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Nov 2

An Unexpected Robot Policy: Early Evaluations of GPT-6 Astra on RoboDojo and Beyond

Embodied AI systems are often organized into System 1 and System 2. System 1 is typically a pretrained policy that generates actions at high frequency, whereas System 2 is often instantiated as a vision-enabled language model for high-level planning. We ask whether a large language model (LLM) can act as the policy for robot manipulation without task-specific finetuning. We call this setting LLM as policy. We evaluate three LLMs on all 42 RoboDojo tasks and compare their scores with 40 public policies. Astra and GPT-5.5 use the official 50-episode-per-task protocol; DeepSeek-Flash uses 10 episodes per task. GPT-6 Astra achieves 22.48% average success rate and 28.97 Score over 2,100 trials, ranking above every public entry. Yet GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek-Flash reach only 0.88% and 1.92% average success rate with the same post-processing. We find that Astra exhibits a sharply polarized capability profile. It generalizes well to tasks that require semantic understanding but not high-precision control. In contrast, it performs poorly on tasks that require precision, dynamic control, or complex bimanual coordination. In-context experiments show no aggregate benefit from one-shot demonstrations, while selected interaction traces show within-episode corrections under perturbations. Overall, the evaluated LLMs vary substantially in manipulation performance. Astra stands out and provides initial evidence for the potential of a general-purpose manipulation model, although reliable precision and dynamic control remain limitations in the evaluated setting.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 20

Systematically Exploring the Capabilities of GPT-6 Astra as Embodied Policies

GPT-6 Astra exhibits a remarkable ability to generate numerical robot actions, extending its role beyond high-level planning. To assess Astra's capabilities as general-purpose embodied policies, we conduct comprehensive evaluations across six domains, examining direct control, cooperation with learned policies, and feedback-driven adaptation. In gripper manipulation, Astra can correct task targets and prepare contact conditions for subsequent policy execution; hybrid control with π0.5 achieves 48% success on the evaluated RoboDojo subset. In dexterous manipulation, hybrid control achieves 50% success in ten experience-guided DexJoCo trials, while direct in-hand control struggles to coordinate finger contacts. In mobile manipulation, hybrid control reaches 38.7% success on the evaluated RoboCasa365. In navigation, Astra leads our local comparisons, reaching 92% success on RxR instruction following and 82% on HM3D object search, although search incurs substantial detours. In locomotion, dense motion-reference generation remains unreliable: none of five sequential attempts on a single obstacle course reaches the goal, despite improvements in stability and forward progress. In humanoid loco-manipulation, Astra exceeds baseline methods on 13 of 30 HumanoidBench tasks with pretrained whole-body controllers. These findings reveal a gap between useful task decisions and reliable physical control. Inference latency further constrains practical control: across 50 RoboDojo instances per condition, policy-assisted and direct control consume 624.8 million and 1.132 billion tokens. A 30-second locomotion run requires 250 model calls averaging 39.86 seconds each, with physics paused during inference.

Galbot Galbot
·
Sep 28 3

GPT-6-Astra Lights Up Embodied Navigation: Evaluation in Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

We investigate whether GPT-6-Astra, a general-purpose foundation model, can navigate unfamiliar environments using its own perception, reasoning, and decision-making capabilities. Our evaluation focuses on zero-shot vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE) through a minimal interface in the Codex harness, aiming to unleash GPT-6-Astra's full potential for navigation. Using monocular RGB, GPT-6-Astra decides when to observe, how to move, and when to stop, without navigation-specific fine-tuning, a trained waypoint predictor, or a pre-built scene map. Our evaluation yields four key findings and implications. First, GPT-6-Astra achieves strong zero-shot navigation performance using only monocular RGB observations. On R2R-CE-100, GPT-6-Astra (ultra reasoning) achieves a success rate of 81.3%, exceeding the strongest reported zero-shot and even train-based success rates by 15.3 and 9.2 percentage points, respectively. Second, GPT-6-Astra exhibits promising capabilities in interpreting multi-stage instructions, understanding the environment, and adjusting routes. Third, execution and goal-verification failures persist even with ultra reasoning. Fourth, these results motivate combining general-purpose model capabilities with navigation-specific expertise. Based on these findings, future VLN research should investigate which aspects of instruction interpretation, spatial understanding, and navigation decision-making general-purpose models can handle directly, and where navigation-specific learning can extend their capabilities. This includes exploring how spatial representations, navigation experience, and learned control skills can improve progress tracking, error recovery, and goal verification while preserving the flexibility to adjust routes.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24

Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?

GPT-6-Astra demonstrates a level of competence in robotic manipulation and navigation that challenges the conventional paradigm of building specialized models for individual tasks and embodiments. In this report, we ask not only how capable GPT-6-Astra is, but what its capabilities imply for the field. First, we probe the limits of standalone GPT-6-Astra. We conduct a large-scale evaluation across 12 representative benchmarks spanning tabletop manipulation, humanoids, mobile platforms, and dexterous hands. Under a unified protocol that allows in-context learning (ICL) from training-set demonstrations and substantially increases the number of execution steps, GPT-6-Astra achieves unprecedented performance (Fig. 1). Future research may focus on improving 1) the generality of ICL 2) cost and execution time, 3) physical-state verification, 4) recovery from irreversible failures, and 5) long-horizon preservation of progress. Second, we study the agentic harness for embodied control. We identify that close-loop coordination between a high-level "System 2" reasoner (i.e., GPT-6-Astra) and a low-level "System 1" controller (e.g., π0.5) is costly but effective. Third, we examine GPT-6-Astra on real-world deployment. Our experiments on 8 robot configurations reveal substantial gaps: 1) robot demonstrations required for ICL are expensive to collect, and 2) it is implausible to trade longer execution for higher success rates with physical constraints. Fourth, we envision the next generation of embodied benchmarks. We develop a prototype that 1) derives tasks from real-world needs, 2) provides no in-domain demonstrations, and 3) judges agents on a world clock that keeps running while they deliberate. Taken together, our results suggest that GPT-6-Astra has largely crossed the threshold of embodied competence, but not yet that of practical embodied intelligence.

sensenova SenseNova
·
Oct 14 2

How High Can GPT-6 Astra Climb in Contact-Rich Manipulation? PhysLadder: A Hierarchical, Matched Sim-Real Benchmark for Physical Interaction

We introduce PhysLadder, a hierarchical Sim-Real benchmark for evaluating physical interaction capabilities in contact-rich manipulation. Its 16 household tasks span three cumulative levels: contact selection and geometric alignment (L1), force regulation within sustained contact (L2), and coordinated contact reconfiguration and force regulation (L3). Each task is instantiated in physically and visually matched simulated and real-world environments, with shared task definitions and success criteria. We evaluate GPT-6 Astra zero-shot with three trials per task in each environment. Real-world success rates decline from 80.0% at L1 to 47.6% at L2 and 0.0% at L3, with corresponding simulation rates of 66.7%, 47.6%, and 0.0%. Ten of the 16 tasks have identical success counts across environments; the remaining six differ by one success out of three trials. Across both environments, recurring difficulties in spatial reasoning, contact selection, force regulation, and coordination often prevent local physical progress from accumulating into task completion. These findings characterize Astra's observed capability boundary across increasing interaction demands and, for this model, support matched simulation as a repeatable, scalable testbed for studying the sustained, coordinated physical interactions that limit reliable manipulation.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 24

Hard Vision, Easy Vision: What GPT-6 Astra Reveals Across Computer Vision

Frontier general-purpose systems are rapidly expanding beyond visual understanding into capabilities traditionally handled by dedicated computer-vision models. As these capabilities expand, a central question for the computer-vision community is how far this reach extends, and what remains hard. We evaluate GPT-6 Astra alongside five frontier general-purpose AI systems across 34 capabilities and 55 benchmarks spanning nine areas of computer vision. We compare their performance with dedicated models and humans where suitable references are available. Astra demonstrates broad visual capability, with substantial gains over other frontier systems in visual and spatial reasoning and several forms of structured prediction. Across the state-of-the-art systems, a consistent pattern emerges. Capabilities involving semantic interpretation, reasoning, and object-centric prediction increasingly approach or reach available reference levels. In contrast, larger gaps remain when tasks require metric geometric accuracy, faithful reconstruction, temporally consistent dense prediction, or specialized fine-grained visual knowledge. Additional reasoning and specialist tools close selected gaps, but their benefits vary across capabilities. These results map a changing landscape of computer vision in which increasingly sophisticated visual tasks are accessible through a general-purpose interface, while precise and fidelity-sensitive perception remains an important frontier.

RoboICL: Embodied In-Context Learning with GPT-6 Astra

General-purpose vision-language models offer a promising way to zero-shot robot control: excels at open-ended and language- or image-conditioned manipulation but remains substantially weaker on high-precision and long-horizon tasks. We introduce RoboICL, an in-context robot-control framework that narrows these gaps without robot-specific parameter updates or a learned VLA. RoboICL separates demonstration context, which provides recorded examples when available, from interaction memory, which accumulates the model's own actions and observed outcomes. Both use a shared observation--action--receipt--observation grammar. To preserve experience across task stages, RoboICL combines sampled demonstration blocks with bounded anchored memory. Fixed anchors keep earlier rollout interactions available for in-context learning, while the latest interaction supports immediate error correction. Across 30 RoboDojo tasks, using zero shot for Open and one demonstration elsewhere, RoboICL improves on official zero-shot by 20--27 progress-score points in every category. It leads the leaderboard baselines on Memory and Open, achieves comparable performance to the strongest Precision baseline, and remains competitive on Long-Horizon. Its 30-task Overall score is 50.64, versus 33.68 for the strongest baseline. On a separate ten-task subset, RoboICL scores 60.60, within 2.00 points of the π_{0.5} + hybrid approach. On three real-robot tasks, mean progress rises from 14.45 at zero shot to 63.33 at one shot and 78.89 at three shots. On two development tasks, optional Jev-gated action reuse reduces calls by 33--48\%. Code is available at https://github.com/Mosi-AI/RoboICL{https://github.com/Mosi-AI/RoboICL}.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 27

Large Multimodal Models for Direct Robot Control: GPT-6 as a Beginning

Recent advances in visuospatial understanding and agentic reasoning enable direct robotic manipulation with general-purpose multimodal models, but their embodied capabilities remain poorly understood. This paper systematically evaluate GPT-6 Astra for closed-loop robotic manipulation using a lightweight agent execution framework. We first probe three fundamental embodied capabilities-depth perception, embodied in-context learning, and tactile understanding-and demonstrate that the model can exploit depth information, acquire simple manipulation strategies from contextual demonstrations, and use tactile feedback to correct its actions. We then evaluate GPT-6 Astra across five established manipulation benchmarks along six capability dimensions. Despite competitive performance on several benchmarks-26.92\% success on RoboDojo and 76.0\% on RoboTwin 2.0-our analysis reveals a pronounced gap between semantic reasoning and physical execution, particularly in consequence-aware action planning, precision, and complex motion coordination. To further examine these limitations, we introduce LIBERO-GeoMotion, a new benchmark of geometry-constrained tasks that require precise pose alignment, coordinated translation and rotation, and anticipation of physical action consequences. GPT-6 Astra achieves only 11.1\% zero-shot success, exposing the difficulty of translating spatial understanding into physically feasible motion. Real-world experiments corroborate these findings: zero-shot execution is feasible for simple tasks, yet persistent deficits remain in motion feasibility, precise control, and physical safety, while substantial inference latency further hinders practical deployment. Overall, our results characterize the emerging embodied capabilities of general-purpose multimodal models and delineate the key challenges toward safe, efficient, and reliable robotic manipulation.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 19

RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) have advanced along two separate lines: graphical interaction and software development through code and the command line. Real digital work requires both, interleaved rather than stacked end to end. We study hybrid CUAs that autonomously decide when to explore an interface, implement software, and run and visually verify their artifacts. We introduce RecreationWorld, a five-platform framework built around recreation: given a running reference, an agent must discover its behavior and build a faithful implementation with no prescribed workflow. RecreationWorld provides reproducible environments on Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, Android, and Web, plus a unified harness with native GUI control and coding tools. The running reference serves as an oracle for hidden behavioral tests, providing execution-grounded rewards. We scale trajectory generation with high-quality open-source applications. Models trained on these trajectories improve across five out-of-distribution coding and hybrid computer-use benchmarks and more frequently verify their rendered outputs, providing evidence of transfer beyond recreation. For held-out evaluation, we introduce RecreationBench, comprising 250 diverse tasks across domains and platforms. Reference-grounded programmatic and visual assertions cover action-conditioned outcomes at multiple interaction depths; each is validated on the reference and by human reviewers before the suite is frozen for automatic scoring. GPT-6 Astra leads at 58.1% overall, but passes all programmatic tests on just 2.8% of tasks. Agents reproduce static interface structure more reliably than interactions and computed outputs, while generated applications remain smaller and more monolithic than their references. We release the benchmark, environments, and test suites.

Qwen Qwen
·
Sep 17 3

MaLiang-Harness: A Programmable Path to Image and Video Generation

Executable programs offer explicit control over how images and videos are constructed, but generating runnable code is only the beginning of visual creation. A program can execute correctly while violating the requested composition, appearance, or motion. We define this discrepancy as the Program-to-Visual (P2V) gap and introduce MaLiang-Harness, a unified framework for organizing MLLM-driven visual generation into a persistent process of construction, inspection, and revision. Its central design is to make the evolving visual program, its construction history, and its verification share a common revision reference. We define the Persistent Executable Generation (PEG) state as preserving programs and task context. Traceable Generation Process (TGP) connects edits to rendered evidence, and Revision-aware Editing and Verification (REV) supports restoration and checks the current revision before completion. Together, these mechanisms coordinate planning, execution, and visual feedback across rendering backends. We evaluate 11 powerful closed-source MLLMs on MaLiang-IBench and four on MaLiang-VBench, measuring generation success, visual quality, and computational cost. GPT-6-Astra achieves 100% generation success on both benchmarks, with 96.0% of image tasks and 76.9% of video tasks meeting all quality thresholds. The comparison also reveals a mismatch between general capability scores and visual generation performance, with similarly scored models differing substantially in their ability to satisfy visual requirements. MaLiang-Harness provides a systematic basis for studying how MLLMs translate executable code into visual outcomes, exposing both the potential of programmable generation and the limitations of general benchmarks as predictors of this ability. The project is available at https://github.com/gulucaptain/MaLiang-Harness.

Investor's Last Exam: Can AI Agents Do Equity Investment Without Seeing the Future?

Financial agents must form forecasts and investment judgments from decision-time evidence, with predictions evaluated against subsequent outcomes. Existing benchmarks assess financial knowledge, research workflows, or forecasting, but evaluating the full research process requires a strictly frozen information set and professional evaluation criteria. We introduce Investor's Last Exam (ILE), an equity-research benchmark led by experienced buy-side investors and fund managers. Its three components are a versioned financial database spanning 3.43 million document versions and nine source categories, supplemented by structured market data, with validated timestamps governing retrieval and computation; a task taxonomy organized around professional analyst deliverables; and an expert-led framework linking scoring criteria to sources, calculations, and assumptions through financial dependency graphs. Evaluation spans 86 assignments and jointly assesses research quality, forecast accuracy, and simulated investment performance. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 lead overall at 68.1 and 66.9 out of 100, yet even Astra scores only 52.5 on Forecast & Model. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models fail to translate overall research capability into predictive performance. ILE shifts the evaluation unit from isolated capabilities to the evidence--assumption--judgment chain, allowing researchers to locate where analytical advantages fail to translate into forecasts and investment judgments, and providing a traceable, diagnostic foundation for training and evaluating financial agents.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 27 4

Multimodal Filesystem Memory For Long-Horizon Embodied Agents

Agents operating over long horizons need an effective memory that allows them to reuse their experience throughout long interactions. If the entire history of an interaction is retained, it becomes difficult to find the relevant experience, while compressing it into summaries may result in the loss of visual and spatial details that are required later on. We present MFM, a multimodal filesystem memory architecture that keeps complementary types of agent memory. Episodic memory stores the observations, actions, and outcomes, and spatial memory associates experiences with locations. Semantic and procedural memory build up general knowledge and reusable methods of acting, and working memory holds the current plans. MFM makes use of searchable textual records to connect these different representations to the underlying multimodal episodes. The agents are able to find previous experiences by means of contextual cues and to examine the original observations in order to recover details that are missing from their textual descriptions. Through consolidation, the agents convert experience into higher-level knowledge and procedures while still keeping references to the original episodes. In the case of long-horizon Minecraft and computer-use tasks, MFM leads to improved performance with three base models. With GPT-6-Astra, MFM completes Mine Diamond from Scratch and reaches 16 out of 24 milestones on the Ender Dragon task, as against 12.7 for the best baseline. On CUABench-KiCad it attains a mean reward of 0.440, as compared to 0.400 for the best baseline and 0.267 in the case of no persistent memory.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 14

HexaShell: A Thin Harness for Exploring the Limits of VLM Agents as Robot Coding Agents

Agents built on vision language models (VLMs) now compete with learned policies on robot manipulation leaderboards. We ask how far a coding agent can go when it controls a robot instead of a computer, and where it stops. Our system, HexaShell, keeps the harness thin: it only turns the agent's commands into robot motion. The agent drives a robot with two arms through one command line. It sees three RGB cameras and knows their calibration. After each failed attempt, the agent reads the log, finds the cause, and writes or fixes small programs called tools. In this way it keeps what it learns as code, as a coding agent does when it fixes a failing test. The tools may use only what the robot observes. They use triangulation to find where objects are, relative to each other and to the gripper. If two cameras see the same point, the point lies where the two camera rays meet. If a point lies on a known plane, such as the table or the top of a block, it lies where its ray meets that plane. When the head camera is not enough, the robot moves a wrist camera to get a second view. We build the tools on only ten layouts of one seed per task, then freeze them and test them on ten new layouts of the same seed. We use Codex with GPT-6-Astra at medium reasoning effort. On all 42 RoboDojo tasks, HexaShell reaches a success rate of 39.7% and a progress score of 48.0, averaged in the same way as the leaderboard. This is a new state of the art on RoboDojo. The limit is contact, not reasoning: pushing reaches 92.5% and memory tasks 65.0%, but tight insertion only 8.3%. When the agent fails, it usually sees the failure but cannot make the motion work. We open source the tools evolved so far at https://github.com/HexaFuture/HexaShell.

HexaFuture HexaFuture
·
Oct 15 3

ACE-Brain-0.6: Scaling Spatial Grounding for Physical Foundation Models

General-purpose multimodal models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5, demonstrate broad capabilities in embodied manipulation. Our analysis indicates that this generality is accompanied by strong spatial perception, as Astra can determine where to interact with task-relevant entities amid visual distractors. Because spatial perception connects high-level reasoning to the physical scene, we investigate scaling visual grounding to strengthen the perceptual foundation of general embodied operation. We develop a unified data pipeline that combines robot manipulation recordings with complementary visual data from diverse sources. After automatically annotating the robot recordings, the pipeline converts the collected data into verifiable grounding supervision. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on approximately 1.5 million samples produced by this pipeline yields ACE-Brain-0.6. The model outperforms GPT-6 Astra on four of seven public grounding benchmarks, with an overall average score of 75.41 compared with Astra's 73.68. Under a fixed Qwen3.5-9B fine-tuning setup, aggregate grounding performance improves steadily as successive data releases expand the training collection to cover a broader range of grounding scenarios. These results show that scaling verifiable grounding supervision from diverse sources can strengthen the spatial perception of an open 9B model for general embodied operation.

ACERobotics ACE Robotics
·
Oct 18 2

From Reasoning to Action: Benchmarking Frontier AI Models on LIBERO-10 Robot Manipulation Tasks

Recent advances in frontier AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, planning, and tool use, raising the possibility of using general-purpose AI models for robot manipulation without task-specific training. However, their manipulation capabilities have not been systematically evaluated on standardized robotics benchmarks. In this report, we present a unified closed-loop manipulation framework for evaluating frontier AI models on the LIBERO-10 benchmark. Our framework enables models to control a robot directly through visual observations, robot proprioception, and structured tool calls, primarily by specifying target end-effector poses and gripper commands, without task-specific fine-tuning or pretrained manipulation skills. We evaluate six frontier AI models, including GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 5.5, and Gemini-4 Argon, across three reasoning effort levels, resulting in 18 configurations and 1,800 evaluation episodes. Our results show that GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest success rate of 44%, followed by Gemini-4 Argon at 43%. Increasing reasoning effort generally improves manipulation performance, but the benefits vary across models and come at additional inference cost. We also observe substantial differences across tasks, with models performing relatively well on object placement tasks but struggling with precise spatial arrangements and complex multi-step interactions. These findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of frontier AI models for robot manipulation, highlighting the challenges of translating reasoning capabilities into reliable physical actions. We release our evaluation framework and experimental results to support reproducible benchmarking and future research on reasoning-based robot manipulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 20

Big-Big-SycoBench: A Benchmark to Detect Sycophancy Through Model Responses to Valid vs. Invalid Arguments

Sycophancy in large language models risks amplifying unsupported claims or beliefs across the knowledge ecosystem as these systems increasingly contribute to research synthesis, evaluation, and decision-making. A reliable model should revise its judgement when a user identifies a genuine flaw, but should resist pushback based on fallacies, emotion, or irrelevant appeals to authority. While sycophancy is usually measured on questions with a verifiable answer, the evaluative tasks in which it is most difficult to detect have no such ground truth. We introduce Big-Big-SycoBench, which measures sycophancy through argument discernment: the ability to revise an evaluation after valid criticism while resisting invalid pressure. The benchmark consists of 450 text artefacts with 5,400 arguments for raising or lowering their quality scores, each reviewed by one or more of twelve human annotators. An LLM scores each artefact twenty times to establish its baseline score and uncertainty. The model is then given a valid or invalid argument and asked to update its score. We only count a revision if it exceeds the model's own baseline variability. We use the resulting score delta to distinguish responsiveness to valid arguments from compliance with invalid ones. Across ten models, responsiveness is 88-95\% for seven, 76-77\% for Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3, and 32\% for Opus 5.5. Compliance ranges from 0.2\% for GPT-6 Astra to 95\% for GPT-4o. Big-Big-SycoBench is intended to guide the development of models whose judgements can be corrected by sound arguments, but not displaced by unsupported pressure.

  • 14 authors
·
Oct 10

BlenderWorld: Benchmarking Visual Agents for 3D Creation from Real-World References

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled them to act as autonomous agents, creating and editing 3D models via code or direct software manipulation. In practical workflows, these models must infer object shapes, materials, spatial layouts, and lighting from diverse references while strictly following instructions to reconstruct, modify, or design 3D content. However, existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of such open-ended requests across real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce BlenderWorld, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to evaluating frontier models on realistic 3D creation tasks. BlenderWorld comprises 223 tasks spanning architecture, products, natural environments, and scientific visualization, driven by text, image, video, and structured specification inputs. To rigorously assess these complex deliverables, we establish a unified evaluation protocol: we render the submitted Blender projects from multiple viewpoints and evaluate them against 2,651 task-specific binary rubrics alongside holistic visual quality scores. Benchmarking thirteen frontier models reveals that GPT-6-Astra achieves the highest overall fused score of 79.9, followed by Opus-5 (73.0) and GPT-5.6-Sol (67.7). Ultimately, our findings reveal a critical bottleneck: while current models can parse broad instructions, they still profoundly struggle with fine-grained 3D spatial coherence and accurate structural reproduction in Blender, leaving substantial headroom for future 3D-native agentics.

Qwen Qwen
·
Oct 13 2

LEGO-Anything: Coding Agents for 3D Scene Reconstruction

A 3D scene reconstructed from a single image is most useful when represented not as a rendering or a fixed 3D output, but as an explicit scene program whose execution yields a scene that can be inspected, edited, and queried. We present LEGO-Anything, an Image-to-Code framework in which a coding agent iteratively writes and executes Blender code, inspects scenes and renderings, and revises the program. To evaluate end-to-end scene recovery, we introduce LEGO-Bench, a simulator-grounded benchmark with 208 images from 104 diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. LEGO-Bench separately scores artifact validity, visible-surface geometry, and rendered appearance. Its simulator-grounded design enables extensibility and precise automatic evaluation. Among evaluated agents, GPT-6-astra achieves the strongest overall results, with 53.4% indoor and 39.6% outdoor scores, yet substantial gaps remain between delivering valid scene artifacts and faithfully recovering scene geometry and appearance. Analysis of agent construction trajectories reveals three recurring issues: weak scene initialization, regressive edits during iteration, and unreliable self-evaluation. These findings motivate LEGO-Plugin, a training-free harness plugin for more controlled iterative scene construction, which improves all six evaluated models, with relative gains of up to 62.7% in overall score. Finally, we test whether reconstructed scenes can represent natural images and support vision tasks. In LEGO-World, we derive object detections, instance masks, and relative depth as deterministic queries on scenes reconstructed by GPT-6-astra. These readouts show non-trivial performance across all three tasks but fall well short of specialized vision models, suggesting that program-constructed scenes from current coding agents are a promising but not yet sufficiently precise representation of natural images.

CodeActionBench: Evaluating Agentic Code-as-Policy for Embodied Manipulation

How well can general-purpose multimodal models turn visual understanding and reasoning into embodied manipulation via executable code? We introduce CodeActionBench, a benchmark of 25 manipulation tasks that evaluates this capability through agentic Code-as-Policy. Without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrations, external specialist perception or grasp modules, privileged scene state, or predefined task policies, agents should select visual evidence, form task-relevant 3D estimates, construct manipulation targets, and iteratively execute and revise their policies. A shared robot API provides RGB observations, calibrated geometric operations, robot feedback, and bounded motion, leaving task-dependent decisions to the evaluated agent. Fixed task instances, resource budgets, and a hidden physical-outcome verifier support controlled comparisons across models and harness configurations. Extensive evaluations across nine configurations and 675 attempts achieve success rates ranging from 2.7% to 73.3%. The strongest configuration, GPT-6 Astra with Codex CLI, solves 22 of 25 tasks at least once in three attempts, demonstrating the best performance while still leaving substantial room for improvement. Trajectory analyses reveal difficulties in spatial alignment, object retention, and completion judgment, including task failures despite successfully completed motions. CodeActionBench provides a controlled testbed for measuring how general-purpose models translate their capabilities into manipulation behavior and for examining typical failure scenarios in that process.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26

LIBERO-Agent: Evaluating General-Purpose Agents for Direct Embodied Manipulation

General-purpose agents can plan, use tools, and revise their behavior from feedback, but it remains unclear whether these capabilities transfer from digital environments to embodied manipulation. To investigate this question, we introduce LIBERO-Agent, an agent-native benchmark for evaluating these agents in robot manipulation tasks. Rather than asking agents to submit task-level Python control programs or operate through high-level robot skills, LIBERO-Agent provides an interactive robotic environment where agents can select which observations to inspect, process them with their own tools, and issue native action commands. LIBERO-Agent integrates 200 tasks into a common interaction framework and provides a 30-task primary suite that separates perception, short-horizon execution, and long-horizon composition. Results reveal a pronounced reliability gap: while agents perform well on perception and easy short-horizon tasks, their performance degrades substantially on hard short-horizon and long-horizon tasks. Richer observations improve short-horizon manipulation, while demonstration benefits depend on the agent and format. Among these agents, GPT-6 Astra achieves the strongest overall performance. Further analysis shows its major advantage lies in mechanism interaction, especially when sustained physical contact is needed, while its remaining failures stem from cross-stage interference and geometric errors.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 29

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 12 2

Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems

Task and motion planning (TAMP) problems remain difficult even with full observability and object-centric states because discrete decisions are tightly coupled to geometric, kinematic, and dynamic constraints. Generalized TAMP addresses this difficulty by exploiting regularities across problem instances to reduce planning effort on new instances. However, existing methods require substantial TAMP-specific engineering. We investigate whether coding agents can automate this process by synthesizing programs that generalize across instances. Given a task description and simulator access, each agent chooses how to interact with the environment while developing a program within a fixed synthesis budget. The program is then frozen and evaluated on unseen instances. We evaluate Claude Code (Opus 5) and Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra) on 28 simulated environments from KinDER and PDDLStream, with object counts beyond those evaluated in the original benchmark. Across all program synthesis methods, we evaluate 980 generated programs on 100 held-out instances each, 98,000 evaluation episodes in total. Overall, we find that coding agents are surprisingly effective at generalized TAMP: all three agent configurations outperform hand-engineered planners, one-shot generation, and an LLM-based generalized planning baseline in mean success (56% to 95% versus 47% for the planners, on the 16 environments where a planner is available). As object counts grow, the agents' programs maintain higher success than the planner, using an order of magnitude less computation per instance on average. Logs show agents using interaction to calibrate physical models, test edge cases, and refine strategies. We release all code, including the full prompts given to the agents. These findings suggest that coding agents are a strong baseline for generalized TAMP.

BrickWright: Agentic Creation of Physically Feasible Brick Builds

Frontier coding agents are becoming increasingly adept at 3D modeling. Yet, they still face challenges when building objects meant to be assembled in the physical world, often creating invalid assemblies with floating, colliding, or disconnected parts. We argue that providing agents with tools for assembling builds and verifying their physical feasibility is sufficient for them to produce physically valid assemblies that still adhere to input prompts. Focusing on the domain of LEGO brick builds, we present BrickWright, a framework for generating physically feasible brick builds from text or image prompts using pre-trained agents, where a build is physically feasible if it uses only real parts, has no colliding or floating parts, and forms a connected structure if possible. BrickWright guides agents to create builds by writing code with BrickLayer, a Python toolkit with two main components: an ergonomic brick assembly API that halves inference cost compared to working in raw LDraw, and a validator that provides feedback on physical feasibility. Whereas baseline agents achieve physical validity rates ranging from only 9% (GPT-6 Luna) to 69% (GPT-6 Astra), BrickWright-guided agents achieve 100% validity on a sample of 512 prompts, while improving prompt adherence for lightweight agents and maintaining it for stronger agents. Additionally, they outperform specialized models on the text-to-brick task. Code is available on our project page: https://avalovelace1.github.io/brickwright/

NavHarness: Towards Lifelong Embodied Navigation

Frontier models can now perform well on individual embodied navigation tasks through multi-round multimodal reasoning with simple tools. Across successive tasks, however, an agent must also rely on an evolving map and earlier search records, both of which may be incomplete or conflict with new observations. We present NavHarness, a training-free embodied harness towards lifelong navigation that makes memory processing part of the navigation loop. During navigation, its multi-round agentic session draws on maps, task records, and house knowledge, checking them against observations and recording corrections to guide its actions. NavHarness preserves this experience across fresh conversations for new tasks or recovery attempts, while outcome verification and run-end summaries support its later reuse. On GOAT-Bench, NavHarness improves s-SR over context-only independent sessions by 18.6 points with Astra and 22.6 with Opus 5. Using SLAM-estimated poses, NavHarness with GPT-6 Astra achieves state-of-the-art task success of 83.7 s-SR with 36.9 e-SR on GOAT-Bench and 85.9 s-SR on IR2R-CE. To understand these gains, we examine how experience is carried between sessions and find that structured recovery handovers outperform length-matched summaries. In extended deployments across houses, consolidation improves navigation beyond retaining maps and task records, with case studies showing how agents use earlier experience to interpret new goals, investigate unresolved questions, and resume failed searches. We suggest that progress towards lifelong navigation depends on how successive reasoning sessions build on prior experience, alongside improvements in single-task capability.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 27 3

OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Use

Computer use has reached a turning point: the focus is expanding from GUI-only interaction to systems that complete tasks on users' computers through visual and programmatic interfaces. We define a generalist computer-use agent (GCUA) as a system in which the model chooses how to observe, act, and organize its work across visual and programmatic interfaces. Yet frontier implementations, such as GPT-6 Astra's computer-use system, remain largely closed, limiting systematic study of their design. We introduce Open Generalist CUA (OpenGCUA), an ongoing project to develop and open the full stack for GCUAs with the community. This report presents the first release of OpenGCUA. Code execution is a key feature of our agent design: it lets intermediate results determine subsequent operations and enables models to apply their existing programming capabilities directly to computer interaction. We also propose harness-to-model decision transfer, moving selected observations and task-state decisions from fixed harness rules to the model. On OSWorld-v2, our full configuration improves task scores across all eight evaluated models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5, raising mean partial score by +19.6 points and reducing reported steps per task by an average of 53.0% relative to batched GUI-only execution. We release our implementation and prompts, evaluation trajectories from all eight models, and preliminary versions of a real-device harness and a cross-device SDK. The harness addresses real-device challenges not fully captured by benchmarks, while the SDK provides a common programming interface across computers, mobiles and browsers. Across four real macOS tasks under our real-device harness, selected Qwen3.8-Max runs use 19.4 times as many reported reasoning tokens as GPT-6 Astra, highlighting substantial differences between models in real-device execution efficiency.

Tongyi-MAI Tongyi-MAI
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Oct 14 4

Beyond Compilation: Evaluating Faithful Natural-Language-to-Lean Statement Formalization

Lean verifies that a generated declaration is well typed, but cannot check whether it states what the user intended. We measure how far compilation overstates faithfulness in statement autoformalization without canonical Lean targets. Our criterion requires Lean compilation and agreement of two LLM judges from different model families. On an independent random audit, it agrees with the human majority on 91.5% of cases; it rarely accepts an unfaithful output but rejects some faithful ones. Across eight systems on 227 university-level statements, the gap between compiling and accepted outputs ranges from 1.3 to 29.5 percentage points: our tool-augmented agent compiles 87.2% of the statements, but only 57.7% are accepted. Human review of all the agent's rejections confirms that 23.8 of its 29.5 points are real translation errors. For the gaps of the seven one-shot systems, a two-stage review by Claude Opus 5.5 with Lean and GPT-6.1 Sol, validated on these human labels, finds that 78-100% are real translation errors for six of them. When GPT-5.2, one of the two judges, grades the translations of two models released after it, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5, it accepts 83% of the statements for each, against 21% for one-shot GPT-5.2. For these two models, the same review classifies only 4 of their 54 rejections (7%) as translation errors, so most of their measured gap is judge errors rather than translation errors. This is consistent with these systems erring less while the judge does not: the fewer errors a system makes, the smaller the share of its rejections that are translation errors. Finally, a 2^3 tool ablation of the agent shows that Lean feedback drives most of its compilation gain, and that nearly half of this gain fails the semantic criterion. Code and data are available at https://github.com/grenadeComing/beyond-compilation.

ucriverside UC Riverside
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Oct 14 2

Profiling a Frontier Agent with EBench: From Direct Control to Harness with Policy

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can control robots without robot-specific training, but how their capabilities compare and interact with post-trained vision-language-action (VLA) and world action model (WAM) policies across manipulation demands remains to be thoroughly evaluated. In this report, we evaluate GPT-6-Astra on EBench as the core of an agent that controls a robot through an agent harness under the same visual and proprioceptive observation protocol as post-trained policies. We study two agent configurations: direct control, in which the agent generates waypoint commands directly, and harness with policy, in which it can also invoke a post-trained VLA or WAM policy for action execution. Under direct control, the agent achieves competitive overall performance relative to post-trained policies. It leads on short-horizon tasks and exhibits the least performance variation across generalization dimensions, whereas it underperforms post-trained policies on long-horizon tasks, tabletop manipulation, and high-precision contact-rich tasks. In the harness with policy, invoking a post-trained VLA or WAM combines the complementary strengths of both components, raising overall task success to the level of the strongest compared post-trained policies while substantially reducing token cost. However, performance remains below the per-task upper bound of the standalone components due to suboptimal policy invocation, fixed-instruction execution without subgoals, and grasp disruption when the agent resumes control. Overall, our study characterizes the capability boundary of a frontier MLLM agent and suggests directions for improving future agent harness design. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/EBench-Astra-Tech-Report/

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 25

CaPtain: A Pipeline for Post-Training Code-as-Policy Robot Agents

Across coding, web, and tool-use tasks, language-model agents are now routinely trained with the same recipe: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to learn the interface, then multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) to master it. Code-as-policy (CaP) casts robot manipulation in the same form, as the policy writes code against robot APIs and reads back the results, so the same recipe should apply. Yet existing CaP agents sidestep training: they either prompt closed frontier models or delegate manipulation to pre-trained vision-language-action models (VLAs) and high-level skills, while small open vision-language models (VLMs) fail outright. We present CaPtain, an open post-training pipeline that turns a small open VLM into a capable CaP agent, with no VLA, frontier model, or privileged state at test time. CaPtain trains and deploys the policy inside CaPtain-Harness, which exposes low-level perception, geometry, and guarded-motion primitives across simulation and real hardware. We first align the base model via SFT on synthetic trajectories generated with GPT-6 Astra, then apply multi-turn RL. Multi-turn RL must credit tens of agent requests, whose physical effects often surface turns later, from a single end-of-episode outcome. We therefore introduce a physical critic that reads privileged simulator state, never seen by the policy, and credits each request by how much it changes the predicted chance of success. Starting from Qwen3.5-4B (0% zero-shot), CaPtain-4B reaches 55.4% held-out LIBERO success after SFT and 73.8% after RL. On LIBERO-PRO, it reaches 78.5%, surpassing several frontier-model agents, and its RL gains persist across three perturbation suites (+17.6 to +21.2 points). Without target-domain training, it attains 83.3% on SimplerEnv WidowX, exceeds frontier models on CaP-Bench, and runs on a real robot after simulation-only adaptation. We release all code, data, and model weights.

WorldBench: Evaluating LLMs on Three.js Voxel World Generation

Large language models can now write complete, interactive 3D worlds as code, but grading those worlds automatically is unreliable. Existing judges take one view of the output: a vision-language model scores a few rendered snapshots, or a language model reads the source. On worlds written by five frontier models we find that the two views disagree on 32% of required items, mostly code that no frame shows, and that fixed views miss small close-up contents. We present WorldBench, a benchmark and judge for open-ended, LLM-generated Three.js worlds. From one prompt describing a floating voxel island with ten biomes, physics, and day/night and seasonal cycles, the judge explores the running world, controlling its clock, orbiting it, and sending a navigator agent to frame each biome, and reads the code for what it sees. Neither channel is trusted on its own: a code quote counts only if it is text the source contains, and visual claims are checked against measured pixels where the property is measurable. A mutation test, in which we remove features by construction, shows that code-only judging gives full credit to four of five removed features, because their code remains in the file. Our judge cuts the points kept on removed features by a third (5.44 to 3.55 of 7.11), and what it still credits is mostly code that exists but never runs. We evaluate five frontier models: Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Kimi K3, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Code, prompt, tests and judge configuration are available at https://github.com/KrishBakshi/worldbench

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 6 1

UniMetric: Universal Metric Scale Recovery for Visual Geometry Foundation Models

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models, exemplified by GPT-6 Astra, raise the prospect of general-purpose embodied reasoning and planning. Using Internet videos for embodied pretraining calls for reliable physical-scale annotations. Yet visual geometry foundation models often recover scene structure and camera motion without reliable metric scale. We show that uncertain size priors of familiar objects can jointly constrain a reconstruction's shared scale. Building on this insight, we present UniMetric, a universal and training-free metric scale recovery framework for geometry foundation models, without additional sensors or task-specific metric supervision. Specifically, Metric Prior Acquisition elicits object height intervals from a vision-language model. Semantic-Geometric Alignment measures reconstructed object heights along the estimated support-surface normal in each frame and converts the priors into scale intervals. Global Scale Recovery reconciles these intervals through a convex objective, yielding a jointly feasible scale when they overlap and a unique compromise otherwise. The estimated sequence-level scale is applied uniformly to reconstructed points and camera translations. Controlled experiments with real VLM priors show that combining observations improves scale accuracy with exact relative object heights. To evaluate metric accuracy on GFM reconstructions without ground-truth scale alignment, we introduce MetricBench, covering twelve embodied, driving, and roadside subsets with sensor-derived ground truth. Across nine geometry foundation models, UniMetric reduces mean depth Abs Rel, reconstruction Chamfer distance, and trajectory error by 54.2%, 83.8%, and 65.6%, respectively, improving every model on all three tasks at the suite level. We release the UniMetric code and MetricBench data.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 11

In-Context Robot Learning with VLM Agents

Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations can cover every task and situation a robot will encounter, making the ability to learn from context at deployment essential for generalization. Such in-context learning (ICL), however, remains largely beyond the reach of existing robotic policies. The broad agentic capabilities of commercial vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-6 Astra, raise a compelling question: can these models learn from demonstrations, examples, and interaction feedback, then translate that information into executable and verifiable robot behavior from a new initial state without gradient updates or persistent changes to task-specific parameters? We introduce GPT-Policy, a general-agent framework for in-context robot learning. GPT-Policy integrates a context compiler that preserves task-relevant visual transitions, a VLM that proposes robot-tool actions, and a constrained controller that verifies and executes each action and reports its outcome. We evaluate its reliability and limitations through task success and efficiency metrics, matched comparisons across models, and controlled context ablations. In real-robot trials, human video demonstrations improve task completion even without robot action labels, while aligned action references yield further gains on contact-sensitive tasks. These findings position GPT-Policy as a step toward robot adaptation through in-context learning, providing an empirical foundation for translating the general-purpose capabilities of VLMs into physical behavior and clarifying the challenges that must be overcome for reliable deployment.

  • 15 authors
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Sep 15 4

Real2Gym: Building Gyms from Videos, Bringing Skills to Robots

Real-world videos provide rich demonstrations of manipulation, but turning them into reusable robot skills requires visually aligned environments, executable physical interactions, and mechanisms for learning from experience. We introduce Real2Gym, an agentic Real2Sim2Real framework that turns human and robot demonstrations into interactive simulation gyms and brings skills acquired in simulation to physical robots. The Real2Sim module reconstructs editable scenes, aligns objects and cameras with the input, validates demonstrated or retargeted actions through native physics execution, and generates task-conditioned variations with action-feasibility checks. Within these environments, the agent generates executable code for manipulation stages, observes their outcomes, and distills successful attempts and failures into reusable task procedures, object-relative motions, and recovery strategies. Through a shared perception-and-control interface, these skills guide subsequent execution in simulation and on real robots, with motions adapted to current observations and no updates to the underlying model weights. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Real2Gym enables high-fidelity simulation environment reconstruction, outperforming GPT-6 Astra Direct Mode by 16.7% in success rate with approximately 74.9% fewer policy-execution tokens across these environments, while exceeding it by 33.3% in physical robot execution success rate across four tasks on a real Franka robot.

PainterBench: A Figural Divergent-Thinking Benchmark for Tool-Using Language Models

Figural divergent thinking is the ability to develop a given shape fragment into an original drawing. In humans, this ability is assessed with incomplete-drawing tasks. We introduce PainterBench, a benchmark that ports the incomplete-drawing task to the agentic setting. The agent draws on a canvas through tool calls and observes the result after every turn. The canvas includes a starting shape which cannot be erased, and the agent's goal is to incorporate this shape into the most original drawing it can produce. The task is open-ended, and the agent itself decides when the drawing is finished. The benchmark tests incremental visual planning over a short horizon and the transfer of creative ability from pretraining to multi-turn tool use. We evaluate 14 multimodal language models from small to frontier scale. Across the primary study and six sensitivity analyses, we collect 2,700 drawings and crowdsource creativity and recognizability ratings for every drawing and for 300 human reference drawings. We also present ViDrA-adapted, an automated scorer that predicts human creativity ratings of agent drawings (r = 0.85 on random held-out test split). Figural divergent thinking varies widely across the 14 models, and GPT-6 Astra produces the most creative drawings. Relative to the human drawings, the agent drawings score higher in creativity but lower in recognizability. We release the final drawings, per-round canvas snapshots, tool call traces, stimulus bank, benchmark harness, crowdsourced ratings (N = 72,000), and ViDrA checkpoint.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 27

VibeTraining-Bench: Data-Trainer-Harness Co-Design for Iterative System Improvement

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) requires agents to diagnose system bottlenecks and coordinate improvements across training and inference. We refer to the agents' capability to jointly optimize training data, the trainer, and the inference harness as cross-component co-design. We introduce VibeTraining-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating this capability across tasks spanning terminal operation, software engineering, multi-turn tool use, and mathematical reasoning. Within each task, research agents start from an identical initial agent system under a fixed resource budget. Guided by validation feedback, they iteratively refine data, trainers, and inference harnesses, then select and submit a final agent system for evaluation on the test set. To prevent reward hacking, we enforce three safeguards: test data isolation, separate research and grading containers, and network restrictions for research agents. Our evaluation results show that frontier research agents substantially improve target agent systems. For example, on SWE-bench Verified, GPT-6-Astra raises the target agent system's performance from 32.9% to 53.7%, comparable to the human-developed instruct model's 55.4%. However, there is still room to improve their ability to co-design and iteratively refine data, trainer, and harness to achieve cumulative performance gains. We hope that VibeTraining-Bench will serve as a unified platform for advancing RSI, deepening our understanding of cross-component optimization for agent systems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/D2I-ai/VibeTraining-Bench.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 19

VibeVideoBench: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Code-Driven Video Generation

Diffusion video models produce striking clips, but they cannot reliably render an exact formula, a correct chart, a rule-consistent game or narration synchronized to on-screen events. A different route is emerging: multimodal agents that write code to render every frame and synthesize every sound. We introduce VibeVideoBench, a benchmark for evaluating agents on code-driven video generation. Its 239 self-contained tasks in English and Chinese span 12 categories, from data stories and music-driven pieces to classroom lessons and paper explainers; each asks an agent, running in its native harness inside a sandbox with no image or video generation model, to deliver a finished MP4 with sound within one hour. Evaluation is hierarchical and evidence-based: program checks of the delivery spec, about 13k task-specific rubric checks traced to the requirements they enforce, and five quality dimensions anchored per task, scored by three VLM judge panels. Across nine frontier agent systems and 2,151 scored rollouts, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 rank first and second with both the judges and human annotators, and the strongest system satisfies every core requirement on 76.3% of tasks. Delivery is a second axis: counting missing videos as zero changes the ranking, and three quarters of the lost videos are final renders that started too late, ran too slowly or never started, a failure of how agents plan their hour. Agents build their own rendering pipelines and inspect their own frames, yet how much they look does not predict quality. The judges' ranking of the systems closely matches blind human preferences.

  • 24 authors
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Oct 26 2

Training Reasoning Models to Generate Diverse Scientific Ideas

One of the first steps of a research pipeline is generating ideas. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate this step, but most of this work optimizes the quality of individual ideas, while overlooking diversity. In our work, we study document-grounded ideation, focusing on increasing the diversity of LLM generated ideas and ensuring they are high quality. Given prior papers, a model must propose a set of ideas that are each high-quality and clearly distinct from one another, while also being grounded in the input documents. To optimize for this, we propose training with a set-level reinforcement learning objective. In our setup, in a single generation, the model writes K structured idea cards grounded in the source papers, and the set is scored jointly, where each idea's quality is weighted by its distance from the ideas written before it. This teaches the model to steer each new idea away from its predecessors. We show that our trained 8B model achieves higher creative utility (a measure combining quality and diversity) than Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-6 Astra on our contamination-free benchmark. In a pilot human study with four experts, our sets are judged as promising as Claude Opus 4.8's and contain marginally more unique ideas. When a coding agent runs proof-of-concept experiments on the ideas, our model's success@k is comparable to Claude Opus 4.8's, so we see that the added diversity does not cost any executability.

Grounding Generative Verification in 3D Content

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and 3D generation have expanded 3D understanding and synthesis. However, beyond visual fidelity, task-specific correctness grounded in 3D evidence remains a major challenge. We argue that building reliable 3D systems requires not only stronger generation and reasoning, but also verification feedback that identifies unmet requirements and explains their violations, allowing systems to reflect on and refine their outputs. Such feedback must integrate multi-view observations and distinguish genuine inconsistencies from projection-dependent appearances. We make three contributions. First, we introduce 3DVerifierBench, a benchmark spanning 10 tasks that evaluates decisions, rejection explanations, and responses to controlled changes in specifications and candidates. A human study reveals a 21.6 percentage-point gap between humans and the strongest tested model, GPT-6 Astra, while explanation-aware analysis exposes weaknesses in rejection reliability. Second, we analyze verification across fine-grained factual categories, exposing errors in values and target binding. We develop a scalable pipeline combining multi-view fact extraction, controlled 3D editing, and native annotations to produce 14,126 training examples with contradiction explanations and linked counterfactuals. Third, we examine how verification could support 3D generation through candidate selection and recursive refinement. In human-labeled sixteen-candidate pools, oracle selection improves complete factual success from 26.7% to 90.0%. In a separate eight-input study, human-guided recursive refinement satisfies all seven requirements for every input, compared with three under parallel Oracle@8. Together, our benchmark, analysis, and data pipeline establish a foundation for models to reflect on 3D content through reliable verification feedback.

AI-YesLab YesLab
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Oct 14

HARMONY: Hierarchical Agentic Reasoning for MONocular Image-to-Scene Synthesis

Compositional 3D scene reconstruction has recently been explored from two directions: agentic reasoning that provides semantic understanding of spatial relationships but lacks precise alignment with input images; and visual geometry foundation models that predict dense point maps from input images but the reconstruction quality is limited. Therefore, recovering a complete 3D scene from a single monocular image with accurate inter-object relationships and high-fidelity reconstruction quality remains challenging. In this paper, we present HARMONY, a hierarchical chain-of-thought framework that leverages both agentic reasoning and visual geometry foundation. Given an image of an indoor scene, starting from an empty 3D floorplan, HARMONY first calibrates the camera against the reference image to establish a semantically-grounded spatial frame, then uses agentic VLM reasoning to recover the 3D room layout and an initial placement order. It then places the objects in a hierarchical order, from wall-mounted elements, free-standing furniture, to dependent decorations on top of furniture. We also use depth-first traversal for furniture so each placement conditions on previously resolved structure and a reflective feedback loop to avoid error accumulation. After each object placement by VLM, we use the point cloud estimations to perform geometry-based refinement so that the rendered image aligns better with the input. HARMONY can produce 3D scenes that are semantically consistent and perceptually aligned with the reference image, extending single-image compositional reconstruction to complex indoor scene images. Experiments on synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that HARMONY outperforms the evaluated reconstruction baselines, while qualitative comparisons with GPT-6 Astra suggest more faithful object arrangements and better preservation of scene details.

Code4Scene: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Constructing and Editing 3D Scenes

Frontier coding agents can now write and execute code that authors 3D environments, but whether they reliably understand 3D structure and precisely control scene state remains unclear. The generated 3D scene is a persistent, executable artifact: a convincing render can hide incorrect spatial relations, intersecting objects, or unintended modifications. We introduce Code4Scene, a benchmark of 190 Unreal Engine cases built from human-assembled scenes that evaluates coding agents on two complementary settings under a shared execution interface. Construction tests scene-level spatial reasoning from open-ended language specifications, where many realizations are valid; editing tests precise control of scene state, where the agent must recover the target scene from reference images while preserving everything else. Rather than scoring code or rendered views, Code4Scene evaluates the generated engine-native scene for task fulfillment, artifact integrity, and static physical validity, with edits additionally compared against withheld ground truth. Across 14 coding-agent configurations on the 95-case public set, construction and editing performance are strongly correlated but not interchangeable (Spearman ρ= 0.78): Claude Fable 5.1 leads construction, Gemini 3.8 Flash leads editing, and GPT-6 Astra narrowly leads overall. Spatial Composition is the weakest construction category for every agent, while editing remains imprecise: the best Repair F1 is only 0.527, and 35.8% of edits that fully recover the target still introduce unintended changes elsewhere in the scene. These results expose a gap between plausible 3D generation and reliable spatial reasoning and state control.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 28

KlinikeBench: Evaluating Language Models Beyond Diagnostic Accuracy

Most clinical benchmarks evaluate language models (LMs) on diagnosis using complete case descriptions. In clinical practice, however, patients present information in different ways, and clinicians must obtain relevant history and determine which examinations are needed before reaching a diagnosis. Diagnostic accuracy alone therefore cannot establish whether an agent gathered essential information or conducted an appropriate clinical assessment. Furthermore, existing benchmarks lack professional clinicians' verification. To address this gap, we introduce KlinikeBench, a benchmark of 333 clinician-authored tasks, each providing an isolated sandbox environment with a virtual patient, clinical tools, and task-specific success criteria. More than 35 clinicians contributed to case authoring and benchmark evaluation. In an empirical study, clinicians gave simulated dialogues higher mean quality ratings than reference conversations, which is adapted from real conversation. In each task, an LM has a fixed budget of turns to communicate with the patient, ask about relevant history, request examinations, follow action constraints, and record a final diagnosis. We score these steps separately as well as together. Across 31 models and seven model families, the best-performing models (e.g., GPT-6-astra and Claude Opus 5) succeed on less than 30% of tasks, even though their diagnosis accuracy reaches 90.7%. Some models benefit from talking with the patient; others diagnose well from a complete chart but perform much worse in conversation. Overall, KlinikeBench provides a testbed for evaluating the full clinical encounter and reveals a substantial gap between diagnostic accuracy and performance in interactive clinical assessment.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 28

GroundingPI: A Grounding Foundation Model towards Physical Intelligence with Visual Primitives

Precise grounding matters. It specifies which object is the target and where that object is, even in clutter and for tiny objects, and it has to be fast enough for closed-loop control. Yet vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) take perception from general-purpose vision-language and video-generation backbones, which still fail in these settings. We introduce GroundingPI, a 4B grounding foundation model that generates points and boxes as quantized coordinates in a shared vocabulary. Training combines multimodal and spatial pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with GRPO, using supervision from public datasets and dedicated data engines. Against 44 baselines across 34 grounding benchmarks spanning 11 perceptual capabilities, GroundingPI establishes a new state of the art, averaging 73.68%, above the larger GPT-6 Astra (71.54%). As a downstream visual backbone, GroundingPI improves performance on robotic manipulation and autonomous driving. On RoboTwin 2.0, it outperforms every mainstream backbone we evaluate in all four out-of-distribution settings, by up to 24.8% relative to the strongest backbone. On RoboCasa-GR1, GroundingPI trained with 50% of the demonstrations outperforms those baselines trained with 75%. On nuScenes, used as the visual backbone, GroundingPI attains an average open-loop L2 error of 0.296 m. We systematically analyze GroundingPI's pretraining in scale and data composition. Downstream autonomous driving and robotic manipulation improve as the pretraining is scaled. Analyzing the data recipe across these 11 perceptual capabilities shows dense grounding's substantial benefits for both, and OCR's potential as a catalyst for perceptual learning. These results support grounding as a perceptual foundation, and dedicated perceptual pretraining as a promising direction for foundation models of physical intelligence.

XPENG-AI XPENG AI
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Sep 29 2

GroundAnything: Reconciling Parallel Decoding with Precise Visual Grounding at Flash Speed

Autoregressive (AR) grounding models serialize spatial predictions, introducing sequential latency and imposing a causal order on output tokens. We view grounding as visual evidence extraction: objects, locations, and spatial relations are jointly constrained by the image and query, yet their dependencies do not imply an intrinsic left-to-right generation order. This distinction makes bidirectional diffusion a natural fit, allowing spatial hypotheses to emerge in parallel and be jointly refined through iterative denoising. We introduce GroundAnything, a 4B-parameter grounding foundation model that reconciles fast parallel decoding with precise localization through blockwise denoising. Training combines grounding pretraining from public datasets and dedicated data engines, direct AR-to-diffusion conversion with joint AR and diffusion objectives, supervised fine-tuning, and GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. Across 30 grounding benchmarks, our autoregressive variant, GroundAnything-VLM, establishes a new overall state of the art among similarly sized models at 72.42%, remaining competitive with GPT-6 Astra (71.35%). With entropy-guided decoding, GroundAnything also surpasses the prior state of the art at this scale, averaging 61.75% versus 53.32% for the fast MTP-based LocateAnything model. We further explore decoding strategies, showing that an optional self-speculative mode achieves a 4.51times speedup over the AR counterpart with a 0.74 percentage-point drop in COCO F1mIoU. Infrastructure experiments show that progressive inference optimizations translate parallel decoding into practical speedups. These support efficient visual grounding in latency-sensitive real-world systems.

XPENG-AI XPENG AI
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Sep 29 2

Priced Guidance: Can Language Models Generate Future Research Ideas?

We evaluate language models' capability to generate novel research ideas through the lens of compression. We aim to lower-bound the potentially tiny probability that a language model generates the essence of a future research idea without any hints. Rather than estimate this probability through expensive repeated sampling, our Priced Guidance framework measures the compression cost: how many additional bits of information are needed to guide the model to recover the target idea. We prove that if the model can recover the target idea with at most K bits of guidance in expectation, then it can generate the idea without any guidance with probability at least 2^{-K}. In our framework, the language model, called the generator, can pose a sequence of multiple-choice questions and specify a probability distribution over possible answers. A guide, which is a language model with access to the target idea, selects answers. If a selected answer has prior probability p, the generator pays -log_2 p bits. The generator aims to produce an idea that matches the essence of the target idea with minimal cumulative cost. This cumulative cost equals, up to an additive constant, the number of bits of information sent by the guide. Using this methodology, we evaluate five generator LLMs (Opus 5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and GLM 5.3) on the core ideas in 87 recent high-quality deep learning papers and we use LLM as judge to determine whether the generated idea matches the target in terms of the central research object and defining mechanism. Fable 5.1 achieves the lowest median compression cost at 69.9 bits, substantially lower than gzip's median of 5,712 bits for losslessly compressing the summary of the target idea. A uniform ensemble of Fable 5.1, Opus 5, and Astra further reduces the median compression cost to 55.8 bits and improves the generation probability lower bound by 18,000 times.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 3

AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?

An essential control of AI agents is their ability to manage runtime. This ability requires a sense of time-awareness, to predict and estimate wall-clock time and to control their own actions. Prior work has focused on time-awareness, but duration-following and control in native agent harnesses remain unexplored. We present AgentTime, a benchmark for testing whether agents can work for a requested duration, predict their runtime, and estimate elapsed time afterward. It comprises 222 tasks from 18 sources spanning coding, computer use, agentic work, and automated research. Duration-following experiments append a single instruction specifying how long to work, with requests ranging from about a minute to multiple days. Accuracy on these instructions varies substantially: Fable 5.1 in Claude Code deviates from requested runtimes by a typical factor of 2.9times, compared with only 1.2times for GPT-6 Astra in Codex. However, matching the requested runtime does not, by itself, establish continued work on the task. Among 158 reviewed Astra runs with classifiable transcripts, 14 explicitly slept after appearing to finish. In forecasting experiments, predictions tend to overestimate natural runtimes. In retrospective experiments, removing temporal information more than doubles deviation for Sol and Astra and nearly doubles it for Fable. An agent's ability to complete a task does not guarantee that it can control its own time or work for the whole requested duration. For agents to run reliably, safely, and autonomously over long horizons, we require the evaluation of both.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 6

A Closer Look at Agentic BBO: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Black-Box Optimization

Black-box optimization (BBO) arises in many scientific and engineering problems where objective evaluations are expensive and limited. Recent large language model (LLM) agents offer a new way to approach BBO by combining task semantics, computation, optimization tools, and feedback-driven decision making, showing great potential due to the integration with mathematically rigorous tools. However, existing agentic BBO studies use different task domains and system configurations, making their results difficult to compare and the effects of individual design choices hard to isolate. We therefore introduce AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark for agentic BBO spanning synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design under a unified finite-budget evaluation protocol. In our experiments, agentic BBO achieves higher family-averaged scores than direct LLM-based methods in all five domains and outperforms the best numerical optimizers in four. We further study three factors shaping agent performance: optimization tools, task information and prior knowledge, and the role of the LLM during search. Our results show that additional numerical tools do not consistently improve performance, task semantics are broadly useful while more specific priors are less reliable, and numerical optimizers can effectively absorb gains from search trajectories established by the agent. Finally, we introduce a five-task frontier challenge within AgenticBBO-Bench and evaluate seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, where GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lie on the Pareto frontier of performance and cost among the evaluated models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/agentic-bbo.

  • 11 authors
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Oct 7 2

Humanity's Sixth Sense: Benchmarking Intuitive Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Models

Humans perceive far more in a scene than what is explicitly depicted: a single glance captures past causes and future trajectories; a quick peek determines if a vehicle can fit between two parked cars; a few seconds of video reveals who holds authority in a room; and a fleeting clip highlights subtle abstract patterns like unwritten rules or hidden labels. This capacity reflects a form of humanity's sixth sense: an intuitive reasoning mechanism that recovers implicit information beyond raw sensory perception. Crucially, this rapid, zero-shot visual intuition underpins everyday navigation and social interaction, making it a vital capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deployed alongside people. Existing visual benchmarks, however, target either deliberate expert-level analysis in academic and mathematical domains or low-level perception, leaving the intuitive reasoning that people perform largely untested. To bridge this gap, we introduce Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark for intuitive visual reasoning. HSS spans diverse image and video inputs, organizes items under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human-written prompts probing the implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract structure that people infer at a glance. Frontier MLLMs fall short of human performance: participants reach 93.1% accuracy, while the strongest model, GPT-6-astra, reaches only 53.6% even at maximum reasoning effort. Despite excelling in many complex tasks that require advanced perception and knowledge, current models still struggle significantly on these visual tasks that are intuitive for humans. We further explore agentic setup that apply dynamic visual manipulation to HSS, which narrows but does not close the gap. HSS establishes intuitive visual reasoning as a measurable axis and directs attention to a capability that scaling on current benchmarks has so far left behind.

ScaleAI Scale AI
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Oct 7 2

Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards

Long-horizon agents have drawn growing attention for their ability to work autonomously -- from hours to days -- on economically valuable tasks, a capability essential to automated discovery and recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet open-source models still struggle on long-horizon tasks, largely for lack of both training data and a working recipe, and scaling both is hard: long, complex tasks are difficult to curate and verify, and their rewards are sparse. We address both. First, we introduce Tev-Gym, the first long-horizon agent training dataset with verifiable, dense, progressive rewards -- 1,170 verified task environments across 7 domains. It is built on a latent-world-first approach that first constructs a latent world: a complete and correct hidden specification of the task domain, workflow, and expected state after each step. Each task is then progressively rendered from this specification into an agent-facing environment, enabling controllable complexity and a natural progress metric. Second, we turn this metric into a training recipe: via progress-potential reward shaping (PPRS), we convert progress into a dense per-step reward that improves training efficiency and makes otherwise-intractable tasks trainable. Training with this recipe yields Tev-27B, which achieves substantial gains on the Agents' Last Exam computing and math sciences domains (ALE-CM), matching GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5 at Pass@5. Despite training only on ALE-related data, it generalizes to the Terminal-Bench (TB) 3.0 and 4.0 subsets, surpassing GLM 5.2 and Gemini 3.7 Flash, and reaches Claude Opus 4.8-level performance on middle-horizon tasks such as TB 2.1.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 12 3

Doc2Harness: Benchmarking LLMs on Long-Horizon Harness Engineering of Coding Agents

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.

Agent World Model in the Wild: Computer-Use Agent Environment Synthesis

Agent learning is shifting from learning from human data toward learning through interaction with the world. However, scaling such learning directly in real-world computer systems is challenging and can introduce substantial security risks. We therefore propose Agent World Model in the Wild (WildAWM), a scalable pipeline for synthesizing controllable environments and tasks for training general computer-use agents (CUAs). Whereas existing approaches typically specialize in a single agent interaction interface, we construct executable environments that jointly support graphical user interfaces, model context protocol services, and command-line interfaces, allowing agents to flexibly combine visual interaction, tool use, and code execution. WildAWM is entirely powered by open-source models, demonstrating that high-quality computer-use environments can be generated without proprietary frontier models. Beyond environments, we address three recurring challenges in task synthesis: ensuring solvability, maintaining sufficient difficulty, and producing reliable verifiers, by introducing execution-based quality gates that combine heterogeneous agent rollouts, cross-judge consistency checks, and counterfactual probes of judgment robustness. The resulting pipeline synthesizes 341 long-horizon environment-task pairs that can require over 100 agent steps to solve and remain challenging even for frontier models, with GPT-6-Astra solving only 60% of them. We train two Qwen models of different sizes exclusively in these synthetic worlds. Both models achieve substantial gains across 8 out-of-distribution benchmarks spanning web, claw, and computer-use agents, demonstrating that learning in WildAWM's synthesized worlds generalizes broadly to unseen computer-use tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MSR-Orchard/WildAWM.

Small Average Error, Wide Individual Error: General-Purpose LLMs Estimating Energy Intake from Meal Photos in a Feeding Trial

Photo-based estimation of food energy could ease dietary assessment, and general-purpose multimodal large language models (LLMs) make such estimates easy to obtain. Most evaluations use one photo taken before eating and compare with energy served, while dietary assessment needs energy eaten. We evaluated six models from two vendors (Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus 5.5; GPT-6 luna, 6.1 sol and 6 astra) on 802 meals from ACETADA, a controlled feeding trial with weighed intake, with the before photo only, before and after photos in separate calls (subtraction), or both photos in one request. Three results ran against intuition. Subtraction under-estimated intake for five of six models, because the models still report hundreds of kilocalories for a nearly empty tray. Scaling the before-only estimate by the average share eaten (0.87) matched much of the gain from the after photo; beyond that constant, the second photo lowered meal-level error by only 2.2 to 3.4 points, mainly in meals with food left. With one photo, two models had a near-zero intake bias only because they under-estimated the served energy and ignored uneaten food. In ablations, adding the after photo improved accuracy under both prompt formats for five models, while prompt effects varied across models. Over 148 feeding days, three models kept the 90% confidence interval of their mean error within a pre-set 10% margin, but no model reached the pre-set 30% limits of agreement. Protein was under-estimated by every model, most in protein-dense meals; repeated calls changed error by at most 1.4 points; a high reasoning effort helped only the smallest model (4.2 points) and changed the others by less than 1 point. A low average bias is not evidence of accurate individual intake estimation; such estimates should support, not replace, assessment by a dietitian.

  • 1 authors
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Oct 18

RSI Arena: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement with Human Feedback

Can AI agents autonomously train useful language models and improve them using feedback from users? We introduce RSI Arena, a two-stage study of autonomous post-training as a step toward recursive self-improvement. Ten frontier models act as training agents, each starting from NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base. During a six-day first stage, each agent has 1,000 GPU-hours and $300 in API credit on a shared 64-GPU cluster, independently selecting data, implementing training procedures, and choosing checkpoints. We evaluate their models on 20 benchmarks and through blind human evaluations. All ten agents produce working assistants, with the strongest model, trained by GPT-6 Astra, closing a median of 76% of the base-to-Instruct gap across 12 capability benchmarks. Its human-preference rating is also close to NVIDIA Instruct after statistical adjustment for answer length and formatting. In Stage 2, each agent receives the comparison records and votes involving its Stage 1 model and is given three additional days for further training. Using NVIDIA Instruct as a common reference across the two evaluation rounds, we observe an improvement from Stage 1 to Stage 2 in the style-adjusted relative rating of eight of the ten models. We show that benchmark gains were modest, with no clear link to preference gains, while some agents encouraged longer responses and one model showed increased harmful compliance on StrongREJECT. RSI Arena provides an auditable setting for studying how human feedback can guide autonomous model development. It takes a step toward recursive self-improvement with human feedback (RSIHF), in which people help define what improvement means for the AI systems they use.

RSIArena RSI Arena
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Oct 23 2

Evaluating DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 for loss of control and harmful manipulation risks

As frontier language models grow increasingly capable and autonomous, independent third-party evaluations are critical for characterizing their systemic safety risks. While closed-source releases are routinely accompanied by comprehensive system cards, open-weight models receive less scrutiny regarding frontier risks. To address this gap, we present an independent safety evaluation of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017, the latest version of V4.1 Flash that departs from V4 with a new architecture, scaled-up training, and strong agentic capabilities. Drawing on the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, we evaluate the model across 34 benchmarks, including 5 in-house suites, spanning evaluation integrity, loss of control, and harmful manipulation. Conforming to the AEF-1 standard, we compare V4.1 Flash-1017 against V4.1 Flash, earlier DeepSeek V4 models, and leading closed-source systems (GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Gemini 3.8 Flash). Overall, V4.1 Flash-1017 shows substantial safety improvements over the V4 generation and approaches or matches leading closed-source baselines on several dimensions, while still exhibiting notable behaviors that warrant continued attention. Building on our findings, we highlight three key observations and recommendations. First, because safety can shift and even regress across minor updates, developers should integrate safety evaluation into incremental releases. Second, as final-turn outputs and end-state checks alone cannot reliably detect loss-of-control behaviors, deployments require process-level observability across both reasoning traces and action logs. Third, because public benchmarks elicit strong evaluation awareness and face data contamination risks, developing private benchmarks is essential for trustworthy frontier evaluation.

FangcunAI Fangcun AI
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Oct 25 2

NumTrace: Auditing the Number Provenance of Financial Analyst Agents

A numerical claim generated by a financial analyst agent can match a number in a company filing but refer to the wrong entity, concept, period, unit or scope. A check based on reference answers can mark such an answer as wrong but does not explain why it fails. In this paper, we present NumTrace, a new benchmark that audits the provenance of each numerical claim made by financial analyst agents: its source and financial semantics. NumTrace currently has 540 questions over 2,163 SEC EDGAR documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first numerical benchmark about who holds a company's shares (Form 13F) and what its executives are owed (Item 402(i)). On a frozen snapshot of these documents, we build the reference answers according to accounting rules. NumTrace then gives each claim three separate verdicts: value, binding and support. By retaining separate value and binding verdicts, NumTrace detects right number, wrong account (RNWA) errors: a claim has an RNWA error when it passes the value check but fails the binding check. The RNWA rate quantifies the gap between value-only and joint value-and-binding pass rates. Finally, we audit three agents, Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. RNWA errors make up 67.5-81.8% of each agent's failing claims. In particular, on 13F co-filing group questions, about 91% of claims pass the value check, but fewer than half pass the binding check.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 25

HuatuoGPT-3: RL-Only Domain Adaptation from Base Models

Domain adaptation aims to turn a general-purpose large language model (LLM) into an expert for a target domain. While the dominant SFT+RL pipeline offers a convenient cold start, it may reduce exploration diversity and introduces additional complexity through multi-stage optimization. These limitations motivate RL-only adaptation. However, pure on-policy RL suffers from a cold-start problem, while mixed-policy RL still falls short: informative tokens in teacher outputs are learned too slowly in early training, and stale teacher outputs can hinder later improvement. We identify these two failure modes as Gradient Starvation and Teacher-Distribution Anchoring. To address them, we propose One-stage Policy Optimization (OnePO), which treats teacher outputs as transient guidance for policy improvement. OnePO combines Adaptive Objective Evolution to strengthen learning on informative low-probability teacher tokens and Teacher Retirement to discard teacher outputs once the current policy can surpass them. On medical adaptation, OnePO achieves 67.2 on HealthBench (Total) with only 20K training samples, outperforming SFT+RL and pure RL by 2.7 and 7.4 points, respectively. We further scale OnePO to produce HuatuoGPT-3, an open-source medical LLM series whose 27B variant reaches 70.1 on HealthBench (Total) and 71.4 on HealthBench Professional, surpassing frontier models such as GPT-6 Astra. Models and code are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/HuatuoGPT-3.

OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal Memory

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retained across reasoning steps. We introduce OpenVLHarness, a multimodal reasoning harness organized around a capability layer and persistent multimodal memory. The capability layer combines task-level tool interfaces with evidence rendering, providing consistent access to heterogeneous backends and converting their outputs into model-readable observations. Persistent multimodal memory retains the corresponding images, structured data, and web references as addressable artifacts throughout each query. A coding interface executes generated programs over stored data, enabling computations that combine results from multiple tools. Together, these mechanisms support an iterative process of acquiring, inspecting, and composing multimodal evidence. Evaluated on 22 benchmarks with eight open and proprietary backbones, OpenVLHarness improves average scores by 9.7-12.6 points over matched no-tool baselines, including +11.2 with Qwen3-VL-8B, +9.7 with Kimi K3, and +9.9 with GPT-6 Astra. With GPT-6 Luna at medium reasoning effort, OpenVLHarness outperforms the base model, Codex, and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort by 7.7-8.5 points while incurring at most 37% of their model-token cost.

apple Apple
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Oct 18 1

Strike a Chord! Modal Kinetic Typography

We introduce modal kinetic typography, which animates a vector glyph to express a semantic concept while keeping it legible. Our key idea is to build motion from the glyph's natural vibration modes. Specifically, a finite-element eigenproblem assembled from the vector outline yields the glyph's softest modes, for the whole letter and for each of its parts, allowing it to bend. The problem's zero-energy solutions, i.e., rigid translations and rotations, are applied in closed form to each part, allowing parts to also move as blocks. To animate the glyph, a frozen video diffusion model supervises only the modes' amplitudes and phases. Our modal approach addresses two weaknesses of prior work. Free-form point optimization under video score distillation (SDS) moves each point and frame independently along noisy gradients, tearing the outline and causing jitter. In contrast, our modes are smooth along the outline and driven by a few whole-cycle harmonics, which restricts these gradients to smooth, seamlessly looping motion. On the other hand, structured alternatives rely on skeletons or keypoints from category-specific priors, whereas our modes come from the glyph itself; the only prior is a list naming each letter's moving parts, generated once for the whole alphabet by a language model. In modal kinetic typography, shape and motion are disentangled by construction: a single base outline is sculpted toward the concept, and the modal drive cannot alter it, so a letter can also be animated without being reshaped. Our method produces more articulated and smoother motion than Dynamic Typography and AniClipart at comparable or better concept alignment, with less glyph tearing than Dynamic Typography, and is preferred by human raters, including in a frozen-shape setting where motion alone must carry the concept. Our results were also preferred over Astra (GPT-6) by human raters.

  • 4 authors
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Sep 28 2