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01.
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.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

LiAuto-GeoX: Efficient Grounded Driving Transformer

Dense 3D reconstruction has demonstrated immense potential for spatial understanding, yet its viability as a real-time, onboard representation for autonomous driving remains an open challenge. Existing large-scale visual geometry models typically require substantial computational resources and lack the long-range geometric fidelity, surround-view consistency, and real-time efficiency demanded by dynamic driving environments. To bridge this gap, we present LiAuto-GeoX, an efficient grounded driving transformer designed for deployable, ego-centric 3D scene understanding. Our approach begins by learning a high-capacity driving geometry model from large-scale surround-view data, utilizing sparse LiDAR priors to provide robust geometric grounding in distant, ambiguous, or structure-sparse regions. We then instantiate this capability into a highly compact 155M-parameter onboard model through a novel geometry-preserving distillation framework. This framework employs mask-guided depth-aware distillation to retain fine-grained metric structures by emphasizing geometrically informative regions, and relative-pose relational distillation to enforce cross-view spatial consistency through pose-induced geometric relations. Extensive evaluations reveal that LiAuto-GeoX runs at 220 FPS on KITTI while maintaining high-fidelity dense reconstruction, enabling real-time deployment. The learned geometry transfers seamlessly to downstream autonomy tasks, achieving 90.6 PDMS in trajectory prediction, 24.63 mIoU in occupancy prediction, and 47.67 IoU in future-frame prediction. These all demonstrate that efficient dense 3D reconstruction can transcend its traditional role as a perception target to serve as a scalable, foundational geometric representation for next-generation autonomous driving.

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

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

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

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

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

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

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

Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models

Generative AI has enabled the creation of photorealistic images and videos that are increasingly disseminated on social media, often used for spam, misinformation, manipulation, and fraud. Existing AI-generated content (AIGC) detection methods face challenges including poor generalization to new generation models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. We present our pipeline that mitigates these issues by continuously curating diverse multi-modal social media data and training a compact vision-language model for detection and explanation. Our model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and demonstrates robust detection and explanation capabilities on internal social media datasets across multiple platforms. We deployed our model for post recommendation on social media platforms and observed positive downstream impacts on user engagement, demonstrating that it is feasible to perform effective AIGC detection in dynamic, real-world social media environments.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Context-Aware RL for Agentic and Multimodal LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) often fail when answering requires identifying a small but decisive piece of evidence within a long or complex context, such as a single line in a tool trace or a subtle detail in an image. We propose ContextRL, a context-aware reinforcement learning (RL) method that improves long-horizon reasoning and multimodal performance through an indirect auxiliary objective. Instead of supervising only the final answer, ContextRL presents the model with a query, an answer, and two highly similar contexts, and rewards it for selecting the context that supports the query–answer pair, thereby encouraging fine-grained grounding. We construct contrastive context data in two domains: for coding agents, trajectories serve as contexts, yielding 1k pairs built via condition filtering; for multimodal reasoning, images serve as contexts, yielding 7K pairs built via generative editing and similarity search. ContextRL achieves average gains of +2.2% over standard GRPO on 5 long-horizon benchmarks, and +1.8% across 12 diverse visual question answering benchmarks. To disentangle the effect of the proposed objective from that of additional data, we compare against data-augmentation baselines that repurpose the same contrastive contexts as standard query–context–answer examples. These baselines provide little to no improvement, showing that the gains arise from the proposed context-selection objective rather than from the contrastive data alone.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Are Text-to-Image Models Inductivist Turkeys? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Causal Reasoning

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell's inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to investigate whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate both open-source and closed-source T2I models using a Vision Language Model (VLM)-based evaluator (CF-Eval). Furthermore, we introduce two metrics: Prior Resistance Rate (PRR), which measures a model's ability to overcome entrenched real-world priors, and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR), which assesses whether models can maintain reasoning-dependent counterfactual generation without explicit visual cues. Experiments show that all models exhibit sharp degradation from factual to counterfactual settings. Further analyses suggest that these failures arise because current T2I models encode world knowledge and visual appearances as tightly coupled patterns. Consequently, their heavy reliance on frequent visual co-occurrences within the training data forces them to default to familiar commonsense priors when tasked with rendering counterfactual worlds.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MorVess: Morphology-Aware Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation Network

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Text-to-SQL: An Agentic LLM System for Governed Enterprise Analytics APIs

Enterprise analytics aims to make organizational data accessible for decision-making, yet non-technical users still face barriers when using traditional business intelligence tools or Text-to-SQL systems. While recent Text-to-SQL approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) promise natural language access to structured data, they fall short in enterprise settings where analytics pipelines rely on governed APIs rather than raw databases. In practice, these APIs encapsulate complex business logic to ensure consistency, auditability, and security. However, delegating mathematical or aggregation logic to an LLM introduces reliability and compliance risks. To this end, we present Analytic Agent, an LLM-based agentic system that translates natural language intents into secure interactions with enterprise analytics APIs. Evaluated on 90 real enterprise use cases constructed by domain experts, it reliably interprets user goals, validates permissions, executes governed queries, and generates compliant visualizations through multi-step reasoning and policy-aware orchestration.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT

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

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

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

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

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

Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm – Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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

AREAL-DTA: Dynamic Tree Attention for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

arXiv:2602.00482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, as it generates many rollout sequences that frequently share long token prefixes. Existing RL frameworks usually process these sequences independently during policy training, i.e., repeatedly recomputing identical prefixes in both the forward and backward passes of policy gradient computation, leading to substantial inefficiencies in computation resources and memory usage. Although prefix sharing naturally induces a tree structure over rollouts, packed tree-mask approaches scale poorly in RL settings. In this paper, we introduce AReaL-DTA, which efficiently exploits prefix sharing in RL training. AReaL-DTA employs a depth-first search (DFS)-based execution strategy that dynamically traverses the rollout prefix tree during both forward and backward computation, materializing only a single root-to-leaf path at a time. To further improve scalability, AReaL-DTA incorporates a load-balanced distributed batching mechanism that dynamically constructs and processes prefix trees across multiple GPUs. On $\tau^2$-bench, AReaL-DTA improves training throughput by up to $8.31\times$ over dense training and up to $1.70\times$ over sparse training. Our code is available at https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL/tree/feat/dta.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Fabless Quantum Chip Design and Commercial Production

arXiv:2606.17956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a fabless quantum-chip design and production architecture for superconducting quantum computing, centered on the SPICE-Q multiphysics simulation framework. The proposed ecosystem connects process-certified quantum PDKs, parameterized device cells, traceable model cards, SPICE-Q physical modeling languages, unified Q-EDA flows, foundry sign-off rules, cryogenic test feedback, and reusable quantum IP. In this model, design firms do not merely outsource fabrication; they prepare verified tape-outs under standardized process constraints and calibrated physical models. Its economic value lies in reducing repetitive device debugging, process exploration, and low-level layout effort, while its feasibility depends on PDK maturity, foundry yield, cryogenic test throughput, model-prediction accuracy, data-feedback mechanisms, and IP licensing boundaries. We argue that superconducting quantum chips can move from the current largely vertically integrated development model toward a fabless-foundry ecosystem only when hardware design is supported by standardized, verifiable, and reusable software and process interfaces. The required pillars are certified PDKs, PCell-based parameterized design, SPICE-Q cross-physics simulation, end-to-end Q-EDA automation, and a tradable quantum-IP market. By adapting lessons from the classical semiconductor industry to quantum hardware, this framework defines a path toward scalable, manufacturable, and commercially reusable superconducting quantum-chip design.

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

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.