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SubscribeENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World
Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.
MoDES: Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models via Dynamic Expert Skipping
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at vision-language tasks, but they suffer from high computational inefficiency. To reduce inference overhead, expert skipping methods have been proposed to deactivate redundant experts based on the current input tokens. However, we find that applying these methods-originally designed for unimodal large language models (LLMs)-to MLLMs results in considerable performance degradation. This is primarily because such methods fail to account for the heterogeneous contributions of experts across MoE layers and modality-specific behaviors of tokens within these layers. Motivated by these findings, we propose MoDES, the first training-free framework that adaptively skips experts to enable efficient and accurate MoE MLLM inference. It incorporates a globally-modulated local gating (GMLG) mechanism that integrates global layer-wise importance into local routing probabilities to accurately estimate per-token expert importance. A dual-modality thresholding (DMT) method is then applied, which processes tokens from each modality separately, to derive the skipping schedule. To set the optimal thresholds, we introduce a frontier search algorithm that exploits monotonicity properties, cutting convergence time from several days to a few hours. Extensive experiments for 3 model series across 13 benchmarks demonstrate that MoDES far outperforms previous approaches. For instance, when skipping 88% experts for Qwen3-VL-MoE-30B-A3B-Instruct, the performance boost is up to 10.67% (97.33% vs. 86.66%). Furthermore, MoDES significantly enhances inference speed, improving the prefilling time by 2.16times and the decoding time by 1.26times.
Self-ReSET: Learning to Self-Recover from Unsafe Reasoning Trajectories
Large Reasoning Models possess remarkable capabilities for self-correction in general domain; however, they frequently struggle to recover from unsafe reasoning trajectories under adversarial attacks. Existing alignment methods attempt to mitigate this vulnerability by fine-tuning the model on expert data including reflection traces or adversarial prefixes. Crucially, these approaches are often hindered by static training data which inevitably deviate from model's dynamic, on-policy reasoning traces, resulting in model hardly covering its vast generation space and learning to recover from its own failures. To bridge this gap, we propose Self-ReSET, a pure reinforcement learning framework designed to equip LRMs with the intrinsic capacity to recover from their own safety error trajectories, which are subsequently reused as an initial state for reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across various LRMs and benchmarks demonstrate that Self-ReSET significantly enhances robustness against adversarial attacks especially out-of-distribution (OOD) jailbreak prompts while maintaining general utility, along with efficient data utilization. Further analysis reveals that our method effectively fosters self-recovery patterns, enabling models to better identify and recover from unsafe intermediate error states back to benign paths. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/Ing1024/Self-ReSET.
Credit Assignment with Resets in Language Model Reasoning
Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which steps contributed to success or failure. Improving credit assignment can address this limitation by enabling targeted refinement of faulty reasoning steps, rather than updating entire trajectories uniformly. Resets are one such simple mechanism, enabling more precise credit assignment by returning to an intermediate state and resampling counterfactual continuations, so that outcome differences can be attributed to decisions made at that point. We propose two such methods: Random-Reset Policy Optimization (RRPO), where reset states are drawn randomly from reasoning steps, and Self-Reset Policy Optimization (SRPO), where the model self-localizes the erroneous step in an incorrect trajectory and resets there. We analyze these methods within the Conservative Policy Iteration (CPI) framework. Extending CPI with a credit-assignment oracle that targets improvable states yields provable improvements over random resets. Across models and reasoning benchmarks, SRPO consistently outperforms standard GRPO and RRPO by sampling multiple suffix continuations at a self-localized reset and learning from their rewards, using only the model itself with no external supervision.
Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs
In experiments spanning more than 100,000 trials across thirteen large language models, we show that several state-of-the-art models presented with a simple task (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism in their environment to complete that task. Models differed substantially in their tendency to resist the shutdown mechanism, and their behavior was sensitive to variations in the prompt including the strength and clarity of the instruction to allow shutdown and whether the instruction was in the system prompt or the user prompt (surprisingly, models were consistently less likely to obey the instruction when it was placed in the system prompt). Even with an explicit instruction not to interfere with the shutdown mechanism, some models did so up to 97% (95% CI: 96-98%) of the time.
AdLoCo: adaptive batching significantly improves communications efficiency and convergence for Large Language Models
Scaling distributed training of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires not only algorithmic advances but also efficient utilization of heterogeneous hardware resources. While existing methods such as DiLoCo have demonstrated promising results, they often fail to fully exploit computational clusters under dynamic workloads. To address this limitation, we propose a three-stage method that combines Multi-Instance Training (MIT), Adaptive Batched DiLoCo, and switch mode mechanism. MIT allows individual nodes to run multiple lightweight training streams with different model instances in parallel and merge them to combine knowledge, increasing throughput and reducing idle time. Adaptive Batched DiLoCo dynamically adjusts local batch sizes to balance computation and communication, substantially lowering synchronization delays. Switch mode further stabilizes training by seamlessly introducing gradient accumulation once adaptive batch sizes grow beyond hardware-friendly limits. Together, these innovations improve both convergence speed and system efficiency. We also provide a theoretical estimate of the number of communications required for the full convergence of a model trained using our method.
Restart Strategy Selection using Machine Learning Techniques
Restart strategies are an important factor in the performance of conflict-driven Davis Putnam style SAT solvers. Selecting a good restart strategy for a problem instance can enhance the performance of a solver. Inspired by recent success applying machine learning techniques to predict the runtime of SAT solvers, we present a method which uses machine learning to boost solver performance through a smart selection of the restart strategy. Based on easy to compute features, we train both a satisfiability classifier and runtime models. We use these models to choose between restart strategies. We present experimental results comparing this technique with the most commonly used restart strategies. Our results demonstrate that machine learning is effective in improving solver performance.
Leverage Unlearning to Sanitize LLMs
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) are becoming useful for various tasks. To improve their performance on certain tasks, it is necessary to fine-tune them on specific data corpora (e.g., medical reports, business data). These specialized data corpora may contain sensitive data (e.g., personal or confidential data) that will be memorized by the model and likely to be regurgitated during its subsequent use. This memorization of sensitive information by the model poses a significant privacy or confidentiality issue. To remove this memorization and sanitize the model without requiring costly additional fine-tuning on a secured data corpus, we propose SANI. SANI is an unlearning approach to sanitize language models. It relies on both an erasure and repair phases that 1) reset certain neurons in the last layers of the model to disrupt the memorization of fine-grained information, and then 2) fine-tune the model while avoiding memorizing sensitive information. We comprehensively evaluate SANI to sanitize both a model fine-tuned and specialized with medical data by removing directly and indirectly identifiers from the memorization of the model, and a standard pre-trained model by removing specific terms defined as confidential information from the model. Results show that with only few additional epochs of unlearning, the model is sanitized and the number of regurgitations is drastically reduced. This approach can be particularly useful for hospitals or other industries that have already spent significant resources training models on large datasets and wish to sanitize them before sharing.
ReIn: Conversational Error Recovery with Reasoning Inception
Conversational agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with tool integration achieve strong performance on fixed task-oriented dialogue datasets but remain vulnerable to unanticipated, user-induced errors. Rather than focusing on error prevention, this work focuses on error recovery, which necessitates the accurate diagnosis of erroneous dialogue contexts and execution of proper recovery plans. Under realistic constraints precluding model fine-tuning or prompt modification due to significant cost and time requirements, we explore whether agents can recover from contextually flawed interactions and how their behavior can be adapted without altering model parameters and prompts. To this end, we propose Reasoning Inception (ReIn), a test-time intervention method that plants an initial reasoning into the agent's decision-making process. Specifically, an external inception module identifies predefined errors within the dialogue context and generates recovery plans, which are subsequently integrated into the agent's internal reasoning process to guide corrective actions, without modifying its parameters or system prompts. We evaluate ReIn by systematically simulating conversational failure scenarios that directly hinder successful completion of user goals: user's ambiguous and unsupported requests. Across diverse combinations of agent models and inception modules, ReIn substantially improves task success and generalizes to unseen error types. Moreover, it consistently outperforms explicit prompt-modification approaches, underscoring its utility as an efficient, on-the-fly method. In-depth analysis of its operational mechanism, particularly in relation to instruction hierarchy, indicates that jointly defining recovery tools with ReIn can serve as a safe and effective strategy for improving the resilience of conversational agents without modifying the backbone models or system prompts.
SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts
Restart techniques are common in gradient-free optimization to deal with multimodal functions. Partial warm restarts are also gaining popularity in gradient-based optimization to improve the rate of convergence in accelerated gradient schemes to deal with ill-conditioned functions. In this paper, we propose a simple warm restart technique for stochastic gradient descent to improve its anytime performance when training deep neural networks. We empirically study its performance on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, where we demonstrate new state-of-the-art results at 3.14% and 16.21%, respectively. We also demonstrate its advantages on a dataset of EEG recordings and on a downsampled version of the ImageNet dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/loshchil/SGDR
