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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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

FacProcessTwin: An LLM-Based System for Process Twin Development

arXiv:2606.17666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process twins provide real-time representations of entire production processes. By capturing how process steps interact, rather than monitoring a single machine in isolation as an asset-based digital twin does, they have the potential to drive efficiency gains across the whole process. However, developing a process twin is costly. It requires accurately modelling the entire production process: its process steps, the equipment and product-specific settings each step uses, and its process variations. The resulting model must then be bound to live operational data. We present FacProcessTwin, a system that leverages a large language model (LLM) to reduce this development time, building a process twin from a plant's process documentation and natural-language input from an operator. FacProcessTwin generates this complete process model and then automatically binds its process steps to live operational data. The generated model and its data bindings are rendered as an interactive process diagram through which manufacturing personnel can monitor and correct the system's autonomous decisions, such as resolving uncertainty at safety-critical binding steps. We evaluate FacProcessTwin through a real-world case study of an Australian food manufacturer, covering 16 production process flows that span chilled, frozen, and aseptic shelf-stable product categories and include process variations within the same product. The results show that FacProcessTwin generates these process models accurately (a mean F1 of 95.2% against ground truth) and builds each twin in roughly a sixth of the manual time. Its human-in-the-loop governance then keeps the safety-critical bindings correct: at ambiguous tags where a single-pass baseline silently mis-binds 75.0% of the time, FacProcessTwin defers to the operator and mis-binds none.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Global vs. Local Discrimination of Locally Implementable Multipartite Unitaries

arXiv:2509.10430v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study single-shot distinguishability of locally implementable multipartite unitaries under Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) and global operations. As unitary discrimination depends on both the choice of probing states and the measurements on the evolved states, we classify LOCC and global distinguishability into two categories: adaptive strategies, where probing states are chosen based on measurement outcomes from other subsystems, and restricted strategies, where probing states remain fixed. Our findings uncover three surprising features in the bipartite setting and establish new structural limits for unitary discrimination: (i) Certain pairs of unitaries are globally distinguishable with restricted strategies but indistinguishable under LOCC, even with adaptive strategies. (ii) There exist sets of four unitaries that are distinguishable via LOCC, yet remain globally indistinguishable with restricted strategies. (iii) Some sets of unitaries are globally indistinguishable under adaptive strategies, when probed with separable states, but become distinguishable via LOCC.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SceneMiner: Identity-Preserving Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Unified BEV Scene Mining

Mining hard, safety-critical scenes from driving logs is bottlenecked by the absence of difficulty labels, and no single proxy, collision risk, trajectory ambiguity, or semantic rarity suffices to find such scenes on its own. We present SceneMiner, a unified, camera-only bird's-eye-view pipeline that emits complementary mining signals from a frozen vision-language backbone in a single forward pass, with no LiDAR or radar: a retrieval embedding for text-prompted scenario search, a multi-label scene-tag distribution, and a continuous physics-based risk score (a motion forecast is a byproduct, not a contribution). Building such a multi-head model exposes our central finding, a failure mode we term cross-task interference: adding or upgrading one head shifts a shared activation stream and degrades weight-frozen sibling heads, so freezing parameters alone is insufficient. Our contribution, identity-preserving multi-task fine-tuning, removes this interference by zero-initializing every new sub-module and freezing every parameter that feeds the shared stream. The mining heads are thereby preserved bit-identically while training only ~102k parameters. The tagging head reaches mAP 0.4614 (micro-F1 0.5557) on 20 scene tags by pooling each scene into 32 visual tokens, and the embedding head supports text-prompted retrieval, validated qualitatively. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/sceneminer_anonymous-64E5

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

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Towards a Bathroom-Centered Human-Building Digital Twin Framework for Indoor Safety Analysis

arXiv:2606.23292v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bathroom use is a critical safety challenge for older adults because wet surfaces, constrained layouts, limited support, and frequent posture transitions are concentrated within a small domestic space. These conditions create risks that cannot be adequately understood by considering either the bathroom environment or human motion in isolation. Existing bathroom safety studies mainly identify hazards, accessibility problems, or design modifications, whereas human-centered sensing studies often focus on activity recognition or fall detection without sufficient semantic understanding of the surrounding environment. This separation limits the interpretation of how older adults interact with fixtures, support surfaces, wet areas, and spatial constraints during daily bathroom activities. To address this gap, this study proposes a bathroom-centered human-building digital twin framework for interaction-aware indoor safety analysis with a specific emphasis on older adult bathroom safety. The framework conceptualizes bathroom risk as a coupled human-environment process and integrates semantic bathroom representation, skeleton-based human representation, spatial-semantic coupling, interaction-aware event analytics, and safety-oriented visualization. A Unity-based proof-of-concept prototype is developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. Although the current work remains a prototype-oriented investigation, it establishes a methodological basis for analyzing older adults' bathroom safety through explicit body-environment relations and for advancing privacy-sensitive, interaction-aware digital twin applications in aging-in-place residential environments.

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

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.

10.
Science (Express) 2026-06-04

Long-range extended chains arising from polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A central challenge for conjugated polymers is to achieve long-range order while remaining solution-processable, which is essential for matching the electrical performance of their counterparts of crystalline inorganic semiconductors. Here we show that n-doped poly(benzodifurandione) (n-PBDF) can undergo polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly (PSA), in which chain growth, chemical doping, and structural ordering are intrinsically coupled, yielding long-range chain extension over hundreds of nanometers. We reveal that the spontaneously formed n-PBDF nanoribbons arise from a self-initiated, convergent growth mechanism driven by cooperative monomer–polymer interactions and stabilized by proton-coupled duplex chains and the polymer’s intrinsic polyelectrolyte character. With long-range extended chains in the nanoribbons, the aligned n-PBDF thin films demonstrate metallic-level conductivity (>10 4 Siemens per centimeter).

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

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

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

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

DOG-DPO:Dynamic Optimization in Geometry for Safety Alignment

arXiv:2606.07678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment for large language models relies on preference data, but current pipelines often train on large, redundant datasets. Existing data selection methods typically score each preference pair independently, collapsing directional preference information into scalar quality or diversity scores. This sample-centric view is especially limiting in multi-dataset settings, where shared safety directions coexist with dataset-specific residual risks. We propose DOG-DPO, a training-free data selection framework that treats preference pairs as structured geometric signals. DOG-DPO first represents each preference pair as a direction in model representation space. It then decomposes multi-dataset preference geometry into a global anchor subspace and dataset-specific residual subspaces. Finally, it selects subsets by maximizing diversity-based coverage, encouraging broad, non-redundant coverage of alignment directions before DPO training. Across six safety benchmarks and two model backbones, DOG-DPO achieves a strong utility-robustness trade-off using only 11% of the preference pairs. It recovers most of the safety gains of full-data training while remaining entirely teacher-free, training-free, and substantially faster than representative selection baselines.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Blood-brain barrier dysfunction in cerebral amyloid angiopathy is associated with disseminated cortical superficial siderosis

Background: Blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction is increasingly recognized as a feature of cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and has been linked to hemorrhagic imaging manifestations such as cortical superficial siderosis. However, it remains unclear whether neurovascular barrier dysfunction can be captured by routinely available fluid biomarkers and whether such markers identify clinically relevant hemorrhage-prone CAA phenotypes. The CSF/serum albumin quotient (QAlb) is an established marker of neurovascular barrier dysfunction. We investigated QAlb levels in CAA and their association with imaging markers of disease severity. Methods: We included 225 participants (115 with CAA, 72 with Alzheimers disease [AD], 38 healthy controls) with CSF biomarkers and standardized MRI evaluation. Pathologic QAlb levels were identified via the age-corrected Reiber-formula. Group differences and determinants of pathological QAlb were assessed using uni- and multivariable regression analyses. The diagnostic relevance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: QAlb levels were higher in CAA than in controls (ratio of means [RoM] 1.43, 95% CI 1.28-1.58) and patients with AD (RoM 1.22, 95% CI 1.10-1.35; both p

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

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Higher moments of intrinsic volumes of random beta-prime polytopes

arXiv:2603.22224v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider beta-prime polytopes, i.e., the convex hulls of iid random points chosen according to beta-prime distributions in $\mathbb{R}^d$. After suitable scaling, beta-prime polytopes converge in distribution to the convex hulls of Poisson point processes with power-law intensity functions. We prove moment convergence for the volume and all intrinsic volumes. Beta-prime polytopes are the push-forwards of spherical random polytopes on the upper open half-sphere of the unit sphere $S^d\subset \mathbb{R}^{d+1}$. We prove convergence of moments of the spherical volume difference of the half-sphere and the spherical random polytopes.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

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

ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues

Reproducing research results from papers and released code is central to scientific progress. Existing works have introduced benchmarks to evaluate whether LLM agents can assist with reproducibility, but they are difficult to scale due to their reliance on substantial manual effort for data curation and evaluation. We introduce ReproRepo, a scalable framework for reproducibility evaluation that leverages human-raised GitHub issues as naturally occurring supervision on realistic reproduction blockers. We instantiate ReproRepo on 1,149 recent machine learning papers from major conferences and evaluate four frontier model-agent configurations. Our results show that LLM agents, even without executing code, can identify many real-world reproducibility problems from paper-repository pairs: the best agent in our study, namely Codex with GPT-5.5, surfaces at least one semantically related human-reported blocker for ~90% of papers in the study. Further analysis shows that agents are particularly effective for surfacing visible failures and identifying the right semantic region, but may still be insufficient in exact localization. ReproRepo can serve as a reusable, scalable framework for future evaluations of LLM agents on real-world reproducibility auditing. Our code is released at https://github.com/LithiumDA/ReproRepo.

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

CAF-Gen: A Multi-Agent System for Enriching Argumentation Structures

Formalizing complex reasoning from natural text is one of the central challenges in computational linguistics. It requires systems to understand not just keywords but also the context and complex reasoning embedded in a text. Current Argument Mining (AM) techniques identify basic claims and premises, yet they often struggle to capture the richer structural information required by advanced schemas such as the Carneades Argumentation Framework (CAF), which incorporates features such as premise types, proof standards, and argument schemes. We address this limitation by introducing CAF-Gen, an automated multi-agent framework designed to enrich shallow argument structures into CAF-compliant argument models. By employing an iterative Creator-Reviewer pipeline, a creator agent's output is validated by a critical agent to ensure structural integrity. This multi-agent collaboration is crucial for mitigating the structural instability typical of single-pass generative models. Our experiments demonstrate that the iterative feedback loop improves the quality of the resulting data and achieves strong alignment with the original annotations, while producing structurally richer models. Our findings show that the multi-agent system can overcome the limitations of single-pass generation, providing a robust methodology for the automated modeling of formal argumentation.

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

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

How Task Structure Limits Multi-Agent Success: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

arXiv:2606.13733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) were expected to overcome the limitation of single-agent systems (SAS) through collaboration. However, under typicality conditions on the task's constraint graph and bounded inter-agent communication, we prove that the success probability of a MAS is closely tied to the connectivity of task constraints, where each agent has limited information-processing capacity. Specifically, the success probability decays exponentially with an information bottleneck that emerges from partitioning the task's constraint graph among agents. We define this quantity as the minimum cut cost $C_{\min}$ of the potential constraint graph of each task. This information-theoretic bound applies to both open systems with external feedback and closed systems without. We validate our theory on both synthetic experiments and real-world empirical data from SWE-bench submissions. From our framework, effective MAS design should incorporate task-inherent constraints alongside engineering optimization, and when $\Cmin$ is high, practitioners should restructure tasks rather than simply scaling agents or communication.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

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

Critique of Agent Model

arXiv:2606.23991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be internalized within the system itself rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between agentic systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and agentive systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

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

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.