Daily Paper Cast

🤗 Upvotes: 73 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Zhenda Xie, Yixuan Wei, Huanqi Cao, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Jiashi Li, Damai Dai, Huazuo Gao, Jiang Chang, Liang Zhao, Shangyan Zhou, Zhean Xu, Zhengyan Zhang, Wangding Zeng, Shengding Hu, Yuqing Wang, Jingyang Yuan, Lean Wang, Wenfeng Liang Title: mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24880v1 Abstract: Recently, studies exemplified by Hyper-Connections (HC) have extended the ubiquitous residual connection paradigm established over the past decade by expanding the residual stream width and diversifying connectivity patterns. While yielding substantial performance gains, this diversification fundamentally compromises the identity mapping property intrinsic to the residual connection, which causes severe training instability and restricted scalability, and additionally incurs notable memory access overhead. To address these challenges, we propose Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), a general framework that projects the residual connection space of HC onto a specific manifold to restore the identity mapping property, while incorporating rigorous infrastructure optimization to ensure efficiency. Empirical experiments demonstrate that mHC is effective for training at scale, offering tangible performance improvements and superior scalability. We anticipate that mHC, as a flexible and practical extension of HC, will contribute to a deeper understanding of topological architecture design and suggest promising directions for the evolution of foundational models.

🤗 Upvotes: 45 | cs.CL Authors: Junru Lu, Jiarui Qin, Lingfeng Qiao, Yinghui Li, Xinyi Dai, Bo Ke, Jianfeng He, Ruizhi Qiao, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Yunsheng Wu, Yinsong Liu, Shuangyin Liu, Mingkong Tang, Haodong Lin, Jiayi Kuang, Fanxu Meng, Xiaojuan Tang, Yunjia Xi, Junjie Huang, Haotong Yang, Zhenyi Shen, Yangning Li, Qianwen Zhang, Yifei Yu, Siyu An, Junnan Dong, Qiufeng Wang, Jie Wang, Keyu Chen, Wei Wen, Taian Guo, Zhifeng Shen, Daohai Yu, Jiahao Li, Ke Li, Zongyi Li, Xiaoyu Tan Title: Youtu-LLM: Unlocking the Native Agentic Potential for Lightweight Large Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24618v1 Abstract: We introduce Youtu-LLM, a lightweight yet powerful language model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with native agentic intelligence. Unlike typical small models that rely on distillation, Youtu-LLM (1.96B) is pre-trained from scratch to systematically cultivate reasoning and planning capabilities. The key technical advancements are as follows: (1) Compact Architecture with Long-Context Support: Built on a dense Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) architecture with a novel STEM-oriented vocabulary, Youtu-LLM supports a 128k context window. This design enables robust long-context reasoning and state tracking within a minimal memory footprint, making it ideal for long-horizon agent and reasoning tasks. (2) Principled "Commonsense-STEM-Agent" Curriculum: We curated a massive corpus of approximately 11T tokens and implemented a multi-stage training strategy. By progressively shifting the pre-training data distribution from general commonsense to complex STEM and agentic tasks, we ensure the model acquires deep cognitive abilities rather than superficial alignment. (3) Scalable Agentic Mid-training: Specifically for the agentic mid-training, we employ diverse data construction schemes to synthesize rich and varied trajectories across math, coding, and tool-use domains. This high-quality data enables the model to internalize planning and reflection behaviors effectively. Extensive evaluations show that Youtu-LLM sets a new state-of-the-art for sub-2B LLMs. On general benchmarks, it achieves competitive performance against larger models, while on agent-specific tasks, it significantly surpasses existing SOTA baselines, demonstrating that lightweight models can possess strong intrinsic agentic capabilities.

🤗 Upvotes: 33 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Weixun Wang, XiaoXiao Xu, Wanhe An, Fangwen Dai, Wei Gao, Yancheng He, Ju Huang, Qiang Ji, Hanqi Jin, Xiaoyang Li, Yang Li, Zhongwen Li, Shirong Lin, Jiashun Liu, Zenan Liu, Tao Luo, Dilxat Muhtar, Yuanbin Qu, Jiaqiang Shi, Qinghui Sun, Yingshui Tan, Hao Tang, Runze Wang, Yi Wang, Zhaoguo Wang, Yanan Wu, Shaopan Xiong, Binchen Xu, Xander Xu, Yuchi Xu, Qipeng Zhang, Xixia Zhang, Haizhou Zhao, Jie Zhao, Shuaibing Zhao, Baihui Zheng, Jianhui Zheng, Suhang Zheng, Yanni Zhu, Mengze Cai, Kerui Cao, Xitong Chen, Yue Dai, Lifan Du, Tao Feng, Tao He, Jin Hu, Yijie Hu, Ziyu Jiang, Cheng Li, Xiang Li, Jing Liang, Chonghuan Liu, ZhenDong Liu, Haodong Mi, Yanhu Mo, Junjia Ni, Shixin Pei, Jingyu Shen, XiaoShuai Song, Cecilia Wang, Chaofan Wang, Kangyu Wang, Pei Wang, Tao Wang, Wei Wang, Ke Xiao, Mingyu Xu, Tiange Xu, Nan Ya, Siran Yang, Jianan Ye, Yaxing Zang, Duo Zhang, Junbo Zhang, Boren Zheng, Wanxi Deng, Ling Pan, Lin Qu, Wenbo Su, Jiamang Wang, Wei Wang, Hu Wei, Minggang Wu, Cheng Yu, Bing Zhao, Zhicheng Zheng, Bo Zheng Title: Let It Flow: Agentic Crafting on Rock and Roll, Building the ROME Model within an Open Agentic Learning Ecosystem Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873v1 Abstract: Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agent LLMs. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME (ROME is Obviously an Agentic Model), an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-based Policy Alignment (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of the ALE infrastructure.

🤗 Upvotes: 22 | cs.CV Authors: Yi-Chuan Huang, Hao-Jen Chien, Chin-Yang Lin, Ying-Huan Chen, Yu-Lun Liu Title: GaMO: Geometry-aware Multi-view Diffusion Outpainting for Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.25073v1 Abstract: Recent advances in 3D reconstruction have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality scene capture from dense multi-view imagery, yet struggle when input views are limited. Various approaches, including regularization techniques, semantic priors, and geometric constraints, have been implemented to address this challenge. Latest diffusion-based methods have demonstrated substantial improvements by generating novel views from new camera poses to augment training data, surpassing earlier regularization and prior-based techniques. Despite this progress, we identify three critical limitations in these state-of-the-art approaches: inadequate coverage beyond known view peripheries, geometric inconsistencies across generated views, and computationally expensive pipelines. We introduce GaMO (Geometry-aware Multi-view Outpainter), a framework that reformulates sparse-view reconstruction through multi-view outpainting. Instead of generating new viewpoints, GaMO expands the field of view from existing camera poses, which inherently preserves geometric consistency while providing broader scene coverage. Our approach employs multi-view conditioning and geometry-aware denoising strategies in a zero-shot manner without training. Extensive experiments on Replica and ScanNet++ demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction quality across 3, 6, and 9 input views, outperforming prior methods in PSNR and LPIPS, while achieving a $25\times$ speedup over SOTA diffusion-based methods with processing time under 10 minutes. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/GaMO/

🤗 Upvotes: 72 | cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Ang Lv, Jin Ma, Yiyuan Ma, Siyuan Qiao Title: Coupling Experts and Routers in Mixture-of-Experts via an Auxiliary Loss Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23447v1 Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models lack explicit constraints to ensure the router's decisions align well with the experts' capabilities, which ultimately limits model performance. To address this, we propose expert-router coupling (ERC) loss, a lightweight auxiliary loss that tightly couples the router's decisions with expert capabilities. Our approach treats each expert's router embedding as a proxy token for the tokens assigned to that expert, and feeds perturbed router embeddings through the experts to obtain internal activations. The ERC loss enforces two constraints on these activations: (1) Each expert must exhibit higher activation for its own proxy token than for the proxy tokens of any other expert. (2) Each proxy token must elicit stronger activation from its corresponding expert than from any other expert. These constraints jointly ensure that each router embedding faithfully represents its corresponding expert's capability, while each expert specializes in processing the tokens actually routed to it. The ERC loss is computationally efficient, operating only on n^2 activations, where n is the number of experts. This represents a fixed cost independent of batch size, unlike prior coupling methods that scale with the number of tokens (often millions per batch). Through pre-training MoE-LLMs ranging from 3B to 15B parameters and extensive analysis on trillions of tokens, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the ERC loss. Moreover, the ERC loss offers flexible control and quantitative tracking of expert specialization levels during training, providing valuable insights into MoEs.