73.4AIJun 3
Agents' Last ExamYiyou Sun, Xinyang Han, Weichen Zhang et al.
Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long-horizon, economically valuable, real-world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 subfields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is 2.6%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP-relevant impact.
51.6AIMay 26
The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World IntelligenceMiniMax, Aili Chen, Aonian Li et al.
We introduce the MiniMax-M2 series, a family of Mixture-of-Experts language models built around the principle that mini activations can unleash maximum real-world intelligence. The flagship M2 contains 229.9B total parameters with only 9.8B activated per token. Designed end-to-end for agentic deployment, the M2 series rests on three components: (i) agent-driven data pipelines producing large-scale, verifiable trajectories across agentic coding and agentic cowork, each grounded in an executable workspace and an artifact-aligned reward; (ii) Forge, a scalable agent-native RL system that adapts to long-horizon agent trajectories, paired with windowed-FIFO scheduling, prefix-tree merging, inference optimization, and a clean training-inference-agent decoupling that supports both white-box and black-box agents; (iii) the latest M2.7 checkpoint takes an early step toward self-evolution -- autonomously debugging training runs and modifying its own scaffold. Across M2 through M2.7, this combination translates a mini-activation footprint into frontier-tier performance on agentic coding, deep search, office-task, and reasoning benchmarks.
CVDec 16, 2024
UniLoc: Towards Universal Place Recognition Using Any Single ModalityYan Xia, Zhendong Li, Yun-Jin Li et al.
To date, most place recognition methods focus on single-modality retrieval. While they perform well in specific environments, cross-modal methods offer greater flexibility by allowing seamless switching between map and query sources. It also promises to reduce computation requirements by having a unified model, and achieving greater sample efficiency by sharing parameters. In this work, we develop a universal solution to place recognition, UniLoc, that works with any single query modality (natural language, image, or point cloud). UniLoc leverages recent advances in large-scale contrastive learning, and learns by matching hierarchically at two levels: instance-level matching and scene-level matching. Specifically, we propose a novel Self-Attention based Pooling (SAP) module to evaluate the importance of instance descriptors when aggregated into a place-level descriptor. Experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset demonstrate the benefits of cross-modality for place recognition, achieving superior performance in cross-modal settings and competitive results also for uni-modal scenarios. Our project page is publicly available at https://yan-xia.github.io/projects/UniLoc/.