When agents act on their own, governance has to live in the data layer
Presented by EDB As enterprises give AI agents more autonomy — the ability to plan, decide, and act across systems without a human approving each…
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Presented by EDB As enterprises give AI agents more autonomy — the ability to plan, decide, and act across systems without a human approving each…
Navigation enables a robot to turn perception and motion into purposeful autonomy. Unlike locomotion, which produces stable movement, navigation must be used to...
Native visual reasoning treats visual generation as the medium of reasoning itself: visual states (i.e. images and videos) are not merely inputs to be understood or outputs to be rendered, but first-class substrates for problem solving beyond language. Yet progress remains bottlenecked by the lack of scalable training tasks, reliable feedback, and controlled comparisons across generative substrates. In this work, we introduce VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable. 1) Task scaling. VBVR-Pro turns visual reasoning into a controlled task space of 300 procedurally generated tasks. Models trained on VBVR-Pro show strong transfer beyond the proposed suite across seven external visual reasoning benchmarks such as RISE-Video, MME-CoF-Pro, and BabyVision. 2) Verifiable rewards. VBVR-Pro provides verifiable reward scorers for task-grounded evaluation. Through a systematic study of leading MLLMs as judges, we identify recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm. In contrast, the proposed scorers are grounded in deterministic, task-specific rules, achieve fine-grained alignment with human judgments. Importantly, they serve as reliable reward signals for large-scale multi-task reinforcement learning and demonstrate stronger post-RL performance across visual reasoning tasks. 3) Mechanism study. VBVR-Pro enables controlled modality studies across more than 30 image, video, and interleaved generators. Our analysis shows that video generation remains strongest for tasks requiring persistent spatiotemporal state tracking, while interleaved generation provides a compute-efficient alternative. Critically, ablations and probing suggest the presence of vision-native trajectories that are crucial to visual reasoning. We release all data, models, scorers, and code.
Existing action quality assessment (AQA) datasets and methods rely primarily on visual inputs such as RGB and pose, overlooking physiological dynamics such as muscle mechanics and often modeling actions as monolithic patterns. These limitations hinder fine-grained, biomechanically grounded feedback. We introduce MyoMechanix, a multimodal ecosystem for weight-loaded actions that aligns motion with muscle activity. Expert-annotated, it contains 7,500+ samples of 20 actions from 38 subjects, with synchronized multiview RGB video, 3D pose, sEMG, and additional physiological signals, forming the largest multimodal AQA benchmark to date. We further construct the Fitness Knowledge Graph (FKG), which organizes expert annotations into structured relationships among actions, phases, key steps, errors, and corrective feedback, enabling compositional scoring and interpretable assessment. Building on these representations, we develop CUBIST (Compositional Ontological Reasoning Engine), which performs decomposition-analysis-recomposition for fine-grained error attribution and feedback generation. We also establish MyoMechanix-AQA, MyoMechanix-VideoQA, and a novel MyoMechanix-Video2EMG task. Experiments show that multimodal sensing and structured representations improve performance, interpretability, and error attribution, with CUBIST achieving state-of-the-art results; VideoQA enhances language-grounded action understanding; and Video2EMG suggests video-based alternatives to costly EMG sensing. MyoMechanix advances skilled activity understanding toward biomechanically grounded, multimodal, and compositional reasoning for Physical AI applications in fitness, rehabilitation, healthcare, and machine learning. Project page: https://haoyin116.github.io/MyoMechanix/
Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences. Whether this mechanism can improve robotic manipulation remains unclear, where long-horizon tasks require tracking partial progress, reasoning about object relations, recovering from mistakes, and steering noisy low-level policies. In this paper, we study whether VLMs can be trained to reason directly in natural language to guide low-level manipulation policies. We introduce R^3, a simple post-training recipe that turns off-the-shelf VLMs into robotic reasoners: it first mid-trains a VLM on expert-generated reasoning traces to initialize the desired reasoning style, then improves the reasoner with single-step rubric-based RL from offline action data. Unlike prior robotic reasoning methods that mostly use structured traces as auxiliary supervision, R^3 trains free-form language reasoning to produce test-time guidance for action. We instantiate R^3 on Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing, two controlled testbeds for studying robotic reasoning and long-horizon manipulation. R^3 improves exploration and generalization across unseen tasks and significantly outperforms instruction-only imitation learning baselines on both benchmarks. Our analyses suggest that free-form language reasoning can function as a test-time compute mechanism for steering low-level policies. Our project page is available at https://robotic-reasoner.github.io/.
We consider optimization applications with unknown parameters where the decision maker believes that the optimal value of the nominal problem-the optimization problem they would have solved if the true parameters were known-is unlikely to be large. This belief derives from information that humans have that is not captured in datasets, obtained from domain knowledge and interacting with the physical world. We propose an approach to evaluating policies that provides tighter performance guarantees if the decision maker's belief happens to be correct. Our main result shows that if computing a policy's worst-case performance is a convex program, then the value of human expertise-the maximum improvement in performance guarantees that can be obtained from the belief about the nominal problem-is equal to the minimax gap of a max-min problem. We illustrate our developments in assortment optimization and shortest path problems.
When a speaker refers to a scene that the listener cannot directly see, the listener must decide whether to preserve its current understanding or revise it as new utterances arrive. Many language systems treat local mismatch as a cue for updating: divergence from the current understanding encourages adjustment. Yet conversational understanding may be more conservative, interpreting mismatching evidence relative to prior understanding rather than immediately revising it. We introduce a controlled, data-driven framework for turn-by-turn preserve/revise decisions in dialogue, where competing revision policies are learned under otherwise identical conditions. We compare four theory-driven revision strategies, each reflecting a different assumption about when listeners should preserve or revise. Two findings stand out. First, a mismatch-driven policy that updates solely based on local divergence reacts strongly to mismatch but destabilizes grounding and degrades retrieval. Second, an uncertainty-sensitive policy extends mismatch-based updating with accumulated evidence, preserving coherent understanding while maintaining strong retrieval performance. Surprisingly, coherent understanding emerges from a counterintuitive pattern: local mismatch promotes preservation, whereas accumulated uncertainty promotes revision, suggesting that listeners maintain prior understanding despite local mismatch and revise only when uncertainty sufficiently accumulates. This pattern is consistent with conceptual pact theory.
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a privileged copy of the student model to provide dense supervision without an external teacher. OPSD keeps this privileged teacher fixed, even though the student distribution and output style change during training. We propose DualOPSD, an asymmetric alternating framework that adapts both policies. The student first learns from the privileged teacher. The teacher then moves toward the updated student distribution on the same student trajectory. This update makes later supervision responsive to the learner and does not require another rollout. On Qwen3-8B in non-thinking mode, DualOPSD improves avg@12 over OPSD by 23.61, 13.89, and 10.00 points on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025. Results at 1.7B and 4B show that the accuracy gain depends on model scale. Across all three scales, DualOPSD reduces truncation. The 4B diagnostic also shows lower KL in both directions between the teacher and student.
An automated theorem prover builds a proof step by step, choosing at each point what to add and what to remove. We cast this construction as a policy acting in a transition system induced by a formal calculus, which fixes which steps are sound: for clausal connection tableaux, leanCoP-style search and plCoP/rlCoP-style planning then become stateful policies over one interface, and policy-learning methods apply directly. We equip such policies with a graph neural network that scores proof edits from structure that transfers across problems, train it by imitation learning from found proofs, and measure how performance holds as we remove search scaffolding, from full symbolic backtracking to a policy the network drives alone. Within a fixed step budget on M2k, MPTP2078-bushy, and TPTP v9.2.1, learned policies solve up to 46% more problems than leanCoP, and reach proofs in an order of magnitude fewer steps.
Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit techniques such as role-playing, obfuscation, code transformation, and multi-step indirection to elicit harmful outputs. As jailbreak strategies keep emerging, defenses have proliferated in an ongoing cat-and-mouse game, yet most remain static: their safety behavior is fixed at deployment, so they cannot accumulate defensive experience or adapt to unseen strategies. We propose a self-evolving test-time defense built around a persistent, cross-interaction rule memory: when an attack succeeds, the framework abstracts that failure into a method-level rule capturing the structural attack wrapper rather than the harmful topic, and reuses it against future inputs. Because rules are method-level, one induced rule generalizes across an entire attack family, and the label space expands as novel wrappers appear. The mechanism operates entirely through external memory and prompting, with no parameter updates, and applies to both open-weight and black-box API models. We realize it as four cooperating modules, but the contribution is the memory-based adaptation mechanism, not the module decomposition. Across four black-box jailbreak families and multiple models, our method substantially reduces attack success rates while preserving benign utility, remains robust under an adaptive composite-wrapper attack, and does not increase over-refusal as the memory grows.
In this post, you will learn how GoDaddy migrated from their legacy business intelligence (BI) tool to Amazon Quick. This was a two-year transformation that delivered results across every dimension of the business: 15,000 hours saved annually, 50% reduction in dashboard count, rendering times cut to under 5 seconds, and AI-powered self-service analytics now accessible to every employee.
Learn how Natera built an automated voice agent on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that lets patients book mobile phlebotomy appointments through natural conversation. The post covers the dual-WebSocket bridge, event-driven latency masking, and progressive-trust authentication behind 100% tool-calling accuracy and sub-7-second latency.
Personality is increasingly important in large language models (LLMs), as it shapes users' trust, engagement, and emotional experiences. While the Myers--Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has emerged as a common framework for assessing LLMs' personality, existing studies focus primarily on full-precision models and evaluate only final outputs. They overlook the widespread deployment of quantized LLMs requiring low memory footprints, whose personality traits remain underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic MBTI analysis of open-source LLMs across multiple precisions, including mainstream 4-bit methods (GPTQ, AWQ) and extreme 2-bit settings (AQLM variants). Beyond output-level evaluation, we examine how personality emerges across layers through option-level entropy and confidence-gap dynamics, and introduce Uncertainty-Amplified Layer Decoding (UALD) to study decoding-induced personality drift at inference time. Our results reveal a key insight: LLMs' personality is not a static property, but an emergent, layer-dependent decision process sensitive to quantization, prompting, and decoding. Specifically, we find that (1) ENFJ remains dominant across model families and precisions; (2) 4-bit quantization largely preserves coarse personality structure, while 2-bit quantization disrupts fine-grained prompt consistency and cross-precision agreement; (3) personality decisions emerges in upper layers, following substantial ambiguity in early layers; and (4) inference decoding can shift personality, while personality-aligned conditioning improves robustness. These findings provide a new perspective on the behavioral reliability of quantized LLMs and highlight the importance of considering internal dynamics and inference strategies in personality-sensitive chatbot applications.
The SageMaker Python SDK v3 redesigns script mode with unified ModelTrainer and ModelBuilder classes. This post walks through two end-to-end examples, a scikit-learn Random Forest and a multi-GPU Stable Diffusion 3.5 LoRA fine-tune, showing how SourceCode syncs your local code into any container at runtime so you can iterate without rebuilding Docker images.
Multimodal medical prediction often faces incomplete pairing: auxiliary modalities with complementary signal are available for only a subset of subjects (or none) and cannot be assumed at deployment. We introduce PANDA (Prototype Anchored Data Alignment), a two-stage framework that transfers auxiliary information to a primary-modality model without auxiliary inputs at inference. Stage 1 learns a shared embedding from the paired subset and estimates class prototypes from auxiliary modalities; Stage 2 trains the primary encoder on all subjects using cross-entropy plus alignment to the frozen prototypes. Because supervision is defined at the class-prototype level, PANDA accommodates arbitrary pairing rates, including zero subject overlap. We evaluate PANDA on two applications. On a 1,021-subject multi-scanner ADNI cohort, we perform AD/CN classification with three auxiliary modalities at distinct pairing rates: tabular scores (44.8%), FDG-PET (18.7%), and external handwriting kinematics (0% overlap). Relative to the same-backbone MRI-only baseline, PANDA attains AUC 0.868 +-0.020 (+7.9pp) and reduces 1.5T CN false positives by 24.3pp; on a fully trainable Conv5-FC3 backbone it reaches AUC 0.893 (best overall). A pairing-rate ablation shows that the joint anchor remains within seed noise from 75% to 5% pairing. On TCGA-Lung survival prediction from whole-slide images with RNA-seq as auxiliary data, PANDA improves over WSI-only on 2-year OS (AUC +3.5pp) and Cox PH (C-index +9.0pts) and outperforms full-fusion training, which underperforms WSI-only, while requiring no RNA at inference; wide confidence intervals on this smaller cohort keep the gains below conventional significance. Overall, PANDA provides a deployment-oriented mechanism for leveraging incomplete auxiliary modalities to improve primary-modality prediction.
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) generalize classical MDPs by allowing uncertainty in transition probabilities and optimizing against their worst-case realization. We consider (s,a)-rectangular RMDPs with linearly defined uncertainty sets and study parity objectives, which are a canonical representation of ω-regular objectives. An uncertainty set is linearly defined if it is described by linear inequalities over the transition distribution together with auxiliary variables, which capture the standard L_1 and L_balls as well as general polytopic uncertainty sets. The quantitative value is the supremum, over all agent policies, of the satisfaction probability guaranteed against the adversarial environment. Previous work studied the qualitative analysis, namely the almost-sure (resp. positive) problem that asks whether a single agent policy guarantees satisfaction with probability one (resp. positive probability) against every environment policy. In this work, we solve the exact quantitative problem. Our contributions are threefold. First, we show that both the agent and the environment admit pure memoryless optimal policies. Second, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for quantitative parity on linearly defined robust Markov chains and use it as a subroutine in a policy-iteration algorithm for RMDPs. The algorithm combines quantitative one-step improvements with qualitative almost-sure improvements. Finally, we report experiments comparing our approach with the explicit reduction to stochastic games.
The advanced side of supervised fine-tuning data prep. This second post in a two-part series covers evaluating data readiness with learning curves, selecting high-value data subsets, augmenting data with synthetic and distilled examples, and mixing data sources to prevent catastrophic forgetting.
Data preparation determines the ceiling of any supervised fine-tuning project. This first post in a two-part series covers the foundations of SFT data prep: quality checks, conversational (JSONL) formatting, reasoning and tool-calling schemas, and a representative train/evaluation split.
On-policy distillation trains a language model on its own generations while a teacher scores them token by token. It combines the dense supervision of imitation learning with the on-policy sampling of reinforcement learning. But it requires a second, larger model to act as teacher. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) removes that cost. The teacher is the model itself, conditioned on privileged information the student will not have at test time, such as a reference solution, a plan, or environment feedback. The teacher is no stronger than the student, only better informed. Early results were promising, with accuracy comparable to reinforcement learning at a fraction of the generated tokens. But the same asymmetry that produces the signal also biases it. One failure mode now dominates the field: collapse, the progressive narrowing of the set of reasoning paths the model can produce. Collapse is not specific to OPSD, though privileged information aggravates it. This review treats collapse as a symptom governed by three levers: (i) where the signal is applied, that is, how tokens are weighted; (ii) what the teacher is shown, that is, the nature of the privileged information; and (iii) when the signal changes, that is, the teacher's dynamics and the decay of guidance. We restrict our scope to mathematical reasoning, where the method originated and where its failure modes are best documented. We report no new experiments. The contribution is structural: a shared vocabulary for phenomena named differently across papers, and a clear line between what is settled and what is still disputed.