🚀 DeepSeek R1 moment has come for GUI agents: Rule-based Reinforcement Learning gives better results than SFT with 500x smaller datasets!
Traditionally (by which I mean "in the last few months"), GUI agents have been trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This meant, collecting huge datasets of screen captures from people using computers, and using these to fine-tune your model. 📚
👉 But last week, a new paper introduced UI-R1, applying DeepSeek's R1-style rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) specifically to GUI action prediction tasks. This is big news: with RL, maybe we could build good agents without the need for huge datasets.
UI-R1 uses a unified reward function that evaluates multiple responses from models, optimizing via policy algorithms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO).
Specifically, the reward function assesses: 🎯 Action type accuracy: Does the predicted action match the ground truth? 📍 Coordinate accuracy (specifically for clicks): Is the predicted click within the correct bounding box? 📑 Output format: Does the model clearly articulate both its reasoning and final action?
Using just 136 carefully selected mobile tasks—compared to 76,000 tasks for larger models like OS-Atlas—UI-R1 shows significant efficiency and improved performance: 📈 Boosted action prediction accuracy from 76% to 89% on AndroidControl. 🌐 Outperformed larger, SFT-trained models (e.g., OS-Atlas-7B), demonstrating superior results with vastly fewer data points (136 tasks vs. 76K). 🔍 Enhanced adaptability and generalization, excelling even in out-of-domain scenarios.
The paper tests this RL-based method only in low-level GUI tasks. Could it generalize to more complex interactions? 🧐
As one of the most popular local inference solutions, the community had been asking us to integrate vLLM: after a heavy refactoring of our LLM classes, we've just released smolagents 1.11.0, with a brand new VLLMModel class.
If you ever asked which LLM is best for powering agents, we've just made a leaderboard that ranks them all! Built with @albertvillanova, this ranks LLMs powering a smolagents CodeAgent on subsets of various benchmarks. ✅
🏆 GPT-4.5 comes on top, even beating reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 or o1. And Claude-3.7-Sonnet is a close second!
The leaderboard also allows you to show the scores of vanilla LLMs (without any agentic setup) on the same benchmarks: this shows the huge improvements brought by agentic setups. 💪
(Note that results will be added manually, so the leaderboard might not always have the latest LLMs)
🔥 Agents can do anything! @microsoft Research just announced the release of Magma 8B!
Magma is a new Visual Language Model (VLM) with 8B parameters for multi-modal agents designed to handle complex interactions across virtual and real environments; and it's MIT licensed!
Magma comes with exciting new features such as: - Introduces the Set-of-Mark and Trace-of-Mark techniques for fine-tuning - Leverages a large amount of unlabeled video data to learn the spatial-temporal grounding and planning - A strong generalization and ability to be fine-tuned for other agentic tasks - SOTA in different multi-modal benchmarks spanning across UI navigation, robotics manipulation, image / video understanding and spatial understanding and reasoning - Generates goal-driven visual plans and actions for agentic use cases
We now have a Deep Research for academia: SurveyX automatically writes academic surveys nearly indistinguishable from human-written ones 🔥
Researchers from Beijing and Shanghai just published the first application of a deep research system to academia: their algorithm, given a question, can give you a survey of all papers on the subject.
To make a research survey, you generally follow two steps, preparation (collect and organize papers) and writing (outline creation, writing, polishing). Researchers followed the same two steps and automated them.
🎯 For the preparation part, a key part is find all the important references on the given subject. Researchers first cast a wide net of all relevant papers. But then finding the really important ones is like distilling knowledge from a haystack of information. To solve this challenge, they built an “AttributeTree” object that structures key information from citations. Ablating these AttributeTrees significantly decreased structure and synthesis scores, so they were really useful!
📝 For the writing part, key was to get a synthesis that's both short and true. This is not easy to get with LLMs! So they used methods like LLM-based deduplication to shorten the too verbose listings made by LLMs, and RAG to grab original quotes instead of made-up ones.
As a result, their system outperforms previous approaches by far!
As assessed by LLM-judges, the quality score os SurveyX even approaches this of human experts, with 4.59/5 vs 4.75/5 🏆
SmolVLM-2 and SigLIP-2 are now part of transformers in dedicated releases!
They're added on top of the v4.49.0 release, and can be installed from the following tags: v4.49.0-SmolVLM-2 and v4.49.0-SigLIP-2.
This marks a new beginning for the release process of transformers. For the past five years, we've been doing monthly releases featuring many models (v4.49.0, the latest release, features 9 new architectures).
Starting with SmolVLM-2 & SigLIP2, we'll now additionally release tags supporting new models on a stable branch. These models are therefore directly available for use by installing from the tag itself. These tags will continue to be updated with fixes applied to these models.
Going forward, continue expecting software releases following semantic versioning: v4.50.0 will have ~10 new architectures compared to v4.49.0, as well as a myriad of new features, improvements and bug fixes. Accompanying these software releases, we'll release tags offering brand new models as fast as possible, to make them accessible to all immediately.
Less is More for Reasoning (LIMO): a 32B model fine-tuned with 817 examples can beat o1-preview on math reasoning! 🤯
Do we really need o1's huge RL procedure to see reasoning emerge? It seems not. Researchers from Shanghai Jiaotong University just demonstrated that carefully selected examples can boost math performance in large language models using SFT —no huge datasets or RL procedures needed.
Their procedure allows Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct to jump from 6.5% to 57% on AIME and from 59% to 95% on MATH, while using only 1% of the data in previous approaches.
⚡ The Less-is-More Reasoning Hypothesis: ‣ Minimal but precise examples that showcase optimal reasoning patterns matter more than sheer quantity ‣ Pre-training knowledge plus sufficient computational resources at inference levels up math skills
➡️ Core techniques: ‣ High-quality reasoning chains with self-verification steps ‣ 817 handpicked problems that encourage deeper reasoning ‣ Enough inference-time computation to allow extended reasoning
💪 Efficiency gains: ‣ Only 817 examples instead of 100k+ ‣ 40.5% absolute improvement across 10 diverse benchmarks, outperforming models trained on 100x more data
This really challenges the notion that SFT leads to memorization rather than generalization! And opens up reasoning to GPU-poor researchers 🚀
𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁: you can now share agents to the Hub! 🥳🥳
And any agent pushed to Hub get a cool Space interface to directly chat with it.
This was a real technical challenge: for instance, serializing tools to export them meant that you needed to get all the source code for a tool, verify that it was standalone (not relying on external variables), and gathering all the packages required to make it run.
The most difficult part was getting the model running in the first place, but the next steps are simple: ✂️ Implement sentence splitting, allowing for streamed responses 🌍 Multilingual support (only phonemization left)
➡️ How well do reasoning models perform on agentic tasks? Until now, all indicators seemed to show that they worked really well. On our recent reproduction of Deep Search, OpenAI's o1 was by far the best model to power an agentic system.
So when our partner Adyen built a huge benchmark of 450 data science tasks, and built data agents with smolagents to test different models, I expected reasoning models like o1 or DeepSeek-R1 to destroy the tasks at hand.
👎 But they really missed the mark. DeepSeek-R1 only got 1 or 2 out of 10 questions correct. Similarly, o1 was only at ~13% correct answers.
🧐 These results really surprised us. We thoroughly checked them, we even thought our APIs for DeepSeek were broken and colleagues Leandro Anton helped me start custom instances of R1 on our own H100s to make sure it worked well. But there seemed to be no mistake. Reasoning LLMs actually did not seem that smart. Often, these models made basic mistakes, like forgetting the content of a folder that they had just explored, misspelling file names, or hallucinating data. Even though they do great at exploring webpages through several steps, the same level of multi-step planning seemed much harder to achieve when reasoning over files and data.
It seems like there's still lots of work to do in the Agents x Data space. Congrats to Adyen for this great benchmark, looking forward to see people proposing better agents! 🚀