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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

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

PathRouter: Aligning Rewards with Retrieval Quality in Agentic Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Agentic GraphRAG trains language-model agents to iteratively retrieve and reason over graph-structured evidence, enabling more accurate and context-aware decision-making by efficiently navigating complex information networks. However, outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from answer-path reward aliasing, where correct answers may come from shortcuts rather than useful evidence paths. It also exhibits search-update ambiguity, as scalar trajectory-level feedback does not indicate which retrieval actions to adjust. To mitigate these shortcomings, we present PathRouter, a path-aware training framework for agentic GraphRAG. PathRouter jointly evaluates each trajectory along answer correctness and evidence-path overlap, yielding four trajectory categories with differentiated GRPO advantage scaling that suppresses shortcut reinforcement while preserving evidence-seeking behavior. For evidence-poor trajectories, a frozen gold-evidence teacher provides token-level KL guidance on reasoning and search-query tokens, excluding answer tokens to avoid direct response imitation. Experiments on six QA benchmarks across three model sizes show that PathRouter consistently improves answer F1 and evidence-path overlap, achieving average F1 gains of 3.1 on 3B and 4.9 on 7B models compared to a strong baseline.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

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

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

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

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

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

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.

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

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.

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

Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift

Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters can accumulate weight drift, potentially causing catastrophic forgetting and degrading general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that \textsc{ReGrad} outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

R2RDreamer: 3D-aware Data Augmentation for Spatially-generalized 2D Manipulation Policies

Spatial generalization is critical for imitation-learned manipulation policies, but achieving it typically requires scaling demonstrations across diverse object poses, robot configurations, and camera viewpoints. Data augmentation from a few source demonstrations offers a practical alternative to costly real-world collection. Simulation-based augmentation can create controllable variation, but requires complex environment and object setup and may introduce a sim-to-real gap. Recent real-to-real methods avoid these issues by jointly editing 3D observations and action trajectories from real demonstrations, yet they still rely on strong 3D scene parsing and geometry completion, and often produce observations tailored to 3D pointcloud policies rather than RGB-based 2D policies. We propose R2RDreamer, a real-to-real demonstration augmentation framework that preserves the geometric consistency of 3D action-observation editing while moving visual completion to 2D video space. Specifically, R2RDreamer first performs lightweight 3D augmentation by editing incomplete object pointclouds and end-effector trajectories in a shared 3D frame; it then projects the edited scene into masked image-space control videos with occlusion-aware reasoning and uses a dense-control image-to-video model to complete temporally coherent RGB observations. Experiments on spatially shifted manipulation tasks with both 2D diffusion-style policies and vision-language-action policies show that R2RDreamer improves spatial generalization from limited source demonstrations, with analyses validating the contributions of 3D editing, occlusion-aware projection, and video completion.

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

OmniPlan: An Adaptive Framework for Timely and Near-Optimal Network Planning Optimization

arXiv:2606.18105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Network planning optimization is a fundamental problem across diverse domains, including transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids. It requires simultaneous optimization of multiple competing objectives under complex constraints. Existing network planning optimization frameworks rely on mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers, heuristics, and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models to compute planning decisions. However, they lack effective adaptability to diverse and dynamic user intents, thus leading to the trade-off between execution time and optimality. In this paper, we propose OmniPlan, an adaptive framework that achieves both timeliness and near-optimality in network planning optimization. To achieve the adaptability lacking in existing solutions, OmniPlan employs a large language model (LLM)-based interpreter to convert heterogeneous natural-language intents into a unified and quantifiable user-preference vector. Then it employs a mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates MIP solvers, heuristics, and DRL models as specialized experts, where OmniPlan adapts to diverse intents by dynamically selecting timely and near-optimal experts. Finally, it incorporates a DRL-based expert configuration module that fine-tunes optimization objective weights to align planning decisions with user-specific preferences. We evaluate OmniPlan with a representative real-world workload, i.e., distributed machine learning (ML), where we leverage OmniPlan to offload a wide spectrum of ML inference tasks, e.g., decision trees, SVM, naive Bayes, XGBoost, and random forests, onto a network of hardware devices. Our experiments on a real-world testbed indicate that OmniPlan achieves near-optimal and low-execution-time offloading for real-world ML inference tasks, reducing latency by up to 97.8\% and network device resource consumption by up to 11.5\%.

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

LiAuto-GeoX: Efficient Grounded Driving Transformer

Dense 3D reconstruction has demonstrated immense potential for spatial understanding, yet its viability as a real-time, onboard representation for autonomous driving remains an open challenge. Existing large-scale visual geometry models typically require substantial computational resources and lack the long-range geometric fidelity, surround-view consistency, and real-time efficiency demanded by dynamic driving environments. To bridge this gap, we present LiAuto-GeoX, an efficient grounded driving transformer designed for deployable, ego-centric 3D scene understanding. Our approach begins by learning a high-capacity driving geometry model from large-scale surround-view data, utilizing sparse LiDAR priors to provide robust geometric grounding in distant, ambiguous, or structure-sparse regions. We then instantiate this capability into a highly compact 155M-parameter onboard model through a novel geometry-preserving distillation framework. This framework employs mask-guided depth-aware distillation to retain fine-grained metric structures by emphasizing geometrically informative regions, and relative-pose relational distillation to enforce cross-view spatial consistency through pose-induced geometric relations. Extensive evaluations reveal that LiAuto-GeoX runs at 220 FPS on KITTI while maintaining high-fidelity dense reconstruction, enabling real-time deployment. The learned geometry transfers seamlessly to downstream autonomy tasks, achieving 90.6 PDMS in trajectory prediction, 24.63 mIoU in occupancy prediction, and 47.67 IoU in future-frame prediction. These all demonstrate that efficient dense 3D reconstruction can transcend its traditional role as a perception target to serve as a scalable, foundational geometric representation for next-generation autonomous driving.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

Looped World Models

Current world models face a fundamental tension: faithful long-horizon simulation demands deep computation, but deeper models are expensive to deploy and prone to compounding errors. We resolve this by introducing Looped World Models (LoopWM), which are the first looped architectures for world modelling. Our method iteratively refines latent environment states through a parameter-shared transformer block. This yield up to 100x parameter efficiency over conventional approaches with adaptive computation that automatically scales depth to match the complexity of each prediction step. Orthogonal to scaling model size and training data, LoopWM establishes iterative latent depth as a new scaling axis for world simulation, which might significantly push the community forward.

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

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606.19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

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

Qwen-RobotManip Technical Report: Alignment Unlocks Scale for Robotic Manipulation Foundation Models

Foundation models in language and multimodality achieve strong generalization by aligning heterogeneous data under a unified formulation and training at scale. In this report, we investigate whether this scaling recipe can be applied to robotic manipulation to achieve genuine generalization. This is challenging because, unlike text, manipulation data is heterogeneous by nature, expensive to collect, and narrow in diversity, making alignment and scale simultaneously difficult. We present Qwen-RobotManip, a generalizable Vision-Language-Action foundation model built on Qwen-VL. Qwen-RobotManip introduces a unified alignment framework across the representation, motion, and behavioral dimensions of manipulation, making large-scale multi-source training coherent rather than conflicting. This alignment capability in turn enables Qwen-RobotManip to absorb manipulation data at a scale that prior training regimes could not sustain. A human-to-robot synthesis pipeline converts egocentric hand demonstrations into robot trajectories across 15 platforms, and a rigorous curation pipeline harmonizes heterogeneous datasets. Using only open-source datasets and human videos without proprietary data collection, Qwen-RobotManip constructs a ~38,100-hour pretraining corpus and exhibits emergent generalization capabilities, including zero-shot instruction following, robustness to perturbations, reactive error recovery, and cross-embodiment transfer. We find that standard benchmarks fail to capture pretraining quality and instead adopt OOD settings including RoboCasa365, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, RoboTwin-Clean2Rand, RoboTwin-IF, and RoboTwin-XE. Qwen-RobotManip substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art models, including $\pi$0.5, across all OOD settings, ranks 1st in RoboChallenge with a 20% relative improvement, and is validated on real-robot platforms including AgileX ALOHA, Franka, UR, and ARX.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Consensus on Dynamic Stochastic Block Models: Fast Convergence and Phase Transitions

arXiv:2209.03999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two models of consensus following a majority rule on time-evolving stochastic block models (SBM), in which the network evolution is Markovian or non-Markovian. Under the majority rule, in each round, each agent simultaneously updates their opinion according to the majority of their neighbors. Our network has a community structure and randomly evolves with time. In contrast to the classic setting, the dynamics is not purely deterministic, and reflects the structure of SBM by resampling the connections at each step, making agents with the same opinion more likely to connect than those with different opinions. In the Markovian model, connections between agents are resampled at each step according to the SBM law and each agent updates their opinion via the majority rule. We prove a power-of-one type result, i.e., any initial bias leads to a non-trivial advantage of winning in the end, uniformly in the size of the network. In the non-Markovian model, a connection between two agents is resampled according to the SBM law only when at least one of them changes opinion and is otherwise kept the same. We identify the phase-transition threshold, up to the second-order leading term, between halting and fast convergence to consensus. We also give sufficient initial-lead conditions for consensus to occur within one, two, or three rounds.

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

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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

On Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding for Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning (AV-GZSL) is a challenging task that aims to classify both seen and unseen objects or scenes by integrating data from audio and visual modalities. Recent studies primarily focus on fusing or aligning audio and visual features to generate more informative audio-visual embeddings. Also, aligning the audio-visual and textual features of most existing methods relies solely on the optimization objectives. However, those methods neglect the inherent distributional and structural differences between audio-visual and textual modalities. To address this limitation, we propose a method termed Aligning Hierarchical Standardized Embedding (AHSE), which enables hierarchical alignment of standardized audio-visual and textual embeddings within a shared embedding space. Specifically, we first apply Z-score standardization to the fused audio-visual and textual embeddings to reduce distributional mismatches. We then introduce a hierarchical alignment strategy that minimizes discrepancies at the semantic, class, and batch levels, thereby constructing a more robust and well-structured embedding space. This strategy not only preserves semantic and inter-class relationships but also maintains spatial consistency within each batch. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: VGGSound-GZSL, UCF-GZSL, and ActivityNet-GZSL, demonstrate that AHSE achieves competitive performance in zero-shot learning.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

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

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

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

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

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

GAGPO: Generalized Advantage Grouped Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.13217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a powerful paradigm for post-training large language model agents, yet credit assignment in multi-turn environments remains a challenge. Agents often receive sparse, trajectory-level rewards only at the end of an episode, making it difficult to determine which intermediate actions contributed to success or failure. As a result, propagating delayed outcomes back to individual decision steps without relying on costly auxiliary value models remains an open problem. We propose Generalized Advantage Grouped Policy Optimization (GAGPO), a critic-free reinforcement learning method for precise, step-aligned temporal credit assignment. GAGPO constructs a non-parametric grouped value proxy from sampled rollouts and uses it to compute TD/GAE-style temporal advantages, recursively propagating outcome supervision backward through time. Combined with group-wise advantage normalization and an action-level importance ratio, GAGPO extracts stable, localized optimization signals directly from multi-turn trajectories. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that GAGPO outperforms strong reinforcement learning baselines. Further analyses demonstrate faster early-stage learning, improved interaction efficiency, and smoother optimization dynamics, suggesting that GAGPO offers a simple yet effective framework for multi-turn agentic reinforcement learning.

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

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

arXiv:2606.14409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this report, we present Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA, abbreviated as HyVLA-0.5, an end-to-end system that spans the full robot learning stack: data collection, model design, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, RL post-training, and real-world deployment. Each component serves a distinct role in this stack.