Schema-Adaptive Action-Conditioned JEPA for Cross-Machine CNC Transfer under Partial Sensor Overlap
VideoMM: Adaptive Macro-Micro Inference for Efficient Video MLLMs
Where Should a Document Live: Context, Representations, or Parameters?
The Immutable Past: Formalizing State Mutability and Conflict Resolution in Mutable RAG
Shared KV Caching for Replicated 27B Inference: Correctness Failures and Performance Boundaries
SpectralShift: Effective Context Window Extension of Gated DeltaNet via Spectral Reparameterization
Concertina: Data-Centric Adaptive Pipeline Parallelism for Efficient Heterogeneous Long-Context LLM Training
VideoScout: Learning Agentic Active Exploration with Adaptive Reasoning Pacing for Long Video Understanding
Natural Language Knowledge Graph Query Execution: Leveraging Controlled Semantics in the LLM Context Window
Overflip: Repetition-Induced Label Flips in Guardrail Models
OrchSLM: Probing the Dynamics of Small Language Model Orchestration
Agent Harness vs Agent Framework vs MCP: Which Layer Owns the Loop, State, Tools, Permissions, and Recovery
Harness, framework, and MCP get used interchangeably in agent architecture discussions. They are not the same thing. They sit at different layers, own different responsibilities, and increasingly overlap at the edges. This article separates the 3 with 1 question. Which layer owns the execution loop, state, tool transport, permissions, and recovery?
The 3 categories
- Agent harness: The harness is the execution system that wraps a model and turns it into a working agent. OpenAI’s Codex as a platform post (August 19, 2026) defines it directly. The harness manages conversation state, streams execution, and uses tools. It also enforces sandbox and approval policies and carries work across turns. Anthropic’s Claude Code docs call the same thing an agentic harness. The Claude Agent SDK exposes ‘the same tools, agent loop, and context management that power Claude Code.’ A harness is opinionated. It ships a loop, a permission model, a sandbox, and a context strategy as one unit.
- Agent framework: A framework is a library of primitives for composing agents. It covers model clients, tool abstractions, graph orchestration, memory interfaces, and observability hooks. Examples include LangGraph, the OpenAI Agents SDK, and Microsoft Agent Framework, which reached 1.0 GA in April 2026. A framework gives you the parts and the loop skeleton. You decide the policy.
- MCP: The Model Context Protocol is a wire protocol, not a runtime. It standardizes how an LLM application (the host) discovers and calls capabilities exposed by servers: tools, resources, and prompts. MCP uses JSON-RPC 2.0 messages between hosts, clients, and servers. Since December 2025 the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation has governed it, alongside goose, AGENTS.md, and now A2A. MCP owns no loop and no agent state. It owns the contract between the agent and its tools.
Ownership matrix
The table maps each responsibility to the layer that owns it by default. “Owns” means the layer defines and enforces the behavior. “Exposes” means the layer surfaces a hook but does not decide policy.
| Responsibility | Agent harness | Agent framework | MCP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Execution loop | Owns: Fixed, product-grade loop with turn limits and compaction. | Owns skeleton: You configure termination, handoffs, and turn caps. | None: Request/response only. |
| Agent state and memory | Owns: Sessions, resume, fork, file checkpointing. | Exposes: Checkpointers, session stores, thread IDs. | None at protocol level since 2026-07-28. |
| Tool transport | Consumes: Built-in tools plus MCP client. | Consumes: Function tools plus MCP client. | Own: JSON-RPC over stdio or Streamable HTTP. |
| Permissions and approvals | Owns: Permission modes, hooks, sandbox. | Exposes: Guardrails, interrupts, middleware. | Delegates to host: Cannot enforce. |
| Recovery | Owns: Session resume, checkpoint rewind, compaction. | Exposes: Durable execution, replay, retries. | Partial: Tasks extension for long-running calls. |
| Isolation and sandboxing | Owns: OS sandbox, worktrees, containers. | Optional: Hosted sandboxes or micro-VMs. | None. |
| Multi-agent orchestration | Owns patterns: Subagents, dynamic workflows. | Owns primitives: Graphs, handoffs, fan-out. | None: A2A covers agent-to-agent. |
The rest of this article justifies each row with sources.
Who owns the execution loop
Every agent runs a loop. Send context to the model, read the response, execute tool calls, feed results back, repeat. The harness and the framework both implement this loop. They differ in how much you control it.
- Harness loop: The Claude Agent SDK documents its loop as 5 steps. Receive prompt, evaluate and respond, execute tools, repeat, return result. Each full cycle is 1 turn, and the loop ends when Claude produces a response with no tool calls. Hooks can intercept, modify, or block tool calls before they run. The loop itself is not yours to rewrite. OpenAI’s Codex harness exposes the loop through app-server, a documented client protocol. Applications create threads, start turns, receive events, and handle approval requests.
- Framework loop: The OpenAI Agents SDK loop terminates on final output. It re-runs on handoff, or executes tool calls and continues. Exceeding
max_turnsraisesMaxTurnsExceeded, and a guardrail tripwire raisesGuardrailTripwireTriggered. In LangGraph, the loop is whatever graph you draw. Nodes, edges, and conditional routing define control flow. - MCP: MCP has no loop. Since the 2026-07-28 specification, it does not even have a handshake. The
initialize/initializedexchange andMcp-Session-Idheader were retired. Every request travels alone, carrying its protocol version and client capabilities in_meta. The host’s loop decides when to calltools/call. MCP only defines what that call looks like on the wire.
Who owns state
- Harness: State lives in the harness and persists across sessions. The Claude Agent SDK supports sessions that resume or fork later. File checkpointing restores files to any previous state. Microsoft’s harness layer ships a
FileMemoryProviderfor session-scoped notes and automatic context compaction that monitors token usage mid-loop. Anthropic’s long-running harness work goes further. It hands off state between context windows through artifacts on disk. Each new session begins with no memory of the last. - Framework: Frameworks expose state primi
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash Packs 552B Parameters With Efficient MoE Inference
Overview
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model from deepseek-ai that accepts text and images and generates text. Its defining feature is memory and inference efficiency for long, input-heavy workloads: it has 552B backbone parameters but activates 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decoding, supports a context window of up to 1M tokens, and reduces its global KV-cache footprint to 890 bytes per token. The model uses a 40-layer Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture with 20 causal-encoder layers and 20 decoder layers, plus compressed sparse attention, FP4 KV caching, conditional memory, and speculative decoding. It was trained from scratch on a 45T-token multimodal corpus. The repository identifies transformers as the library and image-text-to-text as the pipeline type, but the release does not include a Jinja chat template; production integration requires the supplied Python encoding reference or the separate deepseek-recipe toolkit. The most important practical qualification is that the model is enormous despite its low active-parameter count: the README provides no VRAM requirement, inference-speed figure, weight-conversion command, or hosted pricing, so local deployment requires careful validation against the inference instructions and available hardware.
Best use cases
Long-context coding agents. The model fits repository-scale and multi-step software tasks that need large tool traces, source trees, test output, and documentation in one context. Its 1M-token context, 8B prefill activation, 16B decode activation, bounded sparse indexing, and KV-cache compression target input-heavy agent workloads. At maximum reasoning effort, it scored 90.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 30.0 on Terminal-Bench 3.0, 31.2 on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and 74.2 resolved tasks on DeepSWE v1.1 under the stated harness configurations.
Tool-using research and automation agents. The model supports tool calls through the supplied encoding implementation and deepseek-recipe, which converts Messages, Chat Completions, and Responses API requests into the model’s Conversation format and parses complete or streamed responses. Its agent-focused post-training used automated synthesis of tasks, environments, and rollouts, and its maximum-effort results include 54.8 on AutomationBench, 31.8 on Agent’s Last Exam, 63.9 on HLE with tools, and 88.1 on CyberGym.
Multimodal document understanding. The model can process images alongside text and performs well on document and visual benchmarks. Its reported base-model scores include 95.6 on DocVQA, 77.9 on CVBench, 56.5 on MMMU-Pro, and 86.0 on RefCOCO average Acc@0.5. This makes it suitable for jobs such as extracting fields from scanned forms, answering questions about charts, locating objects in an image, and combining screenshots with written instructions.
Code generation and mathematical assistance. The base model scored 79.4 Pass@1 on HumanEval, 60.6 Pass@1 on BigCodeBench, 93.0 on GSM8K, and 61.1 on MATH. These results support code completion, test generation, debugging assistance, and structured mathematical problem solving. The model does not lead every reasoning benchmark: MGSM reached 80.2, below both comparison base models, and MATH reached 61.1 versus 64.5 for DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base.
Long-running conversational systems with controllable reasoning cost. Instruct inference exposes reasoning_effort from 1 to 100, allowing an application to trade response cost and latency against accuracy. Use lower settings for routine extraction or short answers and higher settings for coding, planning, and difficult tool tasks. The published instruct evaluations use reasoning_effort=100, temperature=1.0, and top_p=0.95, so lower-effort quality requires application-specific testing.
Limitations
The 552B backbone makes this a demanding local deployment target. The README gives no minimum GPU count, VRAM figure, CPU requirement, quantized checkpoint size, tokens-per-second result, latency result, or practical batch-size guidance. The 8B/16B active-parameter figures do not mean that the full model weights disappear: memory, weight loading, communication, KV cache, and runtime support remain deployment concerns.
The 1M-token limit is a maximum context window, not a guarantee of uniform quality across every position. The reported LongBench-V2 score is 45.2, below DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base at 51.5 and only slightly above DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Base at 44.7. Long-context applications should test retrieval, instruction following, and tool-state retention at the target context lengths.
Quality varies by task. The base model trails DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base on AGIEval, C-Eval, MultiLoKo, SimpleQA-Verified, SuperGPQA, BBH, BBEH, DROP, HellaSwag, MATH, MGSM, and LongBench-V2. In maximum-effort agent evaluations, it scores below the listed frontier models on HLE, Terminal-Bench 3.0, Terminal-Bench 4.0, ProgramBench, and several visual benchmarks. Benchmark results also depend on harness, sampling, context limit, number of samples, and network access; they do not predict every production workflow.
The release lacks a Jinja-format chat template. Direct use through a generic chat interface can produce incorrect prompts unless the application uses the encoding reference implementation or deepseek-recipe. The model expects a protocol that can represent thinking, tool calls, images, system messages, and reasoning effort, so integration work is greater than for a model with a standard Transformers chat template.
The model is MIT-licensed, including the repository and weights according to the model card. MIT permits commercial use, modification, and redistribution subject to the license terms, including preservation of copyright and license notices. The provided material does not describe dataset-specific restrictions, safety evaluations, demographic bias, or a deployment policy, so those areas require independent review.
How it compares
DeepSeek-V4-Flash
Choose DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash when multimodal input, stronger code performance, controllable reasoning, and lower persistent KV-cache use matter. It has 552B backbone parameters versus 284B, activates 8B/16B rather than 13B, stores about 890 bytes per token, and reports roughly one-quarter of the global KV-cache footprint of DeepSeek-V4-Flash; its base scores are higher on HumanEval, BigCodeBench, GSM8K, and MMLU-Pro. Choose DeepSeek-V4-Flash when its smaller backbone, simpler deployment path, or lower model-weight burden fits the workload; it scored higher on DROP, MGSM, and matched it on C-Eval, while the provided data does not establish absolute hosted cost or latency for either model.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash
Choose this DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash release when you need the official deepseek-ai checkpoint, its CED architecture, multimodal capabilities, reasoning-effort control, and the documented CSA2 and FP4 KV-cache design. Choose the Unsloth-listed DeepSeek-V4-Flash when that distribution offers a more convenient local packaging or conversion workflow. The supplied information does not provide independent speed, cost, quantization, or quality measurements for the Unsloth distribution, so those differences cannot be confirmed from this model card.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-DSpark
Choose DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash for the newer architecture and its integrated DSpark speculative deco
84GB GDDR7 英伟达RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell专业显卡登场
英伟达官网正式发布RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell专业工作站显卡。RTX PRO 5500采用Blackwell架构,最引人注目的特性是84GB GDDR7显存。该显存支持错误校正码(ECC),带宽高达1398 GB/秒,可运行更大AI模型、支持更长上下文窗口,并同时运行多个模型而无需卸载到系统内存。
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强化学习大本营新作:如何破解「学新忘旧」困局
阿尔伯塔大学团队提出FAME框架,给持续强化学习一个可求解的公式。作者丨邓哲敏
编辑丨齐铖湧
今天教会机器人拧瓶盖,明天再让它抓杯子,它可能又把拧瓶盖忘得一干二净。
反观人类,这类现象极少出现。人脑拥有成熟的记忆分工体系,新旧知识有序存储,习得新事物的同时不会冲刷掉旧有认知。
这套终身学习的机制,其实是当下大模型同样欠缺的。Demis Hassabis、梁文锋与 Ilya Sutskever 都指出过大模型的固有短板:通过微调注入新知识时,往往会丢掉过往已经掌握的技能;即便靠超长上下文临时读取新信息,也无法把经验真正固化进模型本体。
灾难性遗忘一直是微调范式下挥之不去的痛点,也由此推动持续学习成为近年来的研究热点,尤其是在 LLM-Agent 赛道,人们希望打造能在部署后不断吸收经验、修正认知,同时保留原有能力的智能体。
眼下,具身的处境十分微妙。宇树上市后市场反响不算热烈,多少折射出具身智能商业化的现实挑战。可越是如此,持续学习对具身的长期价值越躲不过去:机器人要在真实世界干活,若始终“学新忘旧”,那比大模型更致命。
阿尔伯塔大学强化学习团队正是想补上这块基础短板,提出一套基于快速学习加元学习双系统的持续强化学习框架,论文已被 ICRL 2026 收录。AI科技评论(雷峰网公众号)联系到论文的两位共同第一作者张鸿铭、孙科,和他们聊了聊论文背后的思路,以及他们对持续强化学习这个方向的判断。

论文链接:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00903

01
从经验方法走向原则性分析框架
传统强化学习有个默认前提:环境是不变的。奖励函数固定,状态转移固定,智能体只要在一亩三分地里磨到最优就行。
现实世界却完全相反,一个真正具有持续学习能力的智能体需要同时具备两种能力:可塑性,即面对新任务时,可以快速学习并适应;稳定性,即学习新任务之后,仍然能够保留过去已经掌握的知识。
EventMemAgent: Hierarchical Event-Centric Memory for Online Video Understanding with Adaptive Tool Use
SeDeM: Selective Decompression of Hidden-State Memories for Long-Context Question Answering
Doc2FRC: Length-Consistent Document-Level Machine Translation via Fixed-Range Chunking