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Drift-Constrained Optimization: Only Direction Matters in Fine-Tuning Instruct Models

Drift-Constrained Optimization reformulates fine-tuning as update-direction selection, letting Qwen3 models improve target tasks within a behavioral drift budget.

The paper specifies a behavioral drift budget before optimization and shows that update direction is the remaining degree of freedom, reformulating fine-tuning as a direction-selection problem. In a stringent QA-only setting where instruct models must still generate multi-step reasoning at inference, a coarse layer-selective probe reverses the failure of QA-only fine-tuning. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, these directions substantially improve scientific reasoning and multilingual translation, matching or outperforming dedicated translation systems over 100+ languages and giving stronger initialization for reinforcement learning.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI research2

Generalized Agent Iteration: One Formal Framework for Iterative Policy Improvement and Recursive Self-Improvement

Generalized Agent Iteration formally unifies iterative policy improvement and recursive self-improvement, defining axes that distinguish anchored, goal-drifting, and self-referential agents.

The paper proposes Generalized Agent Iteration (GAI), a formal framework that models learning as a cycle of agent evaluation and agent improvement, defining the agent as a configuration of modifiable components. Two dials—whether the improving mechanism is part of the agent and whether the evaluation standard is grounded outside it—separate generalized policy iteration (GPI) from recursive self-improvement (RSI) and classify systems as anchored, goal drift, or fully self-referential. The framework places existing systems on shared axes and makes defects of recursive self-improvement statable one condition at a time.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research1

T1: Terminal Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks

T1, a 122B MoE terminal agent trained with reinforcement learning, reaches 64.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, surpassing GPT-5.4 and GLM-5.1 on long-horizon tasks.

T1 is a 122B mixture-of-experts model trained with reinforcement learning to operate a real shell in a cloud sandbox for up to 300+ tool-call turns per task, rewarded by executing each task's own verifier. The recipe combines aggressive warm starts, dense process rewards, TITO construction, and rollout routing replay, cutting the training-to-inference log-probability difference from 0.021 to 0.013 with zero token drift. Training used an out-of-distribution corpus disjoint from Terminal-Bench 2.1. Post-training raised the base model from 43.8% to 64.0% resolved on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 27.9% on Long-Horizon Terminal Bench.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

LynnReal-Omni: Native multi-modal Video Generation for Agentic Visual Workflows

LynnReal-Omni unifies controllable video generation tasks in a 32B multimodal diffusion transformer, with a 27B Flash variant rendering 540p clips in 377 ms.

LynnReal-Omni is a native multimodal video generation framework built on a 32B shared multimodal diffusion transformer unifying text-to-video, image-conditioned generation, reference guidance, structural control, editing, restoration and long-video generation, accepting heterogeneous inputs like 3D renders and game recordings for agentic visual workflows. A dedicated 27B Flash model enables real-time rendering, producing a 22-frame 540p video in 377 ms on one H100 versus 843 ms for the full model. The work introduces a curated multi-shot audiovisual data pipeline and MSAVP, a 100-prompt, 20-metric evaluation design covering instruction following, plausibility, visual quality, temporal behavior and audio coordination.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

Training Specialist Models without Reasoning Trajectories for Domain Expert Distillation

Study shows specialists trained on question-answer pairs implicitly select latent reasoning trajectories, and tuning choices control the precision-generalization trade-off in distillation.

The work demonstrates that specialist optimization implicitly selects from a latent trajectory space when specialists are trained only on question-answer pairs without explicit reasoning supervision. Using student distillation as an agnostic probe across 27 specialist-student pairings, specialization-generalization profiles correlate exceptionally strongly. Explicitly controlling the specialist's distributional drift systematically shifts both teacher and distilled student along a controllable trade-off between domain precision and general-capability retention across chemistry, physics, and multilingual settings, even across divergent model families.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

MOONWALK: Mediating Operations with Intent-Evidence-Action Alignment Across Junior-Supervisor Review Workflows in Animation/VFX Pre-Production

MOONWALK introduces an intent-evidence-action alignment workflow for animation/VFX reviews where AI handles administrative coordination while artists keep creative authority.

MOONWALK is a pre-production review system that articulates creative intent into a shared project record, anchors review judgments to grounded evidence, and converts authorized decisions into concrete revision tasks. AI components handle administrative coordination such as flagging missing context and organizing notes, not creative direction. An in-studio study against a chat-only AI interface showed stronger intent alignment, decision traceability, and checklist executability.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Entropy-Regularized Rank-Masked Policy Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning in Code Generation

Researchers propose ERPO, enabling test-time reinforcement learning for code generation via probe-executed consensus rewards, rank masking, and entropy regularization.

The paper introduces probe-driven test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) for code generation, where output-free probe inputs are constructed from problem statements and candidate programs are executed on them to compute a Probe Consensus Reward (PCR). Because PCR can be gamed through spurious consensus, the authors propose Entropy-Regularized Rank-Masked Policy Optimization (ERPO), which turns low-PCR outcomes into conservative negative updates via rank masking and constrains policy drift with an entropy ceiling. On coding benchmarks, ERPO substantially improves pass@1 and pass@k in both in-domain adaptation and zero-shot transfer.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

Controlled mid-training experiments on Qwen3-8B-Base find each domain has a 10-40% coverage optimum and domain gaps survive alignment SFT.

Using Qwen3-8B-Base (with a 4B replication) across five semantically rule-disjoint KOR-Bench domains, the authors train 30 data allocations spanning the five-domain simplex at five seeds each. All five domains show interior optima in the moderate 10-40% coverage band, and domain gaps persist after a fixed-budget compensatory SFT pass, which raises 116/120 cells yet bridges 0/240 pairs at a 5% threshold. Zero coverage collapses mid-training-only accuracy, though a FineWeb-Edu-only control shows the collapse is partly generic drift. The results argue mid-training data composition requires principled design rather than reliance on later alignment.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

CosmoH2G: A Hand-to-Gripper Transfer Dataset and Baseline Method for Object Manipulation with Complex Spatial Movements

Researchers release CosmoH2G, a 6,189-episode hand-to-gripper dataset with a two-stage method for complex spatial robot manipulation.

The paper introduces a scalable acquisition pipeline using a handheld gripper to collect paired hand-gripper demonstrations, producing 6,189 episodes across 1,254 unique objects with higher spatial complexity than existing benchmarks. A two-stage framework first predicts sparse gripper keyframes (initial and terminal), then generates the full continuous action sequence conditioned on them, while learning gripper orientation and post-optimizing translation via grasping heuristics and kinematic consistency. Simulation and real-robot experiments show stable, precise hand-to-gripper transfer of complex spatial manipulations, outperforming traditional baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 11d agoAI research

Online Change-point Detection for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Researchers propose Patterns of Past Rewards (PPR), a lightweight reward-based detector that flags environment shifts in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning training.

The paper introduces Patterns of Past Rewards (PPR), an algorithm-agnostic detector that smooths cooperative agents' return streams and applies statistical drift testing to flag environment or task changes. Evaluation in a custom Speaker-Listener environment built on the Multi-Agent Particle Environment under two non-stationarity scenarios shows PPR balances detection speed against alarm stability. It avoids the repeated alarms of a smoothed-return baseline and the missed shifts of raw-return detection, enabling MARL systems to reliably identify major changes during training.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research1

Learning 3D Editing without Paired Supervision via Generative Prior Distillation

New framework distills 2D editing and VLM priors into a feed-forward 3D editing model without paired 3D training data.

The method, PriorEdit3D, learns feed-forward instruction-guided 3D editing by distilling knowledge from foundation models instead of using ground-truth 3D pairs. Through a differentiable rendering pipeline it supervises a 2D visual prior from an image editing model at the main view and a Vision-Language Model semantic prior at novel views for instruction fidelity and identity preservation. A 3D-aware Distribution Matching regularization constrains outputs to the manifold of realistic 3D assets defined by a pretrained image-to-3D teacher. Experiments report superior instruction fidelity and cross-view consistency over state-of-the-art baselines, with code released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

AdaptVPR: Route-Aware Hard Positive Generation for Robust Visual Place Recognition

AdaptVPR generates route-aware synthetic hard positives for visual place recognition, releasing the 160K-image AdaptCities dataset with R@1 gains up to 9.2% under domain shift.

AdaptVPR is a generative augmentation framework that creates same-place hard positives under illumination, weather, seasonal, and dynamic-occlusion shifts for robust visual place recognition training. A vision-language model parses scene attributes and estimates editability, while a rule-based scheduler routes generation through global appearance, local occlusion, or dual perturbation routes with geometric-consistency verification. The resulting AdaptCities dataset contains 160K verified synthetic hard positives, and experiments show R@1 gains up to 9.2% across VPR baselines and backbones. Code and data are publicly released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

ENEAS: Embedding-guided Neural Ensemble for Adaptive Segmentation

ENEAS adds text prompting and semantic verification to video segmentation to keep tracking targets through occlusion and reject lookalike distractors.

ENEAS is a unified text-promptable method for instance tracking and open-concept semantic discovery in video, designed to fix temporal hallucinations, spatial fragmentation, and semantic misclassification seen in SAM 3-class foundation models. It extends the geometrically robust SeC architecture with a text-prompting adapter and temporal memory, and uses a verification layer combining fast visual embedding matching with conditional VLM refinement for ambiguous candidates. It targets 3D reconstruction pipelines where a single misclassified distractor corrupts the asset. Code and models are open-sourced.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

Bilevel Coordinated Reflection: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Paper models multi-agent LLM orchestration as a bilevel game, proving transcript-only gating limits and introducing grounded-memory SRMA.

A new paper frames orchestrator-worker coordination in multi-agent LLM systems as a bilevel coordination game and analyzes free-form reflection as stochastic movement over semantic memory states, deriving finite-time bounds and an information-theoretic impossibility result: no gate observing only the generated transcript can uniformly improve over text-indistinguishable environments, while an environment-grounded gate can. The authors propose Stochastic Reflective Memory Ascent (SRMA), which accepts candidate memory only when grounded evaluation risk strictly decreases, with geometric or polynomial convergence guarantees. On 500 SWE-bench instances, a Kimi-based instantiation of the full system resolves 72.2% versus a 70.8% public mini-SWE-agent reference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research1