Daily Papers

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and modular skills has endowed autonomous agents with increasingly powerful capabilities. Existing frameworks typically rely on monolithic LLMs and fixed logic to interface with these skills. This gives rise to a critical bottleneck: different LLMs offer distinct advantages across diverse domains, yet current frameworks fail to exploit the complementary strengths of models and skills, thereby limiting their performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we present Maestro (Multimodal Agent for Expert-Skill Targeted Reinforced Orchestration), a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven orchestration framework that reframes heterogeneous multimodal tasks as a sequential decision-making process over a hierarchical model-skill registry. Rather than consolidating all knowledge into a single model, Maestro trains a lightweight policy to dynamically compose ensembles of frozen expert models and a two-tier skill library, deciding at each step whether to invoke an external expert, which model-skill pair to select, and when to terminate. The policy is optimized via outcome-based RL, requiring no step-level supervision. We evaluate Maestro across ten representative multimodal benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, chart understanding, high-resolution perception, and domain-specific analysis. With only a 4B orchestrator, Maestro achieves an average accuracy of 70.1%, surpassing both GPT-5 (69.3%) and Gemini-2.5-Pro (68.7%). Crucially, the learned coordination policy generalizes to unseen models and skills without retraining: augmenting the registry with out-of-domain experts yields a 59.5% average on four challenging benchmarks, outperforming all closed-source baselines. Maestro further maintains high computational efficiency with low latency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/Maestro.

Self-supervised learning holds great promise for remote sensing, but standard self-supervised methods must be adapted to the unique characteristics of Earth observation data. We take a step in this direction by conducting a comprehensive benchmark of fusion strategies and reconstruction target normalization schemes for multimodal, multitemporal, and multispectral Earth observation data. Based on our findings, we propose MAESTRO, a novel adaptation of the Masked Autoencoder, featuring optimized fusion strategies and a tailored target normalization scheme that introduces a spectral prior as a self-supervisory signal. Evaluated on four Earth observation datasets, MAESTRO sets a new state-of-the-art on tasks that strongly rely on multitemporal dynamics, while remaining highly competitive on tasks dominated by a single mono-temporal modality. Code to reproduce all our experiments is available at https://github.com/ignf/maestro.

Describing skills in natural language has the potential to provide an accessible way to inject human knowledge about decision-making into an AI system. We present MaestroMotif, a method for AI-assisted skill design, which yields high-performing and adaptable agents. MaestroMotif leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively create and reuse skills. It first uses an LLM's feedback to automatically design rewards corresponding to each skill, starting from their natural language description. Then, it employs an LLM's code generation abilities, together with reinforcement learning, for training the skills and combining them to implement complex behaviors specified in language. We evaluate MaestroMotif using a suite of complex tasks in the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), demonstrating that it surpasses existing approaches in both performance and usability.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been a large driver and enabler for AI breakthroughs in recent years. These models have been getting larger in their attempt to become more accurate and tackle new upcoming use-cases, including AR/VR and intelligent assistants. However, the training process of such large models is a costly and time-consuming process, which typically yields a single model to fit all targets. To mitigate this, various techniques have been proposed in the literature, including pruning, sparsification or quantization of the model weights and updates. While able to achieve high compression rates, they often incur computational overheads or accuracy penalties. Alternatively, factorization methods have been leveraged to incorporate low-rank compression in the training process. Similarly, such techniques (e.g.,~SVD) frequently rely on the computationally expensive decomposition of layers and are potentially sub-optimal for non-linear models, such as DNNs. In this work, we take a further step in designing efficient low-rank models and propose Maestro, a framework for trainable low-rank layers. Instead of regularly applying a priori decompositions such as SVD, the low-rank structure is built into the training process through a generalized variant of Ordered Dropout. This method imposes an importance ordering via sampling on the decomposed DNN structure. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that our method recovers the SVD decomposition of linear mapping on uniformly distributed data and PCA for linear autoencoders. We further apply our technique on DNNs and empirically illustrate that Maestro enables the extraction of lower footprint models that preserve model performance while allowing for graceful accuracy-latency tradeoff for the deployment to devices of different capabilities.

We present MAESTRO, an evaluation suite for the testing, reliability, and observability of LLM-based MAS. MAESTRO standardizes MAS configuration and execution through a unified interface, supports integrating both native and third-party MAS via a repository of examples and lightweight adapters, and exports framework-agnostic execution traces together with system-level signals (e.g., latency, cost, and failures). We instantiate MAESTRO with 12 representative MAS spanning popular agentic frameworks and interaction patterns, and conduct controlled experiments across repeated runs, backend models, and tool configurations. Our case studies show that MAS executions can be structurally stable yet temporally variable, leading to substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability. We further find that MAS architecture is the dominant driver of resource profiles, reproducibility, and cost-latency-accuracy trade-off, often outweighing changes in backend models or tool settings. Overall, MAESTRO enables systematic evaluation and provides empirical guidance for designing and optimizing agentic systems.

Today's best-explored routes towards generalist robots center on collecting ever larger "observations-in actions-out" robotics datasets to train large end-to-end models, copying a recipe that has worked for vision-language models (VLMs). We pursue a road less traveled: building generalist policies directly around VLMs by augmenting their general capabilities with specific robot capabilities encapsulated in a carefully curated set of perception, planning, and control modules. In Maestro, a VLM coding agent dynamically composes these modules into a programmatic policy for the current task and scenario. Maestro's architecture benefits from a streamlined closed-loop interface without many manually imposed structural constraints, and a comprehensive and diverse tool repertoire. As a result, it largely surpasses today's VLA models for zero-shot performance on challenging manipulation skills. Further, Maestro is easily extensible to incorporate new modules, easily editable to suit new embodiments such as a quadruped-mounted arm, and even easily adapts from minimal real-world experiences through local code edits.

We introduce a film score generation framework to harmonize visual pixels and music melodies utilizing a latent diffusion model. Our framework processes film clips as input and generates music that aligns with a general theme while offering the capability to tailor outputs to a specific composition style. Our model directly produces music from video, utilizing a streamlined and efficient tuning mechanism on ControlNet. It also integrates a film encoder adept at understanding the film's semantic depth, emotional impact, and aesthetic appeal. Additionally, we introduce a novel, effective yet straightforward evaluation metric to evaluate the originality and recognizability of music within film scores. To fill this gap for film scores, we curate a comprehensive dataset of film videos and legendary original scores, injecting domain-specific knowledge into our data-driven generation model. Our model outperforms existing methodologies in creating film scores, capable of generating music that reflects the guidance of a maestro's style, thereby redefining the benchmark for automated film scores and laying a robust groundwork for future research in this domain. The code and generated samples are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HPM.

Cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the intricate process of synthesizing and drawing inferences across divergent sensory modalities, is increasingly recognized as a crucial capability in the progression toward more sophisticated and anthropomorphic artificial intelligence systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a class of AI algorithms specifically engineered to parse, produce, and engage with human language on an extensive scale. The recent trend of deploying LLMs to tackle CMR tasks has marked a new mainstream of approaches for enhancing their effectiveness. This survey offers a nuanced exposition of current methodologies applied in CMR using LLMs, classifying these into a detailed three-tiered taxonomy. Moreover, the survey delves into the principal design strategies and operational techniques of prototypical models within this domain. Additionally, it articulates the prevailing challenges associated with the integration of LLMs in CMR and identifies prospective research directions. To sum up, this survey endeavors to expedite progress within this burgeoning field by endowing scholars with a holistic and detailed vista, showcasing the vanguard of current research whilst pinpointing potential avenues for advancement. An associated GitHub repository that collects the relevant papers can be found at https://github.com/ZuyiZhou/Awesome-Cross-modal-Reasoning-with-LLMs

Generating musical audio directly with neural networks is notoriously difficult because it requires coherently modeling structure at many different timescales. Fortunately, most music is also highly structured and can be represented as discrete note events played on musical instruments. Herein, we show that by using notes as an intermediate representation, we can train a suite of models capable of transcribing, composing, and synthesizing audio waveforms with coherent musical structure on timescales spanning six orders of magnitude (~0.1 ms to ~100 s), a process we call Wave2Midi2Wave. This large advance in the state of the art is enabled by our release of the new MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous TRacks and Organization) dataset, composed of over 172 hours of virtuosic piano performances captured with fine alignment (~3 ms) between note labels and audio waveforms. The networks and the dataset together present a promising approach toward creating new expressive and interpretable neural models of music.

While AI innovation accelerates rapidly, the intellectual process behind breakthroughs -- how researchers identify gaps, synthesize prior work, and generate insights -- remains poorly understood. The lack of structured data on scientific reasoning hinders systematic analysis and development of AI research agents. We introduce Sci-Reasoning, the first dataset capturing the intellectual synthesis behind high-quality AI research. Using community-validated quality signals and an LLM-accelerated, human-verified pipeline, we trace Oral and Spotlight papers across NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR (2023-2025) to its key predecessors, articulating specific reasoning links in a structured format. Our analysis identifies 15 distinct thinking patterns, with three dominant strategies accounting for 52.7%: Gap-Driven Reframing (24.2%), Cross-Domain Synthesis (18.0%), and Representation Shift (10.5%). The most powerful innovation recipes combine multiple patterns: Gap-Driven Reframing + Representation Shift, Cross-Domain Synthesis + Representation Shift, and Gap-Driven Reframing + Cross-Domain Synthesis. This dataset enables quantitative studies of scientific progress and provides structured reasoning trajectories for training the next generation AI research agents.

We investigate optimal control problems governed by the elliptic partial differential equation -Delta u=f subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions on a given domain Omega. The control variable in this setting is the right-hand side f, and the objective is to minimize a cost functional that depends simultaneously on the control f and on the associated state function u. We establish the existence of optimal controls and analyze their qualitative properties by deriving necessary conditions for optimality. In particular, when pointwise constraints of the form alphale flebeta are imposed a priori on the control, we examine situations where a {\it bang-bang} phenomenon arises, that is where the optimal control f assumes only the extremal values alpha and beta. More precisely, the control takes the form f=alpha1_E+beta1_{Omegasetminus E}, thereby placing the problem within the framework of shape optimization. Under suitable assumptions, we further establish certain regularity properties for the optimal sets E. Finally, in the last part of the paper, we present numerical simulations that illustrate our theoretical findings through a selection of representative examples.

We investigate the scaling of the Rényi entanglement entropies for a particle bipartition of interacting spinless fermions in one spatial dimension. In the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid regime, we calculate the second Rényi entanglement entropy and show that the leading order finite-size scaling is equal to a universal logarithm of the system size plus a non-universal constant. Higher-order corrections decay as power-laws in the system size with exponents that depend only on the Luttinger parameter. We confirm the universality of our results by investigating the one dimensional t-V model of interacting spinless fermions via exact-diagonalization techniques. The resulting sensitivity of the particle partition entanglement to boundary conditions and statistics supports its utility as a probe of quantum liquids.

We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.

Scientific publication compresses a branching, iterative research process into a linear narrative, discarding the majority of what was discovered along the way. This compilation imposes two structural costs: a Storytelling Tax, where failed experiments, rejected hypotheses, and the branching exploration process are discarded to fit a linear narrative; and an Engineering Tax, where the gap between reviewer-sufficient prose and agent-sufficient specification leaves critical implementation details unwritten. Tolerable for human readers, these costs become critical when AI agents must understand, reproduce, and extend published work. We introduce the Agent-Native Research Artifact (ARA), a protocol that replaces the narrative paper with a machine-executable research package structured around four layers: scientific logic, executable code with full specifications, an exploration graph that preserves the failures compilation discards, and evidence grounding every claim in raw outputs. Three mechanisms support the ecosystem: a Live Research Manager that captures decisions and dead ends during ordinary development; an ARA Compiler that translates legacy PDFs and repos into ARAs; and an ARA-native review system that automates objective checks so human reviewers can focus on significance, novelty, and taste. On PaperBench and RE-Bench, ARA raises question-answering accuracy from 72.4% to 93.7% and reproduction success from 57.4% to 64.4%. On RE-Bench's five open-ended extension tasks, preserved failure traces in ARA accelerate progress, but can also constrain a capable agent from stepping outside the prior-run box depending on the agent's capabilities.

Foundation models offer a promising route to transferable remote sensing representations, but many current approaches depend on very large pretraining datasets and fixed sensor configurations, limiting their suitability for ecological and environmental applications, where observations often vary across platforms, spatial and spectral resolutions, and available modalities. We introduce FLORO, a multimodal geospatial foundation model designed to learn transferable representations from a small but highly diverse remote sensing corpus. FLORO is pretrained using masked autoencoding on a heterogeneous combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, SkySAT imagery, elevation, and UAV-derived data. To accommodate sensor variability, FLORO incorporates availability-aware inputs that indicate which spectral bands and auxiliary modalities are present in each sample, enabling a unified input space across heterogeneous sensor configurations. We evaluated FLORO on the PANGAEA benchmark under a frozen-encoder protocol across scene classification, segmentation, and regression tasks. Despite being pretrained on a smaller corpus than competing foundation models, FLORO achieved strong and stable transfer across optical, optical-SAR, and optical-elevation benchmarks spanning medium-resolution satellite, airborne, and ultra-high-resolution UAV imagery. FLORO obtained the second-best average segmentation performance across six PANGAEA benchmarks, trailing only a recently introduced foundation model pretrained on over two orders of magnitude more images, remained competitive on scene classification, and was robust in regression tasks, while qualitative results showed improved preservation of spatial structure in flood, urban, biomass, and canopy-height prediction settings. In a separate controlled experiment on EuroSAT-MS, geo-positional encoding further improved classification relative to absolute positional encoding.