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Authors: Lei Yuan ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Mirror Descent on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2603.17527v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we develop a Riemannian Mirror Descent (RMD) framework via reparameterization and further propose a stochastic variant of RMD. We also establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both RMD and stochastic RMD. As an application to the Stiefel manifold, our RMD framework reduces to the Curvilinear Gradient Descent (CGD) method proposed in [26]. Moreover, when specializing the stochastic RMD framework to the Stiefel setting, we obtain a stochastic extension of CGD, which effectively addresses large-scale manifold optimization problems.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Offline Multi-agent Continual Cooperation via Skill Partition and Reuse

arXiv:2606.25389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extracting skills from multi-agent offline dataset improves learning efficiency via sharing task-invariant coordination skills among tasks. In settings where tasks occur sequentially and the space of skills grows exponentially, existing approaches that rely on heuristically designed and fixed-sized skill libraries struggle to resolve the problem of distributional shift and interference, facing catastrophic forgetting and plasticity loss. To address this problem and endow agents with the ability to continually discover and reuse coordination skills in open-environment, we propose COMAD, a principled framework for Continual Offline Multi-agent Skill Discovery via Skill Partition and Reuse. We first discover skills from mixed multi-agent behavior data with an auto-encoder to transform coordination knowledge into reusable coordination skills. Then we construct a skill-augmented policy learning objective with multi-head architectures, explicitly guiding the advantage function with reusable skills identified via a density-based reusability estimator. Theoretical analysis shows our method approximates the optimum of a continual skill discovery problem. Empirical results across diverse MARL benchmarks show that COMAD continually expands its skill library to mitigate interference, achieving superior forward and backward transfer for task streams compared to multiple baselines.

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

Understanding Diversity Collapse in RLVR via the Lens of Overtraining

arXiv:2606.15455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, RLVR often suffers from diversity collapse: Pass@$1$ improves while high-$k$ Pass@$k$ degrades, which is viewed as a narrowing of the model's reasoning boundary. We formalize this diversity collapse through the lens of overtraining: once a problem's contribution to the reference metric has effectively saturated, further updates no longer expand what the model can solve but still concentrate probability mass on the trajectories favored by on-policy sampling. Under a standard setup with few rollouts per problem, even a single observed success places a problem in a nearly saturated regime for high-$k$ Pass@$k$, so most updates in standard RLVR are overtraining from the boundary perspective. This perspective also suggests a reading of whether RLVR can expand the model's reasoning abilities beyond the base model: since RLVR is structurally biased against high-$k$ Pass@$k$, its aggregate decline does not by itself mean that no new reasoning gains occurred. Interventionally, restricting updates to problems with zero observed success lifts Pass@$256$ above the base model on difficult benchmarks; observationally, a non-trivial fraction of initially unsolvable problems become solvable during standard RLVR training. Building on these findings, we propose Bayesian Boundary Gating (BBG), which redirects optimization away from overtraining by estimating each problem's marginal contribution to the reasoning boundary. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, BBG improves average Pass@$k$ across a wide range of $k$.

04.
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.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction

Dense prediction is a fundamental requirement for many medical vision tasks such as medical image restoration, registration, and segmentation. The most popular vision model, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), has reached bottlenecks due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations. Recently, transformers have been widely adopted for dense prediction for their capability to capture long-range visual dependence. However, due to the high computational complexity and large memory consumption of self-attention operations, transformers are usually used at downsampled feature resolutions. Such usage cannot effectively leverage the tissue-level textural information available only at the full image resolution. This textural information is crucial for medical dense prediction as it can differentiate the subtle human anatomy in medical images. In this study, we hypothesize that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are superior alternatives to transformers in medical dense prediction where tissue-level details dominate the performance, as MLPs enable long-range dependence at the full image resolution. To validate our hypothesis, we develop a full-resolution hierarchical MLP framework that uses MLPs beginning from the full image resolution. We evaluate this framework with various MLP blocks on a wide range of medical dense prediction tasks including restoration, registration, and segmentation. Extensive experiments on six public well-benchmarked datasets show that, by simply using MLPs at full resolution, our framework outperforms its CNN and transformer counterparts and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various medical dense prediction tasks.

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

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling for Stable RLHF

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals, as exemplified by GRPO's uniform treatment of rewards during advantage computation. As policies explore increasingly diverse responses, these two limitations create a critical vulnerability: unreliable reward estimates may be granted disproportionate influence, triggering severe reward hacking. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling (UARM), which equips reward models with calibrated uncertainty via quantile-based conformal prediction and reweights GRPO advantages through heteroscedastic variance decomposition. Experiments across HelpSteer, UltraFeedback, and PKU-SafeRLHF demonstrate that UARM significantly improves reward model calibration, reduces reward hacking, and enhances downstream alignment quality compared to standard GRPO and uncertainty-agnostic baselines.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

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

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Achieving High-Quality Portfolio Optimization with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver

arXiv:2508.18625v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Portfolio optimization lies at the core of quantitative finance and aims to determine how assets should be allocated to balance expected returns against risk. It can be formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, which is NP-hard. Quantum computing offers the potential to solve such problems more efficiently than classical methods. In this work, we employ the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to address the portfolio optimization problem. To increase the likelihood of converging to high-quality solutions, we propose using the Weighted Conditional Value-at-Risk (WCVaR) as the cost function and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) as the optimizer. Our experiments are conducted using both classical simulations and quantum hardware on the Wuyue QuantumAI platform. Together, these results demonstrate that the combination of WCVaR and CMA-ES improves the performance of VQE for portfolio optimization and provides a practical route for applications on NISQ devices.

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

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

Foundation models in language and multimodality achieve strong generalization by aligning heterogeneous data under a unified formulation and training at scale. In this report, we investigate whether this scaling recipe can be applied to robotic manipulation to achieve genuine generalization. This is challenging because, unlike text, manipulation data is heterogeneous by nature, expensive to collect, and narrow in diversity, making alignment and scale simultaneously difficult. We present Qwen-RobotManip, a generalizable Vision-Language-Action foundation model built on Qwen-VL. Qwen-RobotManip introduces a unified alignment framework across the representation, motion, and behavioral dimensions of manipulation, making large-scale multi-source training coherent rather than conflicting. This alignment capability in turn enables Qwen-RobotManip to absorb manipulation data at a scale that prior training regimes could not sustain. A human-to-robot synthesis pipeline converts egocentric hand demonstrations into robot trajectories across 15 platforms, and a rigorous curation pipeline harmonizes heterogeneous datasets. Using only open-source datasets and human videos without proprietary data collection, Qwen-RobotManip constructs a ~38,100-hour pretraining corpus and exhibits emergent generalization capabilities, including zero-shot instruction following, robustness to perturbations, reactive error recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. We find that standard benchmarks fail to capture pretraining quality and instead adopt OOD settings including RoboCasa365, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, RoboTwin-Clean2Rand, RoboTwin-IF, and RoboTwin-XE. Qwen-RobotManip substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art models, including $\pi$0.5, across all OOD settings, ranks 1st in RoboChallenge with a 20% relative improvement, and is validated on real-robot platforms including AgileX ALOHA, Franka, UR, and ARX.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MODE: Modality-Decomposed Expert-Level Mixed-Precision Quantization for MoE Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2606.17118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal Large Language Models (MoE-MLLMs) offer remarkable performance but incur prohibitive GPU memory costs, making compression essential. Among PTQ methods, expert-level mixed-precision quantization has proven effective for MoE-LLMs, yet suffers notable degradation on MoE-MLLMs due to two overlooked biases in expert importance estimation. (1) At the cross-modal level, the numerical dominance of vision tokens causes expert selection frequency to be dominated by vision tokens, masking experts that are critical to the text modality; (2) at the intra-vision level, the large proportion of redundant vision tokens further skew frequency statistics, obscuring experts critical for informative visual content. To bridge gaps, we propose MODE, a modality-decomposed expert-level mixed-precision quantization framework for MoE-MLLMs that decomposes expert selection frequency by modality, filters redundant vision tokens to obtain denoised visual frequency, and further evaluates quantization sensitivity per modality as a complementary signal to frequency-based estimation. These signals are integrated into an Integer Linear Programming formulation to assign per-expert bit-widths under a given budget. Extensive experiments show that MODE is particularly well-suited for MoE-MLLMs, limiting average performance loss to within 2.9% at W3A16, with larger gains at the extreme 2-bit setting.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists' First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

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

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

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

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

arXiv:2606.11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

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

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

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

AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation

Audio and music generation based on flexible multimodal control signals is a widely applicable topic, with the following key challenges: 1) a unified multimodal modeling framework, 2) large-scale, high-quality training data, and 3) the prohibitive inference cost of multi-step diffusion sampling. As such, we propose AudioX-Turbo, a unified and efficient framework for anything-to-audio generation that integrates varied multimodal conditions (i.e., text, video, and audio signals) in this work. AudioX-Turbo follows a teacher-student paradigm. The teacher AudioX-Base is built on a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer with a Multimodal Adaptive Fusion module that aligns diverse multimodal inputs for high-fidelity synthesis, and is then distilled into the few-step student AudioX-Turbo via Distribution Matching Distillation adapted to flow matching, complemented by a diffusion-based discriminator for high-quality few-step generation. To support the training of AudioX-Turbo, we construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset, IF-caps-Pro, comprising approximately 9.2M samples curated through a two-stage data collection and annotation pipeline. We benchmark AudioX-Turbo across a wide range of tasks, finding that our model achieves superior performance, especially on text-to-audio and text-to-music generation, while operating at only 4 sampling steps and requiring approximately 25x fewer function evaluations (NFE) than multi-step baselines. These results demonstrate that our method is capable of audio generation under flexible multimodal control, showing efficient and powerful instruction-following capabilities. The code and datasets will be available at https://zeyuet.github.io/AudioX-Turbo/.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An iterative Ising decoder for quantum error correction codes

arXiv:2606.12301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Ising framework maps the decoding problem in quantum error correction onto ground-state optimization of a classical Hamiltonian, in which $X$-$Z$ error correlations enter as cross terms. Under phenomenological depolarizing noise, the exact joint formulation contains up to 8-body interactions for the toric code and 10-body for the $6.6.6$ color code. These high-order terms degrade solver convergence, inflate runtime, and raise the auxiliary spin overhead when embedding into native 2-body Ising hardware. In this work, we propose the iterative low-order decoding (ILOD) algorithm, which alternates between $X$- and $Z$-type sub-Hamiltonians, approximating cross-type correlations through Bayesian priors that reweight each type's couplings using the other type's inferred error configuration. This halves the maximum body count of interaction terms in the Hamiltonian, accelerating the solver, restoring convergence at larger code distances, and reducing the total spin count for 2-body embedding by a factor of $2.5$. For the toric code, ILOD attains a threshold of $4.73%$ versus $4.83%$ for the joint formulation, with the empirical runtime ratio scaling as $(0.81)^d$. For the $6.6.6$ color code, their thresholds agree within statistical uncertainty for small code distances, and ILOD remains convergent for larger distances where the joint formulation fails to converge despite a larger annealing budget.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

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

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

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

CrossEarth-Gate: Fisher-Guided Adaptive Tuning Engine for Efficient Adaptation of Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

In Remote Sensing (RS), Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a key approach to activate the generalizable representation ability of foundation models for downstream tasks. However, existing specialized PEFT methods often fail when applied to large-scale Earth observation tasks, as they are unable to fully handle the multifaceted and unpredictable domain gaps (e.g., spatial, semantic, and frequency shifts) inherent in RS data. To overcome this, we propose CrossEarth-Gate, which introduces two primary contributions. First, we establish a comprehensive RS module toolbox to address multifaceted domain gaps, comprising spatial, semantic, and frequency modules. Second, we develop a Fisher-guided adaptive selection mechanism that operates on this toolbox. This selection is guided by Fisher Information to quantify each module's importance by measuring its contribution to the task-specific gradient flow. It dynamically activates only the most critical modules at the appropriate layers, guiding the gradient flow to maximize adaptation effectiveness and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy and generalizability of our method, where CrossEarth-Gate achieves state-of-the-art performance on 16 out of 18 cross-domain benchmarks for RS semantic segmentation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ClinHallu: A Benchmark for Diagnosing Stage-Wise Hallucinations in Medical MLLM Reasoning

Building trustworthy medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is critical for reliable clinical decision support. Existing medical hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on data collection, but often ignore where hallucinations originate within the reasoning process. We find that hallucination sources vary across samples: errors may arise from visual misrecognition, incorrect medical knowledge recall, or flawed reasoning integration. To enable source-level hallucination diagnosis, we introduce ClinHallu, a benchmark for stage-wise hallucination diagnosis in medical MLLM reasoning. ClinHallu contains 7,031 validated instances, where each instance is augmented with a structured reasoning trace decomposed into Visual Recognition, Knowledge Recall, and Reasoning Integration. We also use stage-replacement interventions to measure how correcting specific stages affects the final answer. Beyond evaluation, we show that trace-supervised fine-tuning reduces stage-wise hallucinations. ClinHallu provides a fine-grained hallucination testbed for diagnosing and mitigating reasoning failures in medical MLLMs. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/ClinHallu.