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Authors: Ming Jing ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

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

CAP: Towards PPG Universal Representation Learning with Patient-level Supervision

arXiv:2606.15284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a central role in wearable health monitoring and clinical decision support. Yet existing approaches to universal PPG representation learning largely focus on signal-level objectives and often overlook patient-level health context, which limits generalization to complex clinical tasks and heterogeneous cohorts. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale paired PPG-EHR multimodal dataset by distilling fragmented medical histories and clinical records into cohesive, patient-level electronic health records (EHR). Building on this resource, we propose Clinical Anchored Pretraining for PPG (CAP). During pretraining, CAP performs cross-modal contrastive alignment that anchors PPG representations to patient-level clinical semantics, guiding the encoder beyond waveform fitting toward modeling consistency in a patient's overall physiological state. During downstream adaptation, the pretrained PPG encoder provides clinically grounded representations that strengthen inductive bias and improve robustness and transferability. Experiments demonstrate that CAP consistently outperforms strong baselines on four diverse downstream tasks. CAP achieves a particularly large gain on respiratory rate prediction (up to +87.6% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline) and delivers an average relative +26.7% across all tasks. We further enhance the interpretability of our approach through comprehensive analyses, including ablations and multiple complementary visualizations of the learned representations. The code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/gody123gody/CAP .

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

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

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

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

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

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.

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

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

09.
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.

10.
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.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

arXiv:2606.12871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users' expectations. To facilitate future research, our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Eval-Official/DailyReport.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Knowing When to Ask: Self-Gated Clarification for Hierarchical Language Agents

arXiv:2606.11349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In hierarchical reasoning, failures often originate at intermediate decision points where the agent commits to a wrong branch without recognizing that it lacks critical information. Rather than treating clarification as an external uncertainty trigger, we propose ACTION-RATING, a formulation that places it inside the agent's action space on a shared ordinal scale with navigation, so that asking competes directly with acting at every decision point and help-seeking becomes observable at intermediate states. Two structurally distinct information-seeking modes emerge from the agent's own ratings: mandatory (no viable branch) and opportunistic (residual uncertainty despite a leading candidate). On Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification (30,000-node taxonomy, three benchmarks, 9~LLMs across 4 families), we observe a regime shift from mandatory to opportunistic clarification, with Information-Seeking Effectiveness (ISE), a local diagnostic defined as the fraction of help interactions followed by a correct next navigation step (not a final-task metric), rising from 50% to 74%. Three diagnostic contrasts fail to reproduce this structure. A separability test shows that the information-seeking pattern (mode split, ISE ranking) persists when answer quality is degraded (-18.8% accuracy), supporting an empirical separation between where an agent seeks help and the quality of the help it receives. Under the controlled answer channel, accuracy gains reach +16.2% at 10-digit; we read this as an upper bound on what better localization could unlock, not a deployment estimate.

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

NEXUS: Neural Energy Fields for Physically Consistent Contact-Rich 3D Object Dynamics

Physics-grounded video generation requires controllable 3D object dynamics that remain physically consistent under contact, deformation, and external forcing. Existing trajectory-based methods often model isolated physical effects, making it difficult to compose conservative and non-conservative dynamics in contact-rich 3D scenes. We present NEXUS, a neural energy-field framework for contact-rich 3D object dynamics. NEXUS represents each object as a structural graph and constructs dynamic object-object and object-environment contact graphs. Inspired by Hamiltonian Neural Networks, NEXUS formulates motion through scalar energy and dissipation terms rather than directly predicting states or accelerations. Conservative effects, including gravity and elastic deformation, are composed as additive energy terms, while non-conservative effects such as damping and impact-induced energy loss are modeled with learned Rayleigh-style dissipation. Forces are derived by differentiating the energy and dissipation functions and rolled out with a multi-substep semi-implicit integrator. Across controlled trajectory benchmarks, NEXUS improves long-horizon accuracy over representative learned and physics-structured dynamics baselines under varying mechanical properties and physical-effect compositions. We further show that NEXUS trajectories provide effective guidance for contact-rich video generation, improving physical plausibility while maintaining competitive visual quality.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PO-PDDL: Learning Symbolic POMDPs from Visual Demonstrations for Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.15654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robot task planning must operate under both stochastic action execution and partial observability, yet constructing Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) models for real robotics domains remains difficult and labor-intensive. We introduce PO-PDDL, a symbolic formulation of POMDPs that preserves the relational structure and LLM-friendly syntax of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), while explicitly modeling partial observability, stochasticity, and beliefs. Building on this formulation, we propose a demonstration-driven pipeline for learning PO-PDDL models. The proposed method reconstructs latent symbolic state trajectories from real-robot execution videos, identifies partial observability via inconsistencies between inferred states and visual observations, and learns stochastic transition and observation models accordingly. The resulting PO-PDDL domains are reusable across tasks and enable online belief-space planning under both perception and execution uncertainty. Experiments on real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks show that our method consistently outperforms existing PDDL and POMDP model-learning approaches, achieving robust task planning under uncertainty with significantly lower planning cost.

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

SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks

Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on passive evaluation (e.g., static VQA) or simulator-specific pipelines, failing to assess general interactive spatial understanding. We introduce SpatialWorld, a unified benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the interactive spatial understanding of multimodal agents in complex real-world tasks. Integrating eight heterogeneous simulation backends under a shared, simulator-agnostic protocol, SpatialWorld features 760 human-annotated tasks across diverse domains (e.g., household routines, travel, social collaboration). Agents must solve tasks under vision-only partial observability, actively gathering egocentric visual evidence and expressing decisions via a unified, text-based action interface native to MLLMs. For reliable evaluation, each task includes a human-validated initial state, a reference trajectory, and a terminal-state verifier. Evaluating 15 advanced agents reveals that robust spatial task solving remains challenging: the strongest model, GPT-5, achieves an average task success rate (TSR) of only 17.4%, while the leading open-source model, Qwen-3.5, reaches 14.1%. Further analysis exposes a clear mismatch between task success and execution efficiency, alongside substantial domain-specific performance variations. These bottlenecks in active exploration and long-horizon planning position SpatialWorld as a rigorous testbed for future spatial agents.

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

Conditional Latent Diffusion Model with Fourier-based Motion Modelling for Virtual Population Synthesis

In-silico trials of medical devices require the generation of virtual populations of anatomies. In cardiovascular applications, virtual anatomy is typically represented as a 3D+t mesh sampled from a generative model. However, most existing mesh generators focus on static anatomy, while sequence models often lack explicit periodicity. To this end, we propose 4D F-MeshLDM, a conditional generative framework comprising a convolutional mesh VAE to encode meshes, a structural latent space that parameterises motion using a truncated Fourier series, and a diffusion prior that learns the latent distribution over Fourier coefficient tokens. By conditioning the diffusion process on clinical covariates via affine modulation, we enable controllable synthesis. Sampling tokens and performing inverse Fourier synthesis yield cycle-consistent latent trajectories, which can be decoded into 3D+t cardiac mesh sequences. Experiments on 5,000 UK Biobank subjects demonstrate that 4D F-MeshLDM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in anatomical fidelity and achieves near-zero cycle closure error. Furthermore, the generated cohorts accurately preserve clinical functional indices, highlighting the potential of our framework for reliable in-silico cardiac trials.

18.
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.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Auxiliary Reasoning Unleashes GUI Grounding in VLMs

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to better articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. Experimental results show substantial gains from auxiliary reasoning. Mark-Grid Scaffold boosts Gemini-3.1-Pro from 11.72\% under direct inference to 95.20\% on ScreenSpot-v2, achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScreenSpot, and approaches the strongest fine-tuned methods on ScreenSpot-v2 and UI-I2E-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/liweim/AuxiliaryReasoning.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

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

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting Mergeability of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Updates

arXiv:2606.19549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes it cheap to train many domain- and task-specific language model adapters, but whether two adapters can be merged is usually discovered only after both have been fully trained and evaluated. This late feedback is costly: adapters that are strong in isolation can interfere destructively once their updates are combined. We ask whether this outcome can be anticipated. We formalize adapter mergeability as the degree to which an adapter preserves its single-task utility after merging, and show that it can be forecast from signals measured in the first few percent of training – chiefly how the low-rank updates and their gradients align across tasks and how much they disturb shared representations. We package these signals into MergeProbe, a lightweight predictor that estimates pairwise and set-level retention and turns the estimate into a concrete decision: merge directly, reweight, prune, or route. On MERGE-PEFT, a five-domain benchmark spanning math, code, science, instruction following, and safety, MergeProbe attains the best average and worst-case retention among strong interference-aware merge baselines while adding far less deployment overhead than full task routing. This turns LoRA merging from a post-hoc engineering step into an anticipatory measurement problem.

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

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

25.
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.