Weekly Reads

Week of March 2, 2026

Papers

• Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters — Snell et al.

  Shows that adaptively allocating test-time compute can outperform 14x larger models.

• DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning — DeepSeek-AI

  Demonstrates how RL-based training produces strong reasoning without supervised fine-tuning.

• Utonia: Toward One Encoder for All Point Clouds — Yujia Zhang, Xiaoyang Wu et al.

  We dream of a future where point clouds from all domains can come together to shape a single model that benefits them all. Toward this goal, we pre...

• MIBURI: Towards Expressive Interactive Gesture Synthesis — M. Hamza Mughal, Rishabh Dabral et al.

  Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) aim to emulate human face-to-face interaction through speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Current large...

• CFG-Ctrl: Control-Based Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance — Hanyang Wang, Yiyang Liu et al.

  Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has emerged as a central approach for enhancing semantic alignment in flow-based diffusion models. In this paper, we...

• How to Peel with a Knife: Aligning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Human Preference — Toru Lin, Shuying Deng et al.

  Many essential manipulation tasks - such as food preparation, surgery, and craftsmanship - remain intractable for autonomous robots. These tasks ar...

• ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation — Xialin He, Sirui Xu et al.

  Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing appr...

Blog Posts

• A Visual Guide to Quantization — Maarten Grootendorst

  Intuitive visual walkthrough of LLM quantization techniques from FP16 to GPTQ and GGUF.

• Inference at the Edge: Practical Lessons from Deploying LLMs on Consumer GPUs — vLLM Blog

  Real-world tips for efficient local LLM inference with vLLM on consumer hardware.

• Understanding AI and learning outcomes — OpenAI Blog

  OpenAI introduces the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite to assess AI's impact on student learning across diverse educational environments over time.

• PRX Part 3 — Training a Text-to-Image Model in 24h! — Hugging Face Blog

• GPT-5.3 Instant System Card — OpenAI Blog