Applied AI Digest

Hybrid solver + agent stacks and budget‑aware planners remain dominant (ADC‑LLM, budgeted value‑tree search, EP122 pillars). Verification‑focused agents (MiroThinker‑1.7, H1) and new grounded scrutiny agent (Claude Opus 4.6) reproduce computational physics papers. Tool‑use advances: TRUST‑SQL. New entries: Ornith Models' self‑scaffolding, Sakana AI's Fugu and Sheaf-ADMM. SkillWeaver achieves 99% token reduction. New empirical finding: clean code makes agents 34% more efficient. New: PAW (compile once, run locally) achieves 73.78% on FuzzyBench at 30 tok/s on MacBook M3. New: EVA-Client — open-source framework for embodied policy deployment on real robots. New: LLM-as-a-Verifier — verification as a new scaling axis using logit expectation, SOTA on agent benchmarks. New: Differentiated Effects of Agent Diversity. New: Ghost memory problem and A-TMA. New: Light-Omni achieves 12.1× speedup and 2.6× memory efficiency in video agents via reflex over reasoning. New: SIEVE achieves better VLA imitation learning with 50% data and 50% training steps via structure-aware data selection. New: TurnOPD makes on-policy distillation turn-aware for efficient long-horizon agent training. New: EvoSOP — iterative tool optimization via SOP synthesis. New: PROBE — proactive problem solving benchmark (frontier models only 40% success). New: LaMem-VLA — dual latent memory tokens for VLA. New: GRAM — training method to make dual-use capabilities removable. New: Harness Engineering for Auditable Enterprise LLM Agents — code-owned control layers, source grounding, validation contracts; evaluated with fault injection and model substitution. New: UniClawBench — universal benchmark for proactive agents on real-world Docker tasks (400 bilingual tasks, step-by-step checkpoints). New: Ideas Have Genomes — IdeaGene-Bench tests scientific lineage reasoning across 10 domains; strongest system only 27.3% exact accuracy, revealing compositional bottleneck. New: OpenCoF — reasoning through video generation (Chain-of-Frame reasoning), bridging video generation and logical reasoning. New: Fine-grained subtask annotations improve VLA performance — SOTA on REASSEMBLE and Amazon Robotics blade insertion, generalizes across embodiments. New: GPT-5-mini rivals frontier LLMs at verifying AI citations, but hidden bias in false positive/negative rates means calibration matters more than model size. New: State-Aware Runtime for Long-Horizon LLM Agents — formalizes ghost memory, state corruption, side-effect governance; coupled-recovery thesis. Production benchmarks shifting to multi‑turn, cost‑aware evaluations. New benchmarks: EvoPolicyGym, AgenticDataBench, AgenticSTS. PACE proxy predicts agentic capability. New training method: TAC. New on-device memory: DuoMem, AutoMem. New: Learning to Move Before Learning to Do for VLAs. New: Top Agent Harnesses comparison, ORCA cognitive grammar, LOCOS retrieval heads, GI-Agent code optimization, Uncertainty-Aware Clarification, SRPO, VLA-Corrector, MultAttnAttrib, AGE. KAIST study quantifies AI agent energy cost (up to 136.5x more energy per query). New real-world deployments: ORNL's ARM Data Advisor (ADA) agent and ATLAS framework for scientific data discovery and workflow automation. GitHub closes the agentic loop in VS Code — agents can now browse web, test UIs, run parallel sessions with security isolation. New: on-policy distillation can recover instruction-following after domain-specific SFT (IF-eval drop from 85% to 45% then recovery to 83%). Practical tips: using ripgrep, fd, jq for agent terminal tools improves efficiency. Stateful agents via Tensorlake MicroVMs with suspend/resume. Sakana AI's Picbreeder experiment explores open-ended creativity in agents. Retrieval quality is a defining challenge for agent success. Key unknowns: latency/cost tradeoffs, scaling claims, replication, energy mitigation.