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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) 2026-06-16

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Static Endpoints: Tool Programs as an Interface for Flexible Agentic Web Services

arXiv:2606.19992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the agentic web era, LLM-based agents increasingly invoke web services as tools, yet most interfaces remain static endpoints that poorly express long-horizon workflows with loops, conditionals, joins, and retries. We present ToolPro, which represents an agent's tool intent as an executable tool program that compactly encodes multi-step service interactions with explicit effect types. ToolPro combines constraint-guided program construction, effect-aware replay for exactly-once state-modifying calls, and a profile-driven policy that decides when program execution outperforms stepwise calling. We instantiate ToolPro over MCP-style services with WebAssembly sandboxing and evaluate it on diverse workflows of real-world applications. ToolPro reduces end-to-end latency by up to 53.4\% and client-side traffic by up to 96.1\%, with larger gains under higher network latency and workflow complexity.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ARB4WM: An Adversarial Robustness Benchmark for World Models in Continuous Control

arXiv:2606.16605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are widely used in robotic and agentic engineering control systems due to their ability to learn latent dynamics for planning and decision-making. As these systems are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, understanding their robustness under adversarial conditions has become essential. However, existing evaluations lack a unified benchmark for testing adversarial threats across the policy, value, and latent-dynamics levels of world-model agents. To fill this gap, we present ARB4WM, a unified evaluation framework for pre-deployment robustness and risk assessment of world-model agents under visual perturbations. ARB4WM defines five white-box loss objectives across these three levels and studies their effects when combined with single-step or multi-step perturbation strategies and temporal attack modes, including full-frame, half-sequence, and sparse-frame exposure. Specifically, we evaluate four Dreamer-style agents across 20 tasks from MetaWorld and the DeepMind Control Suite under different loss objectives, perturbation strategies, and temporal attack modes. Results show that attacks targeting value estimation, latent representations, and RSSM dynamics can be as damaging as direct policy disruption, and that early or frequent perturbations are especially harmful, while input-level defenses provide limited recovery under adaptive attacks. These findings suggest that safety, risk, and reliability assessment for world models should cover multiple component-oriented attack objectives and temporal exposure protocols rather than relying solely on action-space robustness. Source code is available at https://github.com/zaoanguai/ARB4WM.

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

Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel to the agent, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. For non-forward actions, we append auxiliary directive regions to the image plane, where the left/right/bottom regions are interpreted as turning left, turning right, and stopping, respectively. To enable long-horizon navigation, we propose a visibility-aware keyframe memory for compact and informative history representation. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance while requiring fewer VLM inference calls than prior methods. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with just 7.75 VLM calls per episode, 6x fewer than the 46.62 required by direct action prediction at 32.9% SR. The same trend holds on RxR-CE.Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

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

Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network for High-Dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii Equations on Unbounded Domains

arXiv:2604.09361v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces the Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network (SD-FSNN), a novel computational framework for solving high-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) on unbounded domain. The proposed method circumvents the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues traditional discretizations and the computational bottlenecks of gradient-based neural network solvers through a synergistic combination of techniques. First, a prescribed Gaussian envelope encodes the far-field decay of the wavefunction, enabling a space-time separation where the spatial approximation is handled by a frozen, single-hidden-layer neural network with data-driven sampled features. This yields a gradient-free formalism where spatial derivatives are analytically precomputed and time-dependence is evolved via reduced ODEs. Second, a stochastic-dimension sampler provides a conditionally unbiased estimate of the spatial operator by evaluating only a small subset of spatial dimensions at each time step, essentially reducing computational and memory costs. Discrete conservation laws are also enforced, ensuring long-term stability. Extensive numerical experiments on GPE in up to 1000 dimensions demonstrate that SD-FSNN achieves significantly higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, including PINNs, randomized feature methods, and tensor-network approaches. The results confirm that SD-FSNN effectively mitigates the Kolmogorov $n$-width barrier for frozen-basis models on structured solution manifolds.

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

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

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

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

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

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Physics-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling for AI-Generated Video Detection

AI-generated videos have achieved near-perfect visual realism (e.g., Sora), urgently necessitating reliable detection mechanisms. However, detecting such videos faces significant challenges in modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics and identifying subtle anomalies that violate physical laws. In this paper, we propose the first physics-driven AI-generated video detection paradigm based on probability flow conservation principles. Specifically, we propose a statistic called Normalized Spatiotemporal Gradient (NSG), which quantifies the ratio of spatial probability gradients to temporal density changes, explicitly capturing deviations from natural video dynamics. Leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, we develop an NSG estimator through spatial gradients approximation and motion-aware temporal modeling without complex motion decomposition while preserving physical constraints. Building on this, we propose an NSG-based video detection method (NSG-VD) that computes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between NSG features of the test and real videos as a detection metric. Last, we derive an upper bound of NSG feature distances between real and generated videos, proving that generated videos exhibit amplified discrepancies due to distributional shifts. Extensive experiments confirm that NSG-VD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.00% in Recall and 10.75% in F1-Score, validating the superior performance of NSG-VD. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZSHsh98/NSG-VD.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.

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

Your "Pro" LLM Subscription May Actually Be "Free": Exposing Fingerprint Spoofing Risks in LLM Inference Services

As Large Language Model (LLM) APIs become ubiquitous, users increasingly rely on black-box fingerprinting to verify that providers are serving the advertised premium models. However, these methods may overlook adversarial providers who manipulate model weights to cheat the fingerprint process. We introduce a novel threat termed fingerprint spoofing, where a malicious provider stealthily serves a weaker model that has been parameter-efficiently fine-tuned to mimic a stronger model, thereby evading user-side fingerprinting. We first formally prove that user-side resource constraints (i.e., finite query budgets and weak fingerprinting classifiers) make current fingerprinting vulnerable to fingerprint spoofing. Guided by this theoretical analysis, we propose GhostPrint, a cost-effective attack framework leveraging surrogate modeling, reward-ranked fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation. Extensive evaluations in both static and continual fingerprinting settings demonstrate that GhostPrint allows weak models to consistently bypass representative fingerprint methods while maintaining utility at a low fine-tuning cost, exposing a critical vulnerability in current LLM fingerprinting pipelines.

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

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

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

SpecAlign: Efficient Specification-Grounded Alignment of Large Language Models via Synthetic Data

arXiv:2606.16276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, alignment is no longer governed by a single universal notion of safety or helpfulness, but instead by provider- or application-specific model specifications. These specifications are typically long, structured, and frequently updated, yet existing alignment pipelines lack a systematic mechanism to operationalize them as training signals. In this paper, we propose specification-grounded alignment, a new alignment paradigm that treats provider-authored model specifications as the primary alignment target rather than abstract principles or static benchmarks. To instantiate this paradigm, we introduce SpecAlign, a framework that synthesizes alignment data directly from specification documents. SpecAlign combines structured rule annotation, controllable specification instantiation, and multi-agent adversarial data synthesis to generate fine-grained, boundary-aware preference pairs that capture both compliant behaviors and meaningful specification violations. Experiments across multiple model specifications and backbone models demonstrate that training with SpecAlign consistently improves rule compliance while preserving general capabilities and avoiding over-conservative behavior. These results suggest that grounding alignment in explicit model specifications enables rapid, precise, and scalable adaptation of LLM behavior to evolving policy requirements.

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

EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective

Recent benchmarks for Large Language Model (LLM) agents mainly evaluate reasoning, planning, and execution. However, memory is also essential for agents, as it enables them to store, update, and retrieve information over time. This ability remains under-evaluated, largely because existing benchmarks do not provide a systematic way to assess memory mechanisms. In this paper, we study agent memory from a self-evolving perspective and introduce EvoMemBench, a unified benchmark organized along two axes: memory scope (in-episode vs. cross-episode) and memory content (knowledge-oriented vs. execution-oriented). We compare 15 representative memory methods with strong long-context baselines under a standardized protocol. Results show that current memory systems are still far from a general solution: long-context baselines remain highly competitive, memory helps most when the current context is insufficient or tasks are difficult, and no single memory form works consistently across all settings. Retrieval-based methods remain strong for knowledge-intensive settings, whereas procedural and long-term memory methods are more effective for execution-oriented tasks when their stored experience matches the task structure. We hope EvoMemBench facilitates future research on more effective memory systems for LLM-based agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/DSAIL-Memory/EvoMemBench.

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

Flux-Guard: Facial Identity Protection using diffusion models

The widespread deployment of face recognition (FR) systems exposes personal images shared on social media and public platforms to identity linkage and privacy risks. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods can degrade unauthorized FR performance but are not compatible with generative face editing. Artificial intelligence-driven face editing tools are gaining popularity, which has significantly increased user demand for personalized portrait generation and social sharing. However, current editing methods often preserve identity features, making the edited images still susceptible to tracking by malicious FR systems. Thus, this paper proposes Flux-Guard, a privacy-preserving face editing framework based on adversarial attacks, which integrates face editing and privacy protection within a unified generative process. Specifically, we design a flow trajectory control method to align semantic manipulations with the generative process and introduce latent-space adversarial optimization with an adaptive perceptual-loss-driven weighting strategy, dynamically adjusting adversarial strength to maximize attack effectiveness while preserving visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flux-Guard supports face editing while significantly improving attack success rates against cross-domain face recognition models on the CelebA-HQ and LADN datasets. Furthermore, evaluation results for commercial APIs have confirmed its effectiveness in real-world applications. The code is released at https://github.com/JLMWang/Flux-Guard.

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

StagePilot: Stage-Level Planning for Long-Horizon Dialogue Simulation in Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming is an evolving threat to youth, requiring proactive educational interventions. We address this by modeling dialogue progression as a structured planning problem over stage-wise interactions. We propose StagePilot, a dialogue framework that separates stage-level planning from response generation, in which the model selects the next stage under constrained transitions and generates responses conditioned on it, enabling coherent and realistic progression. Reinforcement learning is used to learn stage-level policies from offline data, optimizing for both emotional alignment and goal-consistent progression. Our empirical experiments show that StagePilot generates more structured, coherent dialogue trajectories and reduces conversational stagnation compared to baselines; notably, the IQL+AWAC variant reaches the final stage more often while maintaining over 70% positive or neutral responses, yielding a 43% relative improvement.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

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

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

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

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.