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Accelerating Long-Tail Generation in Synchronous RLHF Training via Adaptive Tensor Parallelism

arXiv:2605.23945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a key post-training paradigm for improving model quality. However, the synchronous three-stage RLHF pipeline is often bottlenecked by the generation stage, where response-length skew causes the effective batch size to shrink rapidly during decoding, leaving GPUs underutilized while a few long responses remain unfinished. Mainstream frameworks employ a static tensor parallelism (TP) configuration that cannot adapt to changing batch characteristics, leaving substantial performance headroom unexplored. We propose PAT, an adaptive TP method that dynamically reconfigures TP during the generation stage of each RLHF iteration. PAT introduces two key techniques. First, a predictor-guided online reconfiguration method decides both the reconfiguration point and the target TP configuration based on offline profiling, triggering reconfiguration only when the predicted latency benefit outweighs the reconfiguration overhead. Second, a lightweight online reconfiguration mechanism updates only the states and layouts affected by TP changes: it adapts unfinished decoding states through a cost-model-based choice between KV-cache migration and recomputation, performs in-place weight resharding, and reuses cached communication groups. We implement PAT on top of SGLang and integrate it with the VeRL framework. Evaluations on LLaMA3.1-8B and Qwen3-14B using DeepScaleR show that PAT reduces generation latency by up to 34.6% and end-to-end RLHF training iteration latency by up to 27.2% compared to the original VeRL setup.
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IndexMem: Learned KV-Cache Eviction with Latent Memory for Long-Context LLM Inference

arXiv:2605.25475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to operate over long contexts, yet standard softmax attention incurs a KV cache that grows linearly with sequence length, quickly becoming the bottleneck for long context inference. A practical remedy is to evict less important KV entries; however, existing eviction policies are largely heuristic and struggle to capture the rich, input-dependent distribution of token importance. In this work, we introduce a learnable indexer that predicts KV importance, enabling more accurate retention of critical tokens. Meanwhile, naively evicting tokens permanently discards their information, leading to irreversible forgetting and degraded retrieval over long ranges. To address this, we propose a lightweight latent memory module that compresses evicted tokens into a compact, online-updated state and provides residual readouts to compensate for the attention contributions lost through KV eviction. Collectively, our method enables accurate long-context inference under a bounded KV budget, delivering consistent improvements on RULER (4K/16K) across Qwen, Mistral, and Llama models (up to 25 points under aggressive eviction), markedly more stable Needle-in-a-Haystack retrieval, and superior LongBench scores and compression curves compared to existing eviction policies.
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FG-CLIP 2: A Bilingual Fine-grained Vision-Language Alignment Model

arXiv:2510.10921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained vision-language understanding requires precise alignment between visual content and linguistic descriptions, a capability that remains limited in current models, particularly in non-English settings. While models like CLIP perform well on global alignment, they often struggle to capture fine-grained details in object attributes, spatial relations, and linguistic expressions, with limited support for bilingual comprehension. To address these challenges, we introduce FG-CLIP 2, a bilingual vision-language model designed to advance fine-grained alignment for both English and Chinese. Our approach leverages rich fine-grained supervision, including region-text matching and long-caption modeling, alongside multiple discriminative objectives. We further introduce the Textual Intra-modal Contrastive (TIC) loss to better distinguish semantically similar captions. Trained on a carefully curated mixture of large-scale English and Chinese data, including a newly released 12M Chinese region-text dataset, FG-CLIP 2 achieves powerful bilingual performance. To enable rigorous evaluation, we present a new benchmark for Chinese multimodal understanding, featuring long-caption retrieval and bounding box classification. Extensive experiments on 29 datasets across 8 tasks show that FG-CLIP 2 outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both languages. We release the model, code, and benchmark to facilitate future research on bilingual fine-grained vision-language alignment.
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E3AD: An Emotion-Aware Vision-Language-Action Model for Human-Centric End-to-End Autonomous Driving

arXiv:2512.04733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems increasingly adopt vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet they typically ignore the passenger's emotional state, which is central to comfort and AD acceptance. We introduce Open-Domain End-to-End (OD-E2E) autonomous driving, where an autonomous vehicle (AV) must interpret free-form natural-language commands, infer the emotion, and plan a physically feasible trajectory. We propose E3AD, an emotion-aware VLA framework that augments semantic understanding with two cognitively inspired components: a continuous Valenc-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) emotion model that captures tone and urgency from language, and a dual-pathway spatial reasoning module that fuses egocentric and allocentric views for human-like spatial cognition. A consistency-oriented training scheme, combining modality pretraining with preference-based alignment, further enforces coherence between emotional intent and driving actions. Across real-world datasets, E3AD improves visual grounding and waypoint planning and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) VAD correlation for emotion estimation. These evaluation results show that injecting emotion into VLA-style driving yields more human-aligned grounding, planning, and feedback.
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RecGOAT: Graph Optimal Adaptive Transport for LLM-Enhanced Multimodal Recommendation with Dual Semantic Alignment

arXiv:2602.00682v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrating large language model (LLM) representations into multimodal recommendation has shown promise, yet a fundamental challenge remains largely overlooked: the semantic heterogeneity between generative LM representations and the ID-based collaborative signals that recommendation systems rely on. Naively injecting LM features without alignment degrades recommendation performance rather than improving it. To resolve this, we propose RecGOAT, a dual-granularity semantic alignment framework built on graph neural networks and optimal transport theory. RecGOAT first enriches collaborative semantics through multimodal attentive graphs that capture item-item, user-item, and user-user relationships, initializing user representations via LLM-inferred behavioral preferences. It then aligns LM-derived modality representations with recommendation IDs at two complementary granularities: (1) instance-level alignment via cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL), which produces discriminative per-sample representations; and (2) distribution-level alignment via optimal adaptive transport (OAT), which minimizes the 1-Wasserstein distance between ID distributions and LLM semantics to produce a unified, consistently aligned feature space. Theoretically, we prove that the unified representation achieves strictly lower target error than any single-modality representation, with the gap bounded by the Wasserstein distance and the InfoNCE loss, providing rigorous guarantees for both alignment consistency and fusion comprehensiveness. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Deployment on a large-scale online advertising platform further validates RecGOAT's industrial scalability. Our code is available at https://github.com/6lyc/RecGOAT-LLM4Rec.
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A pathogen lncRNA secreted into rice sequesters a host miRNA for virulence

Nature, Published online: 20 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10572-x

A fungal long non-coding RNA from Magnaporthe oryzae translocates into rice cells to sequester a host microRNA that normally represses PKR1, a negative immunity regulator, thereby facilitating infection and revealing a widespread RNA-based pathogen–host interaction mechanism.
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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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Multi-omics integration identifies ribosome biogenesis-active macrophage subpopulation and its key gene GNL2 in driving liver hepatocellular carcinoma progression and mechanisms

Cancer Cell Int. 2026 May 14. doi: 10.1186/s12935-026-04330-2. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) is a common malignancy, yet the core genes driving its progression and potential therapeutic targets remain insufficiently explored. Ribosome biogenesis (RB) is a critical biological process linked to various cancers; however, its systematic role in LIHC remains unclear.

METHODS: This study integrated LIHC single-cell RNA-Seq, bulk RNA-Seq, and spatial transcriptomic data with ribosome biogenesis-related gene sets to construct a single-cell atlas of LIHC. Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis (WGCNA) was employed to characterize myeloid cell subsets. Furthermore, an LIHC prognostic risk model based on RB-related genes was developed using 117 machine-learning algorithm combinations. Key findings were subsequently corroborated through experimental validation and clinical sample analysis.

RESULTS: We identified a distinct macrophage subpopulation with high ribosome biogenesis activity, termed ribosome biogenesis-active macrophages (RAMs). These cells exhibited strong communication with inflammatory macrophages, potentially mediated by MIF-related receptor-ligand interactions. We further constructed an 8-gene prognostic model (PA2G4, GNL2, PWP1, DDX49, NOC4L, GDI2, CST7, and RCL1), which showed good predictive performance. Drug sensitivity analysis suggested that the high-risk group may be more responsive to several agents, including docetaxel. Among these genes, GNL2 was selected for further investigation. Elevated GNL2 expression was associated with increased stemness features in myeloid cells. Molecular docking analysis identified several candidate compounds with potential binding affinity to GNL2. Functionally, GNL2 knockdown in macrophages reduced TGF-β and TNF-α expression and was associated with decreased proliferation, migration, and invasion of LIHC cells.

CONCLUSION: We identified a highly active ribosome biogenesis-macrophage subpopulation (RAM), and constructed a robust risk model to aid in the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of LIHC. GNL2 is associated with increased expression of TGF-β and TNF-α and may contribute to LIHC progression.

PMID:42135716 | DOI:10.1186/s12935-026-04330-2

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Safety-Aligned 3D Object Detection: Single-Vehicle, Cooperative, and End-to-End Perspectives

arXiv:2604.03325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception plays a central role in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), underpinning not only conventional modular driving stacks, but also cooperative perception systems and recent end-to-end driving models. While deep learning has greatly improved perception performance, its statistical nature makes perfect predictions difficult to attain. Meanwhile, standard training objectives and evaluation benchmarks treat all perception errors equally, even though only a subset is safety-critical. In this paper, we investigate safety-aligned evaluation and optimization for 3D object detection that explicitly characterize high-impact errors. Building on our previously proposed safety-oriented metric, NDS-USC, and safety-aware loss function, EC-IoU, we make three contributions. First, we present an expanded study of single-vehicle 3D object detection models across diverse neural network architectures and sensing modalities, showing that gains under standard metrics such as mAP and NDS may not translate to safety-oriented criteria represented by NDS-USC. With EC-IoU, we reaffirm the benefit of safety-aware fine-tuning for improving safety-critical detection performance. Second, we conduct an ego-centric, safety-oriented evaluation of AV-infrastructure cooperative object detection models, underscoring its superiority over vehicle-only models and demonstrating a safety impact analysis that illustrates the potential contribution of cooperative models to "Vision Zero." Third, we integrate EC-IoU into SparseDrive and show that safety-aware perception hardening can reduce collision rate by nearly 30% and improve system-level safety directly in an end-to-end perception-to-planning framework. Overall, our results indicate that safety-aligned perception evaluation and optimization offer a practical path toward enhancing CAV safety across single-vehicle, cooperative, and end-to-end autonomy settings.
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RDEx-CMOP: Feasibility-Aware Indicator-Guided Differential Evolution for Fixed-Budget Constrained Multiobjective Optimization

arXiv:2604.03708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constrained multiobjective optimisation requires fast feasibility attainment together with stable convergence and diversity preservation under strict evaluation budgets. This report documents RDEx-CMOP, the differential evolution variant used in the IEEE CEC 2025 numerical optimisation competition (C06 special session) constrained multiobjective track. RDEx-CMOP integrates an {\epsilon}-level feasibility schedule, a SPEA2-style indicator-driven fitness assignment, and a fitness-oriented current-to-pbest/1 mutation operator. We evaluate RDEx-CMOP on the official CEC 2025 CMOP benchmark using the median-target U-score framework and the released trace data. Experimental results show that RDEx-CMOP achieves the highest total score and the best overall average rank among all released comparison algorithms, with strong target-attainment behaviour and near-zero final violation on most problems.
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XModBench: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Capabilities and Consistency in Omni-Language Models

arXiv:2510.15148v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify audio, vision, and text understanding within a single framework. While existing benchmarks primarily evaluate general cross-modal question-answering ability, it remains unclear whether OLLMs achieve modality-invariant reasoning or exhibit modality-specific biases. We introduce XModBench, a large-scale tri-modal benchmark explicitly designed to measure cross-modal consistency. XModBench comprises 60,828 multiple-choice questions spanning five task families and systematically covers all six modality compositions in question-answer pairs, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of an OLLM's modality-invariant reasoning, modality disparity, and directional imbalance. Experiments show that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, (i) struggles with spatial and temporal reasoning, achieving less than 60% accuracy, (ii) reveals persistent modality disparities, with performance dropping substantially when the same semantic content is conveyed through audio rather than text, and (iii) shows systematic directional imbalance, exhibiting lower consistency when vision serves as context compared to text. These findings indicate that current OLLMs remain far from truly modality-invariant reasoning and position XModBench as a fundamental diagnostic tool for evaluating and improving cross-modal competence. All data and evaluation tools will be available at https://xingruiwang.github.io/projects/XModBench/.
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RASA: Routing-Aware Safety Alignment for Mixture-of-Experts Models

arXiv:2602.04448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models introduce unique challenges for safety alignment due to their sparse routing mechanisms, which can enable degenerate optimization behaviors under standard full-parameter fine-tuning. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that naively applying full-parameter safety fine-tuning to MoE models can reduce attack success rates through routing or expert dominance effects, rather than by directly repairing Safety-Critical Experts. To address this challenge, we propose RASA, a routing-aware expert-level alignment framework that explicitly repairs Safety-Critical Experts while preventing routing-based bypasses. RASA identifies experts disproportionately activated by successful jailbreaks, selectively fine-tunes only these experts under fixed routing, and subsequently enforces routing consistency with safety-aligned contexts. Across two representative MoE architectures and a diverse set of jailbreak attacks, RASA achieves near-perfect robustness, strong cross-attack generalization, and substantially reduced over-refusal, while preserving general capabilities on benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, and TruthfulQA. Our results suggest that robust MoE safety alignment benefits from targeted expert repair rather than global parameter updates, offering a practical and architecture-preserving alternative to prior approaches.
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Leptomeningeal metastatic cancer cells induce a permissive choroid plexus vasculature through extracellular-vesicle-derived 5-HIAA signaling

Nature Cancer, Published online: 03 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s43018-026-01145-y

Huang, Hou, Yang et al. demonstrate that leptomeningeal metastatic cells favor the formation of a premetastatic niche by remodeling the choroid plexus vasculature through the serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, which signals into endothelial cells through the aryl hydrocarbon receptor.
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InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2512.08829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly tasked with ultra-long multimodal understanding. While linear architectures offer constant computation and memory footprints, they often struggle with high-frequency visual perception compared to standard Transformers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{InfiniteVL}. We first develop a hybrid base model called \textbf{InfiniteVL-Base} that interleaves a small fraction of Full Attention layers with Gated DeltaNet. Empowered by a tailored distillation and fine-tuning strategy, InfiniteVL-Base matches the fundamental multimodal performance of equivalent Transformers while achieving a \textbf{1.7$\times$} decoding speedup. However, the quadratic complexity of the retained Full Attention inevitably becomes an efficiency bottleneck when scaling to ultra long context. To break this barrier, we propose a novel Long-Sequence Architectural Fine-Tuning strategy that seamlessly transforms the dense attention into vision-specific sparse mechanisms. This yields two specialized variants: \textbf{InfiniteVL-Offline} for offline retrieval and \textbf{InfiniteVL-Online} for online streaming. By eliminating the computation explosion of global attention without sacrificing high-frequency visual recall, InfiniteVL-Offline achieves Transformer-level length generalization with a \textbf{5x} prefill acceleration at 256K context. Concurrently, InfiniteVL-Online delivers robust streaming perception with a constant memory footprint and a real-time throughput of \textbf{25} FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.
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Proposed Role of Circadian Clock Genes in Pathogenesis of HCC: Molecular Subtyping and Characterization

Biomedicines. 2026 Mar 12;14(3):645. doi: 10.3390/biomedicines14030645.

ABSTRACT

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) stands as a prevalent global health issue with increasing incidence and mortality rates. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) exhibits profound molecular and clinical heterogeneity, which limits the effectiveness of current therapeutic strategies. Circadian rhythm disruption has been implicated in metabolic reprogramming, proliferation, and immune modulation in cancer, but its role in shaping HCC heterogeneity remains poorly defined. Methods: Four public HCC transcriptomic cohorts (TCGA-LIHC, CHCC, LIRI, LICA) were integrated using RMA normalization and ComBat for batch correction. Consensus clustering based on 31 core circadian clock genes (CCGs) identified robust molecular subtypes. Multi-omics characterization-including genomic alterations, pathway activity (GSEA/GSVA), immune microenvironment profiling (CIBERSORT, EPIC, MCP-counter, xCell), and drug-sensitivity prediction (pRRophetic/oncoPredict)-was performed to delineate subtype-specific biological properties. A nine-gene CCG-based RiskScore model was constructed using LASSO Cox regression to internally validate subtype robustness and intra-subtype risk stratification. Results: Using consensus clustering of 31 core CCGs in TCGA-LIHC and three independent validation cohorts (CHCC, LIRI, LICA), we identified three reproducible subtypes-Cluster-1 (metabolic-quiescent), Cluster-2 (transition-intermediate), and Cluster-3 (proliferation-inflammatory)-which were recapitulated across cohorts and showed distinct overall survival (Cluster-3 worst; log-rank p values significant across datasets). Multi-omic characterization revealed that Cluster-3 exhibits the highest tumor mutational burden and CNV burden with enrichment of TP53/AXIN1/TERT alterations, strong activation of cell-cycle, E2F, and G2M programs, and an immune-hot yet immunosuppressed microenvironment enriched for TAMs, Tregs and MDSCs. By contrast, Cluster-1 shows relative genomic stability, dominant hepatic metabolic signatures (fatty-acid oxidation, bile-acid and xenobiotic metabolism) and an immune-cold phenotype. Single-cell mapping linked ALAS1 expression to malignant hepatocytes predominating in Cluster-1, whereas NONO and CSNK1D localized to stromal (CAFs/TECs) and both malignant/immune compartments respectively in Cluster-3, providing a cellular mechanism for subtype-specific metabolism, angiogenesis and immune modulation. Finally, a nine-gene CCG-based RiskScore validated prognostic stratification and drug-sensitivity predictions indicated subtype-specific therapeutic vulnerabilities (notably increased predicted TKI sensitivity in Cluster-3). Conclusion: In conclusion, this study proposes a robust circadian rhythm-based molecular classification of hepatocellular carcinoma, revealing three biologically and clinically distinct subtypes characterized by divergent genomic alterations, metabolic programs, immune microenvironment states, and prognostic patterns. By integrating bulk and single-cell transcriptomic data, we identify subtype-specific roles of key circadian regulators-including ALAS1, NONO, and CSNK1D-in shaping tumor metabolism, proliferation, stromal remodeling, and immune suppression. These findings highlight circadian dysregulation as a potential upstream factor associated with HCC heterogeneity and provide a conceptual framework for developing subtype-tailored mechanistic studies and circadian-informed therapeutic strategies.

PMID:41898292 | PMC:PMC13024568 | DOI:10.3390/biomedicines14030645

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Think Before You Drive: World Model-Inspired Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv:2512.03454v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpreting natural-language commands to localize target objects is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing visual grounding (VG) methods for autonomous vehicles (AVs) typically struggle with ambiguous, context-dependent instructions, as they lack reasoning over 3D spatial relations and anticipated scene evolution. Grounded in the principles of world models, we propose ThinkDeeper, a framework that reasons about future spatial states before making grounding decisions. At its core is a Spatial-Aware World Model (SA-WM) that learns to reason ahead by distilling the current scene into a command-aware latent state and rolling out a sequence of future latent states, providing forward-looking cues for disambiguation. Complementing this, a hypergraph-guided decoder then hierarchically fuses these states with the multimodal input, capturing higher-order spatial dependencies for robust localization. In addition, we present DrivePilot, a multi-source VG dataset in AD, featuring semantic annotations generated by a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-prompted LLM pipeline. Extensive evaluations on six benchmarks, ThinkDeeper ranks #1 on the Talk2Car leaderboard and surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on DrivePilot, MoCAD, and RefCOCO/+/g benchmarks. Notably, it shows strong robustness and efficiency in challenging scenes (long-text, multi-agent, ambiguity) and retains superior performance even when trained on 50% of the data.
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SynPlanResearch-R1: Encouraging Tool Exploration for Deep Research with Synthetic Plans

arXiv:2603.07853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research Agents enable models to gather information from the web using tools to answer user queries, requiring them to dynamically interleave internal reasoning with tool use. While such capabilities can in principle be learned via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), we observe that agents often exhibit poor exploration behaviors, including premature termination and biased tool usage. As a result, RLVR alone yields limited improvements. We propose SynPlanResearch-R1, a framework that synthesizes tool-use trajectories that encourage deeper exploration to shape exploration during cold-start supervised fine-tuning, providing a strong initialization for subsequent RL. Across seven multi-hop and open-web benchmarks, \framework improves performance by up to 6.0% on Qwen3-8B and 5.8% on Qwen3-4B backbones respectively compared to SOTA baselines. Further analyses of tool-use patterns and training dynamics compared to baselines shed light on the factors underlying these gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HansiZeng/syn-plan-research.
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CCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Complex Constraints, Control Flows, and Real-World Cases

arXiv:2603.07886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enhancing the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex instructions is critical for their deployment in real-world applications. However, existing evaluation methods often oversimplify instruction complexity as a mere additive combination of atomic constraints, failing to adequately capture the high-dimensional complexity arising from the intricate interplay of content and format, logical workflow control, and real-world applications. This leads to a significant gap between current evaluation practices and practical demands. To bridge this gap, we introduce CCR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to assess LLMs' adherence to complex instructions. CCR-Bench is characterized by: (1) deep entanglement of content and formatting requirements in task specifications; (2) instructions that involve intricate task decomposition, conditional reasoning, and procedural planning; and (3) evaluation samples derived entirely from real-world industrial scenarios. Extensive experiments on CCR-Bench demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models exhibit substantial performance deficiencies, clearly quantifying the gap between current LLM capabilities and the demands of realworld instruction understanding. We believe that CCR-Bench offers a more rigorous and realistic evaluation framework, advancing the development of LLMs toward the next generation of models capable of understanding and executing complex tasks in industrial applications.
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Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills

arXiv:2512.16301v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are moving beyond prompting alone. ChatGPT marked the rise of general-purpose LLM assistants, DeepSeek showed that on-policy reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can improve reasoning and tool use, and OpenClaw highlights a newer direction in which agents accumulate persistent memory and reusable skills. Yet the research landscape remains fragmented across post-training, retrieval, memory, and skill systems. This survey studies these developments under a single notion of \emph{adaptation}: improving an agent, its tools, or their interaction after pretraining. We organize the field with a four-paradigm framework spanning agent adaptation and tool adaptation. On the agent side, A1 (tool-execution-signaled) and A2 (agent-output-signaled) improve the agent itself through supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. On the tool side, T1 (agent-agnostic) provides reusable pre-trained modules any agent can call, while T2 (agent-supervised) uses the agent's outputs to train memory systems, skill libraries, or lightweight subagents. Using this framework, we review post-training methods, adaptive memory architectures, and agent skills; compare their trade-offs in cost, flexibility, and generalization; and summarize evaluation practices across deep research, software development, computer use, and drug discovery. We conclude by outlining open problems in agent-tool co-adaptation, continual learning, safety, and efficient deployment.
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