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01.
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.

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

CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

arXiv:2606.12281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt recommendations based on consensus-derived constraints and to follow the teacher's instructions more smartly. This mechanism enables agents to balance exploration and learning from experienced teachers, improving overall performance. The key is the consensus model construction, for which we propose to employ contrastive learning to construct consensus models based on local observations in the agents' training phase. In action selection, agents score and choose actions based on consensus and shared knowledge. Designed as a plug-and-play solution, CCKS integrates seamlessly with existing DTDE algorithms. Experiments conducted in the Google Research Football environment and the complex StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge demonstrate that the integration with CCKS significantly improves cooperation efficiency, learning speed, and overall performance compared with current DTDE baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/yuanxpy/CCKS.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

APEX: Automated Prompt Engineering eXpert with Dynamic Data Selection

Large Language Models are highly sensitive to prompt formulation, necessitating automatic prompt optimization to unlock their full potential. While evolutionary algorithms have emerged as the dominant paradigm, they suffer from a critical bottleneck: data efficiency. Current methods treat the development dataset as a static benchmark, wasting significant compute budget on uninformative data. In this work, we introduce APEX (Automatic Prompt Engineering eXpert), a novel framework that optimizes the data usage alongside the prompt search. APEX dynamically stratifies the dataset into Easy, Hard, and Mixed tiers based on the optimization lineage. By prioritizing the Mixed tier, which identifies the data where the LLM has mixed performance, we identify two high-leverage subsets: the addressable frontier for generating informative mutations and the rank-sensitive frontier for distinguishing candidate quality. We evaluate APEX across three diverse benchmarks: IFBench, SimpleQA Verified, and FACTS Grounding. Under a fixed budget of 5,000 evaluation calls, due to its data efficiency, APEX outperforms the initial prompt by an average of 11.2% on Gemini 2.5 Flash and 6.8% on Gemma 3 27B, demonstrating that a data-centric approach is key to efficient and effective prompt optimization.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

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

When to Write and When to Suppress: Route-Specialized Dual Adapters for Memory-Assisted Knowledge Editing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing systems must update selected facts while preserving nearby but irrelevant behavior. This paper studies this problem in a memory-assisted setting where an edit memory is retrieved at inference time and a parameter-efficient adapter corrects the model's object preference. We argue that the central design question is not only how to write an edit, but also when to suppress it. We introduce \method{}, a route-specialized dual-adapter editor. A relevance router first decides whether a prompt should receive an edit memory. Routed prompts use an edit adapter trained to prefer the new object over the original object; unrouted non-direct prompts use a separate locality adapter trained to preserve or restore the original-object preference. We evaluate \method{} on three 1,000-case protocols, \cf{}, \zsre{}, and \mquake{}, under the same memory protocol and two 7B/8B base models. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, \method{} obtains the best overall probability-preference accuracy on all three benchmarks: 0.8180 on \cf{}, 0.8946 on \zsre{}, and 0.9922 on \mquake{}. The same trend holds on Qwen3-8B. Router ablations show that the relevant memory boundary differs across datasets: a lexical neural router is safest on \cf{}, while BGE embedding routing is better on \zsre{} and \mquake{}. Component and module ablations show that the gain mainly comes from separating edit injection from off-route suppression rather than from simply increasing LoRA capacity.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce DriveJudge. DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning and selectively invokes physically-grounded deterministic rule functions after interpreting the environmental context. To train and evaluate DriveJudge, we curate a large-scale dataset of 33,577 challenging driving samples with human annotations on whether the driving behavior is reasonable in the given scenario. With this dataset, we address the underexplored problem of driving metric evaluation, and introduce two human-aligned benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection. DriveJudge outperforms EPDMS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%, setting a new standard for interpretable and precise driving evaluation.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Emergency hub placement with a neutral-atom quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of emergency operation center placement in disaster response, where a minimal number of hubs must be selected to ensure timely coverage of all affected locations. This task can be formulated as a minimum dominating set problem on a graph encoding reachability within a target response time. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical approximation framework that leverages neutral-atom quantum computers as independent set samplers. Candidate dominating sets are constructed from both small maximal independent sets and complements of large independent sets, and are subsequently refined via a lightweight classical procedure. We benchmark the approach on synthetic instances and realistic case studies, and implement it on the Fresnel quantum processor by Pasqal, solving instances of up to 100 nodes. Our results show that quantum-generated samples, despite hardware noise, enable near-optimal solutions of the placement problem. Overall, our results demonstrate that neutral-atom devices operating in analog mode can already be used to tackle graph optimization problems for real-world applications.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GAE: Unleashing Physical Potential of VLM with Generalizable Action Expert

Vision-language models demonstrate strong reasoning and planning abilities, yet grounding these predictions into precise robot actions remains a central challenge. Existing Vision-Language-Action methods typically entangle reasoning and action generation, leading to limited generalization. We propose Generalizable Action Expert (GAE), a task-agnostic model that converts sparse geometric plans into dense robot actions. Our approach introduces a sparse geometric interface: the VLM predicts sparse 3D waypoints representing high-level intention, while GAE maps these waypoints together with real-time point cloud observations to continuous action trajectories. GAE is pretrained on a large-scale pointcloud-trajectory dataset comprising 150k trajectories from both simulation and real-world robots. To further improve efficiency and generalization, we introduce an Action Pre-training, Pointcloud Fine-tuning (APPF) scheme that decouples learning action dynamics from geometry grounding. After pretraining, GAE is frozen and reused across downstream tasks, requiring only lightweight fine-tuning of the VLM to produce the sparse interface. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance and generalization across diverse visual domains, camera viewpoints, and natural language instructions.

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

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Speaking in Self-Assessing Tongues: On the Verbalized Confidence of LLMs in Machine Translation

The rapid rise in popularity of large language models (LLMs) for translation calls for a thorough study of the reliability of their confidence in their own outputs. Unlike many generation tasks, translation errors and confidence levels can be useful at different levels of granularity (tokens, words, or spans). Unsupervised approaches based on internal signals like predicted probabilities can be misleading because they reflect certainty among alternatives rather than correctness. In addition, they require access to such internal signals. Here, we devise five verbalized methods of extracting an LLM's per-token confidence without those shortcomings and compare their reliability with that of the model's internal signals of certainty. We evaluate reliability using two forms of alignment: fine-grained error detection and calibration. For both, internal and verbalized methods perform similarly, although results vary by model. Interestingly, we find little to no correlation between internal and verbalized methods.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Entanglement dynamics for atoms near a reflecting boundary: Enhancement and suppression by environment-induced interactions

arXiv:2602.23773v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate how environment-induced interactions influence the entanglement dynamics of two atoms held at fixed positions near a perfectly reflecting boundary. Within the framework of open quantum systems, we explicitly incorporate the environment-induced energy shifts, including both atom-boundary contributions and an environment-induced atom-atom interaction, which are often neglected in previous studies. We show that, for any initial two-atom state, these energy-shift effects qualitatively and quantitatively modify the entanglement dynamics relative to treatments that omit them. Depending on the geometry and parameter regime, the environment-induced interactions can either enhance entanglement generation – yielding a larger maximum concurrence and a longer entanglement lifetime – or suppress it, reducing both the peak concurrence and the survival time. This behavior contrasts sharply with the free-space case, where the environment-induced atom-atom interaction affects entanglement generation only for a restricted class of initial states and does so in an exclusively assisting manner.

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

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Authors:

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

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

Avoiding Exponential Blow-Up in Distributive Lattice Submodular Minimization

Authors:

Submodular function minimization has gained a lot of interest in recent years. They are highly applicable in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Often such applications require to work with submodular functions defined on distributive lattice. Current best way of dealing with it is using a transformation which extrapolates the submodular function for the respective boolean lattice. It makes optimization system too inefficient due to enlargement of the working space. Quantitatively, the expanded space has additional exponential (in set size) number of elements. We propose a generic framework for dealing with distributive lattice which only works within distributive lattice. Our framework allows one to use already established submodular function minimization algorithms for boolean lattice. In our experiment, we show the huge improvement in terms of running time over tranditional methods for handling distributive lattice.

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

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

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

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

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

Asynchronous Decentralized Federated Learning over Lossy Wireless Links via Reception- and Age-Aware Aggregation

arXiv:2606.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized Federated Learning(DFL) enables collaborative model training across wireless edge nodes, including IoT deployments, autonomous vehicles, UAV swarms, and satellite constellations. Operating over lossy wireless links under constraints, these systems cannot rely on retransmissions, so model parameters must be accepted as partial chunks, leading to two key failure modes, which are selection bias, where poor-quality links are systematically under-represented in gossip aggregation, and update staleness, where asynchronous nodes contribute outdated models. We prove that classical gossip aggregation introduces irreducible selection bias proportional to the link-loss rate. We propose DFL-AA (Decentralized Federated Learning with Adaptive AoI-weighted Aggregation), which corrects selection bias using Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) with online channel estimation and mitigates staleness via Age-of-Information (AoI) decay without requiring a global clock. We prove that DFL-AA removes link-quality distortion in expectation and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across varying loss rates and heterogeneous channel conditions on fixed directed topologies.

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

AI-Driven Framework for Adaptive Water Network Management with Proof-of-Concept Implementation: Addressing Non-Revenue Water in Jordan

arXiv:2606.15709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jordan faces severe water scarcity with 50\% of water produced is lost to leakage, theft and metering issues also known as non-revenue water (NRW). Traditional reactive approaches have proven insufficient for sustained NRW reduction. This paper proposes an intelligent framework integrating EPANET hydraulic modeling, digital twin technology, SCADA systems, and large language model (LLM)-based AI agents for continuous network monitoring and adaptive decision-making. The system combines real-time data streams with physics-based simulation to detect anomalies, employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for policy interpretation and function calling for network control. A proof-of-concept implementation validates technical feasibility using EPYT with offline LLMs (llama3.1:8b via Ollama) on a 1,164-junction Amman district network. The system demonstrates automated hydraulic simulation, flow-based anomaly detection aligned with water distribution zone (DZ) practice, and AI-generated health reports with response times under 2 minutes and zero API costs. Burst detection relies on local flow anomaly analysis: a 30.1~L/s simulated leak produces measurable flow redistribution in 15 pipes, flagging a 15-junction cluster that localises the burst – confirming alignment with water distribution zone (DZ) monitoring practice. The framework accommodates Jordan's intermittent supply patterns and limited automation through phased implementation, offering a scalable pathway for water-scarce regions to leverage intelligent automation for NRW reduction and operational efficiency.

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

AI Supply Chain Galaxy: 3D Visual Analytics for License Compliance

arXiv:2606.16292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of machine learning model reuse has transformed the AI ecosystem into a highly interconnected supply chain. Traditional compliance tools and static reports struggle to navigate these massive, multi-hop dependency networks. To address this, we present AI Supply Chain Galaxy (AISCG), an interactive 3D visual analytics system for model provenance and compliance auditing. AISCG maps models into a 3D spatial layout, integrating explicit structural dependencies with a rule-based compliance engine. It supports multi-scale exploration, from global community detection to localized, path-aware lineage tracing. We demonstrate its efficacy through an ecosystem-scale empirical analysis of 908,449 models from Hugging Face. Our findings reveal a concerning landscape: 55.46% of models exhibit compliance risks or metadata conflicts/omissions. We also identified distinct risk patterns, including a 56.67% license omission rate in adapter derivations and an 8.05% "license drift" rate in fine-tuning. Through a case study on the complex Llama model family, we show how AISCG empowers analysts to intuitively trace inherited restrictive terms and identify root causes across deep topological networks, significantly reducing the cognitive load of compliance auditing.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

22.
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.

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

OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own generative trajectories under dense token-level feedback from a stronger teacher, mitigating both the off-policy distribution shift of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and the sparse credit assignment of Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, standard OPD faces two coupled limitations. First, it requires direct access to the teacher's token-level logits, excluding a broad class of capable proprietary models from serving as teachers. Second, the token-level logit signal itself is brittle, depending on a narrow overlap of plausible next tokens between teacher and student, and prone to amplifying degenerate patterns such as repetition loops. In this paper, we introduce OmniOPD, a novel framework that addresses both limitations through a logit-free, chunk-level supervision signal. OmniOPD replaces deterministic logit matching with Monte Carlo rollouts that approximate the teacher's local preferences through a continuous semantic similarity metric over multi-token chunks, and concentrates this supervision via a peak-entropy scheduler that audits the student only at its high-uncertainty reasoning forks. A Dirichlet-Multinomial Bayesian prior and a base-model KL anchor further bound the variance of discrete sampling and prevent policy collapse across unaudited tokens. Across competitive benchmarks, OmniOPD surpasses the standard OPD approach by up to +28.64% on math, confirming that chunk-level semantic verification extracts a more reliable learning signal than token-level logit matching, whose high information density is offset by significant noise and brittleness. Furthermore, when paired with stronger black-box teachers such as Claude-4.5-Haiku and Gemini-2.5-Flash, OmniOPD achieves an additional +9.54% relative on math over its open-weight teacher counterpart, advancing the student past the performance of self-exploratory RL.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

How fast can you find a good hypothesis?

arXiv:2509.03734v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain $\mathcal{X}$. The goal is to output a distribution $Q$ whose distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the nearest hypothesis in $\mathcal{H}$. Specifically, if the minimum distance is $\mathsf{OPT}$, we aim to output $Q$ such that, with probability at least $1-\delta$, its total variation distance to $P$ is at most $C \cdot \mathsf{OPT} + \varepsilon$. The optimal approximation for proper algorithms (where $Q \in \mathcal{H}$) is $C=3$ using $\Theta(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$ and for improper algorithms (where $Q$ is not necessarily in $\mathcal{H}$) is $C=2$ using $\tilde{\Theta}(\log(n/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from $P$. In the improper setting, the algorithm achieving $C=2$ [Bousquet, Braverman, Kol, Efremenko, Moran, FOCS 2021] runs in time which grows polynomially with $|\mathcal{X}|$ – it does not run in finite time for real-valued distributions. A promising path towards improved runtime is to consider improper algorithms which output a mixture $Q$ of the hypotheses as such a distribution can be represented in $n$ words of memory. We show (1) a lower bound that no algorithm which outputs a mixture can achieve approximation better than $C = 3-2/n$ unless the number of samples is polynomial in $|\mathcal{X}|$, as well as (2) an algorithm which runs in time $poly(n)$ and achieves the same approximation guarantee. In the proper setting, [Aliakbarpour, Bun, Smith, NeurIPS 2024] provided an algorithm with $C=3$ running in $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta^3\varepsilon^3))$ time. We improve this time complexity to $\tilde{O}(n/(\delta \varepsilon^2))$, significantly reducing the dependence on the confidence and error parameters.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Dealing with Annotator Disagreement in Hate Speech Classification

Hate speech detection is a crucial task, especially on social media where harmful content can spread quickly. Collecting social media content (tweets etc.) to train machine learning models is easy, but detecting and categorizing hate speech can be difficult due to the inherently subjective nature. This subjectivity leads to frequent disagreement among annotators, particularly for subtle or borderline content. Traditional approaches either discard non-consensus samples or force a ''gold standard'' through expert adjudication, ignoring valuable information about uncertainty and diverse human perspectives. We examine the largely overlooked problem of annotator disagreement in hate speech classification and evaluate a range of aggregation methods, including majority voting, ordinal strategies (minimum, maximum, and mean), and analyze their impact across binary, 4-class, and 6-class classification tasks. In addition, we leverage annotators' perceived hate speech strength scores to explore regression-based and hybrid modeling approaches. Among others, we show that filtering non-consensus samples results in over-optimistic results and that the perceived strength provides a complementary signal that enhance classification performance. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results for hate speech detection in Turkish tweets, and demonstrate that annotator disagreement, when properly modeled, is a valuable resource for building more robust and reliable systems.