×

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

作者: Ming Li ×
换一批
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

arXiv:2604.22748v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate. Code and resources are available at: https://github.com/matrix-agent/awesome-agentic-world-modeling.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

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

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

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

Tac-DINO: Learning Vision-Tactile Features with Patch Alignment

Touch is the primary medium through which humans interact with the environment. Currently, tactile learning mainly focuses on image-level pretraining or alignment. However, tactile signals correspond to local object contact, while research into scale alignment and holographic matching remains limited and proper datasets and benchmarks also lack. To bridge this gap, we first construct a data collection system to acquire a large-scale tactile dataset, with over 20 K tactile contacts from 505 real-world objects. Building on this dataset, we design a Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark to evaluate vision-tactile local-to-global alignment ability. Then we propose Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods for vision-tactile representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that these exceed the performance of methods without alignment and align with whole-object images.

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

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination. In this work, we evaluate 42 proprietary and open-weight LLMs in zero-shot settings using two complementary approaches: direct discrimination prediction, where models explicitly estimate an item's discrimination value from its content, and response-based Classical Test Theory (CTT) calibration, where LLM answers are treated as synthetic student responses to compute discrimination scores. Our results show that direct prediction yields weak alignment with human-calibrated discrimination: the best-performing model reaches only a Spearman correlation of 0.152. Response-based CTT calibration provides a stronger but still limited signal, with the all-persona synthetic respondent pool reaching a Spearman correlation of 0.241. These findings highlight item discrimination as an open challenge for LLM-based psychometric evaluation: current LLMs contain non-random discrimination-relevant signal, but they do not yet reliably capture how assessment items distinguish human students.

08.
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.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates. To unlock this potential, we present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm to accelerate dLLM inference while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to dLLMs. Spiffy performs auto-speculation to eliminate the overheads of an independent draft model, structuring draft states in the form of a novel directed draft graph to take advantage of the bidirectional, blockwise nature of dLLM generation. These draft graphs are calibrated offline to maximize acceptance rates and are dynamically pruned during inference for improved computational efficiency. We present a detailed formulation of Spiffy and demonstrate its ability to accelerate LLaDA, Dream, and SDAR models in combination with KV caching and threshold-based dynamic unmasking leading to up to $8.6\times$ reduction in model inferences and $6.3\times$ acceleration in token rate.

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

An Electric Potential-Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Physics-Guided Image Reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography

While deep learning has significantly advanced image reconstruction of Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), most data-driven methods map directly between capacitance and permittivity distribution, treating the sensor as a black box. This overlooks the electric potential field – the fundamental physical link governing the nonlinear and ill-posed ``soft-field'' effect. To address this, we propose an electric potential-augmented ECT benchmark dataset designed to explicitly integrate latent physics behind ECT into the learning process. Generated via a COMSOL-MATLAB pipeline for an eight-electrode sensor as an example, the dataset comprises 20,000 randomized samples across four typical flow patterns. Crucially, alongside the conventional capacitance vectors and permittivity distributions depicted as images, each sample preserves eight excitation-wise full-field potential maps. Beyond data release, we provide illustrative evaluation protocols for both forward and inverse problems of ECT. Through comprehensive testing on both in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, we systematically demonstrate how the inclusion of electric potential maps enhances modeling accuracy and robustness. Fundamentally, the explicit inclusion of latent field information significantly lowers the barrier to integrating physical laws into ECT modeling, thereby establishing a standardized foundation for future physics-guided machine learning of ECT image reconstruction.

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

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

arXiv:2606.14551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

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

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

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

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

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

ReA-OVCD: Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection via Semantic and Spatial Refinement

Unlike traditional remote sensing change detection that relies on predefined categories, Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (OVCD) identifies land cover changes flexibly using arbitrary text prompts. However, existing methods suffer from an inherent trade-off when modeling changes: instance-level comparison overlooks fine-grained semantic variations (e.g., partial building extensions), while direct pixel comparison proves unreliable, yielding unstable responses and boundary artifacts due to semantic ambiguity and spatial inconsistency. To this end, we propose an efficient training-free Reliability-Aware Open-Vocabulary Change Detection (ReA-OVCD) framework. It first derives candidate change regions from pixel-wise semantic discrepancies to ensure flexible and detailed localization. To ensure reliability, it subsequently introduces a collaborative refinement strategy to explicitly model change validity from both semantic and spatial perspectives. Specifically, we develop a Semantic Change Reasoning (SCR) module that reassesses changes by jointly analyzing distributional divergence and response variation, enabling the suppression of incidental inconsistencies while preserving reliable semantic shifts. In addition, a Boundary-aware Change Refinement (BCR) module is designed to mitigate artifacts stemming from boundary misalignment and uncertainty through validating whether candidate regions are supported by reliable interior pixels. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, DSIFN, and SECOND) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving $\mathrm{F}_{1}^{C}$ improvements of 2.13\% to 9.75\% with higher computational efficiency. The code is publicly available at \https://github.com/Funny0101/ReA-OVCD

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

TINNs: Time-Induced Neural Networks for Solving Time-Dependent PDEs

arXiv:2601.20361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by learning a mesh-free, differentiable solution that can be evaluated anywhere in space and time. However, standard space-time PINNs take time as an input but reuse a single network with shared weights across all times, forcing the same features to represent markedly different dynamics. This coupling degrades error performance and can destabilize training when enforcing PDE, boundary, and initial constraints jointly. We propose Time-Induced Neural Networks (TINNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes the network weights as a learned function of time, allowing the effective spatial representation to evolve over time while maintaining shared structure. The resulting formulation naturally yields a nonlinear least-squares problem, which we optimize efficiently using a Levenberg-Marquardt method. Experiments on various time-dependent PDEs show up to 4 times improved relative error and 10 times faster convergence compared to PINNs and strong baselines.

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

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

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

ScholarSum: Student-Teacher Abstractive Summarization via Knowledge Graph Reasoning and Reflective Refinement

Abstractive summarization plays a crucial role in enabling efficient understanding of scientific literature, yet it inherently demands both linguistic fluency and factual faithfulness. Existing approaches often fail to reconcile these two requirements. Extractive methods rely on rigid sentence splicing that disrupts macro-level logical coherence, while large language model (LLM)-based generative approaches, despite mastering linguistic fluency, exhibit limited factual consistency. In this work, we propose ScholarSum, a hierarchical reflective graph-based framework that emulates a student-teacher writing process for fluent and faithful scientific summarization. ScholarSum first organizes the document into a hierarchical knowledge graph by segmenting it into semantically coherent units, whose multi-layered community structure captures global logic and macro-level themes. Guided by this global structure, the student generates an initial draft, which is subsequently refined through fine-grained evidence retrieval. To ensure factual consistency, a teacher-like reviewer then iteratively examines the draft, identifies unsupported content, and prompts targeted re-retrieval and rewriting until the summary meets rigorous quality standards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScholarSum significantly outperforms previous baselines in terms of both completeness and faithfulness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/ScholarSum.

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

CoRA: Confidence-Rationale Alignment for Reliable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve LLM performance, but high answer confidence may be misleading when the accompanying CoT rationale is plausible yet incomplete or poorly supported. We study confidence–rationale alignment: whether a model's confidence in its committed answer is justified by its generated rationale. We introduce a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework that jointly rewards answer correctness, committed-answer probability, and rubric-based rationale support, where the rubric assesses grounding, coherence, task match, and connection to the selected answer without revealing the gold answer to the judge. Across MedQA, MathQA, and OpenBookQA using three open-weight LLMs, our method reduces the confidence–rationale alignment error by up to 26.51% compared with untuned checkpoints, SFT, and correctness-only GRPO, while maintaining competitive accuracy and often improving calibration. These results show that reliable CoT reasoning requires not only confident answers, but rationales that substantively support them.

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ActWorld: From Explorable to Interactive World Model via Action-Aware Memory

Interactive world models aim to simulate environment dynamics under real-time user actions. However, their action vocabulary is largely confined to navigation: most actions correspond to motion (e.g., walk, turn, look around), while interaction with objects in the scene (e.g., pick up plates, open doors, or trigger physical responses) is either absent, restricted to game domains, or relegated to prompt-to-full-video scenarios. The resulting worlds are visually explorable but not truly actionable. In this work, we present ActWorld, an interactive world model that extends prior navigation-centric generators to support mid-rollout object interaction within a chunk-autoregressive framework. We argue that the navigation-interaction gap stems from two bottlenecks. First, a data bottleneck: the lack of human-object interaction data with accurate, dense labels. Second, a memory bottleneck: recency-biased history compression in existing world models discards the event-transition frames that causally determine subsequent object states, leading to an action-forgetting pathology. On the data side, we construct a 100K interaction video dataset, each annotated with per-chunk captions via chain-of-thought reasoning. On the model side, we introduce a hierarchical action-aware memory design that routes history compression by interaction importance, complemented by a persistent memory bank that maintains event-update and object-identity tokens across long rollouts. Experiments show that ActWorld supports both flexible navigation and rich object interaction within a single model, substantially improving interaction fidelity over navigation-only baselines without sacrificing viewpoint control. Project page is available at https://interactwm.github.io/ActWorld.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

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

FasterPy: An LLM-based Code Execution Efficiency Optimization Framework

arXiv:2512.22827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant loops, repeated computations), making them labor-intensive and limited in applicability. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives by learning optimization heuristics from annotated code corpora and performance measurements. However, these approaches usually depend on specific program representations and meticulously crafted training datasets, making them costly to develop and difficult to scale. With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities in code generation have opened new avenues for automated code optimization. In this work, we proposed FasterPy, a low-cost and efficient framework that adapts LLMs to optimize the execution efficiency of Python code. FasterPy combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), supported by a knowledge base constructed from existing performance-improving code pairs and corresponding performance measurements, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enhance code optimization performance. Our experimental results on the Performance Improving Code Edits (PIE) benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models on multiple metrics. The FasterPy tool and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WuYue22/fasterpy.