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Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge. However, existing evaluations largely measure whether skills improve aggregated task success, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: \textbf{When do skills help, why do they work, and where do they fail?} Through controlled experiments across various benchmarks, agent harnesses and LLMs, we isolate the effects of representation, outcome annotation, retrieval difficulty, and cross-framework robustness of skills. To further answer this question, we design a contrastive study that combines controlled quantitative experiments with paired trajectory analysis. We normalize 8,135 trial records from controlled experiments and retain 238 valid unique labels from 240 open-coded records. We consolidate these observations into a taxonomy of three high-level categories and twelve skill-use modes: skills work when noisy trajectories become procedural anchors that stabilize execution. Skills improve over Workflow Memory by 6.06 points in matched comparisons. Procedural anchoring accounts for 65.7\% of skill cases, versus 4.5\% for explicit knowledge injection, showing that skills stabilize action rather than inject missing facts. Retrieval is a separate bottleneck: as pools grow from 5 to 100, actual-use precision falls from 29.6\% to 3.3\%. Confusable distractors impair offline identification, yet downstream success remains stable; exact ground-truth invocation is neither sufficient nor necessary. Skills fail under brittle assumptions, incompatible contexts, or insufficient adaptation. These findings move evaluation beyond aggregate success rates and guide reliable self-evolving agents.

Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding. AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its hierarchy and state nodes store structured text, while a linked asset layer holds generated images, audio, and video. Typed edges preserve the relations between these text descriptions and assets in a form that agents can easily understand, query, and edit. The video reconstruction differences drive a textual-gradient optimization framework, which expresses evaluation feedback as natural-language update directions for Data-Independent Encoding Policy Pseudo-Training in the outer loop and optional Data-Dependent KG Representation Refinement in the test-time inner loop. Extensive experiments show that AVA-Encoder improves by 20.7 percentage points over the strongest external baseline. In the controlled policy-only setting, its pseudo-trained shot-level Agentic Video Encoder policy also outperforms a carefully human-tuned policy while using 74.3% fewer system-prompt tokens. We release the complete AVA-Encoder framework, a reliable agentic video reconstruction benchmark, and the first dataset of high-quality film KG representations.

A benchmark should deliver more than a scalar score: what makes an evaluation trustworthy is the reasoning that justifies the score. This is especially critical for world models, where judging a rollout requires understanding whether physics, causality, and world state evolve correctly. Humans spot such violations naturally, yet no existing benchmark automates this capability: metrics are computed brute-force, leaving no reasoning chain that can be examined or verified. We introduce HarnessEval-W, an agentified evaluation pipeline that brings the harness paradigm from the LLM ecosystem to world model benchmarking. Rather than applying a fixed rubric, HarnessEval-W interprets the context of each evaluation case, decomposes the evaluation question into measurable subproblems, and spawns specialized sub-agents, each equipped with tailored context and diagnostic tools to reason over its own subproblem. The parent agent then validates the gathered evidence and summarizes it into the final verdict. This hierarchical workflow turns every evaluation into a transparent evidence tree whose complete reasoning chain justifies the result. We apply HarnessEval-W to 18 representative world models over 330 evaluation cases. Its judgments closely align with human preferences while providing verifiable, fine-grained diagnoses of every generated rollout. We open-source the full pipeline as a live benchmark and invite the broad community to contribute to grow new skills and evaluation cases as world models evolve.

Constructing an interactive 3D open world from a user query is important. However, existing methods are primarily evaluated on idealized, simple queries, making it difficult to systematically analyze and compare how multimodal agents understand user intent, use 3D tools, and reason over textual and visual 3D world information. To this end, we propose VibeWorlding, a unified framework for benchmarking and training vibe worlding agents: a multimodal agent that can autonomously infer user intent, plan scene layout, invoke 3D tools, and reflect on the multimodal feedback in a multi-turn agent-environment interaction process. To achieve this, we first build VWE-BENCH, a benchmark of 2,616 high-quality 3D assets, 323 human-annotated seed 3D worlds, and 6,828 reverse-synthesized multimodal user queries, split into verified queries with ground-truth and unverified queries with carefully designed rubrics. Moreover, we develop VibeWorlding-Gym, a joint multimodal RL post-training framework that integrates (1) a sandbox environment unifying asset retrieval, editing, and image rendering as MCP tools, and (2) a rubric-based verifier that combines physical feasibility and intent fulfillment verification, supporting both fair model evaluation and scalable multimodal RL reward service. Our experiments show that current frontier MLLMs are far from solving the vibe worlding agent task, with even GPT-5.5 and Qwen3.8-Max reaching below 60% success rate, and trace the bottleneck to precise 3D world editing. We further find that RL training can ease this weakness and enable open-source MLLMs to even surpass closed-source frontiers: our VibeWorlder-8B is comparable to frontier MLLMs, while our flagship VibeWorlder-30B-A3B attains the best overall Pass@1 among all evaluated models.

Foundation GUI agents can automate complex digital tasks, but deployment is hindered by scarce and biased training data, ambiguous prompts, and unreliable execution. Routine workflows rely on user-specific tools and tacit conventions, so unstated instructions can produce arbitrary variations across runs. We present UI-Mate, a foundation GUI agent that integrates an environment-grounded training stack with in-context demonstration learning. UI-Mate makes three contributions: A Scalable Environment-Grounded Training Stack: A closed-loop data engine automates task generation, environment construction, rollout, filtering, capability balancing, SFT, and online RL across massively parallel environments via unified task-verifier bundles. In-Context Demonstration Learning: A mechanism that transforms multimodal demonstrations into flexible subtask-level workflows, follows relevant demonstrated steps, and re-plans from the live interface. OSWorkerBench Benchmark and Insights: A benchmark of 100 long-horizon office tasks across 41 applications that supports instruction-only and demonstration-guided evaluation. Its demonstration resources separate a 33-task self-demo setting, built from successful strong-agent rollouts of the same targets, from a 45-task variant-demo setting, built from human recordings of related but non-identical tasks. Experiments show that UI-Mate-27B sets a new open-weight state of the art on general computer-use benchmarks, scoring 77.0% on OSWorld-Verified and 66.2% on WindowsAgentArena. On OSWorkerBench, it reaches 41.0% strict success and 76.9% progress, outperforming its Qwen3.6-27B base by 17.7 and 24.5 points. On the 33-task self-demo subset, one demonstration raises strict success from 17.2% to 35.4% and progress from 67.9% to 81.1%, substantially improving long-horizon reliability. Project page: https://ui-mate.github.io.

This first release of Prior Labs in relational learning shows our continued commitment to open science. We open-source three pieces of software that we expect to accelerate research in the field towards meaningful real-world impact. We aim to steer further development based on feedback from, and in collaboration with, the community. Given the early stage of development, our α-release targets researchers and early-adopting practitioners. Over the past years, a variety of datasets and tasks for relational learning have emerged, but the community has not converged on a reliable, reproducible way to compare different methods on these tasks. Our α-release, RelArena-α, provides a unified framework for running and comparing baselines on RelBench v1 by standardizing data loading, evaluation protocols, tuning regimes, and support for systems with custom tuning, inspired by established tabular benchmarks such as TabArena. We plan to work with the research community to further develop RelArena-α into a catalyst for progress in the relational learning community. We release the initial version of TabPFN-Rel, a purpose-built relational harness for TabPFN-3. Currently ranked first among models on RelArena-α, TabPFN-Rel makes key improvements upon RDBLearn. Beyond its ranking, TabPFN-Rel serves as a strong baseline, adding to the growing evidence that flattening a relational database into a single table remains competitive with specialized relational architectures on real-world tasks. To facilitate adoption of relational learning methods in research and industry, we release an initial α-version of our Relational Predictive Interface, RPI, an open-source, model-agnostic interface that enables early adopters to easily define problems on new databases and apply any model implemented in RelArena-α, including TabPFN-Rel, to these problems.

Recent video generators can fabricate realistic depictions of wars, disasters, public emergencies, and other real-world crises, creating substantial risks of misinformation. Existing benchmarks, however, provide limited evidence on detector and generator behavior in such settings, including how detectability varies with generation conditions, how people perceive generated videos, and whether detectors remain reliable during social dissemination. To address this gap, we introduce RA-Bench, a benchmark for AI-generated video detection that uses Real videos as Anchors. RA-Bench contains 17,886 videos, comprising 1,830 real-video anchors across 10 social-risk categories and 16,056 generated clips from four open-source and five closed-source generators. Based on RA-Bench, we organize our evaluation along three dimensions. We first assess detector generalization across seven traditional detectors, ten zero-shot multimodal models under three review settings, and two MLLMs specifically fine-tuned on AI-generated video detection. Across these methods, none of the three detector families generalizes consistently across RA-Bench instances. We then examine how detectability varies with generation quality, conditioning information, and sampling seeds. These analyses show that generation properties affect detector families differently, while source-level detection patterns remain stable across seeds. Finally, we study human authenticity judgments and detector reliability during social dissemination. We find that videos that mislead people are also difficult for current detectors, and that social dissemination makes detection harder. Together, these findings show that current methods struggle to detect realistic AI-generated videos, highlighting the need for detectors robust to evolving video generators.

Autonomous agents are increasingly capable of improving models, systems, and other technical artifacts through long-horizon experimentation. To understand the current state of this capability, however, evaluation must go beyond final scores, which neither reveal where progress is gained or lost nor indicate whether accumulated experience improves later decisions. We therefore present a systematic evaluation of seven frontier models on 36 long-horizon tasks based on a new framework that uses rule-based metrics to characterize within-run behavior through Solution Framing, Execution, and Feedback Control and controlled comparisons to assess experience reuse within and across tasks. The results show that current agents operate more like engineering optimizers than fully autonomous researchers: they can formulate and implement practical solutions, but their performance varies substantially across runs, their strongest solutions mainly adapt or combine established techniques, and genuine methodological novelty remains rare. Detailed analysis reveals that observed performance is shaped by multiple factors, including distinct process bottlenecks behind similar final outcomes, experience reuse that can help or mislead subsequent decisions, and harness designs that affect performance stability. These findings suggest concrete directions for improving model training, inference-time strategies, experience management, and harness design.

Apollo did not reach the Moon merely because its engineers could solve difficult equations. It succeeded by turning a distant ambition into a mission architecture of explicit objectives, simulation, verification, and repeated correction. AI now faces a similar transition: frontier models can solve difficult tasks once the problem, tools, and success criteria are specified, yet consequential real-world challenges rarely arrive in an executable or verifiable form. We introduce Apodex Discovery, a framework for building and evaluating discoverative AI through the heavy-duty solver, a system comprising a foundation model, harness, tools, and control policies that pursues extended, stateful, verifiable investigations. It has three core components. First, a problem-scouting process surveyed 561 industries across 16 sectors, assembled 423 high-value real-world problems, and selected 20 for the initial release. Second, a common environment-task-episode abstraction provides data, tools, constraints, feedback, trajectory recording, and verification of intermediate artifacts and final submissions. Third, HDS6 evaluates Tools, Repair, Alternatives, Coherence, Evidence, and Scope independently of final-task success. In AAV capsid design, Apodex surpassed the published state of the art by 7% across viability, tropism, structure prediction, and generative design. In drug repurposing and reformulation, a task-specific biomedical environment improved the mean normalized prediction score of GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6-sol by 2.5 and 7.6 points over the same closed-book backbone. Controlled ablations show that the fixed TRACES episode interface enables attribution of performance differences to specific solver components. Apodex Discovery moves AI evaluation beyond predefined benchmarks toward verifiable investigations aimed at genuine discovery.

Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.

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.

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.

Bloomberg : Sources: AI chip startup Fractile is in talks to raise ~$600M at a $6.5B pre-money valuation, up from ~$1B in May, and has an initial ~$250M deal with Anthropic —  Fractile, a startup developing chips tailored for artificial intelligence use that has a deal to supply Anthropic PBC …

Erin Griffith / New York Times : Stripe agrees to acquire New York-based OpenRouter; a source says Stripe is paying $7.5B, with $1.5B going to the startup's founders and $6B to its investors —  The deal is significant for the artificial intelligence industry, uniting Stripe's payments business with OpenRouter's helping businesses direct their spending on A.I. models.

The Information : Sources: Anthropic has been preparing to give its co-founders shares with extra voting power to help insulate them from outside pressure, ahead of a planned IPO —  Anthropic has been preparing to give CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders a class of stock with extra voting power to help insulate …

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch : African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts —  African defense tech company Terra Industries on Monday announced an additional $18 million in funding, bringing its seed round to $52 million.

Antoine Tardif / Unite.AI : Pathway, which is developing AI models based on what it calls its “Post-Transformer” BDH architecture, raised a $30M seed at a $500M valuation —  AI research company Pathway has secured additional funding at a $500 million valuation, bringing its total seed financing to $30 million …

Giacomo Lee / SDxCentral : Point2 Technology, which develops RF-based data center interconnection tech, raised a $136M Series B from LB Investment, Arm, Maverick Silicon, and others —  Data center interconnect disruptor Point2 Technology celebrates Series B success  —  AI data center interconnect specialist Point2 …

Frederic Lardinois / The New Stack : OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns recent computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use —  OpenAI's opt-in Computer History captures a local timeline of Mac activity so ChatGPT Work can recover context across selected apps and sites.

Reuters : Sources: Vantage Data Centers, a major hyperscale developer, is exploring options including a sale or an IPO at a valuation of about $100B as soon as next year —  Vantage Data Centers, a major hyperscale developer and operator, is exploring options including an IPO or sale as soon as next year …

Tulsee Doshi / Google : Google unveils Gemini 3.7 Flash, its “most intelligent workhorse model” for coding and agents, pricing it at $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens at launch —  Our most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents.  —  Senior Director, Product Management, on behalf of the Gemini team

Yueqi Yang / The Information : Sources: Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise $750M+ co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management at a $40B valuation; Kalshi was valued at $22B in May —  Kalshi, the biggest prediction market, is in advanced talks to raise at least $750 million in a new financing round at a $40 billion valuation …

Kenrick Cai / Reuters : Sources detail moves behind Google's AI reshuffle; Sergey Brin urged key staff to go all in on Gemini, and some teams shifted from DeepMind to corporate Google —  Google co-founder Sergey Brin in recent months has urged key AI staff to go all in on the company's Gemini model as parent Alphabet …

Business Insider : Sources: former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil is aiming to raise $150M for a new AI science startup, seeking a valuation of at least $750M —  Kevin Weil, the former chief product officer of OpenAI, has sought a valuation of at least $750 million for a new AI science startup …

8 月 3 日 9:32 pm，一艘搁浅船只在阿拉斯加 Point Highland 附近发出求助信号。海岸警卫队确认该船未遇险后发布了海上援助请求广播，呼吁附近海员提供自愿帮助。这意味着附近船只没有法律义务提供援助。如果海岸警卫队认定该搁浅船只遇险，那么根据国际海事法和美国法律，附近船只的船长有义务提供援助。扎克伯格的超级游轮 Launchpad 当时就在附近，但它没有参与自愿营救，而是减速让身后的一艘船 Wilderness Legacy 驶过它去营救搁浅船只。Wilderness Legacy 将船拖至 Farragut Bay，为其补充了燃料，这艘船上有两名女子、一名儿童和一只狗。扎克伯格发言人称当时扎克伯格及其家人并不在游轮上，称船员未及时收听救援信息，当他们查看到救援信息时救援行动已经开始了。