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Daily report

AI and science frontiers · 2026-10-29

Only content delivered through the publication boundary on this date is included.

Sealed edition v1

medRxiv

Rare missense variants hid more heritability than burden tests showed: a flexible kernel lifts the lower bound from 0.54% to at least 1.27%

Rare missense contributions to complex traits have been underestimated because collapsing variants within a gene into one burden score averages away effect differences. The Kernel Allelic Series Model (KASM) builds within-gene effect covariance kernels from protein-structure and variant-effect annotations; across 786,871 exomes and 26 continuous traits it raises the lower bound on rare missense heritability from 0.54±0.04% to at least 1.27±0.09%, and to 1.83±0.11% under the most flexible model, above the 0.87±0.05% for loss-of-function variants.

arXiv

Ten frontier models each trained a language model: six days produced working assistants, and the best matched NVIDIA's own post-trained release

RSI Arena hands language-model post-training to ten frontier models: each agent starts from the same 30-billion-parameter base, picks its own data, writes its own training code and nominates checkpoints within six days and 1,000 GPU-hours. All ten produced working assistants, and the model trained by GPT-6 Astra closed a median 76% of the base-to-Instruct gap across 12 capability benchmarks; with answer length and formatting controlled, its human-preference rating is level with NVIDIA Instruct, 1,095 against 1,094. A second stage returned each model's blind battle records to its agent, and eight of the ten models improved their style-controlled rating relative to NVIDIA Instruct, while benchmark gains stayed modest and showed no clear link to preference gains.

www.nature.com

Cell morphology profiling drops segmentation: self-supervised models retrieve about a third more mechanism classes than CellProfiler across labs

Cell morphology profiling has relied on cell segmentation and handcrafted features, which are annotation-hungry and hard to reuse across laboratories. Researchers pretrained four self-supervised models on 119,876 unannotated compounds and about 1.77 million JUMP–CP images, then froze the weights and extracted image embeddings directly. On 2,464 EU-OPENSCREEN Bioactives compounds, DINO and DINOv2 beat CellProfiler by 31–37% in site-averaged mean average precision for mechanism-of-action retrieval and consistently surpassed masked-based models.

ProteinQure

Peptide design stops picking among twenty letters: AtomWeaver packs side-chain atoms first and names the residue afterwards, so a new building block costs minutes

The inverse-folding models used to design peptides emit a probability over exactly twenty natural residues at each position, and adding an unnatural one means supplying its structural data and retraining the whole model. AtomWeaver instead grows side chains as atoms in three dimensions under a fixed backbone and a target protein, then matches each finished atom cloud against a reference library of residue templates to read off identity. On PeptideArena, 353 backbones against twelve targets, it stayed competitive with twenty-residue methods and held the same performance regime with a 300-residue vocabulary.

arXiv

Agents that never play the game built a Hearthstone AI that climbed the live ladder to a 1.60 average placement

AutoTavern coordinates specialised LLM research agents through a shared typed research memory and five verification gates, and in 20 days they built TavernGym, a full-content reproduction of Hearthstone Battlegrounds, plus 23 versions of TavernAgent. The agent plays ranked games on the live ladder by itself, with its rating rising from 6,000 to about 15,000; on the public leaderboard's measure its last 20 records average a placement of 1.60 with 80% first places, against 2.34 and 59% for the server's ten highest-rated players together. Asked to make the same decisions directly, frontier LLMs answer at most 63% of play tasks, while TavernAgent answers 91%.

arXiv

Robots now have to run the experiment, not just move the beaker: 30 physics tasks test acting to know, and the best agent succeeds 43.3% of the time

Embodied agents are asked to work like students in a teaching laboratory: set up the apparatus, choose the conditions, read the instruments and report a physical quantity. Prior manipulation benchmarks only scored reaching a given target state, while scientific-discovery benchmarks replaced experiments with text commands or numerical queries. EmbodiedLab sets 30 quantitative experiments across five disciplines on 14 apparatus platforms, resamples each instance's hidden parameters, and scores the result together with the readings recorded in that episode and the restored bench; run in their developers' coding agents, Claude Opus 5.5 reaches 43.3% success under native control and GPT-6 Astra 40.0%.

LLMs keep learning after deployment: sleep-style offline consolidation writes new facts into weights without erasing old skills

Deployed large language models stay frozen at a fixed knowledge cutoff, continual parameter updates cause severe forgetting of earlier tasks, and in-context learning loses information once the session ends. Google Research's sleep framework alternates active interaction with offline consolidation, in which the model opens pre-allocated Mixture-of-Experts memory blocks and updates weights using self-generated practice examples. In multi-stage continual translation into unseen languages such as Manchu and Kalamang, performance dropped near zero, while in-context learning, Cartridges and supervised fine-tuning suffered severe forgetting.

Gemini 4 Carbon goes to cyber defenders first: 88.2% on finding vulnerabilities, with exploitation and patching scored too

Google released Gemini 4 Carbon, a next frontier model aimed at long-horizon agentic workflows and cybersecurity defense, ranking first on version 5.0 of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59. It reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, and says internal testing cut successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0.0%. Access starts with a subset of cyber defenders and widens through the Fairwind Program, at the same price as Argon.

Meta's new ads retrieval engine scores over a billion ads per second on one GH200 server, lifting Facebook conversions 2.4%

Meta has released the next generation of Andromeda, its personalized ads retrieval system, designed jointly across model, system and GPU hardware. Retrieval previously could not afford ranking-stage model depth at its scale; the new architecture brings large-language-model-style mixture-of-experts into retrieval, approaching ranking-level performance at roughly 300x fewer inference FLOPs than the 2024 retrieval model. The combined single-GPU pipeline processes over one billion ads per second on one server, which Meta calls a new throughput benchmark for retrieval-stage models, and Meta reports a 2.4% conversion increase on Facebook since 2025.

arXiv

Data center siting is locked in for years: one multi-objective RL agent lets planners retune water, power, carbon and reliability at inference time

AI data center siting, power procurement and cooling are still settled once by static single-point scoring on day-zero numbers, though water, power and carbon drift over a 10- to 20-year asset life and commitments bind for years. The build-out becomes a tiered Markov decision process: strategic commitments occur only in discrete windows, carry switching costs and take effect after source-dependent lead times, dispatch uses only capacity that exists, and a preference-conditioned multi-objective agent returns a policy family steerable at inference time across cost, carbon, water and reliability. On real site data, preference conditioning gives a confirmed, steerable trade-off on both objective pairs across three commitment regimes, and lock-in covers the frontier more evenly.

PyTorch

PyTorch 2.15 makes its rewritten NCCL backend the default, and a hang now dumps every rank's state to disk

PyTorch 2.15 makes the rewritten NCCL backend, previewed as opt-in nccl2 in 2.14, the default for every nccl process group, keeping TORCH_DIST_USE_NCCL2=0 and the nccl-legacy name as rollback paths. At cluster scale a single stalled GPU could halt a whole training run and the cause was often reproduced by hand; a backend-agnostic flight recorder now writes a post-mortem to disk when a collective hangs, and a timeout on any rank triggers dumps from every rank.

arXiv

Agent memory stops ranking by similarity alone: TrawMem assigns task roles, lifting LoCoMo judge scores by about 4 points

Agent memory systems typically retrieve memories by relevance to the current query and use them as contextual evidence; TrawMem instead organizes interaction histories into local threads, then assigns task-oriented roles and jointly selects complementary memories to build a task workspace. Across LoCoMo and MemGallery with four open- and closed-source backbones, macro-F1 improves by 2.23 to 3.14 points over representative memory systems; on LoCoMo, LLM-Judge scores rise by 4.07 and 4.31 percentage points over SimpleMem on Qwen3.5-9B and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with roughly 12.8% and 5.1% fewer context tokens.

Anthropic

Drug discovery's bottlenecks sit everywhere, not just molecule design: Enveda's Claude review of 1,061 pages cuts human time by 89%

Anthropic's life sciences team reports that Claude has been used inside real drug programs at six organizations, on tasks reaching from molecule design to manufacturing-document review and regulatory filings. Discussion of AI in drug development has centered on proposing initial molecule designs, while manufacturing paperwork stayed manual, with chemists spending up to 75% of their time on records. In Enveda's test, Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers had flagged across 1,061 pages of documentation and flagged seven more, cutting human review time by 89%, from over 25 hours to less than three; most of these results remain preclinical.

LMSYS Org

Software-engineering agents stop waiting for the slowest rollout: async RL lifts pass@1 from 7.3% to 27.5%

On AMD Instinct MI355X, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct trained with fully asynchronous agentic RL after supervised fine-tuning raised pass@1 from 7.3% to 27.5% on a 100-task stratified subset of SWE-bench Verified, with RL tasks drawn from repositories absent from that benchmark. The bottlenecks were long-tail trajectories and CPU sandbox scheduling rather than GPU compute: capping trajectory length cut step time from 850 s to 284 s, and cloud sandboxes at 384 concurrent trajectories lifted rollout throughput from about 860 to about 3,480 trajectories per hour.

arXiv

Long-horizon agent training stops grouping by repeated states alone: adding task progress to the comparison lifts WebShop success by 3.96 and 5.16 points

Long-horizon language-model agent training now builds action preferences inside existing rollout groups, matching on pre-action state plus task progress, and raises mean WebShop success by 3.96 and 5.16 points on Qwen3-4B and 8B.

arXiv

Web-GUI agents pay for every screenshot pixel: keeping 21% of visual tokens cuts latency 31% and holds 77.7% of performance

Web-GUI agents locate buttons and links from screenshots, and high-resolution screenshots plus multi-turn histories create excessive visual tokens that raise inference cost. STP-GUI replaces independent token scoring with query-guided, spatially coherent window-level selection, trained through a lightweight selector while the vision-language backbone stays frozen. On Online-Mind2Web, retaining 21% of tokens preserves 77.7% of full-token performance while cutting inference latency by 31% and FLOPs by 57%; results on Android in the Wild suggest the method transfers to mobile GUI environments.

Microsoft opens its Copilot agent harness in Foundry: swap models without swapping the harness, with 20+ frontier models routed by task

Microsoft has made the Copilot harness built by GitHub engineers, already adopted company-wide, available through Microsoft Foundry so developers can build agents that reason, use tools and finish long-running tasks as a managed service. Previously, keeping up with frontier models meant building and maintaining your own harness or model router; now one harness reaches 20+ frontier models plus bring-your-own-key, with the platform routing work to the right model for the task. The harness runtime has been ported to Rust, which Microsoft says cuts session overhead and time-to-first token, and it already runs across product surfaces at the scale of millions of users.

ElevenLabs Blog

Speak your own language, hear theirs: ElevenLabs opens realtime voice translation to enterprise callers

ElevenLabs released Eleven Realtime Translation, a live voice translation model that lets each person speak their own language and hear the other in theirs, in a natural, expressive voice, while the conversation happens. Previously, a customer calling in one language often waited for an agent who understood them, or an interpreter had to join the call. The model runs on the low-latency speech model Eleven v4 Turbo, covers more than 90 languages with automatic language detection, keeps one voice consistent across languages, and is in alpha for ElevenAPI enterprise customers.

arXiv

Structured knowledge retrieval drops hand-written query-rule pairs: a routing agent and its retriever train in alternation

Structured knowledge retrieval no longer needs predefined query-rule pairs: a routing agent picks a reasoning rule per query, its retriever ranks evidence under that rule's constraints, and the two train in alternation, each supervising the other.

Diffractograms are not photos: an ImageNet-only model reads phase fractions from background noise, while physics pre-training locks onto Bragg rings

Synchrotron X-ray diffraction produces a 2D diffractogram per second, and image models seem able to read α and β phase fractions of Ti–6Al–4V from them. Two models reach similar accuracy after fine-tuning on 250 experimental diffractograms, yet robustness tests and attention maps show the ImageNet-only model infers fractions from background and pixel noise, while the model pre-trained on simulated diffractograms relies on Bragg reflections. Accuracy alone does not validate a model.

arXiv

Fixing an LLM's weak spot is not enough: judging its knowledge state first lifts two benchmarks by 18.41 points on average

Knowledge improvement for large language models is moving from predefined incorporation pipelines to evaluation-guided updating, yet locating a weak spot does not say which intervention fits. Recursive Knowledge Improvement (RKI) organizes knowledge into graph-structured units and, each round, localizes weaknesses, estimates the model's operational knowledge state from diagnostic evidence and intervention history, selects an intervention, and re-evaluates the updated model. On HotpotEval and SafeInternalEval, RKI outperforms existing knowledge incorporation methods by 18.41 points on average, and analyses indicate knowledge states add guidance beyond weakness localization and can change across updates while the observed weakness persists.

Claude models land on Google Cloud: IAM governs access, Marketplace bills, and Opus 5.5 fast mode comes along

Anthropic has put Claude models on Google Cloud in an Anthropic-managed form, so developers call the Claude API through their own Google Cloud project. Access is controlled by Google Cloud IAM and billing runs through Google Cloud Marketplace, replacing a separate arrangement for permissions and payment. Fast mode for Claude Opus 5.5 is available on the same managed channel.

arXiv

Preference optimization gains a linguistic constraint: folding information uniformity into the reward brings model wording closer to human habits

A preference optimization reward built on the psycholinguistic uniform information density hypothesis matches SimPO on AlpacaEval 2, Arena-Hard and MT-Bench, and moves English complement-clause that usage closer to natural language.

Vercel News

Stop hardcoding model names: AI Gateway's virtual models swap models in minutes, no redeploy

Vercel introduced Virtual Models on AI Gateway, so apps and agents call a task-named virtual model ID instead of a concrete model name, with model choice, fallbacks and Zero Data Retention configured on the gateway. Previously switching models was a one-line code change that still usually required a redeploy; now editing the virtual model is picked up by every app and agent using that ID within a few minutes.

CopilotKit's OpenBot Puts Agents on Your Own Machines, With Every Action Cleared and Logged

CopilotKit released OpenBot, a cloneable self-hosted template for an AI agent workspace in which each coworker agent gets its own browser, logins and files and only the tools it is granted. Any agent speaking the AG-UI protocol joins the same way, and every action on a computer, file, MCP server or component passes through one gateway that decides before and records after. A deployment starts with two configuration-defined coworker agents and ten more fintech examples; the project is in beta, with no hosted version and no published package.

arXiv

Not every document question needs an agent: RouteDRAG sends 79.3% of queries to agentic execution and gains 3.47 points on average

In multimodal long-document question answering, agentic retrieval is not always worth its extra computation and can even hurt answer accuracy. RouteDRAG makes both whether to invoke an agent and how it then executes into learned choices: a graph-backed index organizes cross-page, table and figure content, path routing predicts the benefit of an agent over shorter paths, and dynamic execution controls tool use and termination. Across two benchmarks it assigns only 79.3% of queries to an agent while averaging 3.47 percentage points higher accuracy than shorter-path-only execution, and it also surpasses uniform agent execution with fewer answering calls.

GPUs stop being handed out whole: CUDA 13.4 enforces a memory boundary, and Kubernetes carves cards into fractions

NVIDIA CUDA 13.4 adds an application-transparent time-sharing mode that confines each workload to a fraction of GPU memory, so an allocation above the requested size fails as it would on a smaller GPU. KAI Scheduler offers an NvFractions sharing mode from v0.18.0 that picks GPU slices and writes memory and compute mode into Pod annotations, and the new open-source gpu-fractioning operator enforces those limits on each node and measures per-fraction use.

Baseten

Decision models skip text generation: mammoth-1 tops 208 models, elephant-1 leads the 9B class

Baseten's research lab released two open-source decision models, mammoth-1 (27B) and elephant-1 (9B), which return a probability distribution over every possible answer instead of generating text. mammoth-1 ranks first among 208 decision models on the Jev Decision Index 0.4, while elephant-1 is tied for eighth there and is the leading 9B decision model, and is tied for first with d1-ultra on the separate Artificial Analysis Decision Index. Both were post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.5-27B on 6.21 million decision-making examples, are free to try for a week on Baseten Model APIs, and are open-source on Hugging Face.

arXiv

A humanoid face stops following fixed gaze rules: a Transformer-VAE cuts seven-joint error below scripted controllers on a two-second benchmark

Gaze control for a humanoid face robot is split in two: a vision-language model asynchronously picks the scene referent, and a Realistic Gaze Transformer turns a target eye trajectory into coordinated neck, binocular-eye, and eyelid motion. The model is a Transformer-VAE trained on markerless human recordings, first self-supervised and then autoregressively fine-tuned so training includes its own predictions. On a two-second closed-loop benchmark where every controller receives the same ground-truth eye target, RGT-Base reaches the lowest reported seven-joint error, with inference inside the 16.7 ms frame interval.

Cloudflare

Your agent's browser can now open private sites: preview.internal keeps a sandbox dev server off the public internet

Cloudflare added internal hostnames to the persistent browser in its Agents SDK: give the browser a name such as preview.internal and requests to it go to the agent itself rather than the internet. The agent can then check a dev server in its sandbox, a folder in its workspace, or another Worker in the same browser it uses for the web, with nothing exposed publicly. Each internal host has a fetch function running in the Durable Object, so it can use that object's bindings and state, and a host can carry a target schema so the model chooses which port or folder it serves.

Baseten

Model files stop being copied between deployments: Baseten seals each version behind a content digest, and startup no longer waits for a full download

Baseten now lets read-only model data be published once as a sealed volume: a directory or checkpoint is committed as an immutable version addressed by a content digest that any deployment can mount. Previously the same checkpoint was downloaded and re-uploaded to several places, each deployment holding its own config pointing at a copy, so a mismatched revision surfaced only when outputs diverged. Volumes are chunked and keyed by content hash, so a push transfers only changed chunks, and a mount makes files available as the container starts, removing the pull phase from startup. Sealed Volumes ship with Baseten CLI 1.1.0 and newer.

langchain.com

Agents stop re-deriving cross-document answers: a compiled wiki lifts accuracy from 0.10 to 0.52, and an evidence graph adds 27%

A memory layer for agents doing cross-document reasoning now has a controlled comparison: on 111 synthetic insurance documents, an agent using the OpenWiki-compiled wiki reached 0.52 accuracy on 50 questions requiring connections across sources, against 0.10 with keyword search alone; adding an evidence graph built from citations and document references raised accuracy a further 27%, doubled citation consistency and cut cost per correct answer by 58%. On simple lookups the two conditions were about equal, so the wiki brought no advantage there.

Luminary Cloud

No full-body solve per gauge change: SHIFT-NVH holds median field error to 1.1% across 192 test cases

Luminary released SHIFT-NVH, a large physics model trained on finite-element solves of a single body-in-white that takes the gauges of 15 parts, the material and the vehicle speed and returns RMS acceleration in x, y and z at all 130,713 surface nodes under ISO 8608 class B road excitation. On 192 test cases split by design, with material and speed unseen, the median relative L2 field error is 1.1% and the median part RMS error is 0.47%, about one tenth of the 5.4% median gauge-induced change. The model covers a fixed mesh, ±30% gauge, three materials and four speeds from 30 to 110 km/h, and final gauge decisions still rest on full FE and physical testing.

Vercel News

AI Gateway adds virtual models: swap the model and settings without redeploying apps or reconfiguring agents

AI Gateway now offers virtual models: a saved configuration naming which model to use and with which settings, called by apps and agents through a custom model ID such as vmc/coding-agent. Previously, changing the model or settings meant redeploying apps or reconfiguring agents; now the change happens centrally in AI Gateway. It can also supply options a coding agent does not expose, such as reasoning effort, fast mode and prompt caching, and carry provider choice, fallback models and Zero Data Retention requirements.

Claude Enterprise turns team usage into readable reports, splitting spend by workstream and letting admins raise limits from the report

Anthropic has made three admin features generally available for Claude Enterprise: smart reports sample a team's transcripts, group the work into workstreams and show each one's spend, deliverables and common friction points; in-app surveys collect members' own account of value; and pooled group budgets give a team one shared monthly budget while member limits remain a guardrail. All three shipped the same day, with availability varying by configuration, including HIPAA configurations and organizations using customer-managed encryption keys.

Gemini

Gemini app adds an immersive explorations library: tap a label and travel from planetary scale down to atoms

The Gemini app now carries a library of immersive explorations that lets users move through a topic layer by layer in an interactive, visual form, from microscopic systems out to deep space. The library is reachable in the Gemini student hub through “Try immersive explorations,” and direct access inside a Gemini chat is stated as coming soon. Each scene unfolds into guided, interactive experiences, such as tracing trade routes on the Silk Road, peering inside a jet engine, or studying the physics of lightning. The feature is available to all users in English, Indonesian, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and simplified Chinese, while users in all other languages currently receive an English-only experience.

Design rules for AI coding agents: 62 deterministic checks that run without an LLM or API key

Impeccable, a frontend design skill for AI coding agents, ships design constraints as runnable commands and detector rules. Earlier design skills of this kind leaned on the model's own judgment, whereas Impeccable's 62 deterministic detector rules run in a CLI and browser extension with no LLM and no API key. It also provides 24 commands as a shared design vocabulary, and one init step writes durable product truth into PRODUCT.md so later commands keep product facts separate from surface visual direction.

arXiv

Quantum circuits no longer keep only the winner: fusing five models picked by cognitive diversity beats the best single model on all four datasets

Selecting five models by cognitive diversity from a pool of 29 quantum and classical scoring systems and fusing them beats the strongest single model on all four binary classification benchmarks, with gains up to 6.03% in accuracy.