Search: “spatial-computing”

Apple Rolls Out Massive Security Update Fixing 273 Vulnerabilities Across Its Devices

Apple's coordinated rollout patches 273 unique vulnerabilities across iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS and Safari, including remote code execution flaws.

Apple shipped one of its largest coordinated security updates on September 14, 2026, fixing 273 unique CVEs across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, visionOS 27, Safari 27 and Xcode 27. Highlights include CVE-2026-65414, a Bluetooth out-of-bounds write enabling remote code execution, and CVE-2026-84607, an AVEVideoEncoder race condition granting kernel privileges to sandboxed apps. macOS Golden Gate 27 covers the broadest set with 210 CVEs, and Apple states none of the flaws were exploited in the wild.

Cyber Security News·Sep 15, 15:51 UTC · 19h agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-65414CVE-2026-84607CVE-2026-64752+7 CVEs1

SpatialBlock: Enhancing Spatial Intelligence in LVLMs via Synthetic Block-Stacking Problem

Researchers release SpatialBlock-15k, a synthetic block-stacking dataset that improves 3D spatial reasoning in large vision-language models without dense geometric annotations.

The paper addresses limited spatial intelligence in LVLMs by training on structured block-manipulation tasks instead of costly real-scene annotated datasets. SpatialBlock-15k contains 15,000 synthetic problems covering 3D-to-2D projection, viewpoint transformation, and structural combination, with color modulation as visual cues. LVLMs trained on it via direct answering or reasoning-based prediction outperform baselines and generalize to real-world spatial tasks. Code and data are released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Unfold The World: Factorize 4D Properties in Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning

FactoSR factorizes 4D spatial reasoning into XY, Z, and T reinforcement-learning sub-objectives, boosting VLM performance on VSI-Bench by 5.9% and All-Angles-Bench by 4.5%.

Researchers present FactoSR, a factorized reinforcement learning framework that decomposes world-consistent reasoning into planar correspondence, depth consistency, and temporal reversibility sub-objectives. Optimizing these verifiable constraints turns the ill-posed projection recovery problem into tangible reasoning steps. Evaluations show gains of 5.9% on VSI-Bench and 4.5% on All-Angles-Bench for 3D and 4D reasoning, arguing VLMs' spatial bottleneck stems from training on 2D projections versus latent 3D geometry and temporal continuity.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

GPT-6 Astra appears to show a "step change" in spatial reasoning based on early benchmarks

Early StationeryBench robotics results show OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra far ahead of Ai2's MolmoAct2 at dual-arm manipulation, completing 7 of 100 tasks versus zero.

A new robotics benchmark called StationeryBench tested OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra against Ai2's MolmoAct2 on five desk-object tasks using identical dual-arm YAM robots over 200 trials. Astra fully completed 7 of 100 tasks with a median progress score of 46 out of 100, while MolmoAct2 completed zero with a median score of 12. Cornell and Google DeepMind researcher Yoav Artzi called the result a 'step change in spatial reasoning' and noted Astra approaches human-level accuracy on the unpublished REMAP benchmark. He speculated OpenAI trained the model on large amounts of 3D data such as Blender scenes, and OpenAI reportedly plans consumer robots.

The Decoder·Sep 12, 14:26 UTC · 3d agoAI industry1

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·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Researchers introduce Procedural Graphs, self-evolving (procedure, relation, procedure) structures guiding LLM agent tool use and planning.

Procedural Graphs organize procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets to guide LLM agent actions, addressing drift such as lost objectives, out-of-order tool calls, and repeated unproductive steps. At each decision step the framework localizes the active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level situational guidance. An LLM refiner edits graph topology by contrasting failed with successful trajectories, and across datasets, task types and LLMs the approach outperforms memory-based baselines and matches or surpasses hand-designed graphs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:59 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers present TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling humanoid robots to traverse cluttered spaces from language instructions.

TANGO predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions from egocentric RGB observations and natural-language instructions for whole-body humanoid navigation, going beyond 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation using global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. The model reports state-of-the-art simulation performance and was deployed zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation training data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:59 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 28, 20:00 UTC · 18d agoAI research

Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs

RCWM reconstructs complex 3D worlds as executable code from a single image using recursive scene programs with global-local-global solver recursion.

The paper introduces Recursive Code World Models, coupling a Recursive Scene Program representation with a recursive construction solver for image-to-3D-world reconstruction. Each solver call establishes the whole scene, recursively reconstructs unresolved parts, and revisits the whole to refine composition, while a vision-language coding agent compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement. RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods, and ablations show deeper recursive calls improve fine-scale reconstruction.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers introduce TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling zero-shot language-guided humanoid navigation on the Unitree G1 robot.

TANGO addresses humanoid navigation in cluttered indoor environments by predicting 29-DoF joint-space actions directly from natural-language instructions and egocentric RGB, rather than 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation via a pipeline combining global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. In simulation it achieves state-of-the-art vision-language navigation performance and transfers zero-shot to a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation data.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM Agents

Procedural Graph framework stores procedural knowledge as triplets and self-evolves via LLM refinement, beating memory-based baselines across datasets, tasks, and LLMs.

The Procedural Graph organizes procedural knowledge into (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets; at each decision step the framework localizes the agent's active node and a guidance model translates the surrounding subgraph into step-level guidance that biases the solver's next action. An LLM refiner contrasts failed with successful trajectories and edits the graph's topology and attributes, retaining rejected edits to discourage repetition. Starting from a minimal skeleton, the loop builds graphs that match or surpass hand-designed ones and can repair flawed expert priors, delivering consistent gains over memory-based baselines across multiple datasets, task types, and LLMs.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

SceneMosaic: Efficient and Diverse Simulation-Ready Scene Generation via Hybrid Agentic Layout Evolution

SceneMosaic combines image-based 3D priors with VLM agent refinement to generate diverse, simulation-ready indoor scenes 24x faster than agentic baselines.

SceneMosaic is a hybrid framework that takes an initial candidate from a learned image-to-3D prior and evolves it with VLM agents for efficiency and physical validity. It decomposes scenes into independent local units, evolves each separately, and composes the global scene via Cartesian product. On SceneEval-100 it matches the strongest agentic baseline in semantic layout quality with a 24x speedup, substantially reduces physical violations, and receives the highest human ratings. Code is publicly available.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory benchmark with 280 task variants showing current VLA models struggle with spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, covering fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It spans 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments and diverse scenes. Diagnostic metrics go beyond binary success rates, and experiments show current VLA models struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

RoboSPA: Can VLA Models Go Beyond Simple Scenes and Short-Horizon Tasks?

RoboSPA introduces a 527K-trajectory robotic benchmark with 280 task variants exposing VLA model weaknesses in spatial reasoning and long-horizon planning.

RoboSPA is a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset and benchmark for diagnosing embodied reasoning in vision-language-action models, spanning fine-grained spatial reasoning and long-horizon procedural planning. It covers 10 task categories and 56 base tasks instantiated across five difficulty levels for 280 variants, with 527K trajectories collected across multiple embodiments. Experiments on representative VLA models show current systems struggle with complex spatial relations, precise low-level execution, and memory-intensive planning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:19 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Studying Without a Syllabus: Task-Agnostic Environment Preprocessing

Paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where agents study unfamiliar environments under a budget to build reusable artifacts for a frozen solver.

The paper formalizes task-agnostic environment preprocessing, where a studying system explores an environment under a budget and produces artifacts like indices, scripts, or procedural guidance for a frozen solver, without task examples or evaluation feedback. The authors compare unaided and archive-equipped meta-agents against fixed synthetic-practice and corpus-processing methods across six heterogeneous benchmarks. A meta-agent variant achieves the highest Avg@3 reward on five benchmarks, while fixed corpus processing remains best on the largest corpus benchmark. Studied artifacts reduce the test-time sampling needed to reach a given score, shifting computation from repeated test-time attempts to a pre-task study phase.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

JarvisGUI: Towards Cross-Device GUI Agents with Dynamic Task Composition

JarvisGUI benchmark tests GUI agents on cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu, revealing major gaps in state transfer and long-horizon reasoning.

JarvisGUI is a dynamic benchmark that formulates GUI tasks as input-output transformations under a lightweight type system, automatically composing multi-step cross-device workflows across Android, Windows, and Ubuntu virtual environments. Evaluation shows state-of-the-art open-source GUI agents struggle with state-transfer awareness, cross-platform contextual reasoning, and long-horizon dependency management, exposing a capability gap invisible to existing single-device benchmarks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:59 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

TRACE: Trajectory-robust Admission with Evidence Ordering for Efficient GUI Agents

TRACE, a training-free visual token pruning framework, cuts GUI agent inference latency and memory while keeping trajectory-wide visual evidence reusable.

TRACE is a training-free framework for trajectory-robust admission and coverage-aware evidence ordering that prunes high-resolution screenshot tokens accumulated in GUI agent trajectories. It ranks visual evidence using a query-independent layout-derived interaction prior combined with instruction relevance and feature novelty, and reserves part of the budget for native tokens distributed across the screen to repair spatial coverage. A monotone KV contraction incrementally compresses retired frames into compact session state, avoiding repeated visual encoding or pruning. Experiments across six GUI benchmarks and diverse models verify effectiveness under tight budgets, with source code to be released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation

TransNormal-2 improves monocular surface-normal estimation by fixing VAE edge degradation with geometry-aware losses and refinement, matching MoGe-2 with 1.4% of annotations.

TransNormal-2 is a FLUX.2-based rectified-flow framework for monocular surface-normal estimation with single-step deterministic inference. The authors quantify that VAE 8x spatial compression introduces 1.3-8.5 degrees of mean angular error even on ground-truth normals, with edge error up to 2.8x the global error. The method adds geometry-aware pixel-space losses and an RGB-guided Geometric Refinement Module to correct boundary-localized decoding errors. It matches or exceeds MoGe-2 on all eight reported metrics using only 1.4% as many task-specific annotations, and cuts transparent-object MAE by 4.2 degrees on ClearGrasp and 3.1 degrees on ClearPose.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Memory as Plans: World-Action Modeling with Memory-Grounded Planning

Researchers introduce MaP-WAM, decomposing memory-dependent robot manipulation into memory-grounded planning and plan-conditioned execution, achieving 83.3% on RMBench and 78% on real robots.

MaP-WAM converts long-term multimodal episodic memory — segment records with language instructions and sparse visual context — into compact plans of next-segment language goals and visual guidance. A World-Action-Progress model jointly predicts action chunks and execution progress, calibrating predictions via plan-observation alignment for adaptive segment transitions and closed-loop context updates. Structured attention keeps the executor context length fixed and enables key-value caching, yielding state-of-the-art 83.3% success on RMBench, 78.0% on real-robot tasks, and roughly constant inference latency as task history grows.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

Stellar Colosseum: A Many-Agent Harness for Long-Horizon Research in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science

Stellar Colosseum, a many-agent harness for long-horizon math and TCS research, solves open problems and reaches 71% on TCS-Bench with Gemini models.

Stellar Colosseum is a model-agnostic harness that allocates inference across long-horizon research in mathematics and theoretical computer science, using strategy exploration, a readiness gate, section-level decomposition, and verifier feedback routing. Integrated into Google Antigravity's Teamwork framework as the Long Proof pattern, it obtains new results on open problems from FOCS and JMLR papers using Gemini 3.1 Pro. On TCS-Bench it achieves 71.0% accuracy with Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 3.7 Flash, and a Codeforces evaluation with Gemini 3.1 Pro solves 218 of 222 problems.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:58 UTC · 1d agoAI research

MetroLLM-Bench: Evaluating Language Models as Transit Kiosk Runtimes

MetroLLM-Bench is a 955-case benchmark testing language models as transit kiosk tool-calling runtimes across six real metro systems.

The benchmark covers 37-414-station metro systems and eleven task categories including routing, fare calculation, disruptions, accessibility, and adversarial input, with 14 deterministic and 8 semantic scoring components. Of 26 models from six vendors, a PEFT-tuned 4B Qwen 3.5 student scored 91.3 on Tier 1, exceeding GPT-5.6 (90.6/90.0), while Muse Glimmer 30B led the composite ranking. A deterministic rule-based baseline reached 84.6, and PEFT gains over base models shrank from +7.03 points at 2B to -0.91 at 27B.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?

MindTopo benchmark with 11,030 topological tasks shows 14 multimodal LLMs reason better than they plan and remain far below human performance.

MindTopo is a benchmark of topological intuition across five properties grounded in cognitive science and formal topology: continuity, separation, order, enclosure, and knots, evaluated at reasoning and closed-loop planning levels. It contains 11,030 instances across 13 procedurally generated task types with controllable difficulty, benchmarking 14 multimodal LLMs plus agent configurations using image and video generation, including three video generative models. Every MLLM performs better on reasoning than on planning, and the best-performing model remains far below observed human performance. On Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct, supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improve reasoning more than planning, and audited generated rollouts often fail to follow environment dynamics or preserve topology across transitions.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:54 UTC · 5d agoAI research

3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis

Researchers propose 3DPS, a differentiable point renderer for mmWave radar novel view synthesis that outperforms optical-NVS baselines by 1.7x-5.2x.

The paper introduces 3D Point Splatting (3DPS), the first differentiable point renderer for radar, derived from the solid-angle form of the radar equation with ITU-R P.2040 material models and complex phasor splatting. On six outdoor ColoRadar scenes it reaches 0.587 mean Pearson correlation on held-out range-azimuth images, between 1.7x and 5.2x the RadarSplat, Radar Fields, and DART baselines. The same optimized scene produces ADC, complex range profile, and RA outputs via standard FFT pipelines, and training takes about 3 minutes per scene on an RTX 4090.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:52 UTC · 5d agoAI research

Diffusion TV: Experiencing Diffusion Models through Tangible, Embodied Interaction

Researchers present Diffusion TV, a CRT-based installation where antenna manipulation lets audiences physically experience diffusion model denoising.

Diffusion TV is an interactive installation built around a modified CRT television where turning the antenna controls the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, mirroring the denoising process of diffusion models. Three channels present AI-generated animals from the past, present, and future within a temporal and ecological narrative. The authors frame the work as an embodied, non-verbal alternative to explainable AI that highlights intermediate generative states rather than final outputs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:51 UTC · 11d 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·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

CodeTD: Topology of Attention Detects Hallucinations in Code LLMs

CodeTD detects hallucinations in code LLMs before execution by analyzing topological patterns of attention maps, outperforming recent baselines.

CodeTD applies topological data analysis (TDA) to code LLM attention maps to quantify prompt-generation mismatch as a pre-execution correctness signal. Experiments cover HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and MultiPL-E across 5 programming languages and 10 code LLMs up to 34B parameters. The method outperforms recent baselines and transfers between coding benchmarks, helping catch code that fails the task or embeds security vulnerabilities.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:26 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

FOMO in the SOC: Where AI Platforms like Claude Actually Fit

The Hacker News·Aug 3, 11:30 UTC · Aug 3, 2026Malware

Pelican-Sim 1.0: A General World Model Simulator for Embodied Intelligence

Pelican-Sim 1.0 predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions; four-step autoregressive rollouts yield 5.67x speedup and raise policy success from 70% to 93%.

Pelican-Sim 1.0 is a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions using a 28-dimensional unified action space valid across heterogeneous embodiments. Sparse mixture-of-experts layers reduce FVD by 6.530 versus the dense backbone, and causal adaptation with few-step distillation yields a four-step autoregressive simulator achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Trained on roughly one million real-world and simulated trajectories, PSNR improves over the strongest baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin. Downstream on RoboTwin, adding 500 generated trajectories to 50 demonstrations per task raises policy success from 70% to 93%, and policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

PhysStream: Streaming Physics-Grounded Video Generation with Structured Scene Memory and Fine-Grained Motion Control

PhysStream enables mid-generation interactive control of physics-grounded video via structured scene memory and velocity-increment signals, reducing motion distribution distance 33%.

PhysStream is an autoregressive physics-grounded image-to-video model that maintains structured scene memory—positional maps and object tracking maps derived online from previously generated frames—and accepts fine-grained motion control via sparse velocity-increment signals encoding physical quantities. Training runs in two stages: a bidirectional model finetuned with motion-control conditioning, then a causal autoregressive model with structured scene memory. It supports interactive mid-generation control over multi-object tabletop rigid-body scenes, reducing motion distribution distance (FVMD) by 33% and trajectory error by 12% over the strongest baselines. Human evaluators preferred it in over 85% of in-the-wild comparisons.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 15, 17:55 UTC · 17h ago·first Sep 14, 20:00 UTC · 1d agoAI research 2 sources

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

FreeFlow is a bias-free hierarchical transformer achieving state-of-the-art optical flow results on Sintel, KITTI-2015, and Spring benchmarks.

FreeFlow replaces task-specific inductive biases like correlation volumes and iterative warping with a single feed-forward encoder-decoder combining window, shifted-window, and reduced-resolution global attention. It reaches 0.68/1.48 EPE on Sintel Clean/Final, 3.23 Fl-all on KITTI-2015, and 3.192 1px on Spring. The architecture scales consistently from small to large variants and remains memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

Introducing @huggingface/kernels: 200+ WebGPU Kernels for Local AI

Hugging Face released @huggingface/kernels, a library offering 200+ WebGPU compute kernels to accelerate AI inference locally in browsers.

Hugging Face introduced the @huggingface/kernels package, bundling more than 200 optimized WebGPU compute kernels for running AI workloads locally. The release targets browser-based and on-device inference, reducing reliance on server-side compute. No article body was available beyond the title, so benchmark results and supported models are not specified.

Hugging Face Blog·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoAI tools & infra