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Authors: Qing Yan ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Benchmarking Agentic Review Systems

A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.

03.
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.

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

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

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

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

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

JoyAI-VL-Interaction: Real-Time Vision-Language Interaction Intelligence

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

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

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models

Text-agent environments are typically modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), assuming that the simulator's latent state and transition dynamics are hidden from the agent. Yet little work has examined whether executable code can be induced to serve as a world model for prediction and planning under partial observability. We introduce PatchWorld, a gradient-free framework that turns offline trajectories into executable Python world models through counterexample-guided code repair. Instead of predicting the next observation with a black-box model, PatchWorld induces symbolic belief-state programs whose action updates can be inspected, replayed, and locally patched. Across seven AgentGym environments, PatchWorld-Simple achieves the highest code-based planning score among evaluated methods, reaching 76.4\% macro success in live one-step lookahead while invoking no LLM calls inside the world-model prediction module itself. We further find that a human-specified residual-memory bias improves surface observation fidelity but weakens decision utility. This exposes a tradeoff in executable world models, since improving observation fidelity can come at the expense of action-discriminative dynamics, and vice versa. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/PatchWorld.

10.
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.

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

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

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

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Prism: Cost-Efficient Multi-LLM Serving via GPU Memory Ballooning

arXiv:2505.04021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference providers must maintain availability for many LLMs, including low-volume but essential models, making resource efficiency increasingly important as token prices fall. Analysis of production traces reveals a dynamic bursty-group pattern in which sets of models become active together and shift over time; existing space- and time-sharing approaches lack principled mechanisms to adapt to this variability, forcing trade-offs between SLO adherence and efficiency. We observe that elastic memory allocation can unify spatial and temporal sharing. Based on this insight, we have developed Prism, a memory-centric LLM co-serving framework that applies memory ballooning to reclaim memory across models and support both forms of sharing under a single scheme. Prism's balloon driver, referred to as kvcached, has been open-sourced at https://github.com/ovg-project/kvcached, and deployed in production environments across 10K+ GPUs.

14.
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.

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

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

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

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

MP3: Multi-Period Pattern Pre-training forSpatio-Temporal Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatio-Temporal forecasting is crucial in diverse fields, such as transportation, climate, and energy. Urban spatio-temporal data exhibits temporal mirage: similar short-window inputs have divergent future trends, and vice versa. Existing spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) cannot effectively identify such mirages. We argue that the core reason lies in the short-window inputs that have incomplete period observation, heterogeneous global spatial correlation, and cross-period superposition causality. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel Multi- Period Pattern Pre-training (MP3), a plug-and-play pre-training plugin for distinguishing temporal mirages. MP3 presents two core innovations: (1) The multi-period pattern learning is designed to learn multi-period patterns from long time series. Specifically, multi-period temporal modeling leverages edge convolution to identify different multi-period patterns. Multi-period spatial modeling uses a bottleneck project and a global memory bank to capture heterogeneous global spatial relations efficiently. Cross-period pattern interaction employs a causality-enhanced Transformer to capture dependencies across different period patterns. (2) This plugin can seamlessly integrate into existing STGNN backbones to strengthen their forecasting performance. The experiment on five STGNN baselines across five real-world datasets (including a large-scale dataset CA) verify the effectiveness, superior scalability and strong adaptability of MP3, which brings consistent and robust performance improvements across all evaluated baselines. On average, MP3 reduces the MAE 4.7% and the RMSE 5.0%. The code can be available at https://github.com/YAN-outlook/MP3.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

18.
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.

19.
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.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

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

Qwen-RobotWorld Technical Report: Unifying Embodied World Modeling through Language-Conditioned Video Generation

We introduce Qwen-RobotWorld, a language-conditioned video world model for embodied intelligence. With natural language as a unified action interface, it predicts physically grounded future visual trajectories from current observations across robotic manipulation, autonomous driving, indoor navigation, and human-to-robot transfer. This unified formulation provides three promising application directions: synthetic data generation for policy training augmentation, scalable virtual environments for policy evaluation, and language-guided planning signals for downstream robot control. This is achieved through a three-part design: a) Double-Stream MMDiT with MLLM Action Encoding, where a 60-layer double-stream diffusion transformer couples frozen Qwen2.5-VL semantics with video-VAE latents through layer-wise joint attention; b) Embodied World Knowledge (EWK), an 8.6M video-text corpus (200M+ frames) with action-language mapping over 20+ embodiments and 500+ action categories; and c) General+Expert Progressive Curriculum, a two-stage training strategy that first learns general visual priors and then injects embodied specialization under a shared language interface. Extensive results show strong competitiveness: ranks 1st overall on EWMBench and DreamGen Bench, outperforms all open-source models on WorldModelBench and PBench. Additional zero-shot analyses on RoboTwin-IF benchmark further support robust generalization and multi-view consistency.

23.
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.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

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

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.