#01Nov 9, 2026
cs.CL
SMO: Compiling Natural Language Skills into Graphs of Reusable State-Move-Outcome Bricks
Chao Chen, Jiashuo Zhang, Yunhang Shen and 2 more
Large language model agents increasingly rely on reusable natural-language skills, yet growing skill collections remain accumulations of isolated text artifacts that are difficult to compare, deduplicate, and compose. We argue that the reusable content of a skill lies not in its surface wording but in its procedural transitions: which operation to execute under a given state and which observable outcome to produce. Based on this observation, we propose State-Move-Outcome (SMO), a compilation-like framework that decomposes raw skills into reusable procedural bricks and organizes admitted bricks as an externalized symbolic structure. When compiling a skill, SMO first retrieves and composes existing bricks, dynamically connects them through Outcome-to-State conditions, and creates a candidate brick only for an uncovered procedure; the candidate becomes reusable only after validation and admission. Experiments on SkillsBench v1.1 demonstrate that SMO represents 232 rawSkills from 87 underlying tasks with 95 shared bricks, reducing the corresponding skill representations from 366,472 to 149,154 tokens--a $\mathbf{59.3}\times$ reduction and $\mathbf{2.46}\times$ compression. Across 232 skill-conditioned evaluation instances, SMO raises the average task score from $\mathbf{0.6379}$ to $\mathbf{0.7478}$ and increases 5/5 Pass instances from $\mathbf{138}$ to $\mathbf{164}$, while matching or outperforming rawSkill on $\mathbf{208}$ of $\mathbf{232}$ instances. It also reduces average runtime token consumption by $\mathbf{38.38\%}$. These results show that compiling natural-language skills into shared procedural units can jointly improve skill reuse, representation efficiency, and downstream execution.
#02Nov 9, 2026
cs.CV
SAFE-Hair: Scalp-Anchored Fields for Exportable Single-View Hair Reconstruction
Yucheng Wang, Zedong Wang, Yuetong Wu and 2 more
Single-view 3D hair reconstruction has progressed rapidly, but many methods optimize for visual plausibility rather than producing strand assets that can be directly used in grooming, editing, or simulation pipelines. We propose SAFE-Hair, a framework that reconstructs explicit strand grooms from a single portrait by decoding hair from persistent follicles in a canonical scalp-UV domain. Given a fitted template head, SAFE-Hair projects self-supervised image features onto the scalp, uses a conditional Rectified Flow model to generate latent scalp fields, and decodes occupancy, segment directions, length allocation, and total length at a fixed set of scalp follicles. This representation enforces scalp-rooted strand identities by construction and enables direct export with follicle IDs and guide-family metadata. We further introduce attachment, collision, and bending priors to improve geometric validity without per-subject test-time optimization. To evaluate both reconstruction fidelity and asset usability, we introduce HairBench-3D, a benchmark built from public 3D hair assets with standardized alignment, rendering, resampling, and metrics for geometry, direction consistency, invisible-region completion, silhouette agreement, and collision. SAFE-Hair improves Chamfer distance from 3.74 mm to 3.28 mm, F-score from 77.9 to 81.7, invisible-region F-score from 66.1 to 69.8, and penetration ratio from 4.8% to 3.9% over the strongest baseline.
#03Nov 9, 2026
cs.LG
Speculative Self-Distillation enables Efficient Knowledge Internalization
Shayan Talaei, Agam Bhatia, Arshia Soltani Moakhar and 3 more
Many real-world applications require language models to internalize knowledge that was absent from pretraining, to incorporate continually updated facts, or to learn new domain skills. Self-distillation has emerged as a natural approach for this task. A model conditioned on the source material acts as the teacher, and an unconditioned student is trained to reproduce the teacher's behavior closed-book. We propose Speculative Self-Distillation (SSD), an efficient per-token mixed-policy method for self-distillation. The student generates each rollout by default, while the teacher intervenes only at positions where its next-token distribution substantially diverges from the student's. Unlike off-policy distillation with teacher-generated prefixes, this design keeps training rollouts close to the student's test-time behavior, while avoiding the low-signal states that fully on-policy rollouts drift into. In effect, SSD lets the teacher steer the rollout exactly where the privileged context changes the prediction. On three closed-book QA benchmarks measuring fact recall, knowledge updates, and skill acquisition, SSD nearly matches on-policy distillation while using 38-69% fewer supervised tokens and consistently outperforms off-policy distillation on the held-out test set. On a forgetting stress test, SSD retains the most general capability while also achieving the best in-domain accuracy and using less supervision than the on-policy baseline. Overall, SSD establishes a new accuracy-efficiency-forgetting Pareto frontier for self-distillation.
#04Nov 9, 2026
cs.RO
Thermo-VLA: A Thermal-Aware Vision-Language-Action Model with Gated Residual Modulation for Robotic Manipulation
Jingxuan Chen, Junshi Luo, Chencheng Dong and 3 more
Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun incorporating thermal sensing, but existing approaches typically treat thermal images as ordinary visual inputs, providing limited support for temperature-aware relational reasoning in manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose Thermo-VLA with a ThermoRes Encoder, which decomposes thermal images into cold and hot attribute representations and injects them into the RGB token through language-conditioned residual modulation, enabling temperature-driven target selection and continuous manipulation. We further construct six real-world robotic tasks on a dual-arm Unitree G1 platform, spanning basic grounding to relational reasoning. Experiments show that Thermo-VLA achieves an average success rate of 0.86 across four thermal-dependent tasks, outperforming a pi_0.5 baseline that directly incorporates RGB-thermal observations by 18 percentage points. Under unseen-object and scene variations, Thermo-VLA maintains an average success rate of 0.78, achieving the best generalisation performance among the compared methods. Beyond thermal sensing, we transfer the same residual modulation mechanism to colour attributes and observe consistent improvements in both simulation and real-robot experiments, indicating its potential to generalise beyond thermal attributes. Project website: https://j-x-chen.github.io/Thermo-VLA-web/
#05Nov 9, 2026
cs.LG
HyPLM Technical Report
Haowei Lin, Cai Zhou, Xiangxin Zhou
Protein language models (PLMs) are standard tools for variant-effect prediction, protein annotation and design, but the compute needed to train and serve them keeps growing. We present HyPLM-Flash, an efficient and open PLM trained by Hyra 2.0, the research agent developed by our team. HyPLM-Flash is a 650-million-parameter masked language model trained on 726 billion tokens, 0.73 times the data of ESM-2 650M and a fifth to an eighth of the data of E1-600M and ESM C 600M. It runs on an inference engine with fused kernels and INT8 matrix multiplication, embedding about 130,000 residues per second on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU, 1.9 to 2.7 times faster than other 600M-class encoders. In a matched evaluation against 28 public checkpoints on 32 tasks, HyPLM-Flash reaches a ProteinGym zero-shot Spearman correlation of 0.409, statistically tied with ESM-2 650M, ESM C 600M and E1-600M, and the highest organismal-fitness score among self-supervised single-sequence models. It gives the best long-range contact precision of all models evaluated, including ESM-2 15B and ESM C 6B, and a lower masked-residue loss than ESM-2 650M, ESM C 600M and E1-600M on held-out sequences and on recently released PDB chains. Matching state-of-the-art accuracy at a fraction of the training and inference cost, HyPLM-Flash sets a new Pareto frontier for protein language models. We have released the model weights and the inference engine at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/hyra-results/tree/main.