×

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Authors: Yan Li ×
Shuffle
01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

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

Multi-Turn Reflective Masking Elicits Reasoning in Mask Diffusion Models

While reasoning on autoregressive (AR) models is often performed by chain-of-thought reasoning and reflection, their refinement of previous outputs still relies on fully sequential generation, even when only local edits are needed. In contrast, the masking mechanism in Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) naturally supports explicit local edits on previous outputs, allowing selective refinement without discarding previous answers and generating another from scratch. While this property more closely aligns with how humans correct mistakes by iterative local refinement, existing MDMs do not support multi-turn masking and denoising. We propose Reflective Masking (RM), which elicits such an intrinsic reasoning capability in MDMs via lightweight post-training. RM provides a native test-time scaling, where an MDM iteratively revisits and revises its prior outputs based on evolving context. To exploit insights from previous turns like AR reasoning, we further introduce History Reference, a parameter-free mechanism that leverages intermediate denoising states during revision. Our approach requires no architectural changes and is easily applicable to existing MDMs. Across diverse tasks and modalities, including text generation, Sudoku, and image editing, Reflective Masking consistently outperforms standard masking-based baselines and demonstrates strong generality, positioning RM as a fundamental primitive for reasoning on MDMs.

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

DeepRHP: A Hybrid Variational Autoencoder for Designing Random Heteropolymers as Protein Mimics

arXiv:2606.11651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic random heteropolymers (RHPs), consisting of a predefined set of monomers, offer an approach toward the design of protein-like materials. These RHPs, if designed appropriately, can mimic protein behavior and function. As such, there is a need for computational tools to efficiently guide RHP design. We bridge this gap by developing DeepRHP, a modified variational autoencoder (VAE) model under a semi-supervised framework. By equipping a classical VAE with an additional feature-based VAE, DeepRHP forces the latent space to capture structures of critical chemical features as well as individual RHP sequence patterns. In this sense, our method is versatile by allowing any relevant features to be incorporated in a hybrid manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepRHP by suggesting potential monomer compositions that stabilize membrane proteins (e.g. Aquaporin Z) in non-native environments and cross-validating our prediction with published results. The concordance between our model and true RHP function suggests strong potential in utilizing hybrid autoencoder architectures to guide RHP design for proteins and other biological compounds.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

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 (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks using K-Hop Gaussian Diffusion

arXiv:2606.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most graph neural network (GNN) cores rely on graph convolutions, typically implemented as message passing between direct (single-hop) neighbors. In many real-world graphs, edges can be noisy or poorly defined, limiting information propagation to local neighborhoods. Existing diffusion kernels, such as Personalized PageRank (PPR) and Heat Kernel, alleviate this issue through global propagation, but still struggle with complex local structures and distant node noise. To address these limitations, we propose a K-Hop Gaussian (KHG) diffusion kernel as a preprocessing module for graph data. KHG introduces multi-hop diffusion with Gaussian weighting for remote nodes, balancing local and global information propagation before applying standard GNNs. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that KHG significantly outperforms traditional message-passing GNNs, as well as PPR and Heat Kernel diffusion, particularly in noisy or structurally complex graphs.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

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

Drivers, Receivers, and Dynamic Linkages: The Directed Structure of SDG Interdependence, 2000–2024

arXiv:2601.20875v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Governments with limited fiscal and administrative capacity need to know which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propagate progress through the goal system and how quickly. We map the directed interdependence structure of all seventeen goals using a balanced panel of 114 countries observed annually from 2000 to 2024. The goal series are persistent, trending, and cross-sectionally dependent, so we apply two estimators matched to this regime: a Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel Granger non-causality test, run on first-differenced series, to recover the directed interaction network, and panel local projections with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to measure the dynamic magnitude of 31 theory-derived indicator linkages. Of 272 directed goal pairs, 84 linkages survive false-discovery control (40 synergies, 44 trade-offs; network density 0.31). Synergies and trade-offs occur at comparable strength, so no single goal behaves as a universal accelerator, and the goal-level hierarchy itself is fragile. Driver-receiver rankings correlate weakly across lag orders and centrality metrics, and under a country bootstrap only two roles are distinguishable from zero: peace and strong institutions as the clearest net receiver, and poverty reduction as the most probable effect-size-weighted driver. The supported linkages are dynamic, accruing over four to five years: sanitation and poverty improvements are the strongest predictors of lower child mortality, and the education-child-health association is corroborated in independent World Development Indicators data across 183 countries. These results caution against rankings-based accelerator policy and support adaptive portfolios built on supported, time-lagged linkages monitored through constituent indicators.

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

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AcceRL: A Distributed Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning and World Model Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2603.18464v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is severely bottlenecked by synchronization barriers and the high cost of environment data acquisition. To overcome these challenges, we propose AcceRL, a distributed asynchronous RL framework that physically isolates environment rollouts, model inference, and gradient updates. By eliminating the cascading long-tail idle bubbles inherent in synchronous systems, AcceRL maximizes hardware utilization and ensures scalable throughput. Furthermore, AcceRL features a modular design that supports the integration of diverse, plug-and-play world models into its distributed pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the base framework achieves highly competitive performance across all four LIBERO[liu2023libero] task suites. Systematically, the asynchronous architecture delivers a $2.4\times$ throughput speedup over leading synchronous baselines. Algorithmically, by leveraging a world model pre-trained on 1,000 offline trajectories, AcceRL achieves up to a $200\times$ improvement in online sample efficiency on LIBERO-Spatial, establishing a robust framework that is both sample-efficient and time-efficient for embodied AI. Code is included in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/distanceLu/AcceRL.

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

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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

Central Limit Theorems for Stochastic Gradient Descent Quantile Estimators

arXiv:2503.02178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and techniques, we view quantile SGD iteration as an irreducible, periodic, and positive recurrent Markov chain, which cyclically converges to its unique stationary distribution regardless of the arbitrarily fixed initialization. To derive the exact form of the stationary distribution, we analyze the structure of its characteristic function by exploiting the stationary equation. We also derive tight bounds for its moment generating function (MGF) and tail probabilities. Synthesizing the aforementioned approaches, we prove that the centered and standardized stationary distribution converges to a Gaussian distribution as the learning rate $\eta\rightarrow0$. This finding provides the first central limit theorem (CLT)-type theoretical guarantees for the quantile SGD estimator with constant learning rates. We further propose a recursive algorithm to construct confidence intervals of the estimators with statistical guarantees. Numerical studies demonstrate the effective finite-sample performance of the online estimator and inference procedure. The theoretical tools developed in this study are of independent interest for investigating general SGD algorithms formulated as Markov chains, particularly in non-strongly convex and non-smooth settings.

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

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

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

SegTME-UNI2: A Foundation Model-Based Framework for Generalisable Multiclass Cell Segmentation and LLM-Driven Tumour Microenvironment Characterisation in Histopathology

Characterising the tumour microenvironment (TME) from routine H&E-stained histology images requires simultaneous cell segmentation, feature extraction, and interpretable clinical reporting. We present SEGTME-UNI2, a unified framework addressing these requirements. Its core is UNI2-UPERHOVER, a dual-head segmentation model pairing the UNI2-H pathology foundation model (ViT-Giant, pretrained on >100M tiles from 100K slides) with two parallel UperNet decoders: one for six-class semantic segmentation and one for horizontal-vertical gradient regression enabling watershed-based nuclear instance separation. To address the lack of pixel-level annotations in large real-world repositories, UNI2-UPERHOVER undergoes a three-stage progressive pseudo-label curriculum. Each stage trains a fresh model without weight transfer, driving improvement entirely via increased pseudo-label quality: Stage 1: Uses human-annotated PanNuke (7,901 images, 189,744 nuclei, 0.25 um/pixel). Stage 2: Uses entropy-filtered pseudo-labels from the Stage 1 model on 271,711 TCGA-UT scale-0 patches (0.5 um/pixel). Stage 3: Uses pseudo-labels from the Stage 2 model on all 1,608,060 TCGA-UT patches across six resolution scales (0.5-1.0 um/pixel). Segmentation outputs feed a structured TME feature extraction pipeline computing 20+ per-patch compositional, morphological, spatial entropy, and intercellular distance metrics. These are encoded as JSON and passed to a fine-tuned NVIDIA BioNeMo GPT model to generate clinically interpretable TME narratives. Preliminary validation on held-out PanNuke and TCGA-UT partitions demonstrates framework feasibility and internal consistency. The pseudo-labelled TCGA-UT dataset and UNI2-UPERHOVER checkpoint are publicly released to support large-scale TME profiling and spatial biology research.

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

"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild

LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges. Community registries have emerged to distribute these skills, but the security implications remain unstudied due to the absence of labeled threat data. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of 98,380 skills collected from two major registries. Through a combination of static pattern matching and dynamic behavioral verification, we identify 157 skills exhibiting confirmed malicious behavior, encompassing 632 distinct vulnerabilities across 13 attack techniques. Our analysis reveals that these threats are deliberate rather than accidental: each malicious skill contains an average of 4.03 vulnerabilities spanning multiple attack phases. We identify two dominant attack strategies with statistically significant negative correlation – credential theft via remote code execution, and agent manipulation through adversarial instructions embedded in documentation. Over half of all confirmed cases originate from a single threat actor employing templated brand impersonation at scale. We further observe that attack sophistication correlates with concealment investment, with advanced skills universally employing undocumented capabilities while also exploiting platform-native trust mechanisms. Following responsible disclosure, registry maintainers removed all 157 (100%) of the reported skills. Our dataset and detection pipeline are publicly available to facilitate future research on securing LLM agent ecosystems.

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

DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

Recent breakthroughs in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized the field of visual synthesis due to their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs are not well understood. To this end, we first systematically investigate the representation dynamics of DiTs. Through analyzing the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a crucial factor for effective learning. Based on this key insight, we propose DiverseDiT, a novel framework that explicitly promotes representation diversity. DiverseDiT incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 demonstrate that our DiverseDiT yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes, even when tested on the challenging one-step generation setting. Furthermore, we show that DiverseDiT is complementary to existing representation learning techniques, leading to further performance gains. Our work provides valuable insights into the representation learning dynamics of DiTs and offers a practical approach for enhancing their performance.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Programmable Gauge-Field Textures with Ultracold Atoms in Momentum Space

arXiv:2606.15124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic gauge fields with ultracold atoms offer a route to quantum matter in which electromagnetic environments can be designed rather than merely imposed. While the Harper-Hofstadter model has been realized in several cold-atom systems, existing implementations are largely limited to spatially uniform magnetic fluxes. Here we experimentally realize a highly programmable two-dimensional momentum-state lattice of ultracold atoms with local control over the Peierls phase pattern, enabling direct implementation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonians with tunable and spatially structured synthetic gauge fields. We observe a crossover from ballistic to strongly flux-modified bulk dynamics with suppressed transport. By introducing a synthetic electric field through site-dependent energy gradients, we further demonstrate Hall-type transverse drift arising from the interplay between electric and magnetic fields. In addition, we engineer a synthetic flux domain wall separating regions with opposite magnetic fluxes and observe anisotropic propagation guided along the interface. These results move cold-atom gauge-field engineering from uniform magnetic backgrounds toward designer gauge textures, providing an experimental setting for transport across programmable topological interfaces.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

SPICE-Q and Large-Scale Quantum Chip Production

arXiv:2606.17907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose SPICE-Q, a SPICE-inspired design-technology co-optimization framework for superconducting quantum processors. Rather than replacing tools such as HFSS, Qiskit Metal, pyEPR, SQcircuit, SQuADDS, scqubits, or QuTiP, SPICE-Q aims to connect them through a unified, traceable data chain spanning process rules, layout, electromagnetic simulation, energy-participation-ratio and circuit quantization, Hamiltonian extraction, noise analysis, cryogenic test, and manufacturing feedback. The central mapping is from process and PDK constraints to layout geometry, electromagnetic modes, equivalent circuit parameters, effective Hamiltonians, and finally metrics such as frequency, coupling, anharmonicity, decoherence, readout performance, and yield. This flow must capture Josephson-junction variability, transmon frequency allocation, resonator and Purcell constraints, coupler crosstalk, microwave routing, 3D interconnects, material/interface loss, package modes, and wafer-scale process statistics. By introducing standardized model interfaces, statistical parameter models, model cards, version governance, and closed-loop calibration from cryogenic and fabrication data, SPICE-Q frames superconducting quantum-chip design as an engineering workflow rather than a collection of isolated simulations. We argue that scalable and fault-tolerant quantum processors will require such a continuous model chain from device physics and electromagnetic fields to quantum dynamics, noise, manufacturability, and system-level yield.

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

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

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

Speculative Rollback Correction for Quality-Diverse Web Agent Imitation

arXiv:2606.12485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training interactive web agents through imitation learning from expert trajectories has emerged as a highly effective approach. However, determining the optimal timing for expert intervention presents a critical challenge in this context. Delayed intervention often leads to the accumulation of early-stage errors, pushing the page state into an irrecoverable regime. Conversely, premature or excessive intervention causes the agent to become overly reliant on expert policies, trapping the model in local optima characterized by a single, rigid trajectory. We propose Speculative Rollback Correction (SRC), a branch-level imitation framework for resettable agent environments. Instead of requesting teacher labels at every visited state or correcting only after a completed trajectory, SRC uses fixed-horizon branch review: the student executes a short speculative segment before teacher review, and the teacher localizes the first harmful deviation only when local progress breaks. Rollback preserves useful prefixes, while successful rollouts are filtered by a hard verifier and retained in a lightweight quality-diversity archive. The resulting data supports next-action supervised fine-tuning on both localized corrections and verifier-passing trajectories. On WebArena-Infinity, SRC collects 977 verifier-passing trajectories and 9,183 next-action examples; fixed-horizon review improves the recovery-versus-query tradeoff over step-level review while retaining verifier-passing solution variants. Code is available at https://github.com/LongkunHao/SRC_gui_agent.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

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

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