a global trend-seasonal basis for smooth projection, a difference-based incremental basis for nonstationary drift, and a phase-aligned recurrence basis for explicit cyclic reuse. To dynamically orchestrate these distinct behaviors, we introduce a Tri-Factorized Fusion Gate that disentangles routing decisions into channel-specific preferences, horizon-aware offsets, and phase-indexed biases derived from known future time marks. This design allows the model to perform highly granular, point-wise soft routing across different predictive regimes without stacking computationally heavy neural modules. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive accuracy against recent complex foundational models, while offering explicitly interpretable routing patterns and operating with a substantially smaller parameter footprint.
Mohammed Yusuf Mujawar, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarzcs.CV
Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.
Oanh N. Tran, Thanh Quoc Hung Le, Oscar Chew +2cs.CV cs.CL
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle as query-relevant objects become smaller. To address this, recent training-free approaches dynamically retrieve and zoom into local image regions. However, we show that indiscriminately applying retrieval ignores a critical vulnerability: the resolution-context trade-off. Patch-based zooming recovers details for small targets, but can split large objects and destroy global spatial context; attention-based retrieval better preserves large objects, but remains less reliable on tiny details; and global perception is often fastest when retrieval is unnecessary. Motivated by these failure modes, we introduce ViRGo (Visual Retrieval or Global Perception), a lightweight framework that formulates visual retrieval as an adaptive routing problem. ViRGo estimates object scale from the VLM's intrinsic localization heads during the initial forward pass and combines it with semantic token confidence to select between global perception, patch-based retrieval, and attention-based retrieval with minimal additional computation. Experiments across multiple VQA benchmarks and object-size groups show that ViRGo improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off: it matches patch retrieval on small details, leverages attention-based retrieval for larger objects, and reduces inference time by routing to the global baseline when zooming is unnecessary.
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.
Disaggregated inference architectures physically separate prefill and decode phases onto distinct GPU pools, creating competing "agents" that share a fixed hardware budget. We provide, to our knowledge, the first formal game-theoretic analysis of this architecture, using NVIDIA Dynamo as a concrete case study. We model disaggregated serving as three coupled games: a two-player resource game between prefill and decode pools, a selfish caching game over the hierarchical KV cache, and a congestion game with positive externalities for request routing. We empirically validate the latter two; the P/D resource game is treated analytically (Section 9.2). We characterize how GPU saturation induces regime transitions that shift the game's payoff structure: below saturation, selfish behavior has bounded Price of Anarchy (PoA); at saturation, superlinear latency and cache externalities drive our empirical estimator PoA-hat (defined in Section 6.4) upward. Based on this analysis, we design an adaptive controller that detects saturation transitions in real time and adjusts routing parameters accordingly, shifting from cache-affinity exploitation to load-balanced congestion avoidance. We instantiate our framework on a 3-node NVIDIA B200 cluster running Dynamo with two models, Nemotron-4-340B (TP=8, full-node workers with cross-InfiniBand KV transfers) and Llama-3.1-70B (TP=4), and find the same three-regime PoA-hat structure with the same first post-knee grid point (C=128) on both models. Adaptive routing shifts each model to a better operating point. Our strongest result is on the 70B 1P/5D topology, where PoA-hat drops 3.1x (66.4 to 21.5) in the saturated phase at a 13% throughput cost. On the 70B 1P/2D, PoA-hat drops 2.2x and TTFT P99 drops 7.6x (see Section 8.5).
Multi-agent debate (MAD) can improve large language model reasoning, but fixed debate pipelines often waste computation and can amplify correlated errors among similar agents. We propose ARMOR-MAD, a training-free heterogeneous MAD framework that treats debate as conditional computation. ARMOR-MAD combines three components: Pre-debate Agreement Routing (PAR) decides whether independently generated Round-0 answers require debate; Early Agreement Stopping Evaluator (EASE) stops debate after convergence; and Semantic Outlier Detection (SOD) down-weights abnormal final answers during aggregation. Across MATH Level 5, GSM8K, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, ARMOR-MAD consistently improves over fixed-round heterogeneous debate with the same model pool, reaching 65.5\%, 96.5\%, 90.0\%, and 81.5\% accuracy, respectively. The results suggest that genuine model heterogeneity and agreement-based control are both important for making MAD more accurate and efficient.