AI Breakdown

In this episode, we discuss Nested Learning: The Illusion of Deep Learning Architecture by The authors of the paper "Nested Learning: The Illusion of Deep Learning Architecture" are: - Ali Behrouz - Meisam Razaviyayn - Peilin Zhong - Vahab Mirrokni. The paper introduces Nested Learning (NL), a new paradigm framing machine learning as multiple nested optimization problems with distinct context flows, explaining in-context learning in large models. It proposes more expressive optimizers as associative memory modules, a self-modifying sequence model that learns its own update rules, and a continuum memory system to improve continual learning. Together, these contributions enable a continual learning module called Hope, which shows promise in language modeling, knowledge integration, and long-context reasoning tasks.

In this episode, we discuss ARC Is a Vision Problem! by Keya Hu, Ali Cy, Linlu Qiu, Xiaoman Delores Ding, Runqian Wang, Yeyin Eva Zhu, Jacob Andreas, Kaiming He. The paper reframes the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) tasks as an image-to-image translation problem using a vision-centric approach. It introduces Vision ARC (VARC), a model based on a vanilla Vision Transformer trained from scratch on ARC data, which generalizes well to new tasks via test-time training. VARC achieves a 60.4% accuracy on the ARC-1 benchmark, outperforming previous scratch-trained methods and approaching human-level performance.

In this episode, we discuss Solving a Million-Step LLM Task with Zero Errors by Elliot Meyerson, Giuseppe Paolo, Roberto Dailey, Hormoz Shahrzad, Olivier Francon, Conor F. Hayes, Xin Qiu, Babak Hodjat, Risto Miikkulainen. The paper presents MAKER, a system that achieves error-free execution of tasks requiring over one million steps by decomposing them into subtasks handled by specialized microagents. This modular approach enables efficient error correction through multi-agent voting, overcoming the persistent error rates that limit standard LLM scalability. The findings suggest that massively decomposed agentic processes offer a promising path to scaling LLM applications to complex, large-scale problems beyond individual model improvements.

In this episode, we discuss DataRater: Meta-Learned Dataset Curation by Dan A. Calian, Gregory Farquhar, Iurii Kemaev, Luisa M. Zintgraf, Matteo Hessel, Jeremy Shar, Junhyuk Oh, András György, Tom Schaul, Jeffrey Dean, Hado van Hasselt, David Silver. The paper proposes DataRater, a meta-learning approach that estimates the value of individual training data points to improve dataset curation. By leveraging meta-gradients, DataRater optimizes data selection to enhance training efficiency on held-out data. Experiments demonstrate that filtering data with DataRater significantly boosts compute efficiency across various model scales and datasets.

In this episode, we discuss Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale by Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Terence Tao, Adam Zsolt Wagner. AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent that combines large language models with automated evaluation to iteratively generate and refine solutions for complex mathematical problems. It successfully rediscovered and improved known solutions across various math domains and can generalize results into universal formulas. When integrated with proof assistants, AlphaEvolve enables automated proof generation, demonstrating significant potential for advancing mathematical discovery and optimization.

In this episode, we discuss Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery by Ludovico Mitchener, Angela Yiu, Benjamin Chang, Mathieu Bourdenx, Tyler Nadolski, Arvis Sulovari, Eric C. Landsness, Daniel L. Barabasi, Siddharth Narayanan, Nicky Evans, Shriya Reddy, Martha Foiani, Aizad Kamal, Leah P. Shriver, Fang Cao, Asmamaw T. Wassie, Jon M. Laurent, Edwin Melville-Green, Mayk Caldas, Albert Bou, Kaleigh F. Roberts, Sladjana Zagorac, Timothy C. Orr, Miranda E. Orr, Kevin J. Zwezdaryk, Ali E. Ghareeb, Laurie McCoy, Bruna Gomes, Euan A. Ashley, Karen E. Duff, Tonio Buonassisi, Tom Rainforth, Randall J. Bateman, Michael Skarlinski, Samuel G. Rodriques, Michaela M. Hinks, Andrew D. White. The paper presents Kosmos, an AI scientist that autonomously conducts data-driven discovery by iteratively analyzing data, searching literature, and generating hypotheses over extended periods. Kosmos uses a structured world model to integrate information across agents, enabling coherent research workflows involving extensive code execution and literature review. Evaluations show Kosmos produces highly accurate and traceable scientific reports with discoveries spanning multiple fields, some reproducing unpublished work and others novel.

In this episode, we discuss World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AI by NVIDIA, :, Arslan Ali, Junjie Bai, Maciej Bala, Yogesh Balaji, Aaron Blakeman, Tiffany Cai, Jiaxin Cao, Tianshi Cao, Elizabeth Cha, Yu-Wei Chao, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Mike Chen, Yongxin Chen, Yu Chen, Shuai Cheng, Yin Cui, Jenna Diamond, Yifan Ding, Jiaojiao Fan, Linxi Fan, Liang Feng, Francesco Ferroni, Sanja Fidler, Xiao Fu, Ruiyuan Gao, Yunhao Ge, Jinwei Gu, Aryaman Gupta, Siddharth Gururani, Imad El Hanafi, Ali Hassani, Zekun Hao, Jacob Huffman, Joel Jang, Pooya Jannaty, Jan Kautz, Grace Lam, Xuan Li, Zhaoshuo Li, Maosheng Liao, Chen-Hsuan Lin, Tsung-Yi Lin, Yen-Chen Lin, Huan Ling, Ming-Yu Liu, Xian Liu, Yifan Lu, Alice Luo, Qianli Ma, Hanzi Mao, Kaichun Mo, Seungjun Nah, Yashraj Narang, Abhijeet Panaskar, Lindsey Pavao, Trung Pham, Morteza Ramezanali, Fitsum Reda, Scott Reed, Xuanchi Ren, Haonan Shao, Yue Shen, Stella Shi, Shuran Song, Bartosz Stefaniak, Shangkun Sun, Shitao Tang, Sameena Tasmeen, Lyne Tchapmi, Wei-Cheng Tseng, Jibin Varghese, Andrew Z. Wang, Hao Wang, Haoxiang Wang, Heng Wang, Ting-Chun Wang, Fangyin Wei, Jiashu Xu, Dinghao Yang, Xiaodong Yang, Haotian Ye, Seonghyeon Ye, Xiaohui Zeng, Jing Zhang, Qinsheng Zhang, Kaiwen Zheng, Andrew Zhu, Yuke Zhu. The paper presents Cosmos-Predict2.5, a unified flow-based model that integrates Text2World, Image2World, and Video2World generation, enhanced by Cosmos-Reason1 for improved text grounding and control. Trained on 200M videos and refined with reinforcement learning, it outperforms its predecessor in video quality and instruction alignment, supporting robotics and autonomous system simulations. Additionally, Cosmos-Transfer2.5 enables high-fidelity Sim2Real and Real2Real translation with smaller model size, and both models and resources are released openly to advance Physical AI research.

In this episode, we discuss Towards Robust Mathematical Reasoning by Thang Luong, Dawsen Hwang, Hoang H. Nguyen, Golnaz Ghiasi, Yuri Chervonyi, Insuk Seo, Junsu Kim, Garrett Bingham, Jonathan Lee, Swaroop Mishra, Alex Zhai, Clara Huiyi Hu, Henryk Michalewski, Jimin Kim, Jeonghyun Ahn, Junhwi Bae, Xingyou Song, Trieu H. Trinh, Quoc V. Le, Junehyuk Jung. The paper introduces IMO-Bench, a new suite of challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks based on International Mathematical Olympiad problems to better evaluate foundation models. Their model, Gemini Deep Think, achieved state-of-the-art results, surpassing previous models significantly on both answer accuracy and proof-writing tasks. The authors also developed reliable autograders aligned with human evaluations and released the benchmark suite publicly to advance robust mathematical reasoning.

In this episode, we discuss ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models by Mingjie Liu, Shizhe Diao, Ximing Lu, Jian Hu, Xin Dong, Yejin Choi, Jan Kautz, Yi Dong. This paper introduces ProRL, a new reinforcement learning training method that uncovers novel reasoning strategies beyond those found in base language models. Empirical results show that models trained with ProRL consistently outperform base models on challenging reasoning tasks, including cases where base models fail even with extensive attempts. The study demonstrates that prolonged RL can meaningfully expand reasoning capabilities by exploring new solution spaces over time, advancing understanding of how RL enhances language model reasoning.

In this episode, we discuss Roboflow100-VL: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark for Vision-Language Models by Peter Robicheaux, Matvei Popov, Anish Madan, Isaac Robinson, Joseph Nelson, Deva Ramanan, Neehar Peri. The paper introduces Roboflow100-VL, a large benchmark of 100 diverse multi-modal object detection datasets designed to test vision-language models (VLMs) on out-of-distribution concepts beyond typical pre-training data. It demonstrates that state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly in zero-shot settings on challenging domains like medical imaging, highlighting the importance of few-shot concept alignment through annotated examples and rich text. The paper also presents results from a CVPR 2025 competition where the winning approach significantly outperforms baselines in few-shot detection tasks.