Daily Paper Cast

Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com

Creator:
Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/
Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com

Listen on:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236

Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art

Play

Open in

232 episodes
Avg 21 min
English

Episodes 232

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

#2393
Yesterday · 23 min
Any Time, Any Space: A World-State-Centric Framework for Agentic Video Generation
🤗 Upvotes: 166 | cs.CV Authors: Weijie Wang, Haomin Zhang, Ye Li, Akide Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Haoyu Zhao, Yefei He, Donny Y. Chen, Feng Chen, Bohan Zhuang Title: Any Time, Any Space: A World-State-Centric Framework for Agentic Video Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20571v1 Abstract: Long-form agentic video generation must turn a screenplay into shots that remain spatially and temporally consistent across nonconsecutive requests. Passing prompts or recent frames between shots does not provide a shared spatial frame for revisiting a scene or a time-indexed record for replaying an earlier event. We present Any Time, Any Space (ATAS), which compiles a screenplay into shot requests with explicit location, camera, and event-time references. Before generation, it retrieves relevant evidence from a scene memory of registered static geometry and an event memory of dynamic observations indexed by scene, event, and time. After generation, ATAS reconstructs and registers the clip. It updates memory only when review and state checks accept the observation, while film delivery remains independent of memory admission. Across four video generators, ATAS improves all reported cross-shot consistency measures and achieves the highest aggregate benchmark score for each backbone. It also outperforms the compared agents and 3D-guided methods on target-image spatial revisit, leads three event-recapture criteria, and receives the highest human ratings on all six criteria. The video results and code are available on our project page: https://lhmd.top/atas/.
- Transcript
#2392
Yesterday · 23 min
Player-1: Learning to Play from Synthetic Experience
🤗 Upvotes: 117 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.HC Authors: Mingyu Ouyang, Yiran Wang, Siyuan Hu, Xingyilang Yin, Huiqiang Sun, Guangzhi Wang, Junfu Pu, Cheng Cheng, Honghao Chen, Ying Shan, Mike Zheng Shou, Hwee Tou Ng Title: Player-1: Learning to Play from Synthetic Experience Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20584v1 Abstract: Computer-use agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting screens and executing keyboard and mouse actions. However, games, with their visually rich worlds and diverse mechanics, remain challenging and offer a demanding next step toward general digital control. Current game-agent learning pipelines often rely on large-scale demonstrations with limited coverage of dynamic game states, while scalable environments for interactive training remain difficult to obtain. We introduce Player-1, a post-training framework for learning game control beyond demonstrations through synthetic experience. We extend the computer-use action space with relative pointer motion, sustained inputs, and composite actions. For supervised initialization, we fine-tune computer-use models on 6,044 curated gameplay trajectories that pair recorded actions with task instructions and visual reasoning. We construct Player-1-Gym, sixteen synthetic 2D and 3D environments designed around control demands shared across games. Programmatically verifiable rewards and randomized observations and control dynamics support multi-environment reinforcement learning with PPO. The resulting Player-1-9B and Player-1-35B-A3B improve MineDojo-300 success over their SFT policies by 27.8 and 17.7 percentage points, respectively. Player-1-9B reaches 38.33% success compared with 12.63% for the strongest evaluated baseline, with further gains over SFT on ViZDoom-10 and GameWorld. Further analyses show that broader synthetic environment coverage improves transfer, while the use of composite actions that combine multiple keyboard and mouse inputs increases during RL. We demonstrate that learning from synthetic experience substantially improves game control beyond supervised initialization, with gains that generalize beyond the RL training suite.
- Transcript
#2391
Yesterday · 21 min
LatentLoop: Scaling Looped MoE Models with Asymmetric Compute Allocation
🤗 Upvotes: 50 | cs.LG Authors: Zefeng He, Yunkai Chai, Xiaoyang Chen, Tong Zhu, Zongliang Wu, Yun Luo, Yafu Li, Yu Cheng Title: LatentLoop: Scaling Looped MoE Models with Asymmetric Compute Allocation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19975v1 Abstract: Looped Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models combine parameter reuse with sparse computation to improve performance under matched budgets. Prior work demonstrates that different loop visits can play different roles even when they share parameters. To probe the contributions of different loop visits, we learn separate residual coefficients in a model that applies a shared block twice, observing a smaller scale in the first visit. Fixed coefficient experiments show that reducing the first visit's scale preserves or improves performance, whereas the same reductions to the second hurt it. This asymmetry motivates us to explore asymmetric compute allocation. We propose \textbf{LatentLoop}, which compresses the first visit's sequence, retains full resolution in the second, and reallocates saved computation to increase the hidden size. We further learn how strongly the first visit updates the full sequence, and share MoE weights across visits while using separate attention parameters to accommodate their different sequence resolutions. Across 15 configurations spanning 1.3B--7B parameters, with the largest budget exceeding $10^{21}$ FLOPs, LatentLoop consistently lowers validation NLL. At a fitted NLL of 1.988, predicted compute savings are 19.0\% and 7.9\% relative to vanilla MoE and the looped baseline. It also improves average scores on nine benchmarks at all sizes in 0-shot and 5-shot settings. These results suggest asymmetric compute allocation is a promising direction for looped MoE models.
- Transcript
#2390
Yesterday · 20 min
Recovering Reliable Supervision via Critique-Guided On-Policy Distillation
🤗 Upvotes: 47 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Kaixiang Zhao, Tianrun Yu, Shangzhe Li, Yuxiao Yang, Amanda Hughes, Weitong Zhang, Taylor W. Killian Title: Recovering Reliable Supervision via Critique-Guided On-Policy Distillation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20572v1 Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts with token-level supervision from a teacher, assuming that the teacher can reach a correct answer from any prefix the student writes. We call this property the recoverability of the teacher and show it fails on incorrect rollouts: the teacher follows student errors, although it recognizes them. We propose CriticOPD, using error recognition to restore recoverability. The teacher critiques an incorrect rollout, allowing the student to rewrite its solution following the error. The resulting output, including the critique as privileged information, is scored by the teacher while the student uses the revision without the critique for training. On two Qwen3 students and six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, CriticOPD improves OPD, with the largest gains on competition problems.
- Transcript
#2389
Yesterday · 22 min
Cortex: Consolidating Context into Parametric Memory
🤗 Upvotes: 47 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MA Authors: Jintian Zhang, Feng He, Xinnian Liang, Ziwen Xu, Haoming Xu, Haojing Huang, Shuangzhi Wu, Ningyu Zhang Title: Cortex: Consolidating Context into Parametric Memory Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20399v1 Abstract: Context can improve large language model performance, but these gains may be lost after context removal. Inspired by biological systems consolidation, we formulate Memory Consolidation (MC) as internalizing these gains while preserving non-target capabilities, connecting context-specified editing, skill learning, and behavioral steering under a common objective. We introduce a five-task-family testbed measuring consolidation and retention under single, batch, and sequential updates. We propose Cortex, which generates prospective queries to anticipate uses of context and distills context-conditioned outputs into mergeable low-rank or structural feed-forward network updates. Across 4B--120B dense and mixture-of-experts backbones, including both text-only and multimodal models, Cortex lies on the empirical consolidation--retention Pareto frontier in most evaluated settings. After 50 sequential factual edits on a 14B model, Cortex-Structural recovers 88.9% of the context-induced gain while retaining 99.8% of original non-target performance.
- Transcript
#2388
Yesterday · 21 min
ActionOPD: Distilling Decisions, Not Tokens
🤗 Upvotes: 44 | cs.AI Authors: Huining Yuan, Xiangmin Yi, Zelai Xu, Zixu Wang, Xinlei Chen, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yu Wang, Chao Yu Title: ActionOPD: Distilling Decisions, Not Tokens Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19820v1 Abstract: Distilling capable language-model agents into smaller models requires aligning the student's behavior with the teacher's. This raises a fundamental question: at which states and at what granularity should this alignment be performed? Offline imitation provides dense but token-specific supervision and can suffer from state-distribution mismatch. Token-level on-policy distillation (OPD) addresses this mismatch but typically requires teacher token probabilities and compatible tokenization. We argue that semantic actions provide a natural unit of supervision for agent distillation. We introduce ActionOPD, an action-level on-policy distillation method motivated by maximizing expected teacher-action likelihood at student-encountered states. At each such state, ActionOPD samples actions from both the student and a black-box teacher, rewarding student actions according to their semantic agreement with the sampled teacher actions. Through policy optimization, ActionOPD aligns the student's action-level behavior with the teacher's decisions without requiring reproduction of teacher-written reasoning or access to teacher token probabilities. Training Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B with two teachers on diverse, curated tool-use tasks yields average gains of 3.3-6.9 percentage points across four out-of-distribution benchmarks. ActionOPD scales favorably with student size and teacher capability, without requiring the teacher and student to share a model family or tokenizer. On $\tau^2$-bench, ActionOPD achieves competitive performance against offline distillation and token-level OPD. We further explore Self-ActionOPD with a same-model teacher and privileged context. These results establish ActionOPD as a promising approach to agent distillation.
- Transcript
#2387
Yesterday · 19 min
Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding Agents
🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.SE, cs.AI Authors: Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Peizhong Gao, Chendi Ge, Chenxu Liu, Yiwei Wang, Lingrui Mei, Baolong Bi, Jiayu Yao, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng Title: Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20344v1 Abstract: Agents driven by large language models are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks, where they use tools and modify real workspaces. How well they perform depends as much on the harness around the model as on the model itself. Existing benchmarks measure downstream task success under a fixed harness, leaving harness engineering itself unexplored. We propose Doc2Harness, a two-stage benchmark that evaluates long-horizon harness engineering directly. In Stage 1, a build model operating inside a fixed builder harness receives an interface-only contract skeleton and a development document that consolidates behavior across twelve frontier harnesses, and then constructs a complete candidate harness in an isolated container. In Stage 2, the frozen candidate harness runs in containers separate from the construction environment, one per test case, and is driven end to end by a scripted mock model. We score each test case using four observable channels, namely the requests sent to the model, the files on disk, the process exit code, and the command output; positive controls rule out vacuous passes. Across nineteen frontier models, each evaluated with three independent builds on 328 test cases, GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest pass rate at 53.05%, while the weakest model reaches 27.44%, a gap of roughly twenty-six percentage points. Even the strongest model fails nearly half of the test cases, and failures cluster around how cross-cutting functionality is split across modules. To our knowledge, Doc2Harness provides the first deterministic benchmark for measuring long-horizon harness engineering.
- Transcript
#2386
Yesterday · 19 min
Seeing, Maintaining, and Learning: The Evolution of Multimodal Agent Memory
🤗 Upvotes: 31 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.RO Authors: Minghao Guo, Qingyue Jiao, Xiujin Liu, Jianhong Pang, Ruimeng Yang, Naihao Xu, Liwei Che, Haochen Xue, Ziqi Wang, Xinying Cai, Jiaxuan Luo, Jiaxin Deng, Xuesong Ye, Jintao Qu, Wenyao Gao, Jingwen Gu, Chenyang Zhao, Shichun Liu, Guibin Zhang, Zefang Liu, Siyin Wang, Wujiang Xu, Danrui Li, Zeru Shi, Woongyeong Yeo, Shuang Liu, Wei-Chieh Huang, Weizhi Zhang, Tianyu Yang, Kangsan Kim, Yebowen Hu, Bowen Wen, Bowen Jiang, Haohao Su, Ming Yin, Sheldon Yu, Mian Zhang, Yuyan Chen, Hanrong Zhang, Kai Mei, Zihao Zhang, Mingyu Jin, Xi Zhu, Hengyi Wang, Tianxin Wei, Linyong Nan, Zhenwen Liang, Zhendong Chu, Ziqi Huang, Yongye Su, Sixun Dong, Shujian Liu, Kaiqu Liang, Jiaojiao Han, Zhaoye Fei, Kun Wang, Shihan Dou, Zhichun Guo, Xingjian Diao, Zeqi Gu, Heng Wang, Tao Feng, Cheng Qian, Hamid Palangi, Silei Xu, Xi Yun, Yi Zhu, Shilong Liu, Qingsong Wen, Sung Ju Hwang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yiyu Shi, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Jiaxuan You, Julian McAuley, Mengdi Wang, Jiawei Han, Philip S. Yu, Ziyi Ye Title: Seeing, Maintaining, and Learning: The Evolution of Multimodal Agent Memory Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19366v1 Abstract: Multimodal models and agents have emerged to enable AI systems to learn from and interact with the real world more like humans by integrating information across multiple modalities. However, enabling multimodal agents to continually acquire useful information from complex, heterogeneous multimodal data remains a significant challenge as they move toward long-horizon tasks and lifelong settings. Addressing this challenge requires effective memory mechanisms that can maintain continuity across sessions, adapt to changing users and environments, and refine memory-management policies through accumulated experience. We introduce a two-axis analytical framework for multimodal agent memory structured around two key questions: how multimodal information is formed and represented (Axis I, Formation and Representation), and how its management adapts with accumulated experience (Axis II, Memory Management). Axis I, Formation and Representation, characterizes what information is retained and how it is encoded (e.g., modality-specific embeddings, textual and structured records, latent and parametric representations) to support subsequent reasoning and action. Axis II, Memory Management, distinguishes three tiers: T1 Static Memory reuses fixed memory; T2 Dynamic Memory updates memory through a stable policy; and T3 Self-Evolving Memory updates memory through an evolving policy. Based on this framework, we synthesize recurring design patterns and derive principles for balancing source fidelity with abstraction, maintaining temporal validity and provenance, grounding memory use in recoverable evidence, and evolving memory policies over time. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and potential future directions for the memory mechanism of multimodal agents.
- Transcript
#2385
Yesterday · 22 min
LensErase: A Foundation Model for Erase Anything
🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV Authors: Yunuo Chen, Xiuyu Wu, Qinhong Yang, Jinjing Zhao, Yanchen Dong, Sirui Zhang, Dong Chen, Fangyun Wei, Lei Shi, Ji Li, Dongdong Chen, Guo Lu, Yan Lu, Baining Guo Title: LensErase: A Foundation Model for Erase Anything Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18072v1 Abstract: We introduce LensErase, a general-purpose mask-based Erase Anything foundation model designed to cover a broad spectrum of real-world erase scenarios. LensErase supports diverse objects, visual text, watermarks, associated visual effects, multiple-object removal, and a wide range of object scales, aspect ratios, and image resolutions. First, to enable such broad coverage, we construct LensErase-100M, a large-scale dataset containing 101.07 million paired source-mask-target examples spanning diverse erase scenarios. Second, we pretrain LensErase from the text-to-image model Lens, adapting its strong generative prior to mask-based erasing. To efficiently incorporate the source image and erase mask, we propose Mask-Aware RoPE, a 3D rotary positional encoding that directly injects mask information into the source-image tokens without introducing a separate mask token sequence. Finally, we refine the model through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with contract-guided, region-aware rewards, and apply TraceFusion at inference to preserve high-fidelity content outside the effective edit region. Across six public benchmarks and the proposed LensErase-Bench, LensErase achieves substantial improvements under both reference-based objective metrics and reference-free VLM evaluation. We hope LensErase can serve as a foundational model for erase-related applications and systems.
- Transcript
#2384
Yesterday · 25 min
KV4-RL: Unlocking Faster Asynchronous Rollouts for RLVR with INT4 KV Cache Quantization
🤗 Upvotes: 25 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Sihwan Park, Sung-Yub Kim, Doohyuk Jang, Eunho Yang Title: KV4-RL: Unlocking Faster Asynchronous Rollouts for RLVR with INT4 KV Cache Quantization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14448v1 Abstract: Asynchronous rollout improves the efficiency of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by reducing under-utilization during long-tail generation. Sustained concurrency also concentrates context processing into fewer decode steps, increasing the KV workload per step. We characterize this \emph{KV concentration} and find that KV cache quantization delivers substantially greater acceleration than weight-only and weight-activation quantization in our matched-workload comparisons. However, INT4 KV rollout can degrade learning even with token-level truncated importance sampling (TIS). We propose \emph{KV4-RL}, which combines calibration-free INT4 KV quantization with selective INT8 protection of attention sinks and recent context. Protecting a bounded number of positions reduces sampler mismatch while retaining most of the speedup from INT4. Across 400 iterations of Qwen3-8B-Base GRPO training, KV4-RL achieves $1.80\times$ cumulative rollout speedup and $1.27\times$ cumulative full-iteration speedup over BF16 rollout, reaching $1.97\times$ rollout speedup over the final 50 iterations. Under a common BF16 evaluator, its final six-benchmark mean accuracy is within 0.5 percentage points of BF16-rollout training for both Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-8B-Base.
- Transcript
#2383
Wednesday · 22 min
Urbex: Agentic Spatial Grounding for City-Scale 3D Scenes
🤗 Upvotes: 58 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Yu Wang, Rui Dai, Wei Chen, Yi Wang, Bo Dang, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu, Yansheng Li Title: Urbex: Agentic Spatial Grounding for City-Scale 3D Scenes Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18356v1 Abstract: City-scale 3D grounding is commonly formulated as candidate ranking, which requires precomputed instance proposals and becomes inefficient in large outdoor scenes. We propose Urbex, an agentic vision-language framework that instead casts grounding as active spatial search. Urbex represents a city-scale 3D scene as an interactive multi-view environment, allowing a VLM agent to query landmarks, zoom into local regions, render oblique views, and commit a grounded bounding box. We optimize this tool-use policy with reinforcement learning on CityRefer, using smooth localization rewards and lightweight shaping rewards for efficient exploration. Experiments show that Urbex achieves the best Hit@1 and IoU on CityRefer, supports candidate-free grounding without ground-truth boxes, and is substantially faster than the strongest city-scale ranking baseline. Zero-shot results on STPLS3D-Refer further indicate improved cross-scene robustness.
- Transcript
#2382
Wednesday · 23 min
Vela: User Behavior as Supervision Sparks LLM Intelligence
🤗 Upvotes: 55 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Yang Xiao, Yusong Sun, Haoyi Wu, Wenyang Hui, Weiqiang Hang, Luqing Wang, Zejian Wang, Zirui Tu, Jingsheng Mao, Shaobo Hu, Yang Luo, Jiale Guo, Jin Zhang, Yudan Liu, Zhaokai Luo, Ren Huan, Yao Hu, Chengyue Jiang, Wenjie Li, Chuan Mu Title: Vela: User Behavior as Supervision Sparks LLM Intelligence Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14709v1 Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in applications that act on users' long-term behavior histories, from personal assistants to recommendation and advertising systems. These applications demand the user dimension of LLM intelligence: inferring a person's preferences, intent, and likely future actions from weeks to years of behavior data. Yet current models are trained on static text or synthetic data, neither of which captures how user behavior evolves over time. Real-world behavior records, already available at scale on content platforms and in personal-assistant agents, offer a natural supervisory signal. We propose user behavior as supervision and introduce Vela, a framework that converts real user behavior data into trainable tasks and trajectories. From the anonymized behavior records of 100,000 users, Vela generates 100,000 tasks across 91 real-world task templates; difficulty-based filtering and trajectory acceptance criteria retain approximately 75,000 tasks with selected training trajectories. Fine-tuning Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on these trajectories improves performance over the base model by up to 11.5 points on user-related tasks and by an average of 4 points on general benchmarks. Training on more user behavior data further improves user-related performance, and reinforcement learning after fine-tuning outperforms reinforcement learning from the base model by up to 7.7 points. These gains suggest that real-world user behavior is a scalable source of supervision for both user-centered capabilities and the broader intelligence of LLMs.
- Transcript
#2381
Wednesday · 21 min
DoSA: Dots Sparse Attention
🤗 Upvotes: 54 | cs.LG Authors: Fanxu Meng, Taosong Fang Title: DoSA: Dots Sparse Attention Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13990v1 Abstract: Sparse attention visits few keys, yet finding them can still require scoring every key with every indexer head. We introduce DoSA (Dots Sparse Attention), a lossless method for making this computation conditional while preserving exact token selection. Its central observation is that Top-K selection requires sufficient evidence to reject a candidate, not necessarily its full score. A seed set supplies a lower bound on the winning threshold. Nonnegative head projections and joint residual bounds upper-bound positive contributions, while activation-informed aggregation bounds the magnitude subtracted by negative heads. The certificate directs full scoring toward candidates that remain eligible; exact-score filtering further reduces writeback and selection work. We establish the certificate and its exact-selection conditions, and analyze how geometry and selection margins govern its effectiveness. Our GPU implementation accelerates the complete Indexer by up to 2.74 times over SGLang and 1.69 times over LiteTopK across English, Chinese, and code workloads. End-to-end evaluation on GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2 achieves up to 1.94 times and 1.50 times time-to-first-token speedups over the two baselines, respectively.
- Transcript
#2380
Wednesday · 21 min
LeWAM: End-to-End World and Action Modeling with JEPAs
🤗 Upvotes: 48 | cs.RO, cs.AI Authors: Minghao Fu, Tavis Siebert, Eryk Halicki, Randall Balestriero Title: LeWAM: End-to-End World and Action Modeling with JEPAs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12818v1 Abstract: Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn compact latent world models without pixel reconstruction. Existing JEPA pipelines typically train visual representations and action-conditioned dynamics before adding a control policy or solver. We introduce LeWAM, an end-to-end JEPA for control with: (1) a joint training objective over next latent state prediction and action flow matching, and (2) an isotropic Gaussian constraint on the latent state, enabling a single model to support direct policy execution and efficient planning by evaluating sampled actions with its learned latent dynamics. Compared with prior JEPAs in visual planning, LeWAM improves success rate from 28.6% to 89.7% on contact-rich tasks and from 10.9% to 46.2% on long-horizon tasks, and plans 32.3 times faster. On behavior cloning tasks in simulation and physical robots, LeWAM is also competitive with established methods. Interpretability analyses show that LeWAM learns control-relevant representations and action distributions effectively guiding test-time planning and control.
- Transcript
#2379
Wednesday · 22 min
Jeva: System One Models from First Principles
🤗 Upvotes: 40 | cs.AI Authors: Qi Li, Xinchao Wang Title: Jeva: System One Models from First Principles Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18773v1 Abstract: System one models enable direct, low-latency decision-making. Yet recent practice of predicting an answer from serialized text does not, by itself, respect the structure of a decision problem. We argue that current designs underemphasize four important structural requirements. (i) null-aware: Models should distinguish answer absence from uncertainty among candidates; (ii) permutation-invariant: Reordering alternatives should not change the decision; (iii) option-scalable: Growing candidate sets should not require redefining the output space; (iv) cacheable: Request-independent computation over recurring alternatives should be reusable across requests. We introduce Jeva, a decision-native architecture that addresses these requirements jointly. A shared encoder independently represents the request and each option, while a compact decision stack refines only the request state against immutable option memory. Symmetric aggregation yields permutation-equivariant probabilities; shared scoring accommodates variable-size candidate sets. A separate coverage estimate distinguishes answer absence from candidate competition, enabling explicit null outcomes. Request-independent option representations and layer projections support reuse across newly assembled sets. These mechanisms unify Choice, Noul, and Score outputs. Across evaluations, Jeva combines strong typed-decision performance with near-perfect null detection and no decision flips under any tested permutations. It scales to thousands of candidates and substantially reduces latency through cross-request reuse without changing decisions.
- Transcript
#2378
Wednesday · 21 min
TPPO: Tracking-Value PPO For Language Model Reasoning
🤗 Upvotes: 36 | cs.LG, cs.CL Authors: Futing Wang, Chenxi Li, Jianhao Yan, Yun Luo, Zhi Wang, Yizhuo Li, Runzhe Zhan, Yu Cheng, Tao Lin Title: TPPO: Tracking-Value PPO For Language Model Reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16794v1 Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for language-model reasoning. While \emph{value evolution along trajectory} characterizes relative token-level credit, yet standard critics often fail to track it under sparse terminal rewards. To model this evolution, we analyze the relation between successive prefix values and show that they admit a Bayesian decomposition with additive updates in log-odds space. We use this additive structure to construct Tracking-Value PPO (\method), a cumulative value parameterization that sums position-wise scalar outputs into value logits. These outputs are learned through terminal-outcome supervision on the reconstructed values. \method improves aggregate mathematical reasoning scores over PPO by 7.0 and 8.4 points on Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-8B-Base, respectively, while improving out-of-distribution generalization. Gains extend to Qwen3-4B, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, Qwen3.5-9B and to countdown, and scientific coding tasks. Further analysis shows more accurate tracking of value evolution and more reliable advantage estimates. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/LINs-lab/TPPO.
- Transcript
#2377
Wednesday · 24 min
VideoJev: System One Model for Video Understanding and Interaction
🤗 Upvotes: 35 | cs.CV Authors: Yuhan Zhu, Xiangyu Zeng, Qingyi Si, Chenxu Yang, Yifei Li, Luozheng Qin, Junhao Zhou, Dingyu Yao, Jun Zhang, Chuanyu Qin, Zhiqiu Zhang, Yuandong Yang, Yuqi Xu, Tianyu Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan, Limin Wang Title: VideoJev: System One Model for Video Understanding and Interaction Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18615v1 Abstract: Visual agents must turn video observations into timely decisions to track progress and choose what to do next. Building on the emerging System One paradigm, we introduce VideoJev, a family of models that cast video understanding and interaction as structured decision tasks. We adapt pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by replacing autoregressive answer decoding with a shared head that scores temporal intervals and textual options against video evidence. These scores yield event spans or answer choices, unifying temporal grounding and multiple-choice video question answering. This combines the semantic flexibility of MLLMs with efficient decisions that agents can use directly. As an interaction unfolds, new goals and intermediate results prompt further queries about the same visual history. VideoJev therefore reuses visual computation through Cached inference for queries as they arrive and Joint inference for multiple queries in a single forward pass. Across three temporal grounding benchmarks, VideoJev-4B and VideoJev-35B-A3B improve mean mIoU over their backbones by 6.7 and 10.8 points, respectively, with measured inference speedups of $2.8$-$3.1\times$. On four video QA benchmarks, both achieve performance comparable to their backbones in Thinking mode, with measured inference speedups exceeding $100\times$. These results offer a unified, reusable decision interface for composing structured visual judgments into complex, open-ended workflows.
- Transcript
#2376
Wednesday · 22 min
Harness^2: Recursive Agent Harnessing for an Open World
🤗 Upvotes: 34 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Ruiyao Xu, Yanfei Chen, Zhongying CuiZhu, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Yifei Ming, Han Yu, Rujun Han, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister Title: Harness^2: Recursive Agent Harnessing for an Open World Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14224v1 Abstract: LLM agents' capabilities depend not only on their underlying models but also on their execution harnesses. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a promising approach to automatically evolve these harnesses. However, deploying RSI in open-world settings still faces two critical challenges. First, open-world tasks are typically unseen during the harness design phase and novel at test time, leaving no ground-truth verifiers to reliably guide online harness edits. Second, the RSI process remains highly task-specific and fails to generalize to novel scenarios. We introduce Harness^2, a plug-and-play, recursive agent harnessing framework that addresses these challenges through two connected levels of recursion. Task-level recursion refines the current task's harness using a contrastive Propose-Probe-Compose step that reliably guides edits without ground-truth verifiers, and can be scaled further via parallel or sequential recursion. Harnessing-level recursion then extracts experience from these edits to update a continual improvement harness, enabling the agent to better adapt to future tasks. Across three professional benchmarks and four model-harness configurations, a single step consistently improves GLM-5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash over their base harnesses, yielding gains of up to 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench, 4.5 points on JobBench, and 11.8 percentage points on LAB, with further gains as the task-level recursion budget increases.
- Transcript
#2375
Wednesday · 21 min
UltraBERT: Beyond the Limit of BERT Pre-Training
🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Jungwoo Park, Taewhoo Lee, Jaewoo Kang Title: UltraBERT: Beyond the Limit of BERT Pre-Training Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15028v1 Abstract: Recent bidirectional encoders have been modernized with innovations from causal large language models (LLMs). However, the pretraining recipe itself remains inherited from small-scale conventions, leaving encoders underoptimized, with no single model performing competitively across both classification and retrieval tasks. In this work, we investigate how far encoder performance can be pushed by revisiting core design choices in training, revealing three key findings: (1) Encoders saturate on downstream tasks beyond a few trillion tokens, indicating that additional compute past this point does not help. (2) Across model sizes, lower masking ratios benefit classification while higher ones benefit retrieval, contradicting prior work suggesting larger ratios for larger models. (3) Distillation with pruning improves classification at low masking ratios but degrades retrieval at high ones. Guided by these findings, we present UltraBERT, a single encoder that assigns separate LM heads to low and high masking ratios within a batch and restricts the distillation objective to the low ratio. To our knowledge, UltraBERT is the first encoder to achieve state of the art on both classification and retrieval tasks, reaching 91.0 on GLUE and 47.7 on BEIR. Together, these results show how far encoder performance can be pushed and provide a principled basis for compute allocation, masking ratio design, and knowledge transfer in bidirectional models.
- Transcript
#2374
Wednesday · 21 min
Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubrics
🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Maoqi Liu, Junwei He, Bowen Zhang, Feiran Li, Wentao Ma, Rongyi Lin, Shuhan Zhong, Quan Fang Title: Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubrics Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38847v1 Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning (Rubric-RL) trains language models where no verifier exists. A judge checks each criterion of a rubric, and the verdicts are aggregated into a reward, most often by a weighted sum. We show that this additive aggregation is the weak point. Under a sum, criteria compensate for one another: a policy that misses the one decision that matters can buy the points back with advice nobody asked for. On clinical consultation, such a policy scores higher and answers worse. Rubric coverage rises while appropriateness on held-out physician criteria falls below the untrained model. The medical criteria are not to blame. Grouped so that they must hold together, the same criteria, unchanged to the word, recover a third of the loss; shorter answers recover almost none. We therefore propose Protocol-level Rubrics (ProRubric), which keeps what the criteria ask for and changes how they are aggregated. It groups a checklist into a few protocol-level dimensions. A dimension counts only when all of its criteria hold and its failure clause does not fire. The grouping is done once, offline, and leaves the optimizer unchanged. ProRubric raises appropriateness by 10.8 points without losing coverage and has the best seven-benchmark average at both scales. Reward validity is set not only by what a rubric verifies, but by how it aggregates. Code is available at https://github.com/Estrellajer/ProRubric
- Transcript

Showing 1–20 of 232 episodes