Daily AI Intake

Large language models (LLMs) can solve many narrow tasks, but querying them separately for millions of related instances can be prohibitively expensive. Can LLM agents autonomously create cheaper solutions for such workloads? We call this ability "bottling": the ability to turn general capabilities into task-specific solutions that balance answer quality and amortised cost. We introduce BOTTLED, a benchmark in which agents receive an entire unlabelled workload and must complete it under fixed time, compute and LLM API budgets. Agents choose their own approach, such as training a small model or writing a reusable program. Across ten models and three tasks, we find that strong zero-shot task performance does not reliably translate into strong bottling capabilities. Models with similar zero-shot scores can differ substantially after bottling, and 48 of 60 bottling runs score below the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval of their model's zero-shot performance. Moreover, 31 of 60 runs underperform the stronger of two small-model distillation baselines with the same token budget. Nevertheless, bottling can yield substantial savings: on query-product relevance classification, Opus 5 retains about 82% of its zero-shot macro-F1 at roughly 657 times lower reported cost. Bottling is also competitive with Jev, a "system one" model built especially for cheap, repetitive inference: Op...

Pretrained robotic policies can suffer substantial performance degradation under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions encountered during deployment, motivating post-training through real-world interaction. However, reinforcement-learning (RL)-based post-training typically requires substantial environment interactions, a burden that is especially significant in manipulation, where each trial can be slow, costly, or destructive. Therefore, we present PEARS, a physics-prior-guided hybrid RL framework for sample-efficient online adaptation of pretrained policies with tactile feedback. After each episode, its physics-guided force reasoning (PFR) module uses physical priors encoded in a vision-language model (VLM) to diagnose failures from the visual outcome and tactile interaction history and update task-appropriate contact-force bounds. A high-frequency hybrid force-position controller then enforces these bounds during contact. Complementarily, tactile-conditioned diffusion steering reinforcement learning adjusts the latent noise of the frozen flow-matching policy to correct errors in free-space motion and contact timing without updating the base model. In simulation, PEARS improves success rates by 12.4-37.4 percentage points over the strongest per-task baselines. PEARS also reduces the number of interaction episodes required for a certain success threshold by up to 53.2% relative...

World models offer a data-driven alternative to traditional simulators for robotics, with applications spanning policy evaluation, improvement, and planning. All of these uses depend on faithful 3D geometry, yet current video-based world models are trained on RGB alone and produce rollouts that look correct frame-by-frame but do not compose into a consistent 3D world. Closing this gap requires progress on two fronts: large-scale 3D supervision for manipulation, and an architecture that can absorb it without disturbing strong pretrained video priors. We introduce a calibration pipeline that combines learned stereo depth with a joint factor graph, pooling all episodes collected from the same physical robot to recover its shared kinematic parameters alongside per-scene extrinsics. Applied to the DROID dataset, this yields DROID-3D, a calibrated 3D dataset providing dense metric depth and recalibrated multi-view extrinsics (achieving <0.7 px reprojection error on 90% of episodes for external cameras). We then train DepthWorld, a Stable Video Diffusion-based world model that jointly predicts multi-view RGB and depth via spatial latent tiling, leaving the pretrained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) unchanged. Depth supervision improves RGB prediction itself by +1.48 dB PSNR over an identical RGB-only baseline at equal training budget, while simultaneously yielding accurate metric depth...

Video world models can produce visually convincing yet physically inconsistent sequences, raising concerns about their reliability for prediction and planning in embodied AI systems. Existing evaluations often rely on model-based judgments or reference videos, while direct physical tests largely focus on mechanics. We introduce World Models' Last Exam in Physics, a measurement-based benchmark for evaluating physical consistency in video world models. The benchmark comprises 40 controlled tasks spanning mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal and phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension. Each task pairs an initial image and a generation prompt with predefined physical criteria, enabling interpretable tests of observable physical relationships without requiring reference videos. Its evaluator combines task-observability screening with task-specific quantitative physical measurements. Experiments on eight video generation models across 1,280 videos reveal persistent physical inconsistencies and substantial variation across tasks, with the best model achieving an overall score of 57.76 out of 100. Evaluation on synthetic videos with known physical relationships provides evidence for the validity of the measurement module under controlled conditions. The evaluator also achieves higher agreement with human judgments than a direct vision-language model baseline in both...

Scientific research often begins by synthesizing ideas from a set of related papers to identify gaps and formulate new directions. However, training language models to perform this form of literature-grounded ideation remains challenging, as existing approaches based on prompting or feedback lack structured supervision for how papers should be synthesized. We introduce IdeaAnchor, a paradigm for training LLMs to perform research ideation using structured specifications as privileged signals. Each IdeaAnchor instance encodes how each input paper should be synthesized into a successful idea, including their functional roles, relationships, and target synthesis criteria. We build this paradigm by mining instances from published papers, capturing how real ideas emerge from prior literature. We then train models via demonstration, self-distillation, and reinforcement learning, and further enhance generation with retrieval at inference time. Experiments show consistent improvements in ideation quality. Our analysis reveals a functional decomposition: anchor-based training strengthens creative synthesis, retrieval enhances detail elaboration, and combining both yields the best performance.

Current video editors can insert objects but often struggle to make them participate in interactions such as being picked up or manipulated. We introduce ALIVE, a framework that makes inserted objects "alive" through coherent interactions with the source video's contents, using an edited first frame and an instruction naming only the added object. We curate 35,800 editing pairs combining 3D-rendered, model-generated, and real-world videos with general editing pairs from ROSE. Each pair differs in the target object's presence while preserving the surrounding action, teaching editors coordinated object behavior and source preservation. We further train a vision-language model (VLM) to predict interaction guidance from the same inputs. We introduce the ALIVE-interaction benchmark to assess interaction fidelity, source preservation, and visual coherence using a unified VLM-based protocol, and evaluate on the general video object insertion benchmark. Without VLM guidance, ALIVE improves Overall over the strongest evaluated baseline by 43.9% and 4.4% on the two benchmarks, respectively. VLM-predicted guidance further improves the ALIVE-interaction score by 0.95 points without additional user inputs.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable problem solvers, but being able to solve a problem is not the same as being able to teach it. Existing approaches to training LLMs as teachers rely on demonstrations, preference data, or predefined pedagogical criteria that specify what good teaching looks like. However, these signals are often not grounded in individual student learning outcomes, where effective teaching strategies can vary substantially across learners. To address this, we introduce Sherpa, a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework that instantiates multiple student archetypes with LLMs conditioned on distinct learning preferences and trains a teacher model to adapt its instruction by directly maximizing their learning outcomes. Teacher LLMs trained with Sherpa improve instructed students' performance across all archetypes by an average of 20.5 percentage points. Under MathTutorBench's evaluation, Sherpa raises the overall pedagogy score from 52.5% to 79.2%, indicating better teaching responses. Our human studies show that the trained teacher is preferred over the base model in 79.6% of pairwise comparisons. Together, Sherpa trains LLM teachers to adapt to diverse simulated students and become better aligned with human teachers, paving the road towards AI tutors teaching real students.

Existing methods for 4D hand-object reconstruction often rely on costly per-sequence optimization, while generative approaches typically synthesize interactions from random noise, which can lead to unstable interaction prediction. We introduce 4D-HOF, a feed-forward framework that reconstructs 4D hand-object interactions from coarse but informative estimates produced by vision foundation models. Concretely, we learn a conditional flow matching model that transports foundation-model-derived hand-object states toward an interaction manifold, allowing the model to correct errors in translation, rotation, and alignment in a feed-forward manner. A key advantage of our generative formulation is that it naturally enables test-time guidance within the transport process. Rather than applying a separate post-hoc optimization after reconstruction, we directly steer the evolving generative states using physical interaction constraints and observed 2D evidence, allowing the reconstruction to be refined as part of the generative process itself. By training the generative model on diverse datasets, 4D-HOF generalizes robustly to challenging in-the-wild scenarios. Experiments on out-of-domain benchmarks show that 4D-HOF achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing more stable and accurate 4D hand-object reconstructions.

Interactive video world models need to generate each video chunk efficiently while responding faithfully to user controls. Many systems use chunk-wise autoregressive generation with few-step denoising, but each chunk still requires several costly denoising iterations. Training-free caching can reduce this cost, yet existing policies make reuse decisions primarily from model-internal denoising dynamics and do not explicitly account for control transitions. Actually, interactive generation explicitly exposes a signal they do not use: the controls for a chunk arrive before it is denoised, so a schedule derived from them costs no forward pass. To this end, we analyze adjacent chunks under different control regimes and find that structural similarity drops around action changes, while low-frequency structure remains more persistent than high-frequency detail. Motivated by these observations, we propose CtrlCache, a training-free control-aware caching framework that adapts computation to the current control sequence. Specifically, the action-aware scheduling and refresh policy detects action changes across and within chunks, and labels each chunk as initial, transition, turning, or steady state. At one selected interior denoising step, initial and transition chunks retain full computation, while turning and steady chunks reuse the transformer residual from the most recent fully compu...

Web agents complete user requests by reading and acting on pages that third parties write, so an instruction planted on a page can redirect the agent away from the user's goal. The agent cannot simply ignore the page, because the page also holds the values and controls the task requires. Current defenses fine-tune the agent on injections fixed before training, and attackers that adapt to the trained model bypass them. Adversarial training lets the attacker adapt but keeps the tasks fixed, so a task stops teaching once the agent solves it. We introduce AdvSim2Real, which co-evolves a task curriculum, an injection adversary, and the agent inside a frozen web world model. The curriculum is rewarded for tasks the agent solves about half of the time, and the adversary only for a success flip, an injection that turns a judged success into a failure. Training in the simulator makes a 4B agent both more capable and more robust: its completion rises with and without attacks, holds against a frontier-model adversary it never trained against, and its capability gain carries over to a real browser. On 150 web tasks, AdvSim2Real raises completion under this unseen adversary by 33.6\% relative to the base agent.

Flow policies have become a standard policy class for learning robot behaviors from demonstrations, but reinforcement learning is still critical for improving pre-trained flow policies or learning them from scratch through interaction. We introduce QF3 (Fast Flow RL with Filtered Q-Gradients), an online off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy with flow matching plus the critic's action gradient, backpropagated through a one-step prediction of the flow's output. To keep updates where the critic and this prediction are reliable, QF3 applies the critic gradient only to action dimensions that stay near the replay action. To our knowledge, QF3 is the first off-policy flow RL method to train humanoid locomotion policies from scratch and transfer them zero-shot to hardware. Paired with a high-throughput off-policy training recipe, it trains humanoid locomotion and motion-tracking policies with a 10x wall-clock speedup over FPO++, a recent on-policy flow RL method. We further apply QF3 to fine-tune pretrained flow-based manipulation policies on both ABC-Sim and Robomimic tasks. These results suggest that QF3 can both learn robot policies from scratch and refine those acquired from demonstrations. Website: https://qf3-rl.github.io/

Single-image scene generation aims to produce a complete 3D scene mesh from a single image, including surfaces the camera did not observe. While pretrained 3D object generators encode a strong shape prior, they are mainly designed for isolated objects in a fixed canonical volume and focus mostly on indoor scenes, since diverse 3D data for outdoor scenes are quite limited. In this work, we present a method that redesigns such an object-centric generator, e.g., Trellis 2, to work on both indoor and outdoor scenes while retaining its prior. We accomplish this by (a) partitioning the scene into adaptive chunks that scale relative to the distance to the camera; nearby chunks have a smaller size to keep the finer detail, while distant structures, e.g., buildings, are covered by large chunks; (b) making the generator capture explicit 2D-3D correspondence by lifting image features and making the model aware of the free space, observed surface, and unobserved region; (c) synthesizing around 4,000 outdoor scenes to broaden the training data, as existing scene datasets are largely indoor. Experiments on Tanks and Temples, ScanNet++, and in-the-wild images show that our method outperforms all baselines in geometric accuracy and perceptual quality across both indoor and outdoor scenes.