Argus: A General-Purpose Agentic Reasoning Runtime for Long-Horizon Tasks

Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective. We present Argus, a persistent, self-evolving runtime in which Manager, Planner, Engineer, and Reviewer execute bounded missions over durable project state. Argus separates stable user intent from operational objectives, constraints, and verification criteria, and admits memories, skills, procedures, verifiers, routing decisions, and rejected routes only after role-owned review and, when available, task-native verification. Model weights remain fixed; self-evolution occurs through persistent runtime state and control policy, with autonomous execution between operator-owned escalation points. Across seven GPT-5.5 benchmark arenas, Argus achieves about 78% on SWE-Bench Pro versus 59% for Direct Copilot while using 1.41 times the aggregate tokens. After verification-gated self-evolution, mature SWE-Bench waves use 21% fewer solve-input tokens and 15% less active workflow time per task than startup waves, while recording 34 verifier recoveries and 22 strict review-loop rescues. Argus also reaches 76.8% on AARRI-Bench and a 28.0-point gap on mathematical data synthesis, with competitive GPU-kernel and language-model-training results. Beyond benchmarks, an optimized RWKV6 kernel was merged upstream; a multi-day mathematics campaign retained falsified routes and proof-backed frontier updates; and six paper pipelines completed 254 missions with 16 stage rollbacks. These results show that a fixed-weight, self-evolving harness can revise, recover, and accumulate verified approaches while producing structured trajectories for future supervised and reinforcement learning.

Argus: A General-Purpose Agentic Runtime for Long-Horizon Reasoning

Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective. We present Argus, a persistent, self-evolving runtime in which Manager, Planner, Engineer, and Reviewer execute bounded missions over durable project state. Argus separates stable user intent from operational objectives, constraints, and verification criteria, and admits memories, skills, procedures, verifiers, routing decisions, and rejected routes only after role-owned review and, when available, task-native verification. Model weights remain fixed; self-evolution occurs through persistent runtime state and control policy, with autonomous execution between operator-owned escalation points. Across seven GPT-5.5 benchmark arenas, Argus achieves about 78% on SWE-Bench Pro versus 59% for Direct Copilot while using 1.41 times the aggregate tokens. After verification-gated self-evolution, mature SWE-Bench waves use 21% fewer solve-input tokens and 15% less active workflow time per task than startup waves, while recording 34 verifier recoveries and 22 strict review-loop rescues. Argus also reaches 76.8% on AARRI-Bench and a 28.0-point gap on mathematical data synthesis, with competitive GPU-kernel and language-model-training results. Beyond benchmarks, an optimized RWKV6 kernel was merged upstream; a multi-day mathematics campaign retained falsified routes and proof-backed frontier updates; and six paper pipelines completed 254 missions with 16 stage rollbacks. These results show that a fixed-weight, self-evolving harness can revise, recover, and accumulate verified approaches while producing structured trajectories for future supervised and reinforcement learning.

Consistency evaluation of benchmarks used for causal discovery

In graphical causal model, causal discovery aims to construct a causal graph based on numerical data and domain knowledge in plain text. However, the evaluation of causal discovery methods remains a challenge in the area as the progress of domain researches often makes benchmark causal graphs contain mis-aligned knowledge. This problem especially affects the evaluation of large language model (LLM) based causal discovery methods as they are sensitive to the new discoveries in the literature. This work is the first to systematically study the quality of benchmark causal graphs. Specifically, we design a pipeline that automatically retrieves relevant research papers from scientific databases, and prompts LLMs to check the consistency between the benchmark causal graphs and domain research papers. We evaluate 11 popular real-world benchmarks, for which our pipeline in total proceeds 38,081 domain papers. Our results show that popular benchmarks vary significantly in their consistency with domain research, with clear implications for causal discovery research.

Swimming with Whales: Analysis of Power Imbalances in Stake-Weighted Governance

Voting methods weighted by stakes are the fundamental governance paradigm in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Such a paradigm is known to be prone to power distortions: a few users possessing large stakes may completely control decision making, even without owning the totality of the stakes. We study this phenomenon through the lens of computational social choice, focusing on the extent of power imbalances in stake-weighted voting when power is quantified using the Penrose-Banzhaf power index. Our work presents both analytical and empirical contributions. Analytically, we demonstrate that while a perfect alignment between power and relative stake ownership is generally unattainable, it can be approximated in expectation under specific conditions. Empirically, using data from a real-world on-chain governance system (Project Catalyst), we provide a more fine-grained understanding of the power imbalances that are likely to occur in current stake-weighted governance systems.

Deep Speckle Holography Redefines Label-free Nanoparticle Phenotyping

Nanoparticle metrology has long been constrained by the assumption that, in mixed and unprocessed fluids, particle size, morphology, composition, and species-specific abundance cannot be resolved simultaneously from a single label-free measurement. Here, we revisit this long-standing limitation by showing that complex forward speckle-holographic fields define an information-rich optical space for multidimensional particle signatures. We report deep speckle holography, a physics-informed generative framework that profiles particle identity, size, morphology, and species-resolved abundance from a single non-contact optical measurement. Across purified suspensions, mixed particle populations, environmental waters, human urine, and other unprocessed native fluids, the method enables direct nanoparticle inference without purification, labeling, or destructive preprocessing, delivering concurrent multidimensional readouts in 0.9 s over a dynamic range spanning 10 orders of magnitude. Deep speckle holography establishes a route toward direct label-free nanoparticle phenotyping in real-world fluids, moving nanoscale measurement beyond isolated-particle characterization toward multidimensional inference in complex mixtures, and expanding the scope of questions nanoscale measurement can address, from real-time tracking of nanoparticle transformations in living and environmental systems to non-invasive quality control of nanomedicine formulations, and beyond.

Don't Act Blindly: Robust GUI Automation via Action-Effect Verification and Self-Correction

Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking--Verification--Action--Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.

Silo-Bench: A Scalable Environment for Evaluating Distributed Coordination in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems to overcome context limitations by distributing information across agents. Yet whether agents can reliably compute with distributed information -- rather than merely exchange it -- remains an open question. We introduce Silo-Bench, a role-agnostic benchmark of 30 algorithmic tasks across three communication complexity levels, evaluating 54 configurations over 1,620 experiments. Our experiments expose a fundamental Communication-Reasoning Gap: agents spontaneously form task-appropriate coordination topologies and exchange information actively, yet systematically fail to synthesize distributed state into correct answers. The failure is localized to the reasoning-integration stage -- agents often acquire sufficient information but cannot integrate it. This coordination overhead compounds with scale, eventually eliminating parallelization gains entirely. These findings demonstrate that naively scaling agent count cannot circumvent context limitations, and Silo-Bench provides a foundation for tracking progress toward genuinely collaborative multi-agent systems.

Text to Query Plans for Question Answering on Large Tables

Efficient querying and analysis of large tabular datasets remain significant challenges, especially for users without expertise in programming languages like SQL. Text-to-SQL approaches have shown promising performance on benchmark data; however, they inherit SQL's drawbacks, including inefficiency with large datasets and limited support for complex data analyses beyond basic querying. We propose a novel framework that transforms natural language queries into query plans. Our solution is implemented outside traditional databases, allowing us to support classical SQL commands while avoiding SQL's inherent limitations. Additionally, we enable complex analytical functions, such as principal component analysis and anomaly detection, providing greater flexibility and extensibility than traditional SQL capabilities. We leverage LLMs to iteratively interpret queries and construct operation sequences, addressing computational complexity by incrementally building solutions. By executing operations directly on the data, we overcome context length limitations without requiring the entire dataset to be processed by the model. We validate our framework through experiments on both standard databases and large scientific tables, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling extensive datasets and performing sophisticated data analyses.

Improving Generalization Ability of Robotic Imitation Learning by Resolving Causal Confusion in Observations

Recent developments in imitation learning have considerably advanced robotic manipulation. However, current techniques in imitation learning can suffer from poor generalization, limiting performance even under relatively minor domain shifts. In this work, we aim to enhance the generalization capabilities of complex imitation learning algorithms to handle unpredictable changes from the training environments to deployment environments. To avoid confusion caused by observations that are not relevant to the target task, we propose to explicitly learn the causal relationship between observation components and expert actions, employing a framework similar to [6], where a causal structural function is learned by intervention on the imitation learning policy. Disentangling the feature representation from image input as in [6] is hard to satisfy in complex imitation learning process in robotic manipulation, we theoretically clarify that this requirement is not necessary in causal relationship learning. Therefore, we propose a simple causal structure learning framework that can be easily embedded in recent imitation learning architectures, such as the Action Chunking Transformer [31]. We demonstrate our approach using a simulation of the ALOHA [31] bimanual robot arms in Mujoco, and show that the method can considerably mitigate the generalization problem of existing complex imitation learning algorithms.

The Eye of Sherlock Holmes: Uncovering User Private Attribute Profiling via Vision-Language Model Agentic Framework

Our research reveals a new privacy risk associated with the vision-language model (VLM) agentic framework: the ability to infer sensitive attributes (e.g., age and health information) and even abstract ones (e.g., personality and social traits) from a set of personal images, which we term "image private attribute profiling." This threat is particularly severe given that modern apps can easily access users' photo albums, and inference from image sets enables models to exploit inter-image relations for more sophisticated profiling. However, two main challenges hinder our understanding of how well VLMs can profile an individual from a few personal photos: (1) the lack of benchmark datasets with multi-image annotations for private attributes, and (2) the limited ability of current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to infer abstract attributes from large image collections. In this work, we construct PAPI, the largest dataset for studying private attribute profiling in personal images, comprising 2,510 images from 251 individuals with 3,012 annotated privacy attributes. We also propose HolmesEye, a hybrid agentic framework that combines VLMs and LLMs to enhance privacy inference. HolmesEye uses VLMs to extract both intra-image and inter-image information and LLMs to guide the inference process as well as consolidate the results through forensic analysis, overcoming existing limitations in long-context visual reasoning. Experiments reveal that HolmesEye achieves a 10.8% improvement in average accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines and surpasses human-level performance by 15.0% in predicting abstract attributes. This work highlights the urgency of addressing privacy risks in image-based profiling and offers both a new dataset and an advanced framework to guide future research in this area.