Daily Paper Cast

🤗 Upvotes: 171 | cs.CV Authors: Kwai Keye Team, Bin Wen, Changyi Liu, Chengru Song, Chongling Rao, Guowang Zhang, Han Li, Haonan Fan, Hengrui Ju, Jiankang Chen, Jiapeng Chen, Jiawei Yuan, Kaixuan Yang, Kaiyu Jiang, Kun Gai, Lingzhi Zhou, Na Nie, Sen Na, Tianke Zhang, Tingting Gao, Xuanyu Zheng, Yulong Chen, Fan Yang, Haixuan Gao, Lele Yang, Mingqiao Liu, Muxi Diao, Qi Zhang, Qile Su, Wei Chen, Wentao Hong, Xingyu Lu, Yancheng Long, Yankai Yang, Yingxin Li, Yiyang Fan, Yu Xia, Yuzhe Chen, Ziliang Lai, Chuan Yi, Haonan Jia, Tianming Liang, Weixin Xu, Xiaoxiao Ma, Yang Tian, Yufei Han, Feng Han, Hang Li, Jing Wang, Jinghui Jia, Junmin Chen, Junyu Shi, Ruilin Zhang Title: Kwai Keye-VL-2.0 Technical Report Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10651v1 Abstract: We introduce Kwai Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal foundation model designed to advance long-video understanding and agentic intelligence. To address the challenges of ultra-long contexts, information redundancy, and prohibitive computational costs inherent in hour-level videos, Keye-VL-2.0 is the first to adapt DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) to GQA-based multimodal architectures, enabling lossless 256K context processing while capturing critical frames and long-range temporal dependencies. This architecture is underpinned by a highly optimized training and inference infrastructure, including scalable video I/O, heterogeneous ViT-LM parallelism, and custom DSA kernels that significantly maximize throughput and minimize computational overhead. Furthermore, to overcome the algorithmic dilemma of catastrophic forgetting during multi-task alignment, we introduce Cross-Modal Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) paired with Context-RL and Video-RL. By distilling dense token-level teacher feedback from on-policy rollouts back into the MoE backbone, which activates only 3B parameters, Keye-VL-2.0 natively empowers advanced agent collaboration across Code, Tool, and Search scenarios with multimodal self-correction. Extensive evaluations across video understanding, temporal grounding, reasoning, STEM, and agent benchmarks demonstrate that Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale, particularly excelling in fine-grained temporal localization on TimeLens and long-video comprehension on Video-MME-v2 and LongVideoBench. We release our model checkpoints to accelerate community progress toward scalable and robust multimodal agentic applications.

🤗 Upvotes: 48 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Wenbo Pan, Shujie Liu, Chin-Yew Lin, Jingying Zeng, Xianfeng Tang, Xiangyang Zhou, Yan Lu, Xiaohua Jia Title: Evolving Agents in the Dark: Retrospective Harness Optimization via Self-Preference Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05922v2 Abstract: AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks. However, existing optimization methods typically require ground-truth validation sets, yet such labeled data is difficult to acquire in practical deployment settings. To address this problem, we introduce Retrospective Harness Optimization (RHO), a self-supervised method that optimizes the agent harness using only past trajectories. Specifically, RHO selects a diverse coreset of challenging tasks from past trajectories and re-solves them in parallel. The agent analyzes these rollouts using self-validation and self-consistency, then generates candidate harness updates and selects the most effective one by its own pairwise self-preference. We evaluate RHO across three diverse domains, spanning software engineering, technical work, and knowledge work. Notably, a single optimization round improves the pass rate on SWE-Bench Pro from 59% to 78% without any external grading. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that RHO effectively targets prior failure modes. As a result, the optimized harness alters the agent's behavior patterns and sustains higher accuracy during long-horizon sessions.

🤗 Upvotes: 41 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Renjie Mao, Xiangxin Zhou, Lvfang Tao, Yixin Ding, Yu Shi, Yongguang Lin, Yuheng Wu, Honglin Zhu, Qian Qiu, Wenxi Zhu Title: Beyond Uniform Token-Level Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10968v2 Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing PPO-style trust-region mechanisms remain position-agnostic by enforcing uniform thresholds across all tokens independently. This pointwise treatment conflicts with autoregressive generation in two critical ways. First, uniform thresholds ignore autoregressive asymmetry. Early-stage deviations produce compounding sequence-level drift, causing static thresholds to under-regulate early divergence and excessively constrain late-stage exploration. Second, evaluating token-level divergence in isolation overlooks cumulative prefix drift, granting the same divergence allowance regardless of how far the conditioning history has already deviated from the rollout policy. To address this limitation, we propose CPPO (Cumulative Prefix-divergence Policy Optimization), a token-level masking rule that aligns updates with a finite-horizon policy-improvement bound via two coupled mechanisms. First, a position-weighted threshold imposes stricter limits at early positions whose effects persist longer, relaxing constraints for late-stage tokens. Second, a cumulative prefix budget tracks historical deviations, dynamically restricting further token-level deviation to prevent compounding errors along the prefix. Empirically, CPPO enhances training stability and significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various model scales.

🤗 Upvotes: 32 | cs.CV Authors: Wenhao Yan, Fengjia Guo, Zhuoyi Yang, Jie Tang Title: SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10804v2 Abstract: Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves \textbf{end-to-end} character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

🤗 Upvotes: 115 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Yiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang, Yuanbo Pang, Tianyu Wang, Yuhan Cao, Yixiao Huang, Chris Duroiu, Haoyun Zhang, Jeffrey Lin, Weishu Zhang, Tyler Zeng, Ying Yan, Bo Liu, Hanson Wen, Mingyang Xu, Xiaoyuan Liu, Zimeng Chen, Weiyan Shi, Amanda Dsouza, Vincent Sunn Chen, Patrick Bryant, Carl Boettiger, Yamini Rangan, Bradley Rothenberg, Kyle Steinfeld, Arvind Rao, Tapio Schneider, Georgios Yannakakis, Laure Zanna, Kaan Ozbay, Ida Sim, Tarek Zohdi, George Em Karniadakis, Jack Gallant, Teresa Head-gordon, Yushan Li, Wenxi Deng, Tao Sun, Huiqi Wang, Zhun Wang, Justin Xu, Chris Yuhao Liu, Yafei Cheng, Rongwang Hu, Aras Bacho, Shengcao Cao, Zengyi Qin, Yixiong Chen, Hengduan Fan, Hao Liu, Lin Zeng, Shashank Muralidhar Bharadwaj, Litian Gong, Yingxuan Yang, Maojia Song, Ruheng Wang, Zongzheng Zhang, Honglin Bao, Shuo Lu, Jianhong Tu, Zhonghua Wang, Zheng Zhang, Zijiao Chen, yanqiong Jiang, Zhendong Li, Bohan Lyu, Chang Ma, Peiran Xu, Benran Zhang, Shangding Gu, Haoyue Hua, Haoyang Li, Wanzhe Liao, Chengzhi Liu, Junbo Peng, Haoran Sun, Zechen Xu, Bo Chen, Jiayi Cheng, Yi Jiang, Keying Kuang, Yuan Li, Youbang Pan, Ziyan Rao, Alexander Schubert, Yifan Shen, Vincent Siu, Xiatao Sun, Kangqi Zhang, Xiaopan Zhang, Yuchen Zhu, Ishaan Singh Chandok, Lei Ding, Jingxuan Fan, Andrew Glover, Jiaming Hu, Yiran Hu, Wenbo Huang, Zixin Jiang, Haoran Jin, Lukas Kim, Ming Liu, Yang Liu, Alireza Rafiei, Xuhuan Shen, Kunyang Sun, Sophia Sun, Ting Sun, Eric Wang, Yixin Wang, Hanwen Xing, Sihan Xu, Yuzheng Xu, Zhongxing Xu, Zhiling Yan, Boqin Yuan, Ruiqi Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zibo Zhao, Liana, Santanu Bosu Antu, Haoyue Bai, Carlo Bosio, Joseph Cavanagh, Patricia Cavazos-Rehg, Tianxing Chen, Xuewen Chen, Yipu Chen, Zhu Chenyu, Chen Dai, Stefano De Castro, Yunfu Deng, Kaustubh Dhole, Jiayuan Ding, Chenchen Du, Zhehang Du, Hao Fan, Run-ze Fan, Hengyu Fu, Shi Gu, Yifan Gu, Charlie Guo, Baihe Huang, Baixiang Huang, Rimika Jaiswal, Zhihan Jiang, Ran Jin, Erin Kasson, Xin Lan, Joseph Lee, Deren Lei, Chenyu Li, Daofeng Li, Haitao Li, Hongwei Li, Jingyan Li, Xiao Li, Yi Li, Yinsheng Li, Yuangang Li, Zhixu Li, Wenyu Liang, Longtai Liao, Kevin Qinghong Lin, AndyZeyi Liu, Che Liu, Jiaming Liu, Kaiyuan Liu, Xuan Liu, Pan Lu, Wenbo Lv, Yicheng Lv, Qiuyang Mang, Kyle Montgomery, Yuzhou Nie, Ruoxi Ning, Jorin Overwiening, Xu Pan, Layna Paraboschi, Core Francisco Park, Justin Purnomo, Swati Rajwal, Scott Rankin, Bixuan Ren, Yiren Rong, HaoYang Shang, Ventus Shaw, Fiona Shen, Jiawei Shen, Minqi Shi, Qiu Shi, Huaxiu Yao, Tianneng Shi, Jonah So, Vladislav Susoy, Hannah Szlyk, Haocheng Wang, Jialu Wang, Wei Wang, Xinyu Wang, Zehao Wang, Dowling Wong, Angela Wu, Dehao Wu, Fangyu Wu, Mengyuan "Millie" Wu, Yu Wu, Yuchen Wu, Yuhao Wu, Qingpo Wuwu, Weihang Xiao, Yongyi Xiong, Fan Xu, Ruiling Xu, Mingxuan Yan, Benjamin Yang, Jirong Yang, Sen Yang, Xiaoli Yang, Yushi Yang, Haoran Ye, Xiaohu Yu, Zhengming Yu, Chenlong Zhang, Chi Zhang, Hanning Zhang, Hanwen Zhang, Junge Zhang, Kunpeng Zhang, Song Zhang, Wenjin Zhang, Wenshuo Zhang, Ying Zhang, Yizhi Zhang, Brian Zhao, Qijian Zhao, Yimin Zhao, Yuhaohua Zheng, Liwei Zhou, Tianyue Zhou, Sichen Zhu, Siqi Zhu, Yan Zhu, Yishu Zhu, Jierui Zuo, Chonghao Cai, Helena Casademunt, Wenjia Chen, Benjamin Cheng, Nawen Deng, Rao Fu, Tianfu Fu, Yifan Han, Ren He, Zhenyu He, Qiao Jin, Lang Lang, Yuetai Li, Sylvia Liu, Lu Lu, Qing Lu, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Yunqi Ouyang, Yin Ren, Dawei Shi, Haoran Wu, Zhiyue Wu, Hannah Yao, Zhuoran Yi, Jenny Yu, Rhea Zhan, Hang Zhou, Blake Zhu, Junfan Zhu, Alan Yuille, Yang Liu, Russell Alan Poldrack, Jiachen Li, Zhenglu Li, Molei Tao, Jing Huang, Wenqi Shi, Costas Spanos, Lichao Sun, Chenguang Wang, Orson Xu, Zhen Dong, Hector Gomez, Aylin Caliskan, Ali Emami, Haimin Hu, Zhi Li, Lihui Liu, Murphy Niu, Yi Shao, Jianxin Sun, Mikko Tolonen, Ting Wang, Sanjiv Das, Yanjun Gao, Wenbo Guo, Erika J Schneider, Zhiyong Lu, Mark Mueller, Radha Poovendran, Somayeh Sojoudi, Dawn Song Title: Agents' Last Exam Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05405v1 Abstract: Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.

🤗 Upvotes: 59 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Zhennan Shen, Yanshu Li, Qingyu Yin, Chak Tou Leong, Zhilin Wang, Yanxu Chen, Rongduo Han, Sunbowen Lee, Yi R. Fung Title: On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07082v1 Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

🤗 Upvotes: 49 | cs.CV Authors: Weijie Wang, Haoyu Zhao, Yifan Yang, Feng Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Yefei He, Zicheng Duan, Donny Y. Chen, Yuqing Yang, Bohan Zhuang Title: Latent Spatial Memory for Video World Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09828v1 Abstract: Video world models that maintain 3D spatial consistency across generated frames typically rely on explicit point cloud memory constructed in RGB space. This design is both computationally expensive, requiring repeated rendering and VAE encoding, and inherently lossy, as the round trip through pixel space discards rich features of the learned latent representation. In this paper, we introduce \emph{latent spatial memory} for video world models, a persistent 3D cache that stores scene information directly in the diffusion latent space, avoiding pixel-space reconstruction. Building on this, we propose Mirage, a latent-space spatial memory framework that constructs the memory by lifting latent tokens into 3D via depth-guided back-projection and queries it by synthesizing novel views through direct latent-space warping. This unified formulation eliminates both the information loss of pixel-space reconstruction and the computational burden of repeated encoding and rendering. Experiments show that latent spatial memory achieves up to \textbf{10.57}$\times$ faster end-to-end video generation and \textbf{55}$\times$ reduction in memory footprint relative to explicit 3D baselines. Leveraging the geometric prior of the diffusion model, Mirage attains state-of-the-art performance on WorldScore and strong reconstruction quality on RealEstate10K.