Toward Autonomous Long-Horizon Engineering for ML Research

Autonomous AI research has advanced rapidly, but long-horizon ML research engineering remains difficult: agents must sustain coherent progress across task comprehension, environment setup, implementation, experimentation, and debugging over hours or days. We introduce AiScientist, a system for autonomous long-horizon engineering for ML research built on a simple principle: strong long-horizon performance requires both structured orchestration and durable state continuity. To this end, AiScientist combines hierarchical orchestration with a permission-scoped File-as-Bus workspace: a top-level Orchestrator maintains stage-level control through concise summaries and a workspace map, while specialized agents repeatedly re-ground on durable artifacts such as analyses, plans, code, and experimental evidence rather than relying primarily on conversational handoffs, yielding thin control over thick state. Across two complementary benchmarks, AiScientist improves PaperBench score by 10.54 points on average over the best matched baseline and achieves 81.82 Any Medal% on MLE-Bench Lite. Ablation studies further show that File-as-Bus protocol is a key driver of performance, reducing PaperBench by 6.41 points and MLE-Bench Lite by 31.82 points when removed. These results suggest that long-horizon ML research engineering is a systems problem of coordinating specialized work over durable project state, rather than a purely local reasoning problem.

Beyond Reconstruction: Reconstruction-to-Vector Diffusion for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection

While Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection (HAD) excels at identifying sparse targets in complex scenes, existing models remain trapped in a scalar "reconstruction-as-endpoint" paradigm. This reliance on ambiguous scalar residuals consistently triggers sub-pixel anomaly vanishing during spatial downsampling, alongside severe confirmation bias when unpurified anomalies corrupt training weights. In this paper, we propose Reconstruction-to-Vector Diffusion (R2VD), which fundamentally redefines reconstruction as a manifold purification origin to establish a novel residual-guided generative dynamics paradigm. Our framework introduces a four-stage pipeline: (1) a Physical Prior Extraction (PPE) stage that mitigates early confirmation bias via dual-stream statistical guidance; (2) a Guided Manifold Purification (GMP) stage utilizing an OmniContext Autoencoder (OCA) to extract purified residual maps while preserving fragile sub-pixel topologies; (3) a Residual Score Modeling (RSM) stage where a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), guarded by a Physical Spectral Firewall (PSF), effectively isolates cross-spectral leakage; and (4) a Vector Dynamics Inference (VDI) stage that robustly decouples targets from backgrounds by evaluating high-dimensional vector interference patterns instead of conventional scalar errors. Comprehensive evaluations on eight datasets confirm that R2VD establishes a new state-of-the-art, delivering exceptional target detectability and background suppression. The code is available at https://github.com/Bondojijun/R2VD.

HD-VGGT: High-Resolution Visual Geometry Transformer

High-resolution imagery is essential for accurate 3D reconstruction, as many geometric details only emerge at fine spatial scales. Recent feed-forward approaches, such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), have demonstrated the ability to infer scene geometry from large collections of images in a single forward pass. However, scaling these models to high-resolution inputs remains challenging: the number of tokens in transformer architectures grows rapidly with both image resolution and the number of views, leading to prohibitive computational and memory costs. Moreover, we observe that visually ambiguous regions, such as repetitive patterns, weak textures, or specular surfaces, often produce unstable feature tokens that degrade geometric inference, especially at higher resolutions. We introduce HD-VGGT, a dual-branch architecture for efficient and robust high-resolution 3D reconstruction. A low-resolution branch predicts a coarse, globally consistent geometry, while a high-resolution branch refines details via a learned feature upsampling module. To handle unstable tokens, we propose Feature Modulation, which suppresses unreliable features early in the transformer. HD-VGGT leverages high-resolution images and supervision without full-resolution transformer costs, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality.

Bi-CRCL: Bidirectional Conservative-Radical Complementary Learning with Pre-trained Foundation Models for Class-incremental Medical Image Analysis

Class-incremental learning (CIL) in medical image-guided diagnosis requires retaining prior diagnostic knowledge while adapting to newly emerging disease categories, which is critical for scalable clinical deployment. This problem is particularly challenging due to heterogeneous data and privacy constraints that prevent memory replay. Although pretrained foundation models (PFMs) have advanced general-domain CIL, their potential in medical imaging remains underexplored, where domain-specific adaptation is essential yet difficult due to anatomical complexity and inter-institutional heterogeneity. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic benchmark of recent PFM-based CIL methods and propose Bidirectional Conservative-Radical Complementary Learning (Bi-CRCL), a dual-learner framework inspired by complementary learning systems. Bi-CRCL integrates a conservative learner that preserves prior knowledge through stability-oriented updates and a radical learner that rapidly adapts to new categories via plasticity-oriented learning. A bidirectional interaction mechanism enables forward transfer and backward consolidation, allowing continual integration of new knowledge while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. During inference, outputs from both learners are adaptively fused for robust predictions. Experiments on five medical imaging datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods under diverse settings, including cross-dataset shifts and varying task configurations.

HyEvo: Self-Evolving Hybrid Agentic Workflows for Efficient Reasoning

Although agentic workflows have demonstrated strong potential for solving complex tasks, existing automated generation methods remain inefficient and underperform, as they rely on predefined operator libraries and homogeneous LLM-only workflows in which all task-level computation is performed through probabilistic inference. To address these limitations, we propose HyEvo, an automated workflow-generation framework that leverages heterogeneous atomic synthesis. HyEvo integrates probabilistic LLM nodes for semantic reasoning with deterministic code nodes for rule-based execution, offloading predictable operations from LLM inference and reducing inference cost and execution latency. To efficiently navigate the hybrid search space, HyEvo employs an LLM-driven multi-island evolutionary strategy with a reflect-then-generate mechanism, iteratively refining both workflow topology and node logic via execution feedback. Comprehensive experiments show that HyEvo consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse reasoning and coding benchmarks, while reducing inference cost and execution latency by up to 19$\times$ and 16$\times$, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art open-source baseline.

Generalized Recognition of Basic Surgical Actions Enables Skill Assessment and Vision-Language-Model-based Surgical Planning

Artificial intelligence, imaging, and large language models have the potential to transform surgical practice, training, and automation. Understanding and modeling of basic surgical actions (BSA), the fundamental unit of operation in any surgery, is important to drive the evolution of this field. In this paper, we present a BSA dataset comprising 10 basic actions across 6 surgical specialties with over 11,000 video clips, which is the largest to date. Based on the BSA dataset, we developed a new foundation model that conducts general-purpose recognition of basic actions. Our approach demonstrates robust cross-specialist performance in experiments validated on datasets from different procedural types and various body parts. Furthermore, we demonstrate downstream applications enabled by the BAS foundation model through surgical skill assessment in prostatectomy using domain-specific knowledge, and action planning in cholecystectomy and nephrectomy using large vision-language models. Multinational surgeons' evaluation of the language model's output of the action planning explainable texts demonstrated clinical relevance. These findings indicate that basic surgical actions can be robustly recognized across scenarios, and an accurate BSA understanding model can essentially facilitate complex applications and speed up the realization of surgical superintelligence.

EvoPrune: Early-Stage Visual Token Pruning for Efficient MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in vision-language tasks, but their inference efficiency is severely limited by the exponential growth of visual tokens in complex scenarios such as high-resolution images and videos. Existing visual token pruning methods mainly operate after visual encoding, overlooking the substantial computational cost incurred during the encoding stage. To address this issue, we propose EvoPrune, an early-stage visual token pruning method for MLLMs that performs pruning directly during visual encoding. Specifically, EvoPrune employs a layer-wise pruning strategy guided by token similarity, diversity, and attention-based importance to retain the most informative visual tokens at selected encoding layers. Extensive experiments on image and video benchmarks validate the effectiveness of EvoPrune. In particular, on the VideoMME dataset, EvoPrune achieves 2$\times$ inference speedup with less than 1% performance degradation, demonstrating its potential for latency-sensitive MLLM deployment.

BeyondSWE: Can Current Code Agent Survive Beyond Single-Repo Bug Fixing?

Current benchmarks for code agents primarily assess narrow, repository-specific fixes, overlooking critical real-world challenges such as cross-repository reasoning, domain-specialized problem solving, dependency-driven migration, and full-repository generation. To address this gap, we introduce BeyondSWE, a comprehensive benchmark that broadens existing evaluations along two axes - resolution scope and knowledge scope - using 500 real-world instances across four distinct settings. Experimental results reveal a significant capability gap: even frontier models plateau below 45% success, and no single model performs consistently across task types. To systematically investigate the role of external knowledge, we develop SearchSWE, a framework that integrates deep search with coding abilities. Our experiments show that search augmentation yields inconsistent gains and can in some cases degrade performance, highlighting the difficulty of emulating developer-like workflows that interleave search and reasoning during coding tasks. This work offers both a realistic, challenging evaluation benchmark and a flexible framework to advance research toward more capable code agents.

OpAgent: Operator Agent for Web Navigation

To fulfill user instructions, autonomous web agents must contend with the inherent complexity and volatile nature of real-world websites. Conventional paradigms predominantly rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) using static datasets. However, these methods suffer from severe distributional shifts, as offline trajectories fail to capture the stochastic state transitions and real-time feedback of unconstrained wide web environments. In this paper, we propose a robust Online Reinforcement Learning WebAgent, designed to optimize its policy through direct, iterative interactions with unconstrained wide websites. Our approach comprises three core innovations: 1) Hierarchical Multi-Task Fine-tuning: We curate a comprehensive mixture of datasets categorized by functional primitives -- Planning, Acting, and Grounding -- establishing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with strong instruction-following capabilities for Web GUI tasks. 2) Online Agentic RL in the Wild: We develop an online interaction environment and fine-tune the VLM using a specialized RL pipeline. We introduce a Hybrid Reward Mechanism that combines a ground-truth-agnostic WebJudge for holistic outcome assessment with a Rule-based Decision Tree (RDT) for progress reward. This system effectively mitigates the credit assignment challenge in long-horizon navigation. Notably, our RL-enhanced model achieves a 38.1\% success rate (pass@5) on WebArena, outperforming all existing monolithic baselines. 3) Operator Agent: We introduce a modular agentic framework, namely \textbf{OpAgent}, orchestrating a Planner, Grounder, Reflector, and Summarizer. This synergy enables robust error recovery and self-correction, elevating the agent's performance to a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) success rate of \textbf{71.6\%}.

Fully First-Order Algorithms for Online Bilevel Optimization

In this work, we study non-convex-strongly-convex online bilevel optimization (OBO). Existing OBO algorithms are mainly based on hypergradient descent, which requires access to a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle and potentially incurs high computational costs. By reformulating the original OBO problem as a single-level online problem with inequality constraints and constructing a sequence of Lagrangian function, we eliminate the need for HVPs arising from implicit differentiation. Specifically, we propose a fully first-order algorithm for OBO, and provide theoretical guarantees showing that it achieves regret of $O(1 + V_T + H_{2,T})$. Furthermore, we develop an improved variant with an adaptive inner-iteration scheme, which removes the dependence on the drift variation of the inner-level optimal solution and achieves regret of $O(\sqrt{T} + V_T)$. This regret have the advatange when $V_{T}\ge O(\sqrt{T})$.