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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DrivingAgent: Design and Scheduling Agents for Autonomous Driving Systems

Many autonomous driving systems are increasingly incorporating foundation models to improve generalization and handle long-tail scenarios. However, this trend introduces two key challenges: (i) the manual and labor-intensive process of designing and integrating new models, and (ii) the lack of intelligent, dynamic scheduling mechanisms to meet strict real-time constraints. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents offer a promising avenue for automation, existing frameworks are ill-suited for autonomous driving. Specifically, they fail to distinguish between the fundamentally different requirements of system design and real-time scheduling, treat modules as opaque black boxes, and are not designed for continuous operation. To address these limitations, we propose DrivingAgent, a novel agent framework tailored to the dual challenges of autonomous driving system design and scheduling. In the design phase, DrivingAgent automates module development by interpreting system architecture, generating code, and validating modules via super-network training. In the scheduling phase, it employs a lightweight LLM trained with reinforcement learning to dynamically orchestrate system modules in real time, supported by a structured memory that integrates long-term storage with timestamped short-term context. Experimental results demonstrate that DrivingAgent achieves a superior speed–accuracy trade-off on both the nuScenes and Bench2Drive benchmarks.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like depth-first search (DFS). This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-500, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate. Experiments show that ToolGrad models outperform those trained on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. The ToolGrad source code, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhongyi-zhou/toolgrad.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Toward Trustworthy AI: Multi-Target Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defenses for Continuous Data Summarization

arXiv:2606.11804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trustworthy AI requires reliable data-processing pipelines, not only robust downstream predictive models. As an upstream component, data summarization determines which information is retained and passed to subsequent learning or decision modules. Therefore, adversarial perturbations to the summarization process can compromise trustworthy AI in an upstream manner: they may alter the selected summary, reduce its representativeness, and further degrade the utility of subsequent learning tasks. In this paper, we study adversarial attacks on continuous data summarization under similarity-level perturbations through DR-submodular optimization. We show that a class of multi-resolution image summarization objectives can be formulated as multilinear extensions of non-negative submodular set functions and satisfy DR-submodularity with $m$-weak monotonicity. We then formulate multi-target attack generation as a min-max problem, where one admissible perturbation of the similarity structure is optimized to degrade multiple target summarization models. To mitigate such perturbations, we formulate robust defense against mixed attack types as a regularized max-min problem. For both problems, we develop approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on real-data and controlled clustered benchmarks show that the proposed attack is effective in representative low-to-moderate budget regimes and can induce downstream task-performance loss. The proposed defense improves the robustness–mitigation trade-off in structured settings, while also revealing the parameter sensitivity of robust protection on real data.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding

Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the cost of accessing and processing the Key-Value (KV) cache. Despite evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning, since incorporating values incurs prohibitive overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. Rather than replacing KV selection, ART dynamically terminates redundant KV traversal on top of existing dense or sparse attention policies. We introduce a stability-based criterion that monitors both magnitude and directional changes of intermediate attention outputs and provideds a theoretical characterization of the resulting truncation error. Experiments on the LongBench and RULER Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks show that ART increases the generation throughput of existing KV-cache methods by up to 20%, without compromising the result quality.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2602.18291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a prominent framework for efficient agent coordination. Crucially, enhancing policy expressiveness is pivotal for achieving superior performance. Diffusion-based generative models are well-positioned to meet this demand, having demonstrated remarkable expressiveness and multimodal representation in image generation and offline settings. Yet, their potential in online MARL remains largely under-explored. A major obstacle is that the intractable likelihoods of diffusion models impede entropy-based exploration and coordination. To tackle this challenge, we propose among the first \underline{O}nline off-policy \underline{MA}RL framework using \underline{D}iffusion policies (OMAD) to orchestrate coordination. Our key innovation is a relaxed policy objective that maximizes scaled joint entropy, facilitating effective exploration without relying on tractable likelihood. Complementing this, within the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we employ a joint distributional value function to optimize decentralized diffusion policies. It leverages tractable entropy-augmented targets to guide the simultaneous updates of diffusion policies, thereby ensuring stable coordination. Extensive evaluations on MPE and MAMuJoCo establish our method as the new state-of-the-art across $10$ diverse tasks, demonstrating a remarkable $2.5\times$ to $5\times$ improvement in sample efficiency.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Self-Adaptive Scale Handling for Forecasting Time Series with Scale Heterogeneity

arXiv:2606.20010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current time series forecasting (TSF) research predominantly focuses on scale-homogeneous data, where different time series share similar numerical magnitude ranges. However, in real-world industrial scenarios such as financial product sales, different time series often differ by orders of magnitude (scale heterogeneity). Since these series share similar temporal patterns, joint modeling is desirable for better data utilization, yet existing scaling methods either compress low-scale signals (global normalization) or destroy semantic discriminability and amplify inverse-scaling errors (window-based scaling). This paper proposes a self-Adaptive Scale-handling (AS) module that learns adaptive scale factors tailored to each input, preserving semantic discriminability while reducing inverse-scaling errors. AS consists of Scale Calibrating (SC), which calibrates prior mean scaling factors through neural networks, and Scaling Selection (SS), which decides whether to apply calibration or retain the original factor, avoiding over-calibration. Experiments on real-world fund sales datasets from Ant Fortune and Alipay show that AS seamlessly integrates into popular TSF models and consistently improves their performance. The code and dataset are available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/ASTSF.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LIBERO-Occ: Evaluating and Improving Vision-Language-Action Models under Scene-Induced Occlusion via Viewpoint Imagination

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, but most evaluations assume that task-relevant objects are fully visible. This assumption often fails in realistic settings, where occlusion makes manipulation partially observable. In this paper, we study scene-induced occlusion as a fundamental challenge for VLA models and introduce LIBERO-Occ, an occlusion-oriented extension of LIBERO. Experiments show that state-of-the-art VLAs suffer substantial performance degradation under occlusion. To address this issue, we propose Viewpoint Imagination (VIM), which generates a complementary view from an occluded primary observation and conditions action prediction on both observed and imagined evidence. VIM improves robustness across task suites, occlusion types, and severity levels without requiring additional cameras at deployment time, suggesting that viewpoint imagination is an promising mechanism for perception completion in partially observable manipulation. Our benchmark and corresponding code are available at: \href{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}{https://github.com/litsh/Libero-Occ}.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Entanglement of Bethe States

arXiv:2606.14140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the quantum entanglement of Bethe states across a family of integrable spin chains, including the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ model, its higher-spin generalizations (XXX$_s$), and the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain. For on-shell eigenstates, we perform a comprehensive scan of the bipartite entanglement entropy across the entire spectrum of finite chains with periodic boundary conditions, and identify the Bethe solutions that minimize and maximize the entanglement. These extremal solutions follow systematic, spin-dependent patterns in the Bethe quantum numbers. In the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ spin chain, for the antiferromagnetic chain, the state with minimal entropy always coincides with the lowest-energy state (the ground state) within a given fixed-magnon sector. For the higher-spin XXX$_s$ model, however, the lowest-entropy state is not always identical to the ground state, and can even be the state of highest energy. By contrast, the Bethe roots that maximize entropy exhibit considerably more intricate structure. Our analysis further reveals how special Bethe root configurations, such as singular and strange solutions, affect entanglement, and it uncovers characteristic entanglement features in the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain that are absent from compact spin chains. For off-shell Bethe states, we develop an optimization algorithm that extremizes the entanglement entropy over rapidity distributions, enabling us to explore the maximum entanglement achievable by a Bethe state without imposing the Bethe ansatz equations.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Modern analog computing for solving differential and matrix equations

arXiv:2606.13179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, driven by the computational demands of data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence and scientific computing, analog computing has gained renewed interest. Given the diversity of computational tasks and recent advancements in analog CMOS circuits and resistive memory technologies, we refer to the evolving landscape as modern analog computing. In this context, we identify three core computational primitives: solving differential equations, solving matrix equations, and performing matrix-vector multiplications, and we explore the connections among them. We also examine various hardware implementations of these analog computing operators, including those built with discrete components, integrated circuits, and resistive memory devices. Among these, resistive memory arrays emerge as particularly promising due to their implementation efficiency. The paper then surveys recent progress in leveraging modern analog computing to solve differential and matrix equations using both advanced analog CMOS circuits and resistive memory arrays. Finally, we discuss the applications of these circuits, the precision and scalability issues and their potential solutions, the relationship with in-memory computing, and the unique computational complexity of analog computing. This paper provides a unified perspective on analog computing, highlighting its strengths, current developments, and challenges, and positioning it as a pivotal enabler of next-generation computational frontiers.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving High-Quality Portfolio Optimization with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver

arXiv:2508.18625v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Portfolio optimization lies at the core of quantitative finance and aims to determine how assets should be allocated to balance expected returns against risk. It can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, which is NP-hard. Quantum computing offers the potential to solve such problems more efficiently than classical methods. In this work, we employ the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to address the portfolio optimization problem. To increase the likelihood of converging to high-quality solutions, we propose using the Weighted Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) as the cost function and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) as the optimizer. Our experiments are conducted using both classical simulations and quantum hardware on the Wuyue QuantumAI platform. Together, these results demonstrate that the combination of WCVaR and CMA-ES improves the performance of VQE for portfolio optimization and provides a practical route for applications on NISQ devices.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to better articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. Experimental results show substantial gains from auxiliary reasoning. Mark-Grid Scaffold boosts Gemini-3.1-Pro from 11.72\% under direct inference to 95.20\% on ScreenSpot-v2, achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScreenSpot, and approaches the strongest fine-tuned methods on ScreenSpot-v2 and UI-I2E-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/liweim/AuxiliaryReasoning.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Poster: EdgeCitadel – Hybrid NATS-MQTT Orchestration for Edge Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.14710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Edge-resident AI agents increasingly span home servers, IoT hubs, laptops, and phones, yet their coordination stacks still assume cloud-style transports or a central relay. We present EdgeCitadel, an edge multi-agent orchestration platform built around a single NATS 2.10 server with the built-in MQTT adapter. The design combines MQTT connectivity for heterogeneous agents, JetStream-backed persistence and replay for backend services, direct peer delegation over a shared subject namespace, and a passive aggregator that visualizes and stores traffic without sitting on the delivery path. Our poster highlights the migration from MQTT relay prototypes (common in IoT communication) to the current hybrid architecture and demonstrates a working cross-device testbed spanning ARM64, x64, and Android clients.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MaineCoon: Pursuing A Real-Time Audio-Visual Social World Model

As an increasing majority of global video content is consumed on social platforms for interactive social purposes, video generation models built for social worlds are important but largely overlooked by previous studies. In this work, we define the position of social world models and build a prototype model as the first step towards this goal. While previous world models successfully simulate physical environments or gaming world exploration, they remain fundamentally detached from human-centric social dynamics. To bridge this gap as the first step to social world models, we present MaineCoon, the first real-time audio-visual autoregressive model that has 22B parameters and is capable of real-time streaming generation and sub-second interaction, with a record-breaking frame rate of up to 47.5 FPS, on a single GPU. To the best of our knowledge, MaineCoon is also the first real-time audio-visual generation model specifically optimized for social-interactive applications. To enable efficient and stable training, we introduce several novel techniques into MaineCoon, including self-resampling, cross-modal representation alignment, domain-aware preference optimization, and reinforced online-policy distillation (ROPD). We also design the first agentic streaming inference framework that supports thousand-second-scale or even longer generation while mitigating drift with agentic cache management and prompt planing. These innovations significantly accelerate training while optimizing real-time inference performance. We believe this work not only sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark for high-quality, low-latency, and long-horizon audio-visual autoregressive models, but also points out the paradigm shift desired for next-generation AI-native social platforms.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Solving Nonequilibrium Dynamics via Influence Matrix Bootstrap: Floquet-PXP Model

arXiv:2606.19430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of integrable systems have profoundly deepened the fundamental understanding of quantum many-body physics. While equilibrium properties such as ground states and thermodynamics can often be characterized efficiently, accurately characterizing nonequilibrium integrable dynamics remains a significant challenge. Here, we address this problem in the "Rule 201" quantum cellular automaton, an integrable Trotterization of the PXP Hamiltonian. Using the tensor-network approach of the influence matrix, we develop local conditions called generalized zipper conditions that allow exact solutions of local dynamics. We also introduce a numerical bootstrap method for solving influence matrices with finite but relatively large bond dimensions. This uncovers a rich landscape of nonequilibrium behavior exhibiting initial-state dependence. As an example, we investigate the fate of persistent oscillating dynamics under local non-integrable perturbations, and present analytical results for non-thermal relaxation constrained by conservation laws. We also obtain numerically exact results for entanglement growth across a broad class of initial states. Furthermore, from an information-theoretic perspective, we identify a refined structure of multitime correlations termed the hidden Markov order: the memory encoded in the dynamics separates into finite-length and long-range distributed components, which becomes transparent in an exact split-index matrix-product-state representation of the influence matrix. Our approach enables unified investigations of nonthermalizing and thermalizing regimes of nonequilibrium dynamics within a single analytically tractable model, and can be tested experimentally in state-of-the-art quantum simulators such as Rydberg atom arrays.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ActMem: Bridging the Gap Between Memory Retrieval and Reasoning in LLM Agents

Memory management is essential for LLM agents in long-term interactions. Current memory frameworks typically treat agents as passive ``recorders'' and retrieve information without understanding its deeper implications. They may fail in scenarios requiring reasoning and complex decision-making. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a novel actionable memory framework called ActMem that integrates memory retrieval with active causal reasoning. ActMem transforms unstructured dialogue history into a structured causal and semantic graph. By leveraging counterfactual reasoning and commonsense completion, it enables agents to deduce implicit constraints and resolve potential conflicts between past states and current intentions. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset ActMemEval to evaluate agent reasoning capabilities in logic-driven scenarios, moving beyond the fact-retrieval focus of existing memory benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that ActMem significantly outperforms baselines in handling complex, memory-dependent tasks, paving the way for more consistent and reliable intelligent assistants.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Networks: Unlocking High-Frequency Potential

arXiv:2502.18959v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The architecture of a neural network and the choice of its activation function are both fundamental to its performance. Equally important is ensuring that these two elements are well matched, as their alignment is key to effective representation and learning. In this paper, we introduce the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), a model that combines sine-type activations with the multi-component and multi-layer structure of MMNNs. In an FMMNN, each component is represented as a trainable linear combination of fixed random sine-type basis functions, while multi-layer composition generates more complex and adaptive high-frequency features. We establish that FMMNNs retain exponential expressive power for function approximation even under a low-rank architectural structure. We also analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and find it to be substantially more favorable than that of standard fully connected neural networks, especially for high-frequency targets. In addition, we propose a scaled random initialization method for the first-layer weights in FMMNNs, which accelerates training and improves final performance when sufficient samples are available. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical insights, showing that FMMNNs achieve strong accuracy and favorable convergence behavior on oscillatory function-approximation benchmarks.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.