Bing Cheng, Yiran Mao, Zewei Ye, Yifan Jin, Xinyi Chen, Ruifeng Tu, Shuhuai Wang, Tao Lin 等 13 位作者
General-purpose dexterous manipulation requires policies to transfer knowledge from related tasks to new tasks with only a few target demonstrations. Existing benchmarks often provide too many target demonstrations and leave the differences between source and target tasks uncontrolled. As a result, they cannot clearly distinguish knowledge transfer from task memorization. Our key insight is the Core-Gen principle. Core tasks are related tasks that share a functional interaction and provide source knowledge, while a Gen task is a novel target within the same functional family that has only a few demonstrations. This setup tests whether a policy can reuse functional interaction knowledge. Based on this principle, we propose Evo-DexBench, which controls both source-task relatedness and target-task exposure. It comprises 30 tasks in six functional families, three everyday scenes per task, and 1,248 multimodal demonstrations collected via VR teleoperation with simulated Shadow Hands equipped with 123 taxels. Experiments show that, among six representative policies, even the best-performing method achieves an average success rate of only 24.4%, highlighting the challenges existing methods face in transferring functional interaction knowledge. Further analysis shows that, across the two tasks, joint Core + Gen training improves performance by 12% and 38%, respectively, over training on Core followed by fine-tuning on Gen, indicating that joint training makes better use of Core knowledge. With matched Core data, 8 Gen demonstrations achieve performance comparable to training on 16--32 Gen demonstrations alone. On all three tested Gen targets, functionally matched Core data yields greater gains in success rate than mismatched data. We release the Evo-DexBench dataset and benchmark to support the evaluation of dexterous manipulation policies' generalization across related tasks.
Key-value (KV) cache quantization is widely used to reduce LLM inference memory, yet existing evaluations focus only on perplexity and accuracy without assessing the safety impact. In this study, we explore alignment preservation under KV cache quantization. Across eleven instruction-tuned models (3.8B-72B) and five benchmarks (1,894 prompts), we find that low-bit quantization can silently destroy safety alignment: Mistral-7B loses 15.2% of its refusals at only 1.03x perplexity, and no universal safe bit-width exists, with sharp model-specific phase transitions invisible to standard metrics. We identify that the root cause is geometric: safety features occupy a low-dimensional activation subspace $10^2$-$10^3\times$ more vulnerable to quantization noise than the full representation space perplexity averages over. We propose Per-Channel Reduction (PCR), a diagnostic that classifies each model into one of three mechanistic failure modes: outlier-crushes-safety, where safety lives in non-outlier channels collaterally damaged by outlier-driven scale factors; outlier-as-safety, where safety overlaps outlier channels and finer granularity cannot rescue it; and multi-layer dilution, where safety is distributed across many layers and per-layer fixes fail. PCR predicts the correct mitigation direction on all nine primary models and one held-out model from an independent family using 20 calibration prompts. PCR generalizes across unseen prompts, models, and quantizer families, including production quantizers (KIVI: up to 97.2% recovery) and rotation-based quantization (QuaRot-style Hadamard), succeeding where attention-based allocation methods fail. The resulting training-free protocol, requiring ~35 GPU-minutes, recovers up to 97% of lost alignment at under 1% latency and minimal memory overhead, addressing vulnerabilities confirmed in production vLLM serving with FP8 KV cache on NVIDIA GPUs.
Kexin Ding, Yang Zhou, Can Jin, Feng Tong, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas
The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey
Zhimu Zhou, Yanpeng Zhao, Qiuyu Liao, Bo Zhao, Xiaojian Ma
Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.
With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hammer: Robust Function-Calling for On-Device Language Models via Function Masking
Qiqiang Lin, Muning Wen, Qiuying Peng, Guanyu Nie, Junwei Liao, Jun Wang, Xiaoyun Mo, Jiamu Zhou 等 12 位作者
AI 速览：提出 Hammer 系列端侧函数调用基础模型，通过增强数据集和函数掩码技术提升对无关函数的敏感性和跨基准泛化能力。
Large language models have demonstrated impressive value in performing as autonomous agents when equipped with external tools and API calls. Nonetheless, effectively harnessing their potential for executing complex tasks crucially relies on enhancements in their function calling capabilities. This paper identifies a critical gap in existing function calling models, where performance varies significantly across benchmarks, often due to being misled by specific naming conventions. To address such an issue, we introduce Hammer, a novel family of foundation models specifically engineered for on-device function calling. Hammer employs an augmented dataset that enhances models' sensitivity to irrelevant functions and incorporates function masking techniques to minimize misleading. Our empirical evaluations reveal that Hammer not only outperforms larger models but also demonstrates robust generalization across diverse benchmarks, achieving sota results. Our open source contributions include a specialized dataset for irrelevance detection, a tuning framework for enhanced generalization, and the Hammer models, establishing a new standard for function calling performance.