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Authors: Ming Li ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

02.
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.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents

In recent years, image editing models have made significant progress, enabling users to manipulate visual content in a flexible and interactive manner through natural language instructions. However, an important yet underexplored research direction remains dense visual document image editing, which involves modifying textual content within images while faithfully preserving the original text style and background context. Existing methods primarily focus on English scenarios and images with relatively sparse text, and thus cannot adequately address dense, structurally complex documents or non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. To bridge this gap, we propose VDE Bench (Visual Doc Edit Bench), a rigorously human annotated and evaluated benchmark specifically designed to assess the performance of image editing models on bilingual Chinese-English and complex visual document editing tasks. The benchmark comprises a high quality dataset of 942 instruction based image editing samples, whose seed images encompass dense Chinese and English text documents including academic papers, posters, presentation slides, examination materials, and newspapers. Furthermore, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically quantifies editing performance at the OCR parsing level, thereby enabling fine grained assessment of text modification accuracy. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of representative image editing models. Human verification demonstrates a high degree of consistency between human judgments and automated evaluation metrics. VDE Bench constitutes the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the performance of image editing models on bilingual dense text visual documents.

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

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.

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

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

07.
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.

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

Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery

arXiv:2605.12542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large foundation models (FMs) are transforming Earth science by integrating heterogeneous multimodal data, such as multi-platform imagery, gridded reanalysis data, diverse geophysical and geochemical observations, and domain-specific text, to support tasks ranging from basic perception to advanced scientific discovery. This paper provides a unified review of Earth science foundation models (Earth FMs) through two complementary dimensions: depth, which traces the evolution of model capabilities from perception to multimodal reasoning and agentic scientific workflows, and breadth, which summarizes their expanding applications across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere, and cryosphere, as well as coupled Earth system processes. Using this framework, we review representative multimodal Earth foundation models and compile more than 200 datasets and benchmarks spanning diverse Earth science tasks and modalities. We further discuss key challenges in multimodal data heterogeneity, scientific reliability and continual updating, scalability and sustainability, and the transition from foundation models to agentic and embodied Earth intelligence, and outline future directions toward more integrated, trustworthy, and actionable AI Earth scientists. Overall, this paper offers a structured roadmap for understanding the development of Earth foundation models from both capability depth and application breadth.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2510.06048v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (BileveL Influence Scoring method for data Selection): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely from scratch, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.

10.
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.

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

StreamMemBench: Streaming Evaluation of Agent Memory for Future-Oriented Assistance

arXiv:2606.14571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central role of personal-agent memory is to turn stored information and prior interactions into future-oriented assistance. In daily use, useful cues come from what the agent observes and how the user interacts with the agent, and the agent must carry them forward from the current request to similar future tasks. Existing memory benchmarks usually test dialogue recall or task improvement in isolation, leaving the trajectory from streaming observations to later assistance largely untested. We introduce StreamMemBench, a streaming benchmark that constructs a two-step task sequence around each evidence anchor from EgoLife egocentric streams. The initial task tests evidence use, while the follow-up task tests whether feedback and interaction experience are reused. Four metrics diagnose evidence recall, initial evidence use, feedback incorporation, and follow-up reuse. Experiments with eight memory systems across two backbones show that current systems often fail to use observed evidence or turn feedback into reliable follow-up behavior, even when evidence is stored or feedback is incorporated locally. StreamMemBench is publicly available at https://github.com/landian60/StreamMemBench.

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

SupraBench: A Benchmark for Supramolecular Chemistry

Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications. However, designing host-guest systems remains time-consuming, requiring days of dry-lab verification per candidate pair. Although LLMs have emerged as a fast alternative with strong performance on molecular binding tasks, no benchmark currently systematically evaluates LLMs for host-guest reasoning across fundamental supramolecular chemistry tasks, e.g., binding affinity prediction. To this end, we collaborate with domain experts to release the first Supramolecular Benchmark, called SupraBench, to evaluate LLMs in chemistry reasoning. Specifically, we design four fundamental tasks, i.e., binding affinity prediction, top-binder selection, solvent identification, and host-guest description, plus an auxiliary vision-based task for molecular identification. We also release SupraPMC, a curated 16M-token corpus of Supramolecular chemistry articles distilled from Europe PMC, to support the adaptation to the supramolecular domain. We benchmark a broad range of open and proprietary LLMs and find that LLMs leave substantial headroom across all tasks. Domain adaptation pretraining over SupraPMC transfers cleanly to in-distribution regression but trades off against strict letter-format output. Moreover, the difficulty profile differs sharply across task families, revealing distinct failure modes that indicate specific gaps in current supramolecular chemistry reasoning. Our source codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/SupraBench.

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

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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

From Explicit Elements to Implicit Intent: A Predefined Library for Auditable Behavioral Inference

Authors:

We present SemantiClean, a modular framework for extracting structured semantic signals from e-commerce session data and driving pluggable inference targets including purchase intent, customer segmentation, and product affinity through a shared element library. Unlike conventional end-to-end predictors that optimise solely for accuracy, SemantiClean prioritises auditability, structural governance, and sigma=0 reproducibility, explicitly trading marginal predictive gains for element-level transparency and defensible decision trails. Built upon the Online Shoppers Purchasing Intention (OSPI) dataset, the framework organises twenty-four behavioural elements into a four-layer architecture (Functional, Interaction, Systemic, Contextual) and enforces signal quality through three anti-inflation mechanisms: RedundancyGroup contribution caps, TieredPenaltyCalculator bias penalties, and AdaptiveConstraintMode cold-start protection.This report introduces the LLM-Integrated Semantic Inference Engine, a fully implemented two-phase LLM-driven inference architecture that leverages complete element metadata at inference time. All quantitative results reported herein are produced by this engine. Deterministic engine outputs remain fully reproducible (sigma=0); LLM-dependent results (E8, E10) are subject to controlled output variability under fixed provider/model/temperature settings. The gender inference target remains non-functional in the current implementation and is excluded from all quantitative results.

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

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

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

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.

17.
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.

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

AnchorEdit: Maintaining Temporal Consistency in Multi-turn Image Editing via Causal Memory

Multi-turn image editing is essential for iterative design, yet current models often struggle with identity drift and error accumulation over successive steps. While existing research leverages video priors for consistency, their reliance on bidirectional attention is fundamentally misaligned with the causal, sequential nature of interactive editing. In this paper, we propose AnchorEdit, the first autoregressive (AR) diffusion-based framework designed specifically for high-resolution, long-term multi-turn editing. AnchorEdit bridges the gap between video priors and causal inference through a three-stage training curriculum: identity-preserving sing-turn pretraining, causal AR forcing fine-tuning with a novel self-rollout strategy to mitigate exposure bias, and consistency distillation for efficient 4-step generation. During inference, we introduce a memory mechanism to anchor the initial subject identity and ensure stable extrapolation across extended editing trajectories. To evaluate performance, we provide a new high-resolution multi-turn editing benchmark designed to stress-test long-horizon stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorEdit achieves state-of-the-art results, maintaining exceptional subject fidelity and instruction following even over 10+ interaction rounds.

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

OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges

In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.

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 (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

23.
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.

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

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

arXiv:2606.15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions. This cross-task experiential learning capability is pivotal in domains such as personalization and interactive assistance, but existing training/evaluation frameworks do not provide shared, controllable latent structures and cannot measure whether or why agents improve. We introduce LatentGym: a controllable suite in which each environment is organized around a ground-truth latent variable governing the structure across tasks. Our construction yields metrics that separate exploration (whether the agent's actions gather information about the latent) from exploitation (whether the agent uses what it has gathered). We demonstrate our suite on empirical studies addressing three questions: how and why frontier models fail to adapt across related tasks; whether post-training on related task sequences improves general cross-task adaptation, and where those gains come from; and how design choices such as inter-task feedback shape training dynamics and generalization. Together, these results establish a controlled foundation for studying how LLM agents learn from experience across tasks, and for designing agents that adapt more reliably in sequential, personalized, and interactive settings.

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

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.