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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MultiToP: Learning to Patch Visual Tokens to Mitigate Hallucinations in Video Large Multimodal Models

Video Large Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding, yet they remain prone to hallucinations, where generated responses are not faithfully supported by the input video. In this paper, we propose MultiToP, a multimodal-context-aware visual token patching framework that mitigates hallucinations by refining unreliable visual tokens before language generation. MultiToP introduces a lightweight Visual Token Patcher to predict token-level replacement distributions and selectively substitute unreliable visual tokens with a dynamic global patch token. To train the patcher effectively, we further propose information-guided rank calibration, which uses answer-conditioned frame-level information cues derived from the backbone to guide token replacement. Combined with ground-truth answer supervision and sparsity regularization, MultiToP enables localized visual evidence refinement without modifying the original model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiToP effectively reduces hallucinations on Vript-HAL with negligible inference overhead, improving the F1 scores of Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct by 50.60% over the vanilla model. Meanwhile, MultiToP preserves general video understanding ability, yielding an 18.58% relative accuracy gain on ActivityNet-QA for Video-LLaVA-7B.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Simplicity Bias in OOD Detection through Object Co-occurrence Analysis

arXiv:2605.07821v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models. Existing methods mostly focus on regular entangled representations to discriminate in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, neglecting the rich contextual information within images. This issue is particularly challenging for detecting near-OOD, as models with simplicity bias struggle to learn discriminative features in disentangled representations. The human visual system can use the co-occurrence of objects in the natural environment to facilitate scene understanding. Inspired by this, we propose an Object-Centric OOD detection framework that learns to capture Object CO-occurrence (OCO) patterns within images. The proposed method introduces a new OOD detection paradigm that understands object co-occurrence within an image by predicting disentangled representations for the test sample, then adaptively divides patterns into three scenarios based on object co-occurrence patterns observed in ID training data, and finally performs OOD detection in a divide-and-conquer manner. By doing so, OCO can distinguish near-OOD by considering the semantic contextual relationships present in their images, avoiding the tendency to focus solely on simple, easily learnable regions. We evaluate OCO through experiments across challenging and full-spectrum OOD settings, demonstrating competitive results and confirming its ability to address both semantic and covariate shifts. Code is released at https://github.com/Michael-McQueen/OCO.

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

ToolChain-CRC: Conformal Risk Control for Agentic AI Under Retrieval and Tool-Use Drift

arXiv:2606.18467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agents retrieve documents, call tools, check intermediate information, and then produce a final answer or action. This creates a risk-control problem that is not visible from the final answer alone. A final response may look acceptable even when the retrieval was weak, a tool output was wrong, or an earlier step was unsupported. We propose ToolChain-CRC, a conformal risk-control method for retrieval-augmented and tool-using agents under drift. The method treats each agent run as a full trajectory of actions, observations, and final output. It builds step-level risk scores, combines them into a trajectory risk score, calibrates an accept-or-intervene rule, and adds an anytime alarm that can stop risky runs before the final answer. We prove trajectory-level risk control under exchangeable calibration runs, give a drift-aware extension with auditable constants, and prove an anytime escalation rule through a supermartingale construction. Experiments cover synthetic tool-chain drift, RAG/tool-use stress tests, public SQuAD-derived retrieval tasks, an API-free agentic QA case study, ablations, target-risk sensitivity checks, 20-seed robustness checks, a drift-margin audit, and a live RAG/tool-use agent benchmark. Across these settings, final-answer-only calibration can miss retrieval and tool failures, while trajectory-level calibration keeps accepted-trajectory risk below the target.

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

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Scalable Batch Bayesian Optimization Via Subspace Acquisition Functions

arXiv:2411.16206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their optimization efficiencies often deteriorate as the batch size increases. To address this issue, we propose a simple and efficient approach to extend Bayesian optimization to large-scale batch evaluation in this work. Different from existing batch approaches, the idea of the new approach is to draw a batch of axis-aligned subspaces of the original problem and select one point from each subspace using existing acquisition functions. Numerical experiments show that our proposed approach speedups the convergence significantly when compared with the sequential Bayesian optimization algorithm, and performs very competitively when compared with ten batch Bayesian optimization algorithms. The implementation of our proposed approach is available at https://github.com/zhandawei/SubSpace_Acquisition_Functions.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Complex-valued representations of time-series gene expression profiles for network analysis

Time-series RNA sequencing provides a powerful framework for studying dynamic gene regulation, yet conventional analyses usually represent gene expression profiles as real-valued vectors in Euclidean space and quantify similarity using correlation or distance. Inspired by quantum information theory, we present a framework for encoding time-series gene expression profiles as complex-valued vectors comprising amplitude and phase components in Hilbert space. We designed multiple encoding models to represent gene expression in the amplitude of complex-valued vectors, encode temporal differences in the phase, and extend the phase representation to incorporate the direction of local expression changes. Gene-gene similarity was then quantified using fidelity, which measures the overlap between two encoded vectors. Evaluation using time-series RNA-seq datasets across diverse species and biological contexts showed that different encoding models produced distinct fidelity distributions that were related to, but distinct from, conventional correlation measures. We then constructed gene-gene networks using pairwise fidelity values and detected communities containing genes with similar temporal profiles. Although fidelity distributions differed across encoding models, the resulting communities captured major temporal expression programs, and functional annotations based on gene ontology and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes pathway analyses provided exploratory biological context. The detected communities were comparable to those obtained using conventional methods, including weighted correlation network analysis and fuzzy c-means clustering. Furthermore, as a proof-of-concept, we performed SWAP-test circuit simulations to mimic fidelity computation on a quantum computer; under noise-aware conditions, these simulations produced less accurate fidelity estimates with higher computational cost than classical computation. As a proof-of-concept, this study provides a complementary view of temporal transcriptome organization, rather than a uniformly superior alternative to conventional methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Time-Series Foundation Model Embeddings for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

arXiv:2606.11990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

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

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

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

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

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

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

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

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

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

Adaptive Activation Steering for Efficient LLM Reasoning via Closed-Loop PID Control

Reasoning LLMs trained with long chain-of-thought often overthink: they spend tokens on redundant reflection and transitions that inflate cost without improving accuracy. Static activation steering (e.g.\ SEAL) suppresses such content with a fixed vector, but applies the same strength regardless of how redundant the current chunk actually is. We describe PID-steering, a training-free, decoding-time method that modulates the steering strength with a PID controller driven by a lightweight chunk-level redundancy classifier. On a subset of GSM8K with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, the method improves accuracy from 85.7\% to 89.6\% (+3.9 pp) while cutting average output length from 1026 to 790 tokens ($-$23\%). We report it as a small-scale proof of concept rather than a benchmark result.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Orchestra-o1: Omnimodal Agent Orchestration

The recent success of agent swarms has shifted the paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents from single-agent workflows to multi-agent systems, highlighting the importance of agent orchestration for task decomposition and collaboration. However, existing orchestration frameworks are limited to a narrow set of modalities and struggle to generalize to more complex settings where heterogeneous modalities coexist and interact. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in omnimodal scenarios, where tasks require the unified understanding and coordination of diverse inputs such as text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose Orchestra-o1, an omnimodal agent orchestration framework designed to support efficient agent collaboration across multiple modalities. Orchestra-o1 introduces a unified orchestration mechanism that enables modality-aware task decomposition, online sub-agent specialization, and parallel sub-task execution. This scalable design allows agent systems to effectively tackle complex real-world tasks involving heterogeneous information sources, surpassing the second-best approach by 10.3% accuracy on the OmniGAIA benchmark. Furthermore, we introduce decision-aligned group relative policy optimization (DA-GRPO), an efficient agentic reinforcement learning approach for training Orchestra-o1-8B, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance against all existing open-source omnimodal agents.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reinforcement Learning for Accelerated Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation

arXiv:2507.17786v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy evaluation MCMC approach allowing for temporal 'freezing' of some of the parameters to be optimized. The goals are to minimize computational effort, and to use the observed optimization results for interpretation of the discovered extrema in terms of their role in achieving the desired flow-field. By a sequence of local optimized parameter changes around intermediate CFD simulations acting as ground truth, it is possible to speed up the global optimization if (a) the local neighbourhoods of the parameters in which the changed parameters must reside are sufficiently large to compete with the grid-sized steps and its large number of simulations, and (b) the estimates of the rewards and costs on these neighbourhoods necessary for a good step-wise parameter adaption are sufficiently accurate. We give an example of a simple fluid-dynamical problem on which the method allows interpretation in the sense of a feature importance scoring.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Who can compete with quantum computers? Lecture notes on quantum inspired tensor networks computational techniques

arXiv:2601.03035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This is a set of lectures on tensor networks with a strong emphasis on the core algorithms involving Matrix Product States (MPS) and Matrix Product Operators (MPO). Compared to other presentations, particular care has been given to disentangle aspects of tensor networks from the quantum many-body problem: MPO/MPS algorithms are presented as a way to deal with linear algebra on extremely (exponentially) large matrices and vectors, regardless of any particular application. The lectures include well-known algorithms to find eigenvectors of MPOs (the celebrated DMRG), solve linear problems, and recent learning algorithms that allow one to map a known function into an MPS (the Tensor Cross Interpolation, or TCI, algorithm). The lectures end with a discussion of how to represent functions and perform calculus with tensor networks using the "quantics" representation. They include the detailed analytical construction of important MPOs such as those for differentiation, indefinite integration, convolution, and the quantum Fourier transform. Three concrete applications are discussed in detail: the simulation of a quantum computer (either exactly or with compression), the simulation of a quantum annealer, and techniques to solve partial differential equations (e.g. Poisson, diffusion, or Gross-Pitaevskii) within the "quantics" representation. The lectures have been designed to be accessible to a first-year PhD student and include detailed proofs of all statements.

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

Metadata-Aware Multi-Prompt Reasoning for Zero-Shot Accident Understanding

In this paper, we address the problem of zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos by identifying when an impact event occurs, what type of impact it is, and where in the frame it occurs using natural language. We propose a three-stage pipeline that decomposes the accident understanding into when, what, and where. The first stage extracts a short temporal window around the impact using vision-language similarity. In the second stage, we perform metadata-driven multi-prompt reasoning with five complementary views (baseline, motion, geometry, contrast, and tiebreaker) and resolve disagreement via an entropy-gated pairwise adjudicator. Finally, we localize the impact of an open-vocabulary detector queried on the predicted accident type and scene layout, and aggregate detections across keyframes using a score-weighted centroid. Our pipeline achieves a substantial improvement in the harmonic-mean score over a centre-of-frame baseline on the zero-shot ACCIDENT @ CVPR benchmark. We show that decomposing zero-shot video understanding into temporal localization, semantic classification, and spatial grounding enable more reliable reasoning with vision-language models than direct prompting alone.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

OmicOS: A Comprehensive Omics Ecosystem Infrastructure and Agent System for the AI Era

Biology has accumulated a vast ecosystem of omics methods, but much of this ecosystem remains built for expert humans rather than scientific agents. Methods are scattered across Python packages, R/Bioconductor and CRAN workflows, command-line tools, incompatible data containers and implicit object states, making even routine analyses difficult for an AI system to choose, execute and verify reliably. Here we introduce OmicOS, a comprehensive omics ecosystem infrastructure and agent system that turns OmicVerse V2, an open-source omics community, into an executable foundation for agentic biology. OmicVerse V2 provides the community substrate: scalable AnnDataOOM-compatible rust backends, agent-friendly Python algorithms for single-cell, spatial, bulk and multi-omics analysis, interfaces to single-cell foundation models, and Python-native reconstructions of historically R-centred Bioconductor/CRAN-style workflows. OmicOS makes this substrate actionable by registering analytical functions as state-aware capability contracts, allowing agents to inspect live data objects, select valid methods, execute controlled workflows and record provenance. The result is not a fixed pipeline, but a programmable omics environment in which agents compose real analyses from verified community methods rather than inventing tools. Across external and purpose-built benchmarks, OmicOS ranked first among the evaluated systems, reaching 81.2% on BiomniBench. Adding OmicVerse to a minimal agent improved task completion by up to 34.2 percentage points with qwen-3.6-35b, and controlled ablations showed that the gains came from registry-grounded execution rather than from larger models, documentation retrieval or unrestricted tool exposure. The same infrastructure scaled to atlas-sized data, reproduced R-centred workflows in Python and converted external pathology software into agent-usable skills. In a discovery task starting from a whole-body spatial map and the term Alzheimer disease, OmicOS composed a non-canonical workflow that integrated spatial expression, genetic association, eQTL and colocalization evidence to nominate a colon epithelial risk axis centred on PICALM, CD2AP and CR1. Together, OmicVerse and OmicOS define an open foundation for AI-era omics, showing how a community of biological methods can be transformed into a reliable, extensible and agent-operable system for discovery.