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

VideoWeave: Unlocking Geometric Consistency in Video Generation via Joint Geometry-Video Modeling

Large-scale video diffusion models often fail to preserve 3D structure over time, causing geometric drift and implausible motion under viewpoint changes. Existing methods usually enforce geometric consistency by using explicit geometry reconstructions, such as depth maps, point clouds, or reconstructed 3D structures, to define conditions, supervision, or reward signals, making the generator sensitive to errors from upstream geometry pipelines. We propose VideoWeave, a latent-space post-training framework that uses implicit geometry-model features to constrain the generative distribution, providing a more flexible and non-rigid form of guidance that mitigates the impact of reconstruction errors from geometry models. Specifically, VideoWeave adapts these features into geometry latents and jointly models them with video latents in a shared denoising space, allowing geometry to shape the generative distribution during training. To support this process, we build GeoVid-80K, an 80K-video dataset with paired appearance and geometry representations. Experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video generation show that VideoWeave improves geometric coherence while preserving strong visual quality. VideoWeave project page at https://videoweave.github.io/

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

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

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

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TimeLAVA: Learning-Agnostic Data Valuation for Time Series

arXiv:2606.18729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

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

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

arXiv:2603.00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgment scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. Code is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Haiwen-Xia/CMI-RewardBench). Model weights: CMI-RM (https://huggingface.co/HaiwenXia/CMI-RM). Datasets: CMI-Pref-Pseudo (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref-pseudo) and CMI-Pref (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HaiwenXia/cmi-pref)

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

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

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

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

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

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

ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

arXiv:2605.25160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: GUI agents powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, creating urgent needs for evaluation and training based on realistic environments. However, directly doing so in real-world environments introduces some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Real-world environments are complex and uncontrollable, making it difficult to construct verifiable rewards and to save or reset states. Existing works prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for reliable reward building, leaving a persistent gap from real-world usage. Furthermore, relying on virtual machines or docker images demand high resource requirements and suffer from slow response speeds, which limit the efficiency. We present \sys, a framework that could produce high-fidelity synthesized interactive environments for GUI agents across platforms with verifiable rewards. These environments behave as backend-free webpages accessible via URL, requiring near-zero setup and low resource cost, making the approach suitable for both large-scale evaluation and downstream agent training. We support multiple GUI platforms including mobile, desktop, and automotive/in-vehicle interfaces based on the same pipeline, covering 100+ environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks. Among them, 120 challenging tasks across 63 simulated mobile applications are released as a fully synthesized mobile GUI agent benchmark. Experiment results on five state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents reveal substantial headroom – the average success rate is only 27.92\%, dropping to 17.82\% on long-horizon subset – while humans reach 92.08\%. A comparison against real-world sample tasks shows that assessments made in our synthetic environments generalize to real apps. The project website is at https://scalewob.github.io.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

13.
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.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

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

Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet they often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Self-consistency-based approaches push accuracy higher still, but they require sampling and aggregating multiple reasoning trajectories, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a confidence-aware selective sampling framework that, at inference time, analyzes a single reasoning trajectory to adaptively determine whether to rely on that trajectory alone or trigger multi-path sampling. The framework uses trajectory-level numeric features and sentence-level linguistic features extracted from reasoning states to guide selective multi-path reasoning. We train it on MedQA and evaluate it in-domain on MedQA and under calibration-only transfer on MathQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU, without further fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed framework maintains comparable performance to full and efficient multi-path reasoning baselines, with accuracy changes of $-0.41 \pm 0.58$ and $-0.31 \pm 0.58$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing token usage by $71.7 \pm 5.0%$ and $36.6 \pm 9.1%$. These findings demonstrate that reasoning trajectories contain rich signals for uncertainty estimation, enabling a simple, transferable mechanism to balance accuracy and efficiency in LLM reasoning.

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

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

17.
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.

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

Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization

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

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

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

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

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

CoRA: Confidence-Rationale Alignment for Reliable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve LLM performance, but high answer confidence may be misleading when the accompanying CoT rationale is plausible yet incomplete or poorly supported. We study confidence–rationale alignment: whether a model's confidence in its committed answer is justified by its generated rationale. We introduce a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework that jointly rewards answer correctness, committed-answer probability, and rubric-based rationale support, where the rubric assesses grounding, coherence, task match, and connection to the selected answer without revealing the gold answer to the judge. Across MedQA, MathQA, and OpenBookQA using three open-weight LLMs, our method reduces the confidence–rationale alignment error by up to 26.51% compared with untuned checkpoints, SFT, and correctness-only GRPO, while maintaining competitive accuracy and often improving calibration. These results show that reliable CoT reasoning requires not only confident answers, but rationales that substantively support them.

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

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

AREAL-DTA: Dynamic Tree Attention for Efficient Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

arXiv:2602.00482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training for large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, as it generates many rollout sequences that frequently share long token prefixes. Existing RL frameworks usually process these sequences independently during policy training, i.e., repeatedly recomputing identical prefixes in both the forward and backward passes of policy gradient computation, leading to substantial inefficiencies in computation resources and memory usage. Although prefix sharing naturally induces a tree structure over rollouts, packed tree-mask approaches scale poorly in RL settings. In this paper, we introduce AReaL-DTA, which efficiently exploits prefix sharing in RL training. AReaL-DTA employs a depth-first search (DFS)-based execution strategy that dynamically traverses the rollout prefix tree during both forward and backward computation, materializing only a single root-to-leaf path at a time. To further improve scalability, AReaL-DTA incorporates a load-balanced distributed batching mechanism that dynamically constructs and processes prefix trees across multiple GPUs. On $\tau^2$-bench, AReaL-DTA improves training throughput by up to $8.31\times$ over dense training and up to $1.70\times$ over sparse training. Our code is available at https://github.com/areal-project/AReaL/tree/feat/dta.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Workflow-GYM: Towards Long-Horizon Evaluation of Computer-use Agentic tasks in Real-World Professional Fields

arXiv:2606.11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid evolution of AI agents toward handling increasingly complex, real-world tasks. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can operate graphical user interfaces to complete long-horizon, high-value professional workflows across diverse domains. Current GUI benchmarks still predominantly focus on general-purpose software, relatively simple applications, and short-horizon tasks, leaving it largely unknown whether modern agents can follow user instructions to autonomously operate domain-specific professional software and accomplish economically valuable work in an end-to-end manner. To bridge this gap, we introduce Workflow-GYM, a benchmark for long-horizon GUI tasks centered on professional domains and specialized software environments. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we find that even the strongest models achieve only slightly above 30% success rates, highlighting that professional long-horizon GUI workflows remain highly challenging for current GUI agents. Further analysis reveals that current agents struggle to maintain long-horizon workflow consistency, frequently exhibiting workflow stage omission, error propagation, objective drift, and insufficient understanding of professional software environments. Our findings provide important insights into the limitations of current agent systems and suggest key directions for the next generation of GUI-agent research.

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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.