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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

QuBE/Qubex: an integrated hardware-software system for superconducting qubit experiments with broadband control

arXiv:2606.13010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving high-fidelity operation in large-scale superconducting qubit systems requires not only control hardware with broad frequency coverage, low crosstalk, and tight synchronization but also software that coordinates system configuration, experiment execution, and data analysis. Here we present an integrated qubit-control system that combines broadband microwave hardware with a pulse-level software stack for scalable superconducting qubit experiments. The hardware provides broadband microwave coverage, including an instantaneous span of up to 1.6 GHz from a control output, while the software reduces setup and calibration overhead through automated configuration and built-in experiment workflows. We validate the system on a 64-qubit fixed-frequency transmon chip through full-chip frequency identification and representative demonstrations, including multi-unit far-detuned cross-resonance calibration and benchmarking that yields a measured two-qubit gate fidelity of 98.34%, and multilevel readout beyond the computational subspace. By disclosing the hardware architecture and releasing the software stack as open source, this work provides an inspectable hardware-software foundation for scalable superconducting qubit control experiments.

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

The Road to Artificial SuperIntelligence: A Comprehensive Survey of Superalignment

arXiv:2412.16468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked discussion on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system that surpasses human intelligence. Although ASI remains hypothetical and far beyond current AI capabilities, discussing its potential and exploring its feasibility and potential risks is critical for the development of future AI systems. The idea of superalignment originates from scalable oversight, which studies how to supervise increasingly capable AI systems when direct human supervision becomes insufficient. In this paper, we focus on the superalignment problem: "The process of supervising, controlling, and governing artificial superintelligence." We first review scalable oversight paradigms-Sandwiching, Self-Enhancement, and Weak-to-Strong Generalization – then analyze the limitations of current paradigms through the lens of possibility and impossibility, discuss key challenges, and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of future AI systems.

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

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

ALCL: An Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss for Robust Learning under Non-Gaussian Noise

arXiv:2606.16050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust deep learning under heavy-tailed and impulsive noise remains challenging because conventional losses such as mean squared error (MSE) exhibit unbounded sensitivity to outliers. Although correntropy-based objectives improve robustness, existing formulations rely on fixed kernel parameters that must be empirically tuned and remain static during training. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss (ALCL), a heavy-tailed loss formulation that adaptively learns its robustness geometry during optimization. ALCL introduces a logarithmic residual model whose shape and scale parameters are learned jointly with network weights through differentiable reparameterization. This yields a principled maximum likelihood formulation whose influence function is formally bounded and redescending, allowing the loss geometry to adapt dynamically to evolving residual statistics while suppressing extreme outliers. Comparative experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets spanning grayscale and red-green-blue (RGB) image data under mixed heavy-tailed and impulsive noise demonstrate that ALCL consistently outperforms MSE and optimally tuned generalized correntropy losses in both reconstruction fidelity and downstream classification accuracy. While performance differences remain small under low-noise conditions, under high-noise regimes ALCL improves median accuracy by up to 4.75% on grayscale benchmarks and 4.51% on RGB datasets, with reduced variance across runs. These results demonstrate that adaptive robustness through joint learning of loss parameters provides a computationally efficient alternative to static correntropy-based losses for deep learning in non-Gaussian environments.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EvTexture++: Event-Driven Texture Enhancement for Video Super-Resolution

Event-based vision has drawn increasing attention owing to its distinctive properties, including ultra-high temporal resolution and extreme dynamic range. Recent works have introduced it to video super-resolution (VSR) to enhance flow estimation and temporal alignment. In contrast, this paper shifts the focus of event signals from motion refinement to texture enhancement in VSR. We propose EvTexture++, the first event-driven framework dedicated to texture enhancement in VSR. It leverages high-frequency spatiotemporal details from events to improve texture recovery. EvTexture++ incorporates a customized texture enhancement branch, along with an iterative texture enhancement module that progressively exploits high-temporal-resolution event information for texture restoration. This enables gradual refinement of texture regions across iterations, yielding more accurate and detailed high-resolution outputs. Besides intra-frame texture recovery, large motions could degrade inter-frame temporal consistency, particularly in texture regions, leading to texture flickering. To mitigate this, we further exploit the continuous-time motion cues of events to enhance temporal consistency, introducing a temporal texture alignment module that estimates event-guided texture-aware flow for precise inter-frame texture alignment. Moreover, EvTexture++ is designed as a plug-and-play tool to flexibly boost the performance of existing VSR models. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that EvTexture++ achieves state-of-the-art performance. When integrated into recent VSR models, it yields significant improvements, with gains of up to 1.55 dB in PSNR on the texture-rich Vid4 dataset. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/EvTexture.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SSIL: Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2308.14329v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In autonomous driving, the end-to-end (E2E) driving approach that predicts vehicle control signals directly from sensor data is rapidly gaining attention. To learn a safe E2E driving system, one needs an extensive amount of driving data and human intervention. Vehicle control data is constructed by many hours of human driving, and it is challenging to construct large vehicle control datasets. Often, publicly available driving datasets are collected with limited driving scenes, and collecting vehicle control data is only available by vehicle manufacturers. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the first self-supervised learning framework, Self-Supervised Imitation Learning (SSIL), for E2E driving. The proposed SSIL framework can learn vision-based E2E driving networks without using driving command data or a pre-trained model. To construct pseudo steering angle data, proposed SSIL predicts a pseudo target from the vehicle's poses at the current and previous time points that are estimated with light detection and ranging sensors. In addition, we propose a new cross-attention-based conditioning approach (CACA) for a vision encoder in E2E driving, where a high-level instruction serves as the conditioning signal for visual information. Our numerical experiments with three different benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SSIL framework achieves very comparable E2E driving accuracy with the supervised learning counterpart. Furthermore, the proposed pseudo-label predictor outperformed an existing one using proportional integral derivative controller, and proposed CACA achieved superior performance over existing conditioning approaches.

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

ASyMOB: Algebraic Symbolic Mathematical Operations Benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to symbolic mathematics, yet existing evaluations often conflate pattern memorization with genuine reasoning. To address this gap, we present ASyMOB, a high-resolution dataset of 35,368 validated symbolic math problems spanning integration, limits, differential equations, series, and hypergeometrics. Unlike prior benchmarks, ASyMOB systematically perturbs each seed problem using symbolic, numeric, and equivalence-preserving transformations, enabling a fine-grained assessment of generalization. Our evaluation reveals three key findings: (1) most models' performance collapses under minor perturbations, while top systems exhibit an apparent regime shift in robustness; (2) integrated code tools stabilize performance, particularly for weaker models; and (3) we identify examples where Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) fail while LLMs succeed, as well as problems solved only via a hybrid LLM-CAS approach, highlighting a promising integration frontier. ASyMOB serves as a principled diagnostic tool for measuring and accelerating progress toward building verifiable, trustworthy AI for scientific discovery.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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

CoCoGEC: Counterfactual Generation for Robust Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems are usually trained and evaluated on GEC benchmarks, but their performance often drops sharply once the surrounding context is slightly perturbed or extended. This indicates that the existing GEC models usually fail to understand the error patterns in the varying contexts. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the counterfactuals for GEC tasks, where the subtle changes to the contexts could lead to the label flipping issue. We propose CoCoGEC, a counterfactual generation framework that creates copies of training instances with error-irrelevant contexts altered. Our framework systematically generates counterfactuals by (1) generating intra- and inter-sentence counterfactuals that maintain the error patterns as well as syntax of the original instances by altering the word-level and sentence-level contexts; (2) revising the generated counterfactuals by selecting the instances with flipped labels and high GEC Mutual Information (MI) coefficient. Extensive experiments show that our method substantially improves the stability of GEC models, outperforming a set of data augmentation baselines. Particularly, it could achieve absolute F0.5 gains of +9.9, +11.3, and +20.8 points on the perturbed BEA-19*,CoNLL-14*, and TEM-8* data set.Our code is released at https://github.com/Quinnok/CoCoGEC

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

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

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

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

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using a Multimodal Approach with 3D MRI and PET

arXiv:2606.20037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of death worldwide. Early diagnosis plays an important part especially at the Mild Cognitive Impairment stage, where timely intervention can help slow its progression before it advances to AD. Neuroimaging data, like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, can help detect brain changes early by providing structural and functional brain changes related to the disease. Yet, many multimodal models still fuse MRI and PET with static concatenation and apply identical computation to all subjects, which limits robustness to patient/site heterogeneity and can waste computation. To address these limitations, we present the first study of combining 3D convolutional feature extractors with three fusion strategies - concatenation, Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), and gated self-attention - and a sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) classifier that performs input-adaptive routing, activating only the most informative experts per case. Finally, we utilize Grad-CAM to visualize disease-related regions, ensuring model interpretability. Experiments are performed across three binary classification tasks (NC vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, and NC vs. AD). Results show that GMU achieves accuracies of 80.46 % (NC vs. MCI) and 95.47 % (NC vs. AD), while gated self-attention attains 82.08 % on MCI vs. AD. Ablations show that removing the MoE consistently degrades accuracy across all tasks. These findings underscore the value of input-adaptive, multimodal modeling for AD diagnosis by leveraging the complementary nature of MRI and PET.

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

ScoreGate: Adaptive Chunk Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dual-Score Statistical Fusion

Fixed-cardinality retrieval injects a constant top-K chunks into the generator regardless of query complexity, causing over-retrieval for narrow queries and under-retrieval for compositional ones. We describe ScoreGate, a lightweight score-space decision mechanism that controls retrieval cardinality at inference time using two scores already produced by the standard pipeline: bi-encoder similarity s_i and cross-encoder reranker score r_i, with no additional model inference calls required. Its core insight is that cross-encoder affirmation can rescue semantically relevant chunks that bi-encoder retrieval ranks poorly due to vocabulary mismatch – a failure mode unaddressed by fixed-K or single-score thresholding. On MS MARCO (200 dev queries), ScoreGate achieves MRR@10 = 0.401 with 35% fewer retained chunks than Standard Top-K. On an internal benchmark (n=300, Fleiss' kappa=0.87), ScoreGate observed zero false positives (95% CI [96.4%, 100%]) at 97.77-99.34% recall, with 34.8% fewer tokens per query and only 31ms added latency. Results on both MS MARCO and real-world production traffic suggest that adaptive retrieval cardinality can improve retrieval efficiency without degrading retrieval quality.

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

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Privacy-Preserving Federated Autoencoder for ECG Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.11556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring could surface rhythm abnormalities before they escalate into cardiovascular events. However, a deployable system must satisfy three requirements simultaneously: legal-grade privacy (GDPR, HIPAA), real-time inference on constrained edge hardware, and detection quality under non-IID cross-hospital data. We design and evaluate an end-to-end federated system addressing all three for unsupervised 12-lead ECG anomaly detection on PTB-XL dataset, combining three autoencoder families (VanillaAE, ConvAE, VAE), Flower-based federated averaging (FedAvg) across ten simulated hospitals, client-side differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with a Rényi-DP accountant, and 8-bit integer (INT8) post-training quantization with Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarking. Our main contributions are: an empirical characterization of how these mechanisms compose, practical DP-specific recommendations, and technical and security insights for a clinically sensitive setting. Federated learning matches or exceeds the centralized baseline across all architectures (ConvAE federated area under the ROC curve, AUROC, $0.782$), and an $\varepsilon$ sweep identifies $\varepsilon=4$ as the recommended clinical operating point. INT8 quantization roughly halves model size and cuts Pi 4 latency by up to $44%$ with $

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models

arXiv:2606.12497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $\mu$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $\mu$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

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

Agents All the Way Down; A Methodology for Building Custom AI Agents from Substrate to Production

arXiv:2606.11869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Custom AI agents areagents that live inside their own application, talk to their own data and tools, enforce their own security boundaries, and carry their own brand and audit trail. What separates them from the general-purpose tier is fit, not capability: each is built for one job, by the engineer who will maintain it. No published practice sets out how to build one end to end. The pieces are everywhere (function-calling APIs, the Model Context Protocol, code agents to pair with), but the practice that chains them lives in podcasts, blogs, and leaked system prompts. This paper writes that practice down as a methodology, Agents All the Way Down: two preconditions crossed once and kept, then three practices repeated for the agent's life. The preconditions are (P1) Substrate, the LLM as a software component, framed as tools, then system, then messages under prompt-caching; and (P2) Building blocks: function calling, MCP, CLI orchestration, the liteshell pattern, the agent loop, skills, characters, hooks, and scaffolding. The practices are (P3) prototype with a general-purpose agent; (P4) harvest, fold, and ship the result as a CLI, the Turtle pattern; and (P5) agent-tests-agent, in which a general-purpose agent drives it through behavioural scenarios, a complement to classical testing, not a replacement. The working loop is P3 to P4 to P5 and back, and one corollary falls out for free: multi-agent orchestration is just CLI composition. The methodology is framework-free by construction. It was distilled from the AAC, a custom agent for the open-source LAMB platform, built in about ten days by one developer with an AI pair-programmer and in production . We present it as a transferable practice, independent of any language or framework.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation. This shift has sparked interest in using intermediate visualizations as a reasoning aid, akin to human mental imagery. Central to this idea is the ability to form, maintain, and manipulate visual representations in a goal-oriented manner. To evaluate and probe this capability, we develop MentisOculi, a procedural, stratified suite of multi-step reasoning problems amenable to visual solution, tuned to challenge frontier models. Evaluating visual strategies ranging from latent tokens to explicit generated imagery, we find they generally fail to improve performance. Analysis of UMMs specifically exposes a critical limitation: While they possess the textual reasoning capacity to solve a task and can sometimes generate correct visuals, they suffer from compounding generation errors and fail to leverage even ground-truth visualizations. Our findings suggest that despite their inherent appeal, visual thoughts do not yet benefit model reasoning. MentisOculi establishes the necessary foundation to analyze and close this gap across diverse model families.