Daily Papers

Large language model (LLM) agents are fundamentally constrained by context length on long-horizon tasks. We introduce Context-Folding, a framework that empowers agents to actively manage their working context. An agent can procedurally branch into a sub-trajectory to handle a subtask and then fold it upon completion, collapsing the intermediate steps while retaining a concise summary of the outcome. To make this behavior learnable, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework FoldGRPO with specific process rewards to encourage effective task decomposition and context management. On complex long-horizon tasks (Deep Research and SWE), our folding agent matches or outperforms the ReAct baselines while using an active context 10times smaller and significantly outperforms models that rely on summarization-based context management.

Long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models faces critical scalability challenges from unbounded context growth, leading to context folding methods that compress interaction history during task execution. However, existing approaches treat summary actions as standard actions, overlooking that summaries fundamentally modify the agent's future observation space, creating a policy-dependent, non-stationary observation distribution that violates core RL assumptions. This introduces three fundamental challenges: (1) gradient dilution where summary tokens receive insufficient training signal, (2) self-conditioning where policy updates change summary distributions, creating a vicious cycle of training collapse, and (3) computational cost from processing unique contexts at each turn. We introduce FoldActhttps://github.com/SHAO-Jiaqi757/FoldAct, a framework that explicitly addresses these challenges through three key innovations: separated loss computation for independent gradient signals on summary and action tokens, full context consistency loss to reduce distribution shift, and selective segment training to reduce computational cost. Our method enables stable training of long-horizon search agents with context folding, addressing the non-stationary observation problem while improving training efficiency with 5.19times speedup.

Multimodal Agentic Retrieval (MAR) requires agents to solve complex information-seeking tasks by iteratively invoking external tools. Typical frameworks such as ReAct maintain raw multimodal inputs and the accumulating interaction history in a single, ever-growing context, leading to the context explosion problem. While existing methods alleviate this issue by compressing redundant text, effective strategies for managing token-intensive visual content remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we first conduct a systematic empirical study of approximately 10,000 trajectories. The results show that as visual cues are progressively extracted through external tools and textualized into the context, raw images become increasingly redundant. Continued image retention is associated with higher output entropy and can even degrade task accuracy. Motivated by these findings, we propose MM-ContextFold, a training-free framework that loads raw images only when needed. It maintains a persistent, text-only main context for high-level planning and spawns ephemeral branch contexts for image-dependent subtasks. Within each branch, the agent loads the relevant images, completes the subtask, and folds the result back into the main context as a concise textual summary; the images and branch trace are then discarded. Experiments on seven MAR benchmarks across five backbone models show that MM-ContextFold improves average accuracy by 6.3 percentage points over ReAct while reducing the working context length by 27.5\%.

Long-horizon LLM agents act on an append-only interaction history that is re-sent to the model at every step, so the context and its cost grow with steps until the sessions exceed the context window. Existing methods manage the context through context requirement prediction, relying on additional model calls, heuristic rules, or trained policies. However, these predictive approaches introduce runtime overhead, invalidate prefix caches, and permanently discard content with no guarantee of recovery. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ReFold: a training-free rendering layer that preserves the underlying interaction history while compressing only the model's rendered context. It removes two kinds of inter-turn redundancy without an auxiliary predictor: content an earlier turn already displayed, replaced by a stub, and turns the agent itself reports finished, folded into a one-line note. Both operators use chunked rendering, rewriting the cached prefix once every few steps rather than at every step. Every removal is strictly reversible, a wrong removal costs one restore from the history rather than permanent content loss. Because it operates at the rendering layer, ReFold is plug-and-play across standard ReAct-style harnesses. Evaluations across five long-horizon benchmarks and two frontier LLMs demonstrate that ReFold reduces token consumption by up to 2.5x and halves the KV-cache memory per session without degrading task success rates. Under capped context budgets, it avoids up to 92% of forced compactions. Under concurrent serving workloads, it reduces request queuing delays by up to 100%, accelerating inference by up to 1.7x, while cutting inference costs by up to 3.4x.

Unlike autoregressive models, which generate one token at a time, dLLMs denoise a chunk of [MASK] tokens jointly and sample one or more tokens per step; despite enabling parallel decoding, this process incurs substantial computational cost due to the large chunk size of masked tokens. We observe that much of this cost is spent on repeatedly processing the preceding context and many [MASK] tokens with the same feature representations, indicating considerable computational redundancy. In this work, we revisit dLLM's redundancy from the perspective of [MASK] tokens. Through systematic analysis, we verify the redundancy of [MASK] tokens while revealing their critical role in providing structural information. Guided by these findings, we propose position-preserving [MASK] token compression and terminal-aware augmentation. By compressing redundant [MASK] computation, this approach accelerates decoding and further provides a natural extension toward context-folding-like long-context scaling under limited input-length constraints for full-sequence dLLMs such as LLaDA-8B-Instruct and LLaDA-1.5. Moreover, for block dLLMs such as LLaDA2.0-mini, it augments the context with a protected terminal [MASK] token to enhance generation quality with negligible overhead.

LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.

We study instruction-based image editing under professional workflows and identify three persistent challenges: (i) editors often over-edit, modifying content beyond the user's intent; (ii) existing models are largely single-turn, while multi-turn edits can alter object faithfulness; and (iii) evaluation at around 1K resolution is misaligned with real workflows that often operate on ultra high-definition images (e.g., 4K). We propose Agent Banana, a hierarchical agentic planner-executor framework for high-fidelity, object-aware, deliberative editing. Agent Banana introduces two key mechanisms: (1) Context Folding, which compresses long interaction histories into structured memory for stable long-horizon control; and (2) Image Layer Decomposition, which performs localized layer-based edits to preserve non-target regions while enabling native-resolution outputs. To support rigorous evaluation, we build HDD-Bench, a high-definition, dialogue-based benchmark featuring verifiable stepwise targets and native 4K images (11.8M pixels) for diagnosing long-horizon failures. On HDD-Bench, Agent Banana achieves the best multi-turn consistency and background fidelity (e.g., IC 0.871, SSIM-OM 0.84, LPIPS-OM 0.12) while remaining competitive on instruction following, and also attains strong performance on standard single-turn editing benchmarks. We hope this work advances reliable, professional-grade agentic image editing and its integration into real workflows.

Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying mechanics give rise to intelligent behaviors. Towards that end, we propose framing Transformer dynamics as movement through embedding space. Examining Transformers through this perspective reveals key insights, establishing a Theory of Transformers: 1) Intelligent behaviours map to paths in Embedding Space which, the Transformer random-walks through during inferencing. 2) LM training learns a probability distribution over all possible paths. `Intelligence' is learnt by assigning higher probabilities to paths representing intelligent behaviors. No learning can take place in-context; context only narrows the subset of paths sampled during decoding. 5) The Transformer is a self-mapping composition function, folding a context sequence into a context-vector such that it's proximity to a token-vector reflects its co-occurrence and conditioned probability. Thus, the physical arrangement of vectors in Embedding Space determines path probabilities. 6) Context vectors are composed by aggregating features of the sequence's tokens via a process we call the encoding walk. Attention contributes a - potentially redundant - association-bias to this process. 7) This process is comprised of two principal operation types: filtering (data independent) and aggregation (data dependent). This generalization unifies Transformers with other sequence models. Building upon this foundation, we formalize a popular semantic interpretation of embeddings into a ``concept-space theory'' and find some evidence of it's validity.

Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered for a particular question, in-context reasoning can be sensitive to distractor facts, additional content that is irrelevant to a question but that may be relevant for a different question (i.e., not necessarily random noise). In these situations, the model fails to distinguish the knowledge that is necessary to answer the question, leading to spurious reasoning and degraded performance. This reasoning failure contrasts with the model's apparent ability to distinguish its contextual knowledge from all the knowledge it has memorized during pre-training. Following this observation, we propose teaching the model to reason more robustly by folding the provided contextual knowledge into the model's parameters before presenting it with a question. Our method, RECKONING, is a bi-level learning algorithm that teaches language models to reason by updating their parametric knowledge through back-propagation, allowing them to then answer questions using the updated parameters. During training, the inner loop rapidly adapts a copy of the model weights to encode contextual knowledge into its parameters. In the outer loop, the model learns to use the updated weights to reproduce and answer reasoning questions about the memorized knowledge. Our experiments on two multi-hop reasoning datasets show that RECKONING's performance improves over the in-context reasoning baseline (by up to 4.5%). We also find that compared to in-context reasoning, RECKONING generalizes better to longer reasoning chains unseen during training, is more robust to distractors in the context, and is more computationally efficient when multiple questions are asked about the same knowledge.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) demonstrate impressive visual perception, they remain epistemically constrained by their static parametric knowledge. To transcend these boundaries, multimodal search models have been adopted to actively interact with the external environment for evidence retrieval. Diverging from prevailing paradigms that merely retrofit general LMMs with search tools as modular extensions, we explore the potential of building a multimodal agentic search model from scratch. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (i) we introduce Agentic Seeding, a dedicated phase designed to weave the foundational precursors necessary for eliciting agentic behaviors; (ii) we uncover a performance bottleneck in long-horizon interactions, where the increasing volume of interaction history overwhelms the model's ability to locate ground-truth evidence. To mitigate this, we propose V-Fold, an adaptive history-aware compression scheme that preserves recent dialogue turns in high fidelity while folding historical context into the visual space via rendering; and (iii) we develop POINTS-Seeker-8B, a state-of-the-art multimodal agentic search model that consistently outperforms existing models across six diverse benchmarks, effectively resolving the challenges of long-horizon, knowledge-intensive visual reasoning.

World generative models are typically used through what they produce: a rendered future, a video-conditioned action, or latent context computed by a costly generative branch. We argue that their more reusable asset is the computation that constructs a future. As a generator transforms a corrupted future into a coherent trajectory, its intermediate states organize appearance, spatial layout, and interaction across levels of abstraction. Can this future-generative computation be internalized in a representation inferred from the present alone? We present Enfold, which transfers this computation into a representation predicted from the current visual context and language instruction. During training, multi-level states exposed as the generator processes the observed future supervise a current-only encoder. The learned representation is fed back to condition future generation and is read by task heads without allowing task gradients to reshape the encoder. At deployment, action prediction no longer executes the generator. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot tasks, Enfold supports strong control while reducing action latency by 3.7times relative to Fast--WAM, Enfold-Flash reaches 10.1times. Representation analyses show that it suppresses nuisance variation and preferentially captures changes that emerge over longer horizons. When the current scene is altered by human intervention, both the generated continuation and the executed actions adapt, which is inconsistent with fixed trajectory replay. These results recast a world generator as a source of predictive control representations: its future need not be materialized at every step if its internal structure can be enfolded into the present.

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition models usually process a limited number of tokens each time, making attention score calculation less of a bottleneck. Instead, the bottleneck lies in the linear projection layers of multi-head attention and feedforward networks, constituting a substantial portion of the model size and contributing significantly to computation, memory, and power usage. To address this bottleneck, we propose folding attention, a technique targeting these linear layers, significantly reducing model size and improving memory and power efficiency. Experiments on on-device Transformer-based streaming speech recognition models show that folding attention reduces model size (and corresponding memory consumption) by up to 24% and power consumption by up to 23%, all without compromising model accuracy or computation overhead.

Understanding cellular machinery requires atomic-scale reconstruction of large biomolecular assemblies. However, predicting the structures of these systems has been constrained by hardware memory requirements of models like AlphaFold 3, imposing a practical ceiling of a few thousand residues that can be processed on a single GPU. Here we present NVIDIA BioNeMo Fold-CP, a context parallelism framework that overcomes this barrier by distributing the inference and training pipelines of co-folding models across multiple GPUs. We use the Boltz models as open source reference architectures and implement custom multidimensional primitives that efficiently parallelize both the dense triangular updates and the irregular, data-dependent pattern of window-batched local attention. Our approach achieves efficient memory scaling; for an N-token input distributed across P GPUs, per-device memory scales as O(N^2/P), enabling the structure prediction of assemblies exceeding 30,000 residues on 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. We demonstrate the scientific utility of this approach through successful developer use cases: Fold-CP enabled the scoring of over 90% of Comprehensive Resource of Mammalian protein complexes (CORUM) database, as well as folding of disease-relevant PI4KA lipid kinase complex bound to an intrinsically disordered region without cropping. By providing a scalable pathway for modeling massive systems with full global context, Fold-CP represents a significant step toward the realization of a virtual cell.

Cloth folding is a complex task due to the inevitable self-occlusions of clothes, their complicated dynamics, and the disparate materials, geometries, and textures that garments can have. In this work, we learn folding actions conditioned on text commands. Translating high-level, abstract instructions into precise robotic actions requires sophisticated language understanding and manipulation capabilities. To do that, we leverage a pre-trained vision-language model and repurpose it to predict manipulation actions. Our model, BiFold, can take context into account and achieves state-of-the-art performance on an existing language-conditioned folding benchmark. Given the lack of annotated bimanual folding data, we devise a procedure to automatically parse actions of a simulated dataset and tag them with aligned text instructions. BiFold attains the best performance on our dataset and can transfer to new instructions, garments, and environments.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models enhance neural network scalability by dynamically selecting relevant experts per input token, enabling larger model sizes while maintaining manageable computation costs. However, efficient training of large-scale MoE models across thousands of GPUs presents significant challenges due to limitations in existing parallelism strategies. We introduce an end-to-end training framework for large-scale MoE models that utilizes five-dimensional hybrid parallelism: Tensor Parallelism, Expert Parallelism, Context Parallelism, Data Parallelism, and Pipeline Parallelism. Central to our approach is MoE Parallel Folding, a novel strategy that decouples the parallelization of attention and MoE layers in Transformer models, allowing each layer type to adopt optimal parallel configurations. Additionally, we develop a flexible token-level dispatcher that supports both token-dropping and token-dropless MoE training across all five dimensions of parallelism. This dispatcher accommodates dynamic tensor shapes and coordinates different parallelism schemes for Attention and MoE layers, facilitating complex parallelism implementations. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in training efficiency and scalability. We achieve up to 49.3% Model Flops Utilization (MFU) for the Mixtral 8x22B model and 39.0% MFU for the Qwen2-57B-A14B model on H100 GPUs, outperforming existing methods. The framework scales efficiently up to 1,024 GPUs and maintains high performance with sequence lengths up to 128K tokens, validating its effectiveness for large-scale MoE model training. The code is available in Megatron-Core.

Long-horizon language agents must repeatedly interact with tools, accumulate evidence, and make decisions under bounded context windows. Existing context-management methods make such rollouts feasible by truncating distant history, folding past turns into summaries, or selecting compact memory states. However, these breakthroughs introduce two coupled limitations. First, as the number of turns grows, historical observations are progressively removed or collapsed into compressed states, making it harder for the policy to reuse fine-grained evidence. Second, once the original turns are no longer source-addressable, outcome-based RL loses an explicit path for aligning policy updates with the evidence that supported a successful final answer. To this end, we propose ECHO, a selective turn-memory framework that jointly addresses history collapse and traceable learning through source-indexed reconstruction. Specifically, ECHO compresses each completed environment turn into a compact memory record, reconstructs bounded policy contexts by selecting from these records, and reuses the selected source indices to route positive outcome credit to the evidence and selection actions that support successful answers. On BrowseComp-Plus, ECHO reaches 43.4% held-out accuracy, outperforming GRPO (28.9%) and the rolling-summary baseline SUPO (36.1%), while using fewer turns and lower trajectory volume than SUPO (Figure 1). Additionally, the trained policy improves zero-shot generalization across multi-objective QA, code generation, and deep information-seeking benchmarks on both dense and MoE backbones.

Origami metamaterials typically consist of folded sheets with periodic patterns, conferring them with remarkable mechanical properties. In the context of Continuum Mechanics, the majority of existing predictive methods are mechanism analogs which favor rigid folding and panel bending. While effective in predicting primary deformation modes, existing methods fall short in capturing the full spectrum of deformation of non-rigid foldable origami, such as the emergence of curvature along straight creases, local strain at vertices and warpage in panels. To fully capture the entire deformation spectrum and enhance the accuracy of existing methods, this paper introduces a homogenization framework for origami metamaterials where the faces are modeled as plate elements. Both asymptotic and energy-based homogenization methods are formulated and implemented. As a representative crease pattern, we examine the Miura origami sheet homogenized as an equivalent Kirchhoff-Love plate. The results reveal that certain effective elastic properties are nonlinearly related to both the initial fold angle and the crease stiffness. When benchmarked with results from fully resolved simulations, our framework yields errors up to 12.9\%, while existing models, including the bar-and-hinge model and the rigid-panel model, show up to 161\% error. The differences in errors are associated with the complex modes of crease and panel deformation in non-rigid origami, unexplored by the existing models. This work demonstrates a precise and efficient continuum framework for origami metamaterials as an effective strategy for predicting their elastic properties, understanding their mechanics, and designing their functionalities.

Scaling Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training introduces systems challenges absent in dense models. Because each token activates only a subset of experts, this sparsity allows total parameters to grow much faster than per-token computation, creating coupled constraints across memory, communication, and computation. Optimizing one dimension often shifts pressure to another, demanding co-design across the full system stack. We address these challenges for MoE training through integrated optimizations spanning memory (fine-grained recomputation, offloading, etc.), communication (optimized dispatchers, overlapping, etc.), and computation (Grouped GEMM, fusions, CUDA Graphs, etc.). The framework also provides Parallel Folding for flexible multi-dimensional parallelism, low-precision training support for FP8 and NVFP4, and efficient long-context training. On NVIDIA GB300 and GB200, it achieves 1,233/1,048 TFLOPS/GPU for DeepSeek-V3-685B and 974/919 TFLOPS/GPU for Qwen3-235B. As a performant, scalable, and production-ready open-source solution, it has been used across academia and industry for training MoE models ranging from billions to trillions of parameters on clusters scaling up to thousands of GPUs. This report explains how these techniques work, their trade-offs, and their interactions at the systems level, providing practical guidance for scaling MoE models with Megatron Core.

Large reasoning models have demonstrated strong problem-solving abilities, yet real-world tasks often require external tools and long-horizon interactions. Existing agent frameworks typically follow predefined workflows, which limit autonomous and global task completion. In this paper, we introduce DeepAgent, an end-to-end deep reasoning agent that performs autonomous thinking, tool discovery, and action execution within a single, coherent reasoning process. To address the challenges of long-horizon interactions, particularly the context length explosion from multiple tool calls and the accumulation of interaction history, we introduce an autonomous memory folding mechanism that compresses past interactions into structured episodic, working, and tool memories, reducing error accumulation while preserving critical information. To teach general-purpose tool use efficiently and stably, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning strategy, namely ToolPO, that leverages LLM-simulated APIs and applies tool-call advantage attribution to assign fine-grained credit to the tool invocation tokens. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks, including general tool-use tasks (ToolBench, API-Bank, TMDB, Spotify, ToolHop) and downstream applications (ALFWorld, WebShop, GAIA, HLE), demonstrate that DeepAgent consistently outperforms baselines across both labeled-tool and open-set tool retrieval scenarios. This work takes a step toward more general and capable agents for real-world applications. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/DeepAgent.

We present FoldingAgent, an agentic framework for inferring explicit parametric folding programs directly from origami demonstration videos. Our framework leverages the reasoning power of a pre-trained Vision-Language Model (VLM) equipped with a suite of specialized tools that enable the agent to simulate geometric transitions, verify physical plausibility, retrieve and compare visual content, and evaluate its own predictions. To translate visual content into folding programs, we define a parametric space that consists of the paper's geometry and a set of parametric folding actions. Unlike models that predict static crease patterns, our agent operates sequentially and possesses the ability to re-plan its actions, effectively mitigating the compounding errors inherent in multi-step folding. Our approach takes a step toward closing the gap between human origami knowledge, which is primarily shared through unstructured visual demonstrations, and computational methods, which typically rely on structured, parametric representations such as a crease pattern or an executable parametric plan. We evaluate our approach on PurelandFold, a newly curated benchmark of diverse Pureland origami videos with ground-truth geometry and action labels. Our results demonstrate that by combining VLM reasoning with a set of specialized tools and physical simulation, we can successfully transform unstructured visual demonstrations into executable, physically plausible folding procedures.

Document rectification in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges due to extreme variations in camera perspectives and physical distortions. Driven by the insight that complex transformations can be decomposed and resolved progressively, we introduce a novel multi-stage framework that progressively reverses distinct distortion types in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, our framework first performs a global affine transformation to correct perspective distortions arising from the camera's viewpoint, then rectifies geometric deformations resulting from physical paper curling and folding, and finally employs a content-aware iterative process to eliminate fine-grained content distortions. To address limitations in existing evaluation protocols, we also propose two enhanced metrics: layout-aligned OCR metrics (AED/ACER) for a stable assessment that decouples geometric rectification quality from the layout analysis errors of OCR engines, and masked AD/AAD (AD-M/AAD-M) tailored for accurately evaluating geometric distortions in documents with incomplete boundaries. Extensive experiments show that our method establishes new state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, yielding a substantial reduction of 14.1\%--34.7\% in the AAD metric and demonstrating superior efficacy in real-world applications. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/chaoyunwang/ArbDR.