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. 10 小時前

    DeepSearch: Overcome the Bottleneck of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Monte Carlo Tree Search

    🤗 Upvotes: 100 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Fang Wu, Weihao Xuan, Heli Qi, Ximing Lu, Aaron Tu, Li Erran Li, Yejin Choi Title: DeepSearch: Overcome the Bottleneck of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Monte Carlo Tree Search Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25454v2 Abstract: Although RLVR has become an essential component for developing advanced reasoning skills in LLMs, contemporary studies have documented training plateaus that emerge following thousands of optimization steps, demonstrating notable decreases in performance gains despite increased computational investment. This limitation stems from the sparse exploration patterns inherent in current RLVR practices, where models rely on limited rollouts that often miss critical reasoning paths and fail to provide systematic coverage of the solution space. We present DeepSearch, a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search directly into RLVR training. In contrast to existing methods that rely on tree search only at inference, DeepSearch embeds structured search into the training loop, enabling systematic exploration and fine-grained credit assignment across reasoning steps. Through training-time exploration, DeepSearch addresses the fundamental bottleneck of insufficient exploration, which leads to diminishing performance improvements over prolonged training steps. Our contributions include: (1) a global frontier selection strategy that prioritizes promising nodes across the search tree, (2) selection with entropy-based guidance that identifies confident paths for supervision, and (3) adaptive replay buffer training with solution caching for efficiency. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that DeepSearch achieves 62.95% average accuracy and establishes a new state-of-the-art for 1.5B reasoning models - using 5.7x fewer GPU hours than extended training approaches. These results highlight the importance of strategic exploration over brute-force scaling and demonstrate the promise of algorithmic innovation for advancing RLVR methodologies. DeepSearch establishes a new direction for scaling reasoning capabilities through systematic search rather than prolonged computation.

    24 分鐘
  2. 10 小時前

    GEM: A Gym for Agentic LLMs

    🤗 Upvotes: 53 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Zichen Liu, Anya Sims, Keyu Duan, Changyu Chen, Simon Yu, Xiangxin Zhou, Haotian Xu, Shaopan Xiong, Bo Liu, Chenmien Tan, Chuen Yang Beh, Weixun Wang, Hao Zhu, Weiyan Shi, Diyi Yang, Michael Shieh, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee, Min Lin Title: GEM: A Gym for Agentic LLMs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01051v1 Abstract: The training paradigm for large language models (LLMs) is moving from static datasets to experience-based learning, where agents acquire skills via interacting with complex environments. To facilitate this transition we introduce GEM (General Experience Maker), an open-source environment simulator designed for the age of LLMs. Analogous to OpenAI-Gym for traditional reinforcement learning (RL), GEM provides a standardized framework for the environment-agent interface, including asynchronous vectorized execution for high throughput, and flexible wrappers for easy extensibility. GEM also features a diverse suite of environments, robust integrated tools, and single-file example scripts demonstrating using GEM with five popular RL training frameworks. Along with this, we also provide a set of baselines across 24 environments using REINFORCE with Return Batch Normalization (ReBN), which -- unlike GRPO -- is compatible with the full RL setting of dense per-turn rewards and offers better credit assignment. We further conduct apple-to-apple benchmarking of PPO, GRPO and REINFORCE in both single- and multi-turn settings using GEM to shed light on the algorithmic designs. Lastly, GEM also functions as a convenient evaluation toolkit besides a training environment. We hope this framework can help accelerate future agentic LLM research.

    26 分鐘
  3. 10 小時前

    VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators

    🤗 Upvotes: 52 | cs.RO, cs.CV Authors: Hengtao Li, Pengxiang Ding, Runze Suo, Yihao Wang, Zirui Ge, Dongyuan Zang, Kexian Yu, Mingyang Sun, Hongyin Zhang, Donglin Wang, Weihua Su Title: VLA-RFT: Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Verified Rewards in World Simulators Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00406v1 Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues yet typically demands costly real-world interactions or suffers from sim-to-real gaps. We introduce VLA-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that leverages a data-driven world model as a controllable simulator. Trained from real interaction data, the simulator predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions, allowing policy rollouts with dense, trajectory-level rewards derived from goal-achieving references. This design delivers an efficient and action-aligned learning signal, drastically lowering sample requirements. With fewer than 400 fine-tuning steps, VLA-RFT surpasses strong supervised baselines and achieves greater efficiency than simulator-based RL. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness under perturbed conditions, sustaining stable task execution. Our results establish world-model-based RFT as a practical post-training paradigm to enhance the generalization and robustness of VLA models. For more details, please refer to https://vla-rft.github.io/.

    27 分鐘
  4. 10 小時前

    Knapsack RL: Unlocking Exploration of LLMs via Optimizing Budget Allocation

    🤗 Upvotes: 32 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Ziniu Li, Congliang Chen, Tianyun Yang, Tian Ding, Ruoyu Sun, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Zhi-Quan Luo Title: Knapsack RL: Unlocking Exploration of LLMs via Optimizing Budget Allocation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25849v1 Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can self-improve through reinforcement learning, where they generate trajectories to explore and discover better solutions. However, this exploration process is computationally expensive, often forcing current methods to assign limited exploration budgets to each task. This uniform allocation creates problematic edge cases: easy tasks consistently succeed while difficult tasks consistently fail, both producing zero gradients during training updates for the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We address this problem from the lens of exploration budget allocation. Viewing each task's exploration as an "item" with a distinct "value" and "cost", we establish a connection to the classical knapsack problem. This formulation allows us to derive an optimal assignment rule that adaptively distributes resources based on the model's current learning status. When applied to GRPO, our method increases the effective ratio of non-zero policy gradients by 20-40% during training. Acting as a computational "free lunch", our approach could reallocate exploration budgets from tasks where learning is saturated to those where it is most impactful. This enables significantly larger budgets (e.g., 93 rollouts) for especially challenging problems, which would be computationally prohibitive under a uniform allocation. These improvements translate to meaningful gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with average improvements of 2-4 points and peak gains of 9 points on specific tasks. Notably, achieving comparable performance with traditional homogeneous allocation would require about 2x the computational resources.

    25 分鐘
  5. 10 小時前

    SINQ: Sinkhorn-Normalized Quantization for Calibration-Free Low-Precision LLM Weights

    🤗 Upvotes: 25 | cs.LG Authors: Lorenz K. Müller, Philippe Bich, Jiawei Zhuang, Ahmet Çelik, Luca Benfenati, Lukas Cavigelli Title: SINQ: Sinkhorn-Normalized Quantization for Calibration-Free Low-Precision LLM Weights Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22944v2 Abstract: Post-training quantization has emerged as the most widely used strategy for deploying large language models at low precision. Still, current methods show perplexity degradation at bit-widths less than or equal to 4, partly because representing outliers causes precision issues in parameters that share the same scales as these outliers. This problem is especially pronounced for calibration-free, uniform quantization methods. We introduce SINQ to augment existing post-training quantizers with an additional second-axis scale factor and a fast Sinkhorn-Knopp-style algorithm that finds scales to normalize per-row and per-column variances, thereby minimizing a novel per-matrix proxy target for quantization: the matrix imbalance. Our method has no interactions between layers and can be trivially applied to new architectures to quantize any linear layers. We evaluate our method on the Qwen3 model family and DeepSeek-V2.5. SINQ improves WikiText2 and C4 perplexity significantly against uncalibrated uniform quantization baselines and can be further enhanced by combining it with calibration and non-uniform quantization levels. Code to reproduce the results of this work and to easily quantize models using SINQ is available at https://github.com/huawei-csl/SINQ.

    24 分鐘
  6. 10 小時前

    ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents

    🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Minki Kang, Wei-Ning Chen, Dongge Han, Huseyin A. Inan, Lukas Wutschitz, Yanzhi Chen, Robert Sim, Saravan Rajmohan Title: ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00615v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents in dynamic, real-world environments, where success requires both reasoning and effective tool use. A central challenge for agentic tasks is the growing context length, as agents must accumulate long histories of actions and observations. This expansion raises costs and reduces efficiency in long-horizon tasks, yet prior work on context compression has mostly focused on single-step tasks or narrow applications. We introduce Agent Context Optimization (ACON), a unified framework that optimally compresses both environment observations and interaction histories into concise yet informative condensations. ACON leverages compression guideline optimization in natural language space: given paired trajectories where full context succeeds but compressed context fails, capable LLMs analyze the causes of failure, and the compression guideline is updated accordingly. Furthermore, we propose distilling the optimized LLM compressor into smaller models to reduce the overhead of the additional module. Experiments on AppWorld, OfficeBench, and Multi-objective QA show that ACON reduces memory usage by 26-54% (peak tokens) while largely preserving task performance, preserves over 95% of accuracy when distilled into smaller compressors, and enhances smaller LMs as long-horizon agents with up to 46% performance improvement.

    25 分鐘
  7. 1 天前

    MCPMark: A Benchmark for Stress-Testing Realistic and Comprehensive MCP Use

    🤗 Upvotes: 124 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Zijian Wu, Xiangyan Liu, Xinyuan Zhang, Lingjun Chen, Fanqing Meng, Lingxiao Du, Yiran Zhao, Fanshi Zhang, Yaoqi Ye, Jiawei Wang, Zirui Wang, Jinjie Ni, Yufan Yang, Arvin Xu, Michael Qizhe Shieh Title: MCPMark: A Benchmark for Stress-Testing Realistic and Comprehensive MCP Use Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24002v1 Abstract: MCP standardizes how LLMs interact with external systems, forming the foundation for general agents. However, existing MCP benchmarks remain narrow in scope: they focus on read-heavy tasks or tasks with limited interaction depth, and fail to capture the complexity and realism of real-world workflows. To address this gap, we propose MCPMark, a benchmark designed to evaluate MCP use in a more realistic and comprehensive manner. It consists of $127$ high-quality tasks collaboratively created by domain experts and AI agents. Each task begins with a curated initial state and includes a programmatic script for automatic verification. These tasks demand richer and more diverse interactions with the environment, involving a broad range of create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of cutting-edge LLMs using a minimal agent framework that operates in a tool-calling loop. Empirical results show that the best-performing model, gpt-5-medium, reaches only $52.56$\% pass@1 and $33.86$\% pass^4, while other widely regarded strong models, including claude-sonnet-4 and o3, fall below $30$\% pass@1 and $15$\% pass^4. On average, LLMs require $16.2$ execution turns and $17.4$ tool calls per task, significantly surpassing those in previous MCP benchmarks and highlighting the stress-testing nature of MCPMark.

    25 分鐘

簡介

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

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