Research in computer science, including AI, systems, theory, and applications.
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The performance of large language model (LLM) systems depends not only on model weights, but also on their harness: the code that determines what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. Yet harnesses are still designed largely by hand, and existing text optimizers are poorly matched to this setting because they compress feedback too aggressively. We introduce Meta-Harness, an outer-loop system that searches over harness code for LLM applications. It uses an agentic proposer that accesses the source code, scores, and execution traces of all prior candidates through a filesystem. On online text classification, Meta-Harness improves over a state-of-the-art context management system by 7.7 points while using 4x fewer context tokens. On retrieval-augmented math reasoning, a single discovered harness improves accuracy on 200 IMO-level problems by 4.7 points on average across five held-out models. On agentic coding, discovered harnesses surpass the best hand-engineered baselines on TerminalBench-2. Together, these results show that richer access to prior experience can enable automated harness engineering.
AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.
Scaling laws for large language models depend critically on the optimizer and parameterization. Existing hyperparameter transfer laws are mainly developed for first-order optimizers, and they do not structurally prevent training instability at scale. Recent hypersphere optimization methods constrain weight matrices to a fixed-norm hypersphere, offering a promising alternative for more stable scaling. We introduce HyperP (Hypersphere Parameterization), the first framework for transferring optimal learning rates across model width, depth, training tokens, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) granularity under the Frobenius-sphere constraint with the Muon optimizer. We prove that weight decay is a first-order no-op on the Frobenius sphere, show that Depth-$μ$P remains necessary, and find that the optimal learning rate follows the same data-scaling power law with the "magic exponent" 0.32 previously observed for AdamW. A single base learning rate tuned at the smallest scale transfers across all compute budgets under HyperP, yielding $1.58\times$ compute efficiency over a strong Muon baseline at $6\times10^{21}$ FLOPs. Moreover, HyperP delivers transferable stability: all monitored instability indicators, including $Z$-values, output RMS, and activation outliers, remain bounded and non-increasing under training FLOPs scaling. We also propose SqrtGate, an MoE gating mechanism derived from the hypersphere constraint that preserves output RMS across MoE granularities for improved granularity scaling, and show that hypersphere optimization enables substantially larger auxiliary load-balancing weights, yielding both strong performance and good expert balance. We release our training codebase at https://github.com/microsoft/ArchScale.
Autonomous systems that generate scientific hypotheses, conduct experiments, and draft manuscripts have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerating discovery. However, existing AI Scientists remain largely domain-agnostic, limiting their applicability to clinical medicine, where research is required to be grounded in medical evidence with specialized data modalities. In this work, we introduce Medical AI Scientist, the first autonomous research framework tailored to clinical autonomous research. It enables clinically grounded ideation by transforming extensively surveyed literature into actionable evidence through clinician-engineer co-reasoning mechanism, which improves the traceability of generated research ideas. It further facilitates evidence-grounded manuscript drafting guided by structured medical compositional conventions and ethical policies. The framework operates under 3 research modes, namely paper-based reproduction, literature-inspired innovation, and task-driven exploration, each corresponding to a distinct level of automated scientific inquiry with progressively increasing autonomy. Comprehensive evaluations by both large language models and human experts demonstrate that the ideas generated by the Medical AI Scientist are of substantially higher quality than those produced by commercial LLMs across 171 cases, 19 clinical tasks, and 6 data modalities. Meanwhile, our system achieves strong alignment between the proposed method and its implementation, while also demonstrating significantly higher success rates in executable experiments. Double-blind evaluations by human experts and the Stanford Agentic Reviewer suggest that the generated manuscripts approach MICCAI-level quality, while consistently surpassing those from ISBI and BIBM. The proposed Medical AI Scientist highlights the potential of leveraging AI for autonomous scientific discovery in healthcare.
Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.
Achieving general-purpose humanoid control requires a delicate balance between the precise execution of commanded motions and the flexible, anthropomorphic adaptability needed to recover from unpredictable environmental perturbations. Current general controllers predominantly formulate motion control as a rigid reference-tracking problem. While effective in nominal conditions, these trackers often exhibit brittle, non-anthropomorphic failure modes under severe disturbances, lacking the generative adaptability inherent to human motor control. To overcome this limitation, we propose Heracles, a novel state-conditioned diffusion middleware that bridges precise motion tracking and generative synthesis. Rather than relying on rigid tracking paradigms or complex explicit mode-switching, Heracles operates as an intermediary layer between high-level reference motions and low-level physics trackers. By conditioning on the robot's real-time state, the diffusion model implicitly adapts its behavior: it approximates an identity map when the state closely aligns with the reference, preserving zero-shot tracking fidelity. Conversely, when encountering significant state deviations, it seamlessly transitions into a generative synthesizer to produce natural, anthropomorphic recovery trajectories. Our framework demonstrates that integrating generative priors into the control loop not only significantly enhances robustness against extreme perturbations but also elevates humanoid control from a rigid tracking paradigm to an open-ended, generative general-purpose architecture.
Deep research agents autonomously conduct open-ended investigations, integrating complex information retrieval with multi-step reasoning across diverse sources to solve real-world problems. To sustain this capability on long-horizon tasks, reliable verification is critical during both training and inference. A major bottleneck in existing paradigms stems from the lack of explicit verification mechanisms in QA data synthesis, trajectory construction, and test-time scaling. Errors introduced at each stage propagate downstream and degrade the overall agent performance. To address this, we present Marco DeepResearch, a deep research agent optimized with a verification-centric framework design at three levels: \textbf{(1)~QA Data Synthesis:} We introduce verification mechanisms to graph-based and agent-based QA synthesis to control question difficulty while ensuring answers are unique and correct; \textbf{(2)~Trajectory Construction:} We design a verification-driven trajectory synthesis method that injects explicit verification patterns into training trajectories; and \textbf{(3)~Test-time scaling:} We use Marco DeepResearch itself as a verifier at inference time and effectively improve performance on challenging questions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Marco DeepResearch agent significantly outperforms 8B-scale deep research agents on most challenging benchmarks, such as BrowseComp and BrowseComp-ZH. Crucially, under a maximum budget of 600 tool calls, Marco DeepResearch even surpasses or approaches several 30B-scale agents, like Tongyi DeepResearch-30B.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing RLVR approaches typically rely on outcome-driven optimization that updates both perception and reasoning using a shared reward based solely on the final answer. This shared reward blurs credit assignment, frequently improving reasoning patterns while failing to reliably enhance the accuracy of upstream visual evidence extraction. To address this perception bottleneck, we introduce PRCO (Perception-Reasoning Coevolution), a dual-role RLVR framework with a shared policy. PRCO consists of two cooperative roles: an Observer that generates an evidence caption tailored to the question and a Solver that predicts the final answer based on this caption. Crucially, PRCO employs role-specific reward signals: the Solver is optimized using verifiable outcome rewards on the final answer, while the Observer receives a utility reward derived from the Solver's downstream success. Extensive experiments across eight challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PRCO yields consistent improvements across model scales by over 7 points on average accuracy compared to the base model, outperforming prior open-source RL-tuned baselines.
2603.30045Modeling scenes using video generation models has garnered growing research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches rely on perspective video models that synthesize only limited observations of a scene, leading to issues of completeness and global consistency. We propose OmniRoam, a controllable panoramic video generation framework that exploits the rich per-frame scene coverage and inherent long-term spatial and temporal consistency of panoramic representation, enabling long-horizon scene wandering. Our framework begins with a preview stage, where a trajectory-controlled video generation model creates a quick overview of the scene from a given input image or video. Then, in the refine stage, this video is temporally extended and spatially upsampled to produce long-range, high-resolution videos, thus enabling high-fidelity world wandering. To train our model, we introduce two panoramic video datasets that incorporate both synthetic and real-world captured videos. Experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, controllability, and long-term scene consistency, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further showcase several extensions of this framework, including real-time video generation and 3D reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/OmniRoam.
Diffusion models have made significant progress in both text-to-image (T2I) generation and text-guided image editing. However, these models are typically built with billions of parameters, leading to high latency and increased deployment challenges. While on-device diffusion models improve efficiency, they largely focus on T2I generation and lack support for image editing. In this paper, we propose DreamLite, a compact unified on-device diffusion model (0.39B) that supports both T2I generation and text-guided image editing within a single network. DreamLite is built on a pruned mobile U-Net backbone and unifies conditioning through in-context spatial concatenation in the latent space. It concatenates images horizontally as input, using a (target | blank) configuration for generation tasks and (target | source) for editing tasks. To stabilize the training of this compact model, we introduce a task-progressive joint pretraining strategy that sequentially targets T2I, editing, and joint tasks. After high-quality SFT and reinforcement learning, DreamLite achieves GenEval (0.72) for image generation and ImgEdit (4.11) for image editing, outperforming existing on-device models and remaining competitive with several server-side models. By employing step distillation, we further reduce denoising processing to just 4 steps, enabling our DreamLite could generate or edit a 1024 x 1024 image in less than 1s on a Xiaomi 14 smartphone. To the best of our knowledge, DreamLite is the first unified on-device diffusion model that supports both image generation and image editing.
Agent traces carry increasing analytical value in the era of context learning and harness-driven agentic cognition, yet most prior work treats conversation format as a trivial engineering detail. Modern agent conversations contain deeply structured content, including nested tool calls and results, chain-of-thought reasoning blocks, sub-agent invocations, context-window compaction boundaries, and harness-injected system directives, whose complexity far exceeds that of simple user-assistant exchanges. Feeding such traces to a reflector or other analytical mechanism in plain text, JSON, YAML, or via grep can materially degrade analysis quality. This paper presents VCC (View-oriented Conversation Compiler), a compiler (lex, parse, IR, lower, emit) that transforms raw agent JSONL logs into a family of structured views: a full view (lossless transcript serving as the canonical line-number coordinate system), a user-interface view (reconstructing the interaction as the user actually perceived it), and an adaptive view (a structure-preserving projection governed by a relevance predicate). In a context-learning experiment on AppWorld, replacing only the reflector's input format, from raw JSONL to VCC-compiled views, leads to higher pass rates across all three model configurations tested, while cutting reflector token consumption by half to two-thirds and producing more concise learned memory. These results suggest that message format functions as infrastructure for context learning, not as an incidental implementation choice.
Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.
Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.
Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.
In this paper, we propose Extend3D, a training-free pipeline for 3D scene generation from a single image, built upon an object-centric 3D generative model. To overcome the limitations of fixed-size latent spaces in object-centric models for representing wide scenes, we extend the latent space in the $x$ and $y$ directions. Then, by dividing the extended latent space into overlapping patches, we apply the object-centric 3D generative model to each patch and couple them at each time step. Since patch-wise 3D generation with image conditioning requires strict spatial alignment between image and latent patches, we initialize the scene using a point cloud prior from a monocular depth estimator and iteratively refine occluded regions through SDEdit. We discovered that treating the incompleteness of 3D structure as noise during 3D refinement enables 3D completion via a concept, which we term under-noising. Furthermore, to address the sub-optimality of object-centric models for sub-scene generation, we optimize the extended latent during denoising, ensuring that the denoising trajectories remain consistent with the sub-scene dynamics. To this end, we introduce 3D-aware optimization objectives for improved geometric structure and texture fidelity. We demonstrate that our method yields better results than prior methods, as evidenced by human preference and quantitative experiments.
In-context segmentation (ICS) aims to segment arbitrary concepts, e.g., objects, parts, or personalized instances, given one annotated visual examples. Existing work relies on (i) fine-tuning vision foundation models (VFMs), which improves in-domain results but harms generalization, or (ii) combines multiple frozen VFMs, which preserves generalization but yields architectural complexity and fixed segmentation granularities. We revisit ICS from a minimalist perspective and ask: Can a single self-supervised backbone support both semantic matching and segmentation, without any supervision or auxiliary models? We show that scaled-up dense self-supervised features from DINOv3 exhibit strong spatial structure and semantic correspondence. We introduce INSID3, a training-free approach that segments concepts at varying granularities only from frozen DINOv3 features, given an in-context example. INSID3 achieves state-of-the-art results across one-shot semantic, part, and personalized segmentation, outperforming previous work by +7.5 % mIoU, while using 3x fewer parameters and without any mask or category-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/visinf/INSID3 .
Most existing vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotic manipulation lack progress awareness, typically relying on hand-crafted heuristics for task termination. This limitation is particularly severe in long-horizon tasks involving cascaded sub-goals. In this work, we investigate the estimation and integration of task progress, proposing a novel model named {\textbf \vla}. Our technical contributions are twofold: (1) \emph{robust progress estimation}: We pre-train a progress estimator on large-scale, unsupervised video-text robotic datasets. This estimator achieves a low prediction residual (0.07 on a scale of $[0, 1]$) in simulation and demonstrates zero-shot generalization to unseen real-world samples, and (2) \emph{differentiable progress guidance}: We introduce an inverse dynamics world model that maps predicted action tokens into future latent visual states. These latents are then processed by the progress estimator; by applying a maximal progress regularization, we establish a differentiable pipeline that provides progress-piloted guidance to refine action tokens. Extensive experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks, alongside real-world robot deployment, consistently demonstrate substantial improvements in success rates and generalization over strong baselines.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and world models have recently emerged as promising paradigms for general-purpose robotic intelligence, yet their progress is hindered by the lack of reliable evaluation protocols that reflect real-world deployment. Existing benchmarks are largely simulator-centric, which provide controllability but fail to capture the reality gap caused by perception noise, complex contact dynamics, hardware constraints, and system latency. Moreover, fragmented real-world evaluations across different robot platforms prevent fair and reproducible comparison. To address these challenges, we introduce ManipArena, a standardized evaluation framework designed to bridge simulation and real-world execution. ManipArena comprises 20 diverse tasks across 10,812 expert trajectories emphasizing reasoning-oriented manipulation tasks requiring semantic and spatial reasoning, supports multi-level generalization through controlled out-of-distribution settings, and incorporates long-horizon mobile manipulation beyond tabletop scenarios. The framework further provides rich sensory diagnostics, including low-level motor signals, and synchronized real-to-sim environments constructed via high-quality 3D scanning. Together, these features enable fair, realistic, and reproducible evaluation for both VLA and world model approaches, providing a scalable foundation for diagnosing and advancing embodied intelligence systems.
We present KAT-Coder-V2, an agentic coding model developed by the KwaiKAT team at Kuaishou. KAT-Coder-V2 adopts a "Specialize-then-Unify" paradigm that decomposes agentic coding into five expert domains - SWE, WebCoding, Terminal, WebSearch, and General - each undergoing independent supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, before being consolidated into a single model via on-policy distillation. We develop KwaiEnv, a modular infrastructure sustaining tens of thousands of concurrent sandbox instances, and scale RL training along task complexity, intent alignment, and scaffold generalization. We further propose MCLA for stabilizing MoE RL training and Tree Training for eliminating redundant computation over tree-structured trajectories with up to 6.2x speedup. KAT-Coder-V2 achieves 79.6% on SWE-bench Verified (vs. Claude Opus 4.6 at 80.8%), 88.7 on PinchBench (surpassing GLM-5 and MiniMax M2.7), ranks first across all three frontend aesthetics scenarios, and maintains strong generalist scores on Terminal-Bench Hard (46.8) and tau^2-Bench (93.9). Our model is publicly available at https://streamlake.com/product/kat-coder.
Recent multimodal generation models have achieved remarkable progress on general-purpose generation tasks, yet continue to struggle with complex instructions and specialized downstream tasks. Inspired by the success of advanced agent frameworks such as Claude Code, we propose \textbf{GEMS} (Agent-Native Multimodal \textbf{GE}neration with \textbf{M}emory and \textbf{S}kills), a framework that pushes beyond the inherent limitations of foundational models on both general and downstream tasks. GEMS is built upon three core components. Agent Loop introduces a structured multi-agent framework that iteratively improves generation quality through closed-loop optimization. Agent Memory provides a persistent, trajectory-level memory that hierarchically stores both factual states and compressed experiential summaries, enabling a global view of the optimization process while reducing redundancy. Agent Skill offers an extensible collection of domain-specific expertise with on-demand loading, allowing the system to effectively handle diverse downstream applications. Across five mainstream tasks and four downstream tasks, evaluated on multiple generative backends, GEMS consistently achieves significant performance gains. Most notably, it enables the lightweight 6B model Z-Image-Turbo to surpass the state-of-the-art Nano Banana 2 on GenEval2, demonstrating the effectiveness of agent harness in extending model capabilities beyond their original limits.
Covers all areas of AI except Vision, Robotics, Machine Learning, Multiagent Systems, and Computation and Language (Computational Linguistics), which have separate subject areas. In particular, includes Expert Systems, Theorem Proving (Coverage Overlap with Logic in Computer Science), Knowledge Representation, Planning, and Uncertainty in AI.
Covers systems organization and hardware architecture. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Classes C.0, C.1, and C.5.
Covers models of computation, complexity classes, structural complexity, complexity tradeoffs, upper and lower bounds.
Covers applications of computer science to the mathematical modeling of complex systems in the fields of science, engineering, and finance.
Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Classes I.3.5 and F.2.2.
Covers natural language processing. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Class I.2.7.
Covers all areas of cryptography and security including authentication, public key cryptosystems, proof-carrying code, etc.
Covers image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and scene understanding.
Covers impact of computers on society, computer ethics, information technology and public policy, legal aspects of computing, computers and education.
Covers database management, datamining, and data processing. Roughly includes material in ACM Subject Classes H.2, H.3, and H.4.
Covers fault-tolerance, distributed algorithms, stabilility, parallel computation, and cluster computing.
Covers all aspects of the digital library design and document and text creation.