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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

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

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

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

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

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

VIMPO: Value-Implicit Policy Optimization for LLMs

arXiv:2606.20008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment. Group-relative methods such as GRPO avoid training a critic, but typically assign a trajectory-level advantage to every token. Actor-critic methods provide denser learning signals, but require a learned value function with its own training instability. We introduce VIMPO, a critic-free policy optimization method that derives a policy-implied value function from the optimality conditions of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. For autoregressive generation, the resulting value recurrence can be written in terms of policy-reference log-ratios and anchored by the terminal condition that no future reward remains at the end of a trajectory. This gives a simple value loss that incorporates outcome-level verifiable rewards without training a critic. The same derivation also yields a critic-free actor advantage, allowing VIMPO to separate reward incorporation through the value loss from policy improvement through a PPO-style actor update. On mathematical RLVR benchmarks, VIMPO improves over GRPO across MATH-500, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and OlympiadBench, with especially larger gains on competition-style evaluations. Under noisy rewards, VIMPO retains a consistent advantage over GRPO, suggesting that policy-implied value optimization can provide finer credit assignment while preserving the practical simplicity of critic-free training.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.

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

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

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

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Enhanced Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliable and Efficient Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

arXiv:2510.21127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid advancements in sensor networks, conventional battery-powered sensor networks suffer from limited operational lifespans and frequent maintenance requirements that severely constrain their deployment in remote and inaccessible environments. As such, wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) with mobile charging capabilities offer a promising solution to extend network lifetime. However, WRSNs face critical challenges from the inherent trade-off between maximizing the node survival rates and maximizing charging energy efficiency under dynamic operational conditions. In this paper, we investigate a typical scenario where mobile chargers move and charge the sensor, thereby maintaining the network connectivity while minimizing the energy waste. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the network node survival rate and mobile charger energy usage efficiency across multiple time slots, which presents NP-hard computational complexity with long-term temporal dependencies that make traditional optimization approaches ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced evolutionary multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which integrates a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based policy network for temporal pattern recognition, a multilayer perceptron-based prospective increment model for future state prediction, and a time-varying Pareto policy evaluation method for dynamic preference adaptation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing approaches in balancing node survival rate and energy efficiency while generating diverse Pareto-optimal solutions. Moreover, the LSTM-enhanced policy network converges 25% faster than conventional networks, with the time-varying evaluation method effectively adapting to dynamic conditions.

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

Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation

World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

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

UR-BERT: Scaling Text Encoders for Massively Multilingual TTS Through Universal Romanization and Speech Token Prediction

We propose UR-BERT, a Romanized transcription-based text-to-speech (TTS) encoder for massively multilingual TTS systems. Conventional grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P)-based approaches are limited to around 100 languages due to the availability of reliable G2P resources. In contrast, UR-BERT scales to 495 languages by unifying diverse writing systems into a shared Romanization representation. To further enhance phonetic fidelity and text-speech alignment, we introduce a speech token prediction objective during training, which encourages the encoder to learn speech-aware phonetic representations in a data-efficient manner. Experiments show that TTS systems built on UR-BERT consistently outperform recent text encoder baselines across a wide range of languages and resource conditions, and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen languages.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$\lambda$ Mix Interaction ($L\lambda MI$) block. Comprising Local-$\lambda$ and Interactive-$\lambda$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2\% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

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

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

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

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

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

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

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

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TerraTransfer: Learning End-to-End Driving Policies Without Expert Demonstrations

End-to-end autonomous driving has achieved state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and real-world deployments. Its standard training recipe, however, is expensive across all stages: collecting and labeling millions of driving frames is costly, and closed-loop RL on images is bottlenecked by the per-step cost of photorealistic rendering plus a forward pass through a large vision backbone. Self-play in vectorized simulators changes the economics: millions of rollout steps per second, and a state distribution naturally rich in collisions, near-misses, and recoveries that no driving log contains. Our approach exploits this asymmetry by decoupling learning to drive from learning to see. We pretrain a single policy by self-play, then align its latent space with a pretrained vision backbone, through the action KL divergence and a batch-relational low-rank structural loss. The action target comes from the self-play policy, so alignment never supervises against a logged trajectory: a paired dataset of (image, scene-state) frames suffices, with no need for the curated expert demonstrations that imitation pretraining is built on. On photorealistic 3D Gaussian splatting closed-loop scenarios, the resulting end-to-end policy matches or exceeds prior end-to-end methods.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

X-MADAM-RAG: Diagnosing and Handling Chinese-English Evidence Conflict in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems may receive evidence that is not merely noisy but mutually contradictory. This issue becomes particularly salient in multilingual settings, where retrieved Chinese and English evidence may support incompatible answer candidates. We study this problem through X-RAMDocs-ZHEN, a controlled Chinese-English benchmark derived from RAMDocs for diagnosing evidence conflict in RAG. The benchmark contains 300 examples across six balanced conditions, including monolingual support, bilingual agreement, reversed conflict directions, and conflict with optional noise. We further examine X-MADAM-RAG, an interpretable pipeline that decomposes evidence handling into per-document candidate extraction, visible-evidence repair, deterministic candidate grouping, and conflict-aware aggregation. On the original controlled benchmark with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, X-MADAM-RAG achieves 0.9667 strict accuracy and 0.9767 conflict-aware success, outperforming an evidence-normalized single-call baseline. However, a zero-call rule-only extractor reaches 1.0000 on the same benchmark, revealing strong template regularity. To probe this limitation, we construct a deterministic naturalized stress test that removes explicit answer templates while preserving candidate strings. On its 100-sample subset, rule-only extraction falls to 0.0000, but X-MADAM-RAG also drops to 0.3000 strict accuracy, below both naive and evidence-normalized baselines. A privileged oracle remains perfect, indicating that document-level extraction is the main bottleneck. These findings position X-RAMDocs-ZHEN and X-MADAM-RAG as diagnostic tools for controlled evidence conflict rather than as evidence of general hallucination detection or robustness to natural retrieval.

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

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.

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

SDFLoRA: Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA for Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning with Heterogeneous Clients

arXiv:2601.11219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) for large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention as a privacy-preserving approach for adapting models over distributed data, where parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) are widely adopted to reduce communication and memory costs. However, practical deployments often exhibit rank and data heterogeneity: clients operate under different low-rank budgets and data distributions, making direct aggregation of LoRA updates biased and unstable. Existing approaches either enforce a unified rank or align heterogeneous updates into a single shared subspace, which tends to mix transferable and client-specific directions and consequently undermines personalization. Moreover, under differential privacy (DP), perturbing such structurally mixed updates injects noise into directions that should remain purely local, leading to unnecessary utility degradation. To address these issues, we propose Selective Decoupled Federated LoRA (SDFLoRA), a structure-aware LoRA framework that decouples each client update into a shared component for aggregation and a private component that preserves client-specific semantics. Only the shared component participates in subspace alignment, while the private component remains local and uncommunicated, making the training DP-compatible and stabilizing aggregation under rank heterogeneity. By injecting noise only into the aggregated shareable update, this approach avoids perturbations to local directions and improves the utility-privacy trade-off. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SDFLoRA outperforms federated LoRA baselines and achieves a strong utility-privacy trade-off.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency