Daily Papers

The composition of pre-training datasets for large language models (LLMs) remains largely undisclosed, hindering transparency and efforts to optimize data quality, a critical driver of model performance. Current data selection methods, such as natural language quality assessments, diversity-based filters, and classifier-based approaches, are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. To address these gaps, we propose four dimensions to evaluate data quality: professionalism, readability, reasoning, and cleanliness. We further introduce Meta-rater,a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates these dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. Meta-rater employs proxy models to train a regression model that predicts validation loss, enabling the identification of optimal combinations of quality scores. Experiments demonstrate that Meta-rater doubles convergence speed for 1.3B parameter models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23, with advantages that scale to models as large as 7.2B parameters. Our work establishes that holistic, multi-dimensional quality integration significantly outperforms conventional single-dimension approaches, offering a scalable paradigm for enhancing pre-training efficiency and model capability. To advance future research, we release scripts, data, and models at https://github.com/opendatalab/Meta-rater.

Recent advances in Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models, such as Imagen, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX, have led to remarkable improvements in visual quality. However, their performance is fundamentally limited by the quality of training data. Web-crawled and synthetic image datasets often contain low-quality or redundant samples, which lead to degraded visual fidelity, unstable training, and inefficient computation. Hence, effective data selection is crucial for improving data efficiency. Existing approaches rely on costly manual curation or heuristic scoring based on single-dimensional features in Text-to-Image data filtering. Although meta-learning based method has been explored in LLM, there is no adaptation for image modalities. To this end, we propose **Alchemist**, a meta-gradient-based framework to select a suitable subset from large-scale text-image data pairs. Our approach automatically learns to assess the influence of each sample by iteratively optimizing the model from a data-centric perspective. Alchemist consists of two key stages: data rating and data pruning. We train a lightweight rater to estimate each sample's influence based on gradient information, enhanced with multi-granularity perception. We then use the Shift-Gsampling strategy to select informative subsets for efficient model training. Alchemist is the first automatic, scalable, meta-gradient-based data selection framework for Text-to-Image model training. Experiments on both synthetic and web-crawled datasets demonstrate that Alchemist consistently improves visual quality and downstream performance. Training on an Alchemist-selected 50% of the data can outperform training on the full dataset.

Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) aim to use language to improve end-to-end planning, but the language-action gap limits this promise. We propose DriveMA, a Driving VLA framework built on verifiable meta-actions, which summarize future ego motion into compact language-domain intentions and can be constructed from expert trajectories with a trajectory-grounded annotation pipeline and can be verified against generated trajectories through rule-based projection. DriveMA exploits this verifiability with action-centric supervised training and a data-efficient turn-level credit assignment reinforcement learning framework, explicitly aligning high-level decisions with low-level trajectory planning through dense rewards and precise credit assignment. DriveMA sets a new state of the art on the Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, achieving a Rater Feedback Score of 8.060 with a 2B model and further improving it to 8.079 with a 4B model; it also obtains competitive closed-loop planning performance on NAVSIM. These results show that even a simple meta-action interface can achieve state-of-the-art planning when made verifiable and optimized for language-action alignment. Code, data, and models are available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/DriveMA.

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization -- within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings -- of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior works, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod/examples/research_cod.

This paper documents and theorises a self-reinforcing dynamic between two measurable trends: the exponential expansion of large language model (LLM) context windows and the secular contraction of human sustained-attention capacity. We term the resulting asymmetry the Cognitive Divergence. AI context windows have grown from 512 tokens in 2017 to 2,000,000 tokens by 2026 (factor ~3,906; fitted lambda = 0.59/yr; doubling time ~14 months). Over the same period, human Effective Context Span (ECS) -- a token-equivalent measure derived from validated reading-rate meta-analysis (Brysbaert, 2019) and an empirically motivated Comprehension Scaling Factor -- has declined from approximately 16,000 tokens (2004 baseline) to an estimated 1,800 tokens (2026, extrapolated from longitudinal behavioural data ending 2020 (Mark, 2023); see Section 9 for uncertainty discussion). The AI-to-human ratio grew from near parity at the ChatGPT launch (November 2022) to 556--1,111x raw and 56--111x quality-adjusted, after accounting for retrieval degradation (Liu et al., 2024; Chroma, 2025). Beyond documenting this divergence, the paper introduces the Delegation Feedback Loop hypothesis: as AI capability grows, the cognitive threshold at which humans delegate to AI falls, extending to tasks of negligible demand; the resulting reduction in cognitive practice may further attenuate the capacities already documented as declining (Gerlich, 2025; Kim et al., 2026; Kosmyna et al., 2025). Neither trend reverses spontaneously. The paper characterises the divergence statistically, reviews neurobiological mechanisms across eight peer-reviewed neuroimaging studies, presents empirical evidence bearing on the delegation threshold, and proposes a research agenda centred on a validated ECS psychometric instrument and longitudinal study of AI-mediated cognitive change.

Multimodal foundation models serve numerous applications at the intersection of vision and language. Still, despite being pretrained on extensive data, they become outdated over time. To keep models updated, research into continual pretraining mainly explores scenarios with either (1) infrequent, indiscriminate updates on large-scale new data, or (2) frequent, sample-level updates. However, practical model deployment often operates in the gap between these two limit cases, as real-world applications often demand adaptation to specific subdomains, tasks or concepts -- spread over the entire, varying life cycle of a model. In this work, we complement current perspectives on continual pretraining through a research test bed as well as provide comprehensive guidance for effective continual model updates in such scenarios. We first introduce FoMo-in-Flux, a continual multimodal pretraining benchmark with realistic compute constraints and practical deployment requirements, constructed over 63 datasets with diverse visual and semantic coverage. Using FoMo-in-Flux, we explore the complex landscape of practical continual pretraining through multiple perspectives: (1) A data-centric investigation of data mixtures and stream orderings that emulate real-world deployment situations, (2) a method-centric investigation ranging from simple fine-tuning and traditional continual learning strategies to parameter-efficient updates and model merging, (3) meta learning rate schedules and mechanistic design choices, and (4) the influence of model and compute scaling. Together, our insights provide a practitioner's guide to continual multimodal pretraining for real-world deployment. Our benchmark and code is here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/fomo_in_flux.

Universal graph pre-training has emerged as a key paradigm in graph representation learning, offering a promising way to train encoders to learn transferable representations from unlabeled graphs and to effectively generalize across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, recent explorations in universal graph pre-training primarily focus on homogeneous graphs and it remains unexplored for heterogeneous graphs, which exhibit greater structural and semantic complexity. This heterogeneity makes it highly challenging to train a universal encoder for diverse heterogeneous graphs: (i) the diverse types with dataset-specific semantics hinder the construction of a unified representation space; (ii) the number and semantics of meta-paths vary across datasets, making encoding and aggregation patterns learned from one dataset difficult to apply to others. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Meta-path-aware Universal heterogeneous Graph pre-training (MUG) approach. Specifically, for challenge (i), MUG introduces a input unification module that integrates information from multiple node and relation types within each heterogeneous graph into a unified representation.This representation is then projected into a shared space by a dimension-aware encoder, enabling alignment across graphs with diverse schemas.Furthermore, for challenge (ii), MUG trains a shared encoder to capture consistent structural patterns across diverse meta-path views rather than relying on dataset-specific aggregation strategies, while a global objective encourages discriminability and reduces dataset-specific biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MUG on some real datasets.

Recent work in probability-domain knowledge distillation has established axiomatic frameworks for temperature scaling, multi-teacher aggregation, and bias-variance trade-offs in single-stage settings. However, the mathematical behavior of recursive or multi-generation distillation remains poorly understood, with prior approaches relying primarily on empirical heuristics. In this work, we introduce an axiomatic and operator-theoretic framework for recursive meta-distillation, formalizing iterative knowledge distillation as a sequence of probability-distribution operators with explicit anchoring to base teachers. We define structural axioms for valid meta-teacher construction and prove the existence of non-trivial operator families satisfying these axioms without specifying particular algorithms or loss functions. Under mild realizability and convexity assumptions, we show that anchored recursive distillation induces contraction in KL divergence, yielding geometric convergence to base teacher distributions and a unique, globally attractive fixed point. The contribution is foundational rather than algorithmic: the framework characterizes when recursive distillation is mathematically well-posed and convergent rather than error-accumulating, independent of model architecture, optimization details, or specific operator instantiations. These results provide a theoretical basis for understanding stability, bias-variance behavior, and failure modes in iterative and multi-teacher distillation under capacity constraints.

Prompt tuning, a recently emerging paradigm, enables the powerful vision-language pre-training models to adapt to downstream tasks in a parameter -- and data -- efficient way, by learning the ``soft prompts'' to condition frozen pre-training models. Though effective, it is particularly problematic in the few-shot scenario, where prompt tuning performance is sensitive to the initialization and requires a time-consuming process to find a good initialization, thus restricting the fast adaptation ability of the pre-training models. In addition, prompt tuning could undermine the generalizability of the pre-training models, because the learnable prompt tokens are easy to overfit to the limited training samples. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Gradient-RegulAted Meta-prompt learning (GRAM) framework that jointly meta-learns an efficient soft prompt initialization for better adaptation and a lightweight gradient regulating function for strong cross-domain generalizability in a meta-learning paradigm using only the unlabeled image-text pre-training data. Rather than designing a specific prompt tuning method, our GRAM can be easily incorporated into various prompt tuning methods in a model-agnostic way, and comprehensive experiments show that GRAM brings about consistent improvement for them in several settings (i.e., few-shot learning, cross-domain generalization, cross-dataset generalization, etc.) over 11 datasets. Further, experiments show that GRAM enables the orthogonal methods of textual and visual prompt tuning to work in a mutually-enhanced way, offering better generalizability beyond the uni-modal prompt tuning methods.

Domain shift refers to the well known problem that a model trained in one source domain performs poorly when applied to a target domain with different statistics. {Domain Generalization} (DG) techniques attempt to alleviate this issue by producing models which by design generalize well to novel testing domains. We propose a novel {meta-learning} method for domain generalization. Rather than designing a specific model that is robust to domain shift as in most previous DG work, we propose a model agnostic training procedure for DG. Our algorithm simulates train/test domain shift during training by synthesizing virtual testing domains within each mini-batch. The meta-optimization objective requires that steps to improve training domain performance should also improve testing domain performance. This meta-learning procedure trains models with good generalization ability to novel domains. We evaluate our method and achieve state of the art results on a recent cross-domain image classification benchmark, as well demonstrating its potential on two classic reinforcement learning tasks.

We introduce Meta 3D Gen (3DGen), a new state-of-the-art, fast pipeline for text-to-3D asset generation. 3DGen offers 3D asset creation with high prompt fidelity and high-quality 3D shapes and textures in under a minute. It supports physically-based rendering (PBR), necessary for 3D asset relighting in real-world applications. Additionally, 3DGen supports generative retexturing of previously generated (or artist-created) 3D shapes using additional textual inputs provided by the user. 3DGen integrates key technical components, Meta 3D AssetGen and Meta 3D TextureGen, that we developed for text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation, respectively. By combining their strengths, 3DGen represents 3D objects simultaneously in three ways: in view space, in volumetric space, and in UV (or texture) space. The integration of these two techniques achieves a win rate of 68% with respect to the single-stage model. We compare 3DGen to numerous industry baselines, and show that it outperforms them in terms of prompt fidelity and visual quality for complex textual prompts, while being significantly faster.

Can small language models achieve strong tool-use performance without complex adaptation mechanisms? This paper investigates this question through Meta-Tool, a controlled empirical study comparing hypernetwork-based LoRA adaptation against carefully designed few-shot prompting. Using a Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct backbone, we evaluate four adaptation mechanisms--few-shot prompting, documentation encoding, hypernetwork-generated LoRA weights, and value-guided beam search--across four diverse benchmarks: Gorilla APIBench, Spider 2.0, WebArena, and InterCode. Our central finding is a well-supported negative result: despite generating non-trivial weight matrices, the 227.8M-parameter hypernetwork provides no measurable improvement over few-shot prompting alone. Comprehensive ablation studies reveal that few-shot examples contribute +21.5% to performance and documentation contributes +5.0%, while the hypernetwork adds 0%. A 3B model with well-designed prompts achieves 79.7% of GPT-5's average performance at 10 times lower latency. Error analysis across 722 failure cases spanning all shot counts (0--5) shows that at the 5-shot configuration (106 failures), failure modes are task-dependent: schema-heavy tasks (Spider 2.0, WebArena) show near-zero format errors with remaining failures semantic, while format errors dominate on Gorilla (100%) and InterCode (70%). These findings redirect practitioners toward prompt engineering and example curation rather than complex adaptation architectures.

AI agents are increasingly used to solve complex, multi-step tasks, but existing multi-agent frameworks remain brittle as workflows grow in scale and depth. Small errors at intermediate stages can propagate through agent interactions, while insufficient grounding and weak verification mechanisms further limit reliability. We present Meta-Agent, a two-phase framework that automatically constructs and executes specialized multi-agent systems from natural-language task descriptions. In the construction phase, a task planner decomposes a problem into a directed acyclic graph of agent specifications with explicit input/output contracts and verification criteria. A web search module grounds each specification with external evidence, and a code generation module produces system prompts and tool configurations. A construction-time verification stage then validates generated artifacts and triggers targeted regeneration when failures are detected. In the execution phase, a coordinator dispatches subtasks across the agent graph while execution-time verification gates intermediate outputs. We further introduce a three-level error attribution mechanism that distinguishes local, upstream, and structural failures, enabling targeted recovery strategies ranging from localized retries to partial re-execution and re-decomposition. We evaluate Meta-Agent across coding, contextual learning, and open-ended reasoning tasks. Experiments against strong multi-agent baselines and ablation studies demonstrate consistent improvements in task success rate, error recovery, and workflow stability. The results highlight the importance of tightly integrating planning, grounding, and verification for building reliable multi-agent systems.

We propose a hybrid machine learning architecture that simultaneously employs multiple deep learning models analyzing contextual and behavioral characteristics of Windows portable executable, producing a final prediction based on a decision from the meta-model. The detection heuristic in contemporary machine learning Windows malware classifiers is typically based on the static properties of the sample since dynamic analysis through virtualization is challenging for vast quantities of samples. To surpass this limitation, we employ a Windows kernel emulation that allows the acquisition of behavioral patterns across large corpora with minimal temporal and computational costs. We partner with a security vendor for a collection of more than 100k int-the-wild samples that resemble the contemporary threat landscape, containing raw PE files and filepaths of applications at the moment of execution. The acquired dataset is at least ten folds larger than reported in related works on behavioral malware analysis. Files in the training dataset are labeled by a professional threat intelligence team, utilizing manual and automated reverse engineering tools. We estimate the hybrid classifier's operational utility by collecting an out-of-sample test set three months later from the acquisition of the training set. We report an improved detection rate, above the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art model, especially under low false-positive requirements. Additionally, we uncover a meta-model's ability to identify malicious activity in validation and test sets even if none of the individual models express enough confidence to mark the sample as malevolent. We conclude that the meta-model can learn patterns typical to malicious samples from representation combinations produced by different analysis techniques. We publicly release pre-trained models and anonymized dataset of emulation reports.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly surpassing human knowledge in many domains. While improving these models traditionally relies on costly human data, recent self-rewarding mechanisms (Yuan et al., 2024) have shown that LLMs can improve by judging their own responses instead of relying on human labelers. However, existing methods have primarily focused on improving model responses rather than judgment capabilities, resulting in rapid saturation during iterative training. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Meta-Rewarding step to the self-improvement process, where the model judges its own judgements and uses that feedback to refine its judgment skills. Surprisingly, this unsupervised approach improves the model's ability to judge {\em and} follow instructions, as demonstrated by a win rate improvement of Llama-3-8B-Instruct from 22.9% to 39.4% on AlpacaEval 2, and 20.6% to 29.1% on Arena-Hard. These results strongly suggest the potential for self-improving models without human supervision.

The main challenge in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is how to understand natural-language instructions in an unseen environment. The main limitation of conventional VLN algorithms is that if an action is mistaken, the agent fails to follow the instructions or explores unnecessary regions, leading the agent to an irrecoverable path. To tackle this problem, we propose Meta-Explore, a hierarchical navigation method deploying an exploitation policy to correct misled recent actions. We show that an exploitation policy, which moves the agent toward a well-chosen local goal among unvisited but observable states, outperforms a method which moves the agent to a previously visited state. We also highlight the demand for imagining regretful explorations with semantically meaningful clues. The key to our approach is understanding the object placements around the agent in spectral-domain. Specifically, we present a novel visual representation, called scene object spectrum (SOS), which performs category-wise 2D Fourier transform of detected objects. Combining exploitation policy and SOS features, the agent can correct its path by choosing a promising local goal. We evaluate our method in three VLN benchmarks: R2R, SOON, and REVERIE. Meta-Explore outperforms other baselines and shows significant generalization performance. In addition, local goal search using the proposed spectral-domain SOS features significantly improves the success rate by 17.1% and SPL by 20.6% for the SOON benchmark.

Memory-augmented LLM agents tackle complex long-horizon tasks by recursively summarizing interaction trajectories into compact memory. However, existing approaches typically train these memory policies using outcome-based reinforcement learning, failing to localize where intermediate memory quality degrades. As interactions unfold, ambiguous recursive summaries progressively discard task-relevant information and introduce semantic noise. This exacerbates belief deviation, obscuring the agent's estimate of the latent task state and ultimately derailing long-horizon reasoning. We therefore argue that memory optimization should focus not merely on trajectory-level success, but on the clarity of the belief induced by intermediate summaries. To this end, we introduce Belief Entropy, a self-supervised proxy that probes how uncertain the model remains about the latent task state given its current memory. Based on this proxy, we propose Metacognitive Memory Policy Optimization (MMPO). Instead of relying only on sparse outcome-based signals, MMPO provides fine-grained, memory-specific supervision via explicitly penalizing summaries that induce high epistemic uncertainty. Experiments show that MMPO consistently outperforms existing methods on diverse long-horizon tasks, maintaining 97.1% performance even when scaled to 1.75M-token contexts.

Large language models show impressive results on few-shot NLP tasks. However, these models are memory and computation-intensive. Meta-training allows one to leverage smaller models for few-shot generalization in a domain-general and task-agnostic manner; however, these methods alone results in models that may not have sufficient parameterization or knowledge to adapt quickly to a large variety of tasks. To overcome this issue, we propose meta-training with demonstration retrieval, where we use a dense passage retriever to retrieve semantically similar labeled demonstrations to each example for more varied supervision. By separating external knowledge from model parameters, we can use meta-training to train parameter-efficient models that generalize well on a larger variety of tasks. We construct a meta-training set from UnifiedQA and CrossFit, and propose a demonstration bank based on UnifiedQA tasks. To our knowledge, our work is the first to combine retrieval with meta-training, to use DPR models to retrieve demonstrations, and to leverage demonstrations from many tasks simultaneously, rather than randomly sampling demonstrations from the training set of the target task. Our approach outperforms a variety of targeted parameter-efficient and retrieval-augmented few-shot methods on QA, NLI, and text classification tasks (including SQuAD, QNLI, and TREC). Our approach can be meta-trained and fine-tuned quickly on a single GPU.

This paper introduces Meta-PerSER, a novel meta-learning framework that personalizes Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) by adapting to each listener's unique way of interpreting emotion. Conventional SER systems rely on aggregated annotations, which often overlook individual subtleties and lead to inconsistent predictions. In contrast, Meta-PerSER leverages a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) approach enhanced with Combined-Set Meta-Training, Derivative Annealing, and per-layer per-step learning rates, enabling rapid adaptation with only a few labeled examples. By integrating robust representations from pre-trained self-supervised models, our framework first captures general emotional cues and then fine-tunes itself to personal annotation styles. Experiments on the IEMOCAP corpus demonstrate that Meta-PerSER significantly outperforms baseline methods in both seen and unseen data scenarios, highlighting its promise for personalized emotion recognition.

Recent advances in text recognition led to a paradigm shift for page-level recognition, from multi-step segmentation-based approaches to end-to-end attention-based ones. However, the naïve character-level autoregressive decoding process results in long prediction times: it requires several seconds to process a single page image on a modern GPU. We propose the Meta Document Attention Network (Meta-DAN) as a novel decoding strategy to reduce the prediction time while enabling a better context modeling. It relies on two main components: windowed queries, to process several transformer queries altogether, enlarging the context modeling with near future; and multi-token predictions, whose goal is to predict several tokens per query instead of only the next one. We evaluate the proposed approach on 10 full-page handwritten datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on average in terms of character error rate. Source code and weights of trained models are available at https://github.com/FactoDeepLearning/meta_dan.

Retrieval-augmented generation resorts to content retrieved from external sources in order to leverage the performance of large language models in downstream tasks. The excessive volume of retrieved content, the possible dispersion of its parts, or their out of focus range may happen nevertheless to eventually have a detrimental rather than an incremental effect. To mitigate this issue and improve retrieval-augmented generation, we propose a method to refine the retrieved content before it is included in the prompt by resorting to meta-prompting optimization. Put to empirical test with the demanding multi-hop question answering task from the StrategyQA dataset, the evaluation results indicate that this method outperforms a similar retrieval-augmented system but without this method by over 30%.

Large language models encode impressively broad world knowledge in their parameters. However, the knowledge in static language models falls out of date, limiting the model's effective "shelf life." While online fine-tuning can reduce this degradation, we find that naively fine-tuning on a stream of documents leads to a low level of information uptake. We hypothesize that online fine-tuning does not sufficiently attend to important information. That is, the gradient signal from important tokens representing factual information is drowned out by the gradient from inherently noisy tokens, suggesting that a dynamic, context-aware learning rate may be beneficial. We therefore propose learning which tokens to upweight. We meta-train a small, autoregressive model to reweight the language modeling loss for each token during online fine-tuning, with the objective of maximizing the out-of-date base question-answering model's ability to answer questions about a document after a single weighted gradient step. We call this approach Context-aware Meta-learned Loss Scaling (CaMeLS). Across three different distributions of documents, our experiments find that CaMeLS provides substantially improved information uptake on streams of thousands of documents compared with standard fine-tuning and baseline heuristics for reweighting token losses.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited. We find this limitation is partially attributable to a reasoning-answer hit gap, where the model identifies the correct facts during reasoning but fails to incorporate them into the final response, thereby reducing factual fidelity. To address this issue, we propose MR-ALIGN, a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that enhances factuality without relying on external verifiers. MR-ALIGN quantifies state transition probabilities along the model's thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments. This re-weighting reshapes token-level signals into probability-aware segment scores, encouraging coherent reasoning trajectories that are more conducive to factual correctness. Empirical evaluations across four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning. These results highlight that aligning the reasoning process itself, rather than merely the outputs, is pivotal for advancing factuality in LRMs.

Agent skills today are static artifact: authored once -- by human curation or one-shot generation from parametric knowledge -- and then consumed unchanged, with no mechanism to improve from real use. We propose SkillEvolver, a lightweight, plug-and-play solution for online skill learning, in which a single meta-skill iteratively authors, deploys, and refines domain-specific skills. The learning target of SkillEvolver is the skill's prose and code, not model weights, so that the resulting artifact drops into any agent without retraining; and the meta-skill itself is just another skill, loaded through the same interface by any protocol-compliant CLI-agent. Unlike trace-distillation, the meta-skill refines only after deploying the learnt skill, such that the learning signal comes from failures another agent encounters while using it -- not from exploratory traces alone. Refinement iterations are governed by a fresh-agent overfit audit that catches possible leakage as well as deployed-skill-specific failures, including the silent-bypass mode in which a skill appears valid in content but is never invoked at runtime. On 83 SkillsBench tasks spanning 15^{+} domains, SkillEvolver reaches 56.8% accuracy versus 43.6% for curated human skills and 29.9% for the no-skill baseline; on three GPU kernel optimization tasks from KernelBench, it also raises mean speedup from 1.16 to 1.51 on average.

If autoresearch is itself a form of research, then autoresearch can be applied to research itself. We present Bilevel Autoresearch, a bilevel framework in which an outer autoresearch loop improves an inner autoresearch loop by reading its code and traces, identifying bottlenecks, and generating injectable Python search mechanisms at runtime. The inner loop optimizes task performance; the outer loop optimizes how the inner loop searches. Both loops use the same LLM, so improvements come from the bilevel architecture rather than a stronger meta-level model, although the outer loop consumes additional inference and wall-clock budget. On Karpathy's GPT pretraining benchmark, the meta-autoresearch outer loop achieves a 5x improvement over the standard inner loop alone (-0.045 vs. -0.009 val_bpb), while parameter-level adjustment without mechanism change yields no reliable gain. The outer loop instantiates mechanisms from adjacent search domains, including combinatorial optimization, multi-armed bandits, and design of experiments, without human specification of the final mechanism design. Trace analysis suggests that these mechanisms break deterministic search patterns and force exploration of directions the LLM's priors avoid. The experiments demonstrate, on this benchmark, a first bilevel step: an outer loop improves the search behavior of an inner loop. Code is the mechanism carrier in this implementation, but skills, prompts, workflows, evaluators, domain principles, world-model assumptions, and memory schemas can also encode mechanisms that shape future agent behavior. This suggests a path toward recursive bootstrapping, where mechanisms discovered for the inner loop can be fed back to improve the meta-level loop itself.

Meta-learning researchers face two fundamental issues in their empirical work: prototyping and reproducibility. Researchers are prone to make mistakes when prototyping new algorithms and tasks because modern meta-learning methods rely on unconventional functionalities of machine learning frameworks. In turn, reproducing existing results becomes a tedious endeavour -- a situation exacerbated by the lack of standardized implementations and benchmarks. As a result, researchers spend inordinate amounts of time on implementing software rather than understanding and developing new ideas. This manuscript introduces learn2learn, a library for meta-learning research focused on solving those prototyping and reproducibility issues. learn2learn provides low-level routines common across a wide-range of meta-learning techniques (e.g. meta-descent, meta-reinforcement learning, few-shot learning), and builds standardized interfaces to algorithms and benchmarks on top of them. In releasing learn2learn under a free and open source license, we hope to foster a community around standardized software for meta-learning research.

Visual outcomes are increasingly central to multimodal large language models, making reliable and fine-grained verification essential for scaling generalist foundation models. In this work, we investigate multimodal meta-verification, which leverages verifier-generated rationales rather than decision-only signals, and explore how to effectively incorporate meta-verification feedback into multimodal verifier training. We identify two key findings. First, symbolic verifier outputs (e.g., bounding boxes) outperform textual explanations as meta-verification rationales, enabling efficient rule-based reinforcement learning rewards while avoiding reliance on model-based rewards from auxiliary judge models. Second, decoupling reinforcement learning objectives for binary judgment and meta-verification substantially outperforms joint reward optimization, due to intrinsic differences in output structure and learning dynamics. Based on these insights, we train OmniVerifier-M1, a generalist visual verifier leveraging symbolic meta-verification and decoupled reinforcement learning. OmniVerifier-M1 provides robust verification and fine-grained error localization, and further enables M1-TTS, a verifier-driven agentic generation system achieving dynamic region-level self-correction. This approach paves the way for more reliable, interpretable, and fine-grained multimodal verification, supporting safer and more controllable foundation model deployment.

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation (RLME), which optimizes a generator using reward derived from an evaluator's answers to natural-language meta-questions (e.g., "Is the answer correct?" or "Is the reasoning logically consistent?"). RLME treats the evaluator's probability of a positive judgment as a reward and updates the generator via group-relative policy optimization, enabling learning without labels. Across a suite of experiments, we show that RLME achieves accuracy and sample efficiency comparable to label-based training, enables controllable trade-offs among multiple objectives, steers models toward reliable reasoning patterns rather than post-hoc rationalization, and generalizes to open-domain settings where ground-truth labels are unavailable, broadening the domains in which LLMs may be trained with RL.

Identifying the vulnerabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their safety by addressing inherent weaknesses. Jailbreaks, in which adversaries bypass safeguards with crafted input prompts, play a central role in red-teaming by probing LLMs to elicit unintended or unsafe behaviors. Recent optimization-based jailbreak approaches iteratively refine attack prompts by leveraging LLMs. However, they often rely heavily on either binary attack success rate (ASR) signals, which are sparse, or manually crafted scoring templates, which introduce human bias and uncertainty in the scoring outcomes. To address these limitations, we introduce AMIS (Align to MISalign), a meta-optimization framework that jointly evolves jailbreak prompts and scoring templates through a bi-level structure. In the inner loop, prompts are refined using fine-grained and dense feedback using a fixed scoring template. In the outer loop, the template is optimized using an ASR alignment score, gradually evolving to better reflect true attack outcomes across queries. This co-optimization process yields progressively stronger jailbreak prompts and more calibrated scoring signals. Evaluations on AdvBench and JBB-Behaviors demonstrate that AMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance, including 88.0% ASR on Claude-3.5-Haiku and 100.0% ASR on Claude-4-Sonnet, outperforming existing baselines by substantial margins.

Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregating their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations, leading to significant operational expense, end-to-end latency and failures due to hallucinations. This work introduces Agent Workflow Optimization (AWO), a framework that identifies and optimizes redundant tool execution patterns to improve the efficiency and robustness of agentic workflows. AWO analyzes existing workflow traces to discover recurring sequences of tool calls and transforms them into meta-tools, which are deterministic, composite tools that bundle multiple agent actions into a single invocation. Meta-tools bypass unnecessary intermediate LLM reasoning steps and reduce operational cost while also shortening execution paths, leading to fewer failures. Experiments on two agentic AI benchmarks show that AWO reduces the number of LLM calls up to 11.9% while also increasing the task success rate by up to 4.2 percent points.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on accumulated memory to solve long-horizon decision-making tasks. However, most existing approaches store memory in fixed representations and reuse it at a single or implicit level of abstraction, which limits generalization and often leads to negative transfer when distribution shift. This paper proposes the Meta-Cognitive Memory Abstraction method (MCMA), which treats memory abstraction as a learnable cognitive skill rather than a fixed design choice. MCMA decouples task execution from memory management by combining a frozen task model with a learned memory copilot. The memory copilot is trained using direct preference optimization, it determines how memories should be structured, abstracted, and reused. Memories are further organized into a hierarchy of abstraction levels, enabling selective reuse based on task similarity. When no memory is transferable, MCMA transfers the ability to abstract and manage memory by transferring the memory copilot. Experiments on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and BabyAI demonstrate substantial improvements in performance, out-of-distribution generalization, and cross-task transfer over several baselines.

While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using meta-tokens, special tokens injected during pre-training, along with a dedicated meta-attention mechanism to guide LMs to use these tokens. We pre-train a language model with a modified GPT-2 architecture equipped with meta-attention in addition to causal multi-head attention, and study the impact of these tokens on a suite of synthetic tasks. We find that data-efficient language model pre-training on fewer than 100B tokens utilizing meta-tokens and our meta-attention mechanism achieves strong performance on these tasks after fine-tuning. We suggest that these gains arise due to the meta-tokens sharpening the positional encoding. This enables them to operate as trainable, content-based landmarks, implicitly compressing preceding context and "caching" it in the meta-token. At inference-time, the meta-token points to relevant context, facilitating length generalization up to 2times its context window, even after extension with YaRN. We provide further evidence of these behaviors by visualizing model internals to study the residual stream, and assessing the compression quality by information-theoretic analysis on the rate-distortion tradeoff. Our findings suggest that pre-training LMs with meta-tokens offers a simple, data-efficient method to enhance long-context language modeling performance, while introducing new insights into the nature of their behavior towards length generalization.

On a global level, ecological communities are being perturbed at an unprecedented rate by human activities and environmental instabilities. Yet, we understand little about what factors facilitate or impede long-term persistence of these communities. While observational studies indicate that increased biodiversity must, somehow, be driving stability, theoretical studies have argued the exact opposite viewpoint instead. This encouraged many researchers to participate in the ongoing diversity-stability debate. Within this context, however, there has been a severe lack of studies that consider spatial features explicitly, even though nearly all habitats are spatially embedded. To this end, we study here the linear stability of meta-ecosystems on networks that describe how discrete patches are connected by dispersal between them. By combining results from random-matrix theory and network theory, we are able to show that there are three distinct features that underlie stability: edge density, tendency to triadic closure, and isolation or fragmentation. Our results appear to further indicate that network sparsity does not necessarily reduce stability, and that connections between patches are just as, if not more, important to consider when studying the stability of large ecological systems.

Autonomous scientific discovery systems offer the potential to accelerate research by automating the process of hypothesis generation and validation. However, current systems operate within constrained search spaces or require predefined research questions, limiting their capacity for true open-ended inquiry. Furthermore, while they generate hypotheses iteratively, they largely lack the ability to explicitly synthesize their own accumulated findings to uncover complex, interconnected phenomena. We introduce DiscoPER, an autonomous large language model-powered framework that conducts open-ended research by dynamically generating and executing code to explore datasets without pre-specified research objectives. To ensure rigorous scientific validity, every proposed discovery must pass statistical testing. To overcome the limitations of isolated search, our framework introduces a second-order reasoning mechanism that periodically analyzes its own accumulated discoveries. By treating prior discoveries as empirical data, DiscoPER identifies structural patterns, confounds, and epistemic gaps, actively redirecting hypothesis exploration toward uncharted regions of the search space. The search space is further expanded by incorporating tool use, enabling the system to explore hypotheses beyond structured metadata by seamlessly processing and extracting useful information from multimodal sources like images. Evaluated on iNatDisco, a new multimodal ecological knowledge benchmark with pattern-level ground truth obtained from peer-reviewed literature, DiscoPER recovers 8 of 9 known patterns with a 72.7% hypothesis support rate, outperforming both classical causal discovery and LLM-guided baselines. Ablations show that DiscoPER scales with more data, and confirms the benefits of second-order meta-reflection.

Making deep learning recommendation model (DLRM) training and inference fast and efficient is important. However, this presents three key system challenges - model architecture diversity, kernel primitive diversity, and hardware generation and architecture heterogeneity. This paper presents KernelEvolve-an agentic kernel coding framework-to tackle heterogeneity at-scale for DLRM. KernelEvolve is designed to take kernel specifications as input and automate the process of kernel generation and optimization for recommendation model across heterogeneous hardware architectures. KernelEvolve does so by operating at multiple programming abstractions, from Triton and CuTe DSL to low-level hardware agnostic languages, spanning the full hardware-software optimization stack. The kernel optimization process is described as graph-based search with selection policy, universal operator, fitness function, and termination rule, dynamically adapts to runtime execution context through retrieval-augmented prompt synthesis. We designed, implemented, and deployed KernelEvolve to optimize a wide variety of production recommendation models across generations of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as Meta's AI accelerators. We validate KernelEvolve on the publicly-available KernelBench suite, achieving 100% pass rate on all 250 problems across three difficulty levels, and 160 PyTorch ATen operators across three heterogeneous hardware platforms, demonstrating 100% correctness. KernelEvolve reduces development time from weeks to hours and achieves substantial performance improvements over PyTorch baselines across diverse production use cases and for heterogeneous AI systems at-scale. Beyond performance efficiency improvements, KernelEvolve significantly mitigates the programmability barrier for new AI hardware by enabling automated kernel generation for in-house developed AI hardware.

We introduce Shepherd, a functional programming model that formalizes meta-agent operations on target agents as functions, with core operations mechanized in Lean. Shepherd records every agent-environment interaction as a typed event in a Git-like execution trace, enabling any past state to be forked and replayed. The system forks the agent process and its filesystem 5times faster than Docker, achieving >95% prompt-cache reuse on replay. We demonstrate the model through three applications. First, in runtime intervention, a live supervisor increases pair coding pass rates from 28.8% to 54.7% on CooperBench. Second, in counterfactual meta-optimization, branching exploration outperforms baselines across four benchmarks by up to 11 points while reducing wall-clock time by up to 58%. Third, in Tree-RL training, forking rollouts at selected turns improves TerminalBench-2 performance from 34.2% to 39.4%. These results establish Shepherd as an efficient infrastructure for programming meta-agents. We open-source the system to support future research.

Training large neural networks with data-parallel stochastic gradient descent allocates N GPU replicas to compute effectively identical updates -- a practice that leaves the rich space of learning rate configurations entirely unexplored during training. We propose Hyperparameter-Divergent Ensemble Training (HDET), a method that repurposes these replicas for simultaneous learning rate exploration at negligible communication overhead. HDET operates in alternating phases: a fan-out stage in which replicas train independently under a structured, symmetric spread of learning rates, and a converge stage in which parameters are averaged across all replicas via AllReduce every T steps. Building on this ensemble substrate, we further propose an automatic learning rate (auto-LR) controller that treats the relative training loss across replicas as a performance signal, updating the shared base schedule toward higher-performing configurations via a momentum-based gradient-free meta-update. The combined method produces a self-adapting learning rate schedule that improves both optimization quality and generalization without additional hyperparameter sweeps or training budget. Crucially, the framework generalizes beyond learning rate: any scalar hyperparameter that does not alter model architecture -- such as dropout rate, attention scale temperature, or weight-decay coefficient -- can be explored across replicas using the same fan-out/converge protocol, with inter-replica loss differences serving as zero-order hypergradients that guide the search direction. HDET is implemented as a drop-in replacement for PyTorch's OneCycleLR scheduler, requiring no changes to model architecture, optimizer, or data pipeline.

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success often reinforce flawed or inefficient reasoning paths, a problem we term inefficient exploration. This leads to agents that are brittle and fail to generalize, as they learn to find solutions without learning how to reason coherently. To address this, we introduce RLVMR, a novel framework that integrates dense, process-level supervision into end-to-end RL by rewarding verifiable, meta-reasoning behaviors. RLVMR equips an agent to explicitly tag its cognitive steps, such as planning, exploration, and reflection, and provides programmatic, rule-based rewards for actions that contribute to effective problem-solving. These process-centric rewards are combined with the final outcome signal and optimized using a critic-free policy gradient method. On the challenging ALFWorld and ScienceWorld benchmarks, RLVMR achieves new state-of-the-art results, with our 7B model reaching an 83.6% success rate on the most difficult unseen task split. Our analysis confirms these gains stem from improved reasoning quality, including significant reductions in redundant actions and enhanced error recovery, leading to more robust, efficient, and interpretable agents.

This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload? This study focuses on the topic of LLMs assist NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLM in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with "deficiency" labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) "LLMs as Reviewers", how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) "LLMs as Metareviewers", how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

This paper describes Meta's TestGen-LLM tool, which uses LLMs to automatically improve existing human-written tests. TestGen-LLM verifies that its generated test classes successfully clear a set of filters that assure measurable improvement over the original test suite, thereby eliminating problems due to LLM hallucination. We describe the deployment of TestGen-LLM at Meta test-a-thons for the Instagram and Facebook platforms. In an evaluation on Reels and Stories products for Instagram, 75% of TestGen-LLM's test cases built correctly, 57% passed reliably, and 25% increased coverage. During Meta's Instagram and Facebook test-a-thons, it improved 11.5% of all classes to which it was applied, with 73% of its recommendations being accepted for production deployment by Meta software engineers. We believe this is the first report on industrial scale deployment of LLM-generated code backed by such assurances of code improvement.

Long-horizon reasoning in LLM-based agents often fails not from generative weakness but from insufficient verification of intermediate reasoning. Co-Sight addresses this challenge by turning reasoning into a falsifiable and auditable process through two complementary mechanisms: Conflict-Aware Meta-Verification (CAMV) and Trustworthy Reasoning with Structured Facts (TRSF). CAMV reformulates verification as conflict identification and targeted falsification, allocating computation only to disagreement hotspots among expert agents rather than to full reasoning chains. This bounds verification cost to the number of inconsistencies and improves efficiency and reliability. TRSF continuously organizes, validates, and synchronizes evidence across agents through a structured facts module. By maintaining verified, traceable, and auditable knowledge, it ensures that all reasoning is grounded in consistent, source-verified information and supports transparent verification throughout the reasoning process. Together, TRSF and CAMV form a closed verification loop, where TRSF supplies structured facts and CAMV selectively falsifies or reinforces them, yielding transparent and trustworthy reasoning. Empirically, Co-Sight achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on GAIA (84.4%) and Humanity's Last Exam (35.5%), and strong results on Chinese-SimpleQA (93.8%). Ablation studies confirm that the synergy between structured factual grounding and conflict-aware verification drives these improvements. Co-Sight thus offers a scalable paradigm for reliable long-horizon reasoning in LLM-based agents. Code is available at https://github.com/ZTE-AICloud/Co-Sight/tree/cosight2.0_benchmarks.

The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature vectors, followed by agglomerative clustering, intra-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection to reveal underlying conceptual archetypes. This methodology revealed a continuous landscape of the themes relating to the definition of life, suggesting that what has historically been approached as a binary taxonomic problem should be instead conceived as differentiated perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. We offer a new methodological bridge between reductionist and holistic approaches to fundamental questions in science and philosophy, demonstrating how computational semantic analysis can reveal conceptual patterns across disciplinary boundaries, and opening similar pathways for addressing other contested definitional territories across the sciences.

Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time. At the core of TTL is an adaptation policy that updates the actor policy based on experience from previous episodes, thereby improving future behavior. Existing methods rely on fixed, hand-crafted adaptation policies rather than optimizing them for downstream improvement. We argue that optimal adaptation policies should be learned from task environments, not hand-engineered based on human intuition. To achieve this, we introduce Meta-TTL, a framework that formulates the discovery of effective adaptation policies as a bi-level optimization problem. Within this framework, the inner loop executes the standard TTL process, measuring how effectively a candidate adaptation policy helps an agent correct errors across sequential episodes. Guided by the agent's performance, the outer loop employs evolutionary search over a diverse distribution of training tasks to iteratively refine the adaptation policy. We evaluate Meta-TTL on Jericho and WebArena-Lite across both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, using multiple meta-agent backbones. Results on both benchmarks show that Meta-TTL consistently outperforms hand-crafted baselines, suggesting that the optimized adaptation policy encodes transferable strategies that generalize beyond the training task distribution.

Quantile regression is a fundamental problem in statistical learning motivated by a need to quantify uncertainty in predictions, or to model a diverse population without being overly reductive. For instance, epidemiological forecasts, cost estimates, and revenue predictions all benefit from being able to quantify the range of possible values accurately. As such, many models have been developed for this problem over many years of research in statistics, machine learning, and related fields. Rather than proposing yet another (new) algorithm for quantile regression we adopt a meta viewpoint: we investigate methods for aggregating any number of conditional quantile models, in order to improve accuracy and robustness. We consider weighted ensembles where weights may vary over not only individual models, but also over quantile levels, and feature values. All of the models we consider in this paper can be fit using modern deep learning toolkits, and hence are widely accessible (from an implementation point of view) and scalable. To improve the accuracy of the predicted quantiles (or equivalently, prediction intervals), we develop tools for ensuring that quantiles remain monotonically ordered, and apply conformal calibration methods. These can be used without any modification of the original library of base models. We also review some basic theory surrounding quantile aggregation and related scoring rules, and contribute a few new results to this literature (for example, the fact that post sorting or post isotonic regression can only improve the weighted interval score). Finally, we provide an extensive suite of empirical comparisons across 34 data sets from two different benchmark repositories.

The proliferation of agentic AI coding assistants, including Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and emerging skill-based architectures, has fundamentally transformed software development workflows. These systems leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with external tools, file systems, and shell access through protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). However, this expanded capability surface introduces critical security vulnerabilities. In this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of prompt injection attacks targeting agentic coding assistants. We propose a novel three-dimensional taxonomy categorizing attacks across delivery vectors, attack modalities, and propagation behaviors. Our meta-analysis synthesizes findings from 78 recent studies (2021--2026), consolidating evidence that attack success rates against state-of-the-art defenses exceed 85\% when adaptive attack strategies are employed. We systematically catalog 42 distinct attack techniques spanning input manipulation, tool poisoning, protocol exploitation, multimodal injection, and cross-origin context poisoning. Through critical analysis of 18 defense mechanisms reported in prior work, we identify that most achieve less than 50\% mitigation against sophisticated adaptive attacks. We contribute: (1) a unified taxonomy bridging disparate attack classifications, (2) the first systematic analysis of skill-based architecture vulnerabilities with concrete exploit chains, and (3) a defense-in-depth framework grounded in the limitations we identify. Our findings indicate that the security community must treat prompt injection as a first-class vulnerability class requiring architectural-level mitigations rather than ad-hoc filtering approaches.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for personalizing automatic speech recognition (ASR) has recently shown promise for adapting general population models to atypical speech. However, these approaches assume a priori knowledge of the atypical speech disorder being adapted for -- the diagnosis of which requires expert knowledge that is not always available. Even given this knowledge, data scarcity and high inter/intra-speaker variability further limit the effectiveness of traditional fine-tuning. To circumvent these challenges, we first identify the minimal set of model parameters required for ASR adaptation. Our analysis of each individual parameter's effect on adaptation performance allows us to reduce Word Error Rate (WER) by half while adapting 0.03% of all weights. Alleviating the need for cohort-specific models, we next propose the novel use of a meta-learned hypernetwork to generate highly individualized, utterance-level adaptations on-the-fly for a diverse set of atypical speech characteristics. Evaluating adaptation at the global, cohort and individual-level, we show that hypernetworks generalize better to out-of-distribution speakers, while maintaining an overall relative WER reduction of 75.2% using 0.1% of the full parameter budget.

Finding high-quality solutions quickly is an important objective in motion planning. This is especially true for high-degree-of-freedom robots. Satisficing planners have traditionally found feasible solutions quickly but provide no guarantees on their optimality, while almost-surely asymptotically optimal (a.s.a.o.) planners have probabilistic guarantees on their convergence towards an optimal solution but are more computationally expensive. This paper uses the AO-x meta-algorithm to extend the satisficing RRT-Connect planner to optimal planning. The resulting Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) finds initial solutions in similar times as RRT-Connect and uses any additional planning time to converge towards the optimal solution in an anytime manner. It is proven to be probabilistically complete and a.s.a.o. AORRTC was tested with the Panda (7 DoF) and Fetch (8 DoF) robotic arms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset. These experiments show that AORRTC finds initial solutions as fast as RRT-Connect and faster than the tested state-of-the-art a.s.a.o. algorithms while converging to better solutions faster. AORRTC finds solutions to difficult high-DoF planning problems in milliseconds where the other a.s.a.o. planners could not consistently find solutions in seconds. This performance was demonstrated both with and without single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) acceleration.

Agent skills today are hand-crafted, generated one-shot, or evolved through loosely controlled self-revision, none of which behaves like a deep-learning optimizer for the skill, and none of which reliably improves over its starting point under feedback. We argue the skill should instead be trained as the external state of a frozen agent, with the same discipline that makes weight-space optimization reproducible. SkillOpt is, to our knowledge, the first systematic controllable text-space optimizer for agent skills: a separate optimizer model turns scored rollouts into bounded add/delete/replace edits on a single skill document, and an edit is accepted only when it strictly improves a held-out validation score. A textual learning-rate budget, rejected-edit buffer, and epoch-wise slow/meta update make skill training stable while adding zero inference-time model calls at deployment. Across six benchmarks, seven target models, and three execution harnesses (direct chat, Codex, Claude Code), SkillOpt is best or tied on all 52 evaluated (model, benchmark, harness) cells and beats every per-cell competitor among human, one-shot LLM, Trace2Skill, TextGrad, GEPA, and EvoSkill skills. On GPT-5.5 it lifts the average no-skill accuracy by +23.5 points in direct chat, by +24.8 inside the Codex agentic loop, and by +19.1 inside Claude Code. Transfer experiments further show that optimized skill artifacts retain value when moved across model scales, between Codex and Claude Code execution environments, and to a nearby math benchmark without further optimization.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit a wide range of capabilities, such as writing robot code from language commands -- enabling non-experts to direct robot behaviors, modify them based on feedback, or compose them to perform new tasks. However, these capabilities (driven by in-context learning) are limited to short-term interactions, where users' feedback remains relevant for only as long as it fits within the context size of the LLM, and can be forgotten over longer interactions. In this work, we investigate fine-tuning the robot code-writing LLMs, to remember their in-context interactions and improve their teachability i.e., how efficiently they adapt to human inputs (measured by average number of corrections before the user considers the task successful). Our key observation is that when human-robot interactions are formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (in which human language inputs are observations, and robot code outputs are actions), then training an LLM to complete previous interactions can be viewed as training a transition dynamics model -- that can be combined with classic robotics techniques such as model predictive control (MPC) to discover shorter paths to success. This gives rise to Language Model Predictive Control (LMPC), a framework that fine-tunes PaLM 2 to improve its teachability on 78 tasks across 5 robot embodiments -- improving non-expert teaching success rates of unseen tasks by 26.9% while reducing the average number of human corrections from 2.4 to 1.9. Experiments show that LMPC also produces strong meta-learners, improving the success rate of in-context learning new tasks on unseen robot embodiments and APIs by 31.5%. See videos, code, and demos at: https://robot-teaching.github.io/.

Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context learning capabilities of LLMs, we propose Few-Shot Preference Optimization (FSPO), which reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under this framework, an LLM learns to quickly adapt to a user via a few labeled preferences from that user, constructing a personalized reward function for them. Additionally, since real-world preference data is scarce and challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. In particular, to successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across across three domains: movie reviews, pedagogical adaptation based on educational background, and general question answering, along with a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate on average in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 72% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Machine Translation (MT), applying them to linguistically complex domains-such as Social Network Services, literature etc. In these scenarios, translations often require handling non-literal expressions, leading to the inaccuracy of MT metrics. To systematically investigate the reliability of MT metrics, we first curate a meta-evaluation dataset focused on non-literal translations, namely MENT. MENT encompasses four non-literal translation domains and features source sentences paired with translations from diverse MT systems, with 7,530 human-annotated scores on translation quality. Experimental results reveal the inaccuracies of traditional MT metrics and the limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge, particularly the knowledge cutoff and score inconsistency problem. To mitigate these limitations, we propose RATE, a novel agentic translation evaluation framework, centered by a reflective Core Agent that dynamically invokes specialized sub-agents. Experimental results indicate the efficacy of RATE, achieving an improvement of at least 3.2 meta score compared with current metrics. Further experiments demonstrate the robustness of RATE to general-domain MT evaluation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/BITHLP/RATE.

We present FabriVLA, a lightweight Vision-Language-Action model for Precise Multi-Task Manipulation. FabriVLA combines an InternVL3.5 vision-language backbone with a flow-matching action head featuring gated self-attention across action tokens and shallow VLM layer fusion for enriched spatial context. The model is trained via single stage joint optimization from a pretrained VLM and randomly initialized action head. On the Meta-World MT50 benchmark spanning 50 diverse manipulation tasks, FabriVLA achieves a tier-average success rate of 90.0%, demonstrating that a compact VLA built on a 1B scale VLM can achieve strong performance without relying on multi billion parameter VLA backbones.

We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 MLCommons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous tasks. However, these advancements have predominantly benefited "first-class" languages such as English and Chinese, leaving many other languages underrepresented. This imbalance, while limiting broader applications, generates a natural preference ranking between languages, offering an opportunity to bootstrap the multilingual capabilities of LLM in a self-improving manner. Thus, we propose Language Imbalance Driven Rewarding, where the inherent imbalance between dominant and non-dominant languages within LLMs is leveraged as a reward signal. Iterative DPO training demonstrates that this approach not only enhances LLM performance in non-dominant languages but also improves the dominant language's capacity, thereby yielding an iterative reward signal. Fine-tuning Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct over two iterations of this approach results in continuous improvements in multilingual performance across instruction-following and arithmetic reasoning tasks, evidenced by an average improvement of 7.46% win rate on the X-AlpacaEval leaderboard and 13.9% accuracy on the MGSM benchmark. This work serves as an initial exploration, paving the way for multilingual self-improvement of LLMs.

Embodied AI is a crucial frontier in robotics, capable of planning and executing action sequences for robots to accomplish long-horizon tasks in physical environments. In this work, we introduce EmbodiedGPT, an end-to-end multi-modal foundation model for embodied AI, empowering embodied agents with multi-modal understanding and execution capabilities. To achieve this, we have made the following efforts: (i) We craft a large-scale embodied planning dataset, termed EgoCOT. The dataset consists of carefully selected videos from the Ego4D dataset, along with corresponding high-quality language instructions. Specifically, we generate a sequence of sub-goals with the "Chain of Thoughts" mode for effective embodied planning. (ii) We introduce an efficient training approach to EmbodiedGPT for high-quality plan generation, by adapting a 7B large language model (LLM) to the EgoCOT dataset via prefix tuning. (iii) We introduce a paradigm for extracting task-related features from LLM-generated planning queries to form a closed loop between high-level planning and low-level control. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of EmbodiedGPT on embodied tasks, including embodied planning, embodied control, visual captioning, and visual question answering. Notably, EmbodiedGPT significantly enhances the success rate of the embodied control task by extracting more effective features. It has achieved a remarkable 1.6 times increase in success rate on the Franka Kitchen benchmark and a 1.3 times increase on the Meta-World benchmark, compared to the BLIP-2 baseline fine-tuned with the Ego4D dataset.

LLMs have made impressive progress, but their growing capabilities also expose them to highly flexible jailbreaking attacks designed to bypass safety alignment. While many existing defenses focus on known types of attacks, it is more critical to prepare LLMs for unseen attacks that may arise during deployment. To address this, we propose a lifelong safety alignment framework that enables LLMs to continuously adapt to new and evolving jailbreaking strategies. Our framework introduces a competitive setup between two components: a Meta-Attacker, trained to actively discover novel jailbreaking strategies, and a Defender, trained to resist them. To effectively warm up the Meta-Attacker, we first leverage the GPT-4o API to extract key insights from a large collection of jailbreak-related research papers. Through iterative training, the first iteration Meta-Attacker achieves a 73% attack success rate (ASR) on RR and a 57% transfer ASR on LAT using only single-turn attacks. Meanwhile, the Defender progressively improves its robustness and ultimately reduces the Meta-Attacker's success rate to just 7%, enabling safer and more reliable deployment of LLMs in open-ended environments. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/LifelongSafetyAlignment.

Large language models (LLMs) often appear to excel on public benchmarks, but these high scores may mask an overreliance on dataset-specific surface cues rather than true language understanding. We introduce the Chameleon Benchmark Overfit Detector (C-BOD), a meta-evaluation framework that systematically distorts benchmark prompts via a parametric transformation and detects overfitting of LLMs. By rephrasing inputs while preserving their semantic content and labels, C-BOD exposes whether a model's performance is driven by memorized patterns. Evaluated on the MMLU benchmark using 26 leading LLMs, our method reveals an average performance degradation of 2.15% under modest perturbations, with 20 out of 26 models exhibiting statistically significant differences. Notably, models with higher baseline accuracy exhibit larger performance differences under perturbation, and larger LLMs tend to be more sensitive to rephrasings indicating that both cases may overrely on fixed prompt patterns. In contrast, the Llama family and models with lower baseline accuracy show insignificant degradation, suggesting reduced dependency on superficial cues. Moreover, C-BOD's dataset- and model-agnostic design allows easy integration into training pipelines to promote more robust language understanding. Our findings challenge the community to look beyond leaderboard scores and prioritize resilience and generalization in LLM evaluation.

Scalar reward models compress multi-dimensional human preferences into a single opaque score, creating an information bottleneck that often leads to brittleness and reward hacking in open-ended alignment. We argue that robust alignment for non-verifiable tasks is fundamentally a principle generalization problem: reward should not be a learned function internalized into a judge, but an explicit reasoning process executed under inspectable principles. To operationalize this view, we present the Open Rubric System (OpenRS), a plug-and-play, rubrics-based LLM-as-a-Judge framework built around Pairwise Adaptive Meta-Rubrics (PAMR) and lightweight Pointwise Verifiable Rubrics (PVRs), which provide both hard-constraint guardrails and verifiable reward components when ground-truth or programmatic checks are available. OpenRS uses an explicit meta-rubric -- a constitution-like specification that governs how rubrics are instantiated, weighted, and enforced -- and instantiates adaptive rubrics on the fly by conditioning on the semantic differences between two candidate responses. It then performs criterion-wise pairwise comparisons and aggregates criterion-level preferences externally, avoiding pointwise weighted scalarization while improving discriminability in open-ended settings. To keep principles consistent yet editable across various domains, we introduce a two-level meta-rubric refinement pipeline (automated evolutionary refinement for general principles and a reproducible human-in-the-loop procedure for domain principles), complemented with pointwise verifiable rubrics that act as both guardrails against degenerate behaviors and a source of verifiable reward for objective sub-tasks. Finally, we instantiate OpenRS as reward supervision in pairwise RL training.

Large language models can resist task-misaligned activation steering during inference, sometimes recovering mid-generation to produce improved responses even when steering remains active. We term this Endogenous Steering Resistance (ESR). Using sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to steer model activations, we find that Llama-3.3-70B shows substantial ESR, while smaller models from the Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families exhibit the phenomenon less frequently. We identify 26 SAE latents that activate differentially during off-topic content and are causally linked to ESR in Llama-3.3-70B. Zero-ablating these latents reduces the multi-attempt rate by 25%, providing causal evidence for dedicated internal consistency-checking circuits. We demonstrate that ESR can be deliberately enhanced through both prompting and training: meta-prompts instructing the model to self-monitor increase the multi-attempt rate by 4x for Llama-3.3-70B, and fine-tuning on self-correction examples successfully induces ESR-like behavior in smaller models. These findings have dual implications: ESR could protect against adversarial manipulation but might also interfere with beneficial safety interventions that rely on activation steering. Understanding and controlling these resistance mechanisms is important for developing transparent and controllable AI systems. Code is available at github.com/agencyenterprise/endogenous-steering-resistance.

In this work, we address the cooperation problem among large language model (LLM) based embodied agents, where agents must cooperate to achieve a common goal. Previous methods often execute actions extemporaneously and incoherently, without long-term strategic and cooperative planning, leading to redundant steps, failures, and even serious repercussions in complex tasks like search-and-rescue missions where discussion and cooperative plan are crucial. To solve this issue, we propose Cooperative Plan Optimization (CaPo) to enhance the cooperation efficiency of LLM-based embodied agents. Inspired by human cooperation schemes, CaPo improves cooperation efficiency with two phases: 1) meta-plan generation, and 2) progress-adaptive meta-plan and execution. In the first phase, all agents analyze the task, discuss, and cooperatively create a meta-plan that decomposes the task into subtasks with detailed steps, ensuring a long-term strategic and coherent plan for efficient coordination. In the second phase, agents execute tasks according to the meta-plan and dynamically adjust it based on their latest progress (e.g., discovering a target object) through multi-turn discussions. This progress-based adaptation eliminates redundant actions, improving the overall cooperation efficiency of agents. Experimental results on the ThreeDworld Multi-Agent Transport and Communicative Watch-And-Help tasks demonstrate that CaPo achieves much higher task completion rate and efficiency compared with state-of-the-arts.The code is released at https://github.com/jliu4ai/CaPo.

Memory-based self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for coding agents. However, existing approaches typically restrict memory utilization to homogeneous task domains, failing to leverage the shared infrastructural foundations, such as runtime environments and programming languages, that exist across diverse real-world coding problems. To address this limitation, we investigate Memory Transfer Learning (MTL) by harnessing a unified memory pool from heterogeneous domains. We evaluate performance across 6 coding benchmarks using four memory representations, ranging from concrete traces to abstract insights. Our experiments demonstrate that cross-domain memory improves average performance by 3.7\%, primarily by transferring meta-knowledge, such as validation routines, rather than task-specific code. Importantly, we find that abstraction dictates transferability; high-level insights generalize well, whereas low-level traces often induce negative transfer due to excessive specificity. Furthermore, we show that transfer effectiveness scales with the size of the memory pool, and memory can be transferred even between different models. Our work establishes empirical design principles for expanding memory utilization beyond single-domain silos. Project page: https://memorytransfer.github.io/

Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can translate unseen or low-resource languages by undergoing continued training or even by encoding a grammar book in their context. However, both methods typically overfit specific languages, with limited zero-shot transfer at test time. To translate extremely low-resource languages at scale, we argue that LLMs must acquire the meta-skill of utilizing in-context linguistic knowledge rather than memorizing specific languages. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to unseen language translation given rich linguistic context, using a surface-level translation metric (chrF) as the reward. Empirically, despite the lightweight reward, our RL-trained models effectively extract and apply relevant linguistic information from the provided context, leading to better translations on completely unseen languages than in-context learning or supervised fine-tuning. Our analyses suggest that outcome-based RL can extend beyond conventional reasoning tasks like math and coding to serve as a recipe for language learning from context.

Recent advancements in learned image compression (LIC) have yielded impressive performance gains. Notably, the learned image compression models with multi-reference entropy models (MLIC series) have significantly outperformed existing traditional image codecs such as the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Intra. In this paper, we present MLICv2 and MLICv2^+, enhanced versions of the MLIC series, featuring improved transform techniques, entropy modeling, and instance adaptability. For better transform, we introduce a simple token mixing transform block inspired by the meta transformer architecture, addressing the performance degradation at high bit-rates observed in previous MLIC series while maintaining computational efficiency. To enhance entropy modeling, we propose a hyperprior-guided global correlation prediction, enabling the capture of global contexts in the initial slice of the latent representation. We also develop a channel reweighting module to dynamically prioritize important channels within each context. Additionally, advanced positional embedding for context modeling and selective compression with guided optimization are investigated. To boost instance adaptability, we employ stochastic Gumbel annealing to iteratively refine the latent representation according to the rate-distortion optimization of a specific input image. This approach further enhances performance without impacting decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that our MLICv2 and MLICv2^+ achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing Bjontegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) by 16.54%, 21.61%, 16.05% and 20.46%, 24.35%, 19.14% respectively, compared to VTM-17.0 Intra on the Kodak, Tecnick, CLIC Pro Val dataset, respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various domains but remain vulnerable to adversarial jailbreak attacks. Existing prompt-defense strategies, including parameter-modifying and parameter-free approaches, face limitations in adaptability, interpretability, and customization, constraining their effectiveness against evolving threats. To address these challenges, we propose ShieldLearner, a novel paradigm that mimics human learning in defense. Through trial and error, it autonomously distills attack signatures into a Pattern Atlas and synthesizes defense heuristics into a Meta-analysis Framework, enabling systematic and interpretable threat detection. Furthermore, we introduce Adaptive Adversarial Augmentation to generate adversarial variations of successfully defended prompts, enabling continuous self-improvement without model retraining. In addition to standard benchmarks, we create a hard test set by curating adversarial prompts from the Wildjailbreak dataset, emphasizing more concealed malicious intent. Experimental results show that ShieldLearner achieves a significantly higher defense success rate than existing baselines on both conventional and hard test sets, while also operating with lower computational overhead, making it a practical and efficient solution for real-world adversarial defense.

State-of-the-art multimodal web agents, powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), can autonomously execute many web tasks by processing user instructions and interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Current strategies for building web agents rely on (i) the generalizability of underlying MLLMs and their steerability via prompting, and (ii) large-scale fine-tuning of MLLMs on web-related tasks. However, web agents still struggle to automate tasks on unseen websites and domains, limiting their applicability to enterprise-specific and proprietary platforms. Beyond generalization from large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning, we propose building agents for few-shot adaptability using human demonstrations. We introduce the AdaptAgent framework that enables both proprietary and open-weights multimodal web agents to adapt to new websites and domains using few human demonstrations (up to 2). Our experiments on two popular benchmarks -- Mind2Web & VisualWebArena -- show that using in-context demonstrations (for proprietary models) or meta-adaptation demonstrations (for meta-learned open-weights models) boosts task success rate by 3.36% to 7.21% over non-adapted state-of-the-art models, corresponding to a relative increase of 21.03% to 65.75%. Furthermore, our additional analyses (a) show the effectiveness of multimodal demonstrations over text-only ones, (b) shed light on the influence of different data selection strategies during meta-learning on the generalization of the agent, and (c) demonstrate the effect of number of few-shot examples on the web agent's success rate. Overall, our results unlock a complementary axis for developing widely applicable multimodal web agents beyond large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning, emphasizing few-shot adaptability.

Visual model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable sample-efficient robot learning from visual observations. Yet the current approaches typically train a single model end-to-end for learning both visual representations and dynamics, making it difficult to accurately model the interaction between robots and small objects. In this work, we introduce a visual model-based RL framework that decouples visual representation learning and dynamics learning. Specifically, we train an autoencoder with convolutional layers and vision transformers (ViT) to reconstruct pixels given masked convolutional features, and learn a latent dynamics model that operates on the representations from the autoencoder. Moreover, to encode task-relevant information, we introduce an auxiliary reward prediction objective for the autoencoder. We continually update both autoencoder and dynamics model using online samples collected from environment interaction. We demonstrate that our decoupling approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of visual robotic tasks from Meta-world and RLBench, e.g., we achieve 81.7% success rate on 50 visual robotic manipulation tasks from Meta-world, while the baseline achieves 67.9%. Code is available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/mwm-rl.

Most reported gains from agent-optimization methods are one-shot: an agent is optimized against a fixed benchmark and the resulting improvement is reported as if it were a stable property of the method. This does not test the setting that matters for deployed agents, where optimization is applied recursively as new failures and new tasks appear over time. The central question this raises is whether optimizer-driven gains compound: after an agent has been optimized once, can it be optimized again on newly arrived tasks without eroding the gains the first round produced? We study this question with a two-phase continual-learning evaluation built from hard tasks in Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparing three approaches to agent-harness optimization (GEPA, Meta Harness, and RELAI's Verifiable Continual Learning, RELAI-VCL) under identical optimization budgets. All three methods improve over the baseline agent in the conventional, static, single-phase setting. However, once new tasks are introduced, the methods diverge sharply: GEPA's optimized agent transfers below the unoptimized baseline, Meta Harness transfers well but fails to improve further once given a second optimization budget, and RELAI-VCL is the only method that both transfers positively to unseen tasks and continues improving after those tasks are folded into the optimization objective, reaching the highest pass rate at every evaluated stage and the highest lifelong average pass rate overall (76.4% vs. 66.0% for GEPA, 64.6% for Meta Harness, and 58.7% for the baseline). Our key observation was that optimization gains compounded only when regression control was built into the optimization loop, providing an inductive bias against shortcut solutions that fail to generalize.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution is vital for improving diagnostic accessibility, yet most methods treat it as a deterministic mapping from a fixed low-resolution input to a high-resolution target. This overlooks a key property of MRI acquisition physics: spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are inherently coupled, making any given low-resolution scan merely one of many possible realizations under varying acquisition trade-offs. We rethink MRI super-resolution as a physics-aware reconstruction problem, in which the goal is to identify the optimal resolution-SNR configuration and then super-resolve it to obtain high-quality MRI results. A key implication of this formulation is that MRI resolution becomes dynamic rather than fixed. To handle such resolution-heterogeneous inputs, we adapt 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D GS) to MRI by formulating reconstruction as a coordinate-based, resolution-agnostic rendering problem. To further enhance fidelity, we introduce three innovations: (1) a prior-aware Gaussian representation that combines an Anatomical Structure Prior for tissue-specific kernel initialization with an Imaging System Prior that captures hardware characteristics via a covariance dictionary; (2) a physics-constrained signal modeling scheme that predicts intrinsic tissue parameters (proton density rho and effective relaxation rate R2) and synthesizes intensities through governing physical equations, ensuring biophysically plausible contrast; and (3) a meta-learning framework that alleviates paired-data scarcity by pretraining on simulated data and adapting to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments on dynamic-resolution datasets and standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its strong potential for clinical deployment.