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Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork

arXiv:2605.24423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) has enabled foundation agents to adapt instantaneously to novel tasks, yet its efficacy in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT)-where coordination with unknown partners is required-remains unexplored. To rigorously evaluate this, we introduce a large-scale benchmark ICRL4AHT, built upon a high-throughput JAX implementation of Overcooked-V2. Our benchmark includes a large, diverse teammate suite spanning both RL and heuristic policies, enabling controlled train-test shifts, and provides a reproducible end-to-end pipeline for teammate generation, learning-history collection, dataset construction, and online multi-episode evaluation. We evaluate representative history-conditioned ICRL algorithms, including Algorithm Distillation (AD) and Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), across millions of transitions. Results reveal notable limitations: contrary to their success in single-agent domains, these baselines fail to exhibit robust test-time adaptation in multi-agent settings. Specifically, these methods frequently underperform random baselines across both unseen teammate and unseen layout tracks, with no clear in-context improvement over long horizons. These findings highlight the challenges of strategic inference under partial observability within the OvercookedV2 AHT protocol, establishing our benchmark as a critical testbed for next-generation coordination algorithms.

Rethinking Federated Unlearning via the Lens of Memorization

arXiv:2605.24545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) increasingly needs machine unlearning to comply with privacy regulations. However, existing federated unlearning approaches may overlook the overlapping information between the unlearning and remaining data, leading to ineffective unlearning and unfairness between clients. In this work, we revisit federated unlearning through the lens of memorization. We argue that unlearning should mainly remove the unique memorized information attributable to the data to be forgotten, while preserving overlapping patterns that are also supported by the remaining data. Specifically, we propose Grouped Memorization Evaluation, an example-level metric that separates memorized knowledge from overlapping knowledge. Building on this metric, we introduce Federated Memorization Pruning (FedMemPrune), a pruning-based unlearning approach that resets redundant parameters responsible for memorization. Extensive experiments show that FedMemPrune closely matches retraining-based unlearning baselines while more effectively eliminating memorization than existing federated unlearning algorithms, yielding strong unlearning performance without sacrificing the utility of retained knowledge.

AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2605.20025v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

E = T*H/(O+B): A Dimensionless Control Parameter for Mixture-of-Experts Ecology

arXiv:2605.06415v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce E = T*H/(O+B), a dimensionless control parameter that predicts whether Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models will develop a healthy expert ecology or collapse into dead experts. E combines four hyperparameters -- routing temperature T, routing entropy weight H, oracle weight O, and balance weight B -- into a single quantity. Through 12 controlled experiments (8 vision, 4 language) totaling over 11,000 training epochs, we establish that E >= 0.5 alone is sufficient to guarantee zero dead experts, removing the necessity for handcrafted load-balancing auxiliary losses. We validate this cross-modally on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet-200, WikiText-2, and WikiText-103. Six additional findings emerge: (1) dead experts can resuscitate -- triggered by balance loss driving router re-exploration; (2) ortho toxicity is dataset-dependent, not universal; (3) task complexity shifts the critical E threshold; (4) model overfitting is decoupled from expert ecological health; (5) three-tier MoE spontaneously collapses into a two-tier functional structure; (6) ecological structure is temperature-invariant across a 50x range. We propose that E serves as a unified diagnostic for MoE training, analogous to the Reynolds number in fluid dynamics.

A SAUR gene enhances maize drought resilience by promoting silk elongation

Nature, Published online: 20 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10566-9

The Small Auxin Up RNA (SAUR) protein ZmSAUR72 in maize (Zea mays) promotes silk growth via regulation of H+-ATPase activity, and is a key determinant of the anthesis-silking interval and thus resilience to drought.
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