Daily Paper Cast

Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com Creator: Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/ Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236 Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art

  1. 16H AGO

    When Vision Speaks for Sound

    🤗 Upvotes: 89 | cs.CV, cs.SD Authors: Xiaofei Wen, Wenjie Jacky Mo, Xingyu Fu, Rui Cai, Tinghui Zhu, Wendi Li, Yanan Xie, Muhao Chen, Peng Qi Title: When Vision Speaks for Sound Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16403v1 Abstract: Despite rapid progress in video-capable MLLMs, we find that their apparent audio understanding in videos is often vision-driven: models rely on visual cues to infer or hallucinate acoustic information, rather than verifying the audio stream. This issue appears across both state-of-the-art open-source omni models and leading closed-source models from providers such as Google and OpenAI. We characterize this failure mode as an audio-visual Clever Hans effect, in which models appear (falsely) audio-grounded, but actually exploit visual-acoustic correlations without verifying whether the audio and visual streams are truly aligned. To systematically study this behavior, we introduce Thud, an intervention-driven probing framework based on three counterfactual audio edits: Shift, which tests temporal synchronization; Mute, which tests sound existence; and Swap, which tests audio-visual consistency. Beyond diagnosis, we further study a two-stage alignment recipe: intervention-derived preference pairs teach audio verification, while event-level general video preferences regularize the model against over-specialization. Our best 10K-sample recipe improves average performance across the three intervention dimensions by 28 percentage points, while slightly improving performance on general video and audio-visual QA benchmarks.

    23 min
  2. 16H AGO

    Anti-Self-Distillation for Reasoning RL via Pointwise Mutual Information

    🤗 Upvotes: 71 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Guobin Shen, Xiang Cheng, Chenxiao Zhao, Lei Huang, Jindong Li, Dongcheng Zhao, Xing Yu Title: Anti-Self-Distillation for Reasoning RL via Pointwise Mutual Information Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11609v1 Abstract: On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger external teacher. Yet in math reasoning the gains are inconsistent, even when the same approach succeeds elsewhere. A pointwise mutual information analysis traces the failure to the privileged context itself: it inflates the teacher's confidence on tokens already implied by the solution (structural connectives, verifiable claims) and deflates it on deliberation tokens ("Wait", "Let", "Maybe") that drive multi-step search. We propose Anti-Self-Distillation (AntiSD), which ascends a divergence between student and teacher rather than descending it: this reverses the per-token sign and yields a naturally bounded advantage in one step. An entropy-triggered gate disables the term once the teacher entropy collapses, completing a drop-in replacement for default self-distillation. Across five models from 4B to 30B parameters on math reasoning benchmarks, AntiSD reaches the GRPO baseline's accuracy in 2 to 10x fewer training steps and improves final accuracy by up to 11.5 points. AntiSD opens a path to scalable self-improvement, where a language model bootstraps its own reasoning through its training signal.

    23 min
  3. 16H AGO

    AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

    🤗 Upvotes: 53 | cs.AI Authors: Jiaqi Liu, Shi Qiu, Mairui Li, Bingzhou Li, Haonian Ji, Siwei Han, Xinyu Ye, Peng Xia, Zihan Dong, Congyu Zhang, Letian Zhang, Guiming Chen, Haoqin Tu, Xinyu Yang, Lu Feng, Xujiang Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Jiawei Zhou, Xiao Wang, Weitong Zhang, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Jieru Mei, Hongliang Fei, Jiaheng Zhang, Linjie Li, Linjun Zhang, Yuyin Zhou, Sheng Wang, Caiming Xiong, James Zou, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Mingyu Ding, Huaxiu Yao Title: AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20025v1 Abstract: Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

    24 min
  4. 16H AGO

    OpenComputer: Verifiable Software Worlds for Computer-Use Agents

    🤗 Upvotes: 52 | cs.AI, cs.SE Authors: Jinbiao Wei, Qianran Ma, Yilun Zhao, Xiao Zhou, Kangqi Ni, Guo Gan, Arman Cohan Title: OpenComputer: Verifiable Software Worlds for Computer-Use Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19769v1 Abstract: We present OpenComputer, a verifier-grounded framework for constructing verifiable software worlds for computer-use agents. OpenComputer integrates four components: (1) app-specific state verifiers that expose structured inspection endpoints over real applications, (2) a self-evolving verification layer that improves verifier reliability using execution-grounded feedback, (3) a task-generation pipeline that synthesizes realistic and machine-checkable desktop tasks, and (4) an evaluation harness that records full trajectories and computes auditable partial-credit rewards. In its current form, OpenComputer covers 33 desktop applications and 1,000 finalized tasks spanning browsers, office tools, creative software, development environments, file managers, and communication applications. Experiments show that OpenComputer's hard-coded verifiers align more closely with human adjudication than LLM-as-judge evaluation, especially when success depends on fine-grained application state. Frontier agents struggle with end-to-end completion despite partial progress, and open-source models exhibit sharp drops from their OSWorld-Verified scores, exposing a persistent gap in robust computer automation.

    25 min
  5. 16H AGO

    GoLongRL: Capability-Oriented Long Context Reinforcement Learning with Multitask Alignment

    🤗 Upvotes: 51 | cs.CL Authors: Minxuan Lv, Tiehua Mei, Tanlong Du, Junmin Chen, Zhenpeng Su, Ziyang Chen, Ziqi Wang, Zhennan Wu, Ruotong Pan, jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Han Li Title: GoLongRL: Capability-Oriented Long Context Reinforcement Learning with Multitask Alignment Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19577v1 Abstract: We present GoLongRL, a fully open-source, capability-oriented post-training recipe for long-context reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing long-context RL methods often treat data construction as a matter of designing increasingly complex retrieval paths, leading to homogeneous task coverage and reward formulations that inadequately reflect practical long-context requirements. Our work offers two contributions. (1) Capability-oriented data construction with full open release. We openly release a dataset of 23K RLVR samples, the complete construction pipeline, and all training code. Guided by a taxonomy of long-context capabilities, the dataset spans 9 task types, each paired with its natural evaluation metric. It comprises curated open-source samples from established corpora and synthetic samples whose QA pairs are generated from real source documents such as books, academic papers, and multi-turn dialogues. Under the same vanilla GRPO setup, our dataset alone outperforms the closed-source QwenLong-L1.5 dataset. Moreover, our Qwen3-30B-A3B model trained on this data delivers long-context performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507, suggesting that broader coverage and greater reward diversity substantially benefit long-context capability improvement. (2) TMN-Reweight for heterogeneous multitask optimization. To address optimization challenges from heterogeneous rewards, we propose TMN-Reweight, which combines task-level mean normalization for cross-task reward scale alignment with difficulty-adaptive weighting for more reliable advantage estimation. TMN-Reweight further improves average performance over vanilla GRPO, with general capabilities preserved or improved across reported evaluations.

    25 min
  6. 16H AGO

    Process Rewards with Learned Reliability

    🤗 Upvotes: 46 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Jinyuan Li, Langlin Huang, Chengsong Huang, Shaoyang Xu, Donghong Cai, Yuyi Yang, Wenxuan Zhang, Jiaxin Huang Title: Process Rewards with Learned Reliability Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15529v1 Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide step-level feedback for reasoning, but current PRMs usually output only a single reward score for each step. Downstream methods must therefore treat imperfect step-level reward predictions as reliable decision signals, with no indication of when these predictions should be trusted. We propose BetaPRM, a distributional PRM that predicts both a step-level success probability and the reliability of that prediction. Given step-success supervision from Monte Carlo continuations, BetaPRM learns a Beta belief that explains the observed number of successful continuations through a Beta-Binomial likelihood, rather than regressing to the finite-sample success ratio as a point target. This learned reliability signal indicates when a step reward should be trusted, enabling downstream applications to distinguish reliable rewards from uncertain ones. As one application, we introduce Adaptive Computation Allocation (ACA) for PRM-guided Best-of-N reasoning. ACA uses the learned reliability signal to stop when a high-reward solution is reliable and to spend additional computation on uncertain candidate prefixes. Experiments across four backbones and four reasoning benchmarks show that BetaPRM improves PRM-guided Best-of-N selection while preserving standard step-level error detection. Built on this signal, ACA improves the accuracy--token tradeoff over fixed-budget Best-of-16, reducing token usage by up to 33.57% while improving final-answer accuracy.

    23 min
  7. 16H AGO

    EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL

    🤗 Upvotes: 41 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Minrui Xu, Zilin Wang, Mengyi DENG, Zhiwei Li, Zhicheng Yang, Xiao Zhu, Yinhong Liu, Boyu Zhu, Baiyu Huang, Chao Chen, Heyuan Deng, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xingshan Zeng, Zhijiang Guo Title: EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18703v1 Abstract: Equipping LLMs with tool-use capabilities via Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) is bottlenecked by two challenges: the lack of scalable, robust execution environments and the scarcity of realistic training data that captures implicit human reasoning. Existing approaches depend on costly real-world APIs, hallucination-prone LLM simulators, or synthetic environments that are often single-turn or depend on pre-collected documents. Moreover, synthetic trajectories are frequently over-specified, resembling instruction sequences rather than natural human intents, reducing their effectiveness for RL training. We introduce EnvFactory, a fully automated framework that addresses both challenges. EnvFactory autonomously explores and verifies stateful, executable tool environments from authentic resources, and synthesizes natural multi-turn trajectories through topology-aware sampling and calibrated refinement, producing grounded queries with implicit intents. Using only 85 verified environments across 7 domains, EnvFactory generates 2,575 SFT and RL trajectories. Despite using significantly fewer environments than prior work, which are often 5 times more, EnvFactory achieves superior training efficiency and downstream performance, improving Qwen3-series models by up to +15% on BFCLv3, +8.6% on MCP-Atlas, and +6% on conversational benchmarks including $τ^2$-Bench and VitaBench. By fully automating both environment construction and trajectory synthesis, EnvFactory provides a scalable, extensible, and robust foundation for Agentic RL.

    27 min

About

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com Creator: Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/ Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236 Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art