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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Token-Operations-Oriented Inference Optimization Techniques for Large Models

Large model inference optimization serves as a key foundation for supporting the scalable, low-cost, and highly stable operation of large model services. Centered on token-oriented inference optimization technology, this paper proposes for the first time a four-layer technical architecture consisting of Multi-model Fusion, Model Optimization, Compute-Model Fusion, and Compute-Network-Model Fusion. It systematically reviews the key technologies and current industry status across these four levels and analyzes the application value of related technologies in real-world business scenarios. This paper provides a practical technical path for reducing token production costs, improving token service efficiency, ensuring the stability of token supply, and driving the transition of large model services from being merely callable to being operable.

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

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Lost at the End: Primacy Bias in Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) lets vision-language systems answer questions that exceed their parametric knowledge by conditioning a reader on passages retrieved from a Wikipedia-scale knowledge base. In pure-text long-context LLMs, retrieved-context use follows the U-shaped "lost-in-the-middle" effect of Liu et al. (2024): information at the start and end of context is used, the middle is lost. Whether this transfers to deployed multimodal KB-VQA is open. To close this gap, we design the first controlled probe of reader-side position dependence in multimodal KB-VQA: a gold-position protocol in which only the gold passage's prompt slot varies within question. We run it on three open-source 7B/8B VLM readers and two KB-VQA benchmarks at k up to 20. The shape flips from U to primacy: gold-at-first beats gold-at-last by 16 to 26 points on every reader-by-benchmark cell, an effect we call "Lost at the End". Three targeted ablations narrow the cause: a text-only control shows the multimodal setting amplifies an already-present text-mode primacy 2.2 to 4.5 times, and image-position and distractor-shuffle ablations together pin the locus to prompt slot 0 of the instruction-tuned reader. On a frozen reader, three retrieval-side fixes (MMR, oracle reranking, rank-based reordering) all leave the gap intact (no separable improvement). Our findings indicate that recall@k is the wrong metric for deployed KB-VQA and that closing the gap requires reader-side intervention; we release our protocol as a controlled instrument for evaluating such interventions.

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

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CoRe: A Continuously Reward-Finetuned LLM Query Rewriter for Multi-Stage Context-Aware Relevance in Web-Scale Video Search

LLM-based query rewriters in production face a tension: the training reward must reflect how the rewrite is consumed by the production ranker, yet the training procedure must be cheap enough to support continuous redeployment as data drifts. We present CoRe (Context Relevance), such a system, redeployed weekly for over five months in a major short-video search engine. Our reward uses the deployed multimodal relevance model as its source and a multiplicative ratio form mirroring the production fusion algebra, closing the simulation-production gap that offline reward proxies leave open. A semi-online Mixed Preference Optimization loop makes this reward affordable at multi-million-instance weekly scale: a DPO-style pairwise objective restricts the gradient pass to a small top-k/bottom-k subset of sampled trajectories, and a phase structure reduces trainer/inference-server parameter syncs from per-step to per-phase. An automated promotion gate over reward-like and stability metrics detected and recovered from a real reward-hacking incident in production. Rewriter output is consumed as parallel relevance signals at recall, rawrank, and finerank without displacing the original signals, bounding rewriter-failure blast radius. Online A/B from two sequential production launches, first deploying the rewriter at finerank, then extending consumption to recall and rawrank, delivers statistically significant reductions in change-query rate on rewrite-impacted queries, with all headline relevance and engagement metrics moving in the expected direction.

08.
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.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

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

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ParkingTransformer: LLM-Enhanced End-to-End Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Parking

arXiv:2606.17082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end autonomous parking has emerged as a critical task within the realm of autonomous driving. However, existing methods suffer from black-box characteristics, lacking high-level semantic understanding and interpretability, which impedes the realization of seamless long-distance autonomous parking from the road to the target spot. To address these limitations, we propose ParkingTransformer, a novel framework that leverages multi-view perception and the scene understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). By combining trajectory queries with LLMs implicit state features, our method interacts directly with historical information and raw sensor data to output planning trajectories, eliminating the need for dense Bird's-View (BEV) representations. To compensate for the inadequate spatial reasoning ability of LLMs, we introduce 3D positional encoding to explicitly inject spatial geometric awareness. Furthermore, a fixed-window streaming mechanism is designed for historical information processing, significantly improving long-term temporal processing efficiency and inference speed. Additionally, a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy is employed to progressively enhance trajectory precision. Extensive closed-loop experiments are conducted on the CARLA simulator and real-world vehicle platforms. The results demonstrate that our method achieves a driving score of 61.32 in CARLA simulator and an average success rate of 88.70% in real-world experiments, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Enhancing Pathological VLMs with Cross-scale Reasoning

Pathological images are inherently multi-scale, requiring pathologists to integrate evidence from global tissue architecture at low magnification to cellular morphology at higher magnification for accurate diagnosis. While existing pathological datasets for vision-language model (VLM) include various scales, they often lack an explicit cross-scale reasoning objective. This limitation prevents VLMs from capturing essential cross-scale representations and learning evidence-based reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first cross-scale training and evaluation paradigm that formulates pathology interpretation as multi-magnification reasoning. However, creating such a task reveals a critical challenge: multi-image visual question answering (VQA) is prone to text-only shortcuts, which allow models to guess answers using magnification-dependent artifacts rather than visual evidence. To address this, we propose a leakage-aware curation pipeline that combines adversarial text-only screening with constraint-guided question design. Using this pipeline, we construct Scale-VQA, a high-quality benchmark with 4,685 multiple-choice questions grounded in 2,537 pathology images across multiple magnification levels. Finally, we present ScaleReasoner-R1, a model trained via reinforcement learning to optimize performance on the cross-scale VQA task. ScaleReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on our cross-scale reasoning benchmark and generalizes to SOTA performance on established single-scale benchmarks. Findings suggest that even the limited cross-scale supervision can significantly improve pathological understanding. The code and demos will be open-sourced.

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

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FFinRED: An Expert-Guided Benchmark Generation and Evaluation Framework for Financial LLM Red-Teaming

arXiv:2606.19887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

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

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

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

CMDS-AD: Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Decoupling for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

Few-shot anomaly detection remains challenging due to limited training data. Multi-modal anomaly detection (MAD) offers a viable solution, leveraging 3D geometric cues to enrich 2D RGB representations and compensate for this scarcity. However, existing MAD methods apply spatially uniform feature processing, conflating stable macroscopic structures with high-frequency localized defect signals, exacerbating cross-modal misalignment and inflating false-positive rates. To overcome this, we present CMDS-AD, a Cross-Modal Dual-Stream Anomaly Detection framework. A LoRA-guided diffusion model generates diverse RGB samples to mitigate extreme data scarcity. For 3D normal augmentation, we employ a pre-trained diffusion model as a normal estimator. Crucially, this estimator inherently acts as a non-linear low-pass filter, directly extracting low-frequency normal representations from RGB inputs. This establishes an auxiliary estimated stream of purely low-frequency information, anchoring robust structural templates and assisting the uncompressed real stream, containing coupled high- and low-frequency components, to precisely isolate micro-defects. A Coordinate-Aware Hierarchical Feature Mapper adaptively aligns cross-modal semantics, while a multiplicative scoring mechanism filters modality-specific noise. Under the extreme 1-shot setting, CMDS-AD achieves absolute performance gains of 5.7% (I-AUROC) and 2.0% (AUPRO) on MVTec 3D-AD, alongside 7.7% and 5.6% improvements on EyeCandies, establishing a new state-of-the-art.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

SinGeo: Unlock Single Model's Potential for Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization

Robust cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) remains challenging despite the surge in recent progress. Existing methods still rely on field-of-view (FoV)-specific training paradigms, where models are optimized under a fixed FoV but collapse when tested on unseen FoVs and unknown orientations. This limitation necessitates deploying multiple models to cover diverse variations. Although studies have explored dynamic FoV training by simply randomizing FoVs, they failed to achieve robustness across diverse conditions – implicitly assuming all FoVs are equally difficult. To address this gap, we present SinGeo, a simple yet powerful framework that enables a single model to realize robust cross-view geo-localization without additional modules or explicit transformations. SinGeo employs a dual discriminative learning architecture that enhances intra-view discriminability within both ground and satellite branches, and is the first to introduce a curriculum learning strategy to achieve robust CVGL. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets reveal that SinGeo sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under diverse conditions, and notably outperforms methods specifically trained for extreme FoVs. Beyond superior performance, SinGeo also exhibits cross-architecture transferability. Furthermore, we propose a consistency evaluation method to quantitatively assess model stability under varying views, providing an explainable perspective for understanding and advancing robustness in future CVGL research. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

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

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Assisted Stance Detection in Scientific Discourse: A Test Case in Bayesian Cognitive Science

Qualitative coding is central to social science, but expert annotation is difficult to scale. LLMs offer a possible extension, yet require careful validation when the target construct is interpretive, theoretically loaded, and only indirectly expressed. We study this problem in a difficult case: detecting whether authors treat Bayesian models as descriptions of mental and neural mechanisms (realism) or as useful mathematical tools (instrumentalism). Our method combines a theory-driven codebook, expert-coded reference annotations, a diagnostic-gated prompt-optimization search yielding a shared zero-shot prompt for three frontier LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview), and multi-rater reliability analysis. The final prompt achieved a held-out combined reliability score of 0.76 (harmonic mean of ICC = 0.79 and $\alpha$ = 0.74), with all diagnostics satisfied. Deployed on 6,858 quotes from 210 articles, the three LLMs reached substantial quote-level agreement (ICC = 0.80; $\alpha$ = 0.76; combined = 0.78) and near-perfect article-level rank stability ($r$ = 0.96-0.97 across rater pairs). The corpus was predominantly weakly realist, but article-level stances were rarely uniform: only 1.4% of articles used a single band, while 59.5% spanned four or more. Low-level perception/motor articles scored 8.8 Realism points higher than high-level cognition articles ($p < .001$, $d = 0.60$), quantifying a long-held qualitative intuition. We present this as an expert-led case study; the framework is intended to generalize to similar theoretically demanding tasks, not to all qualitative analysis.

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.