Quant-Arena: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Quantitative Trading Research

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantitative research is an iterative loop: a researcher proposes a market hypothesis, implements it as an executable signal, tests it on historical data, and decides what to keep. Existing benchmarks score formulas, code, or individual trading decisions, leaving open whether large language models (LLMs) can complete this loop and produce strategies that work beyond the research period. We introduce Quant-Arena, a benchmark and public leaderboard for end-to-end quantitative research on real A-share market data. A model constructs features and stock-scoring code, receives feedback only on 2022--2023, and freezes one strategy for assessment on the sealed year 2024. A cash-account evaluator applies trading constraints and costs, including market impact estimated from a simulated order book. Scores are dominated by realized excess return and complemented by signal quality and the diversity of features used by the strategy. We evaluate nine frontier models, among which GPT-6 Astra scores highest; yet no model beats the equal-weight market in 2024. Quant-Arena is open to submissions from any model or agent harness.
Houde Qian, Zheng Jiang, Wenyi Li, Chenxi Xu, Xinjie Lin, Yuzhao Peng, Ruoyu Han, Youjie Zheng, Kaisen Yang, Qinhuai Na, You Fu, Calvin Xiao

Multimodal Embodied Agents: A Unified Capability-centric Perspective from Computer-Use to Robot-Use

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal agents (MMAs) sustain interaction through reasoning, memory, tools, and feedback, most visibly as computer-use agents, while robotic systems (RSs) couple sensing and actuation under physical dynamics. We define multimodal embodied agents (MMEAs) as goal-directed systems that couple multimodal task reasoning with physical action and revise decisions from the resulting feedback. This raises a central question: what changes when a multimodal agent moves from computer-use to robot-use? We introduce PAPAV, a unified capability-centric framework of five recurring functions: Perceive the current state, Anticipate action effects, Plan a feasible course, Act through an interface or body, and Verify the outcome. Defined by function rather than architecture, these capabilities let PAPAV identify what all three share and then compare MMEAs with MMAs and with RSs. Five physical constraints, from partial observability to unverifiable outcomes, leave fewer choices fixed in advance and less room to reverse errors. Across 64 benchmarks, explicit evaluation centers on Act; only 5 assess Anticipate and 3 assess Verify, leaving both largely hidden behind task success. These constraints also frame the open challenges we identify. PAPAV therefore provides a common basis for designing reliable physical agents and measuring progress across all five capabilities rather than task success alone.
Yanzhe Chen, Ziyi Yang, Jifeng Zhu, Qiming Huang, Ruihe An, Peiyao Xu, Hesen Yang, Runda Liu, Chang Gong, Zhijun Cao, Zechen Bai, Wenzheng Zeng, Yiqi Lin, Guoqiang Liang, Kevin Yuchen Ma, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Mike Zheng Shou

Asymmetric On-Policy Distillation Learns In-Context Exploration

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision-making under partial observability is difficult because agents must explore to infer hidden, task-relevant information before acting effectively. Learning such information-gathering behaviors tabula rasa via online reinforcement learning is sample-inefficient, whereas offline imitation averages expert actions across hidden states and fails to learn exploration. In this work, we propose ASTEROID, a simple and effective student--teacher supervised learning framework that can learn test-time exploration. Although a privileged expert never needs to explore, we demonstrate that a history-conditioned student can learn to do so when trained with on-policy contexts: the student first collects on-policy context under partial observability, and the privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that context. By distilling expert actions directly conditioned on the student's on-policy history, the student learns to systematically resolve partial observability, i.e., search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. This enables efficient test-time exploration (similar to Bayesian posterior sampling) without incurring the impractical training-data costs of reinforcement learning. Across a diverse range of eleven different environments, including discrete exploration benchmarks, robotic manipulation, navigation, and Procgen environments, ASTEROID achieves ~2x higher returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses ~100x fewer interactions than RL baselines, and outperforms frontier models at exploration. Finally, our method transfers policies trained in simulation to vision-denied real-world robot manipulation, exhibiting efficient exploration and increasing success by +40% over standard distillation. Overall, it provides a simple yet surprisingly effective framework to learn efficient test-time exploration.
Sriyash Poddar, Yanda Bao, Jacob Krantz, Matthew Chang, Xavier Puig, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Natasha Jaques, Abhishek Gupta

BatchBench: Benchmarking AI Robustness to Batch Effects and Domain Shift in Biomedical Images - A JUMP Cell Painting Leaderboard

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite recent advances, current AI systems remain highly susceptible to domain shifts, particularly in biomedical imaging, where images are usually acquired under substantially different experimental conditions. Although recent domain adaptation methods have made substantial progress, significant performance gaps under domain shift persist. To measure progress in this regard, we introduce BatchBench, a leaderboard that evaluates and compares the robustness of AI systems on biomedical images from unseen experimental batches and data sources. BatchBench is built on JUMP-CP, one of the largest publicly available biomedical imaging datasets. Generated using the Cell Painting assay, JUMP-CP exhibits pronounced batch effects and domain shifts, making it a challenging testbed for evaluating robustness to distributional changes.
Sonja Topf, Ana Sanchez-Fernandez, G\"unter Klambauer

Differentially Private Sparse Reward Estimation with Preference Feedback

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a central paradigm for aligning Large Language Models with human values. However, the reliance on sensitive preference data necessitates rigorous differential privacy (DP) guarantees to prevent user information leakage. Existing private alignment methods typically assume dense reward parameterizations, resulting in estimation error bounds that scale polynomially with the ambient {model size $d$}. Such dependence is prohibitive in modern {overparameterized models} where $d$ is vast. In this work, we study \emph{Private Sparse RLHF} problem to address this limitation, assuming that human preferences (reward model) are governed by a subset of $s^* \ll d$ relevant features. We provide the first comprehensive theoretical framework for differentially private sparse reward estimation from pairwise preference feedback under the Bradley-Terry-Luce model, and introduce efficient algorithms for both Sample-DP and Label-DP settings. Theoretically, under the squared $\ell_2$ parameter estimation error, we establish upper bounds of $\widetilde{O}(s^*/n + {s^*}^2/n^2\varepsilon^2)$ for $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-Sample-DP and $\widetilde{O}(s^*/n + s^*/n\varepsilon^2)$ for $\varepsilon$-Label-DP based on randomized response, where $n$ is the training data size. For the lower bounds, we show that the Sample-DP rate is nearly optimal, and that the guarantee for our Label-DP method cannot be further improved within the randomized-response framework. We also provide a general lower bound for the problem with Label-DP. Empirically, our framework demonstrates superior efficacy over dense baselines across sentiment generation and safety alignment benchmarks, offering a significantly more favorable privacy-utility trade-off.
Meng Ding, Mingxi Lei, Jie Zhang, Jinyan Liu, Di Wang

AtomicRL: Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, but imitation learning (IL) alone often struggles to master complex long-horizon skills. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an effective avenue for further improving VLA policies. However, existing VLA-RL methods typically suffer from delayed and biased credit assignment due to trajectory-level sparse rewards, while imbalanced subtask mastery creates bottlenecks that limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicRL, an RL post-training framework that leverages atomic task structures for reliable credit assignment and adaptive exploration. AtomicRL introduces Semantic-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses semantic-aware gating to constrain TD residuals from failed atomic subtasks from propagating across task boundaries, mitigating credit contamination while preserving intra-subtask credit assignment and value bootstrapping. In addition, Bottleneck-Adaptive Target Exploration (BATE) dynamically coordinates task sampling and local exploration incentives based on the mastery of individual atomic subtasks, directing learning toward the remaining bottlenecks. Finally, we develop a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that bridges online RL in simulation with real-world deployment, facilitating practical transfer to physical robots. On LIBERO-LONG, AtomicRL achieves absolute performance gains of 3.6% and 4.0% over PPO across two VLA architectures. On CALVIN ABC-D, it improves full-task performance by up to 9.5% over PPO. Combined with the Real2Sim2Real pipeline, AtomicRL further improves real-world task performance by an average of 21.3%. These results demonstrate that AtomicRL effectively improves the learning efficiency and manipulation performance of VLA policies on long-horizon tasks.
Likui Zhang, Zhe Zhu, Zhihao Zhan, Yibo Bai, Hanlin Wang, Dongwei Li, Bin Wang, Tianle Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Liang Lin

Parallel AI Agent Collaboration as Graph-Structured Distributed Block Optimization

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parallel AI agents can produce useful local edits yet degrade a shared solution when their edits are combined. We model this coordination problem as discrete block optimization with an exactly evaluable objective and a known dependency graph. Independent sets certify compatible edits whose verified gains, measured against the same current solution, add exactly. A coordinator constructs a safe compatible candidate and can also evaluate interacting edits to capture favorable interactions. We prove that an optimal fractional coloring yields a merger that preserves a $1/\chi_f(G)$ fraction of the total verified local improvement, where $\chi_f(G)$ is the graph's fractional chromatic number. This guarantee is tight among mergers that select a subset of the same proposals. Under conditional local-improvement guarantees and a block error-bound condition, repeated collaboration converges geometrically in the objective gap. The rate separates task structure, agent allocation, and computation cost, yielding a linear program for agent assignment and an explicit time-cost trade-off. Code-repair experiments show that verified merging resolves conflicts between individually useful edits that cause naive merging to fail. On larger conflict-free tasks, parallel agents reduce modeled completion time at higher input-token-equivalent cost. On three public road networks, fractional integration retains 922 units of verified graph-cut improvement across 90 paired runs. For route-search agents sharing exclusive access to vehicle routes, fractional scheduling reduces measured wall time by a median of 15% across twelve paired runs, with route-cost changes varying across runs.
Hanmin Li, Yury Demidovich, Peter Richt\'arik

From Reasoning to Action: Benchmarking Frontier AI Models on LIBERO-10 Robot Manipulation Tasks

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in frontier AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, planning, and tool use, raising the possibility of using general-purpose AI models for robot manipulation without task-specific training. However, their manipulation capabilities have not been systematically evaluated on standardized robotics benchmarks. In this report, we present a unified closed-loop manipulation framework for evaluating frontier AI models on the LIBERO-10 benchmark. Our framework enables models to control a robot directly through visual observations, robot proprioception, and structured tool calls, primarily by specifying target end-effector poses and gripper commands, without task-specific fine-tuning or pretrained manipulation skills. We evaluate six frontier AI models, including GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 5.5, and Gemini-4 Argon, across three reasoning effort levels, resulting in 18 configurations and 1,800 evaluation episodes. Our results show that GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest success rate of 44%, followed by Gemini-4 Argon at 43%. Increasing reasoning effort generally improves manipulation performance, but the benefits vary across models and come at additional inference cost. We also observe substantial differences across tasks, with models performing relatively well on object placement tasks but struggling with precise spatial arrangements and complex multi-step interactions. These findings demonstrate both the potential and limitations of frontier AI models for robot manipulation, highlighting the challenges of translating reasoning capabilities into reliable physical actions. We release our evaluation framework and experimental results to support reproducible benchmarking and future research on reasoning-based robot manipulation.
May Espinola, Qifan Zhang, Yu Xiang

SWE-DIVE: Multi-Turn Coding Agent Evaluation with Dynamic User Simulation

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents are typically evaluated using one-shot, well-formulated prompts. Benchmarks such as SWE-bench use existing GitHub issues as input for a coding agent and evaluate whether the agent successfully solves the task. However, in real-world use cases, prompts are often not as well-formulated or structured as existing GitHub issues. Additionally, a coding agent session is not limited to a single prompt; it typically involves a multi-turn interaction in which the user iteratively adds new tasks and requirements that the agent must fulfill. To benchmark these abilities, we developed SWE-DIVE, a dynamic, interactive validation and evaluation framework for benchmarking coding agents in a multi-turn environment. To achieve this, we introduce a user simulator that can simulate different behavioral patterns and communicate with the coding agent. We also introduce a conversation validator that evaluates the user simulator's outputs to determine whether they fulfill the initial requirements and guide the agent toward successfully solving the task. The entire framework is embedded in a Harbor environment, which orchestrates the coding agent, user simulator, and conversation validator, and executes the test environment to determine whether the agent successfully solves the task. Our results and source code are available in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/lorenzbrehme/swe-dive_usersim).
Lorenz Brehme, Benjamin Steenhoek, Ruth Breu

SP-HLM: Sparse-Pose-Driven Motion Generation and Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

2 días 16 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first predicts task-relevant sparse poses and finger joint positions from multimodal observations and language instructions using asynchronous action-chunk inference. Given these sparse targets, SP-MGM, a motion generation model trained through two-stage distillation, reconstructs coordinated full-body motion in real time. A pretrained motion encoder maps this motion to a compact latent representation. SP-GMT, a general motion tracker, then integrates the explicit sparse targets with this implicit motion prior for whole-body control. Experiments in simulation and on a real humanoid robot demonstrate improved motion tracking, whole-body coordination, and loco-manipulation success over existing approaches. Additional results and videos are available on our \href{https://sp-hlm.github.io/}{\textcolor{blue}{project page}}.
Zhaohui Yang, Quanbao Lin, Chengqi Shi, Zhenglang Weng, Jicheng Lin, Boyu Chen, Tengjie Zhu, Guanzhu Ren, Jiahao Xu, Yang Feng, Xiaokang Yang, Yao Mu