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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

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

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

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

PhoneHarness: Harnessing Phone-Use Agents through Mixed GUI, CLI, and Tool Actions

Phone agents are increasingly expected to complete real mobile workflows rather than merely predict the next screen action. However, much of the current mobile-agent literature still evaluates agents primarily as GUI controllers that observe a screen, emit taps and swipes, and are scored by target app state. Real phone-use tasks are broader: they require deciding when to use app GUIs, device-side commands, or structured tools, while leaving evidence that the intended side effect actually occurred. We introduce PhoneHarness, a mixed-action benchmark and execution harness for studying phone-use agents on verifiable mobile workflows. PhoneHarness runs a device-side agent loop over GUI, CLI, and host-side tool actions, combining deterministic action routing with bounded GUI delegation and auditable execution traces. Its benchmark, PhoneHarness Bench, evaluates whether agents complete tasks with observable side effects, not only whether they produce plausible final answers. On the annotated evaluation split, PhoneHarness reaches a 75.0% pass rate, outperforming the strongest non-PhoneHarness settings by 12.9 percentage points. PhoneHarness and PhoneHarness Bench therefore play distinct but mutually dependent roles: the harness makes mixed phone workflows executable, while the benchmark measures whether agents can use that harness reliably and safely. Our findings suggest that reliable phone automation depends on action-surface routing and verifiable execution, not only visual GUI control.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Prompt Perturbation for Reliable LLM Evaluation over Comparison Graphs

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is important for understanding their capabilities, comparing competing systems, and supporting the deployment of reliable models in practice. For open-ended tasks, pairwise evaluation has become a popular paradigm, in which two responses to the same prompt are compared and the resulting judgments are aggregated into an overall ranking. A central challenge of this paradigm is intransitivity: the induced comparison outcomes may fail to support any coherent global ranking. For example, one may observe cyclic preferences such as $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$, or inconsistencies involving ties such as $A \equiv B\equiv C\neq A$. Such contradictions make the resulting leaderboard unstable and challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a prompt perturbation framework for improving the consistency of pairwise LLM evaluation. Our approach generates perturbed variants of each prompt, uses the resulting comparison graphs to identify and filter out structurally inconsistent comparison patterns, and then applies standard ranking methods to the filtered comparisons. A key feature of the proposed framework is that graph-level structural consistency is incorporated explicitly into the evaluation pipeline before ranking aggregation. This provides a simple and principled way to reduce cyclic inconsistencies and improve the reliability of LLM rankings.

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

PP-OCRv6: From 1.5M to 34.5M Parameters, Surpassing Billion-Scale VLMs on OCR Tasks

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on general vision-language tasks, yet they suffer from hallucination, imprecise localization, and prohibitive computational cost when applied to dedicated OCR scenarios. This paper presents PP-OCRv6, a lightweight OCR system that combines architectural innovation with data-centric optimization. PP-OCRv6 redesigns the backbone, detection neck, and recognition neck around a unified MetaFormer-style building block with structural reparameterization, decoupling spatial token mixing from channel mixing and supporting both tasks through task-specific stride configurations. Three model tiers (medium, small, tiny) share the same block primitives, covering deployment scenarios from server to edge. On our in-house benchmarks, PP-OCRv6_medium achieves 83.2% recognition accuracy and 86.2% detection Hmean, outperforming PP-OCRv5_server by +5.1% and +4.6% respectively while surpassing Qwen3-VL-235B, GPT-5.5, and Gemini-3.1-Pro with orders of magnitude fewer parameters. The tiny tier achieves 3.9$\times$ faster inference than PP-OCRv5_mobile on Intel Xeon CPU while maintaining comparable accuracy.

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

Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence

While LLMs have substantially advanced text-to-code synthesis, many real programming tasks specify intent through visual artifacts such as screenshots, charts, documents, vector drawings, videos, and interactive states. These tasks require models to connect visual perception to executable programs, because correctness depends not only on syntax but also on layout, geometry, data semantics, editability, interaction behavior, and domain-specific constraints that apply after execution. This survey examines Multimodal Code Intelligence, covering systems that generate, edit, refine, execute, or reason with code under visually grounded inputs and outputs. We first formulate the field by the role that code plays in each task, distinguishing code as a rendered artifact, an editable symbolic structure, a scientific representation, an intermediate reasoning trace, or an executable policy or tool interface. We then organize benchmarks and methods into four domains: Graphical User Interface, Scientific Visualization, Structured Graphics, and Frontier Tasks and Frameworks. This taxonomy connects mature artifact-generation problems to emerging agentic and unified settings and allows us to compare how different tasks treat evidence of correctness. Looking ahead, we argue that future research may benefit from four verification-centered directions. Multi-signal validation can combine complementary evidence of correctness, multi-state verification can test behavior across execution trajectories, cross-task transfer testing can probe reusable visual-code skills, and verifiable agent traces can reveal whether agent actions are grounded in visual evidence. Together, these directions may move multimodal code generation from single-output imitation toward evidence-grounded executable systems.

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

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

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

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

JAMER: Project-Level Code Framework Dataset and Benchmark on Professional Game Engines

Current AI-driven game development has made substantial progress in asset generation, gameplay design, and web-based game coding, yet project-level code engineering on professional game engines remains largely unexplored due to the absence of large-scale datasets and deterministic evaluation methods. We present JamSet and JamBench, the first project-level game code framework dataset and benchmark built on a professional game engine. Our key insight is that Game Jam competitions, community events where developers build complete games under tight time constraints, yield thousands of open-source projects suitable for this purpose. Building on the Godot engine's text-based format and headless execution mode, we design a deterministic verification pipeline from file integrity to runtime behavior collection, distilling 8,133 verified projects from over 240,000 repositories. Of these, 300 manually verified projects form JamBench; the rest constitute JamSet. JamBench defines theme-driven generation and code completion tasks, evaluated through a pipeline combining compilation pass rates, Structural Completeness Score (SCS), and Behavioral Alignment Score (BAS). Evaluation of 9 frontier models reveals a capability cliff as project scale increases, with runtime pass rates dropping from 80.4% on small projects to 5.7% on large ones (Task2a). Code Agents improve compilation rates yet yield no gains in runtime behavioral quality, indicating that the bottleneck lies in architectural design rather than syntactic correctness. Experiments validate JamSet as effective training data. All data and code are publicly available.

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

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EnvRL: Learn from Environment Dynamics in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, conventional RL methods for long-horizon agentic tasks often struggle with sparse outcome rewards. Intuitively, this overlooks the rich environment dynamics information contained in rollout interaction trajectories. We argue that the interaction experience inherently serves as an implicit supervision signal, reveals the underlying transition mechanisms of the environment, and enables the agent to construct a more accurate internal model of the environment.. Therefore, in this work, we investigate how to leverage this additional signal to improve policy learning. Specifically, we propose EnvRL, a framework that incorporates environment dynamics learning into agentic RL via two auxiliary objectives: state prediction and inverse dynamics. By jointly optimizing with the primary RL objective, we encourage the agent to internalize environment dynamics from its own interaction experience. Extensive experiments on two long-horizon agentic benchmarks demonstrate that EnvRL achieves significant improvements on success-rates over RL-only baselines, e.g., when trained with GRPO, lifting Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct from 72.8% to 77.4% on ALFWorld, and from 56.8% to 67.0% on WebShop.

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

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

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

Robust Regularized Policy Iteration under Transition Uncertainty

arXiv:2603.09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift. The learned policy may visit out-of-distribution state-action pairs where value estimates and learned dynamics are unreliable. To address policy-induced extrapolation and transition uncertainty in a unified framework, we formulate offline RL as robust policy optimization, treating the transition kernel as a decision variable within an uncertainty set and optimizing the policy against the worst-case dynamics. We propose Robust Regularized Policy Iteration (RRPI), which replaces the intractable max-min bilevel objective with a tractable KL-regularized surrogate and derives an efficient policy iteration procedure based on a robust regularized Bellman operator. We provide theoretical guarantees by showing that the proposed operator is a $\gamma$-contraction and that iteratively updating the surrogate yields monotonic improvement of the original robust objective with convergence. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that RRPI achieves strong average performance, outperforming recent baselines including percentile-based methods on the majority of environments while remaining competitive on the rest. Moreover, RRPI exhibits robust performance by aligning lower $Q$-values with high epistemic uncertainty, which prevents the policy from executing unreliable out-of-distribution actions.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

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

Principled RL for Flow Matching Emerges from the Chunk-level Policy Optimization

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage attribution. In this work, we argue that aggregating consecutive steps into a coherent 'chunk' and shifting the policy optimization paradigm from GRPO's step level to the chunk level can effectively mitigate the negative impact of this issue. Building on this insight, we propose Group Chunking Policy Optimization (GCPO), the first chunk-level reinforcement learning approach for post-training flow matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPO achieves superior performance on both standard T2I benchmarks and preference alignment, with up to 43% relative gains over GRPO, highlighting the promise of chunk-level policy optimization. The code is available on https://github.com/xingzhejun/GCPO.

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

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

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

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

arXiv:2606.16358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is $851$ lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.

21.
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.

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

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

作者:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.

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

Quality Over Clicks: Iterative Reinforcement Learning for Early-Stage E-Commerce Query Suggestion

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

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

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.