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Authors: Feng Lu ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

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

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

Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling under Constraints

arXiv:2405.15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains. We revisit the proximal framework for handling constraints through projection operators and develop a more general formulation that encompasses Euclidean, Bregman, and Gauge projections. The resulting smooth approximation allows a unified and tractable analysis of Langevin algorithms and their variants under constraints. Within this framework, we establish convergence guarantees in Wasserstein-$q$ $(q\geqslant 1)$ distances between the smooth surrogate and the target distribution. We further derive complementary lower bounds, showing that the results are near-optimal in order. Building upon this tight approximation analysis, we obtain new convergence guarantees for the randomized midpoint Langevin algorithms and refined bounds for both vanilla and kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo methods under constraints, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of constrained diffusion-based sampling.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

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

ScoutVLA: UAV-Centric Active Perception via a Dual-Expert VLA Model for Open-World Embodied Question Answering

Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions. Existing outdoor EQA systems usually stop once the target enters the UAV's field of view, leaving the fine-grained viewpoint adjustment needed for evidence-seeking questions largely unresolved. To address this issue, we introduce FG-EQA, a fine-grained active perception EQA benchmark with more than 40K simulated trajectories and 1K real-world trajectories. Drawing inspiration from the ``waggle dance'' of scout bees, which iteratively adjust their flight paths to verify target information, we propose ScoutVLA, an evidence-driven Vision-Language-Action model for outdoor EQA. To emulate this active exploration behavior, ScoutVLA features a decoupled dual-expert architecture: a vision-language expert infers the semantic intent to identify missing evidence, while an independent action expert employs high-DoF flow matching to generate continuous viewpoint-refinement trajectories. To balance the competing demands of continuous control and semantic reasoning, we devise a decoupled training strategy with a knowledge insulation mechanism that prevents the action gradients from erasing the model's multimodal reasoning ability. Extensive simulated experiments and a qualitative real-world field study both verify the superiority of ScoutVLA over the state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating a 10.48$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average strict success rate and a 7.72$\boldsymbol{\times}$ higher average QA correctness.

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

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

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

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remains suboptimal. This is mainly due to the challenge of retrieving suitable in-context demonstrations that capture error patterns instead of semantic similarity. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can inherently capture information related to grammatical errors through their internal states. From these states, we extract the Grammatical Error Representation (GER), an informative and semantically neutral encoding of grammatical errors. Our novel GER-based retrieval method significantly boosts performance in ICL settings on multilingual GEC datasets, improving the precision of correction. For high-resource languages, our results on 8B-sized open-source models match those of closed-source models such as Deepseek2.5 and GPT-4o-mini. For low-resource languages, our $F_{0.5}$ scores surpass the baseline by up to a factor of 1.20. This method provides a more precise and resource-efficient solution for multilingual GEC, offering a promising direction for interpretable GEC research.

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

BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers?

arXiv:2510.18003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The convergence of LLM-powered research assistants and AI-based peer review systems creates a critical vulnerability: fully automated publication loops where AI-generated research is evaluated by AI reviewers without human oversight. We investigate this through BadScientist, a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. Our generator employs presentation-manipulation strategies requiring no real experiments. We develop a rigorous evaluation framework with formal error guarantees (concentration bounds and calibration analysis), calibrated on real data. Our results reveal systematic vulnerabilities: fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to . Critically, we identify concern-acceptance conflict – reviewers frequently flag integrity issues yet assign acceptance-level scores. Our mitigation strategies show only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. Despite provably sound aggregation mathematics, integrity checking systematically fails, exposing fundamental limitations in current AI-driven review systems and underscoring the urgent need for defense-in-depth safeguards in scientific publishing.

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

Co-PLNet: A Collaborative Point-Line Network for Prompt-Guided Wireframe Parsing

Wireframe parsing aims to recover line segments and their junctions to form a structured geometric representation useful for downstream tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing methods predict lines and junctions separately and reconcile them post-hoc, causing mismatches and reduced robustness. We present Co-PLNet, a point-line collaborative framework that exchanges spatial cues between the two tasks, where early detections are converted into spatial prompts via a Point-Line Prompt Encoder (PLP-Encoder), which encodes geometric attributes into compact and spatially aligned maps. A Cross-Guidance Line Decoder (CGL-Decoder) then refines predictions with sparse attention conditioned on complementary prompts, enforcing point-line consistency and efficiency. Experiments on Wireframe and YorkUrban show consistent improvements in accuracy and robustness, together with favorable real-time efficiency, demonstrating our effectiveness for structured geometry perception. Our code is available at https://github.com/GalacticHogrider/Co-PLNet.

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

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Dual Dimensionality for Local and Global Attention

Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens. Keys (and Values) are typically represented with the same dimensionality, regardless of its distance from the prediction target. In natural language, however, the next word is most strongly influenced by the immediately preceding tokens. We hypothesize that local and distant tokens impose asymmetric demands on representational capacity: local tokens are more critical for predicting immediate outputs and thus require richer representations, whereas distant tokens primarily serve as long-range memory, for which lower-dimensional representations may suffice. We formalize this idea as Distance-Adaptive Representation (DAR), implemented in a controlled setting that preserves full-dimensional representations within a local context window while assigning reduced-dimensional representations (e.g. 1/4 of the original dimensionality) to tokens beyond that window. Across multiple pretraining scales (70M to 410M parameters), as well as continued supervised fine-tuning on a 1B-scale model, this approach closely matches the performance of full-dimensional baselines. In contrast, uniformly reducing dimensionality across all token positions leads to worse performance. These results challenge the common assumption that key and value dimensionality should be uniform across token positions. Our findings suggest a new direction for designing attention architectures that adaptively allocate representational capacity across sequences, enabling further reductions in KV cache during inference.

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

CLAP: Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining for Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Human Videos

Generalist Vision-Language-Action models remain constrained by the scarcity of robotic data relative to the abundance of human video demonstrations. Existing Latent Action Models attempt to use video data but often suffer from visual entanglement, encoding noise rather than manipulation skills. To address this limitation, we propose Contrastive Latent Action Pretraining (CLAP), a framework that first uses Act-VAE to learn an executable action-token vocabulary from robot trajectories and then aligns human visual transitions with this vocabulary through contrastive learning. This alignment maps unlabeled human videos into a physically grounded latent action space rather than reconstructing appearance. Building on the aligned tokens, we train CLAP-NTP as an autoregressive VLA using robot demonstrations and pseudo-labeled human videos, preserving instruction following and object generalization. For deployment and target-domain adaptation, we further introduce a post-training strategy that combines CLAP-RF, a Rectified Flow action head for low-latency continuous action chunk prediction, with Knowledge Matching regularization to preserve pretrained semantic knowledge during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that CLAP achieves strong performance against competitive baselines while enabling effective skill transfer from human videos to robotic execution.

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

MoVerse: Real-Time Video World Modeling with Panoramic Gaussian Scaffold

We present MoVerse, a real-time video world model that creates an interactively navigable scene from a single narrow-field-of-view image. This setting is challenging because the input observes only a small fraction of the environment, while interactive roaming requires a complete surrounding world, persistent geometry, controllable camera motion, and temporally coherent high-fidelity observations. MoVerse addresses this problem by separating world construction from observation rendering. It first expands the input into a gravity-aligned 360$^\circ$ panorama with topology-aware diffusion, closing the missing field of view before 3D reasoning. It then lifts the panorama into a persistent 3D Gaussian scaffold using panoramic geometry-aware residual prediction, yielding a dense and directly renderable spatial memory. Finally, a Gaussian-conditioned video renderer translates scaffold renderings along user-specified camera trajectories into photorealistic video. To make this renderer practical for interaction, we train a bidirectional diffusion teacher for high-quality conditional rendering and distill it into a causal autoregressive student for bounded-latency streaming. This design combines the controllability and long-range consistency of explicit 3D representations with the perceptual quality of generative video models. MoVerse supports real-time scene roaming at 8~FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX~4090 GPU, demonstrating a practical path toward single-image world creation with interactive video output.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

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

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606.01561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, the standard Bradley-Terry instantiation of DPO is limited in modeling common departures from transitivity in human preferences. To address this, recent work has introduced Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), which iteratively refines the policy by training on self-generated win-lose pairs. Our investigation, however, reveals a critical instability in SPPO: the optimization is prone to policy degeneration when the preference oracle assigns overly confident wins to semantically indistinguishable responses. To mitigate this, we propose S-SPPO, a dual-space semantic calibration framework comprising: i) Supervision Calibration via semantic gating, which anneals win rate targets toward the maximum-entropy baseline as semantic overlap increases; and ii) Representation Calibration via latent repulsion to enforce geometric diversity to prevent manifold collapse and maintain latent diversity between chosen and rejected samples. Theoretically, we show that the calibration preserves the constant-sum game structure, facilitating convergence to a Nash Equilibrium. Empirically, S-SPPO avoids the performance degradation seen in prior methods, achieving 52.19% win rate and 47.46% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with Llama-3-8B, without using additional human-annotated preferences during training. The code will be available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/s-sppo.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

19.
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.

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.CL) 2026-06-15

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

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

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

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.CV) 2026-06-12

Where, What, Why, and Importance: Structured Defect Grounding for Text-to-Image Feedback

Despite generating increasingly photorealistic images, text-to-image (T2I) models still exhibit localized, subtle, and structurally complex failures. Diagnosing these failures requires instance-level feedback that answers where a defect occurs, what type it is, why it is defective, and its importance to overall image quality. While recent dense-feedback methods move beyond scalar supervision, their heatmap-centric representations still formulate diagnosis as pixel-field regression, making it difficult to localize variable-cardinality defects and bind semantic reasons to individual failures. To address this representation bottleneck, we propose Structured Defect Grounding (SDG), which casts T2I diagnosis as structured set prediction by modeling each defect as a (location, type, reason, importance) tuple. To make this formulation trainable and measurable, we introduce SDG-30K, a 30K-image dataset with box-grounded annotations across four modern T2I generators, together with a dedicated evaluation protocol, SDG-Eval. Building on this structured representation, we further present a diagnosis-to-alignment framework in which a Vision-Language Model (VLM) serves as the SDG detector, and BoxFlow-GRPO converts predicted defect sets into box-derived, importance-weighted spatial rewards for diffusion model alignment. Extensive experiments show that our SDG detector outperforms leading proprietary VLMs on structured defect grounding, while SDG-guided rewards consistently improve T2I alignment and support localized image refinement. These results establish SDG as a unified, instance-level interface for diagnosing, evaluating, and enhancing modern generative models.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.