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Authors: Jun Hou ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

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

Measuring Epistemic Resilience of LLMs Under Misleading Medical Context

Large language models (LLMs) now reach expert-level scores on medical licensing exams, encouraging the assumption that high scores imply safe medical judgment while patients increasingly use them for health advice. We show this assumption is fragile: when misleading context is injected into questions that LLMs originally answer correctly, they abandon the correct answer. We call the ability to maintain correct judgment under adversarial context epistemic resilience, and introduce MedMisBench to measure it. MedMisBench contains 10,932 medical question items and 48,889 misleading context-option pairs spanning medical reasoning, agentic capability, and patient-journey evaluation. Across 11 model configurations, mean accuracy falls from 71.1% on original questions to 38.0% under focused misleading context, with 51.5% attack success. The most damaging injections are formal, rule-like fabrications: authority-framed falsehoods reach 69.5% attack success and exception-poisoning claims reach 64.1%. A 14-member clinical panel from 7 countries identified serious potential harm in 38.2% of reviewed cases. MedMisBench exposes a structural blind spot in LLM evaluation in medical settings: existing benchmarks measure what models know, but not whether they preserve correct medical judgment under misleading context.

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

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bridging Modal Isolation in Interleaved Thinking: Supervising Modality Transitions via Stepwise Reinforcement

Interleaved thinking, where a unified multimodal model alternates between textual reasoning and visual generation, has shown promise on spatial and physical tasks. However, in complex long-chain scenarios, we identify a fundamental failure mode: generated images diverge from the textual context while subsequent text ignores the visual evidence, causing the two modalities to alternate without genuinely informing each other. We term this Modal Isolation and attribute it to compounding information loss at modality boundaries. We decompose each reasoning cycle into atomic operations and define modality transition loss, quantifying cross-modal hallucination (text-to-image) and visual utilization deficit (image-to-text) at each boundary. We propose MoTiF (Modality Tiransition Fidelity), a two-stage training framework that directly optimizes these transitions: Reflective SFT trains the model to detect and recover from erroneous visual outputs; Flow-GRPO improves image generation fidelity via reinforcement learning. All training signals in MoTiF derive from transition-level fidelity rather than end-task accuracy. Across four visual puzzle benchmarks, this transition-level supervision substantially improves both cross-modal coherence and final task accuracy. The results demonstrate that effective interleaved reasoning requires explicit structural supervision at modality boundaries, not merely scaling or end-task optimization.

06.
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.

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

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

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

VISTA: An End-to-End Benchmark for Visual Spec-to-Web-App Coding Agents

We present VISTA (VIsual Spec-To-App Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating the end-to-end web-app generation capabilities of LLM-based agents. Unlike prior code generation benchmarks that focus on algorithmic tasks, VISTA targets realistic UI-centric development, where agents must produce functional, visually coherent applications from underspecified inputs. We define five prompt-information conditions that vary along two axes, visual/structural fidelity and stack constraint: (1) text only with free stack choice, (2) text with reference screenshots under three specified stacks, (3) text with reference screenshots under free stack choice, (4) text with screenshots and pruned Figma structure under a single specified stack, and (5) text with screenshots and pruned Figma structure under free stack choice. To enable robust evaluation, each page in the benchmark is manually annotated with interactive UI components and around three visual anchor points, addressing the well-known limitations of script-based testing tools such as Playwright in open-ended code generation settings. Evaluation combines DOM-grounded reference matching, behavior-specific browser tests, and CLIP-based visual similarity, jointly measuring structural alignment, behavioral completeness, and overall visual fidelity. We use VISTA to assess four agent systems drawn from two model families and two harnesses, finding that visual fidelity and functional correctness are partially decoupled across both input conditions and agents, and that agent editing style varies sharply but is largely orthogonal to task quality. VISTA establishes a rigorous and reproducible foundation for advancing agent-based software engineering research.

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

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

QK-Normed MLA: QK normalization without full key caching

Query-key (QK) normalization stabilizes attention by controlling the scale of queries and keys before the dot product, but is not immediately compatible with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). MLA achieves efficient decoding by caching low-dimensional latent states instead of full keys, whereas post-projection QK RMSNorm appears to require the fully projected key for every cached token. We show this apparent incompatibility is an implementation artifact, not an architectural constraint. RMSNorm decomposes into a static affine weight and a dynamic scalar RMS statistic. The static key-side weight can be absorbed into the MLA query-side projection; the dynamic key statistic reduces to one inverse-RMS scalar per token and KV group. The resulting formulation is exactly equivalent to explicit post-projection QK RMSNorm in exact arithmetic and preserves MLA's latent decode path. In our 400M runs trained for up to 100B tokens, QK-Normed MLA achieves lower training loss and better downstream accuracy than QK clipping, while H800 decode benchmarks show less than 2% latency overhead up to 256k context. These results make QK normalization a practical stabilization option for MLA models without requiring full-key caching.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

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

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

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

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

Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.12563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arbor is a multi-agent framework that introduces structured tree search as a cognition layer for autonomous agents operating in large, stateful action spaces. Prior autonomous optimization systems operate on isolated targets with stateless evaluation. Arbor instead maintains an explicit search tree of scored hypotheses that serves as the shared working memory across agents, evolving with every measurement, treating failures as diagnostic signal that reshapes subsequent exploration, and expanding as prior successes shift the bottleneck distribution. We validate Arbor on full-stack LLM inference optimization, a domain where achieving peak performance has historically required coordinated effort from engineering teams across the application, framework, compiler, kernel, and hardware stack. Arbor pairs an Orchestrator agent, which drives optimization by delegating to Domain Specialists across the inference stack, with a Critic agent that safeguards stability through root-cause analysis, introspection, and measurement validation – a checks-and-balances architecture where neither agent can unilaterally drive the system. Agent capabilities are decomposed into hard skills (domain expertise) and soft skills (coordination protocols that determine how contributions compose), enabling fully autonomous multi-day campaigns. Arbor achieves up to 193% inference throughput-latency Pareto improvement over vendor-optimized baselines, while a single agent without the harness plateaus at +33% throughput improvement and crashes irrecoverably within hours. Arbor generalizes to multiple generations of hardware platform, and run-to-run variance is within 2 percentage points demonstrating that the method is hardware-agnostic and reproducible.

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

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

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

DoubtProbe: Black-Box Jailbreak Defense via Structural Verification and Semantic Auditing

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing systems, black-box jailbreak defense has become an important practical problem. Existing defenses often rely on known-attack coverage, prompt-level semantic judgment, or local runtime control, yet these paths can become unstable under evolving prompt packaging, expression rewriting, and structure manipulation. We observe that many black-box jailbreaks do not remove the harmful goal, but reorganize the information needed to express and execute it, thereby evading safety alignment while remaining recoverable during generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose DoubtProbe, a dual-branch inference-time defense framework that combines structural verification with semantic auditing and formulates black-box jailbreak defense as consistency checking under controlled transformation. The structural branch extracts a structured representation from the original request, reconstructs the request under representation constraints, and detects information-preservation failures between the original and reconstructed requests; the semantic branch audits the original prompt directly. We evaluate DoubtProbe against representative black-box defenses on jailbreak and benign-request benchmarks, and further test backbone transfer from Qwen2.5-72B to Llama-3.1-70B. Results show that DoubtProbe achieves a stronger and more stable defense-utility trade-off: on Qwen2.5-72B, it reduces the JBB attack success rate from 0.293 to 0.100 and the CodeAttack attack success rate from 0.152 to 0.001, while maintaining false positive rates of 0.022 and 0.016 on AlpacaEval and OR-Bench; the same pattern remains stable on Llama-3.1-70B. These findings show that structural inconsistency signals provide a practical and generalizable basis for black-box jailbreak defense, especially when combined with semantic auditing.

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

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

VibeThinker-3B: Exploring the Frontier of Verifiable Reasoning in Small Language Models

This technical report introduces VibeThinker-3B, a compact dense model with 3B parameters developed to investigate how far verifiable reasoning can be pushed within a strictly small-model regime. Building upon the Spectrum-to-Signal post-training paradigm, we systematically enhance the model through an optimized pipeline that includes curriculum-based supervised fine-tuning, multi-domain reinforcement learning, and offline self-distillation. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VibeThinker-3B achieves frontier-level performance on highly demanding verifiable tasks. Specifically, it attains a score of 94.3 on AIME26 (improving to 97.1 with claim-level test-time scaling), an 80.2 Pass@1 on LiveCodeBench v6, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution generalization with a 96.1\% acceptance rate on recent unseen LeetCode contests. This effectively places it in the performance band of first-tier reasoning systems, matching or exceeding flagship models that are orders of magnitude larger, such as DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, and Gemini 3 Pro. Furthermore, a score of 93.4 on IFEval confirms that this extreme reasoning enhancement does not compromise strict instruction controllability. Extending our previous 1.5B work, these findings motivate the Parametric Compression-Coverage Hypothesis, which views verifiable reasoning as compressible into compact reasoning cores, while open-domain knowledge and general-purpose competence require broad parameter coverage over facts, concepts, and long-tail scenarios. This perspective suggests that compact models are not merely deployment-efficient substitutes, but a complementary path toward frontier-level performance in parameter-dense capability regimes.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Clin-JEPA: A Multi-Phase Co-Training Framework for Joint-Embedding Predictive Pretraining on EHR Patient Trajectories

arXiv:2605.10840v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Clin-JEPA, a multi-phase co-training framework for joint-embedding predictive (JEPA) pretraining on EHR patient trajectories. JEPA architectures have enabled latent-space planning in robotics and high-quality representation learning in vision, but extending the paradigm to EHR data – to obtain a single backbone that simultaneously forecasts patient trajectories and serves diverse downstream risk-prediction tasks without per-task fine-tuning – remains an open challenge. Existing JEPA frameworks either discard the predictor after pretraining (I-JEPA, V-JEPA) or train it on a frozen pretrained encoder (V-JEPA 2-AC), leaving the encoder unaware of the rollout signal that the retained predictor must use at inference; co-training the encoder and predictor under a shared JEPA prediction objective would supply this grounding, but naïve co-training is unstable, with representation collapse and online/target drift causing autoregressive rollout to diverge. Clin-JEPA's five-phase pretraining curriculum – predictor warmup, joint refinement, EMA target alignment, hard sync, and predictor finalization – addresses each failure mode by phase, stably co-training a Qwen3-8B-based encoder and a 92M-parameter latent trajectory predictor. On MIMIC-IV ICU data, three independent evaluations support the framework: (1) latent $\ell_1$ rollout drift uniquely converges ($-$15.7%) over 48-hour horizons while baselines and ablations diverge (+3% to +4951%); (2) the encoder learns a clinically discriminative latent geometry (deteriorating-patient cohorts displace 4.83$\times$ further than stable patients in latent space, vs $\leq$2.62$\times$ for baseline encoders); (3) a single backbone outperforms strong tabular and sequence baselines on multi-task downstream evaluation. Clin-JEPA achieves mean AUROC 0.851 on ICareFM EEP and 0.883 on 8 binary risk tasks (+0.038 and +0.041 vs baseline average).

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MemNovo: Look Back at the Spectrum for Balanced De Novo Peptide Sequencing from Mass Spectrometry

arXiv:2606.11868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: De novo peptide sequencing from tandem mass spectrometry is pivotal in proteomics, enabling identification of novel peptides without reference databases. While recent Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have achieved remarkable performance, we uncover a critical pathology in their inference dynamics. Through comprehensive feature scaling experiments, we demonstrate that existing auto-regressive peptide decoders tend to over-rely on generated-sequence priors while progressively under-utilizing fine-grained physical evidence from the input mass spectrum. This phenomenon leads to suboptimal results, where generated peptide sequences are biologically plausible yet not faithful to the input spectrum. To rectify this, we propose MemNovo, a training-free and plug-and-play mechanism that re-balances peptide and spectral contributions at inference time. MemNovo alleviates the information bottleneck by establishing a persistent spectral memory bank and injecting retrieved features directly into the final decoding stage via an ultra-conservative residual connection. Theoretical analysis confirms that this mechanism restores the mutual information between the decoder state and the raw spectrum. Extensive experiments on the Nine Species benchmark with two representative baselines, Casanovo and InstaNovo, demonstrate that MemNovo consistently improves both amino acid precision and peptide precision, achieving up to 39.1% relative improvement in peptide precision for Casanovo and up to 3.9% for InstaNovo, with negligible computational overhead.

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

Cross-Modal Registration Between 3D and 2D Fingerprints via Pose-Aware Unwrapping and Point-Cloud Fusion

Three-dimensional (3D) fingerprints preserve global finger geometry and local ridge structure while avoiding contact-induced deformation, but they remain difficult to integrate with legacy two-dimensional (2D) fingerprint systems. This paper addresses the intermediate stage between 3D acquisition and cross-modal matching, and presents a unified framework for 3D fingerprint preprocessing and registration across contactless and contact-based 2D modalities. The framework combines four components: 1) a nonparametric visualization and unwrapping method that converts a 3D fingerprint point cloud into a rolled-equivalent 2D representation without relying on a global finger-shape model; 2) a point-cloud fusion pipeline that registers and mosaics multiple partial 3D captures into a more complete fingerprint model; 3) an ellipse-based pose normalization method for canonical finger alignment; and 4) a pose-aware cross-modal registration strategy that improves compatibility between 3D fingerprints and both contactless and contact-based 2D fingerprints. Experiments on a self-collected multimodal fingerprint database containing 150 fingers show that the proposed framework achieves ridge-level 3D registration accuracy, robust pose estimation, and consistent gains in 2D compatibility. In particular, the 3D fusion error is concentrated around 0.09 mm, contactless 2D–3D registration reaches ridge-scale projection accuracy, and pose-aware unwrapping improves genuine matching scores relative to generic 3D unwrapping. These results support the use of 3D fingerprints as an effective geometric bridge across heterogeneous fingerprint modalities. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/3DFpVisual.

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

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.