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Authors: Heng Li ×
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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Quantum Interferometry

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ToolSelf: Unifying Task Execution and Self-Reconfiguration via Tool-Driven Emergent Adaptation

arXiv:2602.07883v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-powered agentic systems excel at complex long-horizon tasks, but remain constrained by static configurations fixed before execution. Such rigidity forces a trade-off between domain-specific performance and cross-task generalization: strong priors and compact tool spaces aid specialization but weaken transfer, while task-agnostic workflows and broad action spaces expand coverage but dilute guidance. Existing pre-execution optimization, planner-worker orchestration, and configuration patching fall short of resolving this tension, as they decouple adaptation from execution, causing information loss, fragmented optimization, and ambiguous credit assignment. We propose ToolSelf, a tool-driven runtime self-reconfiguration paradigm that abstracts configuration updates as a standardized tool interface and unifies execution and adaptation within one policy's action space. The execution agent can dynamically update sub-goals, strategies, toolboxes, context, and context-management modes based on task progress and feedback. We further introduce Configuration-Aware Two-stage Training (CAT), which combines rejection sampling fine-tuning with trajectory-level KTO reinforcement learning to internalize self-reconfiguration. Across diverse benchmarks, zero-shot ToolSelf rivals task-specialized agents; after CAT training, ToolSelf gains 28.8 points over the static-configuration baseline on average, illuminating a path toward emergent adaptivity that obviates manually injected guidance. The code is available at https://github.com/lian-tian-mo-zun/ToolSelf.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Integration of lung tissue proteomics and genome-wide association data to identify lung cancer susceptibility proteins and potential drug targets

Background: Proteins directly impact disease development and act as drug targets. Therefore, we integrated genomic and lung tissue proteomics data to identify lung cancer susceptibility proteins, elucidating genetic mechanisms and candidate drug targets. Method: We profiled the proteome and genome in non-neoplastic lung tissue from 200 lung cancer patients. Using this data, we constructed genetic models to predict abundance across the proteome in lung tissue. We applied these models to genome-wide association study (GWAS) data from 55,174 lung cancer cases and 1,294,174 controls to evaluate their associations with the risk of lung cancer, overall and by major histological subtypes. Bayesian colocalization and Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses were used to prioritize putative causal proteins, which were cross-referenced with three main drug-protein databases to identify potential therapeutic targets. Results: We identified 29 proteins associated with lung cancer risk at a false discovery rate < 5%, including 25 for overall lung cancer, two (AQP3 and IL18) specifically for adenocarcinoma, and another two (HMGN2 and HLA-DMB) for squamous cell carcinoma. Of them, genes encoding 17 proteins reside at least 2Mb away from any known GWAS risk loci, including 14 for overall lung cancer (HYI, GPX1, GMPPB, DSP, HDDC2, MTCH2, SUOX, JMJD7, PDIA3, IL16, IQGAP1, SULT1A2, ARHGAP27, and TYMP) and three for subtypes (AQP3, IL18, and HMGN2). Among the 12 proteins located within the known risk loci, EPHX2, CLDN18, PSMD5, and CYP2S1 proteins showed an association independent of the proximal GWAS-identified lead variant. Colocalization and/or MR analysis suggested 11 potential causal proteins. Five of these candidate causal proteins (DSP, CLDN18, IQGAP1, IL18 and TYMP) are targeted by nine drugs already approved by the FDA or in phase III trials. Conclusion: Our study identified novel lung cancer susceptibility proteins and potential drug targets, offering valuable insights into lung cancer biology and future translational utilities.

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

Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning

arXiv:2605.06734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.

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

FUSE: Frequency-domain Unification and Spectral Energy Alignment for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification

Despite significant progress in multi-modal Re-Identification (ReID), existing methods tend to emphasize low-frequency cues. Consequently, they focus on attributes such as color, illumination, and coarse appearance, while overlooking mid and high-frequency structures that encode geometric, textural, and identity-discriminative details. This imbalance leads to incomplete spectral representations and unstable cross-modal alignment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FUSE, a frequency-domain framework that reformulates multi-modal ReID as a two-stage process of spectral disentanglement and energy alignment. The proposed Spectral Decomposition Module (SDM) adaptively partitions features into low, mid, and high-frequency subspaces, enabling hierarchical spectral modeling. The Cross-Modal Alignment Module (CAM) further enforces energy alignment and subspace complementarity across modalities via frequency-consistency regularization. In addition, FUSE incorporates learnable frequency modulation to enhance robustness under varying illumination and heterogeneous sensor conditions. Extensive experiments on RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310 show that FUSE achieves 9.1\% mAP and 9.5\% Rank-1 improvements, establishing an interpretable frequency-domain paradigm for multi-modal representation learning.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

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

SER: Learning to Ground Video Reasoning with Semantic Evidence Rewards

Video MLLMs often struggle with fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, sometimes generating correct answers based on irrelevant frames or objects. Although outputting spatio-temporal evidence during reasoning is a promising direction, existing RL frameworks typically rely on geometry-only (IoU) rewards, which can be sensitive to boundary perturbations and overlook semantic alignment. To address this, we propose Semantic Evidence Reward (SER), which reformulates spatio-temporal evidence grounding as a constrained verification task. Instead of computing pixel-level overlap, SER uses a referee VLM as a local checker to evaluate model-generated evidence claims across two dimensions: relevance and localization quality, combined with a temporal penalty. This design reduces the reliance on dense box annotations and enables training directly on standard video QA data. On the V-STAR benchmark, SER achieves 49.6% mLGM, improving by 3.0 points over the strong evidence-grounded baseline Open-o3-Video, demonstrating its potential in enhancing both answer accuracy and evidence grounding.

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

Agentic Discovery of Non-Canonical Antimicrobial Peptides with AMPGAN v3

arXiv:2606.17127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance causes to over a million deaths annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising solution, but generative AMP models are not yet ready to design peptides with non-natural amino acids and/or chemical modifications, which are essential for real-world peptide drugs. We present AMPGAN v3, a multi-objective conditional GAN that expands the generative vocabulary to D-amino acids and N/C-terminus modifications such as amidation. By separating adversarial and activity-aware supervision across two specialized discriminators, AMPGAN v3 substantially improves training stability and outperforms prior generative AMP models on external classifiers. We validated five candidates spanning three structural classes in vitro; two showed activity against Gram-positive strains, with the best candidate reaching MIC 8 {\mu}g/mL against B. subtilis. To support downstream curation, we further present PepCraft, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end AMP discovery in which a Planning Agent orchestrates specialized executors for generation, filtering, and verification. Its prioritization recommendations align with our in vitro outcomes. Together, these contributions let us examine, on a small but real scale, how generative and agentic AI compose in therapeutic peptide discovery. Code: https://github.com/marszzibros/AMPGANv3

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress in short-form audio-video understanding, yet long-form audio-video comprehension remains challenged by limited context windows and severe information redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we propose AVOC, a framework for long-form audio-video understanding in Omni-modal Large Language Models. AVOC introduces a learnable token compression module between the modality encoders and the LLM backbone. We reframe multimodal token compression as a top-$K$ retrieval problem: given a fixed context budget, the module must retrieve a compact subset of tokens that best supports answering the user query. We draw inspiration from three classical Information Retrieval criteria for selecting informative units from a large candidate pool: relevance, importance, and diversity. AVOC instantiates each criterion as a tailored mechanism for audio-video understanding, and integrates them into a unified retrieval-style compression pipeline. Experiments show that AVOC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form audio-video benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.9 and 5.5 points in average accuracy on OmniVideoBench and LVOmniBench, respectively. Moreover, AVOC maintains robust performance on Audio-Video Needle-in-a-Haystack task at durations up to one hour.

11.
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.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Exact Fourier dimensions of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under minimal integrability

arXiv:2606.08683v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We determine the Fourier dimension of dyadic Mandelbrot cascades under the minimal Kahane-Peyriere integrability condition. The interval theorem is proved in a vector-valued dyadic cascade model in which sibling weights may have arbitrary dependence. For every balanced energy-admissible vector law, almost surely on non-extinction, dim_F(mu)=dim_E(mu)=dim_2(mu)=D_E(X). In the canonical scalar case, under W>=0, E W=1, E[W log_2^+ W]

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

LoopCoder-v2: Only Loop Once for Efficient Test-Time Computation Scaling

arXiv:2606.18023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Looped Transformers scale latent computation by repeatedly applying shared blocks, but sequential looping increases latency and KV-cache memory with the loop count. Parallel loop Transformers (PLT) alleviate this cost through cross-loop position offsets (CLP) and shared-KV gated sliding-window attention, making loop count a practical design choice. We therefore study PLT loop-count selection through a gain–cost view: an extra loop may refine representations, but CLP also introduces a positional mismatch at each loop boundary. We instantiate this study by training LoopCoder-v2, a family of 7B PLT coders with different loop counts, from scratch on 18T tokens, followed by matched instruction tuning and evaluation. Empirically, the two-loop variant delivers broad gains over the non-looped baseline across code generation, code reasoning, agentic software engineering, and tool-use benchmarks, improving SWE-bench Verified from 43.0 to 64.4 points and Multi-SWE from 14.0 to 31.0 points. In contrast, variants with three or more loops regress, revealing a strongly non-monotonic loop-count effect. Our diagnostics show that loop 2 provides the main productive refinement, while later loops yield diminishing, oscillatory updates and reduced representational diversity. Because the CLP-induced mismatch remains roughly fixed as refinement gains shrink, the offset cost increasingly dominates. This gain–cost trade-off explains PLT's saturation at two loops and provides diagnostics for loop-count selection.

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

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

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

Sensitivity Shaping for Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.14585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative dynamics models enable planning in challenging robotic systems, but safe deployment requires reliably detecting policy-induced out-of-distribution (OOD) transitions. Existing methods typically treat the learned dynamics as fixed and attach post hoc support surrogates. We show that these surrogates can fail when the dynamics are locally insensitive to critical action choices: unsupported control actions may produce latent predictions that resemble demonstrated transitions, suppressing OOD signals despite large true predictive errors. To address this, we introduce support-conditioned control-sensitivity regularization, which promotes sensitive local response to control input changes in learned dynamics in high-support training regions. This preserves control-induced variation while limiting unstable extrapolation due to weak empirical support. Experiments in vision-based obstacle avoidance, manipulation, and real-robot navigation show improved OOD detection and safer closed-loop planning.

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

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

arXiv:2509.15927v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with \textbf{EvaluAtor via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

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

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

arXiv:2606.16358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is $851$ lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.

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

Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation

arXiv:2606.03089v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm by using a teacher conditioned on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. Prior work has shown that OPSD can collapse in verifiable reasoning tasks, but safety alignment differs in that it is guided by high-level constitutions rather than explicit target answers, making it a natural setting to revisit dense distillation. However, our pilot study show that safety OPSD still suffers from severe collapse: constitutional conditioning contracts the teacher distribution toward short and overly conservative responses, and Reverse KL further amplifies this contraction into reduced expressiveness. We formalize this effect as geometric leakage under safety boundaries in a non-orthogonal semantic space, where safety pressure transfers into the expressiveness dimension. Based on this analysis, we propose Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation (COPSD), which first calibrates the teacher through a Cross-SFT cold-start and then performs constitution-conditioned on-policy distillation. Experiments on 12 benchmarks show that COPSD achieves a consistently stronger safety–helpfulness trade-off than baselines while substantially reducing the safety tax on general reasoning ability.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

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

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Monolingual Deep Research: Evaluating Agents and Retrievers with Cross-Lingual BrowseComp-Plus

Deep research agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to search for evidence, reason over retrieved sources, and produce grounded answers. Existing browsing benchmarks, however, largely assume that the user's query and the supporting evidence are written in the same language, leaving open whether agentic search systems can operate when relevant evidence appears in another language. We introduce XBCP (Cross-lingual BrowseComp-Plus), a controlled benchmark that preserves the English question-and-answer space of BrowseComp-Plus but varies the languages of the supporting documents. XBCP instantiates two complementary settings: in the cross-lingual setting, each query is paired with evidence in a single assigned language. In the multilingual setting, the full evidence corpus is distributed equally and randomly across 12 languages spanning high-resource and low-resource regimes. We evaluate four deep research agents using sparse and dense multilingual retrievers, measuring answer accuracy, evidence recall, search behavior, calibration, citation fidelity, and oracle retrieval. Results reveal substantial degradation when evidence is translated. Even strong, dense retrievers lose evidence recall, and agents become less calibrated and cite evidence less reliably. Notably, accuracy remains lower even when all gold evidence is supplied directly. These findings suggest that cross-lingual deep research exposes both retrieval failures and an independent, agent-side difficulty in integrating language-mismatched evidence.

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

Contrastive Action-Image Pre-training for Visuomotor Control

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

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.