Deep Research Agents (DR-Agents) extend LLMs with multi-step retrieval, tool use, and intermediate computation to solve complex problems. However, their execution logs often contain redundant context, noisy evidence, and brittle dependencies among intermediate decisions. As a result, final answers can be sensitive to irrelevant or weakly verified information. We propose DualResearch, a log-based post-processing framework for answer reconstruction. Given a query and a completed DR-Agent log, DualResearch normalizes the log into event records and constructs two evidence graphs: a breadth semantic graph for declarative evidence and a depth causal graph for procedural provenance. It then retrieves breadth nodes and depth paths, assigns higher weights to retrieval channels with more concentrated retained candidate distributions, and jointly considers relevance and cross-view agreement to select evidence for reconstruction; the concentration measure reflects retrieval confidence rather than factual correctness. Experiments on HLE, GAIA, and GPQA show consistent accuracy improvements over underlying DR-Agents and controlled log-reuse baselines.

Online lifelong learning agents must decide not only how to act but also when to consult prior experience to continually improve on long-horizon tasks. Existing methods typically retrieve memories passively, such as at task initialization or after each step, and therefore miss knowledge gaps that arise during interaction. We propose ProactAgent, an experience-driven lifelong learning framework for proactive retrieval over a structured Experience Base. ProactAgent continually improves through ExpOnEvo, which jointly updates policies and refines memory, organizing past interactions into factual, episodic, and skill repositories. It further introduces ProactRL, which treats retrieval as an explicit policy action and learns when and what to retrieve. By comparing paired continuations from identical interaction prefixes with and without retrieval, ProactRL provides step-level process rewards that encourage retrieval only when it improves task outcomes or efficiency. Experiments on SciWorld, AlfWorld, and StuLife show that ProactAgent consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving up to 32% relative improvement in success rate and over 33% reduction in interaction rounds.

As AI research increasingly moves beyond systems optimized for static tasks, a central challenge is building agents that learn continuously through experience-driven lifelong learning (ELL). In this paper, we introduce StuLife, a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate selected operational capabilities relevant to ELL. Particularly, StuLife simulates a student’s college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around four key design principles: From Isolated Tasks to Stateful Interaction, From Passive to Proactive, From Context to Memory, and From Imitation to Learning. In this dynamic environment, agents must acquire and distill practical skills and maintain persistent memory to make decisions based on evolving state variables (e.g., resource availability and time), and are also expected to initiate actions without external prompting. To this end, StuLife provides an evaluation protocol with dedicated metrics (e.g., StuGPA) for these capabilities. Our evaluation reveals that even the highest-StuGPA model, GPT-5, scores only 17.9/100, highlighting large gaps in long-term retention and proactive task initiation. Beyond evaluating LLMs on StuLife, we also explore the role of context engineering in improving agent performance on lifelong learning tasks.

Existing continual knowledge editing methods suffer from cognitive dissonance: after an edit, the model answers the edit prompt correctly but reverts to the old fact under complex equivalent queries. This means old and new facts coexist rather than the old being replaced. The root cause of cognitive dissonance is that existing methods fit the new fact on the target prompt without overwriting the old one. In constrained methods, static null-space projectors lock outdated representations into the protected subspace, forcing updates into orthogonal directions. To resolve cognitive dissonance, we propose P-Space (Puncturing the Null-Space to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance in Continual Knowledge Editing), which at each edit step (1) punctures the protected covariance to unprotect the outdated representation, (2) overwrites the old mapping in closed form along its original direction under the punctured projector, and (3) anchors the new fact into the covariance with adaptive scaling so that future edits preserve it. Experiments on two datasets show that P-Space outperforms existing methods while preserving general capabilities.

Model merging aims to integrate multiple expert models into a single model that inherits their complementary strengths without incurring the inference-time cost of ensembling. Recent progress has shown that merging can be highly effective when all source models are homogeneous, i.e., derived from the same pretrained backbone and therefore share aligned parameter coordinates or compatible task vectors. Yet this assumption is increasingly unrealistic in open model ecosystems, where useful experts are often built on different families such as Llama, Qwen, and Mistral. In such heterogeneous settings, direct weight-space fusion becomes ill-posed due to architectural mismatch, latent basis misalignment, and amplified cross-source conflict. We address this problem with HeteroFusion for heterogeneous language model fusion, which consists of two key components: topology-based alignment that transfers knowledge across heterogeneous backbones by matching functional module structures instead of raw tensor coordinates, and conflict-aware denoising that suppresses incompatible or noisy transfer signals during fusion, with a small replay set used to assist transfer-operator optimization. We further provide analytical and empirical evidence for preserving the target adapter basis while predicting structured updates. Across heterogeneous transfer, multi-source fusion, noisy-source robustness, and cross-family generalization settings, HeteroFusion consistently outperforms strong merging, fusion, and ensemble baselines.

Continual Learning (CL) models, while adept at sequential knowledge acquisition, face significant and often overlooked privacy challenges due to accumulating diverse information. Traditional privacy methods, like a uniform Differential Privacy (DP) budget, indiscriminately protect all data, leading to substantial model utility degradation and hindering CL deployment in privacy-sensitive areas. To overcome this, we propose a privacy-enhanced continual learning (PeCL) framework that forgets what’s sensitive and remembers what matters. Our approach first introduces a token-level dynamic Differential Privacy strategy that adaptively allocates privacy budgets based on the semantic sensitivity of individual tokens. This ensures robust protection for private entities while minimizing noise injection for non-sensitive, general knowledge. Second, we integrate a privacy-guided memory sculpting module. This module leverages the sensitivity analysis from our dynamic DP mechanism to intelligently forget sensitive information from the model’s memory and parameters, while explicitly preserving the task-invariant historical knowledge crucial for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments show that PeCL achieves a superior balance between privacy preserving and model utility, outperforming baseline models by maintaining high accuracy on previous tasks while ensuring robust privacy.