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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Examining the Cognitive Gap Between Authors and Peer Reviewers on Academic Paper Novelty

Novelty is a crucial metric for assessing the quality of academic papers. Scholars strive to highlight the novel aspects of their work, particularly in the title, abstract, and introduction. Peer review, serving as the gatekeeper of scientific rigor, rigorously evaluates the novelty of papers, yet a cognitive gap may exist between author self-promotion and reviewer evaluation. To investigate this, we analyzed 15,328 academic papers published in Nature Communications from 2016 to 2021, along with their peer-review comments. We found that both reviewers and authors emphasize result-oriented innovation, with reviewers adopting a more comprehensive evaluation perspective. Furthermore, by examining promotional intensity against inherent paper novelty, we found that its effect depends on the paper's actual innovation level. Highly innovative papers benefit from stronger promotional language, receiving more positive evaluations. We also found that promotional language significantly correlates with reviewer disagreement on novelty specifically for papers of moderate innovativeness, whereas it has negligible impact for papers with either very high or very low novelty. This reveals how promotional language operates most prominently in the gray area of academic evaluation.

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

Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering

Coding agents have become a major mode of software engineering, but the benchmarks we use to compare them were designed in a pre-agent era: they collapse model, harness, and environment into a single end-to-end score, typically computed against one reference solution, with no component-level signal for iteration. We argue that current coding benchmarks are misaligned with agentic software engineering. A coding agent in practice is not a model: it is a system harness – a composite of models, harnesses, contexts, environments, and feedback signals, any one of which can move the benchmark score by margins comparable to those between adjacent model generations. We discuss three symptoms: (i) benchmark scores conflate the model with the rest of the harness; (ii) grading against a single reference solution penalises equally valid alternatives; and (iii) the absence of signal at the level of individual harness components makes the end-to-end system score difficult to iterate on.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loading a precomputed KV and continuing matches prefilling from scratch (24/24 greedy tokens, and at the logits level), with no accuracy cost. On Qwen3-4B, reuse is 9-50x cheaper in compute than prefill, and the gap widens with length (prefill's attention scales with L^2), so a single reuse already pays it back. Then the part that matters: where the KV lives. Shipping it fails, because KV is nearly incompressible, so per-load egress costs more than the prefill it saves. Hosting it provider-side, exactly as production prompt-caching works, removes egress entirely. The size of the prize is set by our measured compute saving: serving one hot 3774-token document to 80M agents costs ~$1.5M to re-prefill but only ~$0.03M of reuse compute (49.7x less). The 0.1x cache-read tariff APIs charge passes a 10x discount to users while sitting inside this measured envelope, so the 10x is a floor that the measured ~50x compute saving clears, and the gap to the physical ~50x is provider margin: millions of dollars per popular document. We frame the resulting agent-native prefill CDN and leave lossless KV compression and a cross-party payment layer as the open problems.

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

On the Limitations of Ray-Tracing for Learning-Based RF Tasks in Urban Environments

arXiv:2507.19653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the realism of Sionna v1.0.2 ray-tracing for outdoor cellular links in central Rome. We use a real measurement set of 1,664 user-equipments (UEs) and six nominal base-station (BS) sites. Using these fixed positions we systematically vary the main simulation parameters, including path depth, diffuse/specular/refraction flags, carrier frequency, as well as antenna's properties like its altitude, radiation pattern, and orientation. Simulator fidelity is scored for each base station via Spearman correlation between measured and simulated powers, and by a fingerprint-based k-nearest-neighbor localization algorithm using RSSI-based fingerprints. Across all experiments, solver hyper-parameters are having immaterial effect on the chosen metrics. On the contrary, antenna locations and orientations prove decisive. By simple greedy optimization we improve the Spearman correlation by 5% to 130% for various base stations, while kNN-based localization error using only simulated data as reference points is decreased by one-third on real-world samples, while staying twice higher than the error with purely real data. Precise geometry and credible antenna models are therefore necessary but not sufficient; faithfully capturing the residual urban noise remains an open challenge for transferable, high-fidelity outdoor RF simulation.

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

Test-Time Adaptation in Optical Coherence Tomography Using Trajectory-Aligned Time-Independent Flow

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is essential in ophthalmology, but inconsistent image quality especially in low-cost devices hinders automated analysis. To address this, we introduce a flow-matching-based test-time adaptation method that generates high-quality surrogate images from noisy inputs. Typically, domain gaps between test and training data cause pixel distribution mismatches during the denoising process. We overcome this by matching the test image's histogram to synthetic reference trajectories, successfully aligning the input with expected distributions. Additionally, we remove the network's time conditioning to account for slight deviations in real-world noise distributions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in segmenting critical biomarkers for two stages of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). Code is available: https://github.com/Veit21/tta-flow.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Stitching and dimensionality effects on large artificially generated volume datasets

Generating large images via deep learning requires patching input data to accommodate hardware memory limitations, then assembling output patches, a process that can introduce stitching artifacts when neighboring patches do not align at borders. While these artifacts are known to affect segmentation tasks, their impact on generative models for style-transfer remains poorly understood. We investigated three stitching approaches and two patch dimensionalities (2D vs 3D) using cycleGAN models trained on cryo-electron microscopy datasets. We evaluated both perceptual quality and performance on downstream mitochondria segmentation. Our key findings reveal that: (1) FID scores fail to detect subtle stitching artifacts that significantly impact downstream segmentation performance, (2) 3D models with artifact-free stitching marginally outperform 2D models on downstream tasks, though the improvement barely justifies the computational cost, and (3) 2D models train more stably due to larger batch sizes. Additionally, we demonstrate that ensembling predictions from three orthogonal directions can improve low-quality volumes but provides no benefit for high-quality outputs. These results demonstrate that maximizing generative model performance on large scientific datasets requires careful consideration and mitigation of stitching artifacts, and that perceptual metrics alone are insufficient for evaluating domain adaptation quality in biomedical imaging.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

11.
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.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Random Schrödinger operators on manifolds and abstract bounds for multiplier-type operators

arXiv:2606.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study random Schrödinger operators on closed Riemannian manifolds with Anderson-type potentials. We prove high-probability spectral inclusion bounds showing that eigenvalues remain close to those of the Laplacian, with deviations controlled by a norm of the potential coefficients. Compared with deterministic bounds, this yields a square-root cancellation gain. The proof is based on a general principle showing that randomisation improves operator norm bounds for multiplier-type operators, which we formulate in both discrete and continuous settings.

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

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Holographic Complexity, Extremality, and Cosmic Censorship

arXiv:2604.20170v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a holographic complexity origin for the third law of black-hole mechanics and weak cosmic censorship. In both complexity equals action and complexity equals volume prescriptions, the relative complexity between subextremal and extremal AdS black holes diverges logarithmically. For overcharged RN-AdS, explicit calculations in both prescriptions show that the near-singularity action terms are power-law divergent or finite, while the maximal-volume contribution is finite. Thus, the extremal-to-naked relative complexity also diverges, obstructing finite-time transitions.

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

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

LLM-Aided Joint Secrecy Precoding and Trajectory for RSMA-Based Heterogeneous UAV Networks

arXiv:2507.17188v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates secure communications in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled heterogeneous UAV networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively serve ground terminals in the presence of eavesdroppers. By jointly considering secrecy rate maximization and propulsion energy consumption minimization, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem involving UAV trajectory design, service association, power allocation, and secrecy precoding under mobility, collision-avoidance, service-capacity, and communication constraints. The formulated problem is highly non-convex due to the coupling among UAV trajectories, RSMA transmission variables, and secrecy constraints.To address the resulting non-convex and highly coupled optimization problem, we propose a hierarchical optimization framework. The inner layer uses a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based S2DC algorithm combining penalty functions and difference-of-convex (D.C.) programming to solve the secrecy precoding problem with fixed UAV positions. The outer layer introduces a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning approach (LLM-HeMARL) for trajectory optimization. LLM-HeMARL efficiently incorporates LLM-generated expert heuristic policy, enabling UAVs to learn energy-aware, security-driven trajectories without the inference overhead of real-time LLM calls. The simulation results show that our method outperforms existing baselines in secrecy rate and energy efficiency, with consistent robustness across varying UAV swarm sizes and random seeds.

18.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

TranscriptFormer: A generative cell atlas across 1.5 billion years of evolution | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Single-cell transcriptomics is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular diversity, yet comparing transcriptional programs across the tree of life remains challenging. We developed TranscriptFormer, a family of generative foundation models trained on up to 112 million cells spanning 1.53 billion years of evolution across 12 species. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, even for species separated over 685 million years of evolution, and zero-shot disease state identification in human cells. Developmental trajectories, phylogenetic relationships and cellular hierarchies emerge naturally in TranscriptFormer’s representations without any explicit training on these annotations. This work establishes a powerful framework for quantitative single-cell analysis and comparative cellular biology, thus demonstrating that universal principles of cellular organization can be learned and predicted across the tree of life.

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

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

arXiv:2606.18000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.

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

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

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

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

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

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

When Iterative RAG Beats Ideal Evidence: A Diagnostic Study in Scientific Multi-hop Question Answering

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) beyond parametric knowledge, yet it is unclear when iterative retrieval-reasoning loops meaningfully outperform static RAG, particularly in scientific domains with multi-hop reasoning, sparse domain knowledge, and heterogeneous evidence. We provide the first controlled, mechanism-level diagnostic study of whether synchronized iterative retrieval and reasoning can surpass an idealized static upper bound (Gold Context) RAG. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art LLMs under three regimes: (i) No Context, measuring reliance on parametric memory; (ii) Gold Context, where all oracle evidence is supplied at once; and (iii) Iterative RAG, a training-free controller that alternates retrieval, hypothesis refinement, and evidence-aware stopping. Using the chemistry-focused ChemKGMultiHopQA dataset, we isolate questions requiring genuine retrieval and analyze behavior with diagnostics spanning retrieval coverage gaps, anchor-carry drop, query quality, composition fidelity, and control calibration. Across models, Iterative RAG consistently outperforms Gold Context, with gains up to 25.6 percentage points, especially for non-reasoning fine-tuned models. Staged retrieval reduces late-hop failures, mitigates context overload, and enables dynamic correction of early hypothesis drift, but remaining failure modes include incomplete hop coverage, distractor latch trajectories, early stopping miscalibration, and high composition failure rates even with perfect retrieval. Overall, staged retrieval is often more influential than the mere presence of ideal evidence; we provide practical guidance for deploying and diagnosing RAG systems in specialized scientific settings and a foundation for more reliable, controllable iterative retrieval-reasoning frameworks.

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

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.