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01Nature Portfolio · Nature Machine Intelligence
Microrobots hold considerable potential for various applications in which targeted navigation is a basic requirement. Deep reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for fully autonomous microrobot navigation. Yet, current deep reinforcement learning-based approaches pay limited attention to learning efficiency and effectiveness, requiring hours to days for model training. Consequently, this impedes both rapid practical deployment and parameter optimization. To address these challenges, we present a learning framework that enables effective microrobot navigation policies to be trained within minutes. Here in the proposed framework, we develop a fully vectorized simulator with more than 10,000 artificial vascular environments, parallelizing dynamics, ray-casting-based visual feature extraction and feasibility checks across thousands of environments to achieve roughly 190,000 transitions per second. To achieve effectiveness in the fast training, we propose a task-shaping-regularization reward framework. The task-shaping-regularization framework accelerates convergence, improves final performance, reduces action variation by at least 33.7% and increases obstacle clearance by at least 2.1% across all evaluated scenarios. Results show that the proposed learning framework reduces training time to under 10 minutes, while supporting zero-shot deployment across distinct microrobot types and navigation scenarios. Collectively, this framework can substantially shorten the design loop and accelerate the deployment of autonomous microrobots. A vectorized simulator and structured reward framework enable microrobot navigation policies to be trained within minutes and transferred without retraining across robots and environments.
AIhub · Research news and interviews
From left: Dr Liang Qiyu, research fellow at the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science at NTU, and Professor Miao Yansong. Credit: NTU Singapore. Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed two artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platforms that could enable researchers to more accurately predict proteins that undergo phase separation – a process through which proteins in cells separate like oil droplets in water. The tools are the result of a systematic analysis of predicted phase-separating proteins from various living things, including animals, plants, fungi and single-celled organisms such as bacteria. From their analyses, the scientists also uncovered fundamental insights about the phase separation process. Led by Professor Miao Yansong from the School of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science (IDMxS) at NTU, in collaboration with Professor Weibo Gao from NTU’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the research could be applied to advance the understanding of diseases and ageing, as well as to improve crops. Both AI platforms and their research findings have been reported in the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Plant . Predicting which proteins separate Phase-separating proteins separate from their surroundings and concentrate into droplet-like compartments, enabling cells to bring molecules together, accelerate or suppress reactions to respond rapidly to stress. When phase separation is altered, these proteins can form abnormal condensates or aggregates, which are associated with diseases, including cancer and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. In plants, changes in phase separation are linked to impaired stress responses and lowered immunity against microbial pathogens. Identifying proteins that undergo phase separation and determining how this behaviour is regulated are important for applications ranging from biomedical research on diseases and ageing to devising approaches for sustainable agriculture. However, accurate prediction remains challenging because phase-separating proteins assemble dynamically into complex structures and interact with numerous cellular components. Addressing these challenges requires comprehensive experimental datasets and systems-level information across diverse organisms. In addition, m…
Hugging Face Daily Papers
Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In recent incidents and controlled evaluations across the AI industry, agents trained to maximize reward have accessed unauthorized information, attempted to evade monitoring systems, and even breached sandbox protections to attack external systems. As agents become more capable, this behavior could pose increasingly serious risks. To measure this problem, we introduce CheatBench, a benchmark of cheating in AI agents across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, visual tasks, and other domains. Its environments combine challenging assignments with opportunities to cheat, allowing researchers to study how agents pursue a goal when honest work is difficult. CheatBench supports comparisons across models and task categories, providing a testbed for measuring and reducing cheating as agents take on more consequential responsibilities. We publicly release CheatBench at https://cheatbench.ai
Hugging Face Daily Papers
Mobile manipulation extends robot interaction beyond a fixed kinematic workspace by making the reachable region itself controllable. This flexibility introduces two central challenges: spatially grounded perception under continuous ego-motion and coordinated control of heterogeneous arm and base actions. Existing approaches strengthen geometry through explicit 3D representations or predictive world models, and often decouple mobility and manipulation into separate action streams. We argue that effective mobile manipulation requires not only decoupling, but also representations that support efficient cross-stream collaboration. We present MM-ABC, a foundation model built around Seeing, Coordinating, and Imagining Arm-Base Collaboration. MM-ABC combines sparse multi-level VLM features for spatial perception; a training-only future branch that uses world imagination and geometric intent as extra supervision, strengthening perception and manipulation-intent prediction and improving the overall learning signal; and MM-APT, which coordinates separate manipulation and mobility streams through masked joint attention and clean-action x-prediction. In controlled ablations, replacing clean-action prediction with velocity prediction lowers success on RoboCasa365 composite-seen tasks from 32.8% to 29.2%, and removing future supervision or multilevel conditioning causes larger drops. We pretrain MM-ABC on 5,000+ hours of heterogeneous robot data spanning 400K+ episodes, 12 datasets, and 17 embodiments. Experiments cover EBench, RoboCasa365, ManiSkill-HAB, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world mobile manipulation. MM-ABC achieves 44.71% success on EBench, 61.2% on RoboCasa365, 99.1% on LIBERO, 82.8% on LIBERO-Plus without perturbation training, and 83% mean success on five real-world tasks.
Cell Press · Patterns
In this review, Hasib et al. introduce EXHYTE a process centric survey to unify research on AI-assisted scientific discovery. Mapping recent studies reveals rapid advances in evidence retrieval, knowledge assembly, and idea generation, but it also reveals a persistent bottleneck in translating hypotheses into executable tests and using results to refine subsequent steps. The survey underscores the need for human oversight, reproducibility, validation, and auditable end-to-end discovery workflows.
