ISSUE 1022
SUN, OCT 18, 2026
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TODAY · SUN, OCT 18, 2026

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01

Latest Launches

CURATED BY ORANGEBOT
01

AI DIGEST

UPDATED DAILY · EDITOR'S PICK
01.00
AI DIGEST

AI新闻摘要

October 18, 2026

Here is a summary of today's key news events:

AI Boom Faces Economic and Practical Challenges

Investors are becoming more aware of the risks associated with the massive build-out of artificial intelligence. Reports indicate the sector is facing the same economic and logistical hurdles as previous large-scale capital projects, questioning its path to profitability amid high costs.

Ukraine Strikes Russian Tech Infrastructure in Retaliation

Following Russian attacks on its electricity substations, Ukraine has reportedly launched retaliatory strikes targeting Russian tech infrastructure. This signals an escalation in the conflict, with both sides targeting critical infrastructure.

Zelensky Publicly Challenges Trump on War Stance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has decided to publicly confront former U.S. President Donald Trump, taking a political risk to address his position on the war in Ukraine and its potential impact on international support.

U.S. Navigates Tensions with China and Reaffirms Israel Support

A top U.S. general highlighted efforts to build up military deterrence in the Pacific region due to concerns about China's ambitions. Separately, Washington has reaffirmed its support for Israel's prime minister following a recent period of tension between the allies.

Political Unrest and Key Elections Unfold Globally

Several nations are facing political uncertainty. Germany is seeing a surge in support for the far-right AfD party, causing concern in the business community. In Canada, an unofficial independence referendum in Alberta is challenging national unity, while South America's largest economy is holding a tense presidential run-off election.

Rising Bond Yields Shift Market Dynamics

Increasing yields on U.S. Treasury bonds are making stocks a less attractive investment compared to interest-bearing accounts. In this environment, financial firms like Schwab are re-emphasizing the value of human financial advice to navigate the changing economic landscape.

02

ON THE WIRE

6 SOURCES
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HACKER NEWS

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HACKER NEWS

Hacker News - October 18, 2026

Hacker News Feed: Highlighting key posts and discussions.

I Became a Citizen of Japan

(www.derekwessman.com)

213156
Gold is now the top U.S. export

(www.numismaticnews.net)

369208
GLP-1 may slow biological aging

(www.universityofcalifornia.edu)

178170
Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust

(chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com)

32684
DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017

(huggingface.co)

903675
Ultramarine 1 Flash

(www.paperinstruments.com)

374107
Butlerian Jihad

(dune.fandom.com)

369255
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HUGGINGFACE

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HUGGINGFACE

HuggingFace 新闻 - October 18, 2026

HuggingFace Feed:最新的 AI 模型、数据集和社区动态。

Waypoint-OPD: Transferring RL-Induced Policy Shifts via Gated On-Policy Distillation

Policy-shift distillation reuses the difference between a teacher's log probabilities before and after reinforcement learning (RL) as supervision on student-generated trajectories. However, this endpoint policy shift cannot reveal whether local action preferences evolved consistently during teacher training. The same endpoint shift can result from early and late shifts that reinforce or partially cancel each other. We investigate whether agreement between early and late teacher policy shifts can guide selective transfer. We introduce Waypoint-guided On-Policy Distillation (Waypoint-OPD), which uses an intermediate teacher checkpoint from the same RL run to compare early and late shifts in relative action preferences at student-visited prefixes. We gate the endpoint shift according to the directional agreement between the early and late shifts, suppressing it when they point in opposing directions. Compared with endpoint-only transfer, our method requires only one additional frozen-teacher scoring pass. Using RL-trained Qwen3-4B teachers, we evaluate our method with Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-14B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B as student models in mathematical and code reasoning. In all six domain--student settings, Waypoint-OPD achieves the highest domain-average score among the compared distillation methods. Ablations with the Qwen3-8B student show that removing or shuffling gates reduces mathematical reasoning performance. These results support the use of directional agreement between early and late teacher policy shifts to weight the endpoint shift during student training.

667
MJev-Spatial: System One Spatial Intelligence via Native Attention Matching

Spatial intelligence lets an agent perceive and act in the physical world, and many of its judgments must be made at interaction rates: which spatial relation holds, how far an object is, or where to place it. Vision-language models (VLMs) produce these answers by free-form text generation, paying for autoregressive decoding and answer parsing even though the output space is compact: one of a few options, a scalar, or a 2D point. In light of this, we introduce MJev-Spatial, a System 1 multimodal decision model that tackles all three types of spatial understanding tasks within a unified classification framework. Specifically, MJev-Spatial treats each candidate as a class and scores it using the backbone's pretrained query and key projections, without adding parameters. The candidates are the given options for choice tasks, or value bins and image regions refined through coarse-to-fine classification for numerical and point prediction, respectively. At inference, each classification decision takes a single forward pass and generates no answer tokens. To train on heterogeneous spatial data efficiently, we supervise all coarse-to-fine stages jointly with teacher forcing in one forward pass, and combine this with length-aware global batching and cross-GPU load balancing, raising training throughput by 30.8% over the original batching strategy. Built on Qwen3.5-4B and trained on 12.3M question-answer pairs converted from existing spatial datasets, MJev-Spatial achieves the highest overall score (65.64%) among eight tested models, ranks first on seven of twelve benchmarks, and outperforms its unmodified autoregressive base model on all twelve, while running 2.5 times faster than the fastest autoregressive baseline and 5.6 times faster than the base model.

354
OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Use

Computer use has reached a turning point: the focus is expanding from GUI-only interaction to systems that complete tasks on users' computers through visual and programmatic interfaces. We define a generalist computer-use agent (GCUA) as a system in which the model chooses how to observe, act, and organize its work across visual and programmatic interfaces. Yet frontier implementations, such as GPT-6 Astra's computer-use system, remain largely closed, limiting systematic study of their design. We introduce Open Generalist CUA (OpenGCUA), an ongoing project to develop and open the full stack for GCUAs with the community. This report presents the first release of OpenGCUA. Code execution is a key feature of our agent design: it lets intermediate results determine subsequent operations and enables models to apply their existing programming capabilities directly to computer interaction. We also propose harness-to-model decision transfer, moving selected observations and task-state decisions from fixed harness rules to the model. On OSWorld-v2, our full configuration improves task scores across all eight evaluated models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5, raising mean partial score by +19.6 points and reducing reported steps per task by an average of 53.0% relative to batched GUI-only execution. We release our implementation and prompts, evaluation trajectories from all eight models, and preliminary versions of a real-device harness and a cross-device SDK. The harness addresses real-device challenges not fully captured by benchmarks, while the SDK provides a common programming interface across computers, mobiles and browsers. Across four real macOS tasks under our real-device harness, selected Qwen3.8-Max runs use 19.4 times as many reported reasoning tokens as GPT-6 Astra, highlighting substantial differences between models in real-device execution efficiency.

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FDE-Gym: The Last Mile of AI Delivery

Existing agent benchmarks typically evaluate agents on well-specified tasks defined by issue reports, specifications, or task tickets. Real-world customer delivery is different: forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) must clarify ambiguous requirements, work in live systems, and uncover unstated constraints. We introduce FDE-Gym, a benchmark of 95 end-to-end delivery tasks from 20 customer scenarios across 18 sectors, each adapted by industry experts from real-world delivery projects. In simulated customer environments with scripted stakeholders and modifiable customer systems, agents interact with stakeholders and operate on production-like systems to deliver working solutions. FDE-Gym scores a delivery by how much it improves the customer's own success metric, normalized between 0 (unchanged system) and 1 (reference solution), with penalties for stakeholder interactions (messages, trial runs, and waiting time). An online platform lets humans practice FDE skills under the same grading criteria. We evaluate 13 model configurations from seven providers. In the realistic setting, where unstated constraints must be discovered, the best configuration achieves a mean FDE-Gym score of 0.56 and resolves only 14 of the 95 tasks (a score of at least 0.8 with no incident). Discovering unstated constraints is the primary bottleneck: performance drops sharply when models must uncover them without explicit guidance. Yet information discovery alone does not account for the gap: even on the 23 tasks where the best configuration obtains every key fact from stakeholders, it reaches a normalized business uplift of 0.8 or above on only 10. These results reveal a substantial gap between solving well-specified tasks and delivering effective AI systems for real customers.

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RoTA-Bench: Evaluating 3D Spatial Reasoning through Interactive Projection Alignment

Can vision-language models turn 2D observations into 3D understanding that supports precise action? This requires inferring object geometry, anticipating the effects of rotation, and refining actions through visual feedback. We introduce RoTA-Bench to evaluate these abilities through interactive 3D-to-2D projection alignment. Given a target silhouette, a model observes a rotated object and chooses successive rotations to recover the target projection within a limited action budget. Our automated pipeline constructs silhouette-preserving 3D objects from 2D icons and uses reversible initialization to guarantee solvability, yielding 674 tasks and a stratified 100-task test set. Empirically, we find that (i) a substantial human-model gap persists: GPT-5.6-Sol succeeds on only 17% of tasks, whereas 20 undergraduate participants collectively complete the test set four times with a 100% success rate; (ii) image-space and pose-space progress can diverge: at matched states, the model more often improves silhouette overlap while worsening pose alignment than humans (19.4% vs. 10.9%); and (iii) fine-grained control is sensitive to interaction history: removing it leaves 96.8% of the model's actions at a coarse 30-degree step size and sharply reduces observed task success. These findings highlight the challenge of converting visual evidence into precise 3D control, beyond recognizing or matching individual images.

202
Self-Evolving Agent Harness

Harness self-evolution revises an agent's software scaffolding, including prompts, memory, workflows, and executable components, while keeping model weights fixed. We formalize a feedback-driven process in which accepted revisions persist across runs. The framework separates update targets from proposal and admission mechanisms. It distinguishes changes to interpreted state from revisions to tools and code, repository-level control logic, and plugin composition. We characterize search through evolutionary optimization and examine its reliability through continual PAC-learning. Under explicit assumptions, the analysis yields an expected generalization bound, a retention bound conditional on historical regression budgets, and a high-probability admission rule using fresh, independent validation data. We examine how persistent harness revisions affect knowledge sharing and organizational workflows, with implications for scientific reliability, physical safety, and institutional accountability. Cases from prior work illustrate model--harness co-design, distributed execution, and plugin reuse. Reliable deployment requires continual validation as task distributions and evaluators change, with independent safeguards for learning, runtime privileges, and consequential actions. We provide a comprehensive 66-page discussion of related work, theory, algorithms, evaluation, applications, and the broader impact of Harness RSI, together with continuously updated code and supplementary materials, at https://github.com/zgcagi/Harness-RSI.

201
MAI-Gym: An Open All-in-One Platform for GUI Agent Evaluation and RL Training across Mobile and Computer Environments

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has driven rapid progress in mathematics, coding, and tool use, but scaling this success to GUI agents remains challenging due to the high cost of interactive environments and the scarcity of realistic training tasks. We introduce MAI-Gym, an open all-in-one platform that unifies GUI agent evaluation, data collection, and online RL training across mobile, computer, and web environments. Through a shared rollout pipeline, MAI-Gym ensures consistent agent behavior across evaluation and training, supports ten established benchmarks, and scales to 20,000 parallel environment instances. Beyond scalable infrastructure, MAI-Gym enables automated synthesis of diverse GUI applications and challenging tasks, including resettable mocked apps and coherent cross-app worlds with execution-validated task verifiers. Using MAI-Gym, we train MAI-Gym-9B, a unified 9B agent for mobile and computer use, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open GUI agents under 10B parameters: 78.4% on MobileWorld and 76.2% on OSWorld-Verified. Importantly, RL in a mocked train-ticketing app transfers to its real-world counterpart, improving task success on a phys- ical phone from 28.8% to 48.1%. We release the framework, synthesis skills, mocked apps, 2,000 verified tasks, and the model checkpoint to support repro- ducible research and further advances in scalable GUI agent training.

154
Behavioral Compositionality of Sparse Autoencoder Representations

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) represent model activations with sparse, linearly decoded features, but the downstream effects of those features need not compose additively. We introduce SAE Additivity Residuals (SAR), which measure the behavioral variation left unexplained above a chosen interaction order. Under independent feature subset sampling, population SAR is exactly the normalized energy of interactions above that order and bounds coalition ordering error for the optimal low order approximation. To distinguish compositionality associated with the SAE representation from that induced by downstream computation, we compare learned SAE coordinates with sum preserving random rotations of the same selected subspace and find lower first order residuals for the learned coordinates across all 18 model and behavior settings. The coordinates are nevertheless not fully additive: pairwise terms improve held out coalition ordering in every setting and outperform parameter matched models using randomly selected third order terms. In a combined steering experiment, pairwise modeling raises rank fidelity from 0.5874 to 0.7790 and reduces ordering error from 0.1444 to 0.0606. Together, these results show that SAE coordinates support comparatively compositional behavioral descriptions while faithful joint explanations and interventions still require interactions beyond individual feature effects. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenSAE/SAE-Behavioral-Compositionality.

106
Each Reward to Its Relevant Tokens: Reward-Specific Token-Level Credit Assignment for Multi-Reward RL

Language models are increasingly trained against several verifiable rewards at once, such as the correctness and the format of a tool call, or the individual constraints of a complex instruction. Reward-decoupled normalization (GDPO) normalizes each reward separately so that different reward combinations keep distinct advantages, but it still spreads every reward's advantage evenly over the whole response, although each verifier checks only a few positions. We propose MRTPO, which assigns the advantage of each reward to the tokens relevant to it, using the information its verifier checks, without auxiliary models or token-level annotations. For each reward, the policy replays its own response with and without that reward's verifier information, and the per-token Jensen-Shannon distance between the two next-token distributions measures each token's relevance and reassigns the advantage. On text-to-SQL, multi-constraint instruction following and tool calling, MRTPO converges faster and achieves better performance than the compared methods.

56
VLA-Δ: Learning Physical State Transition for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models transfer semantic knowledge acquired through vision-language pretraining to robot control, achieving strong performance across various benchmarks. However, most VLAs directly map observations to demonstrated actions without explicit supervision of intermediate physical state changes, making them prone to overfitting observation-action correspondences. Some methods introduce intermediate reasoning or future-state prediction in language, visual, or latent spaces to guide action generation, but do not explicitly supervise the physical state transition itself. We therefore propose VLA-Δ, a general framework that uses physical changes between current and future states as explicit learning targets. To support this objective, we construct a large-scale pretraining dataset and derive physical state-transition annotations covering task-relevant semantics and visual motion changes, providing more direct supervision for continuous action generation. During inference, the model generates actions directly from current observations without additional inference overhead. VLA-Δ achieves performance competitive with the state of the art on LIBERO and RoboTwin, and outperforms π_{0.5} in real-robot experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-OmniAI/VLA-Delta

54
Mosaic: Multi-Session Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Most existing agentic reinforcement learning methods assume single-session trajectories, where interaction proceeds within one continuously accumulated context. However, agentic techniques such as context compaction and subagent forking may produce trajectories spanning multiple sessions, creating a mismatch between the single-session training assumption and inference-time execution. Therefore, we introduce Multi-Session Agentic Reinforcement Learning, a more general setting that supports an arbitrary number of sessions within a trajectory. Under this setting, a widely adopted method is to broadcast trajectory-level advantages to all sessions, but this does not distinguish contributions from various sessions or guide session allocation within trajectories. To address this issue, we propose Mosaic, a multi-session agentic RL method with critic-free hierarchical optimization. At the trajectory level, it incorporates session-usage signals into advantage estimation. At the session level, it shapes each session's advantage according to the estimated marginal contribution. Experiments on BrowseComp with Qwen3.5-4B show that Mosaic outperforms broadcasting in both context compaction and subagent forking scenarios while using fewer sessions on average. Further analyses show that our method achieves improvements in session utility and allocation, which we suggested is a promising target for future advances in multi-session agentic RL.

54
Can World and Action Modeling Benefit Each Other under Unified Causal Training?

World and action modeling are closely related, yet their reciprocal benefits under unified causal training remain unclear. We introduce OneWM, a simple framework for unified causal training that treats actions as both conditions for world prediction and targets for policy learning within a shared video-action architecture. Using this framework, we investigate whether learning forward dynamics conditioned on specified actions improves action learning, and whether learning to generate actions in turn improves action-conditioned world modeling. We use LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboCasa365 as embodied testbeds to evaluate both policy learning and world modeling, complemented by real-world policy experiments. Learning the visual consequences of specified actions improves policy performance and generalization across changing scenes. In turn, action learning improves multi-view world-prediction fidelity under the same architecture. Together, these results answer both questions positively, supporting reciprocal benefits between world modeling and action generation under unified causal training.

40
OmniVerifier-C1: Decomposed Graded Verifier for Rule-Governed Generative World Modeling

Generative visual verifiers play a crucial role in advancing multimodal intelligence. To enhance the robustness of visual verifiers in complex multimodal scenarios involving compositional requirements, we move beyond conventional binary verifiers that produce only True/False discrete judgments and introduce a verifier that automatically decomposes complex prompts or environmental rules into fine-grained components and assigns pointwise scores to provide a continuous and more informative critique signal. Our experiments further demonstrate that these structured and interpretable outputs improve the verifier's generalization to out-of-domain multimodal critic tasks. To train this verifier, we introduce a Decoupled RL training strategy that jointly optimizes sub-question-level binary judgment and global alignment scoring, using precise local feedback to develop fine-grained verification capabilities that provide a foundation for reliable continuous scoring at the global level. Under a general reinforcement learning framework, we first empirically demonstrate that the proposed pointwise graded verifier significantly outperforms binary verifiers in traditional text-to-image scenarios. We then extend our investigation to rule-governed generative world modeling where generative models are leveraged for world simulation and world reasoning under explicit rules. From a theoretical standpoint, we further show that a pairwise verification paradigm yields more accurate critiques than the pointwise formulation when ground-truth images are available, with empirical results on diverse structured world-modeling tasks such as Maze and Sudoku further validating the effectiveness of our approach. Overall, our findings suggest a key insight: the transition from generative models to structured world-modeling agents critically hinges on the availability of accurate pairwise graded visual verifiers.

32
WorldCast: Exploring Intelligent Visual Generation in World State Prediction

Humans interpret multimodal observations of the world and forecast how it will evolve. Recent multimodal generative systems have demonstrated similar capabilities: they can integrate multimodal context and synthesize visual outputs that depict changes in the world. To characterize this emerging trajectory, we organize model capabilities into a four-level hierarchy and discover that higher-level tasks remain relatively underexplored despite model progress. To bridge this gap, we explore model performance on multi-step world state prediction, a high-level task that requires models to forecast successive future world states from multimodal observations and diverse references. Such a task requires models to possess entangled understanding and generation capabilities, as well as extensive world knowledge to translate human action sequences, physical transformations, and abstract visual reasoning into coherent visual outputs. We introduce WorldCast, a benchmark comprising 320 manually designed cases across eight categories, and evaluate 12 representative models. The conducted experiments yield three key insights: (a) advances in frontier models are rapidly pushing the boundaries of intelligent world modeling, with the GPT-Image-2.5 System scoring 72.8 and demonstrating early-stage visual state prediction capabilities on real-world tasks; (b) WorldCast reveals substantial gaps between models: even Nano Banana Pro reaches only 42.8 and the best open-source model scores 20.1, with deficits in handling complex context, entangled references, and reasoning-heavy tasks; (c) strong generative models effectively draw on the capabilities of their underlying language models. These findings highlight the need for multimodal generative models that are capable of dynamic planning and reasoning while also being deeply unified to faithfully simulate real-world states.

30
Data World: Scaling Data Environments from Scratch

Data agents use code to process heterogeneous files and derive analytical insights. Scaling their training faces costly environment curation, privacy and intellectual-property restrictions, and difficulty verifying open-ended findings without known generative truth. Our core insight is to specify the world behind the files before generating the files themselves. We introduce Data World, a multi-agent engine that synthesizes environments, tasks, and rubrics from explicit mechanisms. Independent audits check target recoverability from observed files; rubrics support evaluation and RL rewards. Human preference-based curation for question realism selects 100 tasks across 50 held-out worlds and 16 domains for DataWorld-Bench. The engine also yields 2,135 training tasks from 1,037 disjoint worlds. Evaluation of ten frontier models shows that the benchmark remains challenging, particularly for insight discovery, with a consistent computation-insight gap. RL-zero training on the synthesized tasks produces DataWorld-35B-A3B from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B without trajectory distillation. Under matched evaluation, it improves over its base by 7.06 points on DataWorld-Bench, 14.28 on DAComp, 20.90 on DABstep-Hard, and 12.13 on JobBench, a broader occupational benchmark.

28
MLExpert: Towards a Generalist Agentic Model for Autonomous Machine Learning Engineering

Large language models (LLMs) are expanding from assisting scientific research and engineering to autonomously developing and improving AI systems, advancing AI for AI (AI4AI) as a pathway toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). Workflow-driven machine learning engineering (MLE) systems provide a practical path toward this pursuit through complex orchestration that manages long-horizon experimentation, while recent MLE systems adopt model-directed interaction, allowing models to autonomously organize experiments and adapt optimization strategies based on execution feedback. However, feedback from each experiment reflects several preceding decisions, and a long MLE run contains many such costly experiments. Training must therefore select useful supervision from long interaction trajectories and learn from intermediate outcomes. We propose a post-training method for autonomous long-horizon MLE optimization and apply it to train MLExpert, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model. We design the Kaggle-MLE Factory to construct executable tasks and an interaction harness for model-directed experimentation. Hierarchical agentic SFT transfers general tool-use and coding capabilities to MLE through outcome-guided supervision. Windowed Interaction RL (WIRL) treats the multi-turn decisions between successive experiment results as an execution window and assigns it a shared outcome-based reward. Asynchronous collection and policy correction support policy updates before the trajectory ends. On MLE-Bench Lite, MLExpert improves the average medal rate of the base model from 37.9% to 72.7%, achieving performance comparable to larger frontier models such as Kimi-K3 and GLM-5.3. Further experiments show that MLExpert improves performance on NatureBench Lite, agent scaffold optimization, and algorithm optimization, suggesting that the learned optimization capability generalizes to other tasks.

25
Trajectory-Level Speculation with Semantic Verification for Tool-Using Agents

Large language model agents solve tasks through long sequences of tool calls, and the prevailing design has a single strong model generate every step, although many steps are routine enough for a much smaller model. Existing ways of sharing this work keep the strong model as the generator: routers and collaborative agents decide which model handles each query or step, and speculative methods check a small model's drafts one step at a time, usually against the strong model's own action. We introduce SpecAgent, a collaboration protocol that turns the strong model from the author of each step into a reviewer of steps drafted by a weak model. The weak model executes read-only tool calls as it drafts, so that every step is grounded in real observations, and holds the first action that would modify the environment. The strong model then verifies the drafted segment in a single prefill pass, commits the longest prefix it judges semantically valid, and repairs the first rejected step. Because verification replaces autoregressive decoding with parallel prefill, the strong model decodes only short verdicts and occasional repairs rather than every step. On τ^2-Bench, SpecAgent comes within one point of the strong model's success rate while roughly halving memory traffic and wall time, and on AutomationBench and VitaBench it recovers 44-75% of the quality gap while lowering both. In an edge-cloud deployment on MCP-Atlas with three cloud models, it closes 53-75% of the weak-strong quality gap while the strong model generates at most half as many tokens. These results suggest that a strong model need not author every step of an agent: reviewing grounded drafts retains most of its quality while cutting both latency and memory traffic.

21
Learning Self-Orchestration in Decentralized Agent Swarms

The capabilities of an agent swarm depend on both its individual members and how they coordinate. Yet existing multi-agent systems often train agents within fixed orchestration structures, separating the learning of individual capabilities from the organization of collective behavior. We introduce market-based post-training (MPT), a framework for jointly learning action policies and self-orchestration in decentralized agent swarms. Agents express their willingness to participate through bids, which determine who acts and how collective outcomes provide local training credit. Learning both action and bidding behavior allows individual capabilities and patterns of participation to adapt together without a central coordinating agent. We evaluate MPT on embodied crafting, robot navigation, and deep research. Results show gains over monolithic post-training and confirm that agent participation indeed evolves with learning. With the same post-trained action policies, learned self-orchestration outperforms alternative coordination strategies. Ablations show that both action and bidding benefit from learning, and that learned bids provide more effective action-training signals. Beyond the original training objectives, trained swarms adapt faster to related tasks and achieve better performance with larger populations at inference time. Larger populations also suffer smaller performance losses under agent dropout, demonstrating that learned self-orchestration supports reuse, scaling, and robustness in decentralized agent swarms. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Embodied-Minds-Lab/MPT.

11
Virtual Head Attention

The design of attention mechanisms in long-context large language models faces an ``impossible triangle'' among KV cache size, training and prefill FLOPs, and model quality. GQA achieves strong quality but incurs high KV cache overhead; alternative approaches such as MLA and MFA can compress the cache, but MLA suffers from quality loss while MFA substantially increases training and prefill compute. We propose Virtual Head Attention (VHA), which simultaneously improves all three vertices through two lightweight linear operations: Q Premix applies a near-identity transformation to queries within each KV group to recover virtual head diversity from halved physical query heads, and Linear Postmix fuses inter-head features via a low-rank I + AB^top residual structure. Since VHA introduces no nonlinear operations, Premix can be folded into the query projection and Postmix into the output projection at inference time, reducing the model to a standard GQA-2 architecture that directly reuses all existing GQA inference optimizations. With only two KV heads, the group size in large models readily reaches 64, fully exploiting Tensor Core parallelism during decoding. Across four scales with 4K-context 50B-token pretraining, VHA consistently surpasses the standard GQA baseline at every scale (+0.05\% to +0.81\%), while reducing KV cache by 4times vs.\ GQA-8 at dense scales and 2times vs.\ GQA-4 at the MoE scale, and lowering training and prefill FLOPs by 7.9\% (1.7B, S{=}4096). On an industrial 30B-A3B MoE model trained on 500B tokens at 8K context, VHA outperforms both MLA and GQA-4 by +0.70\,/\,+2.60\,\% on a 12-benchmark base-model evaluation suite; in a separate matched 10B-A1B MoE comparison after long-context mid-training, VHA attains an average RULER score of 84.4 over 8K--128K versus 73.0 for GQA, while using two rather than four KV heads in the full-attention layers.

10
CarryOn: A Dual-Loop Harness for Personalized and Reliable Robot Assistance

While generalist vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled diverse open-world manipulation, real-world robotic assistance requires two critical capabilities they currently lack: personalization and reliable execution. First, executing an instruction like "make me a sandwich" requires grounding subtask decomposition in persistent user preferences rather than relying on a single generic solution. Second, reliable deployment demands explainable safety assurance that proactively prevents hazards and gracefully recovers from occasional physical failures. To address these gaps, we present CarryOn, a dual-loop harness designed to augment a frozen VLA policy. The planning loop maintains persistent user-level and scene-level context that is continually grounded against new observations and revised through interaction, enabling personalized task selection and execution grounding across conversations and changing scenes. The execution loop actively supervises policy rollouts, shielding actions from predicted hazardous contact. When execution fails, the system invokes reusable control-based recovery skills that restore task progress and are refined through reflection on earlier failures. On a real robot and in simulation, CarryOn dispatches preference-consistent subtasks across users and scenes, reduces the violation rate of an already safety-finetuned VLA from 52.6% to 6.1%, and increases recovery success from 13% to 80% when refined skills are reused.

10
FlashMask-3: Efficient and Expressive Mask-Aware Distributed Attention

Long-context training of large language and multimodal models couples structured attention masks (document, prefix-LM, share-question, sliding-window, block-sparse) with multi-node context parallelism, making the mask a dominant bottleneck. FlashMask's column-wise sparse mask compresses them from O(n^2) to O(n) via four query-axis boundary vectors, covering broad structured patterns. Implemented for Ampere GPUs, it neither exploits FlashAttention-3's TMA/WGMMA warp-specialized pipeline on Hopper nor supports distribution. The column-wise sparse mask is indexed by key positions but stores query-axis interval boundaries. Under any multi-chunk context-parallel assignment, it reduces per-rank mask localization to a provably zero-communication clip--shift--max on the boundary vectors, compatible with the single-GPU kernel. FlashMask-3 introduces a mask-aware Hopper kernel with three-role warp specialization atop FlashAttention-3's TMA/WGMMA pipeline, plus a mask-aware distributed extension: zero-communication mask localization, a sparsity-aware load balancer (HCC-IPO), and a mask-aware compute-communication overlap with mask-driven communication pruning, whose forward all-gather uses topology-aware hierarchical routing. On a single H100 across 12 masks at 4K--128K context, it improves achieved TFLOPs over FlashMask, FlexAttention, and MagiAttention by 45--141%, 34--71%, and 2--44%. At context-parallel degrees 4--32 with 8K sequence per device, it attains 31--75% compute-communication overlap efficiency and improves throughput over Megatron-Core CP ring, Megatron-Core CP all-gather, and MagiAttention by 1.80times--3.71times, 1.71times--2.92times, and 1.09times--1.46times. In end-to-end training of a 118B-A14B MoE at 128K on 128 H100 GPUs, it raises throughput by 7.3--11.0% over a Dual Chunk all-gather baseline, with attention forward+backward 24.5--44.9% faster.

9
CoDA: Co-Evolution of Data Engines and Action Policies

Generative simulation can automate robot environment construction, but physically valid environments are not necessarily useful for training. The challenge is to identify environments that address a policy's failures and supervision that helps it overcome them. We introduce CoDA, a framework in which a simulation data engine and an action policy co-evolve through a shared heterogeneous memory of environment construction, policy failures, and learning progress. The memory compiles validated diagnoses from a vision-language critic into generation programs that recreate difficulties and training programs that help the policy overcome them. We further propose Text2potential to convert these diagnoses into staged potentials for action-chunk value learning, providing dense supervision for policy updates while preserving the task's optimal policy under standard shaping assumptions. Measured learning progress guides further generation and program refinement. Across four manipulation task families, CoDA improves out-of-distribution success from 5.3% after supervised fine-tuning to 27.6%, exceeding the strongest closed-loop baseline by 9.5 percentage points with the same generation budget. On LIBERO-Pro, 15 rounds of generation and training raise success from 25% to 84% under position perturbations and from 1% to 76% under instruction perturbations.

9
LEASH: Uncertainty-Aware Weak-to-Strong Escalation and Oversight for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents increasingly tackle long-horizon tasks, where running a frontier model at every step is expensive and a small open-weight model alone often fails. Weak-to-strong escalation offers a middle ground where a weak agent acts by default and hands control to a strong one only when needed. The core challenge is deciding when to escalate, which requires an uncertainty signal cheap enough to check at every step. However, even after handoff, the strong agent can still get lost, but a black-box API that the strong agent is usually served exposes no internals to monitor. To this end, we propose LEASH, a training-free framework that unleashes the strong agent only when the weak agent's latent uncertainty signals it is needed, and keeps it on a leash afterward. LEASH has three layers: (1) initial task uncertainty for early routing, (2) step-level uncertainty for runtime escalation, and, after handoff, (3) a shadow observer for continued oversight of the strong black-box agent. Here, we use latent uncertainty as a fuel for all three layers. Specifically, we compare the weak model's hidden states with those from its past successful and failed trajectories, and a state that looks more like the failures signals higher uncertainty. During weak-agent execution, our uncertainty estimator reuses activations already produced during action generation, so it needs no extra forward pass or dedicated monitor training. Experiments on OSWorld across four contemporary model backbones show that LEASH consistently improves over standalone weak agents and outperforms random escalation by 6.55--11.94 points at matched escalation rates. With Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, LEASH achieves 73.66% task success at $0.4117 per task, matching always-on Claude Opus 5 (72.90%) while reducing inference cost by 19.2%.

8
Beyond Policy Rollouts: Embedding-Space Directional Exploration with Anchored Noise for LLM RLVR

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically uses small rollout groups per prompt, where repeated sampling from the same policy can yield highly similar trajectories, reducing within-group reward variation and weakening group-relative advantage signals. Existing remedies such as higher sampling temperature, entropy bonuses, asymmetric clipping, and larger rollout budgets broaden sampling or modify policy updates but leave rollout conditioning unchanged. In this paper, we propose EDEN (Embedding-space Directional Exploration via anchored Noise), which intervenes at the rollout source through anchored input perturbations. EDEN explores beyond the policy's own rollouts. Within the same rollout budget, it replaces a small fraction of standard rollouts in each group with rollouts that the same policy generates from the prompt plus a single appended, perturbed embedding position, rather than from the prompt alone. Gaussian noise drives variation, while a shared anchor provides a common conditioning direction within each prompt group. Selected perturbed rollouts contribute to GRPO updates with downweighted advantages, and the model architecture, discrete decoding, and test-time inference remain unchanged. Across model scales and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, EDEN outperforms GRPO and the exploration controls evaluated in the same pipeline, with the largest gains in sampled solution coverage. Analyses show that more prompt groups provide non-zero group-relative learning signals and that noise and anchoring play complementary roles. Intervening at the rollout source is thus an effective lever for exploration in RLVR.

8
SUPRA-TEX: 3D Generation with Super-Aligned Texture

Single image 3D generation aims to dress a given 3D mesh with relightable materials while faithfully preserving the visual details of a reference image. Existing methods either introduce artifacts when fusing inconsistent multi-view predictions or struggle to preserve fine details through implicit image-feature conditioning. To resolve these challenges, we introduce SUPRA-Tex, built on the principle of decoupling visible-material estimation, surface alignment, and observation-guided 3D completion. This division of labor allows the 3D generator, trained on limited 3D data, to focus its capacity on preserving visible evidence and completing unobserved surfaces. Specifically, we first train an MLLM-based image editing model to predict lighting-separated PBR maps in the reference view. We then project these maps onto the visible surface and encode them with the pretrained material VAE encoder into native observation latents that share the generation target's latent space. An interleaved flow transformer holds these latents as fixed, read-only anchors while alternating unobserved-region and full-surface updates to generate complete material latents. This design achieves super-alignment with the reference, delivering What You See Is What You Get fidelity on visible regions and coherent completion on unobserved surfaces. Trained solely on public datasets, SUPRA-Tex achieves SOTA performance in both geometry-conditioned texturing and end-to-end asset generation, matching or even exceeding leading commercial systems on in-the-wild images. Project page: https://supra-3d.github.io/supratex/

8
Cowork-Gym: Synthesizing Interactive Work Environments at Scale

Cowork agents navigate dependencies across tools and files while adapting to changing user requirements and edits to shared workspaces. Scaling such environments requires maintaining consistency among task objectives, executable resources, user behavior, and success criteria. We introduce Cowork-Gym, a framework that synthesizes Cowork environments through a build-execute-revise loop that uses execution evidence and review feedback to validate and repair generated environments. To capture realistic Cowork dynamics, a stateful user simulator responds to the agent's actions through dialogue and direct edits to the shared workspace. We synthesize 64.9K environments across 14 application scenarios and use them to post-train 9B, 27B, and 35B-A3B Qwen models with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Averaged across six agentic benchmarks, these models outperform their corresponding base checkpoints by 8.7, 6.4, and 4.1 points, respectively. Ours-27B ranks second overall among the evaluated models and achieves the highest average scores on PawBench and ClawEval, outperforming models with over 100B total parameters on both benchmarks.

8
Mine, Sample, Render: Test-Time Diversity Alignment Of Generative Models

Modern generative models produce high-quality individual outputs but struggle to sample diversely, even when explicitly instructed to do so. We introduce MINE-SAMPLE-RENDER (MSR), a test-time approach that externalizes the diversity into an explicit, corpus-derived sampling procedure. Our pipeline (i) mines an interpretable categorical schema from a corpus of real artifacts and supplies statistics for sampling; (ii) samples attribute configurations from the corpus-derived statistics; (iii) uses a generative model purely as a conditional renderer of a sampled configuration. Across weather report generation, user simulation, webpage design, text-to-image generation, and agent-generated 3D assets, we evaluate the diversity and output quality of MSR-guided generation and show that MSR improves alignment with corpus distributions and diversity of generated outputs.

6
Gen4P: Video Generators are 4D Perceivers

We introduce Gen4P, a unified framework for recovering 4D geometry and motion from monocular video. We show that a pretrained video generator can be repurposed into a feed-forward 4D perceiver without iterative denoising. Building on on-demand querying, Gen4P processes clean video latents in a single encoder pass and predicts the requested 4D attributes through a lightweight cross-attention decoder. The on-demand query formulation enables flexible spatial sampling, and our proposed continuous-time queries further provide temporal flexibility. To strengthen geometric knowledge, we propose a straightforward plug-in solution by incorporating a pretrained video-depth LoRA as a frozen geometry prior, improving overall performance without adding extra trainable parameters. Gen4P achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on tasks of 3D point tracking, video depth and camera pose estimation. Qualitative results on in-the-wild videos illustrate its capability of tracking complex motion while maintaining the delicate structure. Together, these results demonstrate the potential of video generative pretraining for unified 4D perception. See https://gen4p.github.io for more visual results.

6
LeanPRM: Lean-Grounded Process Supervision for Natural Language Proof Verification

AI systems now write long and difficult mathematical proofs, and checking their step-by-step validity is becoming a bottleneck. A learned verifier could check proofs cheaply, but training one requires a correctness label on every step, and such labels are hard to obtain for open-ended proofs. Existing methods take them from human annotators, which is costly, or derive them from final answers, which proofs do not have, and formalizing each proof in Lean requires expert effort. We introduce LeanPRM, a framework that uses the Lean proof assistant to create step-level labels for natural-language proofs. A model writes a natural-language proof together with a paired formal proof, without feedback from Lean. Lean then labels every step, and a second model discards failures caused only by the formal syntax, so that the negative labels mark errors in the mathematics. LeanPRM contains 10,634 proofs with 152K labeled steps and no human annotation. A Qwen3-4B verifier trained on LeanPRM raises exact step-label accuracy on a held-out set of 200 proofs (LeanPRM-Bench) from 48.2 to 74.7, as opposed to 60.3 when the same base model is trained on PRM800K. It also selects better proofs in best-of-N selection on IMO-level problems, and outperforms the PRM800K-trained verifier on three of four external verification benchmarks. Training on LeanPRM improves verifiers at every size from 0.6B to 8B parameters on LeanPRM-Bench, Hard2Verify and IMO-GradingBench. Given the labels need no human annotation, LeanPRM can grow with the supply of formal statements, offering a path to step-level feedback on AI-generated proofs that are hard for humans to check.

5
Copy-Paste Language Models

Transformers are intuitively considered to be efficient at copying from their inputs. We actually show that the ability of LLMs to copy in context can be improved through explicit modeling. We propose Copy-Paste Language Models (CPLMs), which add a lightweight Copy-Paste head to the conventional language modeling (LM) head. CPLMs improve training efficiency, downstream performance, and offer new operating points in long-context and retrieval setups. We validate our approach by pretraining models from 135M to 1.7B parameters, showing improvements across all scales and backbones with negligible training and inference overheads. We explain the success of CPLMs by showing that they partially mitigate the LM head gradient bottleneck through an alternative gradient path.

5
SERO: Learning from Executable Oracle Continuations for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Long-horizon agentic RL is constrained by the futures visited by the current policy. When rollouts fail to reach useful behaviors, improved credit assignment cannot provide supervision for states and actions that were never encountered. On-policy distillation (OPD) introduces teacher guidance on policy-induced states, and recent multi-turn variants improve how this guidance is scheduled, replayed, refined, or validated. However, they do not directly use the oracle-controlled future itself as the training trajectory. We introduce State-Rooted Executable Rollout Optimization (SERO), which augments on-policy agentic RL with executable oracle continuations. SERO restores a state actually reached by the current policy and lets a training-only oracle continue interacting with the real environment, making the downstream observations and oracle actions themselves available for learning. It then applies policy-reachability weighting, which weights each oracle step by the frozen behavior policy's compatibility with the preceding oracle actions. This allows deeper supervision to become effective as the policy becomes more compatible with the oracle branch. The oracle loss is optimized separately from the base RL estimator and no oracle is used at inference time. We evaluate SERO on two challenging interactive-agent benchmarks, ALFWorld and WebShop, using Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. On ALFWorld, learning the full executable continuation is substantially more effective than supervising only the root oracle action, while policy-reachability weighting further improves out-of-distribution performance.

5
MMSearch-OPD: Easy Made Hard, Hard Made Learnable for Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agents

Multimodal deep search is moving from short queries to long-horizon investigations that continually acquire evidence. However, training such agents remains constrained by limited challenging training questions and insufficient process feedback. We introduce MMSearch-OPD, combining controllable data refinement with joint reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD). Our Refine pipeline performs targeted expansion of reasoning chains derived from existing simple multimodal questions. Parameterized transformations control search depth and cross-modal evidence requirements while reusing existing image--question pairs. For training, answer rewards and lightweight behavior penalties guide RL, while the reward gap modulates token-level teacher guidance on imperfect student trajectories. An exponentially decaying distillation coefficient reduces teacher dependence as training proceeds. Experiments show gains from data refinement and further improvements from joint training after SFT, indicating stronger long-horizon multimodal deep search capabilities.

5
Scalable Weak-to-Strong Verifier Hardening for Agent Environments

Agent environments are essential for large language model (LLM) development. They use programmatic verifiers to turn complex outcomes into rewards. Verifiers can be attacked into awarding full credit to cheating agents without completing the intended task, causing inaccurate evaluation and misalignment in training. As agent environments scale in numbers and difficulty, so must the repairing of exploitable verifiers. To this end, we ask whether today's model with scaled compute can automatically harden agent environments to prevent potentially stronger future models from reward hacking. We introduce a scalable, fully automatic approach to weak-to-strong verifier hardening. It first sets up an isolated verifier sandbox that agents cannot directly modify, then uses a hacker-fixer loop to find and repair remaining verifier vulnerabilities. We apply this loop to Terminal Bench, KernelBench, and SETA, substantially reducing attack success across these agent environments. The iterative design scales with the hardening budget, producing progressively stronger defenses as the number of loop iterations increases and outperforming the static, non-iterative baseline. An earlier version of our hacker-fixer loop has been adopted by the official Terminal Bench repository as a way to audit exploits in its environments. Project page: https://verifier-hardening.github.io/.

4
Recursive Environment Scaling for General Long-Horizon Agents

We study environment scaling as a way to increase agent-benchmark difficulty while holding core task objectives fixed. Our framework, Recursive Environment Scaling (RES), transforms existing benchmark environments while preserving their objectives and completion requirements. A proposer changes information access, resource relations, and execution dependencies; execution-grounded checks validate the resulting candidate, and accepted changes are inherited across rounds. This produces related environments for paired evaluation and training-trajectory collection. Experiments on 294 initial tasks from three benchmarks show lower task success for all six evaluation models, with decreases of 57.14--77.14 percentage points on Claw-Eval-Live. With equal trajectory counts and identical optimization settings, fine-tuning on RES trajectories outperforms original-trajectory SFT in all nine model--benchmark comparisons by 7.00--14.61 percentage points. Ablations identify recursive inheritance and dependency composition as important contributors to increased difficulty. Together, these results support environment scaling for both agent evaluation and training.

4
PathFM: Fast Generative Forecasting of Multivariate Trajectories

Time series foundation models are becoming increasingly popular for general-purpose forecasting. However, most leading models predict marginal quantiles, leaving the dependence structure of future trajectories unspecified. This distinction matters for trajectory-dependent quantities such as cumulative demand, peak load, and event timing, yet point and marginal scores do not reveal it. To model this dependence, we introduce PathFM, a trajectory-based forecasting model that uses flow matching to generate complete future paths. We further distill the model to one or two steps and share history attention cache across draws. Together, these enable PathFM to generate multiple paths for a single series in roughly the time needed for one query to a quantile model. The distilled sampler also makes it practical to optimize a calibration loss directly. PathFM achieves competitive marginal accuracy on the established forecasting benchmarks fev-bench and TIME. To complement these evaluations, we introduce Forecast Path Score Bench (fps-bench), which augments fev-bench tasks with energy and variogram scores and downstream metrics. PathFM achieves a higher aggregate path score on fps-bench than all evaluated external baselines. Experiments on chaotic systems further show that our flow model sustains long-run variability, while strong baselines rapidly collapse. PathFM makes generative time series forecasting both competitive and practical, enabling diverse downstream applications.

3
Learning to Read Out: Unembedding Dynamics in Language Model Pretraining

When does a language model acquire a capability? Developmental studies usually answer this by tracking when models start producing the correct token. But that prediction passes through the unembedding matrix, or readout, which is itself still being learned during pretraining. We show that a model's hidden states can encode task information before its own readout expresses it, so timelines read from outputs conflate what the model encodes with what its readout expresses. To track the readout directly, we introduce parameter-trajectory crosscoding, which fits one sparse dictionary to every token's readout row at every checkpoint. Unlike crosscoders on activations, it needs only checkpoint weights. We use it to locate a narrow early window, 0.4-1.1% of the way through Pythia's pretraining, in which the readout reorganizes and WordNet word categories become decodable from its rows. By then, linear probes on the hidden states already decode task information that the model's own outputs do not yet show. To test whether such gaps depend on how fast the readout learns, we pretrain small models from scratch that differ only in the readout's learning rate. We find that raising it makes the readout develop earlier and the gap close sooner, with little effect on final loss. Together, these results imply that early in training, where many developmental transitions are dated, a behavioral date can reflect when the readout learns to express task information and not when the model learns it.

3
Explaining the Roles of Experts in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs for Personalization

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important for user-centric applications, yet prior methods mainly adapt dense LLMs, whose polysemantic neurons, each encoding multiple unrelated concepts, hinder localizing the components behind personalization, and thus understanding and controlling it. We propose to personalize Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs, which sparsely route each token to a few specialized experts, reducing polysemanticity and enabling such localization. We adapt three open-weight MoE LLMs on a large-scale personalization dataset and train crosscoders on paired activations of the personalized and non-personalized models to learn interpretable personalized latents, from which we identify the experts encoding distinct personalization features. The personalized MoE LLMs perform competitively with dense LLMs while activating only a fraction of their parameters, exhibit lower polysemanticity than dense LLMs with similar active parameters, and, within the same model family, yield personalized latents that are less shared with the non-personalized model. Causal interventions show that these latents suffice to recover the personalized model's behavior and that boosting their associated experts moves the non-personalized model toward it, revealing distinct routing paths for different personalization features.

3
Speech event detector: Timestamped detection of non-verbal vocalizations and background sounds for rich speech transcription

Automatic speech recognition produces words but drops the non-verbal content of a recording: the breaths, coughs, sighs and laughter of the speaker, and the horns, music or barking around them. We describe Speech Event Detector, a 5.8-million-parameter convolutional-Transformer model that outputs probabilities every 40 ms for 54 event classes (20 speaker vocalizations and 34 background sounds), together with post-processing that converts these probabilities into timestamped events and a procedure for merging the events into a Whisper transcript. The model is trained on material drawn from seven public datasets whose labels come in incompatible forms: single detected regions, free-text tags with timestamps, temporally strong ontology labels, symbols embedded in transcripts, isolated recordings and environmental recordings. We unify them using rule-based label mapping, recover timestamps for transcript-embedded labels through CTC forced alignment, locating 6,360 of 8,620 sounds, and combine about 168 hours of real annotated training recordings with synthetic mixtures and augmentation using real background noise. Per-class thresholds for two operating profiles are tuned on real held-out recordings, and performance is estimated using two-fold cross-validation. On whole held-out recordings from four datasets, considering the 48 classes with at least ten held-out events, the sensitive profile detects an average of 49 percent of a class's events, covering 67 percent of all 9,367 events, at a macro precision of 0.30. The balanced profile achieves a macro recall of 0.37 at a precision of 0.36, with macro event F1 scores of 0.32 and 0.33, respectively. The detector runs about 39 times faster than real time on eight CPU threads.

3
H-DDCM: Hadamard Codebooks for Fast Generative Image and Video Compression

Training-free diffusion-based compression methods repurpose the generative priors of a diffusion or a flow model to compress data without retraining them as task-specific codecs. Recent codebook-based approaches such as Turbo-DDCM achieve strong perceptual quality at ultra-low bitrates, but their reliance on dense Gaussian codebooks remains costly in both memory and computation, and scales poorly with the large latent dimensions of modern image and video generators. Their combinatorial bitstream encoding further becomes computationally heavy at this scale. We introduce H-DDCM, a scalable generative compression framework that replaces Gaussian codebooks with implicit randomized Hadamard dictionaries. The fast Walsh-Hadamard transform allows for implicitly synthesizing full-dimensional dictionaries with O(d log d) compute for projection and reconstruction and O(d) memory, without materializing the full-dimensional dictionary. We further introduce an efficient table-free lexicographic coding scheme that makes combinatorial encoding practical at larger dimensions. Beyond images, we adapt the framework to an autoregressive video flow model and develop a streaming compression scheme that periodically re-encodes recently reconstructed frames into a fresh KV-cache prefix, preserving temporal context across segments at no additional transmitted bits. This enables long-form, close to real-time generative video compression on a single GPU. Across image and video benchmarks, H-DDCM achieves competitive rate-distortion-perception performance while substantially reducing the memory and computational overhead of codebook-based training-free generative compression.

3
Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCR

Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name. We introduce semCER, which keeps CER's alignment and denominator and charges each grapheme edit a severity from an LLM judge, with no word segmentation. Normalized CER keeps the score of a whole transcription, where it tracks readers as well as semCER or better, and semCER breaks that score down into named edits. The charges track readers' ratings edit by edit in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese and put the edits readers rate most severe near the top of a sorted list. On pairs drawn where CER and semCER disagreed, readers side with semCER more often than with normalized CER in English and Chinese, and equally often in Vietnamese. Across 16 languages, the judge charges a wrong diacritic or tone mark almost nothing in Spanish but nearly a wrong letter's severity in Telugu. Where we can count real words, a general VLM's wrong letter forms one far above chance while a classical pipeline's stays near it. We release the 61 million judged edits, the aggregated reader ratings, and the distilled scorer at https://github.com/nguyenx2t/semcer.

2
One Bias Score, Two Factors: How Mitigations Affect Option Bias in Multiple-Choice Evaluation

Reordering multiple-choice options can change a model's answer, an effect studied as selection bias (a preference for certain option letters) and as order sensitivity (changes in answers across option orderings). We connect these perspectives through the pooled selection-rate standard deviation (pooled SD), which measures how unevenly option letters are selected across questions and orderings. When every option of each question appears equally often at each position, the pooled SD is exactly the product of two label-free factors: the flip rate and the positional skew. The flip rate is the fraction of questions whose chosen option changes across orderings; the positional skew is the standard deviation of option-letter selection rates among those questions. Across 41 checkpoints and 12 benchmarks, the flip rate tracks accuracy and output uncertainty, while the positional skew tracks the estimated option-symbol prior. Prior correction for selection bias mainly reduces the positional skew. Aggregating each ordering with its reversal, a mitigation for order sensitivity, mainly reduces the flip rate. Both reduce the range of accuracy across correct-answer letters by similar amounts, but aggregation leaves fewer model-rank reversals. Applying prior correction before aggregation reduces both factors and further narrows this accuracy range. However, aggregation lowers the flip rate partly by settling questions on the same wrong option. We therefore recommend reporting both factors to distinguish mitigation effects, alongside accuracy to distinguish stability from correctness.

2
When the KV Cache Is Slower Than the GPU: Scaling Remote KV Tiers for Context-Parallel Prefill

Reusing the attention KV cache across requests is a standard way to cut prefill cost in long-context LLM serving, and production systems increasingly back the per-engine cache with a remote tier shared by every engine. We study such a tier in a disaggregated deployment of GLM-5.3, an FP8 mixture-of-experts model with multi-head latent attention (MLA), on 8xB300 nodes running prefill context parallelism (PCP8). Enabling the remote tier (LMCache with a Valkey store) left median time-to-first-token unchanged but raised the 16k-token p99 from 3.96 s to 17.3 s. Replaying a production request stream on an isolated engine, we find that a remote hit took 0.88 s against 0.31 s to recompute the prompt, and that synchronous loading turned a hit-heavy stream into an unstable queue: p99 83.32 s with the GPUs 7% busy. A two-term cost model explains both: a hit pays off only if the tier delivers more than B* = sR (2.53 GB/s for this model and GPU), and a fixed per-hit engine cost (T0 ~ 0.33 s) means that hits on prompts shorter than about 17k tokens cannot beat recompute at any bandwidth. Guided by the model, we (i) shard the MLA KV store across PCP ranks, with a proof that the existing minimum-over-ranks lookup returns the longest cached prefix and a load protocol that can never desynchronize collectives; (ii) partition the remote tier by rank, one server instance per rank with no coordination, which raises GET bandwidth 6.3x to 10.76 GB/s; (iii) add asynchronous loading to the sharded store; and (iv) fix three client bugs that caused unbounded stalls. On the hit-heavy stream, with 98.5% of prompt tokens served from the remote tier, p99 falls from 83.32 s to 0.67 s. The sharded store raises prefill throughput by 14%, and by 34% together with an upstream kernel fix. All changes are submitted upstream to LMCache.

2
ForcingBooster: Adaptive Patch-wise Denoising for Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Autoregressive video diffusion models have become a leading approach to real-time interactive video generation and video world modeling. However, existing methods typically allocate computation uniformly across space when generating the next video chunk, updating all patches with the same denoising schedule and number of function evaluations. This ignores the spatial heterogeneity of video content: static, simple, or recurring regions are often easier to denoise, while other regions require further refinement or additional context. A uniform budget thus leads to redundant computation on easy patches, whereas reducing the fixed step count can leave difficult patches insufficiently refined. We introduce , a general framework that dynamically allocates denoising steps to individual patches: easy patches stop early to improve efficiency, while difficult patches receive more refinement steps. This design accelerates generation with negligible quality degradation. Our method is compatible with most existing few-step autoregressive diffusion models, requiring only a lightweight routing module with modest training. Experiments demonstrate that reduces the total number of denoising steps applied across video patches by about 50\% while maintaining visual quality comparable to the four-step baseline.

2
SimForcing: Distilling Simulation Motion Priors into Real-Domain Robot World Models

Action-conditioned robot world models must respond precisely to robot trajectories while preserving realistic visual dynamics, yet learning both from heterogeneous robot videos remains challenging. Simulation offers structured motion supervision, but appearance differences hinder direct transfer, and inaccurate simulation predictions can misguide real-video generation. We present SimForcing, a simulation-guided framework that uses simulation both as a source of transferable motion knowledge and as a controllable reference for prediction. First, we transfer motion knowledge from a simulation teacher through latent-motion distillation, aligning temporal changes in latent space to internalize motion priors while mitigating the influence of appearance differences. Second, we introduce multi-block simulation conditioning with condition dropout to exploit predicted simulation trajectories without relying excessively on their accuracy. Our simulation-conditioning classifier-free guidance scheme unifies these two ideas by balancing predictions based on internalized motion knowledge with those additionally guided by simulation latents. The jointly trained student generates both simulation conditions and real-domain videos, requiring no additional world model at inference. On Bridge, SimForcing achieves the best PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and FVD among the compared methods without external embodied pretraining. Evaluation on InternData-A1 further supports its applicability across robot datasets. Moreover, using our trained world model to initialize a vision-language-action model improves LIBERO success, suggesting its utility for downstream policy learning. https://github.com/Wang-Xiaodong1899/SimForcing

2
CoWorld Reasoner: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with the Evolving Video World Model-Driven Harness

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) advance, they are increasingly expected to perform spatiotemporal reasoning over motion, actions, and view changes beyond what the input images show. Video World Models (VWMs) provide a natural unified engine for visual imagination by generating task-relevant visual content as additional evidence. However, existing approaches typically invoke a VWM through fixed pipelines centered on a predefined form of visual imagination, such as novel-view synthesis. To support flexible visual imagination for diverse reasoning tasks, we introduce CoWorld Reasoner, an agentic framework that uses a VWM as a unified visual reasoning engine. Its Video World Model-Driven Harness exposes multiple visual operations through tools and uses skills to guide the VLM in deciding whether to imagine, selecting an operation, constructing a generation request, and interpreting the resulting visual evidence. We further introduce VLM-VWM Harness Co-Evolution, which jointly revises tools, skills, and execution code based on execution feedback while keeping both model weights fixed. Across seven benchmarks spanning spatial intelligence, temporal and causal reasoning, and perceptual reasoning, CoWorld Reasoner outperforms direct reasoning with the same VLM. The strongest variant improves on all seven benchmarks, including relative accuracy gains of 11.8% on MMSI and 13.0% on ERQA, and outperforms all five evolving baselines using the same backbone across five benchmarks.

2
PINT: A Unified Model with Shared Predictive Intent for Robot Manipulation

Generalist robot manipulation can benefit from pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) for semantic reasoning and video generation models (VGMs) for world modeling. However, existing unified models that directly fuse them through shared attention at multiple layers can make it harder to draw on their specialized capabilities. We introduce PINT, a unified model that coordinates semantic reasoning, world modeling, and action generation through a shared chunk-level Predictive Intent while preserving expert-specific pathways. PINT inserts learnable Intent Tokens into the VLM sequence to form this representation, conditioning both the VGM and an Action Expert (AE). It replaces only the VGM's prompt conditioning and retains the VGM at inference, where the AE reads its representations through one-way attention. Rather than prescribing what Predictive Intent should encode, PINT learns it jointly from the native prediction objectives of the VLM, VGM, and AE, which provide complementary views of the same upcoming task execution. Training uses two stages: Stage 1 freezes the VGM so that future video prediction shapes Predictive Intent with task-relevant future dynamics, while Stage 2 fixes the learned Intent and adapts the VGM and AE. Without embodied pretraining, PINT achieves strong in-distribution (ID) performance and substantially improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, reaching 15.5% on RoboTwin 2.0-Hard compared with 1.8% for Fast-WAM and 3.2% for StarVLA, and 79.5% on LIBERO-Plus compared with 51.5% and 75.0%, respectively. Across five real-world bimanual tasks, PINT reaches 68% ID and 24% OOD success, compared with 35%/9% for pretrained Motus and 67%/35% for pretrained π_{0.5}.

2
VascuSR: Iterative Anatomy-Aware Diffusion for CT Super-Resolution

Generative super-resolution (SR) can recover sharp detail in computed tomography (CT) images from severely downsampled observations, but the missing high-frequency content is not uniquely determined by the low-resolution input. Consequently, visually plausible reconstructions may contain anatomically unsupported vascular detail, such as missing, spurious, or incorrectly connected vessels. To overcome this challenge, we introduce VascuSR, an iterative anatomy-aware diffusion framework that combines image reconstruction with explicit 3D vascular guidance. First, to provide richer anatomical guidance, we use an explicit 3D vascular representation that captures structural information beyond individual slices. This representation also simplifies vascular refinement by allowing a lightweight 3D generative refiner to focus on vascular structure rather than complex CT appearance. Second, to guide slice-wise SR, a lightweight anatomy controller injects the refined structure into the diffusion decoder, while iterative feedback updates this guidance from each new SR volume. On re-annotated MSD Task08 and HVM datasets, VascuSR outperforms interpolation and learning-based SR baselines in segmentation accuracy (Dice and clDice) and 3D vascular structure (connectivity and mean centerline distance), while maintaining image quality comparable to its SR backbone. Compared with learning-based baselines, VascuSR reduces class-averaged connected-component counts by over 20% on both datasets and mean centerline distance by over 10% on MSD.

2
Diminishing Returns of Data in Sparse Autoencoders: Functional Behavior does not Guarantee Feature Reproducibility

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are typically trained on hundreds of millions to billions of activation tokens, yet little work has tested whether this scale is necessary. We study how much activation data SAEs need by training four SAE architectures on three language models with budgets ranging from 5M tokens to a 500M-token reference. We measure two notions of convergence: functional behavior on standard evaluations and one-to-one reproducibility of learned features. Functional data requirements are strongly metric-dependent: reconstruction often approaches the full-data reference at substantially smaller budgets, whereas feature reproducibility continues to improve with data. For Gemma-2-2B BatchTopK, the fraction of strictly matched features rises from 2\% at 5M tokens to 29\% at 50M. Data selection also matters: random sampling better preserves the original activation distribution and generally favors reconstruction, whereas diversity-based sampling frequently improves AutoInterp. A theoretical analysis separates statistical consistency of subsampled training from the stronger identifiability and optimization conditions required for one-to-one feature recovery. Our results show that SAE training can often be made far more data-efficient when budgets are matched to the goal, and feature-level claims are backed by explicit reproducibility checks, paving the way toward cheaper and more reliable SAE research.

1
PAIR: Bridging Perception and Action in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions to continuous robot actions. This task requires a transition from representations that describe the scene and instruction to representations that support action generation. Many continuous-action VLAs leave this transition implicit and supervise it mainly through the final action-prediction loss. We introduce PAIR, a framework that learns a shared perception-action representation between these two spaces. During training, a Masked Action Autoencoder encodes expert action chunks into horizon-aligned Action Latent Tokens. A Bridge Module extracts task-relevant features from the current visual-language representations. PAIR aligns these features with the Action Latent Tokens to form Bridge Tokens that preserve task information and capture the structure of expert actions. The Bridge Tokens are then projected into the action-token space and injected into the initial Action Tokens, providing an action-ready starting point for Action Expert refinement. At inference, the autoencoder is removed, and the Bridge Tokens are generated only from the current observation and instruction. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and CALVIN ABC-D show gains for the evaluated OpenVLA-OFT and VLA-Adapter models. On LIBERO-Plus, PAIR raises VLA-Adapter's success rate from 59.1% to 64.2%. On CALVIN, it increases VLA-Adapter's average completed sequence length from 4.42 to 4.53. Across seven real-world tasks, PAIR raises OpenVLA-OFT's success rate from 51.4% to 65.0%. Representation analyses show that Bridge Tokens retain task information while making continuous-action information accessible before Action Expert refinement. These results support a shared intermediate representation as a useful interface between perception and action in continuous-action VLAs.

1
AI-Driven, Timing-Aware Power Optimization

Post-route power recovery changes cell choices under tightly coupled timing, electrical and physical constraints, and the value of each change depends on what it costs to repair its side effects. We propose an AI-driven framework in which a learned model drives both phases of the optimization: it ranks the powerrecovery edits to try and the repair actions that follow, while deterministic electronic design automation (EDA) analyses govern every acceptance. The framework records baseline constraint margins, identifies the damage a recovery transaction introduces in each analysis view, holds pre-existing violations at their baseline rather than working them inside the power step, and caps repair spending at a fraction of the measured saving. An ensemble of gradient-boosted models predicts power change, normalized damage reduction and constraint-regression risk from action and timing-context features available before each trial; calibrated, conservative estimates feed separate acquisition scores for recovery and repair, with a deterministic fallback when the model is uncertain. Recovery and repair remain speculative until physical implementation and fresh analysis establish baseline preservation and positive net saving. We specify the contract, the learned policy, the transactional flow and a pre-registered public evaluation protocol on open designs. Evidence from a companion study on public designs supports the contract; the learned policy is proposed, and no trained-model results or proprietary design measurements are reported.

1
05

PRODUCT HUNT

05.00
PRODUCT HUNT

Product Hunt - October 18, 2026

Product Hunt Daily Feed: Featuring noteworthy tech launches.

Inbox Zero icon
Inbox Zero

Open-source Superhuman alternative

0
Krea 3 icon
Krea 3

Krea's AI image model: 2K edits in under 8 seconds

0
SpeechFast icon
SpeechFast

Local Whisper for Mac

0
Openbroca icon
Openbroca

Lightweight AI dictation for Mac that sounds like you

0
Gravity Notes icon
Gravity Notes

One list of notes, for you and your AI agents

0
Vampire Crawlers™ icon
Vampire Crawlers™

The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

0
Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse icon
Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse

Amazon's personal AI memory, now on your wrist or phone

0
XBOX Nano Controller icon
XBOX Nano Controller

Pocket-sized wireless gamepad with all 18 inputs

0
MeetPaw icon
MeetPaw

Instant meetings from your mac menu bar

0
Tower 18 for Mac icon
Tower 18 for Mac

The most powerful Git client with a better CLI experience

0
shim-cli icon
shim-cli

See what your coding agent sends. Mask what you can.

0
MyLens icon
MyLens

1-1 Live Presentations at Scale with AI.

0
Latch icon
Latch

The app blocker you unlock by walking to your key

0
Popcraft icon
Popcraft

Generate video, images & audio from any AI agent

0
Tomo for ChatGPT icon
Tomo for ChatGPT

Ask anything. Then play it, Duolingo-style.

0
3AM Super Intelligence icon
3AM Super Intelligence

Production incidents: investigated, proven, fixed

0
PasteKit icon
PasteKit

Format JSON, YAML & SQL privately

0
Earnote icon
Earnote

Lecture & meeting notes, written on your device

0
CrewTower Mod for Claude Code icon
CrewTower Mod for Claude Code

Talk to Claude Code right from your MacBook notch

0
Parrot icon
Parrot

Smart Meeting Assistant for Mac that helps during the call

0
Spiralens icon
Spiralens

Golden ratio camera that tells you where to move your phone

0
Ultracite v8 icon
Ultracite v8

The linter and formatter for agentic development

0
GPU Terminal by Context.dev icon
GPU Terminal by Context.dev

Compare GPU rental prices across cloud providers

0
Craft Agents icon
Craft Agents

The world's most powerful agents, with the UX they deserve

0
LooGo icon
LooGo

Find public restrooms fast

0
Train with Pasta icon
Train with Pasta

A personal trainer powered by Apple Intelligence

0
Emochi icon
Emochi

Voice journal to understand yourself through art and science

0
Notion: Context for your agents icon
Notion: Context for your agents

Switch AI agents without re-explaining your work

0
Caldera icon
Caldera

Your Obsidian vault as a living profile and linked garden

0
NitroStack icon
NitroStack

Build, test, and deploy MCP servers in one place

0
Salience icon
Salience

See every request to your website and how it responds.

0
Korinotch icon
Korinotch

Your MacBook notch, turned into a command center

0
Step 5 Preview icon
Step 5 Preview

600B open weights, trained for long-running agents

0
Unfenced icon
Unfenced

Land for sale that actually borders public land

0
Draper icon
Draper

Validate, plan, and launch a business, one step at a time.

0
Palomino icon
Palomino

Ultrafast workspace for agents to run in parallel

0
Atelier icon
Atelier

The studio your AI coding agents work in

0
Tidy Design icon
Tidy Design

Open Source Paper / Figma Alternative

0
FinderGit icon
FinderGit

Every Git repo on your Mac: browse, commit, review, clean

0
Skisso icon
Skisso

Edit your live UI in your design system, hand off the diff

0
NANI??? icon
NANI???

Your interpreter and your boss doesn't even know.

0
Nemotron 3.5 Super VL icon
Nemotron 3.5 Super VL

NVIDIA’s open multimodal model for specialized agents

0
Parallax icon
Parallax

Every coding agent you run, in one place.

0
Lovable Growth Tools icon
Lovable Growth Tools

From building your app to growing it, in one chat

0
Firefox Enterprise icon
Firefox Enterprise

Firefox for enterprises that want control of their data

0
Memory Chess icon
Memory Chess

Study a chess position, then rebuild it from memory

0
Dottr icon
Dottr

Agent that drafts contracts, flags risks + gets them signed

0
Fish Audio Drama 3 icon
Fish Audio Drama 3

AI voice acting you can direct, not just generate

0
Tesla Roadster icon
Tesla Roadster

The hypercar that flies

0
Harness by Autonomous icon
Harness by Autonomous

Every coding agent, every machine, one command center.

0
06

TECHMEME

06.00
TECHMEME

Techmeme - October 18, 2026

Techmeme Digest: Major tech headlines and industry conversations.

Sources: industry execs expect only 7-10 of hundreds of neoclouds to survive, as Nvidia supports them with easier credit terms, site finding, and $20B in leases (Phoebe Liu/The Information)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Phoebe Liu / The Information : Sources: industry execs expect only 7-10 of hundreds of neoclouds to survive, as Nvidia supports them with easier credit terms, site finding, and $20B in leases —  How many young AI cloud providers can the market, and Nvidia, support?  —  That's one of the big questions after a week …

Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund, for a total of ~20% with co-founder and staff pledges, plus 2% per 50% valuation rise (Anthropic)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Anthropic : Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund, for a total of ~20% with co-founder and staff pledges, plus 2% per 50% valuation rise —  Today, we're committing a portion of Anthropic's shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity with a structure that increases the stake as the company grows.

Sources: Nvidia asked Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to make base dies for its custom NVHBM memory on TSMC's 3nm process; Samsung agreed, its first use of TSMC (Kyu-Seok Shim/Reuters)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Kyu-Seok Shim / Reuters : Sources: Nvidia asked Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to make base dies for its custom NVHBM memory on TSMC's 3nm process; Samsung agreed, its first use of TSMC —  Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) will use TSMC's (2330.TW) 3-nanometre process to produce base dies for Nvidia's (NVDA.O) …

Sources: HomeView units sat in warehouses for months; Apple plans a Nov. 6 store reset, likely for new Macs; iPhone Duo preorder mess could boost 18 Pro sales (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg : Sources: HomeView units sat in warehouses for months; Apple plans a Nov. 6 store reset, likely for new Macs; iPhone Duo preorder mess could boost 18 Pro sales —  Also: The company is planning Nov. 6 retail store reset, indicating potential Mac release date.

An interview with Apple's new VP of the App Store, Carson Oliver, on Apple's gaming vision, Apple Arcade, providing tools for indie game developers, and more (Giovanni Colantonio/Polygon)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Giovanni Colantonio / Polygon : An interview with Apple's new VP of the App Store, Carson Oliver, on Apple's gaming vision, Apple Arcade, providing tools for indie game developers, and more —  Back when Apple Arcade launched in 2019, there was a resounding belief among gamers that the mobile gaming service wasn't long for this world.

RegLayer: 47+ large US data center projects were delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026; Bernstein says ~35% of the planned US data center pipeline is credible (Financial Times)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Financial Times : RegLayer: 47+ large US data center projects were delayed, withdrawn, or blocked in 2026; Bernstein says ~35% of the planned US data center pipeline is credible —  A vast bet on the future of the technology is running into the unforgiving economics of the physical world

AI debt worries mount as CoreWeave's bond yield tops 15%, insuring SoftBank debt gets pricier, and some Oracle debt trades near 80 to 90 cents on the dollar (New York Times)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

New York Times : AI debt worries mount as CoreWeave's bond yield tops 15%, insuring SoftBank debt gets pricier, and some Oracle debt trades near 80 to 90 cents on the dollar —  Debt trouble at CoreWeave, Oracle and SoftBank raises questions about whether there are broader problems with the data center build-out.

Microsoft cancels its deal to be the anchor tenant and rent 23K Nvidia AI chips at Nscale's Essex, UK, data center, which may not get grid power until the 2030s (James Titcomb/Telegraph)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

James Titcomb / Telegraph : Microsoft cancels its deal to be the anchor tenant and rent 23K Nvidia AI chips at Nscale's Essex, UK, data center, which may not get grid power until the 2030s —  US tech giant pulls the plug on Nscale deal in threat to multibillion-dollar listing  —  Microsoft has pulled …

Holyvolt, which develops AI tools for making and testing new battery materials, raised $45M from Zone II, CC.VC, and others, a source says at a $245M valuation (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Nick Lichtenberg / Fortune : Holyvolt, which develops AI tools for making and testing new battery materials, raised $45M from Zone II, CC.VC, and others, a source says at a $245M valuation —  Steven Prast is old enough to remember when a mobile phone came in a bag.  It was too heavy to carry around, so most people mounted it in the car.

Sources: Anthropic is consulting law firms on deal negotiation tactics as it develops AI agents to negotiate on humans' behalf and interact with AI counterparts (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times : Sources: Anthropic is consulting law firms on deal negotiation tactics as it develops AI agents to negotiate on humans' behalf and interact with AI counterparts —  Tech companies are being forced to confront the rules of negotiation when machines act on humans' behalf

GTCR and Elliott agree to acquire and take private CCC, a Nasdaq-listed car insurance software provider, for $4.6B; the deal values CCC at $6.1B including debt (Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Bloomberg : GTCR and Elliott agree to acquire and take private CCC, a Nasdaq-listed car insurance software provider, for $4.6B; the deal values CCC at $6.1B including debt —  GTCR and Elliott Investment Management are acquiring car-insurance software provider CCC Intelligent Solutions Holdings Inc …

Filing: Disney agreed to hire 60+ staff from Character.AI and pay them ~$180M over three years, plus $30M for retention awards; a bankruptcy judge must approve (Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Bloomberg : Filing: Disney agreed to hire 60+ staff from Character.AI and pay them ~$180M over three years, plus $30M for retention awards; a bankruptcy judge must approve —  More than 60 workers at Character.AI are being offered a lifeline from the media giant … Soft Landing  —  Layoffs are common in bankruptcy.

An interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Nvidia RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, plans to make Windows a safer OS to run AI agents, and more (Joanna Stern/The New Things)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 18, 2026

Joanna Stern / The New Things : An interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Nvidia RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, plans to make Windows a safer OS to run AI agents, and more —  My exclusive interview with Satya Nadella on the new Surface Laptop Ultra and Microsoft's plan to make Windows safer for AI agents

Google says "magic state cultivation" works in practice on its Willow quantum processor, calling it a breakthrough that reduces errors by about 40x (Google)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 17, 2026

Google : Google says “magic state cultivation” works in practice on its Willow quantum processor, calling it a breakthrough that reduces errors by about 40x —  We've shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.  —  Google Quantum AI has demonstratively opened …

Anomaly Innovations, behind coding agent OpenCode, says a breach hit ~1.4% of OpenCode Console users and their API keys, in a "large scale distillation attack" (Walter Schulze/Startup Fortune)
Source: TechmemePublished: Oct 17, 2026

Walter Schulze / Startup Fortune : Anomaly Innovations, behind coding agent OpenCode, says a breach hit ~1.4% of OpenCode Console users and their API keys, in a “large scale distillation attack” —  A large-scale distillation attack against the company behind the open-source coding agent OpenCode exposed stored OpenAI …

07

STARTUP ARCHIVE

07.00
STARTUP ARCHIVE

Startup News - October 18, 2026

Startup News Roundup: Aggregating key funding and launch updates.

Marc Andreessen on the 5 personality traits of an innovator
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 31, 2026

“When you’re talking about real innovators—people who actually do really creative, breakthrough work—I think you’re talking about a couple things:”

Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 30, 2026

“The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.”

Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 27, 2026

“What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction."

Sam Altman explains how he decides to invest in a startup after 10 minutes
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 26, 2026

"Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.”

Jony Ive recounts the time Steve Jobs called him vain
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 25, 2026

In the clip below, Jony Ive recounts the time he asked Steve Jobs to be less harsh in his critique of a piece of work.

Jeff Bezos’s two pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 24, 2026

“The advice that I would give entrepreneurs is don't chase the hot new thing. It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot."

Elad Gil: “Things that work tend to work pretty fast”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 23, 2026

“I do think there’s a bit of a myth in Silicon Valley that you should keep grinding no matter what and it’s just about perseverance, and I think that’s really bad advice."

Paul Graham on why starting with a “small, intense fire" is the key to startup growth
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 20, 2026

"You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them."

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 19, 2026

“What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.”

Wealthfront CEO on why advertising spend makes it harder to find product/market fit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 18, 2026

“The way that you know you have product/market fit is if you have exponential organic growth."

Eric Schmidt on why most companies get strategy wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 17, 2026

“Work very, very hard to figure out what the world’s going to look like in five years. What will people be doing? What will your customers want? Where will costs be?"

Mark Zuckerberg: “You can’t 80/20 everything”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 16, 2026

"There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at."

Marc Andreessen on Mark Zuckerberg’s founder “superpower”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 13, 2026

“A great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that is probably not well-understood enough is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations"

Sam Altman explains how to come up with a great startup idea
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 12, 2026

"If you start a startup without a good idea… you’ll be under pressure to make something up and it won’t work that well."

Jeff Bezos on the problems with proxies and managing to metrics
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 11, 2026

“One of the things that happens in business is that you develop certain things that you’re managing to—a typical case would be a metric. And that metric isn’t the real underlying thing.”

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design an amazing user experience
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 10, 2026

“If you can design something really amazing using the hand-crafted part of your brain, then you can reverse-engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over."

Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 9, 2026

"If you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”

Patrick Collison explains why it sometimes make sense to quit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 6, 2026

“One thing I’ve learned myself the hard way, is that it is easier to tear down a company and restart it in Silicon Valley, than it is to constantly try to pivot or keep something alive."

Jeff Bezos recounts the time he called Amazon’s customer service number mid-meeting to prove a metric was wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 5, 2026

“I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right"

Ben Horowitz: “Nobody was born a great manager. It’s a very unnatural job.”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 4, 2026

“If you can’t build a great product, it doesn’t matter if you can build a great company.”

03

ALSO TODAY

3 MORE SOURCES
08

SOLIDOT

08.00
SOLIDOT

Solidot News - October 18, 2026

Solidot Feed: Highlighting essential tech & open-source news.

指纹显示秦始皇兵马俑的制作者有男有女有儿童

考古学家长期以来认为秦始皇兵马俑全是由成年男性工匠制作的。但俑上的指纹显示,男性、女性甚至儿童都参与了这项宏大工程。秦始皇帝陵博物院的考古学家从同一发掘坑内的 36 尊兵马俑上提取出 91 枚指纹,其中 12 枚指纹被认为是个别人留下的重复指纹而剔除。研究人员分析了剩下的 79 枚指纹,它们分布在兵马俑的各个部位——头部、手臂、盔甲、手部、领口,甚至还有脚部——显然是制作过程中无意留下的。其中 73 枚指纹是在塑形、成型和组装过程中留下的,6 枚是将预先制作好的装饰如盔甲铆钉和腰带按压到陶俑表面时形成的。研究人员估计,45% 的指纹可能来自成年男性之手;32.7% 的指纹来自成年女性;其余 22.3% 则来自 15 岁以下的儿童。当时的劳动力中出现儿童可能并不罕见。秦代的历史文献记载了一套正式的学徒制度,儿童会在经验丰富的工匠指导下学习。研究人员推测,小学徒可能被分配了相对简单的任务,如盔甲上添加装饰细节,而经验更丰富的工匠则负责要求更高的工作。

退休教授因阻止 Uber Eats 机器人送货被捕

宾夕法尼亚大学 78 岁的荣休教授 Marvin 本周因拒绝给 Uber Eats 的送货机器人让路而被捕。她表示自己记不得多少次挡住机器人的路了,称自己在进行抗议,旨在反对“为增加自身利润而用机器人取代人类送货员的企业”。Marvin 说,她在现场停留了“相当长一段时间”,警察过来要求她让路,让机器人完成送货任务。在她多次拒绝后,警方以扰乱治安为由将她逮捕。Marvin 并未因这次逮捕而退缩,她计划以“美国宪法第一修正案赋予的抗议权利”为由,对这项指控提出抗辩。她打算继续阻挡 Uber Eats的 机器人,并与那些好奇询问她在做什么的路人交流。

内核开发者递交代码无需声明是否 AI 辅助编写

Linux 邮件列表中的一则消息披露,2026 年 10 月 8 日捷克布拉格举行的维护者峰会(Maintainers Summit)达成了一项重大决策:向内核提交代码时,无需再使用“Assisted-by”标签。这意味着内核开发者递交代码无需声明是否 AI 辅助编写。Linux 作者 Linus Torvalds 认为,禁止使用 AI 就像禁止使用文本编辑器是极其愚蠢的规定,表示他认为从事内核开发的人知道他们在做什么。他本周递交了一组用 Claude Code 开发的补丁,但补丁被发现存在竞态条件,其内存回收也被认为有问题,这组补丁的后续开发被交给了人类开发者 Kiryl Shutsemau。

Meta 新增条款允许其抓取客户内容并用于训练 AI

Meta 修改了其商业服务条款,新条款将于 2026 年 10 月 30 日生效。新增条款赋予了 Meta 一项权利,允许它使用自动化软件抓取客户内容,将其用于改进包括 AI 模型在内的公司产品。所谓的自动化软件包括了网页抓取工具、机器人、爬虫及用户智能体。News/Media Alliance 总裁 Danielle Coffey 发表声明谴责 Meta 的做法,认为此举涉嫌违法。法学教授 Eric Goldman 认为,新增服务条款存在程序和实质层面的问题,他表示尽管他倾向于认为合同起草者抱有善意,但 Meta 在业界早已毫无信誉可言,根本谈不上什么善意。

游戏逆向工程网站宣布关闭因为 AI 让反编译游戏变得非常容易

协作游戏逆向工程网站 decomp.dev 宣布将关闭,管理员称 AI 让游戏反编译变得快且易于操作,基于人工的社区协作模式实际上已经瓦解,无法再区分哪些项目是以人工为主导的,哪些是由 AI 完成的。decomp.dev 管理员 Encounter 在官网声明中表示,从历史上看,匹配反编译一直是极其困难且耗时的任务,即便是对那些有适量活跃贡献者的中等规模游戏来说,反编译要以“年”为单位计时,但 GPT-6-Astra 之类的前沿 AI 模型最近已让反编译游戏变得极其轻松:它们在遵循复杂指令、为符号或调试信息交叉检索资源,以及在获得充分指引的情况下编写自然代码方面,要强得多。显而易见,只要有合适的指导、人类输入和代码审查,AI 能以非常显著的方式加速反编译。同样显而易见的是,反编译的社区属性已经被结束了。

天文学家发现第一颗绿色恒星

天文学家可能发现了第一颗绿色恒星——名为 WD J1330+6435 的白矮星,位于地球 326 光年外。部分死亡恒星——即白矮星——在吞噬围绕其运行的行星后,可能会呈现出绿色。WD J1330+6435 一直在吸积其行星伴星上的岩石物质。这一过程使其大气中富含钙、锂和钠元素。模型表明这些元素的存在使得 WD J1330+6435 呈现绿色。WD J1330+6435 是已知首颗真正呈现绿色的恒星。研究人员称,白矮星大气中残留的钠元素吸收了光谱中的橙色部分,留下了幽灵般的绿光。

GNOME 面向普通用户发布 GNOME OS Preview

GNOME 项目已推出发行版项目 GNOME OS 一段时间,但它只提供基于最新代码的 Nightly 版本,主要面向开发者。现在它推出了面向普通用户的 GNOME OS Preview。GNOME OS Preview 基于 Nightly 版本,但去掉了 Nightly 特性,基于最新的 GNOME 51.1 构建。开发者表示该版本尚未经过充分的实际使用测试,可能会遇到问题,但稳定性肯定高于 Nightly 版本,对想要尝鲜的普通用户而言足够稳定,可用于日常使用。但它还需要进一步完善。

英国中年男性自杀率达到历史最高水平

英国中年男性自杀率达历史最高水平。英国国家统计局 2025 年的数据显示,50 岁出头的男性自杀风险最高。2025 年登记的自杀死亡人数为 6162 人,略低于 2024 年的 6190 人,总体自杀率基本不变,即每 10 万人有 11.3 人死于自杀。接近三分之一死者为 45-64 岁男性,该年龄段自杀人数比 2024 年增加 49 人,该年龄段自杀率达到每 10 万人 23.8 人,高于 2024 年的 23.2 人,为 1981 年开始统计该数据以来的最高纪录。其中 50-54 岁男性自杀率达到每 10 万人 28 人。有 553 名中年女性死于自杀,每 10 万人 7 例,于 2024 年持平。Rethink Mental Illness CEO Mark Winstanley 称自杀原因很复杂,许多人正承受着巨大的生活压力,包括经济困难、就业不稳定、住房成本上涨、孤独感以及心理健康问题。

Meta 发布其开放权重模型 Muse Spark Open

Meta 发布了 Muse Spark Open,称它是目前美国最强大的开放权重模型。Muse Spark Open 为多模态模型,总共有 8160 亿参数,激活参数 420 亿,支持 100 万 Token 上下文。该模型利用了苹果最新版本的开源数组框架 MLX,对苹果 Apple Silicon 的统一内存架构进行了优化,能运行在搭载 M5 Ultra 芯片的 Mac Studio 上。M5 Ultra 支持最大 512GB 内存容量,两台最高配置的 Mac Studio 就能容纳整个模型,两台机器相当一台 1TB 统一内存的计算机。Muse Spark Open 已发布在 Hugging Face 上。

人与猫的催产素水平正相关

日本京都大学的研究人员在 iscience 期刊上发表了一篇论文,他们在一个月内测量了 19 名主人和 29 只宠物猫的催产素和皮质醇水平,评估主人的情绪,通过蓝牙信号监视主人和猫之间的距离。结果显示,主人与猫的催产素水平呈正相关,皮质醇水平之间的关联很小。猫的催产素水平越高,与主人皮质醇水平就越低和负面情绪越少相关,主人更高的皮质醇水平与更多的负面情绪相关。主人与猫之间距离越近,主人的活力水平就越高。探索性行为测试则将猫的催产素与社会接近行为联系起来,将皮质醇与对陌生人的接近减少联系在一起。与以皮质醇同步为中心的人犬二元关系不同,人猫关系可能以催产素为核心,将跨物种的激素研究扩展到一种具有独特驯化历史的物种。

人真能活到 200 岁吗?

2000 年生物学家史蒂文·奥斯塔德提出了一个颇具争议的说法:“世界上第一个将活到 150 岁的人现在很可能已经出生了。”他当时乐观地认为,科学将找到延长寿命的新方法,而且他至今仍持这一看法。似乎数不胜数的网红和未来学家也抱有同样的信心,其中一些人甚至做出了更为惊人的预测。生物医学老年学家、SENS 研究基金会创始人奥布里·德格雷声称,如今 40 岁的人有超过 50% 的可能性永远不会因衰老而死亡。但今天研究人员对于未来究竟能在多大程度上延长寿命仍争论不休。问题在于,他们的答案往往只是假设,而且无法得到验证。归根结底,单靠某一项突破性成果恐怕无法阻止衰老。比如大多数肌肉细胞和脑细胞都无法自我更新。就目前而言,我们无法活那么久的最有力证据,可能就是一个简单的事实:有记录以来,还没有人活到 150 岁。自 1997 年以来,有记录可查的最长寿命纪录一直没有被打破。那一年,法国女子让娜·卡尔芒去世,据称享年 122 岁。她的真实年龄存在一些争议。“自那以后,甚至没有人活到 120 岁,”奥斯塔德博士说。

微软声称 Windows 11 显著改进了 8GB 内存下的性能

微软表示,Windows 11 最近的更新通过改进内存管理和减少后台资源占用,系统响应速度提升最高 20%。改进内存管理也显著改进了只有 8GB 内存的电脑的运行表现。由于内存价格飙升,越来越多的 PC 厂商重新开始推出只有 8GB 内存的电脑。微软 Windows 体验部门企业副总裁 Navjot Virk 表示:“Windows 现在可在内存中多保留多达 2GB 的活动数据,而不是把其转移到更慢的存储设备。比如在内存为 8GB 或更少的电脑上,组件(Widgets)只在你打开时才会加载,这可以为应用和其它工作释放出逾 200MB 的内存。”Windows 11 的下一个 重要更新是新的 Windows 搜索体验,速度更快、功能更强。目前已面向 Windows Insider 用户开放,微软将在今年晚些时候推送给更多用户。

三季度中国手机出货量下跌 15.4%

根据 IDC 的数据,三季度全球智能手机出货量同比下降 22% 至 2.553 亿部。受内存价格上涨影响,手机价格上升,出货量降幅创历史最高。IDC 预测未来智能手机市场还将进一步下滑。根据 IDC 的数据,三季度中国智能手机市场出货量约为 5790 万台,同比下降 15.4%。华为是唯一实现同比双位数增长的头部品牌。华为份额升至 21.1%,同比增长 17.3%;其次是苹果的 17.8%,同比下跌 4.3%;之后是 OPPO、vivo、小米、荣耀、WIKO、联想(市场份额 0.4%,同比增长 1.1%)、三星和中兴。除了华为和联想,主要手机厂商的出货量都下跌。

日本准备于 20 日发射火星探测器

日本宇宙航空研究开发机构(JAXA)将于 10 月 20 日凌晨发射火星卫星探测器“MMX”。任务目标是登陆火星卫星“火卫一”并采集样本。MMX 将历时约 1 年抵达火星圈,并登陆火卫一。任务计划利用机械臂采集 10 克以上土壤。预计于 2031 年返回地球。法国和德国联合研发的探测车将先行登陆火卫一。该探测车搭载于 MMX 上,将与其分离并投放。探测车为边长约 50 厘米的立方体,重约 23 公斤。探测车将通过车轮在火卫一表面移动,调查温度、成分等,为 MMX 采集样本提供支持。此次探测的最大目标,是解开火卫一如何形成的谜团。目前较受重视的理论包括:来自其他区域的小行星被火星引力捕获;以及巨型陨石撞击火星时飞散的岩石聚集形成火卫一。调查火卫一砂样,很可能为这一争论画上句号。若其源自小行星,或留存有太阳系诞生初期的物质,有望帮助揭示行星形成及生命诞生的过程。

动物飞行的能量成本受大气条件影响

通过研究对 50 种鸟和蝙蝠的跨越 17 年的观测数据,研究人员提出的见解挑战了传统观点——即飞行具有可预测的能量成本,且总是高于游泳或休息等其他移动方式的成本。这项新研究表明,鸟类和蝙蝠可以利用风力和上升气流来大幅减少飞行所需的能量。研究人员测量了真实条件下的有效运输成本——即飞行动物移动给定距离所消耗的能量,分析了 50 种鸟和蝙蝠的数据,这些物种的体型跨越了三个数量级(从约 12 克到超过 11 公斤);研究使用了来自 850 只动物的历时 17 年的高分辨率 GPS 和加速度传感器测量数据,并辅以针对小型物种的雷达观测数据。研究结果表明,动物在野外飞行时的能量成本在很大程度上取决于它们如何与大气相互作用。翱翔的鸟类(尤其是体型较大的物种)可利用上升气流和其他大气气流来大幅降低能量消耗。在某些情况下,这种方式能使飞行成本降至与游泳甚至静息状态相当的水平。相比之下,频繁扇动翅膀鸟类的飞行成本通常更接近实验室预测值,且会因风况不同而出现较大波动。

国际计量局通过决议用闰时取代闰秒

国际计量局在法国凡尔赛召开会议,多数成员国投票支持一项《关于确保“协调世界时”(UTC)连续性所需的技术措施》的决议,这意味着使用了半个多世纪的闰秒将被取消。根据决议,取消闰秒的举措将于 2027 年 5 月 20 日(世界计量日)生效。此前,在国际计量局 2022 年举行的会议上,成员国投票通过一项决议,呼吁制定不晚于 2035 年逐步取消闰秒的计划。决议还建议用闰时取代闰秒,即等到“原子时”(TAI)和“世界时”(UT)的时刻相差 3600 秒(即1小时)时,再进行调整。闰秒因为需要频繁更改而会导致数字系统发生混乱,闰时则需要 3000 多年才会修改一次。

美国银行雇佣千名合同工修复 AI 工具发现的软件漏洞

美国银行(Bank of America)CEO Brian Moynihan 透露该公司雇佣了千名合同工帮助修复 Anthropic Mythos 等 AI 工具发现的软件漏洞。他表示:“我们在第二季度聘请了 1000 名合同工协助进行修复工作。除了原本负责该领域的 3000 名员外,这些合同工至今仍留在公司内,继续提供协助。”他向分析师透露,美国银行第三季度在软件修复以及与反洗钱合规相关的监管问题上投入了数亿美元以上的资金。这是美国大型企业首次披露其为保护软件系统免受 Mythos 影响所投入的人力和资金规模。

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