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Authors: Bo Song ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

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

MPK: A Compiler and Runtime for Mega-Kernelizing Tensor Programs

arXiv:2512.22219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Mirage Persistent Kernel (MPK), the first compiler and runtime system that automatically transforms multi-GPU model inference into a single high-performance mega-kernel. MPK introduces an SM-level graph representation that captures data dependencies at the granularity of individual streaming multiprocessors (SMs), enabling cross-operator software pipelining, \rev{fine-grained overlap of computation and communication, and other optimizations that are infeasible under the conventional kernel-per-operator execution model}. The MPK compiler lowers tensor programs into optimized SM-level task graphs and generates fast CUDA implementations for each task, while the MPK in-kernel parallel runtime executes these tasks within a single persistent mega-kernel using decentralized scheduling across SMs. Together, these components provide end-to-end kernel fusion with minimal developer effort, while preserving the flexibility of existing programming models. Our evaluation shows that MPK significantly outperforms existing kernel-per-operator LLM serving systems, achieving up to 1.7$\times$ lower end-to-end inference latency and pushing LLM inference performance close to the limits of the underlying hardware. MPK is publicly available at https://github.com/mirage-project/mirage.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck

Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. Despite the strong performance across both general and complex tasks, this paradigm suffers from two core limitations: (i) autoregressive CoT reasoning incurs high computational cost, making it impractical for low-latency retrieval; and (ii) embedding performance is heavily coupled with CoT annotation quality, making large-scale training unreliable. These raise fundamental questions: Is textual CoT the optimal form of reasoning for embedding, and can effective embedding reasoning be accomplished in latent space? To this end, we propose LaME (Latent Reasoning Multimodal Embedding), which formulates embedding-oriented latent reasoning as a weakly supervised information bottleneck. LaME employs K learnable reason tokens as a fixed-capacity bottleneck, completing all reasoning within a single forward pass. The two weak supervision signals structurally decouple contrastive from autoregressive objectives and eliminate dependence on CoT annotations, while a two-stage training pipeline ensures stable convergence. Experiments on MMEB-v2 and MRMR show that LaME achieves competitive performance, surpassing some explicit CoT-based models, while delivering 60x faster inference than explicit CoT methods and 2x faster than latent baselines with throughput comparable to discriminative embedding models. Code will be released.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression

Transitioning bidirectional video diffusion models into an autoregressive paradigm improves the interactivity of video world models, but existing causal pipelines need many stages (control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, few-step distillation) and still trail bidirectional models in quality due to error accumulation. Recent world models such as Yume-1.5 and Matrix-Game-3.0 instead adopt a bidirectional autoregressive approach, gaining fidelity and stable long-horizon rollout from self-correcting error propagation, yet open-source frameworks (e.g., minWM) support only causal models. We present BiWM, the first full-stack framework for interactive video world models under the bidirectional autoregressive paradigm, jointly optimizing generation quality and inference speed. From a pretrained video backbone, BiWM injects camera control by fine-tuning, then runs a few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) stage that turns the backbone into an action/camera-controllable world model: just two training stages instead of four in minWM, converging in a few hundred steps on 8xH200 GPUs. A single recipe spans Wan2.1-1.3B, Wan2.2-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, and also supports secondary fine-tuning of existing bidirectional models. BiWM enables real-world camera control where minWM loses controllability, integrates pluggable history compression (FramePack-style and PackForcing-style) for long rollouts, and offers an optional NVFP4 4-bit training/inference pipeline. To counter DMD's mode-seeking degradation, we add GAN and mass-covering forward-KL objectives that preserve scene dynamics. We open-source BiWM for resource-constrained research and high-fidelity environment simulation.

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

FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing

arXiv:2606.15186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made significant strides, yet achieving precise and consistent audio editing remains a major challenge. However, existing methods struggle to balance temporal consistency with background preservation. In this paper, we propose FreeSonic, a training-free framework leveraging the state-of-the-art Rectified Flow-based TangoFlux model. FreeSonic utilizes an optimized inversion-reverse process and joint text-audio attention maps for precise target segment extraction. For content editing, a novel scheduled attention decoupling confines modifications to target regions while preserving original acoustic context. Furthermore, task-oriented noise injection enhances versatility for tasks such as audio removal and non-rigid replacement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSonic achieves a superior balance by providing a high-fidelity and efficient solution for precise and consistent audio editing. Project and demos: https://free-sonic.github.io/

09.
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.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0 Technical Report

We present FireRed-Image-Edit, a diffusion transformer for instruction-based image editing that achieves state-of-the-art performance through systematic optimization of data curation, training methodology, and evaluation design. We construct a 1.6B-sample training corpus, comprising 900M text-to-image and 700M image editing pairs from diverse sources. After rigorous cleaning, stratification, auto-labeling, and two-stage filtering, we retain over 100M high-quality samples balanced between generation and editing, ensuring strong semantic coverage and instruction alignment. Our multi-stage training pipeline progressively builds editing capability via pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. To improve data efficiency, we introduce a Multi-Condition Aware Bucket Sampler for variable-resolution batching and Stochastic Instruction Alignment with dynamic prompt re-indexing. To stabilize optimization and enhance controllability, we propose Asymmetric Gradient Optimization for DPO, DiffusionNFT with layout-aware OCR rewards for text editing, and a differentiable Consistency Loss for identity preservation. We further establish REDEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 15 editing categories, including newly introduced beautification and low-level enhancement tasks. Extensive experiments on REDEdit-Bench and public benchmarks (ImgEdit and GEdit) demonstrate competitive or superior performance against both open-source and proprietary systems. To support future research, our code, models, and benchmark suite are publicly available at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRed-Image-Edit/ .

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fail under iterative denoising, or requires gradient updates whose backward-pass activations cost tens of GB of extra VRAM and which collapse MDLMs at standard learning rates. We introduce TimeROME-DLM, the first training-free, gradient-free, inference-time knowledge-editing framework for MDLMs. It couples two components: a Temporal Indirect Effect (TIE) causal-tracing protocol that identifies, for each fact, the coordinate whose intervention most strongly drives the object prediction at later denoising steps; and a closed-form, low-rank residual edit memory that aggregates subject keys and target deltas across all forget facts and applies a single ridge-regularised update at that coordinate at every diffusion forward, with sparsification to limit utility spillover. Backbone weights stay frozen; only three hyperparameters (alpha, lambda, q) are tuned on a small validation split. On TOFU forget01 with TOFU-finetuned LLaDA-8B-Base, TimeROME-DLM cuts forget-set log-probability by roughly 83 nats. The same configuration transfers to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, Dream-7B, MMaDA-8B, DiffuLLaMA-7B, and LLaDA-MoE-1.4B. It keeps retain-set log-probability nearly flat (within ~1 nat at the utility-safe operating point) across 50 sequentially inserted facts, delivers a four- to fourteen-fold wall-clock speedup with zero additional VRAM over the strongest converged training-time baseline, and scales sub-linearly to 400 facts. TimeROME-DLM closes the locate-then-edit gap between AR LLMs and MDLMs at a fraction of the computational cost.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery

arXiv:2605.12542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large foundation models (FMs) are transforming Earth science by integrating heterogeneous multimodal data, such as multi-platform imagery, gridded reanalysis data, diverse geophysical and geochemical observations, and domain-specific text, to support tasks ranging from basic perception to advanced scientific discovery. This paper provides a unified review of Earth science foundation models (Earth FMs) through two complementary dimensions: depth, which traces the evolution of model capabilities from perception to multimodal reasoning and agentic scientific workflows, and breadth, which summarizes their expanding applications across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere, and cryosphere, as well as coupled Earth system processes. Using this framework, we review representative multimodal Earth foundation models and compile more than 200 datasets and benchmarks spanning diverse Earth science tasks and modalities. We further discuss key challenges in multimodal data heterogeneity, scientific reliability and continual updating, scalability and sustainability, and the transition from foundation models to agentic and embodied Earth intelligence, and outline future directions toward more integrated, trustworthy, and actionable AI Earth scientists. Overall, this paper offers a structured roadmap for understanding the development of Earth foundation models from both capability depth and application breadth.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BrainFusionNet: a deep learning and XAI model to understand local, global, and sequential features of MRI images for improved brain tumour detection

The noise of Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI poses challenges for Deep Learning DL when tumor boundaries are obscured tumor location and appearance are complex Therefore we develop BrainFusionNet that combines Convolutional Neural Networks CNNs Vision Transformers ViT and Gated Recurrent Units GRUs to extract spatial contextual and sequential features from MRI images for improved brain tumor classification Furthermore explainable AI such as SHAP LIME and GradCAM are integrated to visualise and highlight image regions that contribute to BrainFusionNets decisionmaking process The proposed BrainFusionNet model is evaluated on two publicly available MRI datasets Kfold validation suggests 98 accuracy on both datasets The model was compared with the six stateoftheart SOTA CNNs and transfer learning Among the SOTA CNNs DenseNet121 and VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 96 The novelty of BrainFusionNet is that the hybrid model effectively extracts local and global features from MRI images even in smallscale tumor regions and small tumor sizes The model has a balanced sequential CNN architecture to capture lowlevel and deeperlayer features a customized ViT that captures local features stabilizes gradient flow and reduces the risk of vanishing gradients during MRI image training The CNN and ViT outputs are fed into a GRU for final classification Furthermore we analyze pixel intensities to determine whether MRI image quality affects image classification Our findings are very novel in image interpretation as we found that the distribution of pixel intensities in MRI images affects DL performance

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges

In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.