Autonomous computer-use agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks requiring coordinated application calls, persistent state tracking, and verifier-sensitive writes, yet they remain prone to procedural failures: misreading application state, tool semantics, or task progress. Procedural memory promises more consistent decisions and less redundant exploration, but constructing high-quality memory without model training remains challenging. We introduce CONTRAMEM, a source-flexible, training-free framework for self-evolving procedural memory that treats same-task outcome variation as supervision: differences in correctness, efficiency, recovery, and failure modes expose outcome-relevant procedural distinctions, distilled into a compact bank of app-level Function Cards and task-level Skill Cards that evolves through localized curation rather than append-only accumulation or whole-bank rewriting. On held-out GAIA2/ARE computer-use tasks, CONTRAMEM more than doubles the success rate across the three source-model targets (26.2% to 55.3%), with consistent per-model gains (GPT-5.5: 27.5 to 61.0; Claude Sonnet 4.6: 28.0 to 52.5; DeepSeek V4 Pro: 23.0 to 52.5). The same bank transfers unchanged to the unseen Qwen3.7 Plus (18.5 to 35.5), indicating transferable procedural knowledge rather than model-specific behavior. The same construction carries over unchanged to AppWorld, beating both no memory and its own single-source self-memory variant for all three mid-tier agents on both public test splits. Under a matched trajectory budget, heterogeneous multi-model trajectories yield stronger memory than self- or same-model multi-rollout memory: the margin comes from contrastive behavioral diversity, not stronger source agents or more sampling.
Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to generalize in interactive physical reasoning, particularly under unseen tasks and environments. Two key failure modes are prominent: hallucinated chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that contradicts physical reality, and misalignment between the model's reasoning and actions. We present VAORA (Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment), a novel reward design that directly addresses both issues. VAORA introduces two complementary rewards: Visual Alignment Reward, which anchors VLM reasoning to the visual context independent of the agent action itself, and Visual-Action Alignment Reward, which grounds reasoning in the visual outcome induced by the model's action. Together, these rewards suppress hallucinated CoT and reduce the gap between reasoning and behavior. To improve training stability, we further employ smooth, dense rewards by estimating success probabilities using a pre-trained in-domain expert agent. Experiments on PHYRE and Virtual Tool support our performances across novel-task and unseen-environment settings, confirming that grounded and generalizable physical intelligence can be induced through VAORA.
Despite the intense engagement surrounding low-level vision generalist models, their effectiveness in zero/few-shot scenarios beyond learned tasks remains unverified. The primary challenge of developing an ideal generalist lies in achieving the ability to generalize from new unseen tasks, which also can be assessed by matched quantitative criteria. Existing methods have made some progress in prompt engineering but have not systematically explored this gap across a wide range of low-level visual tasks. Stimulated by the problem, we propose Hidden-Shot, an implicit prompt mechanism aimed at exploring low-level task adaptation in a vision generalist model. Specifically, the method extracts implicit visual task-based information, utilizes a global task-aware textural prompt, and selectively merges implicit information with in-task processing information to enhance one-shot capabilities in new tasks. The overall design performs direct injection in a cost-effective manner, while minimally altering the architecture of the original generalist model. Additionally, we introduce a data-driven evaluation framework termed C/U assessment to cover two basic scenarios, 3C4U (3 conventional and 4 unconventional tasks) for retraining existing models and 3C7U (3 conventional and 7 unconventional tasks) for training from scratch, as a comprehensive assessment to systematically test the generalization ability of low-level generalist models. Experiments on seven and ten datasets outperform the state-of-the-art vision generalist model, respectively verified by 3C4U and 3C7U framework. Our presented Hidden-Shot approach demonstrates superior performance on one-shot new tasks while maintaining consistent performance on existing tasks.