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Authors: Yang Guo ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

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

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

arXiv:2606.20135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM.

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

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

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

SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

05.
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.

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

PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

Reinforcement learning has recently improved the reasoning ability of Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs, yet prevailing reward designs emphasise final-answer correctness and consequently tolerate process hallucinations–cases where models reach the right answer while misperceiving visual evidence. We address this process-level misalignment with PaLMR, a framework that aligns not only outcomes but also the reasoning process itself. PaLMR comprises two complementary components: a perception-aligned data layer that constructs process-aware reasoning data with structured pseudo-ground-truths and verifiable visual facts, and a process-aligned optimisation layer that constructs a hierarchical reward fusion scheme with a process-aware scoring function to encourage visually faithful chains-of-thought and improve training stability. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that our approach substantially reduces reasoning hallucinations and improves visual reasoning fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art results on HallusionBench while maintaining strong performance on MMMU, MathVista, and MathVerse. These findings indicate that PaLMR offers a principled and practical route to process-aligned multimodal reasoning, advancing the reliability and interpretability of MLLMs.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator. The full benchmark contains 350 GitHub issue-resolution instances across 8 languages and 43 repositories, drawn from SWE-bench-Multilingual and SWE-bench-Verified-Mini after future-commit cleanup. We also release Claw-SWE-Bench Lite for faster validation, which is an 80-instance subset selected by a cost-aware, rank-aware procedure over 17 calibration columns. On the full benchmark, OpenClaw with a minimal direct-diff adapter scores only $19.1\%$ Pass@1, whereas the full adapter reaches $73.4\%$ with the same GLM 5.1 backbone, showing that adapter design is essential for enabling OpenClaw-style harnesses to perform coding tasks effectively. Across an OpenClaw $\times$ nine-model sweep and a five-claw $\times$ two-model sweep, model choice changes Pass@1 by $29.4$ pp and harness choice by $27.4$ pp under fixed models; systems with similar accuracy can differ substantially in total API cost. Claw-SWE-Bench therefore treats harness and cost accounting as first-class axes of SWE-style coding-agent evaluation, providing both a full benchmark and a low-cost reference set for reproducible comparison. The data is available at https://github.com/opensquilla/claw-swe-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/TokenRhythm/Claw-SWE-Bench.

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

Beyond English: Uncovering the Multilingual Gap in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models have recently demonstrated promising capabilities in learning generalist robot policies from large-scale multimodal data. However, most existing VLA systems are trained and evaluated primarily with English instructions, leaving their ability to understand and execute instructions in other languages largely unexplored. While the underlying large language models often possess multilingual capabilities, it remains unclear whether these multilingual capabilities transfer to VLAs during training. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multilingual instruction following in VLA models. We first construct multilingual instructions by extending existing benchmarks with translations of their instructions. Using these instructions, we evaluate several representative VLA models across a range of tasks in simulation settings. Our experiments reveal a significant multilingual gap: models trained primarily on English instructions exhibit substantial performance degradation when evaluated on other languages, even when the underlying language backbone is multilingual. We provide several findings and analyses to understand the multilingual gap. Cross-lingual transfer behavior analysis shows that performance drops correlate with both instruction understanding and action execution. Representation analyses suggest that multilingual instruction-caused representation shifts may contribute to the multilingual gap. Motivated by these findings, we further explore strategies to improve multilingual performance in VLAs. We propose a simple yet effective multilingual fine-tuning approach, Multilingual Principal Component Alignment, which leverages Principal Component Analysis to get the principal component subspace and align projected multilingual representations, effectively reducing the multilingual performance gap.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark

Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensing enables time-resolved photon measurements with extreme sensitivity, offering unique potential for active 3D perception in photon-starved scenarios.However, real-world single photon perception remains fundamentally challenging due to unique measurement noise and complex multi-return transient phenomena, which jointly complicate geometric reconstruction and semantic scene understanding. Despite growing interest in SPAD-based sensing, existing studies are largely limited to simulated data or small-scale controlled captures. As a result, systematic evaluation of real-world single photon perception across depth estimation, multi-view reconstruction, and 3D semantic understanding remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SP-TransientBench (STB), a real-captured multi-task benchmark for single photon perception. SP-TransientBenc comprises 10 diverse scenes and 10,297 views captured using a solid-state single-photon LiDAR at $256\times192$ resolution. Each view provides full time-of-flight histograms with multi-return behavior,standardized metadata, and calibrated camera poses for multi-view evaluation. We further provide 13-class 3D semantic annotations for selected scenes. By providing dedicated data splits and evaluation protocols for each task, STB enables consistent and reproducible benchmarking of real-world single photon perception across multiple 3D vision problems. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Lung-R1: A Knowledge Graph-Guided LLM for Pulmonary Diagnostic Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagnosing pulmonary diseases requires integrating heterogeneous evidence amid phenotypic variability and cross-disease overlap. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown progress on pulmonary knowledge question answering (QA) and information-processing tasks, reliable pulmonary diagnosis requires patient-specific, relation-aware reasoning over electronic medical record (EMR) evidence rather than isolated knowledge recall. We define this gap between pulmonary knowledge and case-level diagnostic reasoning as the Pulmonary Knowledge-to-Diagnosis Gap. To address it, we introduce LungKG, the first structured pulmonary knowledge graph for diagnostic knowledge organization and record-grounded reasoning. LungKG contains 59,038 nodes and 164,308 edges across 15 entity types and 112 relation types, serving as both a reusable pulmonary knowledge resource and the foundation for LungKG-guided model adaptation. Built on LungKG, we propose Lung-R1, a LungKG-guided pulmonary LLM trained through KG-constrained reasoning-chain construction and KG-guided reinforcement learning. In a 20-system evaluation, Lung-R1-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across Choice, Pulmonary-QA, and EMR Diagnosis, reaching an EMR Diagnosis score of 4.3583 and surpassing the strongest non-Lung-R1 baseline by 0.1476 points. These results demonstrate the value of LungKG-guided training for EMR-based pulmonary diagnosis.

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

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

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

ATOM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Atomic Skills and Compositional Generalization in Manipulation Policies

arXiv:2606.16826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist manipulation policies are increasingly presented as foundation models for robotic control, but their real-world generalization remains difficult to diagnose. A policy may succeed on demonstrated tasks while still failing to execute fine-grained atomic skills or recombine learned skills in new task structures. We introduce ATOM-Bench, a real-world benchmark for evaluating both atomic skills and compositional generalization in manipulation policies. ATOM-Bench factorizes tabletop manipulation into motor atoms and instruction atoms, and contains 30 atomic tasks and 24 held-out compositional tasks across paired single-arm and dual-arm robot tracks. We collect 3,000 human demonstrations for atomic fine-tuning and release both the demonstration data and evaluation rollout data to support reproducible real-world evaluation. Policies are fine-tuned on atomic tasks and evaluated on both atomic skill acquisition and held-out compositional tasks. We further introduce Atomic Score (AS) and Compositional Failure Share (CFS) to distinguish failures caused by weak atomic skills from failures caused by limited compositional reuse. Through 2,700 physical rollouts on five representative manipulation policies, we find that current policies can acquire simple instruction-grounding skills, but still struggle with fine-grained motor atoms, counting, and logical filtering. More importantly, strong atomic performance does not reliably transfer to held-out compositional tasks. ATOM-Bench provides a diagnostic testbed for studying whether failures arise from weak motor execution, poor instruction grounding, or limited compositional reuse.

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

Agents-K1: Towards Agent-native Knowledge Orchestration

arXiv:2606.13669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM-based research agents have advanced through agent orchestration, yet largely overlook scientific knowledge orchestration. Existing works often reduce papers to abstracts, surface mentions, and flat \texttt{cites} edges, omitting key entities, claims, evidence, mechanisms, and method lineages essential for scientific reasoning. To this end, we introduce Agents-K1, an end-to-end knowledge orchestration pipeline that converts raw documents into agent-native scientific knowledge graphs. Agents-K1 integrates three components under a unifying theoretical foundation: a multimodal parser whose five-module schema captures entities, multimodal evidence, citations, and typed inter-entity relations across the full paper rather than abstracts alone; a 4B information-extraction backbone trained with GRPO under a rule-based reward; and a graphanything CLI, a tri-source agent interface that unifies web search, multimodal graph retrieval, and cross-document traversal. On top of this, we process 2.46 million scientific papers across six subjects to produce Scholar-KG, of which we release a one-million-paper subset, and the full Scholar-KG is accessible via the SCP link below. The same pipeline can be extended to general-domain corpora and to schema-conformant data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agents-K1 achieves superior performance in scientific information extraction, knowledge graph construction, and multi-hop scientific reasoning.

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

Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation

arXiv:2606.03089v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm by using a teacher conditioned on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. Prior work has shown that OPSD can collapse in verifiable reasoning tasks, but safety alignment differs in that it is guided by high-level constitutions rather than explicit target answers, making it a natural setting to revisit dense distillation. However, our pilot study show that safety OPSD still suffers from severe collapse: constitutional conditioning contracts the teacher distribution toward short and overly conservative responses, and Reverse KL further amplifies this contraction into reduced expressiveness. We formalize this effect as geometric leakage under safety boundaries in a non-orthogonal semantic space, where safety pressure transfers into the expressiveness dimension. Based on this analysis, we propose Constitutional On-Policy Safe Distillation (COPSD), which first calibrates the teacher through a Cross-SFT cold-start and then performs constitution-conditioned on-policy distillation. Experiments on 12 benchmarks show that COPSD achieves a consistently stronger safety–helpfulness trade-off than baselines while substantially reducing the safety tax on general reasoning ability.

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

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

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

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

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

nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding

arXiv:2606.12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformer models, yet its extension to high-dimensional domains lacks a unified theoretical formulation. Most existing approaches either apply rotations independently along each axis or empirically mix frequencies, which limits cross-dimensional interactions and yields direction-dependent representations. To address these limitations, we propose nD-RoPE, a decomposition-free generalization of RoPE to arbitrary dimensions. From a translation-invariant formulation in continuous Hilbert space, we derive a spectral condition for isotropy that requires treating positions and frequencies as coupled \(n\)-dimensional vectors. We instantiate this formulation with a multi-scale regular-simplex wave-vector design, which provides non-degenerate spatial coverage and a symmetric, directionally balanced second-order response. Experiments across images, videos, and point clouds demonstrate consistent performance gains and improved generalization in high-dimensional settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

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

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.