#01Nov 4, 2026
cs.AI
FrontierPhysics: Evaluating Agents for End-to-End Physics Research
Bingran You, Wenjun Ke, Ria Rosenauer and 69 more
AI agents are playing an increasingly important role in physics research. However, existing physics benchmarks only evaluate fixed questions, isolated sub-tasks, or paper reproduction with given solutions, and rarely check research quality alongside correctness. We introduce FrontierPhysics, an end-to-end benchmark with 56 tasks made by 42 physicists based on their own research, covering nine domains across theoretical, computational, and experimental physics. Each task requires agents to review the literature, develop a research plan, conduct research and experiments, and produce structured outputs and scientific manuscripts. Combining deterministic verifiers with expert-authored rubrics, FrontierPhysics evaluates whether agents' research is correct and publishable. Across 22 models in 26 configurations, no configuration passes more than 46 of its 168 rollouts. Manual review of agent trajectories shows that frontier agents' main weaknesses are insufficiently rigorous reasoning and limited expert intuition, rather than gaps in physics knowledge or execution errors.
#02Nov 4, 2026
cs.CL
Balancing hierarchical representation and quantization: A performance trade-off in text embeddings
Kai Ponel, Marco Polignano, Erasmo Purificato and 4 more
Hierarchical text embedding models offer variable-length representations, while quantization reduces numerical precision; both aim to improve computational efficiency. This work is an empirical benchmark study of how these two orthogonal, already-established techniques interact. We evaluate 38 tasks from the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) using four transformer-based embedding models, covering 1D and 2D hierarchical representations combined with 32-bit, 8-bit, and binary quantization, for 168 configurations per task. We report each efficiency dimension separately: theoretical per-vector storage and end-to-end evaluation time. Under a Friedman test with Nemenyi post-hoc analysis, int8 quantization is statistically indistinguishable from float32 for pair classification and re-ranking and costs at most 1.5 percentage points overall, whereas binary quantization is significantly worse across every task category. Halving the embedding dimension once is not statistically detectable above $m=16$; two successive halvings always are. Combining an 8x dimensionality reduction with int8 yields a 32x reduction in per-vector storage at 94.4% of baseline effectiveness. Because evaluation times were measured once, we treat them as indicative: we find no evidence that quantization speeds up evaluation, whereas sampling from intermediate layers shortens it substantially. Retrieval degrades far faster than every other category, so we report findings per task category.
#03Nov 4, 2026
cs.LG
Reinforcement Learning Enables Scaling Generalist Robot Policy Improvement
Michal Korniak, Marco Bagatella, Ralf Römer and 21 more
The introduction of generalist robot policies has enabled a single, large model to learn to perform a variety of tasks from a vast pre-training corpus. While these models often exhibit powerful zero-shot generalization capabilities, they typically require an adaptation phase to achieve sufficient performance in deployment. Iterated self-improvement via reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated promise in enabling this adaptation, yet such approaches have been largely explored in single-task settings - where the goal is to simply improve on a narrow deployment task - which lies in stark contrast to the multi-task capabilities of the base policy. In this work we ask whether generalist robot policies are capable of multi-task, generalist improvement in deployment - targeting many diverse tasks simultaneously - and what algorithmic recipe enables this. To answer this question, we first develop a set of structured evaluations to test generalist improvement capabilities, and systematically evaluate algorithmic and practical design choices regarding value estimation, policy extraction and resource allocation. We show that not only can generalist policies be improved online across diverse tasks, but that the right recipe can enable generalization and increase performance on tasks not considered during online training. We characterize when this generalization occurs and show that both the training task distribution and the use of value-based RL are critical. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first evidence for online generalist improvement for robot foundation models.
#04Nov 4, 2026
cs.AI
ServerBench: How can your coding agents design specialized LLM serving systems?
Xinrui Zhong, Zhiming Wang, Yongqi Liu and 5 more
Large language model (LLM) coding agents develop software through experimentation, offering an opportunity to design the serving systems supporting their own operation. Effective serving requires coordinating implementation and operating decisions under session dependencies, latency constraints, and correctness requirements. We introduce ServerBench, a benchmark for agentic design of complete, specialized LLM serving systems. Agents experiment against a common objective, dollars per dollar: latency-qualified token value per dollar of GPU cost. Stateful replay preserves session dependencies, and independent verification checks the submitted system. Across 11 coding-agent models and three deployments, Claude Sonnet 5.5 achieves 2.97 dollars per dollar on Gemma E4B, $4.87\times$ the vLLM reference; 22 of 33 runs yield verified systems, and 13 exceed the strongest baseline. Our analysis identifies three findings: high-value designs coordinate capacity improvements with load selection; agents interpret performance feedback through workload-relevant experiments; and reliable delivery requires verification of the execution paths introduced by optimization. Overall, ServerBench supports systematic study of how agents translate service objectives and feedback into effective, verified serving systems for given task specifications.
#05Nov 4, 2026
cs.AI
Task-Efficient Agent Evaluation Using Cached Traces
Ben Johnson, Hayden Helm
Efficient benchmarking estimates a system's full benchmark performance from a small number of task executions. Standard approaches rely solely on the binary correctness of executions from a collection of already-evaluated reference systems. An agentic system, however, produces a rich trace for each execution that can reveal substantially more about its capabilities. Leveraging this information requires useful trace representations. We propose representing a trace by extracting a structured summary of it with an LLM and embedding the summary with a standard text encoder. These representations preserve correctness- and task-related signal while minimizing the presence of system identity-, model family- and harness-related signals that dominate raw trace embeddings. Given this representation for each task execution from all reference systems, we construct low-dimensional representations of the systems and predict a new system's score from its position among the reference systems. On SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2.0, augmenting an item-response model with this geometry-based prediction reduces mean absolute error from 0.13 to 0.08 (Wilcoxon $p < 10^{-4}$) and from 0.14 to 0.12 (Wilcoxon $p < 10^{-3}$), respectively, when provided a single random executed task. Further, given access to the full set of reference systems, our approach dominates baselines for any given number of executed tasks on both benchmarks.