Daily Papers

We present a method for training multi-task vision-language robotic diffusion policies that reduces training time and memory usage by an order of magnitude. This improvement arises from a previously underexplored distinction between action diffusion and the image diffusion techniques that inspired it: image generation targets are high-dimensional, while robot actions lie in a much lower-dimensional space. Meanwhile, the vision-language conditions for action generation remain high-dimensional. Our approach, Mini-Diffuser, exploits this asymmetry by introducing Level-2 minibatching, which pairs multiple noised action samples with each vision-language condition, instead of the conventional one-to-one sampling strategy. To support this batching scheme, we introduce architectural adaptations to the diffusion transformer that prevent information leakage across samples while maintaining full conditioning access. In RLBench simulations, Mini-Diffuser achieves 95\% of the performance of state-of-the-art multi-task diffusion policies, while using only 5\% of the training time and 7\% of the memory. Real-world experiments further validate that Mini-Diffuser preserves the key strengths of diffusion-based policies, including the ability to model multimodal action distributions and produce behavior conditioned on diverse perceptual inputs. Code available at github.com/utomm/mini-diffuse-actor.

The rapid advancement of native multi-modal models and omni-models, exemplified by GPT-4o, Gemini, and o3, with their capability to process and generate content across modalities such as text and images, marks a significant milestone in the evolution of intelligence. Systematic evaluation of their multi-modal output capabilities in visual thinking processes (also known as multi-modal chain of thought, M-CoT) becomes critically important. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating multi-modal models primarily focus on assessing multi-modal inputs and text-only reasoning while neglecting the importance of reasoning through multi-modal outputs. In this paper, we present a benchmark, dubbed RBench-V, designed to assess models' vision-indispensable reasoning abilities. To construct RBench-V, we carefully hand-pick 803 questions covering math, physics, counting, and games. Unlike previous benchmarks that typically specify certain input modalities, RBench-V presents problems centered on multi-modal outputs, which require image manipulation such as generating novel images and constructing auxiliary lines to support the reasoning process. We evaluate numerous open- and closed-source models on RBench-V, including o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen2.5-VL, etc. Even the best-performing model, o3, achieves only 25.8% accuracy on RBench-V, far below the human score of 82.3%, highlighting that current models struggle to leverage multi-modal reasoning. Data and code are available at https://evalmodels.github.io/rbenchv

We present RelBench, a public benchmark for solving predictive tasks over relational databases with graph neural networks. RelBench provides databases and tasks spanning diverse domains and scales, and is intended to be a foundational infrastructure for future research. We use RelBench to conduct the first comprehensive study of Relational Deep Learning (RDL) (Fey et al., 2024), which combines graph neural network predictive models with (deep) tabular models that extract initial entity-level representations from raw tables. End-to-end learned RDL models fully exploit the predictive signal encoded in primary-foreign key links, marking a significant shift away from the dominant paradigm of manual feature engineering combined with tabular models. To thoroughly evaluate RDL against this prior gold-standard, we conduct an in-depth user study where an experienced data scientist manually engineers features for each task. In this study, RDL learns better models whilst reducing human work needed by more than an order of magnitude. This demonstrates the power of deep learning for solving predictive tasks over relational databases, opening up many new research opportunities enabled by RelBench.

LLM-based agents have shown promising capabilities in a growing range of software engineering (SWE) tasks. However, advancing this field faces two critical challenges. First, high-quality training data is scarce, especially data that reflects real-world SWE scenarios, where agents must interact with development environments, execute code and adapt behavior based on the outcomes of their actions. Existing datasets are either limited to one-shot code generation or comprise small, manually curated collections of interactive tasks, lacking both scale and diversity. Second, the lack of fresh interactive SWE tasks affects evaluation of rapidly improving models, as static benchmarks quickly become outdated due to contamination issues. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel, automated, and scalable pipeline to continuously extract real-world interactive SWE tasks from diverse GitHub repositories. Using this pipeline, we construct SWE-rebench, a public dataset comprising over 21,000 interactive Python-based SWE tasks, suitable for reinforcement learning of SWE agents at scale. Additionally, we use continuous supply of fresh tasks collected using SWE-rebench methodology to build a contamination-free benchmark for agentic software engineering. We compare results of various LLMs on this benchmark to results on SWE-bench Verified and show that performance of some language models might be inflated due to contamination issues.

Recently, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for building vision-language-action (VLA) models has emerged as a promising approach to effective robot manipulation learning. However, only few methods incorporate 3D signals into VLMs for action prediction, and they do not fully leverage the spatial structure inherent in 3D data, leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BridgeVLA, a novel 3D VLA model that (1) projects 3D inputs to multiple 2D images, ensuring input alignment with the VLM backbone, and (2) utilizes 2D heatmaps for action prediction, unifying the input and output spaces within a consistent 2D image space. In addition, we propose a scalable pre-training method that equips the VLM backbone with the capability to predict 2D heatmaps before downstream policy learning. Extensive experiments show the proposed method is able to learn 3D manipulation efficiently and effectively. BridgeVLA outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods across three simulation benchmarks. In RLBench, it improves the average success rate from 81.4% to 88.2%. In COLOSSEUM, it demonstrates significantly better performance in challenging generalization settings, boosting the average success rate from 56.7% to 64.0%. In GemBench, it surpasses all the comparing baseline methods in terms of average success rate. In real-robot experiments, BridgeVLA outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 32% on average. It generalizes robustly in multiple out-of-distribution settings, including visual disturbances and unseen instructions. Remarkably, it is able to achieve a success rate of 96.8% on 10+ tasks with only 3 trajectories per task, highlighting its extraordinary sample efficiency. Project Website:https://bridgevla.github.io/

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control often requires large amounts of online interaction data. Value-based RL methods can mitigate this burden by offering relatively high sample efficiency. Some studies further enhance sample efficiency by incorporating offline demonstration data to "kick-start" training, achieving promising results in continuous control. However, they typically compute the Q-function independently for each action dimension, neglecting interdependencies and making it harder to identify optimal actions when learning from suboptimal data, such as non-expert demonstration and online-collected data during the training process. To address these issues, we propose Auto-Regressive Soft Q-learning (ARSQ), a value-based RL algorithm that models Q-values in a coarse-to-fine, auto-regressive manner. First, ARSQ decomposes the continuous action space into discrete spaces in a coarse-to-fine hierarchy, enhancing sample efficiency for fine-grained continuous control tasks. Next, it auto-regressively predicts dimensional action advantages within each decision step, enabling more effective decision-making in continuous control tasks. We evaluate ARSQ on two continuous control benchmarks, RLBench and D4RL, integrating demonstration data into online training. On D4RL, which includes non-expert demonstrations, ARSQ achieves an average 1.62times performance improvement over SOTA value-based baseline. On RLBench, which incorporates expert demonstrations, ARSQ surpasses various baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in learning from suboptimal online-collected data. Project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/ar-soft-q