OrangeBot.AI Digest — 2026-08-14

90 headlines across 8 sources, aggregated for this day.

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LLMRouter: Unified Infrastructure for Developing, Evaluating, and Deploying LLM Routers
No single large language model (LLM) is optimal across all queries and budget constraints, making model routing essential for cost-effective deployment. Existing routers adopt diverse formulations and implementations, making fair comparison and extension difficult. We present a unified formulation of LLM routing as a sequential decision process characterized by five components: context encoders, model encoders, scoring functions, decision rules, and learning signals, covering single-turn, multi-turn, and personalized routing. Based on this formulation, we develop an automated pipeline for constructing routing supervision and evaluating routers jointly on response quality and inference cost. The resulting benchmark, xRouteBench, spans generic LLM, memory-augmented, vision, time-series, and personalized routing tasks. We further introduce LLMRouter, an open-source modular infrastructure with more than 16 representative routers. Our empirical study shows that learned routers outperform the strongest fixed-model baseline by 14.6% relatively, lightweight routers become more competitive under tight cost constraints, and user-conditioned routing consistently improves personalization.
Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World
Interactive world models must support persistent memory, responsive interaction, and long-horizon generation, yet these requirements place conflicting demands on the model. Maintaining history in the denoiser context or key-value cache incurs growing cost, forcing a trade-off between session length and retained memory, while low-latency interaction relies on few-step generation whose capabilities are bounded by its teacher. Evoke addresses both limitations by externalizing persistent world state and redesigning the teacher for long-horizon interactive generation. Scene geometry is maintained in an external, camera-indexed world state bank, from which only view-relevant information is retrieved, keeping the denoiser context bounded as the session grows. Rather than treating the teacher as a fixed generator, we design it for long-horizon supervision: its sparse attention combines chunk-wise grouping, retrieval of selected distant frames, and a linear-attention global state, yielding linear growth in memory and compute while enabling supervision over long horizons. Such supervision exposes content drift that stays locally plausible within short windows, while per-chunk conditioning enables prompt changes and event control throughout the sequence. A 30-second distribution-matching objective, applied under self-forced rollouts, transfers both capabilities to a three-step student that uses no classifier-free guidance, improving resistance to long-term drift while preserving responsive conditioning. With bounded context and recurrent external memory, Evoke supports open-ended, continuously evolving generation; on a single H200 at 384times 640, each 1.5,s chunk is generated in 2.11,s. As a three-step world model, Evoke achieves state-of-the-art performance on WBench while remaining competitive on VBench-Long and VBench-2.0.
DreamX-Phi 1.0: Action-Conditioned Video World Model for Robotic Manipulation
We present DreamX-Phi 1.0, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and a prescribed action sequence comprising end-effector poses and gripper states, predicts the resulting future observations. Yet realism alone does not guarantee faithfulness: a convincing rollout can still move the wrong arm or lose the manipulated object. To ensure the prediction respects each arm's commanded path, we inject per-arm SE(3) transformations into attention via PRoPE-style geometric encoding, preserving arm identity and rigid-motion structure. Action control alone does not fully constrain scene geometry or the evolution of small manipulated objects. We therefore add a lightweight depth branch for scene-level geometry and use SAM3 masks with a frozen V-JEPA teacher to maintain object consistency throughout grasping. We further distill the multi-step generator into a few-step student via distribution-matching distillation for efficient deployment. At the time of writing, achieves first place on Track~1 and second place on Track~2 of the WorldArena~2.0 Challenge. Our model and code will be publicly available.
DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selection
An LLM agent's capability depends not only on model weights but on its harness: prompts, tools, skills, and control flow. Self-improvement loops already edit harnesses, yet single-lineage search is path-dependent and local wins often regress other tasks. We introduce DarwinX, which treats self-evolution as selection over a population of harnesses with the model frozen: a preserve-and-extend contract admits only variants that extend coverage without regressing, an archive keeps alternative lineages for recombination, and failure-, teacher-, and self-derived evidence share one edit interface. Fitness comes from each benchmark's own verifier: no gold solutions, no hand-picked winners. Across four benchmarks that progressively separate the evolution signal from the test, one loop adds about 17 points on average: Terminal-Bench 2.1 rises +7.7 to 83.2% on a matched base and to the verified frontier at 84.7% on a stronger one; TerminalWorld's held-out split reaches 68.3%, ahead of every off-the-shelf agent; WebArena-Infinity real-task pass@1 rises from 43.5% to 93.0% audit-clean; and a Terminal-Bench 2.1 harness transfers unchanged to SWE-bench Verified. What evolves is general agent competence, not benchmark-specific patches, so it survives changes of task, verifier, and base model. A frozen model need not be a fixed agent: harness selection turns evaluation compute into durable capability.
Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Model
Scientific discovery increasingly requires AI systems that can reason over scientific evidence of heterogeneous modalities, interact with scientific tools and environments, and sustain progress across long task horizons. We present Intern-S2-Preview, a series of scientific agentic foundation models designed to support multimodal scientific understanding, reasoning, generation, and long-horizon tasks. The training pipeline begins with scientific multimodal pre-training over rendered scientific documents, interleaved image-text data, and diverse scientific corpora. Starting from the pretrained checkpoint, we apply a unified post-training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, scalable multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), black- and white-box agentic RL, and on-policy distillation. This pipeline is supported by practical techniques that improve rollout and training stability and efficiency, including partial rollout with off-policy correction, adaptive length regularization, online speculative decoding, robust multi-task optimization, and trace-aware experience assembly for agentic tasks. At the architecture level, Intern-S2-Preview-397B extends time series modelling from efficient long-sequence understanding to numerical forecasting, while Memory Decoder is studied as a separate memory-augmented path for rapid scientific specialization without modifying the frozen 397B backbone. Evaluations across scientific, multimodal, agentic, and general-purpose benchmarks show that Intern-S2-Preview-397B achieves competitive or leading results in multiple settings. The time series modules improve scientific signal understanding and forecasting on SciTS, while the separate Intern-MemDec-4B extension improves the Biology-Instructions average score from 56.92 to 60.32 without modifying the frozen 397B backbone.
How Can Rhetoric Reward-Hack AI Reviewers? Dissecting Rhetorical Sensitivity in AI-Based Peer Review
As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions. We construct a controlled corpus of 4,200 full-paper manuscripts derived from 120 anonymized ICLR 2026 submissions. Two LLM rewriters transform six rhetorical dimensions in opposing directions, and five LLM reviewers evaluate the resulting manuscripts under standard and strict protocols. We also test joint, recursive, and reviewer-guided rewriting. Our results show that rhetorical sensitivity is structured rather than uniform. Evidence framing and novelty stance produce the largest positive-negative contrasts in overall assessment, with scope framing forming a weaker second tier; the remaining dimensions have smaller or less stable effects. This hierarchy persists across human-assessed quality levels, but score movement depends strongly on the AI reviewer's original score: lower scores tend to rise, higher scores tend to fall, and directional contrasts are clearest in the middle ranges. More elaborate workflows do not reliably yield larger gains. Joint rewriting is strongly rewriter-dependent, reviewer guidance does not consistently outperform an unguided second pass, and repeated rewriting yields diminishing, configuration-dependent returns. Across conditions, the rewriter primarily determines the separation between opposing variants, whereas the reviewer determines the magnitude and sign of their score effects. Strict review lowers mean OA by 1.36 points without consistently changing rhetorical sensitivity. These findings identify when rhetorical presentation influences AI scientific review and motivate evaluation systems robust to content-preserving variation in scientific writing.
PlayWorld: Benchmarking World Models with Agent Players over Long-Horizon Objectives
Video world models simulate future states conditioned on current observations and user actions. Recent systems have demonstrated impressive video consistency and action controllability over long sequences. However, fairly comparing these interactive models remains challenging. In practice, a human player typically evaluates a world model by pursuing long-horizon objectives through interaction. For example, a user may turn around 360 degrees to see whether the environment remains consistent, or walk into the water and inspect whether realistic water ripples are generated. The action sequence required to achieve the same objective may vary substantially between models, making fixed action-conditioned evaluation unsuitable for cross-model comparison. To address this, we employ multi-modal Agent Players to interact with world models toward specified long-horizon objectives. Building on this paradigm, we introduce PlayWorld, a benchmark providing 171 scenarios, each with a specified objective. To evaluate performance thoroughly, we assess models along four core dimensions: geometry consistency, interaction fidelity, out-of-sight evolution, and insight evolution. In addition, we incorporate basic ability metrics for video quality and controllability. Experiments across nine state-of-the-art world models reveal that current models remain unreliable on long-horizon interactive objectives, particularly in maintaining spatial consistency and persistent state evolution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kxding/PlayWorld.
AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design
Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.
Spatial Memory Agent: Experience-Grounded Procedure Memory for Spatial Intelligence
Spatial intelligence is becoming a foundation for embodied agents, robotic planning, and multimodal assistants. To improve the spatial reasoning ability of VLM agents, existing work has mainly followed two lines. One line uses post-training methods, such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Another line adopts an agentic paradigm in which the model calls external spatial tools, such as depth estimation and 3D reconstruction tools, to gather intermediate spatial evidence. We study a complementary and underexplored route: Can a frozen VLM agent improve its spatial reasoning through parameter-update-free self-evolution, without depending on external expert spatial tools at inference time? We present Spatial Memory Agent (SMA), an experience-grounded runtime framework that converts verified spatial experience into reusable transferable lessons. In a verifiable spatial environment, SMA queries the frozen VLM, obtains a predicted answer and reward, and uses verifier-guided reflection to distill compact transferable lessons from spatial experience. SMA further assigns each lesson a Transfer Reliability Score (TRS), which is initialized uniformly and calibrated from later retrieval outcomes as visit evidence of future transfer reliability. During read-only deployment, SMA retrieves lessons by semantic filter and similarity-TRS combined ranking, allowing the retrieved memory to guide frozen model inference. Across five representative spatial benchmarks and four base VLMs, SMA achieves the highest macro average in every base-model block and the best accuracy among the evaluated methods in most of the 20 evaluations, establishing a practical parameter-update-free path for spatial self-evolution across the evaluated frozen model scales and environments.
Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus
We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies: MAs consistently spike immediately before full attention layers, forming pre-attention spikes (PAS), and can persist through intervening linear attention layers, giving rise to inter-spike plateaus (ISP). As full attention becomes denser, successive PAS become increasingly connected through ISP, ultimately recovering the stable MA morphology of full attention LLMs. We establish the recurrence of this organization across five linear attention architectures, six hybridization configurations, five data domains, and representative open-source hybrid models spanning 1.2B to 397B total parameters. Controlled pretraining of GDN-based hybrids at scales up to 1.3B shows that both morphologies emerge early and respond asymmetrically to output gating: full attention output gating strongly attenuates their absolute magnitudes without eliminating their layerwise organization, whereas removing GDN gates yields comparatively modest amplification. Mechanistically, our systematic-outlier analysis supports a shared lifecycle account governed by the timing of MA cancellation. PAS follows a localized write-sink-cancel process, while the extended persistence of ISP is consistent with delayed cancellation. At the full attention limit, this account recovers the stable MA morphology characteristic of full attention LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/StartluxLabs/Massive-Activations-HLA.
UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos
Talking-video character replacement requires coordinated transfer of appearance and voice while preserving the source motion, scene, linguistic content, and audio-video timing. Existing methods use separately optimized models for the two modalities, making audio-visual consistency difficult to enforce. We present UniSwap, the first framework for streaming joint audio-visual identity replacement in talking videos. Given a source video, a reference image, and a reference voice clip, UniSwap transfers the reference appearance and vocal timbre within a single audio-visual diffusion transformer while preserving the source content and dynamics. To address the scarcity of aligned cross-identity training pairs, we introduce a swap-and-reconstruct pipeline that removes visual and vocal identity from real clips and uses the original clips as reconstruction targets. Starting from a bidirectional backbone, we progressively adapt the model through In-context Pretraining for joint replacement, Conditional Streaming Adaptation for block-causal KV-cached generation, and Efficient Self-forcing DMD for mitigating exposure bias and reducing sampling from 30 to 3 denoising steps per block. Efficient Multi-LoRA Switching enables the three DMD roles to share a single frozen backbone. Feature-RoPE Decomposition keeps cached positions within the training range, supporting stable long-form inference. Experiments demonstrate strong audio-visual synchronization, competitive identity preservation, efficient streaming, and stable long-form generation.
LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time
Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first animation system to combine real-time streaming with stable long-form generation at billion scale, built on a 14B-parameter video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). A two-stage training pipeline first adapts a pretrained bidirectional DiT into a block-causal autoregressive generator through Reference-Anchored Teacher-Forcing Adaptation, and then reduces the sampling budget to three steps through Block-wise Self-Forcing Distillation. To preserve appearance over extended streams, we introduce Pose-Retrieval Sink Attention (PR-Sink), a bounded KV-cache mechanism combining a Static Sink that permanently anchors the first generated block, a Dynamic Sink that holds a pose-retrieved historical block, and a three-slot Rolling Window. When a pose recurs, PR-Sink restores the relevant appearance context without retaining the entire sequence, so memory and per-block latency remain constant regardless of stream duration. Together with Ulysses sequence parallelism and operator fusion, these designs enable 19.63\,FPS streaming inference on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs. On a three-minute benchmark, LiveAnimate maintains nearly constant perceptual quality and identity from the first 30 seconds to the final minute, while prior systems degrade substantially or require hours of offline computation for the same rollout. These results establish a new operating point in quality, latency, and duration for interactive full-body animation.
Full-bandwidth transformer
Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth. Dense attention gives each token broad horizontal access to the past, but the vertical feedback channel between decoding steps remains narrow: only the sampled token returns to the bottom of the stack, while the top-layer hidden state is discarded. We introduce the full-bandwidth transformer, which widens this channel with latent feedback: at each decoding step, the previous top-layer hidden state is fused with the sampled token embedding through a gated linear unit and fed back as the next input. Latent feedback lets non-verbalized computation re-enter the stack with a renewed depth budget, while preserving the standard transformer architecture, KV cache, and language-modeling objective. To train full-bandwidth transformers without losing parallel teacher forcing, we use a scheduled multi-pass objective that introduces latent feedback late in pretraining and mixes a small fraction of deeper feedback passes for stability. We train 1B-parameter full-bandwidth transformers up to 400B tokens and find that latent feedback improves validation loss, 5-shot language-model evaluation, math and coding generation, and instruction-tuned performance. With negligible per-token decoding overhead, full-bandwidth transformers match or approach standard transformers trained with roughly 1.5times more tokens, and manage to produce shorter reasoning traces at equal or better accuracy.
An AI4AI Framework for Visual Token Pruning
Visual-token pruning can substantially reduce the inference cost of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet existing methods largely rely on fixed, handcrafted heuristics and costly expert trial and error. As pruning objectives, budgets, and model architectures diversify, manually navigating the expanding design space becomes increasingly difficult. This paper aims to build an AI4AI framework for visual-token pruning by addressing a natural question: Can large language models automatically design effective visual-token reduction algorithms? Although LLMs possess broad algorithmic knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities, translating such general knowledge into effective solutions for a specialized task remains nontrivial. We argue that the key lies in designing an appropriate search-state representation that connects the internal knowledge of LLMs with the structural requirements and constraints of visual-token pruning. Based on this insight, we propose AutoPrune, a training-free framework for LLM-driven visual-token pruning policy design. At its core, AutoPrune introduces a Token Pruning Domain-Specific Language (TPDSL) comprising 131 reusable atoms for budget control, token scoring, selection constraints, and token reassembly. A key property of TPDSL is that it represents each search state as a residual modification of a strong base policy. This residual formulation narrows the search space and directs the LLM's attention toward the policy components that are most consequential for performance. Experiments on 14 multimodal benchmarks and three MLLM backbones demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and transferability of AutoPrune. Even when removing 94.4% of visual tokens, AutoPrune preserves more than 99% of full-token performance while reducing FLOPs by 9.9x and prefill latency by 6.4x.
H2R-Bench: Benchmarking Human-to-Robot Manipulation Video Generation in World Models
Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, abundant egocentric human manipulation videos provide rich behavioral experiences, but transferring them across embodiments remains challenging due to differences between human hands and robotic end-effectors. Recent advances in video world models offer a promising pathway to synthesize robot-centric manipulation videos from human observations, while their cross-embodiment transfer capability remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we introduce H2R-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-embodiment human-to-robot manipulation video generation, where models transform egocentric human demonstrations into robot manipulation videos under specified embodiments. Each benchmark instance contains a human demonstration video, target embodiment constraints, and source-grounded annotations covering task goals, action events, functional contacts, and object responses. H2R-Bench evaluates generated videos through five dimensions, including goal-state completion, action-event completion, functional contact transfer, embodiment correctness, and general video quality. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art video generation models across six manipulation families and two robot embodiments. Our evaluation reveals that current video world models remain limited in human-to-robot manipulation transfer: even leading models often fail in embodiment consistency, functional interaction, and task execution. H2R-Bench provides a systematic diagnostic framework for evaluating whether video world models can bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap and convert human manipulation observations into robot-centric training resources.

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