Let the Barbarians In: How AI Can Accelerate Systems Performance Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to transform the research process by automating the discovery of new solutions. This shift depends on the availability of reliable verifiers, which AI-driven approaches require to validate candidate solutions. Research focused on improving systems performance is especially well-suited to this paradigm because system performance problems naturally admit such verifiers: candidates can be implemented in real systems or simulators and evaluated against predefined workloads. We term this iterative cycle of generation, evaluation, and refinement AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS). Using several open-source ADRS instances (i.e., OpenEvolve, GEPA, and ShinkaEvolve), we demonstrate across ten case studies (e.g., multi-region cloud scheduling, mixture-of-experts load balancing, LLM-based SQL, transaction scheduling) that ADRS-generated solutions can match or even outperform human state-of-the-art designs. Based on these findings, we outline best practices (e.g., level of prompt specification, amount of feedback, robust evaluation) for effectively using ADRS, and we discuss future research directions and their implications. Although we do not yet have a universal recipe for applying ADRS across all of systems research, we hope our preliminary findings, together with the challenges we identify, offer meaningful guidance for future work as researcher effort shifts increasingly toward problem formulation and strategic oversight. Note: This paper is an extension of our prior work [14]. It adds extensive evaluation across multiple ADRS frameworks and provides deeper analysis and insights into best practices.

RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging

We unveil that internal representations in large language models (LLMs) serve as reliable proxies of learned knowledge, and propose RECALL, a novel representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. RECALL computes inter-model similarity from layer-wise hidden representations over clustered typical samples, and performs adaptive, hierarchical parameter fusion to align knowledge across models. This design enables the preservation of domain-general features in shallow layers while allowing task-specific adaptation in deeper layers. Unlike prior methods that require task labels or incur performance trade-offs, RECALL achieves seamless multi-domain integration and strong resistance to catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios show that RECALL outperforms baselines in both knowledge retention and generalization, providing a scalable and data-free solution for evolving LLMs.

Distributed Associative Memory via Online Convex Optimization

An associative memory (AM) enables cue-response recall, and associative memorization has recently been noted to underlie the operation of modern neural architectures such as Transformers. This work addresses a distributed setting where agents maintain a local AM to recall their own associations as well as selective information from others. Specifically, we introduce a distributed online gradient descent method that optimizes local AMs at different agents through communication over routing trees. Our theoretical analysis establishes sublinear regret guarantees, and experiments demonstrate that the proposed protocol consistently outperforms existing online optimization baselines.

PANICL: Mitigating Over-Reliance on Single Prompt in Visual In-Context Learning

Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) uses input-output image pairs, referred to as in-context pairs (or examples), as prompts alongside query images to guide models in performing diverse vision tasks. However, VICL often suffers from over-reliance on a single in-context pair, which can lead to biased and unstable predictions. We introduce PAtch-based $k$-Nearest neighbor visual In-Context Learning (PANICL), a general training-free framework that mitigates this issue by leveraging multiple in-context pairs. PANICL smooths assignment scores across pairs, reducing bias without requiring additional training. Extensive experiments on a variety of tasks, including foreground segmentation, single object detection, colorization, multi-object segmentation, and keypoint detection, demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. Moreover, PANICL exhibits strong robustness to domain shifts, including dataset-level shift (e.g., from COCO to Pascal) and label-space shift (e.g., FSS-1000), and generalizes well to other VICL models such as SegGPT, Painter, and LVM, highlighting its versatility and broad applicability.

OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents

Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AgentNet, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales. Our end-to-end agent models demonstrate strong performance across CUA benchmarks. In particular, OpenCUA-32B achieves an average success rate of 34.8% on OSWorld-Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among open-source models and surpassing OpenAI CUA (GPT-4o). Further analysis confirms that our approach generalizes well across domains and benefits significantly from increased test-time computation. We release our annotation tool, datasets, code, and models to build open foundations for further CUA research.

Exploring Visual Prompting: Robustness Inheritance and Beyond

Visual Prompting (VP), an efficient method for transfer learning, has shown its potential in vision tasks. However, previous works focus exclusively on VP from standard source models, it is still unknown how it performs under the scenario of a robust source model: Can the robustness of the source model be successfully inherited? Does VP also encounter the same trade-off between robustness and generalization ability as the source model during this process? If such a trade-off exists, is there a strategy specifically tailored to VP to mitigate this limitation? In this paper, we thoroughly explore these three questions for the first time and provide affirmative answers to them. To mitigate the trade-off faced by VP, we propose a strategy called Prompt Boundary Loosening (PBL). As a lightweight, plug-and-play strategy naturally compatible with VP, PBL effectively ensures the successful inheritance of robustness when the source model is a robust model, while significantly enhancing VP's generalization ability across various downstream datasets. Extensive experiments across various datasets show that our findings are universal and demonstrate the significant benefits of the proposed strategy.

E-InMeMo: Enhanced Prompting for Visual In-Context Learning

Large-scale models trained on extensive datasets have become the standard due to their strong generalizability across diverse tasks. In-context learning (ICL), widely used in natural language processing, leverages these models by providing task-specific prompts without modifying their parameters. This paradigm is increasingly being adapted for computer vision, where models receive an input-output image pair, known as an in-context pair, alongside a query image to illustrate the desired output. However, the success of visual ICL largely hinges on the quality of these prompts. To address this, we propose Enhanced Instruct Me More (E-InMeMo), a novel approach that incorporates learnable perturbations into in-context pairs to optimize prompting. Through extensive experiments on standard vision tasks, E-InMeMo demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it improves mIoU scores by 7.99 for foreground segmentation and by 17.04 for single object detection when compared to the baseline without learnable prompts. These results highlight E-InMeMo as a lightweight yet effective strategy for enhancing visual ICL. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Jackieam/E-InMeMo

Probing then Editing Response Personality of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities to generate responses that exhibit consistent personality traits. Despite the major attempts to analyze personality expression through output-based evaluations, little is known about how such traits are internally encoded within LLM parameters. In this paper, we introduce a layer-wise probing framework to systematically investigate the layer-wise capability of LLMs in encoding personality for responding. We conduct probing experiments on 11 open-source LLMs over the PersonalityEdit benchmark and find that LLMs predominantly encode personality for responding in their middle and upper layers, with instruction-tuned models demonstrating a slightly clearer separation of personality traits. Furthermore, by interpreting the trained probing hyperplane as a layer-wise boundary for each personality category, we propose a layer-wise perturbation method to edit the personality expressed by LLMs during inference. Our results show that even when the prompt explicitly specifies a particular personality, our method can still successfully alter the response personality of LLMs. Interestingly, the difficulty of converting between certain personality traits varies substantially, which aligns with the representational distances in our probing experiments. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive MMLU benchmark evaluation and time overhead analysis, demonstrating that our proposed personality editing method incurs only minimal degradation in general capabilities while maintaining low training costs and acceptable inference latency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/universe-sky/probing-then-editing-personality.

Kimi-VL Technical Report

We present Kimi-VL, an efficient open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model (VLM) that offers advanced multimodal reasoning, long-context understanding, and strong agent capabilities - all while activating only 2.8B parameters in its language decoder (Kimi-VL-A3B). Kimi-VL demonstrates strong performance across challenging domains: as a general-purpose VLM, Kimi-VL excels in multi-turn agent tasks (e.g., OSWorld), matching flagship models. Furthermore, it exhibits remarkable capabilities across diverse challenging vision language tasks, including college-level image and video comprehension, OCR, mathematical reasoning, and multi-image understanding. In comparative evaluations, it effectively competes with cutting-edge efficient VLMs such as GPT-4o-mini, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and Gemma-3-12B-IT, while surpassing GPT-4o in several key domains. Kimi-VL also advances in processing long contexts and perceiving clearly. With a 128K extended context window, Kimi-VL can process diverse long inputs, achieving impressive scores of 64.5 on LongVideoBench and 35.1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Its native-resolution vision encoder, MoonViT, further allows it to see and understand ultra-high-resolution visual inputs, achieving 83.2 on InfoVQA and 34.5 on ScreenSpot-Pro, while maintaining lower computational cost for common tasks. Building upon Kimi-VL, we introduce an advanced long-thinking variant: Kimi-VL-Thinking. Developed through long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), this model exhibits strong long-horizon reasoning capabilities. It achieves scores of 61.7 on MMMU, 36.8 on MathVision, and 71.3 on MathVista while maintaining the compact 2.8B activated LLM parameters, setting a new standard for efficient multimodal thinking models. Code and models are publicly accessible at https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-VL.

GS-SDF: LiDAR-Augmented Gaussian Splatting and Neural SDF for Geometrically Consistent Rendering and Reconstruction

Digital twins are fundamental to the development of autonomous driving and embodied artificial intelligence. However, achieving high-granularity surface reconstruction and high-fidelity rendering remains a challenge. Gaussian splatting offers efficient photorealistic rendering but struggles with geometric inconsistencies due to fragmented primitives and sparse observational data in robotics applications. Existing regularization methods, which rely on render-derived constraints, often fail in complex environments. Moreover, effectively integrating sparse LiDAR data with Gaussian splatting remains challenging. We propose a unified LiDAR-visual system that synergizes Gaussian splatting with a neural signed distance field. The accurate LiDAR point clouds enable a trained neural signed distance field to offer a manifold geometry field, This motivates us to offer an SDF-based Gaussian initialization for physically grounded primitive placement and a comprehensive geometric regularization for geometrically consistent rendering and reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate superior reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality across diverse trajectories. To benefit the community, the codes will be released at https://github.com/hku-mars/GS-SDF.