OrangeBot.AI Digest — 2026-10-18

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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