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Authors: Xi Wang ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

S1-DeepResearch: Beyond Search, Toward Real-World Long-Horizon Research Agents

Deep research agents aim to solve complex knowledge-intensive tasks through long-horizon planning, evidence gathering, reasoning, and report generation. While recent progress in search agents has demonstrated strong capabilities in information retrieval and answer verification, most existing training datasets remain search-centric, focusing primarily on closed-ended question answering and information localization. As a result, they mainly train information-seeking behavior while providing limited coverage of key deep research capabilities, including evidence integration, knowledge synthesis, planning, file understanding, and structured report generation. In this work, we propose a unified trajectory construction paradigm for deep research agents that combines closed-ended QA and open-ended exploration. The proposed framework consists of graph-grounded task formulation, agentic trajectory rollout, and multi-dimensional trajectory verification, enabling scalable synthesis of high-quality agentic trajectories spanning long-chain complex reasoning, deep research instruction following, report writing, file understanding and generation, and skills usage. Compared with existing search-oriented datasets, our synthesized trajectories place greater emphasis on knowledge synthesis, complex reasoning, and planning. S1-DeepResearch-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable scale across 20 benchmarks spanning five capability dimensions, including complex reasoning, instruction following, report generation, file understanding, and skills usage. On several challenging deep research benchmarks, it approaches the performance of leading proprietary frontier models. These results highlight the importance of jointly modeling information acquisition, knowledge synthesis, and planning-oriented agent behaviors for building effective deep research agents.

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

Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet its application to diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) remains unexplored. Existing OPSD methods are inherently autoregressive-centric. They inject privileged information via left-to-right prefix conditioning with token-level divergence supervision, a design that fundamentally conflicts with the arbitraryorder generation of dLLMs. We introduce d-OPSD, the first OPSD framework tailored for dLLMs. Our approach makes two core contributions. First, we reframe self-teacher construction by using self-generated answers as suffix conditioning, enabling the student model to learn from "self future-experience" rather than privileged prefixes. Second, we shift supervision from token-level to step-level, aligning training with the iterative denoising process of dLLMs. Experiments across four reasoning benchmarks show that d-OPSD consistently outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines with superior sample efficiency, requiring only around 10% of the optimization steps by RLVR and opening a promising pathway for dLLM posttraining. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/d-OPSD.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

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

HAPI-EP: Towards Hybrid, Adaptive, and Predictive Digital Twins of Cardiac Electrophysiology

arXiv:2606.15637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A digital twin (DT) of a patient-specific heart offers significant potential in personalized medicine. However, its rapid and dynamic adaptation to an individual's live data and its predictive capability after adaptation remains central challenges. We examine this challenge from its two building blocks: DT formulation where mechanistic and data-driven models show competing merits and limitations, and DT optimization strategies that are largely driven by a reconstruction objective leading to un-identifiable models. We address both bottlenecks via HAPI – an AI framework for building hybrid, adaptive, and predictive DTs with three key enablers. First, HAPI constructs a physics-integrated gray-box model in which an interpretable mechanistic backbone is augmented by a neural component that models its residual to the observed data. Second, rather than attempting to pre-encode all possible variations in a static hybrid model, HAPI enables rapid on-the-fly adaptation of the hybrid model to few-shot live data, achieved by feedforward meta-learners realizing amortized inference of both mechanistic and neural parameters of the hybrid model trained with predictive objectives. Finally, we show that this adaptivity corresponds to the construction of a conditional generative model (i.e., the hybrid DT) that endows it with theoretical identifiability and thus strong performance in predictive scenarios. We demonstrate the proof-of-concept of HAPI in cardiac electrophysiology using a hybrid monodomain model with mechanistic reaction kinetics and neural graph diffusion. Across synthetic and real-data studies, we show that HAPI's mechanistic-neural hybridization and predictive adaptation are critical for obtaining identifiable DTs with strong predictive and out-of-distribution capabilities.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

UniReason-Med: A Shared Grounded Reasoning Interface for 2D-to-3D Transfer in Medical VQA

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

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

LabVLA: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Models in Scientific Laboratories

Scientific laboratories increasingly rely on AI systems to reason about experiments, but the physical act of doing science remains largely outside their reach. AI can help read literature, generate hypotheses, and plan protocols, yet the execution of those protocols at the bench still requires a human operator. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide one possible interface between written protocols and robot execution, but existing policies are trained mostly on household and tabletop demonstrations and rarely encounter the instruments, transparent liquids, or fixed protocol workflows found in scientific laboratories. Closing this gap requires both laboratory-specific supervision and a unified learning framework that can accommodate the diverse robot embodiments used to execute experimental protocols. We therefore identify data and embodiment as central bottlenecks alongside model design. To address the data side, we build RoboGenesis, a simulation-based workflow and data engine that composes configured laboratory workflows from atomic skills, validates and filters rollouts, and exports structured demonstrations across supported robot profiles. On the policy side, we present LabVLA, trained with a two-stage recipe: FAST action token pretraining first makes the Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct backbone action aware before any continuous control is learned, and flow matching posttraining then attaches a DiT action expert under knowledge insulation. On the LabUtopia benchmark, LabVLA achieves the highest average success rate among all evaluated baselines under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.

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

Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization

Domain Generalization (DG) seeks to develop a versatile model capable of performing effectively on unseen target domains. Notably, recent advances in pre-trained Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the generalization capabilities of deep learning models. Despite the increasing attention toward VFM-based domain prompt tuning within DG, the effective design of prompts capable of disentangling invariant features across diverse domains remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose addressing this challenge by leveraging the controllable and flexible language prompt of the VFM. Noting that the text modality of VFMs is naturally easier to disentangle, we introduce a novel framework for text feature-guided visual prompt tuning. This framework first automatically disentangles the text prompt using a large language model (LLM) and then learns domain-invariant visual representation guided by the disentangled text feature. However, relying solely on language to guide visual feature disentanglement has limitations, as visual features can sometimes be too complex or nuanced to be fully captured by descriptive text. To address this, we introduce Worst Explicit Representation Alignment (WERA), which extends text-guided visual prompts by incorporating an additional set of abstract prompts. These prompts enhance source domain diversity through stylized image augmentations, while alignment constraints ensure that visual representations remain consistent across both the original and augmented distributions. Experiments conducted on major DG datasets, including PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraInc, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ConSA: Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention via Learnable Allocation

Hybrid architectures combining full attention (FA) and sliding-window attention (SWA) are a promising paradigm for efficient LLM inference. However, existing methods typically rely on hand-crafted rules or simple post-hoc heuristics for FA/SWA allocation and offer limited analysis of the attention behaviors underlying these designs. We propose Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention (ConSA), a framework that learns optimal FA/SWA assignment under a user-specified sparsity target. ConSA employs L0 regularization to learn binary masks selecting between FA and SWA for each attention unit, while an augmented Lagrangian constraint enforces the target sparsity at either layer or KV-head granularity. We evaluate ConSA on two LLMs at the 0.6B and 1.7B scales. Learned allocations consistently outperform rule-based baselines, with KV-head-wise allocation yielding clear gains over layer-wise allocation. The learned patterns place SWA in the bottom layers and concentrate FA into contiguous middle-layer blocks, diverging from evenly interleaved patterns in rule-based methods. This structure persists across model scales, sparsity levels, and allocation granularities, revealing a fine-grained spectrum of intrinsic attention behaviors that underlies the learned allocation.

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

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

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

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

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

Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?

Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8\% and 51.9\%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1/57.8\% on AndroidWorld; 43.2/26.3/13.3\% on MobileWorld), while every other CLI configuration remains competitive. To establish the paradigm's ceiling, we provide oracle CLI solutions that reach 88.8\% on AndroidWorld (103/116 tasks CLI-solvable) and 86.3\% on MobileWorld (101/117 tasks CLI-solvable), indicating substantial room for future improvement. To cover everyday user intents beyond the GUI scope, we introduce the CLI-Advantage Task Suite, comprising 45 templates across five categories: bulk operations, multi-condition filtering, aggregation, cross-app workflows, and hidden device state. Every CLI agent outperforms every GUI baseline in all five categories, with substantially fewer steps per task (10.7 vs.\ 18.6). To support future research on mobile CLI agents, we will open-source agent implementations, oracle solutions, the CLI-Advantage suite, and evaluation infrastructure.

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

Focus When Necessary: Adaptive Routing and Collaborative Grounding for Training-Free Visual Grounding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in cross-modal reasoning, they often struggle to perceive fine-grained details in complex high-resolution images. Recent training-free methods address this through image scaling and localized cropping. However, applying these manipulations indiscriminately introduces computational redundancy for simple queries and can degrade accuracy by truncating essential global context or introducing irrelevant background noise. To this end, we propose LazyMCoT, a dynamic and training-free framework that adaptively allocates visual grounding efforts based on sample difficulty. The framework features an Adaptive Routing mechanism that evaluates predictive uncertainty using first-token statistics from a single forward pass. This efficiently bypasses confident cases while ensuring the recall of difficult samples via conformal calibration. For these challenging cases, a Collaborative Grounding module integrates the inherent cross-modal attention of the model with an external visual expert through a two-stage refinement process. This refinement process generates a precise localized display to recover small or occluded targets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that LazyMCoT rivals training-based approaches by simultaneously improving reasoning accuracy and reducing average inference latency. Our code is availble at https://github.com/TencentBAC/LazyMCoT.

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

MobilityBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Route-Planning Agents in Real-World Mobility Scenarios

arXiv:2602.22638v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Route-planning agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for supporting everyday human mobility through natural language interaction and tool-mediated decision making. However, systematic evaluation in real-world mobility settings is hindered by diverse routing demands, non-deterministic mapping services, and limited reproducibility. In this study, we introduce MobilityBench, a scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM-based route-planning agents in real-world mobility scenarios. MobilityBench is constructed from large-scale, anonymized real user queries collected from Amap and covers a broad spectrum of route-planning intents across multiple cities worldwide. To enable reproducible, end-to-end evaluation, we design a deterministic API-replay sandbox that eliminates environmental variance from live services. We further propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol centered on outcome validity, complemented by assessments of instruction understanding, planning, tool use, and efficiency. Using MobilityBench, we evaluate multiple LLM-based route-planning agents across diverse real-world mobility scenarios and provide an in-depth analysis of their behaviors and performance. Our findings reveal that current models perform competently on Basic information retrieval and Route Planning tasks, yet struggle considerably with Preference-Constrained Route Planning, underscoring significant room for improvement in personalized mobility applications. We publicly release the benchmark data, evaluation toolkit, and documentation at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MobilityBench.

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

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment

arXiv:2606.13176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO), a reinforcement learning framework tailored for the mental health domain. CRPO extends group relative policy optimization by integrating stage-dependent uncertainty modeling into the policy optimization process. Specifically, we introduce a stage-wise entropy regularization mechanism that encourages broad exploration in early reasoning phases and progressively enforces confident decision-making in later stages, mimicking the human cognitive shift from uncertainty to certainty. In addition, inspired by cognitive appraisal theory, we formalize cognitive reasoning stages, thereby guiding theory-grounded interpretable inference. Experiments on 8 mental health datasets show that CRPO achieves an average improvement of 10.4 percentage points in weighted F1-score over the best reinforcement learning baseline. Furthermore, the CRPO-trained model Mental-R1 demonstrates clear advantages compared with existing large language models on reasoning-intensive cases, suggesting that CRPO enhances reasoning capabilities for mental health assessment.

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

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

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

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

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

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

23.
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.

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

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

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

Lyapunov-Based Sample Complexity Analysis for Weakly-Coupled MDPs

arXiv:2606.14095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the sample complexity of learning in average-reward weakly-coupled Markov decision processes (WCMDPs) and Restless Bandits (RBs) under a generative model. Naive reduction to a tabular MDP leads to high complexity bounds as the state-action space is exponentially large in the number of arms $N$. By exploiting the weakly coupled structure, we show that near-optimal policies can be learned with sample and computational complexities that are polynomial in $N$. Specifically, we analyze the plug-in approach, which applies an efficient planning algorithm to an empirical model estimated from data. For fully heterogeneous WCMDPs, we establish the first finite-sample PAC guarantee with polynomial complexity and an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. For homogeneous RBs, we further prove that a smaller optimality gap is achievable under mild structural assumptions. A primary technical contribution of our work is a novel Lyapunov-based analysis framework. Unlike classical approaches that rely on the difficult-to-control bias function, our framework uses an explicitly constructed Lyapunov function along with a drift transfer technique between the true and empirical models. A key step of independent interest in our framework is a fine-grained perturbation analysis for the underlying linear programming (LP) relaxation, which provides a general tool for analyzing LP-based policies and weakly-coupled systems.