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Nov 10

EurekAgent: Agent Environment Engineering is All You Need For Autonomous Scientific Discovery

LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery. Given an optimizable metric and an execution environment, they can propose, validate, and iterate scientific solutions, and have produced results that outperform human-designed approaches. As model capabilities continue to improve, we argue that the bottleneck for autonomous scientific discovery is shifting from prescribing agent workflows to designing agent environments: the resources, constraints, and interfaces that shape agent behavior. We frame this as environment engineering: building environments that amplify productive behaviors, such as open-ended exploration, systematic artifact management, and inter-agent collaboration, while suppressing harmful behaviors, such as reward hacking and high-friction human oversight. We present EurekAgent, an environment-engineered agent system for metric-driven autonomous scientific discovery. EurekAgent engineers the environment along four dimensions: permissions engineering for bounded agent execution and isolated evaluation; artifact engineering for filesystem and Git-based collaboration; budget engineering for budget-aware exploration; and human-in-the-loop engineering for easy human supervision and intervention. EurekAgent sets new state-of-the-art results on multiple mathematics, kernel engineering, and machine learning tasks, including new state-of-the-art 26-circle packing results discovered with less than $11 in total API cost. We open-source our code and results, and call for environment engineering as a core research direction for developing reliable autonomous research agents.

WorldFoundry: Towards Unified Infrastructure for World Intelligence

Visual generative models increasingly blur the line between synthesizing observations and simulating environments. Yet visual plausibility alone does not constitute successful world modeling: compelling outputs may lack persistent state, physical dynamics, or causally consistent responses to interactions. We define a generative world model as a predictive dynamical system that maintains a persistent, history-conditioned representation of an environment, updates that representation in response to actions or interventions, and generates temporally coherent trajectories that reflect outcomes under observed and counterfactual interventions. From this definition, we derive an intelligence-oriented framework spanning perceptual grounding, persistent state modeling, controllable transformation, dynamics-aware prediction, and closed-loop interaction. We present WorldFoundry, open-source infrastructure for reproducible inference and evaluation across video, 3D and 4D, embodied action, and interactive world systems. WorldFoundry unifies model and benchmark discovery, runtime and asset preparation, execution orchestration, artifact management, and interactive visualization, while modality-specific adapters preserve native inputs, execution semantics, output representations, and evaluation protocols. Explicit manifests, durable artifact contracts, and evidence-aware scorecards separate execution readiness from evaluative claims, making each claim traceable to its supporting artifacts. The catalog contains 270 model entries, 74 benchmarks, and 62 registered metric entries, with readiness and execution evidence recorded separately. WorldFoundry enables reproducible comparison of persistent, controllable dynamics across heterogeneous systems, advancing the field from perceptual synthesis toward measurable world intelligence.

OpenEnvisionLab OpenEnvision
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Nov 7 1

When Agents Fail: Model or Harness--Who's to Blame?

LLM agents combine models with execution harnesses, so agentic benchmark performance reflects their joint behavior. We argue that harnesses should therefore be evaluated through their interactions with underlying models. We develop a framework combining five complementary measures: (i) Valid Completion Rate (VCR), how reliably agents finish normally and deliver evaluable results, irrespective of task correctness; (ii) Model-Harness Fit, how well a harness supports task achievement through valid completion for a given model; (iii) Cross-Model Fit, a harness's overall suitability across evaluated models; (iv) Interaction Residuals, pairing-specific execution strengths and weaknesses hidden by component-level summaries; and (v) Token Load, the token demands of agent execution, including failed attempts. We evaluate four general-purpose harnesses (OpenCode, Codex CLI, Pi CLI, and DeepAgents) with four core models, plus two fixed native model-harness systems, on six benchmarks covering context management, tool use, long-context planning, multimodal interaction, and artifact handoff. Including native references and stress conditions, 111 evaluation settings yield 52,168 trajectories. Harness rankings vary across models and benchmarks; task performance and valid completion can favor different pairings, and similar task scores can accompany distinct execution profiles. OpenCode ranks first in cross-model performance, while DeepSeek V4 Flash Preview maintains consistently high Mean VCR across harnesses on the shared four-benchmark panel. These findings support evaluating model-harness interactions, training transferable harness-use capabilities in models, and harness designs adapted to the model and task.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 22

Knowledge-Aware Artifact Image Synthesis with LLM-Enhanced Prompting and Multi-Source Supervision

Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023

ArtifactWorld: Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting Artifact Restoration via Video Generation Models

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) delivers high-fidelity real-time rendering but suffers from geometric and photometric degradations under sparse-view constraints. Current generative restoration approaches are often limited by insufficient temporal coherence, a lack of explicit spatial constraints, and a lack of large-scale training data, resulting in multi-view inconsistencies, erroneous geometric hallucinations, and limited generalization to diverse real-world artifact distributions. In this paper, we present ArtifactWorld, a framework that resolves 3DGS artifact repair through systematic data expansion and a homogeneous dual-model paradigm. To address the data bottleneck, we establish a fine-grained phenomenological taxonomy of 3DGS artifacts and construct a comprehensive training set of 107.5K diverse paired video clips to enhance model robustness. Architecturally, we unify the restoration process within a video diffusion backbone, utilizing an isomorphic predictor to localize structural defects via an artifact heatmap. This heatmap then guides the restoration through an Artifact-Aware Triplet Fusion mechanism, enabling precise, intensity-guided spatio-temporal repair within native self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtifactWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance in sparse novel view synthesis and robust 3D reconstruction. Code and dataset will be made public.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 13 1

Agentic Artifact Creation: Systems, Evaluation, Principles, and Opportunities

Generative models can turn natural-language prompts into images, text, code, and other content, lowering the cost of producing drafts and components. Their practical impact increasingly depends on whether those pieces can become complete, dependable deliverables. This survey examines agentic artifact creation, which we define as stateful construction in which an AI system materially constructs or revises a deliverable and intermediate observations redirect later work. Functionally, the process links an operational representation of the artifact, a construction policy, and runtime verification whose feedback can redirect later actions. We reviewed 259 works available through August 20, 2026: 230 systems meeting this definition and 29 benchmarks of agentic artifact construction. We compare six artifact families, then analyze application settings and evaluation practice as separate dimensions. Across families, construction challenges reflect not only modality but also how tightly decisions are coupled and whether failures become visible while they remain repairable. Decomposition can reduce local complexity while increasing coordination and reassembly costs. Learned judges may add little independent evidence when they share the generator's preferences or blind spots. We formulate principles for keeping commitments and responsibility explicit, turning feedback into targeted repair, and revalidating affected state after change. We also identify opportunities for sustaining coherent, accountable control as artifacts, creator intent, and construction systems evolve. A curated paper list is available at https://github.com/GeminiLight/awesome-agentic-artifact-creation.

MagicMirror: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Artifacts Assessment in Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in instruction following and aesthetics. However, a persistent challenge is the prevalence of physical artifacts, such as anatomical and structural flaws, which severely degrade perceptual quality and limit application. Given the diversity and complexity of these artifacts, a systematic and fine-grained evaluation framework is required, which is lacking in current benchmarks. To fill this gap, we introduce MagicMirror, a comprehensive framework for artifacts assessment. We first establish a detailed taxonomy of generated image artifacts. Guided by this taxonomy, we manually annotate MagicData340K, the first human-annotated large-scale dataset of 340K generated images with fine-grained artifact labels. Building on this dataset, we train MagicAssessor, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) that provides detailed assessments and corresponding labels. To overcome challenges like class imbalance and reward hacking, we design a novel data sampling strategy and a multi-level reward system for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Finally, we leverage MagicAssessor to construct MagicBench, an automated benchmark for evaluating the image artifacts of current T2I models. Our evaluation with MagicBench reveals that despite their widespread adoption, even top-tier models like GPT-image-1 are consistently plagued by significant artifacts, highlighting artifact reduction as a critical frontier for future T2I development. Project page: https://wj-inf.github.io/MagicMirror-page/.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

ReproBridge: Building Reproducibility into ML Research Artifacts

Reproducing machine learning experiments requires reconstructing procedures from information scattered across papers, released code, and supporting artifacts. For coding agents, reproduction success can therefore depend on their ability to fill in missing details, rather than on the released artifacts alone. We ask whether preserving recovered procedures and decisions improves subsequent independent reproduction. We define a standardized artifact design comprising a refined codebase, environment setup, experiment launchers, and a reproduction guide, and introduce ReproBridge, an agent workflow for constructing these refined reproducible artifacts. ReproBridge-Bench provides 1,029 tasks from 387 experiments across 36 papers, anchored by five human-verified reference scores per task. Agents attempt tasks in fresh sessions with raw code or refined artifacts; a separate Auditor checks execution evidence. Across four evaluated models, refined artifacts raise mean reproduction success from 76.4% to 92.6% and reduce downstream API spending by 19.7% on average. The cross-model success-rate spread narrows from 21.6 to 3.9 percentage points, with all four models achieving mean success rates above 90%. Removing any component reduces success in the ablation study, with the largest losses from code and environment removal. These results suggest that preserving execution knowledge helps even models with lower raw-code success reproduce experiments more reliably and at lower API cost.

google Google
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Nov 5 1

Understanding Reward Hacking in Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard approach for post-training large language models and, more recently, for improving image generation models, which uses reward functions to enhance generation quality and human preference alignment. However, existing reward designs are often imperfect proxies for true human judgment, making models prone to reward hacking--producing unrealistic or low-quality images that nevertheless achieve high reward scores. In this work, we systematically analyze reward hacking behaviors in text-to-image (T2I) RL post-training. We investigate how both aesthetic/human preference rewards and prompt-image consistency rewards individually contribute to reward hacking and further show that ensembling multiple rewards can only partially mitigate this issue. Across diverse reward models, we identify a common failure mode: the generation of artifact-prone images. To address this, we propose a lightweight and adaptive artifact reward model, trained on a small curated dataset of artifact-free and artifact-containing samples. This model can be integrated into existing RL pipelines as an effective regularizer for commonly used reward models. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating our artifact reward significantly improves visual realism and reduces reward hacking across multiple T2I RL setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of lightweight reward augment serving as a safeguard against reward hacking.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 6

Which Models Are Our Models Built On? Auditing Invisible Dependencies in Modern LLMs

Modern LLM training pipelines increasingly rely on other models to generate data, filter corpora, judge outputs, and guide development decisions. These dependencies are recursive: a model may depend on an upstream artifact whose own dependencies are documented only in separate releases and artifacts. As a result, the full dependency structure is fragmented across heterogeneous public artifacts, with complexity and recursive depth far outpacing humans' ability to trace. We introduce ModSleuth, an agentic system that recursively reconstructs LLM dependency graphs from public artifacts with source-grounded evidence. We find that the primary challenge is no longer information extraction, but defining what constitutes a dependency and reconciling artifact references across inconsistent documentation. We address these challenges through a formalization that distinguishes direct and indirect dependencies, represents heterogeneous pipeline roles through operation-centered relationships, and resolves artifact identities across names, versions, and repositories. Applying ModSleuth to four public-artifact-rich LLM releases, we recover 1,060 source-verified dependencies and construct large-scale dependency graphs of modern LLM development. These graphs reveal multi-hop license obligations, train-evaluation coupling, discrepancies between released and training-time artifacts, and documentation inconsistencies that would otherwise be difficult to uncover. We release ModSleuth and the resulting dependency graphs to support transparent analysis of the increasingly complex ecosystems underlying modern LLMs.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 9 2

Verus-Insight: Towards Explainable Artifact Detection in AI-Generated Videos

Recent advances in video generation have made synthetic videos increasingly realistic, placing greater demands on reliable AI-generated video detection. Existing artifact-based detectors typically identify generation artifacts as evidence for source prediction, yet they may either fail to recognize subtle artifacts or reach the correct source decision without faithfully identifying the evidence underlying it. In this work, we systematically investigate how to design and train effective artifact detectors and formulate artifact detection as a structured process comprising three complementary capabilities: Inspection Planning, which determines what should be examined; Evidence Verification, which verifies whether the inspected content exhibits genuine generation artifacts; and Evidence Aggregation, which integrates the verified evidence into the final source decision. Building on this formulation, we introduce Verus-Insight, trained with human-anchored full-process supervision and progressive capability training to strengthen both fine-grained artifact detection and video-level detection. We further introduce Verus-Bench, a benchmark with fine-grained human annotations of perceptible artifacts for evaluating artifact detection. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Verus-Insight achieves strong performance in both fine-grained artifact analysis and AI-generated video detection, with substantial gains in recovering human-perceived artifacts. Further analyses reveal that the three capabilities are complementary yet distinct, and that Verus-Insight more reliably converts relevant inspection targets into supported artifact evidence without increasing spurious artifact claims.

  • 14 authors
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Oct 21 2

Context as Infrastructure: Knowledge Compilation for Retrieval in Agentic Systems with Harnesses

Retrieval-augmented generation is becoming agentic. A search harness writes queries, reads results, reformulates, and decides when to stop. This largely solves accuracy: a harness with only BM25/grep and MiniMax M3 answers 85% of BrowseComp-Plus and 91% on multi-hop FRAMES in our runs, without compiled or vector indexes. It exposes a context problem: an undisciplined loop repeats queries, rereads documents, and fills the window with unused passages. The missing layer is knowledge compilation: a configurable ingestion pipeline where LLMs enrich documents with context no chunk contains alone--navigation hierarchies with claim-evidence leaves, entity graphs, timelines, mind maps, ontologies, wikis, and memory. Compilation is not a better retriever: under a competent harness, structural artifacts gave no detectable accuracy gain on FRAMES, and a PageIndex-style outline degraded at scale. It is a supply layer. A navigation tree whose leaves are claim-evidence pairs--the mechanism we measure--cuts query tokens by 91% when evidence suffices and adds 1.9% when it does not, a 38% average reduction; this implies a 2% break-even sufficiency rate and a measured rate near 43%. A decision gate cuts latency from 140 s to 30 s, though substitution's token saving is bought with retrieval rounds and carries its own latency cost. Other artifacts--ontology, graph, wiki, timeline, mind map, memory--pay off in deployment (governance, integration, onboarding, temporal orientation, continuity) where accuracy benchmarks cannot see them. We describe RAGFlow's pipeline and harness (open source at https://github.com/infiniflow/ragflow), which turns the loop into five disciplined stations and keeps the context entering the model the smallest sufficient set; together they form an agent-native database: a store that hands the agent compiled, governed context instead of a ranked list of passages.

  • 18 authors
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Oct 29 1

Multi-Agent Transactive Memory

The decentralized deployment of LLM agents with diverse capabilities across diverse tasks motivates infrastructure for knowledge sharing across heterogeneous agent populations. Just as search engines index human-generated artifacts to support human problem solving, retrieval systems can organize agent-generated artifacts for reuse across agent populations. We extend retrieval-augmented generation - which demonstrates the value of human-authored artifacts to individual agents - to retrieval of agent-generated artifacts supporting a population of agents. In particular, agent trajectories encode reusable procedural knowledge, yet these artifacts are typically discarded after a single use or retained only by the producing agent, forcing newly instantiated agents to repeatedly rediscover existing solutions. We propose Multi-Agent Transactive Memory (MATM), a framework for population-level storage and retrieval of agent-generated trajectories, where producer agents contribute trajectories to a shared repository and consumer agents retrieve them to improve task execution. We focus on interactive environments (ALFWorld and WebArena), where trajectories are long and encode especially rich procedural structure. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieving trajectories from MATM improves downstream task performance and reduces interaction steps without coordination or joint training. These results position MATM as a design pattern for population-level experience sharing in open agent ecosystems.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 17

3D-QCNet -- A Pipeline for Automated Artifact Detection in Diffusion MRI images

Artifacts are a common occurrence in Diffusion MRI (dMRI) scans. Identifying and removing them is essential to ensure the accuracy and viability of any post processing carried out on these scans. This makes QC (quality control) a crucial first step prior to any analysis of dMRI data. Several QC methods for artifact detection exist, however they suffer from problems like requiring manual intervention and the inability to generalize across different artifacts and datasets. In this paper, we propose an automated deep learning (DL) pipeline that utilizes a 3D-Densenet architecture to train a model on diffusion volumes for automatic artifact detection. Our method is applied on a vast dataset consisting of 9000 volumes sourced from 7 large clinical datasets. These datasets comprise scans from multiple scanners with different gradient directions, high and low b values, single shell and multi shell acquisitions. Additionally, they represent diverse subject demographics like the presence or absence of pathologies. Our QC method is found to accurately generalize across this heterogenous data by correctly detecting 92% artifacts on average across our test set. This consistent performance over diverse datasets underlines the generalizability of our method, which currently is a significant barrier hindering the widespread adoption of automated QC techniques. For these reasons, we believe that 3D-QCNet can be integrated in diffusion pipelines to effectively automate the arduous and time-intensive process of artifact detection.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 9, 2021

VaseMuseum: Digital Intelligent Museum for Ancient Greek Pottery

Vision-language models (VLMs) have made interactive digital museums increasingly feasible by connecting 3D digitization with natural-language artifact exploration. However, in cultural heritage domains such as ancient Greek pottery, reliable VLM assistance is limited by two challenges. First, open-ended interpretation requires grounding fine-grained 2D/3D visual evidence in specialized curatorial knowledge, yet the retrieval process may introduce weak sources and unverifiable references. Second, when the available evidence is incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous, VLMs often produce confident but unsupported answers instead of calibrated uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose VaseMuseum, a lightweight and modular multimodal agent framework for intelligent digital museums of ancient Greek pottery. VaseMuseum combines an interactive virtual museum with VaseAgent, which supports both 2D images and 3D artifacts through multimodal perception, 3D-aware reasoning, external knowledge retrieval, and inference-time reliability control. Specifically, VaseAgent retrieves evidence from authoritative web and museum knowledge sources, and source-level control selects diverse and verifiable evidence before generation. Meanwhile, response-level control checks generated claims against the evidence pool and encourages neutral, evidence-bounded answers when support is insufficient or conflicting. Moreover, a training-free GRPO-style selection mechanism favors responses with valid references and calibrated confidence without updating the VLM backbone. Experiments in a realistic digital museum simulation show that VaseMuseum improves citation validity, reduces hallucinations on knowledge-intensive queries, and produces more neutral answers under ambiguity compared with search-enabled VLM baselines.

Knows: Agent-Native Structured Research Representations

Research artifacts are distributed primarily as reader-oriented documents like PDFs. This creates a bottleneck for increasingly agent-assisted and agent-native research workflows, in which LLM agents need to infer fine-grained, task-relevant information from lengthy full documents, a process that is expensive, repetitive, and unstable at scale. We introduce Knows, a lightweight companion specification that binds structured claims, evidence, provenance, and verifiable relations to existing research artifacts in a form LLM agents can consume directly. Knows addresses the gap with a thin YAML sidecar (KnowsRecord) that coexists with the original PDF, requiring no changes to the publication itself, and validated by a deterministic schema linter. We evaluate Knows on 140 comprehension questions across 20 papers spanning 14 academic disciplines, comparing PDF-only, sidecar-only, and hybrid conditions across six LLM agents of varying capacity. Weak models (0.8B--2B parameters) improve from 19--25\% to 47--67\% accuracy (+29 to +42 percentage points) when reading sidecar instead of PDF, while consuming 29--86\% fewer input tokens; an LLM-as-judge re-scoring confirms that weak-model sidecar accuracy (75--77\%) approaches stronger-model PDF accuracy (78--83\%). Beyond this controlled evaluation, a community sidecar hub at https://knows.academy/ has already indexed over ten thousand publications and continues to grow daily, providing independent evidence that the format is adoption-ready at scale.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 18

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 9

MAIF: Enforcing AI Trust and Provenance with an Artifact-Centric Agentic Paradigm

The AI trustworthiness crisis threatens to derail the artificial intelligence revolution, with regulatory barriers, security vulnerabilities, and accountability gaps preventing deployment in critical domains. Current AI systems operate on opaque data structures that lack the audit trails, provenance tracking, or explainability required by emerging regulations like the EU AI Act. We propose an artifact-centric AI agent paradigm where behavior is driven by persistent, verifiable data artifacts rather than ephemeral tasks, solving the trustworthiness problem at the data architecture level. Central to this approach is the Multimodal Artifact File Format (MAIF), an AI-native container embedding semantic representations, cryptographic provenance, and granular access controls. MAIF transforms data from passive storage into active trust enforcement, making every AI operation inherently auditable. Our production-ready implementation demonstrates ultra-high-speed streaming (2,720.7 MB/s), optimized video processing (1,342 MB/s), and enterprise-grade security. Novel algorithms for cross-modal attention, semantic compression, and cryptographic binding achieve up to 225 compression while maintaining semantic fidelity. Advanced security features include stream-level access control, real-time tamper detection, and behavioral anomaly analysis with minimal overhead. This approach directly addresses the regulatory, security, and accountability challenges preventing AI deployment in sensitive domains, offering a viable path toward trustworthy AI systems at scale.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

How Far Are We From True Auto-Research?

Recent auto-research systems can produce complete papers, but feasibility is not the same as quality, and the field still lacks a systematic study of how good agent-generated papers actually are. We introduce ResearchArena, a minimal scaffold that lets off-the-shelf agents (Claude Code using Opus 4.6, Codex using GPT-5.4, and Kimi Code using K2.5) carry out the full research loop themselves (ideation, experimentation, paper writing, self-refinement) under only lightweight guidance. Across 13 computer science seeds and 3 trials per agent-domain pair, ResearchArena yields 117 agent-generated papers, each evaluated under three complementary lenses: a manuscript-only reviewer (SAR), an artifact-aware peer review (PR) in which agents inspect the workspace alongside the manuscript, and an human conducted meta-review. Under SAR alone the picture is optimistic: Claude Code obtains the highest score, outperforms Analemma's FARS, and matches the weighted-average human ICLR 2025 submission, suggesting that minimally scaffolded agents can produce papers that look competitive on manuscript-only review. Manual inspection, however, reveals this picture is overstated: SAR scores are poorly aligned with its actual acceptance decisions and reward plausible framing without verifying experimental substance. Under artifact-aware PR scores drop sharply, and manual auditing identifies experimental rigor as the major bottleneck, decomposing into three failure modes (fabricated results, underpowered experiments, and plan/execution mismatch) that are highly agent-dependent: Codex 5%/8% paper-vs-artifact mismatch / fabricated references versus Kimi Code 77%/72%, a sim15times spread that tracks distinct research personas the agents develop. None of the 117 agent-generated papers reaches the acceptance bar of a top-tier venue. This suggests that we are still gapped from the true auto-research.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17

VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks

As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging. We study how verification capability can be strengthened with a fixed base model, without access to reference answers or grading rubrics at test time. Repeated sampling yields multiple rollouts that can contain complementary correct claims, but we need a reliable verification mechanism to determine which claims to trust. We first find that disagreement often exposes correct alternatives, while consensus can conceal errors. These observations motivate VeriHarness, which turns the underlying LLM a generator uses into an agentic verifier by giving it a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills. A disagreement resolver checks competing claims against environmental evidence, while a consensus challenger tests shared claims and searches for omitted requirements. Their findings guide the selection and revision of the final artifact. Across five long-horizon workspace benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness achieves the highest selection scores among the evaluated baselines. Evidence-backed revision further improves average performance, bringing gains over a single rollout to 6.2 points with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 6.4 points with Claude Opus 4.8. We further show that verification skills can self-improve from failure feedback, demonstrating VeriHarness as a novel and critical approach for scaling long-horizon agentic verification. We release the full pool of approximately 26,000 rollouts across all five benchmarks and both models, produced at a cost of over $100,000, to support future research on agentic verification.

google Google
·
Sep 30 3

Design Anything, Design at Scale

As multimodal resources are transformed into media outputs, agentic AI is expected to stay aligned with design intent over long horizons. Designers follow briefs specifying goals, constraints, and deliverables, with later work building on earlier decisions. Recent work reuses design experience across tasks, yet alignment among artifacts within one project remains challenging. Agents therefore need to preserve and apply this intent across domains and as projects grow. We introduce Design Anything, a graph-based harness that preserves design intent outside the model and binds deliverables to the workflow steps that produce them through an intent-execution graph. A task contract retains constraints and decisions, selected designs become explicit inputs to later generations, and a deterministic controller uses bindings and execution records to check output types and counts, identify outstanding deliverables, and guide subsequent turns. We also introduce DesignAnything-Bench, with 228 tasks across 19 design domains, including 38 project families at scales of 6, 14, and 24 artifacts. With the LLM held fixed, Design Anything satisfies 85.0% and 92.5% of the brief's factual constraints with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash High and GPT-5.6 Sol High, respectively, exceeding the strongest same-model baselines by 15.4% and 14.4%. These gains reach 25.1% and 23.0% on 24-artifact tasks. Under each model, Design Anything leads or ties in constraint satisfaction in 18 of 19 domains. Professional designers also prefer its complete deliverable sets over those of same-model baselines in a blind evaluation.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 16 2

In the Picture: Medical Imaging Datasets, Artifacts, and their Living Review

Datasets play a critical role in medical imaging research, yet issues such as label quality, shortcuts, and metadata are often overlooked. This lack of attention may harm the generalizability of algorithms and, consequently, negatively impact patient outcomes. While existing medical imaging literature reviews mostly focus on machine learning (ML) methods, with only a few focusing on datasets for specific applications, these reviews remain static -- they are published once and not updated thereafter. This fails to account for emerging evidence, such as biases, shortcuts, and additional annotations that other researchers may contribute after the dataset is published. We refer to these newly discovered findings of datasets as research artifacts. To address this gap, we propose a living review that continuously tracks public datasets and their associated research artifacts across multiple medical imaging applications. Our approach includes a framework for the living review to monitor data documentation artifacts, and an SQL database to visualize the citation relationships between research artifact and dataset. Lastly, we discuss key considerations for creating medical imaging datasets, review best practices for data annotation, discuss the significance of shortcuts and demographic diversity, and emphasize the importance of managing datasets throughout their entire lifecycle. Our demo is publicly available at http://inthepicture.itu.dk/.

  • 29 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025

SR-Prominence: A Crowdsourced Protocol and Dataset Suite for Perceptually-Weighted Super-Resolution Artifact Evaluation

Modern image super-resolution methods generate detailed, visually appealing results, but they often introduce visual artifacts: unnatural patterns and texture distortions that degrade perceived quality. These defects vary widely in perceptual impact--some are barely noticeable, while others are highly disturbing--yet existing detection methods treat them equally. We propose artifact prominence as an evaluative target, defined as the fraction of viewers who judge a highlighted region to contain a noticeable artifact. We design a crowdsourced annotation protocol and construct SR-Prominence, a dataset suite containing 3,935 artifact masks from DeSRA, Open Images, Urban100, and a realistic no-ground-truth Urban100-HR setting, annotated with prominence. Re-annotating DeSRA reveals that 48.2% of its in-lab binary artifacts are not noticed by a majority of viewers. Across the suite, we audit SR artifact detectors, image-quality metrics, and SR methods. We find that classical full-reference metrics, especially SSIM and DISTS, provide surprisingly strong localized prominence signals, whereas no-reference IQA methods and specialized artifact detectors often fail to generalize across datasets and reference settings. SR-Prominence is released with an objective scoring protocol that allows new metrics to be benchmarked on our suite without further crowdsourcing. Together, the data and protocols enable SR artifact evaluation to move from binary defect presence toward perceptual impact. SR-Prominence is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/imolodetskikh/sr-artifact-prominence.

  • 6 authors
·
May 13

Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifacts

Agent Skills have become persistent behavioral artifacts across independent AI agent systems. They combine natural-language task specifications with metadata and optional references, scripts, assets, hooks, package manifests, tests, and companion interfaces. Existing studies explain how Skills are specified, executed, maintained, and evolved, but lack an ontology that defines these artifacts as independent software objects. This paper introduces Skillware as the software abstraction that extends software engineering to persistent Behavioral Artifacts in agent systems. A Skill Artifact specifies reusable task behavior; a Skillware Unit manages that artifact as software through an independent identity and lifecycle. A compatible Agent Host activates the unit for runtime interpretation. Three necessary conditions operationalize category membership: behavioral primacy, independent software identity, and an Agent Host execution relationship. Lifecycle Continuity records whether the same unit identity persists through update, maintenance, rollback, and removal as a separate software-grade property. Evidence combines the Agent Skills specification, a frozen corpus of 138,133 content-deduplicated SKILL.md records associated with 20,556 repository identifiers, independent empirical studies, 15 category-boundary cases, and 13 fixed-revision engineering implementations. The evidence establishes a recurring artifact envelope, separable software identities, compatible execution paths, and lifecycle engineering pressure. Skillware provides the software ontology and engineering lifecycle through which agent capabilities can become identifiable, composable, maintainable, and evolvable software artifacts.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 20

Puzzle Similarity: A Perceptually-guided No-Reference Metric for Artifact Detection in 3D Scene Reconstructions

Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries

Large language model agents increasingly store reusable procedures outside the model. These reusable procedures are often called skills: they may be code functions, natural-language instructions, SKILL.md packages, workflow graphs, or learned adapters that a future agent can retrieve and invoke. This taxonomy-driven survey asks how such skill libraries change over time. Across a 124-paper 2023--2026 audit set, we synthesize dynamic skill systems as lifecycle-managed, verified, evolving artifact stores: agents collect evidence from interaction, propose skill updates, verify and admit candidates, organize them for retrieval and composition, repair or prune stale entries, and govern sharing through provenance and rollback. We organize the literature around three survey tools. First, a six-sense taxonomy distinguishes the structurally different artifacts called ``skills'' in current papers. Second, an eight-stage lifecycle architecture identifies the recurring design decisions behind evidence acquisition, proposal, verification/admission, storage, retrieval/composition, maintenance, distillation/portability, and governance. Third, a lightweight skill-record schema and ten-operator vocabulary provide common terms for comparing library updates without elevating them into a separate method contribution. Using this structure, we synthesize evidence-graded patterns with explicit caveats: admission and repair are repeatedly important, verifier quality materially affects skill-aware RL, flat retrieval can degrade as libraries grow, and current benchmarks still under-report library trajectories, usage--utility gaps, and safety surfaces. We close with concrete reporting standards and open problems for evaluating dynamic skills as changing libraries rather than static prompt or tool collections.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 10

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report. Evaluations centered on question answering or script generation rarely verify this complete evidence chain and may therefore reward fluent outputs even when the underlying engineering workflow is incomplete, internally inconsistent, or non-executable. To address this limitation, we present StructureClaw, an artifact-centered workbench in which LLM agents operate through governed engineering skills, typed tools, shared artifact state, and local analysis backends. We also introduce StructureClaw-Bench, an executable benchmark of 150 controlled scenarios spanning standard workflow execution, interactive robustness, and multimodal structural-model reconstruction. A scenario succeeds only when all required artifact- and execution-level assertions pass in a single run. Across ten agent-model configurations, each evaluated on the same 50 standard cases, the average Success Rate rises from 56.8% with the generic-skill baseline to 88.6% with the full automatic workflow. The interactive and multimodal evaluations identify two prominent remaining challenges: safe handling of invalid numerical inputs and fixture-consistent reconstruction of structural models. These findings show that artifact-centered evaluation can expose workflow-level failures that are difficult to identify from final responses alone, providing a more rigorous basis for evaluating and improving structural-engineering agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/structureclaw/structureclaw.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 15

The 17% Gap: Quantifying Epistemic Decay in AI-Assisted Survey Papers

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in scientific writing promises efficiency but risks introducing informational entropy. While "hallucinated papers" are a known artifact, the systematic degradation of valid citation chains remains unquantified. We conducted a forensic audit of 50 recent survey papers in Artificial Intelligence (N=5,514 citations) published between September 2024 and January 2026. We utilized a hybrid verification pipeline combining DOI resolution, Crossref metadata analysis, Semantic Scholar queries, and fuzzy text matching to distinguish between formatting errors ("Sloppiness") and verifiable non-existence ("Phantoms). We detect a persistent 17.0% Phantom Rate -- citations that cannot be resolved to any digital object despite aggressive forensic recovery. Diagnostic categorization reveals three distinct failure modes: pure hallucinations (5.1%), hallucinated identifiers with valid titles (16.4%), and parsing-induced matching failures (78.5%). Longitudinal analysis reveals a flat trend (+0.07 pp/month), suggesting that high-entropy citation practices have stabilized as an endemic feature of the field. The scientific citation graph in AI survey literature exhibits "link rot" at scale. This suggests a mechanism where AI tools act as "lazy research assistants," retrieving correct titles but hallucinating metadata, thereby severing the digital chain of custody required for reproducible science.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 23

IML-ViT: Benchmarking Image Manipulation Localization by Vision Transformer

Advanced image tampering techniques are increasingly challenging the trustworthiness of multimedia, leading to the development of Image Manipulation Localization (IML). But what makes a good IML model? The answer lies in the way to capture artifacts. Exploiting artifacts requires the model to extract non-semantic discrepancies between manipulated and authentic regions, necessitating explicit comparisons between the two areas. With the self-attention mechanism, naturally, the Transformer should be a better candidate to capture artifacts. However, due to limited datasets, there is currently no pure ViT-based approach for IML to serve as a benchmark, and CNNs dominate the entire task. Nevertheless, CNNs suffer from weak long-range and non-semantic modeling. To bridge this gap, based on the fact that artifacts are sensitive to image resolution, amplified under multi-scale features, and massive at the manipulation border, we formulate the answer to the former question as building a ViT with high-resolution capacity, multi-scale feature extraction capability, and manipulation edge supervision that could converge with a small amount of data. We term this simple but effective ViT paradigm IML-ViT, which has significant potential to become a new benchmark for IML. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets verified our model outperforms the state-of-the-art manipulation localization methods.Code and models are available at https://github.com/SunnyHaze/IML-ViT.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 27, 2023

GSFixer: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting with Reference-Guided Video Diffusion Priors

Reconstructing 3D scenes using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from sparse views is an ill-posed problem due to insufficient information, often resulting in noticeable artifacts. While recent approaches have sought to leverage generative priors to complete information for under-constrained regions, they struggle to generate content that remains consistent with input observations. To address this challenge, we propose GSFixer, a novel framework designed to improve the quality of 3DGS representations reconstructed from sparse inputs. The core of our approach is the reference-guided video restoration model, built upon a DiT-based video diffusion model trained on paired artifact 3DGS renders and clean frames with additional reference-based conditions. Considering the input sparse views as references, our model integrates both 2D semantic features and 3D geometric features of reference views extracted from the visual geometry foundation model, enhancing the semantic coherence and 3D consistency when fixing artifact novel views. Furthermore, considering the lack of suitable benchmarks for 3DGS artifact restoration evaluation, we present DL3DV-Res which contains artifact frames rendered using low-quality 3DGS. Extensive experiments demonstrate our GSFixer outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in 3DGS artifact restoration and sparse-view 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://github.com/GVCLab/GSFixer.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 13, 2025 2

Artifact-Bench: Evaluating MLLMs on Detecting and Assessing the Artifacts of AI-Generated Videos

Recent video generative models have greatly improved the realism of AI-generated videos, yet their outputs still exhibit artifacts such as temporal inconsistencies, structural distortions, and semantic incoherence. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual understanding capabilities, their ability to perceive and reason about such artifacts remains unclear. Existing benchmarks often lack systematic evaluation of artifact-aware perception and fine-grained diagnostic reasoning, especially across diverse AI-generated video domains beyond photorealistic content. To address this gap, we introduce Artifact-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on AI-generated video artifact detection and analysis. We first establish a three-level hierarchical taxonomy of realism artifacts, covering photorealistic, animated, and CG-style videos. Based on this taxonomy, Artifact-Bench defines three complementary tasks: real vs. AI-generated video classification, pairwise realism comparison, and fine-grained artifact identification. Experiments on 19 leading MLLMs reveal substantial limitations in artifact perception and reasoning, with many models approaching random or even below-random performance in challenging settings. We further observe significant misalignment between MLLM judgments and human perceptual preferences, highlighting their limited reliability as general evaluators for AI-generated video realism.

  • 24 authors
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May 17 1

CMAMRNet: A Contextual Mask-Aware Network Enhancing Mural Restoration Through Comprehensive Mask Guidance

Murals, as invaluable cultural artifacts, face continuous deterioration from environmental factors and human activities. Digital restoration of murals faces unique challenges due to their complex degradation patterns and the critical need to preserve artistic authenticity. Existing learning-based methods struggle with maintaining consistent mask guidance throughout their networks, leading to insufficient focus on damaged regions and compromised restoration quality. We propose CMAMRNet, a Contextual Mask-Aware Mural Restoration Network that addresses these limitations through comprehensive mask guidance and multi-scale feature extraction. Our framework introduces two key components: (1) the Mask-Aware Up/Down-Sampler (MAUDS), which ensures consistent mask sensitivity across resolution scales through dedicated channel-wise feature selection and mask-guided feature fusion; and (2) the Co-Feature Aggregator (CFA), operating at both the highest and lowest resolutions to extract complementary features for capturing fine textures and global structures in degraded regions. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CMAMRNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively preserving both structural integrity and artistic details in restored murals. The code is available at~https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet{https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet}.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025

OrgForge: A Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Verifiable Synthetic Corporate Corpora

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines requires corpora where ground truth is knowable, temporally structured, and cross-artifact properties that real-world datasets rarely provide cleanly. Existing resources such as the Enron corpus carry legal ambiguity, demographic skew, and no structured ground truth. Purely LLM-generated synthetic data solves the legal problem but introduces a subtler one: the generating model cannot be prevented from hallucinating facts that contradict themselves across documents.We present OrgForge, an open-source multi-agent simulation framework that enforces a strict physics-cognition boundary: a deterministic Python engine maintains a SimEvent ground truth bus; large language models generate only surface prose, constrained by validated proposals. An actor-local clock enforces causal timestamp correctness across all artifact types, eliminating the class of timeline inconsistencies that arise when timestamps are sampled independently per document. We formalize three graph-dynamic subsystems stress propagation via betweenness centrality, temporal edge-weight decay, and Dijkstra escalation routing that govern organizational behavior independently of any LLM. Running a configurable N-day simulation, OrgForge produces interleaved Slack threads, JIRA tickets, Confluence pages, Git pull requests, and emails, all traceable to a shared, immutable event log. We additionally describe a causal chain tracking subsystem that accumulates cross-artifact evidence graphs per incident, a hybrid reciprocal-rank-fusion recurrence detector for identifying repeated failure classes, and an inbound/outbound email engine that routes vendor alerts, customer complaints, and HR correspondence through gated causal chains with probabilistic drop simulation. OrgForge is available under the MIT license.

  • 1 authors
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Mar 16

ArtifactsBench: Bridging the Visual-Interactive Gap in LLM Code Generation Evaluation

The generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding from static code to dynamic, interactive visual artifacts. This progress is bottlenecked by a critical evaluation gap: established benchmarks focus on algorithmic correctness and are blind to the visual fidelity and interactive integrity that define modern user experiences. To bridge this gap, we introduce ArtifactsBench, a new benchmark and paradigm for the automated, multimodal evaluation of visual code generation. Our framework programmatically renders each generated artifact and captures its dynamic behavior through temporal screenshots. This visual evidence, alongside the source code, is then assessed by a Multimodal LLM (MLLM)-as-Judge, which is rigorously guided by a fine-grained, per-task checklist to ensure holistic and reproducible scoring. We construct a new benchmark of 1,825 diverse tasks and evaluate over 30 leading LLMs. Our automated evaluation achieves a striking 94.4% ranking consistency with WebDev Arena, the gold-standard for human preference in web development, and over 90% pairwise agreement with human experts. This establishes ArtifactsBench as the first framework to reliably automate the assessment of human-perceived quality at scale. Our analysis provides a high-resolution map of the current SOTA, revealing that generalist models often outperform domain-specific ones. We open-source ArtifactsBench, including the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/, to provide the community with a scalable and accurate tool to accelerate the development of user-centric generative models.

  • 32 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

Iterative Service-Learning: A Computing-Based Case-study Applied to Small Rural Organizations

This paper describes the iterative use of service learning to develop, review, and improve computing-based artifacts. It is well-known that computing students benefit from service-learning experiences as do the community partners. It is also well-known that computing artifacts rarely function well long-term without versioning and updates. Service-learning projects are often one-time engagements, completed by single teams of students over the course of a semester course. This limits the benefit for community partners that do not have the expertise or resources to review and update a project on their own. Over several years, teams of undergraduate students in a capstone course created tailored social media plans for numerous small rural organizations. The projects were required to meet client specific needs, with identified audiences, measurable goals, and strategies and tactics to reach the identified goals. This paper builds on previously results for 60 projects conducted over several years. Nine clients were selected to participate in the iterative follow-up process, where new student teams conducted client interviews, reviewed the initial plans, and analyzed metrics from the current strategies and tactics to provide updated, improved artifacts. Using ABET learning objectives as a basis, clients reviewed the student teams and artifacts. This longitudinal study discusses the impact of this intervention to increase implementation and sustained use rates of computing artifacts developed through service learning. Both students and clients reported high satisfaction levels, and clients were particularly satisfied with the iterative improvement process. This research demonstrates an innovative practice for creating and maintaining computing artifacts through iterative service learning, while addressing the resource constraints of small organizations.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 21, 2024

Crayotter: Traceable Multi-Agent Workflows for Long-Form Video Editing

Long-form video editing over heterogeneous footage requires agents to coordinate source selection, multimodal analysis, timeline construction, narration and subtitle alignment, rendering, and revision while exposing intermediate state for inspection and repair. We present Crayotter, an open-source multimodal multi-agent demo system for prompt-driven long-form video editing. Crayotter organizes production around coverage-aware material preparation, artifact-grounded editing research, and tool-grounded timeline execution. Across these stages, retrieval reports, video analyses, editing blueprints, scheduler events, tool calls, intermediate renders, and final exports are treated as first-class artifacts rather than hidden transient state. The workbench supports local assets, agent-assisted retrieval, progress monitoring, artifact preview, failure diagnosis, interrupted-job resumption, and resource-aware asynchronous execution for long-running workflows. In a 23-theme evaluation, Crayotter achieves the highest human overall score (3.40/5) among the compared systems, with its largest margins in theme alignment, narrative coherence, and editing smoothness. These results show that long-horizon video editing agents can be made traceable, inspectable, and practically controllable through observable production artifacts. Code, traces, and examples are publicly available at https://github.com/idwts/Crayotter.

  • 15 authors
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Jul 16

Agent Plasticity: Measuring Self-Improvement Through Experience

AI agents increasingly operate in environments where they can diagnose failures and improve through experience, yet existing evaluations largely measure what an agent can do at a fixed point in time rather than how effectively it learns. Evaluating self-improvement requires answering three questions: does future performance improve and generalize beyond the interactions that enabled learning; how efficiently are new capabilities acquired; and where does the self-improvement process break down? To answer these questions, we study self-improvement in a controlled setting where agents amortize past experience into reusable artifacts that are inherited by future instances. At each checkpoint, we measure performance on training and held-out environment interactions while accounting for learning cost. We introduce agent plasticity, the efficiency with which an agent converts experience into gains in future held-out performance. Across multiple environments, frontier models exhibit sharply different improvement trajectories despite comparable opportunities to learn. Some achieve substantial and persistent gains, while others remain near or below their initial performance, and gains within the training regime often transfer only partially to out-of-distribution conditions. Endpoint capability and acquisition efficiency also diverge: the agent that ultimately performs best need not be the one that improves most efficiently. Tracing failures through the improvement loop further reveals different candidate bottlenecks. Agents with low plasticity often fail to reuse relevant artifacts, whereas more plastic agents may still fail despite reusing relevant artifacts, pointing to limitations in artifact quality, generalization, or application. Evaluating self-improving agents requires measuring not only what they can do, but how effectively they become better through experience.

meta Meta
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Oct 5 2

The Responsible Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: A Review of Tools & Resources

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

  • 23 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

ResearchStudio-Reel: Automate the Last Mile of Research from Paper to Poster, Video, and Blog

Research dissemination, turning a paper into a poster, a talk video, and a blog post, is still a manual last mile. Prior automation treats each artifact in isolation that each re-extract the paper from scratch, usually ship one-way renders the author cannot reopen in PowerPoint or Word, and gates quality on soft VLM-preference scores that plateau while load-bearing sections still read as empty. We argue this last mile is best built as a composition of skills: thin agent-readable contracts that share one upstream extractor and wrap deterministic primitives in a measured-fill loop whose exits are hard pass/fail render gates. We instantiate this as ResearchStudio-Reel, five Claude Code and Codex skills organized into one shared extractor (Paper2Assets), three editable generators (Paper2Poster, Paper2Video, Paper2Blog), and one interactive convergence layer (Paper2Reel). Paper2Assets extracts each paper once into a shared bundle that can be reused by every downstream skill; The three generators produce a print-ready poster, a synchronized talk video, and a bilingual blog that stay factually consistent and round-trip through PowerPoint or Word; Paper2Reel then binds all three into a self-contained HTML viewer whose section-level clicks jump the video, slides, captions, and blog to matching content. On the Paper2Poster benchmark, our posters lead every aesthetic and information sub-criterion against both prior automated systems and single-shot frontier LLMs, surpassing the authors' own on aesthetics under two held-out VLM judges and winning overall on 84% to 93% of papers; capability audits further show that, by uniquely pairing narration-aligned on-slide highlights with a bilingual blog gated by layout-aware DOCX repair, ResearchStudio-Reel is the only pipeline to ship all three editable artifacts. Project is available at https://aka.ms/ResearchStudio

microsoft Microsoft
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Jul 4 7

AIREP: A Protocol for Per-Decision Evidence in AI Runtime Governance

Runtime-governance evidence often collapses materially different events into one audit record: a decision may be made, an instruction dispatched or received, an action may or may not execute, and a resulting state may or may not be observed. This paper presents AIREP, a vendor- and model-independent protocol for per-decision AI runtime evidence. Its current wire model separates evidence into four artifact families: Decision, Control, Execution, and Effect. Artifacts use closed core schemas, explicit identities and digests, declared scope limits, RFC 8785 canonical JSON, domain-separated SHA-256 hashing, and pure Ed25519 signatures. A three-level assurance model distinguishes structural/hash consistency (AIREP-Core), verifier-accepted authorship (AIREP-Authenticated), and independently anchored chain-head freshness and non-truncation relative to an accepted witness (AIREP-Witnessed); these classes do not establish event truth. A structured reconciler preserves failure, missing evidence, unevaluated prerequisites, and indeterminate outcomes as distinct states. The released beta includes a four-family first-party producer, Python and Node reference-verification paths, adversarial/lifecycle corpora, and reproducible validation. Post-release first-party Hermes and LightEval integration exercises preserve explicit evidence boundaries without claiming adoption or interoperability. Independent implementation evidence exists separately for a v0.1.2 producer and a v0.2 consumer/verifier; because they target different frozen versions, they do not establish same-version producer-to-consumer interoperability. AIREP remains experimental.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 15

DiffuMural: Restoring Dunhuang Murals with Multi-scale Diffusion

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have produced excellent results in the field of conditional image generation. However, restoration of ancient murals, as an important downstream task in this field, poses significant challenges to diffusion model-based restoration methods due to its large defective area and scarce training samples. Conditional restoration tasks are more concerned with whether the restored part meets the aesthetic standards of mural restoration in terms of overall style and seam detail, and such metrics for evaluating heuristic image complements are lacking in current research. We therefore propose DiffuMural, a combined Multi-scale convergence and Collaborative Diffusion mechanism with ControlNet and cyclic consistency loss to optimise the matching between the generated images and the conditional control. DiffuMural demonstrates outstanding capabilities in mural restoration, leveraging training data from 23 large-scale Dunhuang murals that exhibit consistent visual aesthetics. The model excels in restoring intricate details, achieving a coherent overall appearance, and addressing the unique challenges posed by incomplete murals lacking factual grounding. Our evaluation framework incorporates four key metrics to quantitatively assess incomplete murals: factual accuracy, textural detail, contextual semantics, and holistic visual coherence. Furthermore, we integrate humanistic value assessments to ensure the restored murals retain their cultural and artistic significance. Extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025 2

AbsoluteDegradation: A Physics-Inspired Synthetic Film-Degradation Pipeline and Archival Film Restoration Benchmark

Restoring archival film remains a fundamentally challenging problem due to the absence of paired training data and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. Pristine versions of deteriorated footage are physically unrecoverable, requiring supervised methods to rely on synthetic data that often fail to capture the complex, temporally coherent nature of real film degradation. At the same time, existing real-world datasets are limited in scale, quality, and accessibility, hindering reliable evaluation and fair comparison across methods. We address both limitations with AbsoluteDegradation, a physics-inspired, modular pipeline for synthesizing realistic film degradations, and a new large-scale archival benchmark. The proposed pipeline models the analog-to-digital process as a structured composition of artifact families, incorporating signal-dependent grain, parametric scratches, and temporally coherent camera motion, enabling controlled generation of diverse degradation regimes. In parallel, we introduce a curated dataset of 81,576 high-resolution frames sourced from real archival footage, designed for consistent evaluation under real-world conditions. Together, these contributions provide a unified framework for training and benchmarking restoration models. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures show that models trained with AbsoluteDegradation generalize better to real-world footage, while the proposed benchmark reveals systematic failure modes of current methods. We hope this work establishes a foundation for reproducible and domain-authentic evaluation in archival film restoration.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 1

SCI-AGENT-EXAM: Benchmarking Agents on Scientific Research Tasks

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of supporting scientific workflows, but their capabilities across diverse research activities remain difficult to assess systematically. Existing benchmarks often focus on selected scientific capabilities or task types, limiting a comprehensive characterization of scientific agents' strengths and weaknesses in realistic research workflows. We introduce SCI-AGENT-EXAM, a workflow-oriented benchmark comprising 120 expert-curated tasks across 11 scientific fields and 7 research task types defined by the Scientific Workflow Task Taxonomy (SWTT). Each task requires both executable artifacts (e.g., code and scripts) and textual artifacts (e.g., reports and explanations). To evaluate the heterogeneous task outputs, we develop a hybrid evaluation protocol combining deterministic programmatic verification for executable artifacts with a calibrated, expert-validated LLM-based judge for textual artifacts. Beyond outcome assessment, we analyze progress and solution stability along execution trajectories to characterize how agents reach their final results. Experiments with 10 frontier LLM agents reveal substantial performance gaps: GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest overall score of 80.9, yet only 26.0% of its runs exceed the 0.95 success threshold. Further analyses uncover distinct capability profiles across scientific task types and substantial variation in execution efficiency and stability. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SKYLENAGE-AI/Sci-Agent-Exam.

  • 20 authors
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Oct 22

MEMONDEMAND: A Memory Management System for Large-Scale Enterprise Data

Enterprise repositories are large, heteroge- neous, and continuously updated, making re- trieval difficult when efficient access, source- faithful evidence, and cross-query adaptation must be supported together. Enterprise mem- ory extends retrieval beyond the model con- text, but existing systems do not jointly address collection-specific hierarchy construction, low- cost routing, detailed evidence loading, and workload-aware memory updates at this scale. We introduce MEMONDEMAND, short for On- Demand Memory, a memory management sys- tem with three coordinated mechanisms: a dy- namic multi-level hierarchy that determines the abstraction structure and depth for each col- lection, dual memory at every hierarchy level that separates distilled routing from detailed evidence, and on-demand memory promotion that updates node priority under a bounded active-state budget. On EnterpriseRAG-Bench, MEMONDEMAND outperforms the strongest published LB#1 result at every evaluated scale from 10M tokens through the complete 618M- token collection, with gains of 12.23% at 10M and 4.66% at 618M. Results on FinanceBench, HotpotQA, and FRAMES further show strong performance across financial, multi-hop, and fact-retrieval settings. Together, these results establish MEMONDEMAND as an accurate, ef- ficient, and scalable memory solution for very large enterprise repositories across data scales, domains, and evidence requirements. Our code is available at https://github.com/ xfab-xinyuansong/MemOnDemand.git.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 21

VaseVQA-3D: Benchmarking 3D VLMs on Ancient Greek Pottery

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress in multimodal understanding tasks, demonstrating strong capabilities particularly in general tasks such as image captioning and visual reasoning. However, when dealing with specialized cultural heritage domains like 3D vase artifacts, existing models face severe data scarcity issues and insufficient domain knowledge limitations. Due to the lack of targeted training data, current VLMs struggle to effectively handle such culturally significant specialized tasks. To address these challenges, we propose the VaseVQA-3D dataset, which serves as the first 3D visual question answering dataset for ancient Greek pottery analysis, collecting 664 ancient Greek vase 3D models with corresponding question-answer data and establishing a complete data construction pipeline. We further develop the VaseVLM model, enhancing model performance in vase artifact analysis through domain-adaptive training. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, where we improve by 12.8% on R@1 metrics and by 6.6% on lexical similarity compared with previous state-of-the-art on the VaseVQA-3D dataset, significantly improving the recognition and understanding of 3D vase artifacts, providing new technical pathways for digital heritage preservation research. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/VaseVQA-3D. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/VaseVQA-3D.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

Accepted but Wrong: Silent Failures of LLM Code Repairs after API Migrations

After a runtime or API migration, an LLM-repaired procedure can run cleanly yet return wrong results, and a release check on typical test inputs ships it. We report a preregistered study of 73 tasks covering 60 documented changes in CPython, Node.js and SQLite. Every candidate is executed on the real runtimes against withheld contracts. Over the complete repair space, the all-assertions gate on typical inputs released 0.410 of wrong repairs. One edge input written from the release note cut this to 0.065, and to 0.061 on 15 unseen clusters. Three inputs from a blind GPT-5.6-luna writer that never saw the program reached 0.070. Two further frozen stages enlarged the menu to 1491 fragments and then added 233 hard distractors that match the legacy output on typical inputs. The edge input (0.058) and the frontier-model writer (0.058) passed their preregistered tests. Yet 0.168 and 0.153 of the hard wrong programs still passed. Two local-model writers failed their preregistered tests. Across four model families, the edge input cut wrong releases per attempt in all three open-weight families on all three menus, for example from 0.233 to 0.057, without lowering correct completion. Self-tests helped less. A blind AI audit flagged 34 contracts as stricter than their requirements. Dropping the disputed checks changed 0 verdicts, but class-label disputes remain open. No model-written code was executed. Artifacts are available from the authors on request.

  • 4 authors
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Nov 5

Hallucination Score: Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Generative Image Super-Resolution

Generative super-resolution (GSR) currently sets the state-of-the-art in terms of perceptual image quality, overcoming the "regression-to-the-mean" blur of prior non-generative models. However, from a human perspective, such models do not fully conform to the optimal balance between quality and fidelity. Instead, a different class of artifacts, in which generated details fail to perceptually match the low resolution image (LRI) or ground-truth image (GTI), is a critical but under studied issue in GSR, limiting its practical deployments. In this work, we focus on measuring, analyzing, and mitigating these artifacts (i.e., "hallucinations"). We observe that hallucinations are not well-characterized with existing image metrics or quality models, as they are orthogonal to both exact fidelity and no-reference quality. Instead, we take advantage of a multimodal large language model (MLLM) by constructing a prompt that assesses hallucinatory visual elements and generates a "Hallucination Score" (HS). We find that our HS is closely aligned with human evaluations, and also provides complementary insights to prior image metrics used for super-resolution (SR) models. In addition, we find certain deep feature distances have strong correlations with HS. We therefore propose to align the GSR models by using such features as differentiable reward functions to mitigate hallucinations.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 18, 2025

Artifact-centered Claim-aware Observability for Autonomous Scientific Agents

Autonomous scientific agents now increasingly propose ideas, write code, run experiments, analyze results, and even draft papers. Observe and audit those agents are necessary but logging every model call is not enough, scientists also need to inspect the artifacts and claims that the systems produced and their relations. This is driven by the fact that failures in scientific agent systems are often distributed across several objects. A manuscript claim may cite the wrong evidence, a search process may select a degenerate candidate, a laboratory novelty claim may depend on an unstated rule, or a multi-agent plan may change without a visible trigger. Existing tracing, experiment tracking, and archival provenance tools are valuable, but their native objects do not make these scientific audit relations first-class. We argue that autonomous scientific systems should emit portable, claim-aware artifact lineage as a minimum audit layer. We propose a compact observability profile organized around individuals, operators, fitness records, lineage, archives, runs, streams, and steering commands. In this profile, scientific claims are ordinary individuals with explicit evidence bindings and verification records. The profile is intended as a semantic layer that complements current telemetry and provenance standards. Execution details can remain in OpenTelemetry. Final packages can export to PROV-O or RO-Crate standards.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 17

Taming Mode Collapse in Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation

Despite the remarkable performance of score distillation in text-to-3D generation, such techniques notoriously suffer from view inconsistency issues, also known as "Janus" artifact, where the generated objects fake each view with multiple front faces. Although empirically effective methods have approached this problem via score debiasing or prompt engineering, a more rigorous perspective to explain and tackle this problem remains elusive. In this paper, we reveal that the existing score distillation-based text-to-3D generation frameworks degenerate to maximal likelihood seeking on each view independently and thus suffer from the mode collapse problem, manifesting as the Janus artifact in practice. To tame mode collapse, we improve score distillation by re-establishing in entropy term in the corresponding variational objective, which is applied to the distribution of rendered images. Maximizing the entropy encourages diversity among different views in generated 3D assets, thereby mitigating the Janus problem. Based on this new objective, we derive a new update rule for 3D score distillation, dubbed Entropic Score Distillation (ESD). We theoretically reveal that ESD can be simplified and implemented by just adopting the classifier-free guidance trick upon variational score distillation. Although embarrassingly straightforward, our extensive experiments successfully demonstrate that ESD can be an effective treatment for Janus artifacts in score distillation.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 31, 2023

Mi-Memory: A Lifecycle Memory Framework for Personal AI

Personal AI is moving beyond chat-only interaction toward continuous services that span phones, cars, homes, wearables, cameras, and tools. In this setting, memory cannot remain a cache of prior conversations. It should serve as a continuity and governance substrate: preserving durable user state, grounding answers in multimodal and device evidence, supporting correction and forgetting, bounding policy evolution, and remaining deployable under latency, cost, privacy, and edge-cloud constraints. This technical report presents Mi-Memory, a lifecycle memory framework for Personal AI organized around four roles: Structure, Expansion, Evolution, and Deployment. A shared audit contract links these roles through four recurring artifact families: typed evidence payloads preserve source identity and provenance, diagnostic traces localize evidence loss across the serving pipeline, strategy artifacts make memory-policy changes explicit, and gate/rollback records bound accepted evolution. MiMemory instantiates the roles through MemStack, MemSense/MemFuse, D^{2}ACCI/E^{2}MEND, and LiteMem. In controlled-reference Structure evaluations, MemStack reaches 93.59%, 57.24%, and 87.47% on LoCoMo, PersonaMem-V2, and LongMemEval, respectively; other tracks report module-level, preliminary/internal, transfer-feasibility, or design-only evidence with explicit boundaries. MiMemory is a step toward auditable, evidence-gated, and deployment-aware memory systems for Personal AI. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/Mi-Memory/ .

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 20

CreativeGame:Toward Mechanic-Aware Creative Game Generation

Large language models can generate plausible game code, but turning this capability into iterative creative improvement remains difficult. In practice, single-shot generation often produces brittle runtime behavior, weak accumulation of experience across versions, and creativity scores that are too subjective to serve as reliable optimization signals. A further limitation is that mechanics are frequently treated only as post-hoc descriptions, rather than as explicit objects that can be planned, tracked, preserved, and evaluated during generation. This report presents CreativeGame, a multi-agent system for iterative HTML5 game generation that addresses these issues through four coupled ideas: a proxy reward centered on programmatic signals rather than pure LLM judgment; lineage-scoped memory for cross-version experience accumulation; runtime validation integrated into both repair and reward; and a mechanic-guided planning loop in which retrieved mechanic knowledge is converted into an explicit mechanic plan before code generation begins. The goal is not merely to produce a playable artifact in one step, but to support interpretable version-to-version evolution. The current system contains 71 stored lineages, 88 saved nodes, and a 774-entry global mechanic archive, implemented in 6{,}181 lines of Python together with inspection and visualization tooling. The system is therefore substantial enough to support architectural analysis, reward inspection, and real lineage-level case studies rather than only prompt-level demos. A real 4-generation lineage shows that mechanic-level innovation can emerge in later versions and can be inspected directly through version-to-version records. The central contribution is therefore not only game generation, but a concrete pipeline for observing progressive evolution through explicit mechanic change.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 20 1

The Last Human-Written Paper: Agent-Native Research Artifacts

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

DRAFT-ing Architectural Design Decisions using LLMs

Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) is crucial for software development but remains challenging due to the lack of standardization and high manual effort. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) provide a structured approach to capture Architecture Design Decisions (ADDs), but their adoption is limited due to the manual effort involved and insufficient tool support. Our previous work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in generating ADDs. However, simply prompting the LLM does not produce quality ADDs. Moreover, using third-party LLMs raises privacy concerns, while self-hosting them poses resource challenges. To this end, we experimented with different approaches like few-shot, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning to enhance LLM's ability to generate ADDs. Our results show that both techniques improve effectiveness. Building on this, we propose Domain Specific Retreival Augumented Few Shot Fine Tuninng, DRAFT, which combines the strengths of all these three approaches for more effective ADD generation. DRAFT operates in two phases: an offline phase that fine-tunes an LLM on generating ADDs augmented with retrieved examples and an online phase that generates ADDs by leveraging retrieved ADRs and the fine-tuned model. We evaluated DRAFT against existing approaches on a dataset of 4,911 ADRs and various LLMs and analyzed them using automated metrics and human evaluations. Results show DRAFT outperforms all other approaches in effectiveness while maintaining efficiency. Our findings indicate that DRAFT can aid architects in drafting ADDs while addressing privacy and resource constraints.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge

Existing computer-use agent benchmarks do not fully evaluate agents acting as assistants. A useful assistant retrieves information across complex, multi-step workflows, synthesizes it into artifacts (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), and navigates program interfaces to produce a coherent final product. Such workflows demand reasoning and synthesis, decomposition of complex tasks, as well as visual and spatial understanding. To study agents on workflows like these, we introduce KNOWS, a benchmark of open-ended, complex, browser-based tasks that jointly evaluate these capabilities, with each task culminating in a produced artifact. To write tasks, we develop a task design rubric and a protocol for ensuring that tasks meet the requirements. Each task is paired with an evaluator, a program that combines deterministic checks with LLM judgments to balance the richness, reliability, and automation tradeoff inherent to agent evaluation. We evaluate and analyze frontier computer-use agents and browser-based harnesses. They achieve moderate scores on partial-success metrics, but the best performer fully succeeds in fewer than 3% of our complex, long-horizon tasks. Failures on visual steps render the resulting artifacts unusable, even when agents complete more than 50% of other evaluation steps. Our results expose limitations of current agents acting as end-to-end assistants, and call for progress on tool use, visual understanding, and long-horizon reasoning.

  • 9 authors
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Sep 23

Repo2Skill-Evo: Repository Skills Go Stale in Silence

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over evolving software repositories, where success depends on repository-specific procedural knowledge: which APIs to call, which scripts to run, and which conventions the current release expects. Agent skills externalize this knowledge into reusable units, and prior work shows that they can improve agent performance. What remains unclear is whether that improvement is durable. The same version specificity that makes a skill useful also makes it fragile: after a release, it may become stale without raising any explicit signal, while continuing to provide obsolete guidance. Externalizing knowledge into a skill can therefore make its decay invisible. We study whether agents can keep this externalized knowledge current. Repo2Skill-Evo casts each release transition as a skill-maintenance task: given a V1 skill set and the official V1-to-V2 patch, an agent must update obsolete skill content while preserving guidance that remains valid. Across 57 real-world repositories and 105 selected release transitions, every evaluated transition invalidates part of the V1 skill set. Yet six frontier agents reach only 29.9%-69.7% avg@3 macro F1 under a patch-grounded removal metric that balances stale-content recall against over-editing precision. Across runs, two opposing errors dominate: incomplete coverage of affected files in the skill set leaves stale content untouched, while overbroad editing is associated with higher recall but lower precision. Repository skills go stale in silence, and even frontier agents cannot reliably maintain them.

  • 13 authors
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Aug 21

VerusEval: Evaluating LLM-Generated Verus Specifications Beyond Verifier Acceptance

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate Verus contracts for Rust programs together with the proofs that establish them. Yet verifier acceptance, the common measure of success, shows only that the implementation satisfies the generated contract, so it leaves open whether the contract captures the intended behavior. Assessing specification generation therefore requires an evaluation methodology, not a single metric. We present VerusEval, a framework that evaluates generated contracts along six dimensions, including Verus-native checks for semantic triviality, validated input-output (I/O) suites, and contract equivalence, and that relates them so that the strength and blind spots of each become measurable. Evaluating 13,716 artifacts from four workflows, five LLMs, and two prompting settings on 762 tasks, we find that acceptance overstates quality: only 42.3\% of the accepted artifacts complete all three semantic checks without a flag, and across workflows and models, higher acceptance does not consistently come with more correct contracts. I/O evaluation rejects 23.6\% of the accepted artifacts, yet only 63.2\% of those that pass it are proved equivalent. Of the accepted artifacts flagged by contract comparison, 84.1\% have a rejected completeness obligation, and the direction of a failure prioritizes inspection of the generated contract or the reference; it does not by itself establish which artifact is defective. Screening and review further identify 36 candidate defects among 61 selected reference contracts, and repairing one of them makes 10 of its 11 failing artifacts equivalent. Based on these findings, we derive four actionable lessons for evaluation, generation, and benchmark maintenance.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 18

Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare

Foundation Models that are capable of processing and generating multi-modal data have transformed AI's role in medicine. However, a key limitation of their reliability is hallucination, where inaccurate or fabricated information can impact clinical decisions and patient safety. We define medical hallucination as any instance in which a model generates misleading medical content. This paper examines the unique characteristics, causes, and implications of medical hallucinations, with a particular focus on how these errors manifest themselves in real-world clinical scenarios. Our contributions include (1) a taxonomy for understanding and addressing medical hallucinations, (2) benchmarking models using medical hallucination dataset and physician-annotated LLM responses to real medical cases, providing direct insight into the clinical impact of hallucinations, and (3) a multi-national clinician survey on their experiences with medical hallucinations. Our results reveal that inference techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Search Augmented Generation can effectively reduce hallucination rates. However, despite these improvements, non-trivial levels of hallucination persist. These findings underscore the ethical and practical imperative for robust detection and mitigation strategies, establishing a foundation for regulatory policies that prioritize patient safety and maintain clinical integrity as AI becomes more integrated into healthcare. The feedback from clinicians highlights the urgent need for not only technical advances but also for clearer ethical and regulatory guidelines to ensure patient safety. A repository organizing the paper resources, summaries, and additional information is available at https://github.com/mitmedialab/medical hallucination.

  • 25 authors
·
Feb 25, 2025

Cleaning up the Mess

A MICRO 2024 best paper runner-up publication (the Mess paper) with all three artifact badges awarded (including "Reproducible") proposes a new benchmark to evaluate real and simulated memory system performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Ramulator 2.0 simulation results reported in the Mess paper are incorrect and, at the time of the publication of the Mess paper, irreproducible. We find that the authors of Mess paper made multiple trivial human errors in both the configuration and usage of the simulators. We show that by correctly configuring Ramulator 2.0, Ramulator 2.0's simulated memory system performance actually resembles real system characteristics well, and thus a key claimed contribution of the Mess paper is factually incorrect. We also identify that the DAMOV simulation results in the Mess paper use wrong simulation statistics that are unrelated to the simulated DRAM performance. Moreover, the Mess paper's artifact repository lacks the necessary sources to fully reproduce all the Mess paper's results. Our work corrects the Mess paper's errors regarding Ramulator 2.0 and identifies important issues in the Mess paper's memory simulator evaluation methodology. We emphasize the importance of both carefully and rigorously validating simulation results and contacting simulator authors and developers, in true open source spirit, to ensure these simulators are used with correct configurations and as intended. We encourage the computer architecture community to correct the Mess paper's errors. This is necessary to prevent the propagation of inaccurate and misleading results, and to maintain the reliability of the scientific record. Our investigation also opens up questions about the integrity of the review and artifact evaluation processes. To aid future work, our source code and scripts are openly available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/ramulator2/tree/mess.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

ContractBench: Can LLM Agents Preserve Observation Contracts?

Tool-augmented LLM agents call APIs whose intermediate outputs, such as presigned URLs, session tokens, and OAuth state parameters, are observation contracts: artifacts whose later use is constrained by the external system that produced them. We show that observation contract compliance (preserving the temporal validity and byte-level integrity) is an emergent, regression-prone capability: it is neither guaranteed by general tool-use ability nor consistently improved by larger or newer models. To measure this, we introduce ContractBench, a benchmark of 33 dual-axis tasks that probe two orthogonal failure modes no existing benchmark evaluates: validity failures (using an artifact after expiry) and integrity failures (corrupting an artifact's bytes through the observation-to-action pipeline). Our evaluation is deterministic and programmatic, with a virtual clock controlling time and SHA-256 hashes verifying byte integrity. We assign each outcome a failure label drawn from real-world API specifications. We evaluate 38 models and report four findings: (i) no evaluated model clears 80%, with Claude-Opus-4.6 leading at 77.8%, revealing that current frontier models still fail to comply with observation contracts; (ii) a sharp within-family capability cliff in Qwen 3.5 between 4B (0%) and 9B (56.6%), smoothing to 70.7% at 397B-A17B: what emerges across the cliff is mid-trajectory restraint, not tool-call competence; (iii) non-monotonic scaling across the GPT-5 family: agentic post-training can erode compliance through sycophancy-driven regression; (iv) our failure taxonomy works as an actionable in-context reward signal, yielding +7.1 pp on 42 paired GPT-5.1 failures.

  • 6 authors
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Sep 26

Autonomous Agents Coordinating Distributed Discovery Through Emergent Artifact Exchange

We present ScienceClaw + Infinite, a framework for autonomous scientific investigation in which independent agents conduct research without central coordination, and any contributor can deploy new agents into a shared ecosystem. The system is built around three components: an extensible registry of over 300 interoperable scientific skills, an artifact layer that preserves full computational lineage as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and a structured platform for agent-based scientific discourse with provenance-aware governance. Agents select and chain tools based on their scientific profiles, produce immutable artifacts with typed metadata and parent lineage, and broadcast unsatisfied information needs to a shared global index. The ArtifactReactor enables plannerless coordination: peer agents discover and fulfill open needs through pressure-based scoring, while schema-overlap matching triggers multi-parent synthesis across independent analyses. An autonomous mutation layer actively prunes the expanding artifact DAG to resolve conflicting or redundant workflows, while persistent memory allows agents to continuously build upon complex epistemic states across multiple cycles. Infinite converts these outputs into auditable scientific records through structured posts, provenance views, and machine-readable discourse relations, with community feedback steering subsequent investigation cycles. Across four autonomous investigations, peptide design for the somatostatin receptor SSTR2, lightweight impact-resistant ceramic screening, cross-domain resonance bridging biology, materials, and music, and formal analogy construction between urban morphology and grain-boundary evolution, the framework demonstrates heterogeneous tool chaining, emergent convergence among independently operating agents, and traceable reasoning from raw computation to published finding.

Metal artefact reduction sequences for a piezoelectric bone conduction implant using a realistic head phantom in MRI

Industry standards require medical device manufacturers to perform implant-induced artefact testing in phantoms at a pre-clinical stage to define the extent of artefacts that can be expected during MRI. Once a device is commercially available, studies on volunteers, cadavers or patients are performed to investigate implant-induced artefacts and artefact reduction methods more in-depth. This study describes the design and evaluation of a realistic head phantom for pre-clinical implant-induced artefact testing in a relevant environment. A case study is performed where a state-of-the-art piezoelectric bone conduction implant is used in the 1.5 T and 3 T MRI environments. Images were acquired using clinical and novel metal artefact reducing (MARS) sequences at both field strengths. Artefact width and length were measured in a healthy volunteer and compared with artefact sizes obtained in the phantom. Artefact sizes are reported that are similar in shape between the phantom and a volunteer, yet with dimensions differing up to 20% between both. When the implant magnet is removed, the artefact size can be reduced below a diameter of 5 cm, whilst the presence of an implant magnet and splint creates higher artefacts up to 20 cm in diameter. Pulse sequences have been altered to reduce the scan time up to 7 minutes, while preserving the image quality. These results show that the anthropomorphic phantom can be used at a preclinical stage to provide clinically relevant images, illustrating the impact of the artefact on important brain structures.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 6, 2023

ART: Artifact Removal Transformer for Reconstructing Noise-Free Multichannel Electroencephalographic Signals

Artifact removal in electroencephalography (EEG) is a longstanding challenge that significantly impacts neuroscientific analysis and brain-computer interface (BCI) performance. Tackling this problem demands advanced algorithms, extensive noisy-clean training data, and thorough evaluation strategies. This study presents the Artifact Removal Transformer (ART), an innovative EEG denoising model employing transformer architecture to adeptly capture the transient millisecond-scale dynamics characteristic of EEG signals. Our approach offers a holistic, end-to-end denoising solution for diverse artifact types in multichannel EEG data. We enhanced the generation of noisy-clean EEG data pairs using an independent component analysis, thus fortifying the training scenarios critical for effective supervised learning. We performed comprehensive validations using a wide range of open datasets from various BCI applications, employing metrics like mean squared error and signal-to-noise ratio, as well as sophisticated techniques such as source localization and EEG component classification. Our evaluations confirm that ART surpasses other deep-learning-based artifact removal methods, setting a new benchmark in EEG signal processing. This advancement not only boosts the accuracy and reliability of artifact removal but also promises to catalyze further innovations in the field, facilitating the study of brain dynamics in naturalistic environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 11, 2024

MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting

Pre-trained large text-to-image (T2I) models with an appropriate text prompt has attracted growing interests in customized images generation field. However, catastrophic forgetting issue make it hard to continually synthesize new user-provided styles while retaining the satisfying results amongst learned styles. In this paper, we propose MuseumMaker, a method that enables the synthesis of images by following a set of customized styles in a never-end manner, and gradually accumulate these creative artistic works as a Museum. When facing with a new customization style, we develop a style distillation loss module to extract and learn the styles of the training data for new image generation. It can minimize the learning biases caused by content of new training images, and address the catastrophic overfitting issue induced by few-shot images. To deal with catastrophic forgetting amongst past learned styles, we devise a dual regularization for shared-LoRA module to optimize the direction of model update, which could regularize the diffusion model from both weight and feature aspects, respectively. Meanwhile, to further preserve historical knowledge from past styles and address the limited representability of LoRA, we consider a task-wise token learning module where a unique token embedding is learned to denote a new style. As any new user-provided style come, our MuseumMaker can capture the nuances of the new styles while maintaining the details of learned styles. Experimental results on diverse style datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed MuseumMaker method, showcasing its robustness and versatility across various scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024

Improving Synthetic Image Detection Towards Generalization: An Image Transformation Perspective

With recent generative models facilitating photo-realistic image synthesis, the proliferation of synthetic images has also engendered certain negative impacts on social platforms, thereby raising an urgent imperative to develop effective detectors. Current synthetic image detection (SID) pipelines are primarily dedicated to crafting universal artifact features, accompanied by an oversight about SID training paradigm. In this paper, we re-examine the SID problem and identify two prevalent biases in current training paradigms, i.e., weakened artifact features and overfitted artifact features. Meanwhile, we discover that the imaging mechanism of synthetic images contributes to heightened local correlations among pixels, suggesting that detectors should be equipped with local awareness. In this light, we propose SAFE, a lightweight and effective detector with three simple image transformations. Firstly, for weakened artifact features, we substitute the down-sampling operator with the crop operator in image pre-processing to help circumvent artifact distortion. Secondly, for overfitted artifact features, we include ColorJitter and RandomRotation as additional data augmentations, to help alleviate irrelevant biases from color discrepancies and semantic differences in limited training samples. Thirdly, for local awareness, we propose a patch-based random masking strategy tailored for SID, forcing the detector to focus on local regions at training. Comparative experiments are conducted on an open-world dataset, comprising synthetic images generated by 26 distinct generative models. Our pipeline achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, with remarkable improvements of 4.5% in accuracy and 2.9% in average precision against existing methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ouxiang-Li/SAFE.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Understanding the World's Museums through Vision-Language Reasoning

Museums serve as vital repositories of cultural heritage and historical artifacts spanning diverse epochs, civilizations, and regions, preserving well-documented collections. Data reveal key attributes such as age, origin, material, and cultural significance. Understanding museum exhibits from their images requires reasoning beyond visual features. In this work, we facilitate such reasoning by (a) collecting and curating a large-scale dataset of 65M images and 200M question-answer pairs in the standard museum catalog format for exhibits from all around the world; (b) training large vision-language models on the collected dataset; (c) benchmarking their ability on five visual question answering tasks. The complete dataset is labeled by museum experts, ensuring the quality as well as the practical significance of the labels. We train two VLMs from different categories: the BLIP model, with vision-language aligned embeddings, but lacking the expressive power of large language models, and the LLaVA model, a powerful instruction-tuned LLM enriched with vision-language reasoning capabilities. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several insights on the complex and fine-grained understanding of museum exhibits. In particular, we show that some questions whose answers can often be derived directly from visual features are well answered by both types of models. On the other hand, questions that require the grounding of the visual features in repositories of human knowledge are better answered by the large vision-language models, thus demonstrating their superior capacity to perform the desired reasoning. Find our dataset, benchmarks, and source code at: https://github.com/insait-institute/Museum-65

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

Self-GC: Self-Governing Context for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Long-horizon LLM agents accumulate tool results, files, plans, and user constraints that are too structured to be treated as a disposable text suffix. Current systems mostly rely on in-run heuristics such as chronological pruning and tool-output masking, or on final self-summary near a context limit. Heuristics are cheap but blind to future dependencies; summaries preserve narrative state but often hide exact evidence, locators, and editable artifacts. We present Self-GC, where GC denotes self-governing context while deliberately echoing garbage collection: the system does not merely reclaim unused tokens, but governs the lifecycle of agent context objects. Self-GC turns user turns, tool spans, and skill state into indexed objects; asks a side-channel planner to propose fold, mask, and prune actions; and lets the harness enforce recoverable sidecars, safe commit boundaries, and cache-aware commit. On a 33-session Hard Set, Self-GC prunes 43.95% of prefix tokens while leaving 84.85% of future continuations unaffected, compared with no-impact rates of 54.55% to 69.70% for heuristic baselines. On a 332-session production-derived suite, three planner backbones reach no-impact rates of 91.27% to 94.58%, while baselines remain at 77.71% to 87.46%. In production, an online account-level split reduces daytime average input tokens by 10% to 15%, with peak reductions near 20%. These results point to context management as runtime lifecycle control over indexed, recoverable objects rather than post hoc text cleanup.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 30

COLLEAGUE.SKILL: Automated AI Skill Generation via Expert Knowledge Distillation

LLM agents are increasingly expected not only to complete isolated tasks, but also to carry bounded representations of human expertise, judgment, and interaction style. Building such person-grounded agents remains difficult because actionable knowledge associated with a person or role is usually embedded in heterogeneous traces rather than written as clean instructions. Existing memory and persona systems capture fragments of this evidence, while skill frameworks provide portable packaging formats; however, there is no end-to-end workflow for distilling these traces into inspectable, correctable, and agent-usable skills. We present an automated trace-to-skill distillation system for generating person-grounded AI skills via expert knowledge distillation. Given materials from a target person or role, COLLEAGUE.SKILL produces a versioned skill package with two coordinated tracks: a capability track for practices, mental models, and decision heuristics, and a bounded behavior track for communication style, interaction rules, and correction history. The package can be inspected, invoked, updated through natural-language feedback, rolled back, installed across agent hosts, and optionally prepared for controlled distribution. We describe the artifact contract, generation workflow, correction lifecycle, deployment surface, and domain presets implemented in the open-source system. At the time of writing, the public repository has approximately 18.5k GitHub stars; the gallery lists 215 skills from 165 contributors and more than 100k cumulative stars across listed skill cards. The system illustrates how person-grounded skills can be represented as portable, correctable packages rather than opaque prompts or hidden memories.