×

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

作者: He Xu ×
换一批
01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

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

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

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

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

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

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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.CL) 2026-06-11

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

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

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. To systematically eliminate background interference, FiCoP first employs an object-centric disentanglement step to isolate the target from macro-level environmental noise. Building upon this localized region, our core methodological innovations are twofold. Firstly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning and text-guided semantic injection. Secondly, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that leverages a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior. This generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

08.
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.

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

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

11.
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.

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

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LLM-based Embeddings: Attention Values Encode Sentence Semantics Better Than Hidden States

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which are optimized for next-token prediction and thus often fail to capture global, sentence-level semantics. This paper introduces a novel perspective, demonstrating that attention value vectors capture sentence semantics more effectively than hidden states. We propose Value Aggregation (VA), a simple method that pools token values across multiple layers and token indices. In a training-free setting, VA outperforms other LLM-based embeddings, even matches or surpasses the ensemble-based MetaEOL. Furthermore, we demonstrate that when paired with suitable prompts, the layer attention outputs can be interpreted as aligned weighted value vectors. Specifically, the attention scores of the last token function as the weights, while the output projection matrix ($W_O$) aligns these weighted value vectors with the common space of the LLM residual stream. This refined method, termed Aligned Weighted VA (AlignedWVA), achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free LLM-based embeddings, outperforming the high-cost MetaEOL by a substantial margin. Finally, we highlight the potential of obtaining strong LLM embedding models through fine-tuning Value Aggregation.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Versioned Late Materialization for Ultra-Long Sequence Training in Recommendation Systems at Scale

arXiv:2604.24806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a versioned late materialization paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

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

VideoWeave: Unlocking Geometric Consistency in Video Generation via Joint Geometry-Video Modeling

Large-scale video diffusion models often fail to preserve 3D structure over time, causing geometric drift and implausible motion under viewpoint changes. Existing methods usually enforce geometric consistency by using explicit geometry reconstructions, such as depth maps, point clouds, or reconstructed 3D structures, to define conditions, supervision, or reward signals, making the generator sensitive to errors from upstream geometry pipelines. We propose VideoWeave, a latent-space post-training framework that uses implicit geometry-model features to constrain the generative distribution, providing a more flexible and non-rigid form of guidance that mitigates the impact of reconstruction errors from geometry models. Specifically, VideoWeave adapts these features into geometry latents and jointly models them with video latents in a shared denoising space, allowing geometry to shape the generative distribution during training. To support this process, we build GeoVid-80K, an 80K-video dataset with paired appearance and geometry representations. Experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video generation show that VideoWeave improves geometric coherence while preserving strong visual quality. VideoWeave project page at https://videoweave.github.io/

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

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

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

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AAPA: Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment for Post-Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.25148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback. SFT provides a useful behavioral anchor but can overfit to static demonstrations, whereas RL encourages exploration but may drift from expert behavior or exploit imperfect rewards. We propose AAPA (Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment), a plug-in framework that augments existing post-training objectives with a sentence-level adversarial anchoring signal. AAPA compares policy rollouts with offline, pre-collected expert responses using a fixed lightweight discriminator, and therefore requires neither online teacher inference nor discriminator co-training during policy optimization. The same anchoring term can be added to SFT, GRPO, and CHORD while preserving their original training pipelines. Experiments on instruction-following benchmarks show that AAPA consistently improves the corresponding base objectives across model scales. In particular, the staged AAPA configuration improves over a strong GRPO baseline by 5.77\% on \texttt{Qwen3-0.6B} and 3.75\% on \texttt{Qwen3-4B}. Further analyses on response length, log-probability distributions, and discriminator variants suggest that adversarial anchoring provides a stable semantic grounding signal for preference optimization. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IsFaqq/AAPA}.

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

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

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

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

GF-DiT: Scheduling Parallelism for Diffusion Transformer Serving

arXiv:2606.13501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for image and video generation, creating growing demand for efficient DiT serving. Existing systems assign each request a fixed parallel configuration throughout its lifetime. However, DiT workloads exhibit substantial heterogeneity across requests, execution stages, and system conditions, making static parallelism inefficient and often leading to poor GPU utilization and degraded service quality. This paper argues that DiT serving should treat GPU parallelism as a first-class schedulable resource. We present GF-DiT, a policy-programmable runtime for elastic DiT serving that dynamically adapts the parallelism of running requests according to workload demands and service objectives. GF-DiT introduces an asynchronous execution abstraction that decomposes requests into independently schedulable trajectory tasks and enables online GPU reallocation. To make elastic parallelism practical, GF-DiT further proposes group-free collectives, a lightweight communication abstraction that supports low-overhead online formation and reconfiguration of arbitrary execution groups. We implement GF-DiT in vLLM-Omni and evaluate it on representative image and video diffusion workloads. Compared with fixed-pipeline execution with static parallelism, GF-DiT improves throughput by up to 6.01$\times$, reduces mean latency by up to 95%, lowers SLO violation rates by up to 90%, and reduces communication-group setup overhead from 778 ms to approximately 60 $\mu$s.