Philip H. S. Torr

Estimating the Impact of Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior on Content Recommendations in Social Networks

CurveShift: Is Agent Progress Scalar? Separating Level from Shape

Progress in large language models is often summarized using a single scalar measure, such as a time horizon, a latent ability estimate, or an aggregate benchmark score. These summaries capture the overall performance, but they do not test whether progress is distributed differently across task difficulty. We find that most of the apparent shift in gains toward harder tasks does not reflect a change in the shape of the difficulty-response curve. On METR time-horizon data, a single Rasch model with rising ability reproduces this pattern, so it is largely explained by ceiling effects rather than a qualitative change in capability. This echoes how the choice of metric can make claimed emergent abilities look like a property of the models themselves. We then identify a smaller hard-task effect that survives this control. Isolating it is difficult on agentic benchmarks, because newer models are usually run with newer agentic harnesses, so a gain on hard tasks cannot be assigned to the model or its scaffold. We break the confound with LiveCodeBench, a public competitive programming benchmark that runs no agentic scaffold while pairing dated models with an exogenous difficulty ordering. After accounting for the rise in overall ability, models released after September 2024 still gain on the hardest problems beyond what their easy and medium performance predicts, by about +0.40 logits under our most conservative assumption, raising the hard-problem solve rate from roughly 18% to 25%. The effect is led by the strongest reasoning models and holds for hard tasks that need only short reasoning, not autonomy over long horizons. We present this as a result specific to competitive programming, since our clean identification rests on a single coding benchmark. We release the LiveCodeBench Difficulty Panel (66 dated models x 1,055 problems) and our analysis code.

SETA: Scaling Environments for Terminal Agents

This work constructs and releases SETA-Env, the largest open-source verifiable terminal RL dataset to date, containing over 4,500 environments, and demonstrates that SETA- Env provides high-quality training environments for terminal agents and serves as a valuable resource for advancing research on terminal-based agent learning.

Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes

This study provides empirical clarity through a systematic exploration of multimodal pretraining and derives efficient pretraining recipes that achieve strong generative performance using only 5% of the compute budget.

Accurate, Interdisciplinary and Transparent Structure-property Understanding with Deep Native Structural Reasoning

SciReasoner is introduced, a multimodal scientific foundation model for native structural reasoning across proteins, small molecules and inorganic crystals that connects accurate prediction with interpretable scientific inference.

AutoOR: Scalably Post-training LLMs to Autoformulate Operations Research Problems

This work presents AutoOR, a scalable synthetic data generation and reinforcement learning pipeline that trains LLMs to autoformulate optimization problems specified in natural language across linear, mixed-integer, and non-linear categories and introduces a curriculum RL strategy that bootstraps from limited initial training data to make this class tractable for post-training.