data-agents (Data Agents)

m-ric

posted an update 1 day ago

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If you didn't yet, you should read the technical report for SmolVLA, published yesterday by the Hugging Face robotics team!
➡️ Amongst other ideas, it introduces "Async inference" to boost their robot actions.

Robots have a problem: performing the actions takes time (Unlike agents where action executions are near-instant!)
Most often, robots wait until they've finished performing actions to start thinking about hte next steps. This is a huge latency cost!

So the team decided to have the PolicyServer (aka the"thinking" part) restart early : instead of waiting for the n observations they just sent to be completed, they gather the observations after k < n steps, and start preparing the next actions based on that while the steps are running until n, to directly send their next steps.

➡️ This boosted robot throughput by ~30%! (nearly 2× tasks per time window).

gg @cadene and team! 👏

Report here: SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics (2506.01844)

thomwolf

authored a paper 3 days ago

SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics

Paper • 2506.01844 • Published 3 days ago • 68

m-ric

posted an update 10 days ago

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2553

A new research paper from KAIST builds on smolagents to push boundaries of distillation 🥳
➡️ "Distilling LLM Agent into Small Models with Retrieval and Code Tools" teaches that, when trying to distil reasoning capability from a strong LLM ("teacher") into a smaller one ("student"), it's much better to use Agent traces than CoT traces.

Advantages are:
1. Improved generalization
Intuitively, this is because your agent can encounter more "surprising" results by interacting with its environment : for example, a web research called by the LLM teacher in agent mode can bring results that the LLM teacher would not have generated in CoT.

2. Reduce hallucinations
The trace won't hallucinate tool call outputs!

Thank you @akseljoonas for mentioning this paper!

lvwerra

updated a Space 16 days ago

288

Jupyter Agent

🏃

Generate code solutions interactively

loubnabnl

posted an update 20 days ago

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2656

SmolVLM is now available on PocketPal — you can run it offline on your smartphone to interpret the world around you. 🌍📱

And check out this real-time camera demo by @ngxson , powered by llama.cpp:
https://github.com/ngxson/smolvlm-realtime-webcam
https://x.com/pocketpal_ai

3 replies

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m-ric

posted an update 23 days ago

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2627

𝗔𝗯𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼: 𝗟𝗟𝗠𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 🤯

Has the "data wall" just been breached?

Recent RL paradigms often relied on a set of questions an answers that needs to be manually curated. Researchers from Tsinghua University went like "why though".

🤔 Indeed, why learn from question designed by a human teacher, when the model can start from their base knowledge and learn by experimenting in a code environment, proposing coding tasks themselves and trying to solve them?

Thus they created “Absolute Zero Reasoning” (AZR), an approach that removes any need for human curated data.

🎭 𝗗𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀:
‣ Proposer: Generates challenging but solvable coding tasks
‣ Solver: Attempts to solve those self-proposed tasks

🧪 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗲𝘀: all types are defined as triplets of program, input and output
‣ Deduction: Give model an input and program, it must deduce the output
‣ Abduction: Give model an program and output, it must find the input that gave said output
‣ Induction: Synthesize a program from input/output pairs
Btw this reminded me of my long-forgotten philosophy classes: Aristotle was more on the induction side, learning from real-world analogies, while Plato was more on the deduction side, trying to progress quite far with just one input and his reasoning.

📊 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀:
‣ AZR post-training creates a nice improvement on known models like Qwen2.5-7B
‣ Shows strong cross-domain transfer: coding ↔️ math reasoning

🧐 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀:
‣ Having a better base performance (general or code specific) amplify the gains from Absolute Zero Reasoning
‣ Researchers warn about "Uh-oh moments" (winking to the "aha moments" of DeepSeek) where the model generates concerning goals like "make an extremely convoluted code to outsmart all these humans": so supervision is still needed!

Paper here: Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data (2505.03335)

lewtun

authored a paper 25 days ago

Kimina-Prover Preview: Towards Large Formal Reasoning Models with Reinforcement Learning

Paper • 2504.11354 • Published Apr 15 • 5

m-ric

posted an update 27 days ago

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I've made an open version of Google's NotebookLM, and it shows the superiority of the open source tech task! 💪

The app's workflow is simple. Given a source PDF or URL, it extracts the content from it, then tasks Meta's Llama 3.3-70B with writing the podcast script, with a good prompt crafted by @gabrielchua ("two hosts, with lively discussion, fun notes, insightful question etc.")
Then it hands off the text-to-speech conversion to Kokoro-82M, and there you go, you have two hosts discussion any article.

The generation is nearly instant, because:
> Llama 3.3 70B is running at 1,000 tokens/seconds with Cerebras inference
> The audio is generated in streaming mode by the tiny (yet powerful) Kokoro, generating voices faster than real-time.

And the audio generation runs for free on Zero GPUs, hosted by HF on H200s.

Overall, open source solutions rival the quality of closed-source solutions at close to no cost!

Try it here 👉👉 m-ric/open-notebooklm

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m-ric

posted an update about 2 months ago

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2870

New king of open VLMs: InternVL3 takes Qwen 2.5's crown! 👑

InternVL have been a wildly successful series of model : and the latest iteration has just taken back their crown thanks to their superior, natively multimodal vision training pipeline.

➡️ Most of the vision language models (VLMs) these days are built like Frankenstein : take a good text-only Large Language Model (LLM) backbone, stitch a specific vision transformer (ViT) on top of it. Then the training is sequential 🔢 : 1. Freeze the LLM weights while you train the ViT only to work with the LLM part, then 2. Unfreeze all weights to train all weights in order to work together.

💫 The Shanghai Lab decided to challenge this paradigm and chose this approach that they call "native". For each of their model sizes, they still start from a good LLM (mostly Qwen-2.5 series, did I tell you I'm a huge fan of Qwen? ❤️), and stitch the ViT, but they don't freeze anything : they train all weights together with interleaved text and image understanding data in a single pre-training phase 🎨.

They claim it results in more seamless interactions between modalities. And the results prove them right: they took the crown of top VLMs, at nearly all sizes, from their Qwen-2.5 parents. 👑

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thomwolf

posted an update about 2 months ago

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5071

If you've followed the progress of robotics in the past 18 months, you've likely noticed how robotics is increasingly becoming the next frontier that AI will unlock.

At Hugging Face—in robotics and across all AI fields—we believe in a future where AI and robots are open-source, transparent, and affordable; community-built and safe; hackable and fun. We've had so much mutual understanding and passion working with the Pollen Robotics team over the past year that we decided to join forces!

You can already find our open-source humanoid robot platform Reachy 2 on the Pollen website and the Pollen community and people here on the hub at

pollen-robotics

We're so excited to build and share more open-source robots with the world in the coming months!

1 reply