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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

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

Recursive Scaling in Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.18022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequence generation. Scaling MDMs is conventionally achieved by increasing the parameter count or the number of denoising steps. We introduce Recursive Masked Diffusion Models (R-MDMs), which add recursive depth as a third scaling axis by repeatedly applying the same denoising transformer within each diffusion step. Recursion enables iterative refinement of the output through parameter reuse, increasing effective model depth without increasing parameter count. Across structured generation tasks, including Sudoku and Countdown, we show that R-MDMs achieve substantially improved parameter efficiency: a model with $L$ recursive iterations often matches the performance of non-recursive baselines with roughly $L\times$ more parameters. Moreover, recursive refinement can partially substitute for additional denoising steps, allowing recursive models to reach the same generation quality with fewer forward passes at inference time. These results suggest that recursive depth is a practically useful scaling mechanism for MDMs, improving both parameter efficiency and the allocation of test-time compute.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

arXiv:2606.20299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.

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

Model Graph Inductive Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion

arXiv:2606.16509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Link prediction in knowledge graphs fundamentally depends on the quality of learned embeddings for entities and relations. However, most existing methods derive these embeddings by aggregating only the local neighborhood of each entity, neglecting the global structure of the knowledge graph. This limited view prevents models from capturing higher-level structural patterns that are essential for accurate and generalizable link prediction. To address these limitations, we introduce Model Graph Inductive Learning (MGIL), a framework that constructs a model graph by clustering entities based on the similarity of their incoming and outgoing relational structures or their entity types. A GNN is then applied to this model graph to produce embeddings that capture the global view of the knowledge graph. These embeddings subsequently serve as high-quality initial features %embeddings for the original knowledge graph, replacing random initialization and leading to more stable and expressive representations. Extensive experiments on standard and recently proposed inductive benchmarks demonstrate that MGIL achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance in inductive link prediction, highlighting its effectiveness across diverse graph settings.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Enhancing Many-Body Chaos via Entropy Injection from Environment

arXiv:2606.11784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In closed quantum systems, local information spreads throughout the entire system and becomes highly complex under unitary evolution. In contrast, when the system is embedded in an environment, system-environment coupling can transfer information from the system into the environment, thereby reducing the rate of complexity growth within the system. This leads to the environment-induced scrambling transition established in previous works. In this work, we identify entropy injection from the environment as a different physical process that instead enhances many-body chaos. Our setup consists of coupling a system that is already in equilibrium with one environment to another environment, which serves as an entropy reservoir and drives the system into a non-equilibrium state. When entropy flows into the system through either heat transfer or particle transfer, the effective Hilbert space explored by the system enlarges, a mechanism that can enhance many-body chaos. We explicitly demonstrate this idea by constructing a solvable complex Brownian SYK model, in which both the relaxation toward the steady state and the steady-state quantum Lyapunov exponent can be computed analytically. Our results provide a controllable mechanism for tuning quantum scrambling through entropy flow in quantum many-body systems coupled to environments.

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

Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform

arXiv:2606.20120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Something from Nothing: Data Augmentation for Robust Severity Level Estimation of Dysarthric Speech

arXiv:2603.15988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies. However, subjective evaluation is costly and difficult to scale, and the scarcity of labeled data limits robust objective modeling. To address this, we propose a three-stage framework that leverages unlabeled dysarthric speech and large-scale typical speech datasets to scale training. A teacher model first generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, followed by weakly supervised pretraining using a label-aware contrastive learning strategy that exposes the model to diverse speakers and acoustic conditions. The pretrained model is then fine-tuned for the downstream DSQA task. Experiments on five unseen datasets spanning multiple etiologies and languages demonstrate the robustness of our approach. Our Whisper-based baseline significantly outperforms SOTA DSQA predictors such as SpICE, and the full framework achieves an average SRCC of 0.761 across unseen test datasets.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Before the Labels: How Dataset Construction Shapes Suicidality Detection in Clinical Text

Clinical NLP increasingly relies on electronic health record (EHR) data to detect suicidal behaviors, treating clinical documentation as more reliable ground truth than social media. We argue that this framing obscures how EHR-based suicidality datasets encode a particular operationalization of suicidality, shaped by who authors the data, how episodes are bounded, and how ambiguity is resolved. We ground this argument in a case study of the ScAN dataset, built over MIMIC-III clinical notes. We show how governance constraints, ICD-based cohort selection, single-annotator labeling, and hospital-stay-level aggregation produce labels that reflect clinician-documented judgments, treat suicidality as a bounded episode, and assume that intent can be reliably inferred from documentation. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that identical labels subsume heterogeneous clinical framings differing in temporality, negation, and uncertainty. We argue that clinical NLP should examine the assumptions embedded in suicidality datasets before interpreting their labels as ground truth.

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

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

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

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606.14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents–differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack–whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another. The standard reputation approach summarizes each agent by a single global trust score, but that scalar is the wrong object here, because routing every task to the globally most-trusted agent leaves the value of specialization unclaimed. We study skill-conditional trust R(i | k)–the trust to place in agent i for a task requiring skill k, rather than one score per agent–and pose three falsifiable questions: when is conditioning worth it, how much cross-skill evidence should be borrowed, and whether that borrowing is safe. A controlled phase-diagram analysis answers the first two: conditional trust wins only in a specific regime–high agent heterogeneity, sparse per-skill evidence, and correlated skills–and the coupling strength beta that buys this data efficiency is dual-use, because the same cross-skill borrowing is also a laundering channel. On a public benchmark of 14 genuinely heterogeneous AppWorld agents, real pools land inside the beneficial regime–a small but genuine gain, with the per-skill best agent genuinely changing across skills. We then show that an attacker with cheap evidence in one skill and none in a target skill hijacks the conditional router, driving routing regret from 0 to 0.94 on a pool our zero-cost Conditional Information Value Test (CIVT) rates GREEN–while the ungated trust verdict it contaminates reads -0.06 instead of the honest +0.19. A zero-evidence gate bounds the attack but does not eliminate it; we characterize the residual cost under an explicit budget. We do not claim Sybil-resistance–we quantify the trade-off.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Jolia: Concept-Level Vision-Language Alignment for 3D CT Contrastive Learning

Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Generative-Model Predictive Planning for Navigation in Partially Observable Environments

arXiv:2606.18888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Navigation in partially observable environments presents a significant challenge for autonomous agents, requiring effective decision-making with limited sensory information in unknown environments. Belief-based methods, particularly those using neural networks to approximate the belief space, often fail to capture the inherent multimodality of belief spaces, especially in high-dimensional cases with perceptual aliasing. While generative models present a compelling alternative, they typically require substantial data or expert demonstrations and lack explicit mechanisms for long-term planning. In this paper, we introduce BeliefDiffusion, a novel framework that combines the benefits of both generation and planning. BeliefDiffusion leverages diffusion models to explicitly characterize multimodal belief distributions and utilizes Model Predictive Control (MPC) to simultaneously plan ahead. It consists of two steps: (1) Imagining plausible environment configurations based on observation history and (2) Planning efficient navigation strategies across an aggregated configurations. Through extensive experiments in synthetic map environments, we demonstrate that BeliefDiffusion significantly outperforms both model-free reinforcement learning baselines and other generative approaches in navigation success rate and path efficiency. Our results validate that explicitly incorporating multimodal belief representations into planning enables more robust navigation in partially observable settings.

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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

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

Teach-and-Repeat: Accurately Extracting Operational Knowledge from Mobile Screen Demonstrations to Empower GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.

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

GOT-JEPA: Generic Object Tracking with Model Adaptation and Occlusion Handling using Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

The human visual system tracks objects by integrating current observations with previously observed information, adapting to target and scene changes, and reasoning about occlusion at fine granularity. In contrast, recent generic object trackers are often optimized for training targets, which limits robustness and generalization in unseen scenarios, and their occlusion reasoning remains coarse, lacking detailed modeling of occlusion patterns. To address these limitations in generalization and occlusion perception, we propose GOT-JEPA, a model-predictive pretraining framework that extends JEPA from predicting image features to predicting tracking models. Given identical historical information, a teacher predictor generates pseudo-tracking models from a clean current frame, and a student predictor learns to predict the same pseudo-tracking models from a corrupted version of the current frame. This design provides stable pseudo supervision and explicitly trains the predictor to produce reliable tracking models under occlusions, distractors, and other adverse observations, improving generalization to dynamic environments. Building on GOT-JEPA, we further propose OccuSolver to enhance occlusion perception for object tracking. OccuSolver adapts a point-centric point tracker for object-aware visibility estimation and detailed occlusion-pattern capture. Conditioned on object priors iteratively generated by the tracker, OccuSolver incrementally refines visibility states, strengthens occlusion handling, and produces higher-quality reference labels that progressively improve subsequent model predictions. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks show that our method effectively enhances tracker generalization and robustness.

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

Cognitive Trajectory Modeling: Quantifying Human-AI Co-Creation through Cognitively Grounded Interaction Trajectories

arXiv:2606.15358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Co-creative AI research increasingly seeks methods capable of representing how interaction dynamics evolve through time. While many existing approaches focus on observable interaction characteristics, interaction metrics, behavioral coding schemes, or activity traces, these methods often struggle to capture higher-order interaction dynamics, including how collaborative processes reorganize, stabilize, regulate, and evolve through time. This paper introduces Cognitive Trajectory Modeling (CTM) as a cognitive theory of interaction dynamics that conceptualizes cognition, interaction, and creative processes as temporally organized trajectories unfolding across cognitively meaningful attractor landscapes. CTM builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Enactive Model of Creativity and Creative Sense-Making (CSM), revisiting the role of sense-making curves and cognitive trajectories in representing co-creative interaction dynamics. We formalize this perspective through the Cognitive Trajectory Principle, which states that temporal representations are only theoretically interpretable as cognitive trajectories when their underlying states possess directional cognitive meaning. Building on this principle, CTM generalizes the notion of cognitive trajectories beyond any particular coding scheme and provides a broader framework for modeling interaction dynamics through trajectories unfolding across meaningful attractor landscapes. We further distinguish cognitive trajectories from interaction traces and situate CTM within a broader hierarchy of cognitive, interaction, and domain dynamics. More broadly, we argue that understanding co-creative systems requires methods capable of modeling how cognition and interaction dynamics unfold through time. CTM provides a foundation for studying interaction dynamics across co-creative AI and human-AI interaction.

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

Beyond Classification: A Cough Regression Benchmark for Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.15436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) excel at cough classification, yet their ability to predict continuous health quantities from cough audio remains largely unexplored, despite the clinical value of passive age, BMI, and disease probability estimation in settings where physical measurements are unavailable. We introduce the multi-model, multi-target cough regression benchmark evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT, OPERA-CE, OPERA-GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) across six targets on three datasets under subject-disjoint protocols, comparing linear, MLP-small, and full MLP regression heads. MLP-small beats the mean-predictor baseline on all tasks and linear probing in 23 of 30 model x task cases, with full MLP overfitting on small clinical data but recovering on larger sets, revealing a dataset size x head-capacity trade-off. HeAR leads within-dataset age regression on Coswara (9.12 yr MAE); its CIDRZ result is excluded from headline claims owing to possible HeAR-CIDRZ pretraining overlap. OPERA-GT is favored over OPERA-CT on age in all three datasets, with the CIDRZ margin within seed variance, extending a generative-pretraining advantage from breath to cough. HeAR and M2D+Resp reach near-full performance at N = 50 samples while OPERA models require N = 400. Cross-dataset transfer is strongly asymmetric as large diverse data generalises to small clinical populations (CoughVID to CIDRZ: -0.17 yr) but not vice versa (CIDRZ to Coswara: +2.43 yr, +26.6%).

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

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

CentroidKV: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference via KV Cache Clustering

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce CentroidKV, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. CentroidKV then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that CentroidKV achieves up to 75% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, CentroidKV accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to $1.92\times$ and increases the serving throughput by up to $4\times$.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Naive Visual Memory is Not Enough: A Failure-Mode Study of GUI Agents

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are increasingly used to automate complex computer tasks across applications, websites, and operating systems. To improve their reliability, recent work has introduced experiential memory, where agents retrieve prior trajectories to guide decision-making in similar states. More recent approaches further extend this idea to visual memory by storing and retrieving screenshots from past interactions, providing agents with richer contextual information than text-only memories. However, the effect of visual memory in GUI agents remains insufficiently understood: it is unclear which failures visual memory mitigates, or which failures it exacerbates. To systematically analyze the effect of visual memory, we introduce a taxonomy of four GUI agent failures (i.e., cognitive failure, visual state misunderstanding, hidden operation blindness, and grounding error) that map to distinct stages of the perception-reasoning-action pipeline. We find that prepending full-image memory has a divergent effect on the failure distribution: it reduces state-level failures but worsens action-level ones, and increases hidden operation blindness and grounding error. Motivated by this finding, we propose Action-Grounded Visual Memory (AGMem), an action-grounded memory framework for GUI agents. The core idea of AGMem is to store image crops that capture the local GUI region closely related to a successful action or a recovery, rather than storing full screenshots. Experiments on OSWorld show that AGMem improves task success rates by 33.3 % over full-image memory. These results demonstrate that AGMem is an effective representation for visual memory in GUI agents.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.