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Authors: Chen Wu ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion

Generating complete digital twins from videos requires precise camera control, global scene coverage, and strict spatial-temporal consistency constraints that remain challenging for perspective video generators due to their limited field of view (FoV). Their narrow FoV forces long or multi-view trajectories, amplifying cross-view inconsistency and temporal drift. We argue that 360{\deg} video generation offers a natural solution: panoramic coverage simplifies trajectory design and provides a strong global context for maintaining coherence. We introduce Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion, a controllable 360{\deg} video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity videos from sparse 360{\deg} inputs. The key idea is an explicit 3D Cache, reconstructed from the input, which serves as a geometric scaffold for any user-defined camera path. This allows the diffusion model to focus on photorealistic texture refinement while the 3D Cache enforces global geometric consistency. Experiments show that Pantheon360 achieves superior visual quality and unmatched geometric coherence, enabling reliable and flexible 360{\deg} scene generation for downstream simulation and digital-twin applications.

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

Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance in enhancing healthcare efficiency across a wide range of medical applications. Nevertheless, their limited ability to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world significantly constrains their effectiveness in real-world clinical workflows, where safety-critical decision-making and physical execution are tightly coupled. Recently, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising physical-interactive paradigm for intelligent healthcare, enabling agents to operate in complex medical environments. As research in this area rapidly expands, understanding how intelligent agents function as integrated, end-to-end systems in clinical environments becomes increasingly critical. However, existing surveys on medical embodied AI largely emphasize individual aspects or functional components, lacking a unified system-level organization of the field. To support and consolidate recent advances, we systematically survey the core components of medical embodied AI, with a particular emphasis on the coordinated integration of perception, decision-making, and action. We further review representative medical applications and relevant datasets, and we analyze the major challenges encountered in real-world clinical practice. Finally, we discuss key directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/VMVLab/Medical_Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

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

Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression based on Low-Rank Adaptation by Progressive Learning

In the digital age, image compression is crucial for numerous applications, including web media, streaming services, high-resolution medical imaging, and connected vehicle networks, enabling efficient data storage and transmission. With the increasing demand for high-quality image communication, the need for advanced compression techniques becomes increasingly critical. Numerous Deep Image Compression (DIC) techniques have recently been introduced, showing impressive performance compared to traditional standards. However, variable-rate image compression remains an unresolved issue. Specific DIC methods deploy multiple networks to attain different compression rates, whereas others use a single model, which often results in higher computational complexity and reduced performance. This work proposes a progressive learning approach for variable-rate image compression based on the parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We introduce an additional LoRA Rate-Adaptive Module (LoRAM) in DIC methods. Due to the re-parameterized merging of LoRA, our proposed method does not introduce additional computational complexity during inference. Compared to methods utilizing multiple models, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, saving 99\% in parameter storage, 90% in datasets, and 97% in training steps.

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

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

Authors:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Embodied-R1.5, a unified Embodied Foundation Model (EFM) that integrates comprehensive embodied reasoning capabilities, spanning embodied cognition, task planning, correction, and pointing, within a single architecture toward general physical intelligence. Leveraging three automated data construction pipelines to significantly expand the data coverage of critical capabilities, we build a large-scale data system of over 15B tokens, and design a multi-task balanced RL recipe to alleviate heterogeneous task conflicts. We further introduce a Planner-Grounder-Corrector (PGC) closed-loop framework that enables a single model to autonomously execute and self-correct over long-horizon tasks. With only 8B parameters, Embodied-R1.5 achieves SOTA on 16 out of 24 embodied VLM benchmarks, surpassing leading models like Gemini-Robotics-ER-1.5 and GPT-5.4. Benefiting from the internalized embodied capabilities, Embodied-R1.5 can be fine-tuned into a VLA with only a small amount of data, outperforming leading VLA models like $\pi_{0.5}$ across 4 popular manipulation benchmark suites. We further conduct extensive zero-shot real-robot experiments, validating performance in instruction following, affordance grounding, articulated object manipulation, and long-horizon complex tasks, demonstrating strong generalization to the physical world. We open-source model weights, datasets, training code, and EmbodiedEvalKit, an evaluation framework tailored for embodied tasks, to facilitate future research in EFMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

11.
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.

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

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

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

Skill-Augmented AI Agents for Medical Research Analysis: An Exploratory Multi-Model Human Evaluation in an NSCLC Transcriptomic Biomarker Task

arXiv:2606.11830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. Large language models and AI agents are increasingly used to support biomedical research, but native model outputs may omit key analytical steps, misuse methods, or overstate conclusions. We evaluated whether autonomous access to a medical research skill package was associated with higher-quality AI-generated transcriptomic research-analysis outputs compared with native AI without skills. Methods. We conducted an exploratory multi-model human evaluation using a non-small cell lung cancer immunotherapy biomarker task. Six model backbones were tested. The evaluation included 21 anonymized outputs: 9 native-AI outputs and 12 skill-augmented outputs generated through an AI agent implementation represented by OpenClaw. Four non-expert biomedical reviewers and two blinded experts evaluated each output, with two ratings from each reviewer type. The primary outcome was expert-rated overall quality. Results. Skill-augmented outputs showed directionally higher expert overall quality than native-AI outputs (mean 5.50 vs 5.11; difference=0.39; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.04 to 0.90; Welch p=0.156). Non-expert reviewer quality showed the same direction (mean 4.72 vs 4.47; difference=0.26; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.25 to 0.80; Welch p=0.373). Expert agreement was limited (single-rating ICC=-0.15), and model-specific effects were descriptive and heterogeneous. Conclusions. Autonomous skill access showed a directional quality signal in this exploratory sample, but the signal was smaller than expert-rating noise and should not be interpreted as confirmatory evidence. The findings primarily motivate larger evaluations of skill-augmented AI agents with stronger reliability controls, platform replication, and biological-validity assessment.

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

Last But Not Least: Boundary Attention CalibratiON for Multimodal KV Cache Compression

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong vision-language reasoning, but long visual contexts enlarge the KV cache and increase decoding latency. Existing compression methods rely on observation window attention for stable token-importance estimation, yet this aggregation can dilute sparse visual evidence and discard answer-critical tokens under aggressive compression. Therefore, we identify last-query attention as a complementary source for recovering such evidence, but its answer-irrelevant signals can mislead retention. We propose BACON, a plug-and-play method that calibrates observation window attention with last-query evidence and suppresses isolated noise via intra-layer coherence and inter-layer persistence. Across diverse benchmarks, models, budgets, and compression methods, BACON improves multimodal KV compression by 7.5% on average under the most aggressive budget, with gains up to 30.9%.

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

Kairos: A Native World Model Stack for Physical AI

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

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

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

When the Past Matters: FlashBack Memory for Precipitation Nowcasting

Accurate precipitation nowcasting is crucial for disaster mitigation and socio-economic planning, yet existing methods often struggle with false alarms, missed events, and long range dependency modeling at high spatiotemporal resolution. To address these challenges, we propose FlashBack Memory (FB), a module that dynamically retrieves key historical states and integrates them via an adaptive fusion gate, enhancing the spatiotemporal representation capability of recurrent-based models. We incorporate FB into PredRNN, PredRNNpp, MIM, MotionRNN, and PredRNN-V2, and evaluate on CIKM2017, Shanghai2020, and SEVIR datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that FB significantly improves MSE, MAE, SSIM, and CSI metrics, particularly for high-intensity rainfall and long-sequence predictions, while reducing false alarms and missed events and enhancing temporal consistency and spatial localization. The proposed method provides a general and efficient memory enhancement mechanism, improving the overall performance of recurrent-based precipitation nowcasting models.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RankGraph-2: Lifecycle Co-Design for Billion-Node Graph Learning in Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based retrieval at billion-node scale requires jointly solving three tightly coupled problems – graph construction, representation learning, and real-time serving – yet existing work addresses each in isolation. We present RankGraph-2, a framework deployed at Meta that co-designs all three lifecycle stages for similarity-based retrieval (U2U2I and U2I2I), where each stage's requirements shape the others. Serving requires a co-learned cluster index to avoid expensive online KNN – this pushes index co-training into the training objective. Training benefits from the observation that similarity-based retrieval tolerates pre-computed neighborhoods, eliminating online graph infrastructure – this requires construction to produce self-contained data. Construction must also support hour-level refresh for item coverage. Acting on these cascading requirements, RankGraph-2 reduces hundreds of trillions of edges to hundreds of billions via subsampling with popularity bias correction, pre-computes multi-hop neighborhoods via personalized PageRank, and co-learns a residual-quantization cluster index that reduces serving computational cost by 83%. This lifecycle co-design enables a simple architecture to achieve 3.8 x higher recall than a GAT + Deep Graph Infomax model on a bipartite graph and 2.1 x higher than PyTorch-BigGraph on item retrieval. RankGraph-2 delivers up to +0.96% CTR and +2.75% CVR, and has powered 20+ retrieval launches across major surfaces.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.