Daily Paper Cast

Authors:

Qize Yu, Lianrui Fan, Boyu Chen, Jiaqi Liang, Xini Ding, Yue Chen, Zetian Song, Yuran Wang, Yi Zou, Kaixuan Wang, Tianxing Chen, Wenxuan Song, Bohan Zhou, Mingleyang Li, Siqiao Huang, Yuqi Ye, Caigao Jiang, Wei Wei, Ruihai Wu, Hang Zhang, Yixiao Ge, Shuchang Zhou, Shilong Liu, Xianming Liu, Ping Luo, Shiyu Huang

Title:

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

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39601v1

Abstract:

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.

Authors:

Shun Zou, Ziyu Ma, Yi Zou, Yong Wang, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Guanhua Chen, Xiangxiang Chu, Feng Zhao

Title:

Scaling Agentic Data for Long-Horizon Terminal Intelligence

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13166v1

Abstract:

Terminal agents are moving beyond local operations toward completing real-world professional tasks. Short trajectories can demonstrate commands and tool calls, but they do not fully show how agents accumulate evidence through exploration, use it to inform judgments, continually adjust strategies based on feedback, and turn intermediate results into final deliverables. High-quality long-horizon trajectories capture these agentic behavioral patterns and their connections within a single problem-solving process, providing richer experience for sustained autonomous work. However, environment synthesis may complete or simplify the key work underlying these patterns in advance and thus remove the need for exploration, implementation, and verification that the agent was meant to perform. To address this, we introduce TerminalHorizon, a fully automated data synthesis engine for long-horizon terminal agents. Starting from real-world professional work, it uses independent execution to identify key work omitted during construction and uses the resulting evidence to guide environment reconstruction. To extend these patterns across stages, it progressively expands tasks under the same goal, introducing new requirements that build on prior results and call for further exploration and improvement. Using this engine, we construct 1.5K task environments and perform supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5-27B on the resulting dataset to obtain TerminalHorizon-27B. We achieve substantial performance gains on all 12 benchmarks spanning coding-agent tasks, agentic tasks in real-world production settings, and general reasoning. Multiple RSI case studies, each with a 12-hour research budget, further demonstrate the model's ability to continue experimenting beyond an initial solution, improve its methods based on feedback, and retain effective improvements in its final deliverables.

Authors:

Jiahao Wang, Hongjin Qian, Yuyang Hu, Jiajun Zhang, Zheng Liu

Title:

AgentSWE: Can Coding Agents Build the Agent You Actually Want?

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13361v1

Abstract:

As the production of software passes into the hands of software itself, coding agents are increasingly commissioned to build agents fitted to their users' own workflows. This delegation carries a quiet assumption, that the delivered agent will faithfully serve the requirement it was built for, rather than merely appear to. No existing benchmark tests that assumption. We introduce AgentSWE, a benchmark for agent software engineering spanning three stages of the agent development lifecycle: Creation of a complete agent from a natural-language requirement, Editing of production agent codebases, and Optimization toward a measurable target. Each of its 25 tasks is framed as a commission rather than an exam: the builder iterates against a handful of illustrative cases, while acceptance exercises the frozen submission on held-out cases designed to span the full requirement, grading behavior against requirement-derived rubrics under hard pass/fail gates or, for Optimization, against the source benchmark's own objective. Evaluating a range of coding agents across models and harnesses, we find that none comes close to delivering what a requirement asks for: the gap between what a builder demonstrates and what it delivers is the norm, not the corner case. An accompanying empirical analysis of the failure trajectories identifies recurring failure modes, among them overfitting to the visible cases, hollow runtimes behind code that looks complete, and unsupported claims of completion, each a signal by which coding agents can learn to build the agents they are asked for.

Authors:

Dianqiao Lei, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Pan Lu, Philip Torr, James Zou

Title:

Thinking Inertia: LLMs Keep Thinking When Told Not To

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11765v1

Abstract:

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly ship with explicit "thinking modes", yet their counterpart, "no-thinking", has received far less attention. We study LLMs' no-thinking behavior along two axes. a. How to measure no-thinking? Prior work typically defines no-thinking through proxies such as a disabled thinking mode or the absence of long traces. These proxies are unreliable: disabled thinking modes may still emit reasoning, while long traces may contain filler rather than genuine inference. We instead normalize each response into a pre-answer trace and final answer, and evaluate it at three levels: (i) Empty-Thinking Rate for strict answer-only compliance; (ii) instruction-aware Question-Pre-answer Relevance for similarity between the question and pre-answer trace; and (iii) LLM-as-judge Explicit Inference Rate for visible explicit inference. Together, these metrics distinguish answer-only output, relevant but non-inferential text, and explicit inference. b. How does no-thinking vary across tasks and models? We evaluate six prompting interventions on six LLMs across Boolean, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions. We find that explicit no-think controls cannot reliably eliminate visible inference. Models instead exhibit "Thinking Inertia": explicit inference persists even under strict controls and becomes more prevalent as the answer space opens. Accuracy remains stable on Boolean and multiple-choice tasks, whereas open-ended tasks reveal a trade-off between answer-only compliance and task accuracy. Rewriting the same questions across answer spaces shows that supplying candidate answers makes answer-only responses easier to produce. These findings establish no-thinking as a non-trivial capability: stopping explicit reasoning cannot be assumed from model settings or instructions alone and deserves systematic evaluation alongside reasoning ability.

Authors:

Xiaohan Qin, Xiangdong Zhang, Tuo Dai, Sunan Zou, Huaijin Wu, Yebin Yang, Zhuo Xia, Lin Yao, Yuliang Liu, Junchi Yan

Title:

Multi-Stream Attention Residuals

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13630v1

Abstract:

Attention Residuals (AttnRes) enables content-dependent retrieval over network depth, which can be viewed as single-stream softmax attention along the depth axis. Inspired by the success of multi-head attention along the sequence axis, we introduce Multi-Stream Attention Residuals (MSAR), an extension of AttnRes that generalizes this mechanism to multi-head depth attention, yielding substantial performance gains with minimal additional overhead. MSAR draws stream diversity from sequence context through multi-scale causal convolutions, allowing different heads to retrieve historical representations through distinct contextual views while preserving the integrity of the hidden representation. The retrieved streams are combined through lightweight adaptive mixing to generate the single-stream layer input. By retaining single-stream sources and expanding them on demand, MSAR supports multi-stream computation without requiring persistent multi-stream storage or communication. Across all 12 downstream benchmarks at the 18B and 28B MoE scales, MSAR consistently outperforms prior residual variants, including standard residual connections, manifold-constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), and AttnRes. Scaling-law experiments yield an iso-loss compute speedup of $1.58\times$ over the standard residual baseline, compared with $1.35\times$ for AttnRes and $1.30\times$ for mHC. These results make MSAR a promising residual architecture for large-scale pre-training.

Authors:

Fuyao Zhang, Xuan Wang, Zherui Li, Jiaming Zhang, Longtao Huang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Title:

Relevance Does Not Imply Applicability: Experience Activation for Personal GUI Agents

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33304v1

Abstract:

Personal Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents rely on interaction history to infer what a user wants from ambiguous instructions and to anticipate recurring routines. Existing approaches retrieve task-relevant history and append it to the policy's context, implicitly assuming that experience relevant to a task remains useful for each decision within it. We find that this help is largely spent at the first decision: retrieved history strongly improves the opening step of an episode, yet provides little sustained benefit over the remaining 90\% of steps, and offers weak guidance on whether a proactive suggestion is warranted. A relevant record may tell the agent where to begin, but not which past action applies to the current screen or whether a routine is due now. The underlying issue is that relevance does not imply applicability}: relevance is determined at the task level, whereas applicability depends on the situation at decision time. We therefore recast personalization as experience activation and introduce ExpActivator, a training-free framework that activates only the experience applicable to the current situation. During execution, ExpActivator matches each new screen to historical states in the frozen GUI backbone's latent space and supplies the corresponding action as a reference. Before execution, it activates a recurring intent only when the current time and scenario provide sufficient support, and otherwise abstains. Across four GUI backbones, ExpActivator improves within-trajectory step success by 28\% on average, achieves the best personalized execution on every backbone while using about one-fifth as many history tokens, and reaches approximately 2.3$\times$ the Matthews correlation coefficient of the strongest proactive baseline. Experience pays where it is activated, not where it is appended.

Authors:

Jiawei Chi, Shangchen Miao, Zhiyuan Shi, Kailu Wu, Hanyang Wang, Weiliang Chen, Qiyu Dai, Jinshan Ren, Jun Gao, Mingsheng Long, Yueqi Duan, Jiangran Lyu, Jialong Wu, Fangfu Liu

Title:

AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12374v1

Abstract:

Interactive virtual worlds allow agents to learn through exploration and interaction. What agents can learn is bounded by the environments they practice in, which must be faithful, with consistent state, rules, and dynamics, and realistic, with observations that follow the real-world visual distributions. Achieving both across diverse worlds remains a bottleneck. We introduce AgentGarten, a framework that couples simulators and game engines with a shared neural renderer to build real-time interactive environments. Its simulation backends maintain persistent world state and execute program-defined interaction rules, while the renderer generates visual observations from structured conditions exported through a common interface. To build the neural renderer, we adapt a pretrained video model to geometry conditions, distill it with our proposed Adversarial Forcing, and optimize inference for real-time interaction. Adversarial Forcing makes history prefilling differentiable through exact replay, so that losses on later predictions update how the renderer encodes prior observations, and adds real-data adversarial supervision to improve its visual quality. In AgentGarten, agents perceive the world through visual observations, interact with it in real time, and improve by distilling each round of experience into playbooks that subsequent agents inherit and refine. Our empirical study demonstrates a substantial gain in learning efficiency, with agents learning from just 4 rounds compared with millions for a conventional reinforcement learning counterpart. As new worlds can be written as code and rendered through the same interface, environments can scale in both number and difficulty alongside their agents, a step toward agents that keep evolving through interactive experience.

Authors:

Yibo Li, Jinhang Qiu, Zhi Zheng, Qianyun Guo, Jiaying Wu, Shuo Ji, Bryan Hooi

Title:

Learn2Play Bench: How Well Do LLM Agents Learn from Experience in Unfamiliar Environments?

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08215v2

Abstract:

Learning from experience is essential for LLM agents to adapt to unfamiliar and dynmaic environments. Evaluating this ability is therefore important for understanding how effectively agents acquire and use new knowledge. Existing benchmarks have sought to evaluate this ability, but they primarily evaluate tasks whose rules are provided in the instructions or already familiar to pretrained models, making it difficult to distinguish learning from interactions from reasoning with existing knowledge. To address this, we introduce Learn2Play Bench, a benchmark of newly designed text-based games, whose rules are novel or counterintuitive, requiring agents to acquire knowledge through interaction rather than rely solely on pretrained knowledge. These games provide reproducible feedback and automatic scoring, enabling controlled evaluation of learning across repeated attempts. We also vary game instances to test whether agents can apply what they have learned to new situations. Therefore, we evaluate how backbone models, self-evolving methods, and agent harnesses affect agents' learning ability, revealing three findings: (1) Experience retention: Retaining complete records of actions and feedback can support more effective learning than summarizing these experiences into rules or strategies. (2) Human agent gap: Top-performing human players achieve higher peak scores than the evaluated agents. Human explore more varied strategies, and repeat actions less. (3) Harness matters: With the backbone fixed, changing the harness can improve performance while reducing estimated inference cost. Together, these findings provide insights into how LLM agents learn from experience and suggest directions for future work to improve their learning ability. Project website: https://liushiliushi.github.io/learn2play-bench-website/

Authors:

Tianyu Fu, Tengxuan Liu, Ruoxi Wang, Yixin Dong, Yi Ge, Yichen You, Yu Wang

Title:

TokenRouter: Efficient Serving System for Token-Level LLM Routing

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12242v1

Abstract:

Large language model (LLM) routing distributes inference work across different models, advancing the cost-quality Pareto frontier of LLM serving. While coarse-grained routing at the session or query level has been widely adopted in production systems, recent algorithmic work shows that fine-grained token-level routing can yield substantial efficiency and quality gains. However, efficiently serving token-level routed inference poses significant challenges to existing systems. Built on single-LLM assumptions, current systems suffer from severe step desynchronization and frequent batch admission delays under token-level routing, and they also impose high implementation complexity on developers. To address these challenges, we design TokenRouter, an efficient and developer-friendly serving system for token-level routed LLM inference. TokenRouter follows the principle of request-centric programming, model-centric execution: developers describe routing logic from the perspective of a single request, while the runtime launches a subserver for each LLM and dispatches requests asynchronously. Each subserver employs a delayed-batching scheduler, whose optimal hyperparameters are derived from a mathematical throughput model of the system. Across diverse routing algorithms, workloads, and model pairs, TokenRouter achieves 2.01-64.15x higher decoding throughput than existing systems, substantially advancing the serving efficiency of token-level LLM routing. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/TokenRouter.

Authors:

Quanyu Long, Xiao Chen, Jianda Chen, Haozhen Zhang, Qisheng Hu, Jianzhu Bao, Wenya Wang

Title:

From Traces to Agentic Worlds: Agentic Language World Models for Interactive Environment Simulation

Arxiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06100v1

Abstract:

Realistic environment replicas are increasingly valuable for training and evaluating LLM agents, yet the original systems may be inaccessible or impractical to reproduce. We explore agentic language world modeling: rather than rebuilding an executable environment, a world model agent serves as the environment for a task agent and supports faithful and stateful simulation. We instantiate this paradigm with Trace2Env, a learning-free framework for settings where the original system is unavailable but historical interaction traces remain accessible. Trace2Env reconstructs these traces into a reusable environment worldbook containing environment schemas, grounded evidence, and induced behavioral knowledge. At runtime, the world model agent actively consults the worldbook together with persistent episodic state to infer each action's observation and lasting state effects. Across nine environments, Trace2Env improves both next-observation fidelity and long-horizon interaction consistency over conventional prompt-based LWMs. In multi-turn interaction, task agent actions generated against Trace2Env remain valid more often when replayed in the real environment, indicating that its simulated dynamics better preserve the consequences of earlier actions across successive turns. These results establish agentic language world modeling as an alternative direction for building realistic environment replicas without reconstructing the original executable system.