OrangeBot.AI Digest — 2026-08-27

90 headlines across 8 sources, aggregated for this day.

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VoiceMem: Streaming Dual-Brain Memory for Real-Time Interaction
Conversational systems, such as duplex speech language models (SLMs), still lack a streaming, accurate, and empathetic memory system as their soul. We introduce VoiceMem, a simple memory architecture with a parallel informational left brain, an emotional right brain, and streaming memory I/O mechanisms. We further build a complete pipeline for memory-aware SLM training, long-horizon evaluation, and decoupled deployment with interchangeable memory backends. Experiments and real-world deployment show three advantages: i) Accuracy: under top-5 retrieval, the left brain outperforms classical systems such as Mem0 at top-200 by nearly 30 points; ii) Emotional & Personal: the right brain, with short- and long-horizon affective attribution and dual-node persona modeling, achieves state-of-the-art performance across three persona benchmarks and improves the aggregate score by 4.29 points over the previous best system; and iii) Real-Time & Cheap: VoiceMem completes retrieval in 134 ms, well within standard VAD latency, adding no extra conversational delay while maintaining high accuracy and low cost. These results show that VoiceMem provides a practical memory foundation for real-time, personalized, and emotionally aware speech interaction.
VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models
Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet reliable evaluation remains challenging: benchmarks should adopt inputs aligned with the visual priors of current video models, require valid evolving processes rather than only plausible final states, and calibrate task difficulty to remain challenging yet partly feasible. To this end, we introduce VGI-bench, containing 27 tasks and 810 instances, organized by a two-level taxonomy of task domains and skill tags for fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning capabilities of video generation models. Our evaluations show that current generative systems can solve a subset of visually grounded reasoning tasks, but remain far from reliable, with even the strongest model, Seedance 2.0, achieving only 51.0% under our evaluation criteria. Our analysis further explore the output failure modes, input condition sensitivity, performance transfer boundary from synthetic fine-tuning, and internal denoising perspective revealing limited self-correction, where later steps mainly refine early hypotheses rather than correct reasoning errors. We hope VGI-bench will help stimulate the development of next-generation video generation models. Website: https://hexuan21.github.io/VGI-Bench/
FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion
Scientific agents increasingly analyze data, execute code, and produce research artifacts, yet most benchmarks emphasize final answers, isolated programs, or a single domain. We introduce FrontierChallenge, a cross-domain benchmark comprising 300 end-to-end scientific workflows. In this paper, we release and evaluate 97 of these tasks, spanning quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, materials characterization, analytical chemistry, life science, and electrochemistry/environment. Each task provides fixed inputs and specifies a bundle of required scientific deliverables. We evaluate twelve frontier models with three agent scaffolds. Pass Rate measures the fraction of tasks satisfying the full-completion criterion, while Avg. Score captures partial progress. Each of the best-performing configurations completed only 20 of the 97 released tasks, yielding a Pass Rate of 20.6%. Partial progress translated especially poorly into complete delivery in analytical chemistry and electrochemistry/environment: Avg. Scores reached 87.6 and 94.9, but the highest Pass Rates were only 4% and 0%. Among non-passing Claude Code trajectories, 75.5% still ended with language claiming completion. These findings show that neither high partial scores nor confident claims of completion reliably indicate that a scientific task has been fully delivered, highlighting the need to evaluate end-to-end workflow execution and the completeness of scientific deliverables together.
WarpSAC: Towards the Pinnacle of Scalable Off-policy RL by Rethinking Exploration and Exploitation
Massively parallel simulation changes the data regime in which off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is trained, challenging stabilizers designed for data-limited replay. Through controlled experiments across eight benchmark families, we show that these stabilizers are data-regime-dependent: parameter normalization helps with narrow replay coverage but restricts value fitting when data are abundant, while clipped double-Q can be relaxed in high-throughput manipulation. Age-biased replay weighting improves learning efficiency across regimes, especially with limited network capacity. Based on these findings, we propose WarpSAC, a regime-aware family of off-policy RL algorithms. WarpSAC uses Sample Weight Decay for efficient exploitation and provides two variants: WarpSAC-L (Norm ON, clipped double-Q) for data-limited CPU-scale training, and WarpSAC-A (Norm OFF, single-Q) for data-abundant GPU-parallel training. WarpSAC improves normalized score--step AUC over FlashSAC by 4.5% across nine CPU-scale environments and 23.1% across fourteen GPU-parallel environments. It increases UnitreeG1TransportBox-v1 success rate from 19.8% to 96.4%, improves mean normalized wall-time AUC on MuJoCo Playground by 19.1%, and achieves 36.4% faster sim-to-real deployment on Unitree G1 than FlashSAC. These results show that scalable off-policy RL should adapt its stabilizers to the available data regime.
JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution
Agent capability is not determined by the model alone. The agent harness, encompassing memory management, planning strategy, action protocol, and tool/skill orchestration, can dominate the contribution of the underlying foundation model. Yet harness design remains manual, task-specific, and fundamentally unscalable. We present JIT-Agent, a harness intelligence model trained to synthesize task-adaptive agent harnesses on the fly for arbitrary off-the-shelf agentic LLMs. We formalize the agent harness as a composable, machine-generatable artifact governed by a fixed four-module protocol, and train JIT-Agent to customize harnesses for a given task at hand, repair harnesses for stable and reliable execution, and self-evolve by distilling performance signals from an expanding archive of prior harness configurations. Equipped with JIT-Agent as a harness helper, DeepSeek-V4-Flash surpasses GPT-5.6 on DeepSearchQA (+9.1) and OdysseyBench (+4.3), while the already strong GLM-5.2 gains up to +20.2 points. Across controlled evaluations, JIT-Agent-generated harnesses are performance-competitive with mature agent runtimes such as OpenCode and Claude Code and consistently improve multi-scale model families of DeepSeek V4, Mimo-V2.5, and Qwen3.6. To our knowledge, JIT-Agent is the first model purpose-built for just-in-time harness generation, establishing harness intelligence as a trainable, transferable, and compounding dimension of agent capability orthogonal to model scaling.
VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning
Native visual reasoning treats visual generation as the medium of reasoning itself: visual states (i.e. images and videos) are not merely inputs to be understood or outputs to be rendered, but first-class substrates for problem solving beyond language. Yet progress remains bottlenecked by the lack of scalable training tasks, reliable feedback, and controlled comparisons across generative substrates. In this work, we introduce VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable. 1) Task scaling. VBVR-Pro turns visual reasoning into a controlled task space of 300 procedurally generated tasks. Models trained on VBVR-Pro show strong transfer beyond the proposed suite across seven external visual reasoning benchmarks such as RISE-Video, MME-CoF-Pro, and BabyVision. 2) Verifiable rewards. VBVR-Pro provides verifiable reward scorers for task-grounded evaluation. Through a systematic study of leading MLLMs as judges, we identify recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm. In contrast, the proposed scorers are grounded in deterministic, task-specific rules, achieve fine-grained alignment with human judgments. Importantly, they serve as reliable reward signals for large-scale multi-task reinforcement learning and demonstrate stronger post-RL performance across visual reasoning tasks. 3) Mechanism study. VBVR-Pro enables controlled modality studies across more than 30 image, video, and interleaved generators. Our analysis shows that video generation remains strongest for tasks requiring persistent spatiotemporal state tracking, while interleaved generation provides a compute-efficient alternative. Critically, ablations and probing suggest the presence of vision-native trajectories that are crucial to visual reasoning. We release all data, models, scorers, and code.
D^3-MOPD: Adaptive Dynamic Domain ScheDuling for Efficient Multi-Teacher Distillation
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) distills several domain-expert teachers into a single student by minimizing per-domain reverse-KL divergence on the student's own rollouts. Existing approaches typically fix the per-domain data mixture before training, overlooking the fact that different domains converge at substantially different rates: some plateau early while others continue to improve throughout the training budget. A fixed mixture therefore wastes compute on fast-converging domains and undertrains slower-converging ones. To address this, we propose D^3-MOPD (Dynamic Domain ScheDuling for MOPD), a zero-overhead scheduler that repurposes the per-domain reverse-KL signal already produced during training to adapt the domain mixture online. Running asynchronously outside the training process, an off-process watcher periodically tracks each domain's KL trajectory, estimates remaining headroom and current improvement rate, and accordingly adjusts the domain sampling ratios without altering the core training loop. Our D^3-MOPD scales naturally to arbitrary numbers of domains, and the expected benefit grows as more domains introduce more diverse convergence patterns for the scheduler to exploit. On a Qwen3.6-35B-A3B student distilled from four domain-expert teachers, D^3-MOPD closes 97% of the average student-to-teacher performance gap, compared with 63% for vanilla MOPD, reaches the same peak performance with an approximately 3times reduction in rollout steps, and surpasses the specialist teachers on three of seven benchmarks.
Agent-G^2: Gaussian Guidance for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Hint-based reinforcement learning addresses reward sparsity in long-horizon agentic tasks by retaining a prefix of an expert trajectory before each rollout, letting the policy explore from a state closer to success. Its effectiveness hinges on the guidance depth: how much of the trajectory to keep. Existing methods treat this depth as a deterministic scalar. Scheduled approaches share one value across samples and ignore per-task heterogeneity; per-sample probing estimates it separately at the cost of extra rollouts. We find that useful guidance occupies a band of depths whose informativeness profile is approximately Gaussian around the band center, rather than concentrating at a single optimal point. We propose Agent-G^2, a Gaussian guidance framework that draws the depth per task from a Gaussian whose center and spread are estimated online from rollouts already collected for policy optimization, requiring no probe rollouts or learned depth predictor. The center combines a global baseline with per-cluster difficulty, and the spread tracks within-cluster variance. We evaluate Agent-G^2 on ALFWorld and WebShop on Qwen2.5-1.5B / 7B-Instruct. Agent-G^2 outperforms the strongest hint-based, hint-free, and Aux-RL baselines on ALFWorld by 2.3 / 3.9 / 7.4 points at under one-third the rollout cost of per-sample probing.
Is Next-Chunk Reasoning RL Really Better than SFT? Revisiting Training Strategies under no-CoT Data
Recent work proposes next-chunk reasoning RL for leveraging no-CoT data---corpora such as worked solutions and textbook derivations that contain reasoning-rich content but lack explicit chain-of-thought annotations. The method trains a model to generate implicit reasoning traces and rewards them by their ability to predict the next chunk of text. While promising, existing evaluations primarily compare against conventional SFT baselines, leaving open whether the gains come from the RL formulation itself or from more effectively exposing the model to no-CoT data. We address this question with a controlled study of next-chunk reasoning RL and a simple but previously overlooked alternative: Mixed SFT, a single supervised fine-tuning stage that jointly trains on no-CoT and long-CoT data. Despite its simplicity, Mixed SFT achieves a clearly higher post-RLVR performance ceiling than next-chunk reasoning RL while requiring over 60 times less training compute. The advantage is consistent across in-domain mathematical reasoning and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Moreover, we show that higher pre-RLVR accuracy does not necessarily translate into higher post-RLVR accuracy, highlighting the need to evaluate no-CoT training strategies in the context of the full post-training pipeline.
Long-Horizon Audio-Visual Generation for Persistent Stories and Interactive Worlds
Video generation is progressing beyond isolated clips toward long-form narratives and interactive worlds, requiring models to preserve identities, follow user controls, and remain stable over extended rollouts. We present JoyAI-Echo-1.5, a unified audio-visual generation system with two purpose-built variants. The long-video variant introduces composable cross-shot memory that aggregates visual evidence across multiple prior shots and speaker cues derived from speech-filtered full-shot audio, enabling persistent character appearance and voice identity across flexible combinations of text, image, and memory conditioning. The world-model variant converts heterogeneous navigation inputs into calibrated metric 6-DoF camera trajectories and injects them through a geometry-aware conditioning pathway, enabling controller-agnostic interaction across flexible viewpoints. To support efficient long-horizon generation, we transform a bidirectional audio-visual backbone into a causal few-step generator using progressive teacher forcing and short- and long-horizon Self-Gradient Forcing on self-generated rollouts. Experiments demonstrate strong performance in both settings. JoyAI-Echo-1.5 achieves improvements over existing long-video baselines in cross-shot consistency, visual quality, text alignment, and speech fidelity. Its world-model variant ranks first on WBench, with an average score of 81.7, and achieves leading visual quality and long-horizon persistence on SANA-WM-Bench. Together, these results indicate that memory, geometric control, and rollout-aware training provide a practical foundation for generating coherent stories and continuously evolving interactive worlds. Project page: https://echo-team-joy-future-academy-jd.github.io/Echo-1.5-Page/.
Open-MOPD: Diagnosing and Fixing Capability Imbalance in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (M-OPD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for consolidating domain-specialized reinforcement learning (RL) experts into a single generalist student via dense, token-level reward supervision. Despite its practical success, the optimization dynamics governing multi-teacher capability integration remain poorly understood, and open, rigorously reproducible recipes are conspicuously lacking. In this work, we establish a controlled M-OPD benchmark on SmolLM3-3B-Base with oracle routing, isolating capability integration from routing ambiguity. Our investigation reveals a pronounced capability integration gap: standard M-OPD captures only 35.6% of the available headroom relative to a domain-routed oracle ensemble, with concise tasks such as instruction following suffering severe degradation and premature stagnation. Crucially, we show that this failure stems not from gradient conflict, but from a severe misallocation of the token-level optimization budget. This pathology is driven by three orthogonal factors: structural sequence-length disparities across domains, dynamic convergence drift due to non-uniform learning rates, and multi-step reward staleness from asynchronous policy updates. To resolve these imbalances, we introduce Open-MOPD, a principled framework incorporating token-share balancing, gap-aware dynamic budget allocation, and student reward refresh. Together, these mechanisms systematically restore cross-domain balance, elevating headroom recovery from 35.6% to 83.4% in a single deployable student. We fully open-source our end-to-end post-training recipe, training trajectories, and evaluation suites on an academically accessible hardware budget.
StreamPI: Streaming Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated effectiveness in robot manipulation, yet state-of-the-art models such as pi0.5 operate under a single-frame paradigm, limiting their ability to retain past observations and develop precise spatial perception. In this paper, we propose StreamPI, a streaming multimodal temporal modeling framework that equips single-frame VLA with temporal reasoning capability without introducing any additional parameters. One core design is instruction-anchored temporal modeling. It treats each (visual observation, language instruction) pair as an atomic temporal unit: bidirectional attention within each pair enables cross-modal fusion, while causal attention across pairs preserves autoregressive streaming inference. This ensures the language instruction serves as a persistent semantic anchor throughout task execution. To bridge the gap between synchronous training and asynchronous real-robot deployment, we introduce a andom-interval streaming training strategy: a proper inter-frame interval (e.g., every 3 frames) enables faster and smoother action execution. Beyond this, randomizing the interval further improves robustness to frame-timing perturbations, supporting asynchronous deployment in practice. Furthermore, by leveraging the length extrapolation capability of the LLM backbone, StreamPI seamlessly inherits pretrained single-frame weights and supports flexible single-frame and multi-frame inference. Experiments on real-robot tasks spanning memory-dependent and precise perception scenarios, as well as the simulation benchmark LIBERO, demonstrate that StreamPI outperforms pi0.5 across diverse tasks.
Video-IFBench: Evaluating Instruction Following of Multimodal LLMs in Video Understanding Scenarios
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding. However, their ability to follow instructions in this domain remains under-explored. Real-world video understanding requires models not only to interpret video content correctly, but also to satisfy diverse user-specified constraints. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on task accuracy rather than instruction adherence, leaving this capability insufficiently evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce Video-IFBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating instruction following in video understanding, where models must satisfy diverse user-specified constraints, including those grounded in visual and audio content. We develop an instruction taxonomy with four templates, including single-task, multi-task, selection, and nested instructions, covering 32 task types and 39 manually designed constraint categories spanning both semantic and format requirements. To reduce annotation cost, we build a semi-automatic data construction pipeline that combines MLLMs, programmatic processing, and human verification, resulting in 1.5K samples. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of more than 20 recent MLLMs and show that video instruction following remains challenging for current models, especially for instructions with many constraints, semantic constraints, or complex conditional structures that require selecting the correct branch or path based on video content. We hope our work will facilitate future research on instruction following in video understanding scenarios.
Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Brain
World models aim to simulate how complex environments evolve under actions and events, yet existing video-based world models primarily learn dynamics from visual observations, which reveal outcomes rather than the underlying knowledge, rules, and mechanisms governing world evolution. This makes it difficult to maintain persistent consequences and support coherent, open-ended evolution. We introduce Code World Model, a framework that separates world evolution from visual realization by combining the reasoning and coding capabilities of language models with the generative priors of video models. A coding agent serves as the world brain, reasoning about events and their consequences and generating executable code to maintain persistent world state and perform rule-consistent evolution. To connect executable state with visual generation, we introduce a proxy representation that encodes frame-wise spatiotemporal constraints and is compiled into a proxy video, which conditions a video model to render high-fidelity visual observations. We further develop data pipelines for constructing aligned proxy-observation pairs from gameplay and real-world videos. After fine-tuning on paired gameplay data, MiniMax-H3 follows proxy-based spatiotemporal specifications from simple interactive worlds built by the coding agent while preserving rich visual details and dynamics. These results demonstrate the potential of combining code for persistent world evolution with video models for flexible visual realization, providing a new path toward open-ended world models.
SWE Refactor Bench: Can Coding Agents Complete a Long-Horizon, Whole-Repository Stack Migration?
Modern software systems accumulate technical debt over decades of development, which makes migration expensive and largely manual. As coding agents become increasingly capable at bug fixing, can they autonomously perform such migrations? Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate only behavioural correctness, not whether the migration actually occurred. This leads an easy hack: agents copy the original implementation to make tests pass. We call this Blindness. To address this problem, we introduce SWE Refactor Bench, a benchmark comprising 20 whole-repository migrations, covering 4 kinds of technical debt. A three-stage evaluation protocol measures both migration completeness and behavioural correctness. (1) Migration Audit verifies that the migration occurred. (2) Behavioural Tests measure correctness with a fixed test suite. (3) Agentic Verification uses 6 independent coding agents to generate targeted tests for hidden behavioural differences. Across 520 runs from 8 frontier models and 26 model-effort configurations, only 28 of 520 runs (5.4%) pass all three stages, 13 of the 20 tasks receive no accepted solution, and the best model (claude-opus-5) scores 47.0/100. Migration completeness and behavioural correctness are distinct abilities: a few runs preserve behaviour by skipping the migration and are stopped at Migration Audit; most attempt it and break behaviour, and are stopped at Behavioural Tests. Agents cannot deliver a perfect migration: among the 340 runs that pass Migration Audit, 58% reach 99% of the fixed checks, yet only 26% reach 100%. Agent capability differs across migration categories: agents score 31.4 on build toolchain rewrites but only 5.6 on language rewrites. Together, these findings position SWE Refactor Bench as a rigorous testbed for developing coding agents for reliable whole-repository migrations.

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