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Mind2Dialogue: Training Human-Aware Language Models by Simulating User Mental States

Mind2Dialogue simulates users' mental states to generate privileged supervision, boosting personalization and preference-following in Qwen, Llama, and OLMo assistants.

The Mind2Dialogue framework uses a psychology-guided simulator that preserves personal characteristics while updating user mental states through interaction, driving coherent conversations and an Oracle assistant's responses. Privileged distillation trains models on the Oracle's well-informed responses so they can assist users without direct access to mental states at deployment. Training on the full corpus improves every reported personalization metric over Qwen, Llama, and OLMo instruction-tuned baselines, including 26.6 to 40.9 percentage point gains in preference-following generation.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 2d agofirst · 3d agoAI research 2 sources

Learning to Coach for Experiential Learning

Learning to Coach trains a dedicated LLM coach to extract transferable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor's trajectories, beating self-refinement.

Learning to Coach (L2C) trains an LLM-as-a-Coach to extract actionable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor model's previous solution trajectories, optimizing rewards based on the actor's guided response correctness. It studies same-instance and cross-instance rewards, where cross-instance elicits knowledge that transfers to other problems. Across mathematical reasoning and interactive text-games, L2C outperforms self-refinement and untrained coaches, scales better with extra inference iterations than larger decoding budgets, and transfers to out-of-distribution tasks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.

The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

Environments as Scaffold: Enriching Feedback to Bootstrap Self-Evolving Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks

Researchers propose Feedback-Enriched Environments (FEEs) that reduce reward sparsity and improve RL training of Qwen3-based agents on SciWorld and BFCL.

The paper proposes shifting from agent-side warmup (SFT) to environment-side adaptation via Feedback-Enriched Environments to address severe reward sparsity in RL training of long-horizon LLM agents. A pilot study defines a feedback strategy that transitions from action guidance to observation enrichment in later training stages. Large-scale experiments on SciWorld and BFCL across Qwen3 model scales and GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO show consistent gains, plus stabilized training dynamics and proactive exploration.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics

Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.

The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.

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

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal injects teacher reasoning traces into diffusion canvases during curriculum RL, improving diffusion LLMs on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2.

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework for diffusion language models that addresses exploration bottlenecks in standard RL. It warm-starts exploration by injecting teacher-generated reasoning traces into the initial diffusion canvas, then gradually removes this guidance so the model generates reasoning trajectories independently. Across mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, it improves over standard diffu-GRPO on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2 and accelerates reward improvement, though gains are task-dependent.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

Forgetting Only What Matters: Layer-Selective Unlearning toward Robust LLMs

Researchers introduce FOM-UL, a layer-selective machine unlearning framework that improves forgetting-utility trade-offs and resists knowledge recovery after quantization.

FOM-UL selects transformer layers for unlearning using a forget-to-retain significance score, concentrating parameter updates on layers highly influential for the forget set while leaving most of the model unchanged. It reduces residual memorization versus GA, NPO, KLD, SURE, ReLearn, and LUNAR-based baselines on TOFU, KnowUnDo, and MUSE-style evaluations while preserving retain-set utility. Under 8-bit and 4-bit post-training quantization and adversarial prompts, it maintains stronger suppression of forgotten content, addressing brittleness of diffuse unlearning updates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities

Controlled experiments show few-shot in-context learning emerges across six modalities including language, genomes, images, and proteins, partially supporting a convergence hypothesis.

The paper tests the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis: that few-shot in-context learning, when it emerges, shares a common cross-modality difficulty profile. A controlled framework instantiated the same task suite across six modalities: language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins. Paired-mapping ICL emerged in all six modalities, surpassed controlled baselines, and showed correlated per-task effects in five of them, providing partial support for the hypothesis.

Hugging Face daily papers · 5d agoAI research

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous UAV Exploration in Wildfire Response

Researchers trained multi-agent deep reinforcement learning UAV agents for autonomous wildfire monitoring, with converging policies tracking fire boundaries in simulation.

The study develops a deep reinforcement learning framework for training UAV agents to navigate and monitor simulated wildfire environments. Agents showed increasingly stable and effective behavior over time, evidenced by converging loss trends, improved rewards, and consistent navigation patterns such as fire-boundary tracking. The findings highlight DRL-based UAV potential for autonomous wildfire monitoring and show that environmental structure and reward design influence policy effectiveness.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Ambient @ EgoProactive 2026 : Proactive Egocentric Assistance with Visually Grounded Supervision

ECCV 2026 challenge winner reformulates egocentric intervention timing as single-token classification, boosting macro-F1 by 0.249 over free-form generation.

The paper describes the winning submission to the EgoProactive track of the ECCV 2026 Wearable AI Challenge, ranking first in the large-model division and second in the <=2B division. The method reformulates intervention timing as single-token yes/no classification, improving macro-F1 by 0.249 and G-mean by 0.30 over free-form generation. Supervision generated by a tool-calling video agent transferred better than a narration-only dataset that was four times larger and ten times cheaper, suggesting visual grounding matters more than annotation volume.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

NeoHorse-1 introduces agentic post-training with intelligent routing that lifts agent benchmark scores at 4B and 9B scales, prototyping recursive self-improvement.

NeoHorse-1 is a family of agent-native models trained through agentic post-training: routing-harness logs (predicted capability demand, service tier, interaction) become structurally validated training data organized into a three-stage SFT curriculum plus routing-guided on-policy distillation. Capability-guided allocation converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop. Post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B across eleven agent, tool-use, coding, and instruction-following benchmarks. The authors position it as a prototype of harness-mediated recursive self-improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research1

ExecCritic: Learn to Test, Test to Improve for Coding Agents

ExecCritic separates test generation from patching for coding agents, lifting SWE-bench Verified resolution to 72.6%.

ExecCritic pairs a test-verify-revise scaffold with role-specific reinforcement learning: a Test agent writes repository-native tests and a Repair agent fixes code from execution feedback, both using Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B backbones. Post-trained Qwen agents compose to 72.6% on SWE-bench Verified, an 11.4-point gain over the 61.2% no-test baseline, without stronger-model or oracle feedback at evaluation time. The work shows test quality is the key variable: base-agent tests lowered resolution to 57.3% while GPT-5.6-sol tests raised it to 65.3%.

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

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI industry

5 useful things you'll learn in my new post-training textbook (shipping now!)

Nathan Lambert's new RLHF and post-training LLM textbook covers PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO and related techniques, freely available online.

Nathan Lambert's book 'Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: Aligning and Post-training LLMs' is now shipping from Manning. It covers policy-gradient algorithms including PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO, and RLOO, plus loss aggregation, truncated importance sampling, asynchronous RL systems, and post-training topics like rejection sampling, outcome reward models, and on-policy distillation. The book is freely available online with a 12-hour course, codebase, and exercises.

Interconnects · Aug 10, 2026AI research

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

ScienceBuddy couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning so scientific agents continually self-improve from researcher feedback in an interactive workspace.

The authors release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that transforms researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. Its recursive-in-recursive self-improvement paradigm couples harness evolution (inner recursion, model fixed) with model reinforcement learning under the improved harness (outer recursion). Case studies span four scientific task families, and the system is released to the scientific community as a research product.

Discovery Foundation Models: Toward Open-Ended Discovery Intelligence

Proposes Discovery Foundation Models that participate in creating new problems and knowledge, instantiated in Zetema and the GALILEO therapeutic-discovery system.

The paper formulates Discovery Foundation Models (DFMs) as general-purpose systems for open-ended discovery, supporting seven coupled capabilities from problem discovery through evidence-grounded revision and continual improvement. It instantiates the framework with Zetema, combining explicit research-state dynamics, verification gating, external grounding, and cross-task Discovery Skill evolution. GALILEO, a real therapeutic-discovery system, closes the loop between Dry-Lab reasoning, robotic and hands-on Wet-Lab experimentation, and iterative hypothesis revision. The authors also define process-centered evaluation so discovery behavior can be trained and measured beyond final answers.

Inoculation Midtraining with Learned Neologisms

Inoculation Midtraining confines unsafe LLM behavior to a neologism-marked context, reducing misalignment after unsafe post-training but leaking under nearby contextual cues.

The paper introduces Inoculation Midtraining, which teaches a base model during midtraining that unsafe behavior belongs to a context marked by a learned neologism token, then post-trains on unsafe data within that context. Across supervised fine-tuning and RL post-training regimes, the technique reduces misalignment while preserving transfer of benign properties like German or Shakespearean prose. However, it does not outperform standard Inoculation Prompting, is sensitive to training configuration, and produces a leaky boundary that nearby contextual cues can reactivate. The authors conclude it is not yet a load-bearing component of a developer safety framework.

Revisiting Complete Reasoning Traces for Post-Training

Researchers show full reasoning traces provide limited benefit in LLM post-training, with heavily truncated or endpoint-only trajectories performing comparably.

A pilot study plus attention-based analyses and controlled token-removal studies show intermediate tokens in reasoning trajectories contribute minimally to final reasoning quality. Partial trajectories remain effective even under heavy truncation, and training on endpoints alone leads to consistent changes in reasoning behavior. The finding also benefits reinforcement-learning and on-policy distillation post-training; code is released at github.com/naver-ai/revisiting-trace.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Learning Multimodal One-step Flow Policy via Value-weighted Optimal Transport

OptiFlow learns one-step multimodal flow policies for offline RL via state-wise entropic optimal transport, avoiding critic overestimation and mode collapse.

The paper introduces OptiFlow, a framework that frames one-step flow policy learning as a structured sample-allocation problem in offline reinforcement learning. It jointly trains a value-aware reference flow policy and a one-step policy, coupling action samples through state-wise entropic optimal transport where critic values set distillation priority and action-distance cost ensures geometrically compatible pairings. By avoiding direct critic maximization, it anchors the policy to high-value dataset-supported modes without out-of-distribution divergence. Code is released on GitHub and the method performs strongly across diverse offline RL benchmarks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d 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 · 12d agoAI research

Expert-Space Exploration in MoE Reinforcement Learning

ESRL explores MoE expert-routing space during RL, lifting Qwen3-30B-A3B Pass@1 by 3.2 points over GRPO at no extra cost.

ESRL (Expert-Space Exploration Reinforcement Learning) is an architecture-aware framework that treats expert routing in Mixture-of-Experts models as an additional source of rollout diversity. It preserves high-confidence experts as anchors, restricts stochastic routing to a plausible candidate pool, adapts perturbation strength to router entropy, and replays recorded expert paths during policy optimization. ESRL achieves the best performance across top-K, top-1, and shared-expert routing backbones on mathematics, science, and code tasks; on Qwen3-30B-A3B it improves average Pass@1 and Pass@8 over GRPO by 3.2 and 4.5 percentage points respectively, without additional sampling or compute.

OmniHarness: Harnessing Generalizable Visual Generation via Symbolic Policy Learning

OmniHarness learns symbolic policies for visual generation agents, reaching a 95.0% resolve rate on ComfyBench Creative tasks, 27.5 points above the strongest baseline.

OmniHarness abstracts verified executions into symbolic policies for visual generation task families, which are instantiated, adapted, and composed for new tasks while model parameters remain fixed. Intermediate verification guides refinement and failure recovery during execution, and self-directed inquiry generates practice tasks near capability limits before downstream objectives are specified. Experiments across six benchmarks, three MLLM backbones, and three visual agent frameworks show strong performance; on ComfyBench Creative tasks it achieves a 95.0% resolve rate, exceeding the strongest baseline by 27.5 percentage points. Frozen policy snapshots improve existing visual agent systems through plug-and-play reuse.

Hugging Face daily papers · 4d agoAI research

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d 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

HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

Researchers introduce HarnessVLN, a zero-shot training-free agent harness that sets new training-free SOTA on vision-language navigation benchmarks including R2R and HM3D.

HarnessVLN is a zero-shot, training-free framework for embodied vision-language navigation that coordinates perception, retrieval, grounding, navigation, recovery, and termination through a unified tool interface. It validates planner proposals against spatial evidence, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency, using hierarchical event memory and a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph that stores reusable spatial evidence and failure annotations. It reports success rates of 60.8% on R2R, 53.9% on RxR, 76.0% on HM3D-v2, and 59.3% on HM3D-OVON, surpassing prior training-free state of the art, with real-world humanoid deployment demonstrated.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d 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 · 8d agoAI research

Breaking the Vision-Action Shortcut: Latent Interface Training for Generalizable Robotics Foundation Models

Latent Interface Training improves robot foundation model generalization by constraining visual conditioning, boosting LIBERO-Plus success up to 10.7 points.

The paper identifies vision-action shortcuts where robot policies exploit task-irrelevant visual cues that fail under distribution shift. Latent Interface Training (LIT) first trains an action expert conditioned on language, robot state, and terminal SE(3) end-effector poses without images, then constrains visual input through a pose-supervised latent interface. Across four VLA and world-action architectures (Pi0.5, MolmoAct2, FAST-WAM, ImageWAM), LIT improves LIBERO-Plus success by 3.87-10.70 percentage points. Real-world tests show 13.30-16.70 percentage-point gains under unseen cameras, lighting, and distractors.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d 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