JUAN LI · AI4SCIENCE

Daily Brief

AI-for-Science developments worth following

Selected from source-grounded bilingual updates that are complete enough to check. Briefs are arranged automatically; items are AI-generated and not individually human-reviewed by default (human-reviewed items are labeled), so verify original sources before citing.

How this brief is selected: we include AI4Science updates with reliable sources and complete Chinese and English coverage, prioritizing fuller and easier-to-check information.

4 items
01

Solving Open Research Problems Together: Six Papers from Meta AI and Mathematicians

Solving Open Research Problems Together Mathematicians and Muse Spark collaborate on six research papers Earlier this year, our models achieved gold-medal-level performance across five high-school Olympiad competitions in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Those results inspired us to see whether AI could also help scientists solve open research problems. Competition problems can be incredibly difficult, but those problems already have a solution. Open research is different. There is no answer key, no guarantee that an approach will work. Making progress means trying and retrying ideas, making new mistakes and resolving them, and sometimes going back to the beginning. Over the past several months, we've partnered with mathematicians to explore problems across several areas of mathematics. They used both Muse Spark 1.1 and 1.2 in Thinking Mode through the regular meta.ai chat interface, with no custom research scaffold. Open research takes time. Our goal here wasn't to mass-produce papers, but to empower researchers and help them develop mathematical insights that others can understand and build on. We’re proud to partner with the scientific community to help them advance research. These collaborations were done under the following principles: - A team of mathematicians guided the research and worked with Muse Spark to explore ideas and develop the arguments. - A second group of mathematicians then reviewed their work. - Each paper clearly marks which passages were primarily drafted by researchers and which were drafted by AI. - Each paper gives credit to the earlier research and mathematical ideas it builds on. Today, we're sharing six such papers from that collaboration. Five present answers to previously open research questions. After completing our work, we learned that other teams outside Meta had independently announced solutions to some of the same problems using different approaches. We recognize and appreciate their contributions and clearly acknowledge their work and how it relates to ours in the papers. Probability: The Strict Threshold for Gaussian Ellipsoid Fitting Aykut Arslan with Muse Spark via meta.ai. Review by Babak Modami, Alexander Roitershtein, Mark Sepanski, and Grigory Sokolov Paper: The Strict Threshold for Gaussian Ellipsoid Fitting. The paper answers a long-standing question about fitting random Gaussian points in high dimensions…

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02

LoHi: A Joint Allocation Perspective on Frames, Pixels, and Front-End Latency in Long-Video Understanding

Efficient long-video understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) is often framed as selecting informative frames or visual tokens at a fixed native resolution. We show that per-frame resolution can instead be traded for denser temporal coverage, while front-end decoding latency depends on the size of the candidate pool rather than the final token budget. An empirical study across multiple VLMs and long-video benchmarks yields three findings: dense low-resolution sampling outperforms sparse native-resolution sampling at matched token budgets; resolution-sensitive tasks benefit from selected high-resolution frames; and front-end decoding dominates wall time for hour-long videos. Motivated by these findings, we introduce LoHi, a training-free, single-pass framework that combines a dense low-resolution video stream with sparse high-resolution image frames through the VLM's native video and image pathways. LoHi-Anchor selects high-resolution frames using codec I-frame metadata, while LoHi-SemDiv uses query relevance and visual diversity over CLIP features. Across three long-video benchmarks, LoHi improves average accuracy by 10.6 percentage points over the native-resolution baseline at a matched token budget and by 5.2 percentage points over the strongest prior efficiency method. It also reduces front-end decoding latency by up to 7x on hour-long videos. Project page: https://sixundong.com/projects/lohi

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03

LMBuild: Evaluating LLM Agents for Generating Buildable and Functional Structures

LLM-based agents are increasingly capable of generating complex 3D structures, with the potential to reshape how objects are designed and realized in the physical world. Yet, producing elegant geometry is fundamentally different from producing objects that can be built and perform their intended functions. Existing evaluations largely focus on geometric quality while overlooking physical realizability. We introduce LMBuild, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on generating buildable and functional structures. LMBuild represents generated objects as assembled structures comprising part decompositions, joints, materials, and sequences. To support reproducible evaluation, we provide a unified framework consisting of: (1) an interactive environment in which agents can use tools to retrieve, create, and place components to construct objects; (2) a curated benchmark that repurposes established CAD datasets and augments them with knowledge from Wikipedia; and (3) a evaluation framework covering structural soundness, functional affordance, design quality, and physical realization. Evaluations across 30 systems reveal several intriguing findings: (a) Soundness and alignment are no longer the primary bottlenecks for frontier closed-source models, while functional affordance and physical operability remain substantially more challenging; (b) stronger models more effectively create new components, whereas weaker models tend to rely on retrieval; and (c) providing functional specifications substantially improves part completeness, kinematics, and physical operability. These results show that generating real-world structures requires deeper reasoning about functional affordances, mechanics, and designing and creating novel components. We expect LMBuild to provide a foundation for measuring progress and incentivizing research toward agents that generate buildable and functional structures.

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04

The Numerical Linear Algebra of Large Language Models

Numerical Linear Algebra (NLA) has consistently played a vital role in advancing science by providing tools to solve fundamental problems encountered in scientific and engineering applications. Over the decades, it has continually evolved to meet the demands driven by successive waves of scientific discovery. For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, substantial efforts were devoted to developing methods for solving eigenvalue problems that emerged from the rapidly growing field of aerodynamics. This led to the discovery of the LR and QR algorithms. Later the attention turned to the solution of sparse linear systems that were common in applications like computational aerodynamics. Today we are experiencing yet another wave of major scientific advancement and NLA is once more at the heart of its development. This Machine Learning (ML) wave is proving to be utterly disruptive in science and engineering. Many tools in ML particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in matrix and tensor methods. As we are approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it is clear that matrix methods will be called to play an even more significant role. For the numerical linear practitioner the speed of the current change makes it particularly challenging to adapt. This is a survey article that centers on machine learning techniques, with a particular focus on large language models. It has two main objectives. The first is to clarify the core concepts behind Large Language Models in a manner accessible to specialists in numerical methods. The second is to examine the key Numerical Linear Algebra concepts employed by LLM techniques, while also highlighting several significant recent contributions of NLA to the field.

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