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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

CrossPool: Efficient Multi-LLM Serving for Cold MoE Models through KV-Cache and Weight Disaggregation

arXiv:2606.24506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emerging LLM services increasingly host many sparse MoE models, yet most models receive sparse requests and remain cold. This creates a GPU memory problem: model weights are stable and model-determined, while KV-cache is transient and demand-determined. Because cold models rarely reach peak KV-cache demand at the same time, reserving worst-case KV capacity per model wastes memory; a shared KV-cache pool can instead provision aggregate active demand. However, KV-cache sharing is not sufficient when weights and KV-cache remain in a monolithic GPU memory pool. Static weights compete with dynamic KV-cache, and KV-head-limited attention under cold, low-concurrency traffic exposes only a fraction of replicated KV capacity, leading to low GPU memory utilization and weak long-context support. We present CrossPool, a serving engine for cold MoE models that separates FFN weights and KV-cache into two GPU memory pools: a weights pool that consolidates FFN weights across cold models, and a KV-cache pool that dynamically serves active requests while keeping attention local to KV-cache. CrossPool combines a KV-cache planner and virtualizer, a layer-wise pipeline scheduler that hides hidden-state transfers, and persistent kernels with control lowering to reduce CPU-GPU control overhead. With efficient GPU memory pooling, CrossPool underpins bursty long-context requests and outperforms the state-of-the-art kvcached-based multi-LLM serving system, reducing P99 TBT by up to $10.4\times$.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge binding. To diagnose their realized effects, we use trajectory signatures including solving cost, answer hit time, and prior-shortcut rate. Guided by this framework, we introduce FORT, a Framework of Shortcut-Resistant Training-Data Synthesis. FORT constructs shortcut-resistant training data by controlling shortcut risks across entity selection, evidence graph construction, question formulation, and adversarial refinement. Experiments show that FORT induces longer pre-answer search and fewer shortcut patterns than existing open-source deep search datasets. Using the resulting trajectories, we train FORT-Searcher with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) only, and it achieves the best overall performance among comparable-size open-source search agents on challenging deep search benchmarks. Relevant resources will be made available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FORT-Searcher.

03.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Mapping and engineering the human cell–cell interactome

Authors:

Efforts to systematically understand how cell interactions tune tissue-level function have motivated transformative advances in single-cell transcriptomics and spatial profiling. Although these technologies can measure molecular states in individual cells and their spatial mapping within tissues, they also reveal that there exists a fundamental knowledge gap of how cells influence each other in context. In this Perspective, we propose an initiative to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome: a functional atlas of how all major human cell types communicate. We highlight how recent innovations can make this vision achievable. As a first moonshot, we propose the ‘Billion Cell×Cell Project’, which systematically characterizes the outcomes of defined cell–cell dyads across diverse cell types and conditions. We envision this multistage initiative will produce progressively deeper insights and unlock additional avenues for therapeutic discovery. We call on the scientific community to join us in building the tools, datasets and models that will decode and rewrite the language of life between cells. Di Carlo and colleagues discuss technologies required to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome and the therapeutic avenues such an atlas could unlock.

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

NRITYAM: Language Models Meet Art and Heritage of Dance

Language models have become essential tools in shaping modern workflows. However, their global effectiveness hinges on a nuanced understanding of local socio-cultural contexts. To address this gap, we present NRITYAM, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the cultural comprehension capabilities of language models in the context of global dance traditions. NRITYAM comprises 9,260 carefully curated question-answer pairs spanning 12 languages, making it the largest dataset dedicated to evaluating cultural knowledge in dance. The dataset has been developed from the ground up through close collaboration with native dance artists and native speakers of the languages, who authored and validated culturally relevant questions specific to their regions. We evaluate a broad set of models, including large language models, small language models, multimodal large language models, and small multimodal language models. As a multilingual and multicultural benchmark, NRITYAM sets a new standard for evaluating the ability of AI systems to understand and reason about traditional performing arts. Detailed dataset samples are available at~\url{https://github.com/niladrighosh03/NRITYAM}.

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

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

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

Evaluation Metrics as Averaged Outcomes of Fair Gambles

arXiv:2401.14483v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the current practices of machine learning, the evaluation of forecasts has become a cornerstone of scientific progress. A multitude of evaluation metrics have been suggested and used to qualify "good" forecasts. What do those metrics share? How are they related? In this work, we use a protocol borrowed from game-theoretic probability to show that a large part of evaluation metrics can be viewed as averaged outcomes of fair gambles. Intuitively, a fair gambler is one which a forecaster would expect to fail. Hence, the gambler's ability to gain disproves the quality of the forecast. Standard evaluation metrics are then variants of choices of such fair gambles. In particular, this choice is structured along two dimensions, one of which separates calibration-type and regret-type metrics. In particular, this framework sheds light on the relationship of calibration and regret showing a theoretical equivalence in their ability to evaluate when being scaled appropriately, but the incomparability of obtained scores.

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

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.

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

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

09.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Post-adjuvant chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive patients with resected colorectal cancer: a randomized phase 3 trial

Authors:

Tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) enables detection of molecular residual disease (MRD) after curative resection of colorectal cancer (CRC), but whether early intervention improves outcomes remains uncertain. ALTAIR was a randomized, double-blind, phase 3 trial embedded in the CIRCULATE-Japan platform evaluating a post-adjuvant ctDNA surveillance strategy with treatment initiation upon molecular recurrence. Patients with resected stage 0–IV CRC who became ctDNA positive after completion of standard-of-care therapy and had no radiological evidence of disease were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive trifluridine/tipiracil (FTD/TPI) or placebo for 6 months. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed disease-free survival (DFS). Between July 2020 and June 2023, 243 patients were randomized to FTD/TPI (n = 122) or placebo (n = 121). Median DFS was 9.30 months with FTD/TPI and 5.55 months with placebo (hazard ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.60–1.05, P = 0.107), and the primary endpoint was not met. FTD/TPI increased grade 3 or higher hematologic adverse events (73.0% versus 3.3%) without new safety signals. These findings indicate that post-adjuvant intervention with FTD/TPI did not significantly improve DFS in ctDNA-positive patients without radiological disease. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04457297 . In the randomized, double-blind phase 3 ALTAIR trial, patients with resected colorectal cancer who became positive for circulating tumor DNA during post-adjuvant surveillance received trifluridine/tipiracil hydrochloride therapy, which did not significantly prolong disease-free survival compared with placebo.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

A Unified Framework for Runtime Verification and Model-Based Diagnosis in LOLA

arXiv:2606.23720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an integrated framework that unifies runtime verification and model-based diagnosis within the stream specification language LOLA. By encoding system descriptions, component health states, and observations into a single stream-based formalism, the approach enables continuous, online fault localization directly alongside fault detection, without requiring separate toolchains. The framework supports both time-invariant and transient faults, and naturally accommodates nondeterministic observations.

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

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

The mutational landscape of STING-induced immunity

Authors:

Stimulator of interferon genes (STING) is an evolutionary conserved immune signalling protein with key roles in host defence, cancer, senescence and inflammation1–3. Downstream of STING, type I interferon, inflammatory cytokine signalling and non-canonical autophagy are governed by a multilayered mechanism integrating ligand-induced structural transitions, protein–protein interactions and coordinated intracellular trafficking4–13. Despite its central role in immunity and relevance as therapeutic target14, the sequence elements that govern STING (in)activation in cells remain incompletely understood. Here we developed a massively parallel assay to systematically chart the sequence-function landscape of STING. Profiling thousands of single amino-acid variants, we identified structural and functional determinants that shape the immunostimulatory capacity of STING and its ability to translate ligand recognition into distinct signalling outputs. Cryogenic-electron microscopy structures of select STING hyperactive variants revealed new regulatory principles dictating conformational transition from inactive to signalling-competent states of STING. Mutational effects are widespread across the functional landscape and can sensitize STING towards the natural ligand 2′3′-cGAMP15–18 or decouple interferon induction from non-canonical autophagy, demonstrating a diversity of possible responses that can be accessed through single point substitutions. Finally, our data showed the clinical and evolutionary relevance of naturally occurring STING protein variants. Collectively, these findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and chart the landscape of its functional potential across immune contexts. A massively parallel assay systematically charts the sequence-function landscape of the STING signalling protein, and the findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and show its functional potential across immune contexts.

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

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

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

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2502.10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy. However, finetuning such large models is challenging on edge devices due to its high resource demand. Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) estimates gradients through finite-difference approximations, which rely on function evaluations under random perturbations of the model parameters. Consequently, ZO with task alignment provides a potential solution, allowing finetuning using only forward passes with inference-level memory requirements and low communication overhead, but it suffers from slow convergence and higher computational demand. In this paper, we propose a new ZO-based method that applies a more efficient technique to reduce the computational demand associated with using a large number of perturbations while preserving their convergence benefits. This is achieved by splitting the model into consecutive blocks and allocating a higher number of perturbations to the second block, enabling efficient reuse of intermediate activations to update the full network with fewer forward evaluations. Our evaluation on RoBERTa-large, OPT1.3B, LLaMa-3-3.2B models shows up to $3\times$ reduction in computation compared to the other ZO-based techniques, while retaining the memory and communication benefits over first-order federated learning techniques.

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

ReSET: Accurate Latency-Critical NVFP4 Reasoning via Step-Aware Temperature Scaling

arXiv:2606.13233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve complex problem-solving by generating long intermediate reasoning traces, but this substantially increases inference costs. NVFP4 inference offers a promising approach to reduce both computational and memory costs through hardware-supported low-precision execution. However, directly applying NVFP4 to LRMs introduces two practical limitations: reasoning accuracy degrades under quantization, and existing NVFP4 kernels do not fully realize latency benefits in small-batch autoregressive decoding. In this work, we analyze the effect of NVFP4 quantization on token-level uncertainty during reasoning. We show that quantization increases incorrect sampling at low-entropy symbolic tokens, while causing over-concentration on a small set of tokens in high-uncertainty reasoning steps. Based on this observation, we propose ReSET, a reasoning-step entropy-based temperature-scaling method that estimates step-level uncertainty online and adapts the decoding temperature using both token-level and step-level entropy signals. To address the latency gap, we further design a CUDA-core small-$M$ NVFP4 kernel for latency-critical autoregressive decoding. Across reasoning benchmarks and model scales, ReSET improves NVFP4 reasoning accuracy by up to $\sim\!$2 points over the NVFP4 baseline. Our CUDA-core small-$M$ kernel further improves latency-critical decoding, delivering up to $2.5\!\times$ kernel-level speedup over NVFP4 vLLM and approximately $2\!\times$ end-to-end decoding speedup over BF16. Code is available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/ReSET.

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

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Medical imaging is central to modern diagnostics, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used to support image-based analysis by improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. However, inequities in healthcare access and differential disease prevalence create severe demographic imbalances in clinical image data. Such imbalances are compounded by the fact that diseases can manifest with distinct features across demographic groups, rendering certain phenotypic presentations naturally rare. AI models trained on such imbalanced data risk perpetuating diagnostic bias and widening healthcare disparities. Here we introduce FairGen, a fairness-aware diffusion framework that synthesizes demographically balanced medical images while preserving pathology-relevant visual features. By embedding physician-aligned preferences into the generation process, FairGen improves subgroup coverage during synthesis and downstream classification. Applied to dermatology, radiology, and neuroimaging benchmark tasks, FairGen achieves fairness improvements of 95.9% for skin images, 80.0% for chest radiography, and 35.2% for brain MRI, while maintaining competitive diagnostic accuracy relative to models trained on original clinical data. Clinician-facing expert review and external validation on independent cohorts further support that these gains extend beyond standard fidelity metrics and are not confined to the original in-distribution datasets.

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

CoVar: Confidence-Variance-Guided Pseudo-Label Selection for Semi-Supervised Learning

arXiv:2601.11670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pseudo-label selection in semi-supervised learning is commonly driven by maximum-confidence thresholds, yet confidence alone can be unreliable under model overconfidence and class imbalance. We propose CoVar, a confidence–variance framework that assesses pseudo-label reliability by jointly modeling Maximum Confidence (MC) and Residual-Class Variance (RCV). Starting from entropy minimization, we derive a second-order cross-entropy approximation showing that low-loss pseudo-labels are favored when MC is high and RCV is low, with a confidence-dependent penalty that becomes stronger for near-certain predictions. Based on this criterion, CoVar embeds predictions into a two-dimensional confidence–variance space and uses SVD-based spectral relaxation to separate reliable and unreliable predictions without hand-tuned confidence thresholds. Cluster-wise Gaussian weighting then converts this separation into per-sample training weights. The resulting weights can be integrated into existing semi-supervised segmentation and classification pipelines during training and introduce no inference-time overhead. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and STL-10 show clear gains on VOC and Cityscapes under matched backbones, as well as competitive or improved error rates on standard classification benchmarks. These results indicate that residual-class dispersion provides a useful signal complementary to confidence for robust pseudo-label selection.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

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

SING: Synthetic Intention Graph for Scalable Active Tool Discovery in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on agent harnesses that manage context, tools, and multi-turn execution, making tools a central interface for acting in realistic digital environments. As harness-connected tool ecosystems expand to hundreds or thousands of APIs, services, and task-specific skills, exhaustive tool schema injection becomes costly and imposes a closed-world assumption that limits agents to a predefined static inventory. Retrieval-augmented tool selection offers a natural alternative, but existing one-shot retrieval methods often fail to align isolated tool descriptions with the agent's true task intention, especially in long-horizon tasks where required capabilities emerge through decomposition, observations, and newly induced subgoals. We propose SING, an intention-aware active tool discovery framework that builds an intention-tool graph linking user intentions, tool capabilities, and tool collaboration patterns, and dynamically retrieves tools according to evolving task states. Using a unified corpus of 7,471 tools, we evaluate SING on three real-world tool-use benchmarks. SING improves Global Recall@5 by up to 59.8% and downstream success rate by up to 28.9% over baselines, while reducing full-corpus tool-schema exposure by 99.8%, demonstrating that intention-aware graph structure enables more accurate and context-efficient tool discovery in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies (Jones et al. (2026); Zeng et al. (2026)) reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether LVLMs can coordinate on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when explicitly prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more implicit prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision

arXiv:2606.01139v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates, it retains the first verifier-passing skill within the revision budget and falls back to empirical utility only when no candidate succeeds. Evaluated across three benchmarks and five LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills transfer across both executors and task environments, suggesting that SkillRevise captures reusable procedural knowledge beyond any single executor.

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

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BrainG3N: A Dual-Purpose Tokenizer for Controllable 3D Brain MRI Generation

arXiv:2606.19651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) brain MRI is central to clinical neurology and neuro-oncology, where generative models could augment under-represented cohorts, simulate disease trajectories, and support privacy-preserving data sharing. Latent diffusion has been the go-to solution for modeling imaging data, but it places two competing demands on the tokenizer: encoder embeddings must retain the clinical information that downstream tasks act on, and the decoder must reconstruct anatomically faithful volumes. Existing reconstruction-driven tokenizers achieve the second at the expense of the first. To address this, we introduce a fully volumetric masked-autoencoder (MAE) based tokenizer for 3D brain MRI latent diffusion, decoupling encoder and decoder: a frozen 3D MAE encoder produces clinically informative embeddings, while a dedicated CNN decoder reconstructs voxels from a linear projection of those embeddings. We pretrain the encoder on 35,309 volumes from 18 public cohorts spanning four modalities, ten disease categories, and 200+ acquisition sites, and demonstrate its dual utility in two settings. First, on a 23-task linear-probing benchmark, the encoder outperforms or matches SOTA models (i.e., BrainIAC, BrainSegFounder, and MedicalNet) on 21 of 23 tasks. Second, a conditional diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on these clinically informative embeddings supports both conditional generation across six variables and patient-specific longitudinal forecasting. Together these results establish a single 3D brain-MRI embedding space capable of both downstream clinical tasks and controllable generation.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning Variable-Length Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2605.17779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates recommendation as next-token prediction over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). A fundamental yet unexplored design choice is that existing methods employ fixed-length tokenization for all items, implicitly assuming uniform encoding capacity regardless of item characteristics. Through systematic experiments across four datasets, we discover the Popularity-Length Paradox: popular items achieve optimal performance with short IDs, while tail items require substantially longer codes to capture discriminative semantics. This reveals a critical mismatch where popular items benefit from abundant collaborative signals and require minimal semantic detail, whereas tail items must rely on fine-grained content features due to sparse interaction data. To address this, we propose VarLenRec, a framework for learning variable-length tokenization. We develop Popularity-Weighted Information Budget Allocation (PIBA), an information-theoretic framework proving that optimal ID length should scale as a negative power of popularity. Directly implementing variable-length allocation faces two technical challenges: standard Euclidean residual quantization lacks geometric capacity to support diverse code lengths without distortion, and discrete length decisions are non-differentiable. We address these through Hyperbolic Residual Quantization, which leverages the exponential volume growth of the Poincaré ball to naturally stratify encoding capacity, and a Soft Length Controller, which enables differentiable length prediction via continuous layer retention probabilities regularized by PIBA-derived priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VarLenRec achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy and training/inference efficiency, revealing the importance of adaptive encoding capacity in generative recommendation.