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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.
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Agent Manufacturing: Foundation-Model Agents as First-Class Industrial Entities

arXiv:2605.24823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manufacturing has passed through four widely recognized paradigms - mechanization, electrification, programmable automation, and Smart Manufacturing - each defined by the kind of work it shifted from humans to machines. In every case, one layer of industrial work remained fundamentally human: the coordinative cognition of production, comprising the interpretive, allocative, diagnostic, negotiative, and governance work exercised by engineers, planners, and operational managers. We argue that a fifth transition is now underway in which this layer, rather than the physical or routine-cognitive layers below it, is what foundation-model-based autonomous agents primarily redistribute. We name this paradigm Agent Manufacturing and define it operationally: a manufacturing system is an instance of Agent Manufacturing when its principal coordination mechanism is reasoning performed by foundation-model agents that can interpret open-ended goals, plan over long horizons, invoke tools and machines, and negotiate with other agents and humans. This is a narrower and more falsifiable definition than the existing literature on cognitive manufacturing or Industry 5.0 provides, and it distinguishes the paradigm sharply from classical multi-agent manufacturing systems, which were autonomous only within closed protocol spaces.
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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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Transplantation of encapsulated mitochondria alleviates dysfunction in mitochondrial and Parkinson’s disease models

A mitochondrial transplantation approach rescues mitochondrial deficiency and prevents mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, Leigh syndrome, and Parkinson’s disease in cellular and mouse models.
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