Daily Paper Cast

Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
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We publish 10 episodes every day to discuss 10 AI research papers. Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. The 10 papers are selected from the highest-voted ones on Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). 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, NLP, 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. 17H AGO

    ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data

    🤗 Upvotes: 81 | cs.CV Authors: Zhaoyang Liu, JingJing Xie, Zichen Ding, Zehao Li, Bowen Yang, Zhenyu Wu, Xuehui Wang, Qiushi Sun, Shi Liu, Weiyun Wang, Shenglong Ye, Qingyun Li, Zeyue Tian, Gen Luo, Xiangyu Yue, Biqing Qi, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Yu Qiao, Qifeng Chen, Wenhai Wang Title: ScaleCUA: Scaling Open-Source Computer Use Agents with Cross-Platform Data Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15221v1 Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled computer use agents (CUAs) that operate GUIs autonomously, showing great potential, yet progress is limited by the lack of large-scale, open-source computer use data and foundation models. In this work, we introduce ScaleCUA, a step toward scaling open-source CUAs. It offers a large-scale dataset spanning 6 operating systems and 3 task domains, built via a closed-loop pipeline uniting automated agents with human experts. Trained on this scaled-up data, ScaleCUA can operate seamlessly across platforms. Specifically, it delivers strong gains over baselines (+26.6 on WebArena-Lite-v2, +10.7 on ScreenSpot-Pro) and sets new state-of-the-art results (94.4% on MMBench-GUI L1-Hard, 60.6% on OSWorld-G, 47.4% on WebArena-Lite-v2). These findings underscore the power of data-driven scaling for general-purpose computer use agents. We will release data, models, and code to advance future research: https://github.com/OpenGVLab/ScaleCUA.

    23 min

  2. 17H AGO

    FlowRL: Matching Reward Distributions for LLM Reasoning

    🤗 Upvotes: 68 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Xuekai Zhu, Daixuan Cheng, Dinghuai Zhang, Hengli Li, Kaiyan Zhang, Che Jiang, Youbang Sun, Ermo Hua, Yuxin Zuo, Xingtai Lv, Qizheng Zhang, Lin Chen, Fanghao Shao, Bo Xue, Yunchong Song, Zhenjie Yang, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Bowen Zhou, Hongyuan Mei, Zhouhan Lin Title: FlowRL: Matching Reward Distributions for LLM Reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15207v1 Abstract: We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO and GRPO), which tend to over-optimize dominant reward signals while neglecting less frequent but valid reasoning paths, thus reducing diversity. In contrast, we transform scalar rewards into a normalized target distribution using a learnable partition function, and then minimize the reverse KL divergence between the policy and the target distribution. We implement this idea as a flow-balanced optimization method that promotes diverse exploration and generalizable reasoning trajectories. We conduct experiments on math and code reasoning tasks: FlowRL achieves a significant average improvement of $10.0\%$ over GRPO and $5.1\%$ over PPO on math benchmarks, and performs consistently better on code reasoning tasks. These results highlight reward distribution-matching as a key step toward efficient exploration and diverse reasoning in LLM reinforcement learning.

    20 min

  3. 17H AGO

    Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Delibration

    🤗 Upvotes: 45 | cs.CL Authors: Haoran Zhang, Yafu Li, Xuyang Hu, Dongrui Liu, Zhilin Wang, Bo Li, Yu Cheng Title: Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Delibration Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14760v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world scenarios, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These spec, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and evolve with changing preferences and requirements. We formalize this challenge as specification alignment, focusing on LLMs' ability to follow dynamic, scenario-specific spec from both behavioral and safety perspectives. To address this challenge, we propose Align3, a lightweight method that employs Test-Time Deliberation (TTD) with hierarchical reflection and revision to reason over the specification boundaries. We further present SpecBench, a unified benchmark for measuring specification alignment, covering 5 scenarios, 103 spec, and 1,500 prompts. Experiments on 15 reasoning and 18 instruct models with several TTD methods, including Self-Refine, TPO, and MoreThink, yield three key findings: (i) test-time deliberation enhances specification alignment; (ii) Align3 advances the safety-helpfulness trade-off frontier with minimal overhead; (iii) SpecBench effectively reveals alignment gaps. These results highlight the potential of test-time deliberation as an effective strategy for reasoning over the real-world specification boundaries.

    21 min

  4. 17H AGO

    Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variation

    🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.LG, cs.CL Authors: Yujun Zhou, Zhenwen Liang, Haolin Liu, Wenhao Yu, Kishan Panaganti, Linfeng Song, Dian Yu, Xiangliang Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu Title: Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15194v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), yet real-world deployment demands models that can self-improve without labels or external judges. Existing label-free methods, confidence minimization, self-consistency, or majority-vote objectives, stabilize learning but steadily shrink exploration, causing an entropy collapse: generations become shorter, less diverse, and brittle. Unlike prior approaches such as Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL), which primarily adapt models to the immediate unlabeled dataset at hand, our goal is broader: to enable general improvements without sacrificing the model's inherent exploration capacity and generalization ability, i.e., evolving. We formalize this issue and propose EVolution-Oriented and Label-free Reinforcement Learning (EVOL-RL), a simple rule that couples stability with variation under a label-free setting. EVOL-RL keeps the majority-voted answer as a stable anchor (selection) while adding a novelty-aware reward that favors responses whose reasoning differs from what has already been produced (variation), measured in semantic space. Implemented with GRPO, EVOL-RL also uses asymmetric clipping to preserve strong signals and an entropy regularizer to sustain search. This majority-for-selection + novelty-for-variation design prevents collapse, maintains longer and more informative chains of thought, and improves both pass@1 and pass@n. EVOL-RL consistently outperforms the majority-only TTRL baseline; e.g., training on label-free AIME24 lifts Qwen3-4B-Base AIME25 pass@1 from TTRL's 4.6% to 16.4%, and pass@16 from 18.5% to 37.9%. EVOL-RL not only prevents diversity collapse but also unlocks stronger generalization across domains (e.g., GPQA). Furthermore, we demonstrate that EVOL-RL also boosts performance in the RLVR setting, highlighting its broad applicability.

    23 min

  5. 17H AGO

    FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and Reasoning

    🤗 Upvotes: 22 | cs.LG, cs.AI Authors: Liang Hu, Jianpeng Jiao, Jiashuo Liu, Yanle Ren, Zhoufutu Wen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xuanliang Zhang, Xiang Gao, Tianci He, Fei Hu, Yali Liao, Zaiyuan Wang, Chenghao Yang, Qianyu Yang, Mingren Yin, Zhiyuan Zeng, Ge Zhang, Xinyi Zhang, Xiying Zhao, Zhenwei Zhu, Hongseok Namkoong, Wenhao Huang, Yuwen Tang Title: FinSearchComp: Towards a Realistic, Expert-Level Evaluation of Financial Search and Reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13160v1 Abstract: Search has emerged as core infrastructure for LLM-based agents and is widely viewed as critical on the path toward more general intelligence. Finance is a particularly demanding proving ground: analysts routinely conduct complex, multi-step searches over time-sensitive, domain-specific data, making it ideal for assessing both search proficiency and knowledge-grounded reasoning. Yet no existing open financial datasets evaluate data searching capability of end-to-end agents, largely because constructing realistic, complicated tasks requires deep financial expertise and time-sensitive data is hard to evaluate. We present FinSearchComp, the first fully open-source agent benchmark for realistic, open-domain financial search and reasoning. FinSearchComp comprises three tasks -- Time-Sensitive Data Fetching, Simple Historical Lookup, and Complex Historical Investigation -- closely reproduce real-world financial analyst workflows. To ensure difficulty and reliability, we engage 70 professional financial experts for annotation and implement a rigorous multi-stage quality-assurance pipeline. The benchmark includes 635 questions spanning global and Greater China markets, and we evaluate 21 models (products) on it. Grok 4 (web) tops the global subset, approaching expert-level accuracy. DouBao (web) leads on the Greater China subset. Experimental analyses show that equipping agents with web search and financial plugins substantially improves results on FinSearchComp, and the country origin of models and tools impact performance significantly.By aligning with realistic analyst tasks and providing end-to-end evaluation, FinSearchComp offers a professional, high-difficulty testbed for complex financial search and reasoning.

    26 min

  6. 17H AGO

    Understand Before You Generate: Self-Guided Training for Autoregressive Image Generation

    🤗 Upvotes: 22 | cs.CV Authors: Xiaoyu Yue, Zidong Wang, Yuqing Wang, Wenlong Zhang, Xihui Liu, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Luping Zhou Title: Understand Before You Generate: Self-Guided Training for Autoregressive Image Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15185v1 Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of high-quality visual representations in image generation and have highlighted the limitations of generative models in image understanding. As a generative paradigm originally designed for natural language, autoregressive models face similar challenges. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation into the mechanisms of applying the next-token prediction paradigm to the visual domain. We identify three key properties that hinder the learning of high-level visual semantics: local and conditional dependence, inter-step semantic inconsistency, and spatial invariance deficiency. We show that these issues can be effectively addressed by introducing self-supervised objectives during training, leading to a novel training framework, Self-guided Training for AutoRegressive models (ST-AR). Without relying on pre-trained representation models, ST-AR significantly enhances the image understanding ability of autoregressive models and leads to improved generation quality. Specifically, ST-AR brings approximately 42% FID improvement for LlamaGen-L and 49% FID improvement for LlamaGen-XL, while maintaining the same sampling strategy.

    21 min

  7. 1D AGO

    Hala Technical Report: Building Arabic-Centric Instruction & Translation Models at Scale

    🤗 Upvotes: 67 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Mohammad Zbeeb, Bernard Ghanem Title: Hala Technical Report: Building Arabic-Centric Instruction & Translation Models at Scale Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14008v1 Abstract: We present Hala, a family of Arabic-centric instruction and translation models built with our translate-and-tune pipeline. We first compress a strong AR$\leftrightarrow$EN teacher to FP8 (yielding $\sim$2$\times$ higher throughput with no quality loss) and use it to create high-fidelity bilingual supervision. A lightweight language model LFM2-1.2B is then fine-tuned on this data and used to translate high-quality English instruction sets into Arabic, producing a million-scale corpus tailored to instruction following. We train Hala models at 350M, 700M, 1.2B, and 9B parameters, and apply slerp merging to balance Arabic specialization with base-model strengths. On Arabic-centric benchmarks, Hala achieves state-of-the-art results within both the "nano" ($\leq$2B) and "small" (7-9B) categories, outperforming their bases. We release models, data, evaluation, and recipes to accelerate research in Arabic NLP.

    22 min

  8. 1D AGO

    SAIL-VL2 Technical Report

    🤗 Upvotes: 29 | cs.CV Authors: Weijie Yin, Yongjie Ye, Fangxun Shu, Yue Liao, Zijian Kang, Hongyuan Dong, Haiyang Yu, Dingkang Yang, Jiacong Wang, Han Wang, Wenzhuo Liu, Xiao Liang, Shuicheng Yan, Chao Feng Title: SAIL-VL2 Technical Report Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14033v1 Abstract: We introduce SAIL-VL2, an open-suite vision-language foundation model (LVM) for comprehensive multimodal understanding and reasoning. As the successor to SAIL-VL, SAIL-VL2 achieves state-of-the-art performance at the 2B and 8B parameter scales across diverse image and video benchmarks, demonstrating strong capabilities from fine-grained perception to complex reasoning. Three core innovations drive its effectiveness. First, a large-scale data curation pipeline with scoring and filtering strategies enhances both quality and distribution across captioning, OCR, QA, and video data, improving training efficiency. Second, a progressive training framework begins with a powerful pre-trained vision encoder (SAIL-ViT), advances through multimodal pre-training, and culminates in a thinking-fusion SFT-RL hybrid paradigm that systematically strengthens model capabilities. Third, architectural advances extend beyond dense LLMs to efficient sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designs. With these contributions, SAIL-VL2 demonstrates competitive performance across 106 datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as MMMU and MathVista. Furthermore, on the OpenCompass leaderboard, SAIL-VL2-2B ranks first among officially released open-source models under the 4B parameter scale, while serving as an efficient and extensible foundation for the open-source multimodal community.

    25 min
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About

We publish 10 episodes every day to discuss 10 AI research papers. Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. The 10 papers are selected from the highest-voted ones on Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). 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, NLP, 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

Information

  • Creator
    Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    1.2K
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
  • Show Website
    Daily Paper Cast

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