×

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Authors: Cheng Peng ×
Shuffle
01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning to Annotate Delayed and False AEB Events: A Practical System for Extreme Class Imbalance and Asymmetric Label Noise

arXiv:2606.19186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) optimization relies on accurately annotated real-world trigger events, particularly rare but critical delayed and false AEB triggers that expose system deficiencies. However, these minority samples comprise less than 5% of thousands of daily triggers, making manual annotation prohibitively expensive at scale. We present the first automated AEB annotation framework to address this problem. During development, we identified two fundamental challenges that severely impair delayed/false trigger annotation accuracy: (1) Extreme class imbalance where delayed/false triggers are overwhelmed by true triggers; (2) Asymmetric label noise where mislabeled majority samples (true triggers) suppress minority samples (delayed/false triggers) learning. To overcome these challenges, we propose two key innovations: (1) Specific data augmentation that synthesizes realistic samples by manipulating focal target attributes, transplanting ego-vehicle dynamics, and masking non-focal agents; (2) noise suppression using stable hardness estimation and probe-guided adaptive threshold to clean mislabeled true trigger samples. Crucially, we deploy our model as a practical annotation system with full-stack architecture, efficiently identifying critical delayed/false triggers from thousands of daily AEB events. Production results demonstrate 80% improvement in recall of delayed/false triggers and 50% reduction in manual workload. Beyond immediate gains, the system enables continuous self-improvement through accumulated high-quality annotations, establishing a necessary data foundation for on-vehicle AEB system optimization

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602.00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness. We introduce PCBSchemaGen, a training-free inference-time framework that turns a frozen LLM into a verifiable, repairable PCB schematic generator. The framework induces a domain schema from IC datasheets to ground LLM decoding, pairs it with a deterministic 5-layer continuous-reward verifier with pin-level error localization, and refines candidates through a Thompson Sampling arm-acquiring bandit. We evaluate on 2 PCB benchmarks covering 227 real-IC tasks across 22 unified circuit domains, including a public-schematic-derived suite that serves as a fully held-out generalization test (verifier, KG library, and prompts frozen before any evaluation). Under our framework, an open-weight 31B model (Gemma-4-31B) passes 81.3% of PCBBench tasks on average, and the same framework transfers across both benchmarks with zero verifier code changes; a Circuitron-style inference-time prompting baseline on the same Gemma-4-31B backbone collapses on hard system-level designs. This suggests inference-time refinement under a deterministic structural verifier is a general recipe for reference-free LLM code synthesis in domains without unit-test oracles. Our benchmarks and deterministic verifier are publicly available at https://github.com/HZou9/PCBSchemaGen_v2.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

04.
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.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

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

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

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

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

07.
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.

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

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

09.
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.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

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

MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling

We present MaxProof, a population-level test-time scaling framework for competition-level mathematical proof in the MiniMax-M3 series. M3 first trains three proof-oriented capabilities – proof generation, proof verification, and critique-conditioned proof repair – using a defense-in-depth generative verifier engineered for low false-positive rate. These capabilities are merged into a single released M3 model. At test time, MaxProof treats the model as a generator, verifier, refiner, and ranker, searches over a population of candidate proofs, and returns one final proof through tournament selection. With MaxProof test-time scaling, the M3 model reaches 35/42 on IMO 2025 and 36/42 on USAMO 2026, exceeding the human gold-medal threshold on both.

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

MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks

Complex medical reasoning requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence across multiple inference steps. Large language models (LLMs) now approach this through two routes: internalized reasoning and externalized agent scaffolding (frameworks that decompose problems collaboratively amongst multiple LLMs). To determine whether these routes are exclusive or complementary, we introduce MedicalAgentsBench, a filtered benchmark of 862 complex clinical questions drawn from the union of eight medical datasets via difficulty-aware curation and contamination screening. Evaluating three internalized reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, o1-mini, and o3-mini), seven base models, and nine externalized agent-based methods, we find that internalized and externalized approaches each independently improve performance, and that their benefits compound: the highest accuracy is achieved by layering agent workflows onto an internalized reasoning model (i.e., o3-mini + MDAgents with 35.1%). Pareto analysis shows this combination dominates the cost-performance frontier; moreover, lightweight optimization on inexpensive models offers an entry point for resource-constrained settings. Our benchmark is at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedicalAgentsBench.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

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

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

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

Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System

Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.

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

FreeStyle: Free Control of Style-Content Dual-Reference Generation from Community LoRA Mining

arXiv:2606.20506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

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

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

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

DreamReasoner-8B: Block-Size Curriculum Learning for Diffusion Reasoning Models

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PP-OCRv6: From 1.5M to 34.5M Parameters, Surpassing Billion-Scale VLMs on OCR Tasks

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on general vision-language tasks, yet they suffer from hallucination, imprecise localization, and prohibitive computational cost when applied to dedicated OCR scenarios. This paper presents PP-OCRv6, a lightweight OCR system that combines architectural innovation with data-centric optimization. PP-OCRv6 redesigns the backbone, detection neck, and recognition neck around a unified MetaFormer-style building block with structural reparameterization, decoupling spatial token mixing from channel mixing and supporting both tasks through task-specific stride configurations. Three model tiers (medium, small, tiny) share the same block primitives, covering deployment scenarios from server to edge. On our in-house benchmarks, PP-OCRv6_medium achieves 83.2% recognition accuracy and 86.2% detection Hmean, outperforming PP-OCRv5_server by +5.1% and +4.6% respectively while surpassing Qwen3-VL-235B, GPT-5.5, and Gemini-3.1-Pro with orders of magnitude fewer parameters. The tiny tier achieves 3.9$\times$ faster inference than PP-OCRv5_mobile on Intel Xeon CPU while maintaining comparable accuracy.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

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

Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) seeks to develop a versatile model capable of performing effectively on unseen target domains. Notably, recent advances in pre-trained Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the generalization capabilities of deep learning models. Despite the increasing attention toward VFM-based domain prompt tuning within DG, the effective design of prompts capable of disentangling invariant features across diverse domains remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose addressing this challenge by leveraging the controllable and flexible language prompt of the VFM. Noting that the text modality of VFMs is naturally easier to disentangle, we introduce a novel framework for text feature-guided visual prompt tuning. This framework first automatically disentangles the text prompt using a large language model (LLM) and then learns domain-invariant visual representation guided by the disentangled text feature. However, relying solely on language to guide visual feature disentanglement has limitations, as visual features can sometimes be too complex or nuanced to be fully captured by descriptive text. To address this, we introduce Worst Explicit Representation Alignment (WERA), which extends text-guided visual prompts by incorporating an additional set of abstract prompts. These prompts enhance source domain diversity through stylized image augmentations, while alignment constraints ensure that visual representations remain consistent across both the original and augmented distributions. Experiments conducted on major DG datasets, including PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraInc, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

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

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.