Haowei Lin

Haowei Lin, Yijia Shao, Weinan Qian et al. · pku, stanford

Class incremental learning (CIL) is a challenging setting of continual learning, which learns a series of tasks sequentially. Each task consists of a set of unique classes. The key feature of CIL is that no task identifier (or task-id) is provided at test time. Predicting the task-id for each test sample is a challenging problem. An emerging theory-guided approach (called TIL+OOD) is to train a task-specific model for each task in a shared network for all tasks based on a task-incremental learning (TIL) method to deal with catastrophic forgetting. The model for each task is an out-of-distribution (OOD) detector rather than a conventional classifier. The OOD detector can perform both within-task (in-distribution (IND)) class prediction and OOD detection. The OOD detection capability is the key to task-id prediction during inference. However, this paper argues that using a traditional OOD detector for task-id prediction is sub-optimal because additional information (e.g., the replay data and the learned tasks) available in CIL can be exploited to design a better and principled method for task-id prediction. We call the new method TPL (Task-id Prediction based on Likelihood Ratio). TPL markedly outperforms strong CIL baselines and has negligible catastrophic forgetting. The code of TPL is publicly available at https://github.com/linhaowei1/TPL.

Zixuan Ke, Yijia Shao, Haowei Lin et al. · pku, stanford

Language models (LMs) have been instrumental for the rapid advance of natural language processing. This paper studies continual pre-training of LMs, in particular, continual domain-adaptive pre-training (or continual DAP-training). Existing research has shown that further pre-training an LM using a domain corpus to adapt the LM to the domain can improve the end-task performance in the domain. This paper proposes a novel method to continually DAP-train an LM with a sequence of unlabeled domain corpora to adapt the LM to these domains to improve their end-task performances. The key novelty of our method is a soft-masking mechanism that directly controls the update to the LM. A novel proxy is also proposed to preserve the general knowledge in the original LM. Additionally, it contrasts the representations of the previously learned domain knowledge (including the general knowledge in the pre-trained LM) and the knowledge from the current full network to achieve knowledge integration. The method not only overcomes catastrophic forgetting, but also achieves knowledge transfer to improve end-task performances. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zixuan Ke, Haowei Lin, Yijia Shao et al. · deepmind, pku

Recent work on applying large language models (LMs) achieves impressive performance in many NLP applications. Adapting or posttraining an LM using an unlabeled domain corpus can produce even better performance for end-tasks in the domain. This paper proposes the problem of continually extending an LM by incrementally post-train the LM with a sequence of unlabeled domain corpora to expand its knowledge without forgetting its previous skills. The goal is to improve the few-shot end-task learning in these domains. The resulting system is called CPT (Continual PostTraining), which to our knowledge, is the first continual post-training system. Experimental results verify its effectiveness.

Zixuan Ke, Yijia Shao, Haowei Lin et al. · deepmind, pku

Domain-adaptive pre-training (or DA-training for short), also known as post-training, aims to train a pre-trained general-purpose language model (LM) using an unlabeled corpus of a particular domain to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the domain can give improved performances. However, existing DA-training methods are in some sense blind as they do not explicitly identify what knowledge in the LM should be preserved and what should be changed by the domain corpus. This paper shows that the existing methods are suboptimal and proposes a novel method to perform a more informed adaptation of the knowledge in the LM by (1) soft-masking the attention heads based on their importance to best preserve the general knowledge in the LM and (2) contrasting the representations of the general and the full (both general and domain knowledge) to learn an integrated representation with both general and domain-specific knowledge. Experimental results will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Xinyue Zheng, Haowei Lin, Kaichen He et al. · pku

Developing AI agents capable of interacting with open-world environments to solve diverse tasks is a compelling challenge. However, evaluating such open-ended agents remains difficult, with current benchmarks facing scalability limitations. To address this, we introduce Minecraft Universe (MCU), a comprehensive evaluation framework set within the open-world video game Minecraft. MCU incorporates three key components: (1) an expanding collection of 3,452 composable atomic tasks that encompasses 11 major categories and 41 subcategories of challenges; (2) a task composition mechanism capable of generating infinite diverse tasks with varying difficulty; and (3) a general evaluation framework that achieves 91.5\% alignment with human ratings for open-ended task assessment. Empirical results reveal that even state-of-the-art foundation agents struggle with the increasing diversity and complexity of tasks. These findings highlight the necessity of MCU as a robust benchmark to drive progress in AI agent development within open-ended environments. Our evaluation code and scripts are available at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MCU.

Haowei Lin, Yuntian Gu · pku

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) instances is crucial for NLP models in practical applications. Although numerous OOD detection methods exist, most of them are empirical. Backed by theoretical analysis, this paper advocates for the measurement of the "OOD-ness" of a test case $\boldsymbol{x}$ through the likelihood ratio between out-distribution $\mathcal P_{\textit{out}}$ and in-distribution $\mathcal P_{\textit{in}}$. We argue that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) feature-based OOD detection methods, such as Maha and KNN, are suboptimal since they only estimate in-distribution density $p_{\textit{in}}(\boldsymbol{x})$. To address this issue, we propose FLatS, a principled solution for OOD detection based on likelihood ratio. Moreover, we demonstrate that FLatS can serve as a general framework capable of enhancing other OOD detection methods by incorporating out-distribution density $p_{\textit{out}}(\boldsymbol{x})$ estimation. Experiments show that FLatS establishes a new SOTA on popular benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/linhaowei1/FLatS.

Zihao Wang, Shaofei Cai, Anji Liu et al. · pku

Achieving human-like planning and control with multimodal observations in an open world is a key milestone for more functional generalist agents. Existing approaches can handle certain long-horizon tasks in an open world. However, they still struggle when the number of open-world tasks could potentially be infinite and lack the capability to progressively enhance task completion as game time progresses. We introduce JARVIS-1, an open-world agent that can perceive multimodal input (visual observations and human instructions), generate sophisticated plans, and perform embodied control, all within the popular yet challenging open-world Minecraft universe. Specifically, we develop JARVIS-1 on top of pre-trained multimodal language models, which map visual observations and textual instructions to plans. The plans will be ultimately dispatched to the goal-conditioned controllers. We outfit JARVIS-1 with a multimodal memory, which facilitates planning using both pre-trained knowledge and its actual game survival experiences. JARVIS-1 is the existing most general agent in Minecraft, capable of completing over 200 different tasks using control and observation space similar to humans. These tasks range from short-horizon tasks, e.g., "chopping trees" to long-horizon tasks, e.g., "obtaining a diamond pickaxe". JARVIS-1 performs exceptionally well in short-horizon tasks, achieving nearly perfect performance. In the classic long-term task of $\texttt{ObtainDiamondPickaxe}$, JARVIS-1 surpasses the reliability of current state-of-the-art agents by 5 times and can successfully complete longer-horizon and more challenging tasks. The project page is available at https://craftjarvis.org/JARVIS-1

Haotian Ye, Haowei Lin, Jiaqi Han et al. · pku

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications, often lack theoretical grounding and rigorous testing on extensive benchmarks. As a result, they could even fail on simple tasks, and applying them to a new problem becomes unavoidably difficult. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework encompassing existing methods as special cases, unifying the study of training-free guidance into the analysis of an algorithm-agnostic design space. Via theoretical and empirical investigation, we propose an efficient and effective hyper-parameter searching strategy that can be readily applied to any downstream task. We systematically benchmark across 7 diffusion models on 16 tasks with 40 targets, and improve performance by 8.5% on average. Our framework and benchmark offer a solid foundation for conditional generation in a training-free manner.

Sijie Li, Shanda Li, Haowei Lin et al.

Scaling laws are used to plan multi-million-dollar training runs, but fitting those laws can itself cost millions. In modern large-scale workflows, assembling a sufficiently informative set of pilot experiments is already a major budget-allocation problem rather than a routine preprocessing step. We formulate scaling-law fitting as budget-aware sequential experimental design: given a finite pool of runnable experiments with heterogeneous costs, choose which runs to execute so as to maximize extrapolation accuracy in a high-cost target region. We then propose an uncertainty-aware method for sequentially allocating experimental budget toward the runs most useful for target-region extrapolation. Across a diverse benchmark of scaling-law tasks, our method consistently outperforms classical design-based baselines, and often approaches the performance of fitting on the full experimental set while using only about 10% of the total training budget. Our code is available at https://github.com/PlanarG/active-sl.

Xinheng He, Yijia Zhang, Haowei Lin et al.

Structure-based drug design has seen significant advancements with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the generation of hit and lead compounds. However, most AI-driven approaches neglect the importance of endogenous protein interactions with peptides, which may result in suboptimal molecule designs. In this work, we present Peptide2Mol, an E(3)-equivariant graph neural network diffusion model that generates small molecules by referencing both the original peptide binders and their surrounding protein pocket environments. Trained on large datasets and leveraging sophisticated modeling techniques, Peptide2Mol not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in non-autoregressive generative tasks, but also produces molecules with similarity to the original peptide binder. Additionally, the model allows for molecule optimization and peptidomimetic design through a partial diffusion process. Our results highlight Peptide2Mol as an effective deep generative model for generating and optimizing bioactive small molecules from protein binding pockets.

Haotian Zhang, Junting Zhou, Haowei Lin et al.

Continual Learning (CL) poses a significant challenge in Artificial Intelligence, aiming to mirror the human ability to incrementally acquire knowledge and skills. While extensive research has focused on CL within the context of classification tasks, the advent of increasingly powerful generative models necessitates the exploration of Continual Learning of Generative models (CLoG). This paper advocates for shifting the research focus from classification-based CL to CLoG. We systematically identify the unique challenges presented by CLoG compared to traditional classification-based CL. We adapt three types of existing CL methodologies, replay-based, regularization-based, and parameter-isolation-based methods to generative tasks and introduce comprehensive benchmarks for CLoG that feature great diversity and broad task coverage. Our benchmarks and results yield intriguing insights that can be valuable for developing future CLoG methods. Additionally, we will release a codebase designed to facilitate easy benchmarking and experimentation in CLoG publicly at https://github.com/linhaowei1/CLoG. We believe that shifting the research focus to CLoG will benefit the continual learning community and illuminate the path for next-generation AI-generated content (AIGC) in a lifelong learning paradigm.

Zihao Wang, Anji Liu, Haowei Lin et al. · pku

We explore how iterative revising a chain of thoughts with the help of information retrieval significantly improves large language models' reasoning and generation ability in long-horizon generation tasks, while hugely mitigating hallucination. In particular, the proposed method -- *retrieval-augmented thoughts* (RAT) -- revises each thought step one by one with retrieved information relevant to the task query, the current and the past thought steps, after the initial zero-shot CoT is generated. Applying RAT to GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and CodeLLaMA-7b substantially improves their performances on various long-horizon generation tasks; on average of relatively increasing rating scores by 13.63% on code generation, 16.96% on mathematical reasoning, 19.2% on creative writing, and 42.78% on embodied task planning. The demo page can be found at https://craftjarvis.github.io/RAT

Haowei Lin, Baizhou Huang, Haotian Ye et al. · pku

The ever-growing ecosystem of LLMs has posed a challenge in selecting the most appropriate pre-trained model to fine-tune amidst a sea of options. Given constrained resources, fine-tuning all models and making selections afterward is unrealistic. In this work, we formulate this resource-constrained selection task into predicting fine-tuning performance and illustrate its natural connection with Scaling Law. Unlike pre-training, we find that the fine-tuning scaling curve includes not just the well-known "power phase" but also the previously unobserved "pre-power phase". We also explain why existing Scaling Law fails to capture this phase transition phenomenon both theoretically and empirically. To address this, we introduce the concept of "pre-learned data size" into our Rectified Scaling Law, which overcomes theoretical limitations and fits experimental results much better. By leveraging our law, we propose a novel LLM selection algorithm that selects the near-optimal model with hundreds of times less resource consumption, while other methods may provide negatively correlated selection. The project page is available at rectified-scaling-law.github.io.

Haotian Ye, Haowei Lin, Jingyi Tang et al.

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains.

Zhou Ziheng, Huacong Tang, Jinyuan Zhang et al.

Discovering causal regularities and applying them to build functional systems--the discovery-to-application loop--is a hallmark of general intelligence, yet evaluating this capacity has been hindered by the vast complexity gap between scientific discovery and real-world engineering. We introduce SciCrafter, a Minecraft-based benchmark that operationalizes this loop through parameterized redstone circuit tasks. Agents must ignite lamps in specified patterns (e.g., simultaneously or in timed sequences); scaling target parameters substantially increases construction complexity and required knowledge, forcing genuine discovery rather than reliance on memorized solutions. Evaluating frontier models including GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.5 under a general-purpose code agent scaffold, we find that all plateau at approximately 26% success rate. To diagnose these failures, we decompose the loop into four capacities--knowledge gap identification, experimental discovery, knowledge consolidation, and knowledge application--and design targeted interventions whose marginal contributions serve as proxies for corresponding gaps. Our analysis reveals that although the general knowledge application capability still remains as the biggest gap across all models, for frontier models the knowledge gap identification starts to become a major hurdle--indicating the bottleneck is shifting from solving problems right to raising the right problems for current AI. We release SciCrafter as a diagnostic probe for future research on AI systems that navigate the full discovery-to-application loop.

Xiangcheng Zhang, Haowei Lin, Haotian Ye et al.

Classical search algorithms have long underpinned modern artificial intelligence. In this work, we tackle the challenge of inference-time control in diffusion models -- adapting generated outputs to meet diverse test-time objectives -- using principles from classical search. We propose a general framework that orchestrates local and global search to efficiently navigate the generative space. It employs a theoretically grounded local search via annealed Langevin MCMC and performs compute-efficient global exploration using breadth-first and depth-first tree search. We evaluate our approach on a range of challenging domains, including planning, offline reinforcement learning, and image generation. Across all tasks, we observe significant gains in both performance and efficiency. These results show that classical search provides a principled and practical foundation for inference-time scaling in diffusion models. Project page at https://diffusion-inference-scaling.github.io/.

Shaofei Cai, Bowei Zhang, Zihao Wang et al. · pku

Developing agents that can follow multimodal instructions remains a fundamental challenge in robotics and AI. Although large-scale pre-training on unlabeled datasets (no language instruction) has enabled agents to learn diverse behaviors, these agents often struggle with following instructions. While augmenting the dataset with instruction labels can mitigate this issue, acquiring such high-quality annotations at scale is impractical. To address this issue, we frame the problem as a semi-supervised learning task and introduce GROOT-2, a multimodal instructable agent trained using a novel approach that combines weak supervision with latent variable models. Our method consists of two key components: constrained self-imitating, which utilizes large amounts of unlabeled demonstrations to enable the policy to learn diverse behaviors, and human intention alignment, which uses a smaller set of labeled demonstrations to ensure the latent space reflects human intentions. GROOT-2's effectiveness is validated across four diverse environments, ranging from video games to robotic manipulation, demonstrating its robust multimodal instruction-following capabilities.

Guangyu Zhao, Kewei Lian, Haowei Lin et al. · pku

A glowing body of work has emerged focusing on instruction-following policies for open-world agents, aiming to better align the agent's behavior with human intentions. However, the performance of these policies is highly susceptible to the initial prompt, which leads to extra efforts in selecting the best instructions. We propose a framework named Preference Goal Tuning (PGT). PGT allows an instruction following policy to interact with the environment to collect several trajectories, which will be categorized into positive and negative samples based on preference. Then we use preference learning to fine-tune the initial goal latent representation with the categorized trajectories while keeping the policy backbone frozen. The experiment result shows that with minimal data and training, PGT achieves an average relative improvement of 72.0% and 81.6% over 17 tasks in 2 different foundation policies respectively, and outperforms the best human-selected instructions. Moreover, PGT surpasses full fine-tuning in the out-of-distribution (OOD) task-execution environments by 13.4%, indicating that our approach retains strong generalization capabilities. Since our approach stores a single latent representation for each task independently, it can be viewed as an efficient method for continual learning, without the risk of catastrophic forgetting or task interference. In short, PGT enhances the performance of agents across nearly all tasks in the Minecraft Skillforge benchmark and demonstrates robustness to the execution environment.

Haowei Lin, Xiangyu Wang, Ruilin Yan et al. · pku

With powerful large language models (LLMs) demonstrating superhuman reasoning capabilities, a critical question arises: Do LLMs genuinely reason, or do they merely recall answers from their extensive, web-scraped training datasets? Publicly released benchmarks inevitably become contaminated once incorporated into subsequent LLM training sets, undermining their reliability as faithful assessments. To address this, we introduce KUMO, a generative evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing reasoning in LLMs. KUMO synergistically combines LLMs with symbolic engines to dynamically produce diverse, multi-turn reasoning tasks that are partially observable and adjustable in difficulty. Through an automated pipeline, KUMO continuously generates novel tasks across open-ended domains, compelling models to demonstrate genuine generalization rather than memorization. We evaluated 23 state-of-the-art LLMs on 5,000 tasks across 100 domains created by KUMO, benchmarking their reasoning abilities against university students. Our findings reveal that many LLMs have outperformed university-level performance on easy reasoning tasks, and reasoning-scaled LLMs reach university-level performance on complex reasoning challenges. Moreover, LLM performance on KUMO tasks correlates strongly with results on newly released real-world reasoning benchmarks, underscoring KUMO's value as a robust, enduring assessment tool for genuine LLM reasoning capabilities.

Shuqi Lu, Haowei Lin, Lin Yao et al. · pku

3D structure modeling is essential across scales, enabling applications from fluid simulation and 3D reconstruction to protein folding and molecular docking. Yet, despite shared 3D spatial patterns, current approaches remain fragmented, with models narrowly specialized for specific domains and unable to generalize across tasks or scales. We propose Uni-3DAR, a unified autoregressive framework for cross-scale 3D generation and understanding. At its core is a coarse-to-fine tokenizer based on octree data structures, which compresses diverse 3D structures into compact 1D token sequences. We further propose a two-level subtree compression strategy, which reduces the octree token sequence by up to 8x. To address the challenge of dynamically varying token positions introduced by compression, we introduce a masked next-token prediction strategy that ensures accurate positional modeling, significantly boosting model performance. Extensive experiments across multiple 3D generation and understanding tasks, including small molecules, proteins, polymers, crystals, and macroscopic 3D objects, validate its effectiveness and versatility. Notably, Uni-3DAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art diffusion models by a substantial margin, achieving up to 256\% relative improvement while delivering inference speeds up to 21.8x faster.

Haowei Lin, Shanda Li, Haotian Ye et al.

Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible outcomes, training-free guidance has gained increasing attention in diffusion models. However, existing methods only handle data in continuous spaces, while many scientific applications involve both continuous and discrete data (referred to as multimodality). Another emerging trend is the growing use of the simple and general flow matching framework in building generative foundation models, where guided generation remains under-explored. To address this, we introduce TFG-Flow, a novel training-free guidance method for multimodal generative flow. TFG-Flow addresses the curse-of-dimensionality while maintaining the property of unbiased sampling in guiding discrete variables. We validate TFG-Flow on four molecular design tasks and show that TFG-Flow has great potential in drug design by generating molecules with desired properties.

Haotian Ye, Himanshu Jain, Chong You et al.

In real-world applications of large language models, outputs are often required to be confined: selecting items from predefined product or document sets, generating phrases that comply with safety standards, or conforming to specialized formatting styles. To control the generation, constrained decoding has been widely adopted. However, existing prefix-tree-based constrained decoding is inefficient under GPU-based model inference paradigms, and it introduces unintended biases into the output distribution. This paper introduces Dynamic Importance Sampling for Constrained Decoding (DISC) with GPU-based Parallel Prefix-Verification (PPV), a novel algorithm that leverages dynamic importance sampling to achieve theoretically guaranteed asymptotic unbiasedness and overcomes the inefficiency of prefix-tree. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods in both efficiency and output quality. These results highlight the potential of our methods to improve constrained generation in applications where adherence to specific constraints is essential.

Jie Ying, Haowei Lin, Chao Yue et al.

In this study, we unveil a new AI model, termed PhyE2E, to discover physical formulas through symbolic regression. PhyE2E simplifies symbolic regression by decomposing it into sub-problems using the second-order derivatives of an oracle neural network, and employs a transformer model to translate data into symbolic formulas in an end-to-end manner. The resulting formulas are refined through Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Genetic Programming. We leverage a large language model to synthesize extensive symbolic expressions resembling real physics, and train the model to recover these formulas directly from data. A comprehensive evaluation reveals that PhyE2E outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, delivering superior symbolic accuracy, precision in data fitting, and consistency in physical units. We deployed PhyE2E to five applications in space physics, including the prediction of sunspot numbers, solar rotational angular velocity, emission line contribution functions, near-Earth plasma pressure, and lunar-tide plasma signals. The physical formulas generated by AI demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in fitting the experimental data from satellites and astronomical telescopes. We have successfully upgraded the formula proposed by NASA in 1993 regarding solar activity, and for the first time, provided the explanations for the long cycle of solar activity in an explicit form. We also found that the decay of near-Earth plasma pressure is proportional to r^2 to Earth, where subsequent mathematical derivations are consistent with satellite data from another independent study. Moreover, we found physical formulas that can describe the relationships between emission lines in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun, temperatures, electron densities, and magnetic fields. The formula obtained is consistent with the properties that physicists had previously hypothesized it should possess.

Xiangxin Zhou, Yi Xiao, Haowei Lin et al.

The dynamic nature of proteins, influenced by ligand interactions, is essential for comprehending protein function and progressing drug discovery. Traditional structure-based drug design (SBDD) approaches typically target binding sites with rigid structures, limiting their practical application in drug development. While molecular dynamics simulation can theoretically capture all the biologically relevant conformations, the transition rate is dictated by the intrinsic energy barrier between them, making the sampling process computationally expensive. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose to use generative modeling for SBDD considering conformational changes of protein pockets. We curate a dataset of apo and multiple holo states of protein-ligand complexes, simulated by molecular dynamics, and propose a full-atom flow model (and a stochastic version), named DynamicFlow, that learns to transform apo pockets and noisy ligands into holo pockets and corresponding 3D ligand molecules. Our method uncovers promising ligand molecules and corresponding holo conformations of pockets. Additionally, the resultant holo-like states provide superior inputs for traditional SBDD approaches, playing a significant role in practical drug discovery.

Haowei Lin, Haotian Ye, Wenzheng Feng et al.

Discovering scaling laws for predicting model performance at scale is a fundamental and open-ended challenge, mostly reliant on slow, case specific human experimentation. To investigate the potential for LLMs to automate this process, we collect over 5,000 experiments from existing literature and curate seven diverse scaling law discovery tasks. While existing agents struggle to produce accurate law formulas, this paper introduces SLDAgent, an evolution-based agent that co-optimize the scaling law model and the parameters, enabling it to autonomously explore complex relationships between variables. For the first time, we demonstrates that SLDAgent can automatically discover laws that exhibit consistently more accurate extrapolation than their established, human-derived counterparts across all tasks. Through comprehensive analysis, we elucidate why these discovered laws are superior and verify their practical utility in both pretraining and finetuning applications. This work establishes a new paradigm for agentic scientific discovery, showing that AI systems can understand their own scaling behavior, and can contribute novel and practical knowledge back to the research community.

Zihao Wang, Shaofei Cai, Zhancun Mu et al.

This paper presents OmniJARVIS, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for open-world instruction-following agents in Minecraft. Compared to prior works that either emit textual goals to separate controllers or produce the control command directly, OmniJARVIS seeks a different path to ensure both strong reasoning and efficient decision-making capabilities via unified tokenization of multimodal interaction data. First, we introduce a self-supervised approach to learn a behavior encoder that produces discretized tokens for behavior trajectories $τ= \{o_0, a_0, \dots\}$ and an imitation learning policy decoder conditioned on these tokens. These additional behavior tokens will be augmented to the vocabulary of pretrained Multimodal Language Models. With this encoder, we then pack long-term multimodal interactions involving task instructions, memories, thoughts, observations, textual responses, behavior trajectories, etc into unified token sequences and model them with autoregressive transformers. Thanks to the semantically meaningful behavior tokens, the resulting VLA model, OmniJARVIS, can reason (by producing chain-of-thoughts), plan, answer questions, and act (by producing behavior tokens for the imitation learning policy decoder). OmniJARVIS demonstrates excellent performances on a comprehensive collection of atomic, programmatic, and open-ended tasks in open-world Minecraft. Our analysis further unveils the crucial design principles in interaction data formation, unified tokenization, and its scaling potentials. The dataset, models, and code will be released at https://craftjarvis.org/OmniJARVIS.