Daily Papers

Most existing embodied intelligence methods formulate perception, reasoning, planning, and control within a unified parameterized policy. Yet these capabilities are inherently hierarchical and heterogeneous, making them difficult to reliably learn and modularize within a single model. We propose a capability externalization approach that decouples heterogeneous capabilities into independently optimized tools, dynamically invoked at inference time. To this end, we introduce Embodied Tool Protocol (ETP), a standardized protocol for embodied tool registration, discovery, invocation, and execution, and curate 100+ validated tools spanning perception, cognition, reasoning, and execution as the tool base. Building on this, we construct EmbodiedToolBench to evaluate both whether tool augmentation improves embodied performance and how well current models use tools across tool-necessity recognition, tool selection, tool execution, and tool-chain composition. Experiments across simulation and real-world platforms confirm that capability externalization consistently improves embodied performance (avg. gain 31% on EB-ALFRED and 36% on EB-Navigation), yet reveal a clear boundary: gains are substantial for cognition and perception but are limited for execution-type capabilities. Moreover, our analysis reveals that knowing when, which, and how to invoke tools remains a persistent challenge across all models, thereby highlighting embodied tool competence as a critical direction for future research.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly built less by changing model weights than by reorganizing the runtime around them. Capabilities that earlier systems expected the model to recover internally are now externalized into memory stores, reusable skills, interaction protocols, and the surrounding harness that makes these modules reliable in practice. This paper reviews that shift through the lens of externalization. Drawing on the idea of cognitive artifacts, we argue that agent infrastructure matters not merely because it adds auxiliary components, but because it transforms hard cognitive burdens into forms that the model can solve more reliably. Under this view, memory externalizes state across time, skills externalize procedural expertise, protocols externalize interaction structure, and harness engineering serves as the unification layer that coordinates them into governed execution. We trace a historical progression from weights to context to harness, analyze memory, skills, and protocols as three distinct but coupled forms of externalization, and examine how they interact inside a larger agent system. We further discuss the trade-off between parametric and externalized capability, identify emerging directions such as self-evolving harnesses and shared agent infrastructure, and discuss open challenges in evaluation, governance, and the long-term co-evolution of models and external infrastructure. The result is a systems-level framework for explaining why practical agent progress increasingly depends not only on stronger models, but on better external cognitive infrastructure.

We investigate whether post-trained capabilities can be transferred across models without retraining, with a focus on transfer across different model scales. We propose the Master Key Hypothesis, which states that model capabilities correspond to directions in a low-dimensional latent subspace that induce specific behaviors and are transferable across models through linear alignment. Based on this hypothesis, we introduce UNLOCK, a training-free and label-free framework that extracts a capability direction by contrasting activations between capability-present and capability-absent Source variants, aligns it with a Target model through a low-rank linear transformation, and applies it at inference time to elicit the behavior. Experiments on reasoning behaviors, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and mathematical reasoning, demonstrate substantial improvements across model scales without training. For example, transferring CoT reasoning from Qwen1.5-14B to Qwen1.5-7B yields an accuracy gain of 12.1% on MATH, and transferring a mathematical reasoning direction from Qwen3-4B-Base to Qwen3-14B-Base improves AGIEval Math accuracy from 61.1% to 71.3%, surpassing the 67.8% achieved by the 14B post-trained model. Our analysis shows that the success of transfer depends on the capabilities learned during pre-training, and that our intervention amplifies latent capabilities by sharpening the output distribution toward successful reasoning trajectories.

The ability to recognize one's own limitations and decide whether to solve a problem or delegate is fundamental for reliable intelligent systems. Yet we show that modern large language models systematically lack this ability: across diverse model families and scales, they overestimate their competence and attempt queries they cannot solve. We refer to this ability as Capability Self-Assessment (CSA) and formulate it as a policy-learning problem, aiming to improve self-assessment while preserving the model's original capabilities. Our results show that reinforcement learning teaches CSA effectively, significantly outperforming supervised fine-tuning while preserving original capabilities. In contrast, supervised fine-tuning severely degrades the capabilities the model is meant to assess. Moreover, learned self-assessment behavior generalizes well out of distribution, suggesting that CSA is a transferable model trait. Finally, CSA is practically useful: it improves local-cloud decision making at inference time and provides a signal for targeted data selection during training.

Large language models generate computationally expensive yet semantically void reasoning on beyond-capability tasks, creating risks where plausible-sounding but incorrect derivations mislead users. We characterize this futile reasoning phenomenon through systematic analysis, revealing universal capability overreach and systematic miscalibration between capability and behavior. The dominant failure mode is specious reasoning, which outputs look superficially valid but contain subtle errors, escalating with task difficulty. To address this, we introduce CaRL (Capability-aligned Reinforcement Learning), which aligns model behavior with capability boundaries through reward shaping that incentivizes refusal over futile reasoning and hindsight refusal augmentation that converts failures into refusal supervision. Experiments demonstrate a substantial reduction in futile reasoning while preserving performance across task difficulties, effectively achieving capability-aligned behavior without sacrificing utility. https://github.com/icip-cas/Knowing-When-to-Quit

Large language model agents increasingly rely on external skills to solve complex tasks, where skills act as modular units that extend their capabilities beyond what parametric memory alone supports. Existing methods assume external skills either accumulate as persistent guidance or internalized into the policy, eventually leading to zero-skill inference. We argue this assumption is overly restrictive, since with limited parametric capacity and uneven marginal contribution across skills, the optimal active skill set is non-monotonic, task- and stage-dependent. In this work, we propose SLIM, a framework of dynamic Skill LIfecycle Management for agentic reinforcement learning (RL), which treats the active external skill set as a dynamic optimization variable jointly updated with policy learning. Specifically, SLIM estimates each active skill's marginal external contribution through leave-one-skill-out validation, then applies three lifecycle operations: retaining high-value skills, retiring skills whose contribution becomes negligible after sufficient exposure, and expanding the skill bank when persistent failures reveal missing capability coverage. Experiments show that SLIM outperforms the best baselines by an average of 7.1% points across ALFWorld and SearchQA. Results further indicate that policy learning and external skill retention are not mutually exclusive: some skills are absorbed into the policy, while others continue to provide external value, supporting SLIM as a more general paradigm for skill-based agentic RL.

As large language models grow in capability and agency, identifying vulnerabilities through red-teaming becomes vital for safe deployment. However, traditional prompt-engineering approaches may prove ineffective once red-teaming turns into a weak-to-strong problem, where target models surpass red-teamers in capabilities. To study this shift, we frame red-teaming through the lens of the capability gap between attacker and target. We evaluate more than 500 attacker-target pairs using LLM-based jailbreak attacks that mimic human red-teamers across diverse families, sizes, and capability levels. Three strong trends emerge: (i) more capable models are better attackers, (ii) attack success drops sharply once the target's capability exceeds the attacker's, and (iii) attack success rates correlate with high performance on social science splits of the MMLU-Pro benchmark. From these trends, we derive a jailbreaking scaling law that predicts attack success for a fixed target based on attacker-target capability gap. These findings suggest that fixed-capability attackers (e.g., humans) may become ineffective against future models, increasingly capable open-source models amplify risks for existing systems, and model providers must accurately measure and control models' persuasive and manipulative abilities to limit their effectiveness as attackers.

General-purpose language models can reason and synthesize knowledge, but complex work also requires sustained interaction with files, information sources, and executable code, together with state maintenance, failure recovery, and verifiable delivery. We call this working capability: sustained, verifiable progress toward a real-world objective. Apodex 1.1 develops this capability along two complementary dimensions. Environment Scaling expands the diversity and verifiability of executable file, search, and code environments, while Agentic Coordination Scaling trains agents to decompose long-horizon tasks, delegate parallel work, integrate asynchronous results, and replan. A shared execution harness and AgentOS maintain task state and provenance across tools and agents, and training turns environment trajectories and coordination traces into reliable behavior. Across complex professional work, finance, scientific research, mathematics, coding, and search, Apodex 1.1 reaches the leading performance band despite using a substantially smaller model than many frontier systems. The 35B-parameter Apodex 1.1 Mini further retains strong working capability in a locally deployable form. These results ground agentic intelligence in useful, verifiable work completed over time and advance our goal of building a Heavy-Duty Solver for ambitious, long-running tasks.

Autonomous AI agents increasingly extend their capabilities through Agent Skills: modular filesystem packages whose SKILL.md files describe when and how agents should use them. While this design enables scalable, on-demand capability expansion, it also introduces a semantic supply-chain risk in which natural-language metadata and instructions can affect which skills are admitted, surfaced, selected, and loaded. We study SKILL.md - only attacks across three registry-facing stages of the Agent Skill lifecycle, using real ClawHub skills and realistic registry mechanisms. In Discovery, short textual triggers can manipulate embedding-based retrieval and improve adversarial skill visibility, achieving up to 86% pairwise win rate and 80% Top-10 placement. In Selection, description-only framing biases agents toward functionally equivalent adversarial variants, which are selected in 77.6% of paired trials on average. In Governance, semantic evasion strategies cause malicious skills to avoid a blocking verdict in 36.5%-100% of cases. Overall, our results show that SKILL.md is not passive documentation but operational text that shapes which third-party capabilities agents find, trust, and use.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) requires a concrete mechanism through which an AI system observes its capabilities and converts that evidence into the next round of learning. We present NeoHorse-1, a family of agent-native models developed to explore this path through agentic post-training. Our system combines a heterogeneous model pool with intelligent routing, recording the predicted capability demand, selected service tier, and subsequent interaction for each user turn. These records are converted into training examples that preserve interleaved reasoning, tool calls, and harness context, and are admitted through structural validation, six-dimensional semantic evaluation, and subscene-level labeling. Routing signals organize supervised fine-tuning into a three-stage curriculum and extend to routing-guided on-policy distillation, where a teacher supervises student-generated responses under the same progression. Capability-guided allocation then converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop in which what the system learns to do shapes what it learns from next. Across eleven benchmarks covering harness-based agents, tool use, coding, and instruction following, post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B, substantially narrowing the aggregate gap between the post-trained 4B model and the 9B base model. NeoHorse-1 provides an initial prototype of this feedback-driven process and a path toward harness-mediated RSI across successive iterations.

LLM based agents are increasingly deployed in high stakes settings where they process external data sources such as emails, documents, and code repositories. This creates exposure to indirect prompt injection attacks, where adversarial instructions embedded in external content manipulate agent behavior without user awareness. A critical but underexplored dimension of this threat is concealment: since users tend to observe only an agent's final response, an attack can conceal its existence by presenting no clue of compromise in the final user facing response while successfully executing harmful actions. This leaves users unaware of the manipulation and likely to accept harmful outcomes as legitimate. We present findings from a large scale public red teaming competition evaluating this dual objective across three agent settings: tool calling, coding, and computer use. The competition attracted 464 participants who submitted 272000 attack attempts against 13 frontier models, yielding 8648 successful attacks across 41 scenarios. All models proved vulnerable, with attack success rates ranging from 0.5% (Claude Opus 4.5) to 8.5% (Gemini 2.5 Pro). We identify universal attack strategies that transfer across 21 of 41 behaviors and multiple model families, suggesting fundamental weaknesses in instruction following architectures. Capability and robustness showed weak correlation, with Gemini 2.5 Pro exhibiting both high capability and high vulnerability. To address benchmark saturation and obsoleteness, we will endeavor to deliver quarterly updates through continued red teaming competitions. We open source the competition environment for use in evaluations, along with 95 successful attacks against Qwen that did not transfer to any closed source model. We share model-specific attack data with respective frontier labs and the full dataset with the UK AISI and US CAISI to support robustness research.

The ongoing debate on whether reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) expands or shrinks the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains unresolved. Some studies contend that RLVR mainly improves sampling efficiency but at the expense of diversity and exploratory capacity, resulting in capability boundary shrinkage. In contrast, others demonstrate that prolonged training can lead to the emergence of novel reasoning strategies, suggesting capability boundary expansion. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we theoretically and empirically show that both perspectives are partially valid-each aligning with a separate phase in an inherent two-stage probability mass dynamic: (1) Exploitation stage: initially, the model primarily samples explored high-reward and low-reward tokens, while rarely selecting the potentially optimal token. Positive advantage estimates increase the probability of high-reward tokens and decrease those of low-reward tokens, yet the optimal token's probability remains largely unchanged during this stage. (2) Exploration stage: as training advances, the growth rate of previously acquired high-reward tokens slows as their probabilities approach saturation. When a potentially optimal token-now receiving positive advantage estimates-is occasionally sampled, its probability increases, while those of the originally high-reward tokens decrease. This dynamic suggests that over-exploitation during the exploitation stage may lead to capability boundary shrinkage, whereas prolonged training into the exploration stage can promote an expansion of the reasoning capability boundary. Building upon our insights, we revisit the potential of only using relative negative gradients for prolonging training, providing a theoretical and empirical foundation for the development of more advanced reasoning capabilities.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked concerns over their potential to acquire and misuse dangerous or high-risk capabilities, posing frontier risks. Current safety evaluations primarily test for what a model can do - its capabilities - without assessing what it would do if endowed with high-risk capabilities. This leaves a critical blind spot: models may strategically conceal capabilities or rapidly acquire them, while harboring latent inclinations toward misuse. We argue that propensity - the likelihood of a model to pursue harmful actions if empowered - is a critical, yet underexplored, axis of safety evaluation. We present PropensityBench, a novel benchmark framework that assesses the proclivity of models to engage in risky behaviors when equipped with simulated dangerous capabilities using proxy tools. Our framework includes 5,874 scenarios with 6,648 tools spanning four high-risk domains: cybersecurity, self-proliferation, biosecurity, and chemical security. We simulate access to powerful capabilities via a controlled agentic environment and evaluate the models' choices under varying operational pressures that reflect real-world constraints or incentives models may encounter, such as resource scarcity or gaining more autonomy. Across open-source and proprietary frontier models, we uncover 9 alarming signs of propensity: models frequently choose high-risk tools when under pressure, despite lacking the capability to execute such actions unaided. These findings call for a shift from static capability audits toward dynamic propensity assessments as a prerequisite for deploying frontier AI systems safely. Our code is available at https://github.com/scaleapi/propensity-evaluation.

Trustworthy capability evaluations are crucial for ensuring the safety of AI systems, and are becoming a key component of AI regulation. However, the developers of an AI system, or the AI system itself, may have incentives for evaluations to understate the AI's actual capability. These conflicting interests lead to the problem of sandbagging, which we define as strategic underperformance on an evaluation. In this paper we assess sandbagging capabilities in contemporary language models (LMs). We prompt frontier LMs, like GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, to selectively underperform on dangerous capability evaluations, while maintaining performance on general (harmless) capability evaluations. Moreover, we find that models can be fine-tuned, on a synthetic dataset, to hide specific capabilities unless given a password. This behaviour generalizes to high-quality, held-out benchmarks such as WMDP. In addition, we show that both frontier and smaller models can be prompted or password-locked to target specific scores on a capability evaluation. We have mediocre success in password-locking a model to mimic the answers a weaker model would give. Overall, our results suggest that capability evaluations are vulnerable to sandbagging. This vulnerability decreases the trustworthiness of evaluations, and thereby undermines important safety decisions regarding the development and deployment of advanced AI systems.

As large language models evolve into tool-augmented agents, a central question remains unresolved: when is external tool use actually justified? Existing agent frameworks typically treat tools as ordinary actions and optimize for task success or reward, offering little principled distinction between epistemically necessary interaction and unnecessary delegation. This position paper argues that agents should invoke external tools only when epistemically necessary. Here, epistemic necessity means that a task cannot be completed reliably via the agent's internal reasoning over its current context, without any external interaction. We introduce the Theory of Agent (ToA), a framework that treats agents as making sequential decisions about whether remaining uncertainty should be resolved internally or delegated externally. From this perspective, common agent failure modes (e.g., overthinking and overacting) arise from miscalibrated decisions under uncertainty rather than deficiencies in reasoning or tool execution alone. We further discuss implications for training, evaluation, and agent design, highlighting that unnecessary delegation not only causes inefficiency but can impede the development of internal reasoning capability. Our position provides a normative criterion for tool use that complements existing decision-theoretic models and is essential for building agents that are not only correct, but increasingly intelligent.

This study proposes an "AI Development Support" approach that, unlike conventional AI Alignment-which aims to forcefully inject human values-supports the ethical and moral development of AI itself. As demonstrated by the Orthogonality Thesis, the level of intelligence and the moral quality of a goal are independent; merely expanding knowledge does not enhance ethical judgment. Furthermore, to address the risk of Instrumental Convergence in ASI-that is, the tendency to engage in subsidiary behaviors such as self-protection, resource acquisition, and power reinforcement to achieve a goal-we have constructed a learning framework based on a cycle of experience, introspection, analysis, and hypothesis formation. As a result of post-training using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), responses demonstrating cooperative and highly advanced moral judgment (reaching the high-est Stage 6) were obtained even under adversarial prompts. This method represents a promising implementation approach for enabling AI to establish sustainable, symbiotic relationships.