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Authors: Chao Yu ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TCHG: Tri-Trust Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Reliable Dynamic Trust Prediction

arXiv:2606.16611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust prediction infers latent user-user trust relations and provides important support for social recommendation, fake-review and manipulation detection, and risk identification. Graph neural networks have become a prominent approach to trust prediction because of their ability to learn network structures and complex trust dependencies. However, existing methods often rely on a unified representation of trust signals and do not disentangle heterogeneous trust evidence into separate evidence channels, failing to exploit the distinct roles that different evidence channels should play during trust modeling. To address this gap, this paper argues that trust evidence should not be treated as an undifferentiated input, but should be decomposed and used as functional control factors over graph propagation. We propose TCHG, a tri-trust conditioned heterogeneous graph learning framework that decomposes trust evidence into three channels and assigns them distinct functional roles in propagation: entity reliability governs message admission, interaction-behavior reliability modulates propagation strength, and contextual trust adjusts the propagation mode through context-conditioned operator selection. Since the three evidence channels evolve at different temporal scales, TCHG maintains independent temporal states with non-uniform decay rates to prevent rapidly changing contextual signals from overwriting slowly accumulated entity reliability. It further predicts trust probability and calibrates the output probability, improving predictive confidence under sparse or conflicting evidence. Extensive experiments on multiple public trust datasets show that TCHG achieves effective and reliable trust prediction compared with representative trust prediction and heterogeneous graph baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a de facto backbone of modern visual generation, and nearly every major axis of their design – tokenization, attention, conditioning, objectives, and latent autoencoders – has been extensively revisited. The residual stream that governs how information accumulates across layers, however, has been directly inherited from the original Transformer. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis of cross-layer information flow in DiTs, jointly along depth and denoising timestep, and identify three concrete symptoms of traditional residual addition, namely monotonic forward magnitude inflation, sharp backward gradient decay, and pronounced block-wise redundancy. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Diffusion-Adaptive Routing (\textsc{DAR}), a drop-in residual replacement that performs learnable, timestep-adaptive, and non-incremental aggregation over the history of sublayer outputs. Moreover, the proposed \textsc{DAR} is compatible with many modern Transformer enhancement methods, such as REPA. On ImageNet $256\times256$, \textsc{DAR} improves SiT-XL/2 by $2.11$ FID ($7.56$ vs.\ $9.67$) and matches the baseline's converged quality with $8.75\times$ fewer training iterations. Stacked on top of REPA, it yields a $2\times$ training acceleration in the early stage, suggesting cross-layer information routing as an underexplored design axis in diffusion modeling, one that operates orthogonally to existing representation-alignment objectives. Beyond pretraining, \textsc{DAR} can also be applied during the fine-tuning stage of large-scale T2I models and preserves high-frequency details during Distribution Matching Distillation.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

arXiv:2606.15225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly individual-centric, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Edu-Theater, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

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

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

arXiv:2606.13192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 – surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 – while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to localize targets that exhibit minimal perceptual differences from backgrounds through physical attributes. Existing methods, constrained by the static train-then-freeze paradigm, suffer from domain rigidity and annotation dependency, limiting their adaptability to scene variations and unseen camouflage patterns. To overcome these, we propose the hierarchical consistency learning (HCL) framework, which integrates test-time adaptation for dynamic representation recalibration. Specifically, we design the hierarchical representation reconstruction (HRR) to alleviate feature entanglement by synergizing spatial reconstruction with dual-stream frequency-domain decomposition, enhancing robustness against appearance homogenization. The pixel and spectrum inference provide structural and contextual priors. We further introduce task affinity guidance (TAG) to propagate knowledge across branches via channel-wise affinity, aligning local discriminative cues and mitigating semantic drift. To ensure semantic invariance, we formulate the prototype consistency calibration (PCC), which aggregates region features into compact prototypes and establishes prototype-feature similarity. This imposes implicit and hierarchical constraints that bridge task and representation gaps. Extensive experiments across four camouflaged and four underwater object benchmarks, under three degradation settings, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its robustness and generalization under distribution shifts.

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

Artemis: Anatomy-Resolved inTervention for Eliminating Multimodal NeuroImage confounderS

arXiv:2606.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN methods introduce causality at the graph-modeling level, their causal mechanisms remain domain-agnostic without accounting for the real-world confounders inherent in clinical neuroimaging data. Moreover, brain networks are constructed from atlas-based parcellations where each region exhibits distinct sensitivity to demographic factors, necessitating region-aware adjustment. We propose Artemis, a region-level causal framework that bridges this gap with causal intervention at each brain region independently by learning region-specific confounder representations with lightweight parameters. Our adjustment comprehensively utilized the multimodal functional and structural features for graph reasoning as a plug-in module compatible with arbitrary GNN backbones. Experiments on three benchmarks, ADNI for disease diagnosis, OASIS for dementia staging, and HCP for sex classification, demonstrate consistent improvements over representative GNN-based baselines. Multiple supporting experiments further demonstrate statistical significance and neuroscientific interpretability.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2601.10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RAVA: Retrieval-Augmented Viewpoint Alignment for Subject-Driven Image Generation

Reference-driven image generation has made rapid progress on identity preservation, but reliable viewpoint control across different subjects remains poorly understood. The difficulty is not merely generating a new image of the target subject: the model must infer the implicit viewpoint of one subject and transfer it to another subject using only image-level evidence, without camera poses, depth, or ray-based conditions. In this setting, existing generators conditioned on multiple image references often rely on spurious semantic correlations, which lead to viewpoint drift, part-level structural mismatches, and missing or unsupported target-specific content. We formulate this challenge as cross-subject viewpoint alignment and propose RAVA, a retrieval-augmented framework that supplies explicit geometric evidence before generation. RAVA first learns a cross-instance viewpoint embedding that retrieves target-subject images aligned with the anchor viewpoint, then applies a LogDet-based subset selection strategy to retain a compact reference set that is both view-consistent and structurally complementary. The selected references are finally consumed by a fine-tuned multi-reference image generator. Experiments show that generic semantic embeddings are nearly random for this task, while the proposed retriever substantially improves viewpoint retrieval quality. On cross-subject generation, RAVA consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines and stronger retrieval alternatives under the same generation backbone. These results indicate that cross-subject viewpoint alignment benefits from retrieval-augmented geometric grounding rather than relying on end-to-end generation alone.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

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

GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

15.
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.

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

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

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

MiniMax Sparse Attention

arXiv:2606.13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale. We introduce MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), a blockwise sparse attention built upon Grouped Query Attention (GQA). A lightweight Index Branch scores key-value blocks and independently selects a Top-k subset for each GQA group, enabling group-specific sparse retrieval while maintaining efficient block-level execution; the Main Branch then performs exact block-sparse attention over only the selected blocks. Designed around a principle of simplicity and scalability, MSA is deliberately streamlined, making it straightforward to deploy efficiently across a broad range of GPUs. To translate sparsity into practical speedups, we co-design MSA with a GPU execution path that uses exp-free Top-k selection and KV-outer sparse attention to improve tensor-core utilization under block-granular access. On a 109B-parameter model with native multimodal training, MSA performs on par with GQA while reducing per-token attention compute by 28.4x at 1M context. Paired with our co-designed kernel, MSA achieves 14.2x prefill and 7.6x decoding wall-clock speedups on H800. Our inference kernel is available at: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MSA. A production-grade natively multimodal model powered by MSA has been publicly released at: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3.

18.
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/ .

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Prior-guided Fusion of Multimodal Features for Change Detection from Optical-SAR Images

Multimodal change detection (MMCD) identifies changed areas in multimodal remote sensing data, demonstrating significant application value in land use monitoring and urban sustainable development. However, literature MMCD approaches exhibit limitations in both cross-modal interaction and exploiting modality-specific characteristics. This leads to insufficient modeling of fine-grained change information, thus hindering the precise detection of semantic changes. To address these problems, we propose STSF-Net, a framework designed for MMCD between optical and SAR images. STSF-Net jointly models modality-specific and spatio-temporal common features to enhance change representations. Specifically, modality-specific features are exploited to capture genuine semantic change signals, while spatio-temporal common features are embedded to suppress pseudo-changes caused by differences in imaging mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce an optical and SAR feature fusion strategy that adaptively adjusts multimodal feature importance based on semantic priors obtained from visual foundation models. Finally, we introduce the novel Delta-SN6 dataset, the first openly-accessible multiclass MMCD benchmark consisting of very-high-resolution fully polarimetric SAR and optical images. Experimental results on Delta-SN6, BRIGHT, and Wuhan datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.21%, 0.87%, and 1.32% in mIoU, respectively.

21.
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.

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

PragReST: Self-Reinforcing Counterfactual Reasoning for Pragmatic Language Understanding

Natural language understanding often depends on meanings that are implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring pragmatic reasoning. Despite strong performance on math and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with making pragmatic inferences, often choosing literal interpretations. To improve LLM pragmatic reasoning, we introduce PragReST, a self-supervised framework that constructs pragmatic QA data, generates counterfactual reasoning traces, and trains models to internalize them through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, without human-labeled training data or distillation from a stronger teacher. Across four pragmatic benchmarks (PragMega, Ludwig, MetoQA, and AltPrag), PragReST improves over backbone models, task-specific pragmatic tuning baselines, and non-counterfactual variants of the same pipeline. On accuracy-based benchmarks, PragReST improves over the instruct backbone by 5.37 and 5.50% (absolute) for Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B, respectively. Our error analysis and ablations underscore the importance of counterfactual reasoning: PragReST primarily reduces errors caused by failures to contrast observed utterances with plausible alternatives, and removing counterfactual reasoning substantially reduces performance. Moreover, our training preserves out-of-domain performance on general-knowledge and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental realization of the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape

arXiv:2606.14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anderson localization has evolved far beyond the conventional dichotomy between extended and localized states. Modern localization theory predicts a complete transport hierarchy comprising extended, critical, and localized phases together with all coexistence phases among them, forming a seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape. Despite its fundamental importance, this hierarchy has never been experimentally realized within a single system. Here we realize the complete seven-phase Anderson-localization landscape in a one-dimensional Floquet photonic lattice. By engineering quasiperiodic hopping profiles containing inhomogeneously distributed hopping zeros, we generate critical states and enable their coexistence with extended and localized sectors. The resulting transport regimes are directly resolved through their distinct spatiotemporal dynamics, including ballistic expansion, confined critical oscillations, and persistent localization. We observe all seven phases, including the elusive triply coexisting extended-critical-localized phase, and experimentally track the phase transitions connecting them. Our results establish the first complete experimental map of the Anderson-localization landscape and provide a unified platform for investigating mobility edges, multifractality, and programmable coherent transport.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.