Daily Research Brief 2026-05-18

📊 Token usage: estimated from retrieval and writing scale.

Covers the latest AI research, open source and industry moves, updated daily.

Editor’s Note

Anthropic hit a $900B valuation on a $30B raise, overtaking OpenAI as the world’s top AI company; OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 Instant as the default ChatGPT model (-52.5% hallucination); arXiv banned AI-generated unreviewed papers; Malta became the first country to give every citizen free ChatGPT Plus.

1. Latest arXiv Papers

1. ARIS: Autonomous Research via Adversarial Multi-Agent Scaffolding — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03042

2. AutoMAS: From Intent to Execution — Composing Agent Systems Automatically — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03986

3. Δ-Mem: Efficient Online Memory for Large Language Models — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12357

4. World-R1: RL Awakens 3D Perception in Video Models

5. EntityBench: Towards Entity-Consistent Long-Range Video Generation — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15199

6. ATLAS: Agentic or Latent Visual Reasoning? One World, Different Tokens — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15198

7. RefDecoder: Enhancing Visual Generation with Conditional Decoders — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15196

8. Towards Trustworthy and Explainable AI for Perception Tasks — https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16087