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Authors: Fan Yang ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

arXiv:2606.11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

arXiv:2606.20135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

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

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

arXiv:2604.22748v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate. Code and resources are available at: https://github.com/matrix-agent/awesome-agentic-world-modeling.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

10.
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.

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

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

Existing vision encoders for robotics face a fundamental bottleneck: robotic datasets lack the scale necessary for large-scale pre-training. Prior work circumvents this data scarcity by turning to internet-scale image and language data or egocentric human video. While these models show promise, neither paradigm learns from paired vision and action data, which downstream visuomotor control policies require. However, robot trajectories, the most direct source of this paired signal, are not available at pre-training scale, motivating us to extract action signals from abundant human video instead. To this end, we introduce CAIP (Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training), a vision encoder that treats human hand poses from large-scale egocentric video as a proxy for end-effector actions. By extracting 3D hand keypoints, a representation that aligns naturally with downstream robot action spaces, CAIP learns a unified action-image representation through a contrastive objective. Leveraging 32,041 hours of egocentric human video and only 88 hours of robotic manipulation data, CAIP outperforms state-of-the-art vision encoders including DINOv2, SigLIP, MVP, and R3M. Evaluated on a challenging real-world dexterous manipulation setup using Dexmate Vega and Sharpa Wave hands, CAIP yields performance gains of more than 30% on tasks involving folding, pouring, and fine-grained manipulation. Our results show that our method of contrastive action-centric pre-training yields a scalable path to achieving robust visual representations better suited for physical interaction.

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

Conflict-Aware Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.15625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuous scaling of large language models (LLMs) incurs prohibitive computational costs, making Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) a scalable alternative for efficient fine-tuning via sparse activation. While federated learning (FL) emerges as the paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative optimization, integrating MoE into FL under data heterogeneity may trigger conflicting expert optimizations. Client-specific data distributions force same-indexed experts to optimize under inconsistent or even conflicting feature-label correlations. This mismatch induces destructive interference during aggregation, thus destabilizing the optimization trajectory and degrading model performance. To address this issue, we propose FC-MoE, a federated conflict-aware framework for MoE fine-tuning. It employs an importance aware weighting scheme to prioritize reliable local updates and utilizes gradient consensus projection to suppress conflicting updates, ensuring a stable global optimization path. Moreover, a local knowledge retention mechanism further preserves specialized client expertise by re-anchoring domain-specific residuals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FC-MoE accelerates convergence and enhances both global and local model performance in non-IID federated environments.

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

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.

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

CIWI-CKT: Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion and Cross-City Knowledge Transfer for Traffic Flow Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

arXiv:2606.17899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Electronic Design Automation (Q-EDA) is emerging as quantum chips move from laboratory prototypes to scalable engineering systems. This paper argues that superconducting quantum chip design is approaching a "SPICE moment" similar to early classical EDA, where growing qubit scale, control complexity, frequency planning, packaging, process variation, and cryogenic measurement feedback require a shift from experience-based design to model-driven engineering. We propose a Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework that treats Q-EDA not only as software, but as part of the quantum chip development paradigm. Unlike classical HDL-first design, quantum chip design must begin with physical structures such as Josephson junctions, resonators, couplers, readout elements, control lines, and packaging environments. The framework emphasizes PCell-based modeling, SPICE-Q simulation, Quantum PDKs, and design-technology-measurement co-optimization. We further outline a hierarchical Q-EDA system spanning physical structures, qubit PCells, logical qubits, quantum arithmetic, functional quantum IP, and Quantum SoC systems. The key goal is to turn physical models, layout rules, simulation results, fabrication data, and measurement feedback into reusable and auditable engineering objects for large-scale quantum processors and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602.22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL – guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher–old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

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

On Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding for Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning (AV-GZSL) is a challenging task that aims to classify both seen and unseen objects or scenes by integrating data from audio and visual modalities. Recent studies primarily focus on fusing or aligning audio and visual features to generate more informative audio-visual embeddings. Also, aligning the audio-visual and textual features of most existing methods relies solely on the optimization objectives. However, those methods neglect the inherent distributional and structural differences between audio-visual and textual modalities. To address this limitation, we propose a method termed Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding (AHSE), which enables hierarchical alignment of standardized audio-visual and textual embeddings within a shared embedding space. Specifically, we first apply Z-score standardization to the fused audio-visual and textual embeddings to reduce distributional mismatches. We then introduce a hierarchical alignment strategy that minimizes discrepancies at the semantic, class, and batch levels, thereby constructing a more robust and well-structured embedding space. This strategy not only preserves semantic and inter-class relationships but also maintains spatial consistency within each batch. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: VGGSound-GZSL, UCF-GZSL, and ActivityNet-GZSL, demonstrate that AHSE achieves competitive performance in zero-shot learning.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

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

AFFORDANCE20Q: Evaluating Affordance Reasoning from Physical Properties

arXiv:2606.14240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance reasoning, the inference of an object's action possibilities from its physical properties (e.g., shape and material), is fundamental to human physical understanding and increasingly critical for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing affordance benchmarks largely expose explicit object identities in the evaluation setup, allowing models to rely on memorized object-affordance mappings rather than reasoning over physical properties. To address this gap, we introduce Affordance20Q, a novel affordance reasoning benchmark formulated as a 20-Questions game without exposing the object's identity. In each game, the model identifies a hidden object's affordance from a candidate set by asking yes/no questions about its physical properties. Affordance20Q comprises 1,009 games over 454 objects and 59 affordances, all manually filtered, refined, and annotated. We conduct comprehensive experiments with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs and find a substantial gap (~20 points) compared to human performance. A KL-based information-gain (IG) analysis further shows that models fail to ask discriminating questions as the game progresses. To close the gap, we develop KB-Anchored Rule Induction (KARI), a pipeline based on LLMs that generates affordance rules grounded in evidence from knowledge bases (KBs). KARI improves open-source LLMs by up to 15.2 points, while the limited coverage of KBs hinders further gains. We release all our code and data at https://github.com/1171-jpg/Affordance20Q.git

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Reason, Then Re-reason: Cross-view Revisiting Improves Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning from egocentric videos is inherently challenging because the observable evidence is constrained by the camera trajectory. Existing methods rely on single-turn inference, forcing models to resolve geometric ambiguity through semantic priors rather than verifiable evidence. We argue that spatial reasoning should be revisitable: conclusions formed under limited evidence should remain open to revision when complementary viewpoints become available. Building on this insight, we propose Reason, then Re-reason (ReRe), a training-free, inference-time framework with two phases: in the Reason Phase, an MLLM forms a spatial hypothesis from the original video; in the Re-reason Phase, it verifies or revises the hypothesis by observing a synthesized novel-view video. To enable effective cross-view revisiting, we design a Geometry-to-Video pipeline that renders strategically complementary novel views from predicted 3D geometry. These views feature an elevated, oblique perspective with scene-spanning coverage, while preserving the MLLM's native video interface without architectural modifications. Extensive evaluations on VSI-Bench and STI-Bench demonstrate that ReRe substantially boosts open-source MLLMs to rival proprietary state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zhenjiemao.github.io/ReRe/

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

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603.10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals. We identify a counterintuitive source of this failure: dominant activation outliers are not merely arbitrary sparse events, but are largely induced by a coherent rank-one mean bias, whose direction aligns with the leading anisotropic spectral component. This mean component strengthens during training, is amplified and reshaped by attention and FFN operators, and increasingly dominates top activation magnitudes. Crucially, this discovery reveals that a seemingly complex outlier-suppression problem admits a truly simple solution: isolate the coherent mean before quantization. We therefore propose Averis, a mean-residual splitting quantization method that separates the mean component using only reductions and elementwise subtractions before FP4 quantization. Across Qwen3 0.6B Dense trained on 100B tokens and Qwen3 7B A1.5B MoE trained on 50B tokens, Averis enables robust W4A4G4 FP4 training, reducing BF16 loss gaps to 1.19%/0.81% versus 2.05%/1.10% for NVIDIA's recently released Hadamard-based outlier-smoothing method, while limiting downstream gaps to 0.89/0.71 points. With only 2.20% end-to-end overhead over vanilla NVFP4, about 30% of NVIDIA's Hadamard-based design, Averis provides a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training. Complementary to Hadamard, Averis further reduces the Qwen3-0.6B loss and downstream gaps to 0.94% and 0.73 points when combined. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/averis-504D.

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

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

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

Beyond Static Leaderboards: Predictive Validity for the Evaluation of LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks are growing fast, but no single benchmark touches more than four or five of the dimensions that deployment exposes. This paper aggregates the largest coordinated deep-dive of one MCP-based industrial-agent benchmark to date: fourteen parallel implementation studies covering new asset classes (including a multi-modal visual extension), alternative orchestrations, retrieval strategies, reasoning modes, infrastructure optimizations, and evaluation-methodology probes. Consolidating those studies with seven prior agent benchmarks, we argue that aggregate-score leaderboards systematically underspecify deployed-agent evaluation. Rankings derived from aggregate scores do not transfer to out-of-distribution settings; recent public-to-hidden competition retrospectives provide direct empirical evidence of this rank instability. We propose ranking configurations by predictive validity, the correlation between in-sample and out-of-sample rank, rather than in-sample mean, and report a twelve-tier measurement apparatus that exposes the deployment-relevant dimensions HELM and its agent-era successors collapse. The position is operationalized through three falsifiable out-of-distribution criteria with explicit thresholds; existing evidence partly supports it but is too thin to confirm. We close with a pre-registered pilot design and a field-level vision for what the next generation of agentic benchmarks should report.