Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeneralVLA-2: Geometry-Aware Reconstruction and Governed Memory for Robot Planning

Generalist vision-language-action systems need object-centric 3D evidence and reusable manipulation experience to plan reliable robot trajectories. GeneralVLA provides a hierarchical interface for converting language and RGB-D observations into 3D end-effector paths, but two bottlenecks remain. First, monocular SAM3D-style object reconstruction can hallucinate pose and unseen geometry, while manipulation benefits from stable object shape when calibrated multi-view observations are available. Second, the original KnowledgeBank mainly retrieves semantically similar snippets and appends new knowledge, which makes it difficult to control memory quality, conflicts, confidence, and geometric relevance. To address the first challenge, we introduce GeoFuse-MV3D, a geometry-prior-guided MV-SAM3D reconstruction branch that verifies external geometry cues with input-view masks, applies soft visual-hull support, performs axis-wise refinement, and fuses only geometry while preserving appearance. To address the second challenge, we upgrade KnowledgeBank into a governed long-term memory system with explicit quality, confidence, lifecycle, verifier, and conflict metadata, together with precision-oriented retrieval. Finally, we evaluate the reconstruction branch on GSO-30 and the memory module on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Verified; GeoFuse-MV3D improves over the MV-SAM3D baseline by reducing CD and LPIPS by 2.20% and 2.02% while increasing PSNR and SSIM by 2.36% and 1.03%, and KnowledgeBank improves over ReasoningBank by 4.53% on Terminal-Bench SR and 3.73% on SWE-Bench resolve rate, while reducing AS by 4.95% and 5.65%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/GeneralVLA-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/GeneralVLA-2.

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

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Creating and Evaluating K-12 GenAI Assessment Graders Through Context Engineering

arXiv:2606.12422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational assessment represents a transformative shift in classroom grading practices. While automated scoring systems and machine learning techniques have existed for decades, generative AI (GenAI) now enables educators to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with unprecedented efficiency and scale. This paper examines the theoretical foundations and evaluates an LLM grader that uses commercially available foundation models with context and prompt engineering to score student work against a rubric. Drawing on an empirical interrater agreement study using Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) data, we observed the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Proportional Reduction in Mean-Squared Error (PRMSE) across mathematics, science, and ELA, using Claude Sonnet 4, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini. The results demonstrate that LLM graders, especially when based on foundational models with more parameters, achieve substantial agreement with human raters in mathematics and science assessments, while the performances vary in ELA, suggesting generic foundation models can be effective at scoring in given contexts. Additional analysis of teacher and student feedback reveals strong acceptance of AI-generated narrative feedback but skepticism toward numerical scores, suggesting that LLMs function most effectively as formative tools rather than summative evaluators. Our findings indicate that thoughtfully designed hybrid models that combine AI efficiency with teacher judgment can reduce workload, enhance feedback quality, and support equitable assessment practices without displacing professional expertise.

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

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

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

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

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

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

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

A Unifying Lens on Reward Uncertainty in RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pm\beta\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/\beta}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

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

Continuous Language Diffusion as a Decoder-Interface Problem

Gaussian-corrupted sentence embeddings have no direct linguistic interpretation, yet continuous diffusion language models can generate fluent text from them. We study this puzzle through Embedded Language Flows (ELF) and identify a decoder-basin mechanism: our evidence suggests that denoising becomes reliable when trajectories reach regions where the native decoder can read stable tokens. We introduce a diagnostic protocol for denoisability, semantic recoverability, order sensitivity, decoder compatibility, and trajectory reliability. It exposes failures hidden by scalar metrics: low mean-squared error can discard linguistic content, low perplexity can reflect low-entropy collapse, and clean latent reconstruction can coexist with a narrow decoder basin. A decoder-margin bound explains why token recovery depends on margin and local decoder sensitivity, not latent error alone. Auditing public ELF checkpoints reveals an interface phase diagram: early predictions are weakly readable, mid-trajectory disagreement marks a competition region, and late predictions enter a high-margin decoder basin. Once inside, token realization is surprisingly simple on generated ELF states: frozen T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) token-embedding lookup recovers $93$–$96\%$ of native decoder decisions, and a single linear readout reaches $97.9\%$ agreement at 32k samples, leaving an $\approx1.1$–$1.2$ perplexity gap in a structured residual tail. Under conservative held-out gates, a margin rule exits roughly $17$–$28\%$ earlier in denoising steps under an explicit diagnostic monitor. Boundary checks on LangFlow, BitstreamDiffusion, and the Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model (Cola-DLM) show that the same interface questions remain meaningful when the state object and decoder change. Continuous and latent diffusion language models should therefore be evaluated as representation-decoder systems.

09.
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.

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

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

A Machine Learning Pipeline for Scalable Annotation of Patient-Ventilator Dyssynchrony from Bedside Ventilator Data

Objective: Patient-ventilator dyssynchrony (PVD) is a common and clinically consequential problem in critically ill patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation. Yet automated identification of PVD subtypes at scale remains an unmet clinical need, owing to the lack of large annotated bedside waveform datasets. Methods: We developed and validated a semi-supervised algorithm for automated annotation of PVD. In two medical ICUs at a tertiary academic center, bedside devices continuously collected airway flow and pressure waveforms from the ventilators. We developed a software interface with an information retrieval system that grouped similar breaths for expert human review, yielding 1,542,296 labeled breaths across eight categories: 2 labels for breath delivery mode, 5 labels for PVD subtypes, and 1 label denoting a normal breath. Two pulmonary physicians with expertise in ventilator training and education provided the expert reference labels. We trained an initial classification model on a model-derivation set of 771,148 breaths (divided into training and validation) and evaluated it on a hold-out test set of 771,149 breaths A semi-supervised approach was utilized to extend labeling to an additional 12,965,000 unlabeled breaths. Results: The supervised model performed well across all labels, with Macro-F1 scores between 0.96 and 1.00. Semi-supervised learning across 12 rounds expanded the training set from 771,148 to 8,563,995 breaths without significant performance degradation. Conclusion: We developed a practical and scalable system for automated PVD annotation that performed well across all subtypes. This work provides a reproducible foundation for automated PVD labeling to support the development of machine-learning-based clinical decision support systems for identifying patient-level asynchrony.

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

Steady-Forcing: Balancing Spatial Persistence and Motion Continuity in Long-Horizon Nature Video Diffusion

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation but often degrade over long rollouts: static scene layouts drift, while mechanisms that improve spatial stability tend to suppress motion, causing natural flows such as water, fire, or smoke to stagnate. We study this stability-motion trade-off in fixed-camera long-horizon nature video generation, where the two failure modes can be more clearly separated than in moving-camera settings. We propose Steady-Forcing, a memory and training framework combining a persistent visual anchor (V-Sink), an exponential moving-average motion memory (EMA-Sink), block-relative temporal encoding, periodic cache purification, and distillation from a Wan2.1-14B teacher with motion-rewarded priors under task-focused configurations. Together, these components are designed to preserve background identity while sustaining visually plausible fluid dynamics over multi-minute autoregressive rollouts. Evaluations across seven baselines show that Steady-Forcing improves long horizon background consistency and imaging quality, while a blind user study indicates stronger perceived stability and motion continuity. The benchmark evaluation further suggest that generic VBench aggregate scores under-penalize fixed-camera artifacts as well as rewarding drift-induced optical flow as Dynamic Degree while not directly penalizing texture hardening or flow stagnation - motivating future task-specific benchmarks for static-camera nature-flow evaluation. Project page: https://minar09.github.io/steadyforcing/

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fusing Stylometric and Embedding Systems to Estimate Authorship Likelihood Ratios in Japanese

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

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

Meta Flow Maps enable scalable reward alignment

arXiv:2601.14430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling generative models is computationally expensive. This is because optimal alignment with a reward function–whether via inference-time steering or fine-tuning–requires estimating the value function. This task demands access to the conditional posterior $p_{1|t}(x_1|x_t)$, the distribution of clean data $x_1$ consistent with an intermediate state $x_t$, a requirement that typically compels methods to resort to costly trajectory simulations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Meta Flow Maps (MFMs), a framework extending consistency models and flow maps into the stochastic regime. MFMs are trained to perform stochastic one-step posterior sampling, generating arbitrarily many i.i.d. draws of clean data $x_1$ from any intermediate state. Crucially, these samples provide a differentiable reparametrization that unlocks efficient value function estimation. We leverage this capability to solve bottlenecks in both paradigms: enabling inference-time steering without inner rollouts, and facilitating unbiased, off-policy fine-tuning to general rewards. Empirically, our single-particle steered-MFM sampler outperforms a Best-of-1000 baseline on ImageNet across multiple rewards at a fraction of the compute.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

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

MIDS: Detecting Stealthy Masquerade and Tampering Attacks on CAN Bus via Bidirectional Mamba

arXiv:2606.18599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol is the primary communication standard for Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in modern vehicles, but its lack of encryption and authentication exposes it to a range of security threats. Existing intrusion detection systems are largely tuned to fabrication-style attacks (DoS, fuzzing, ID spoofing realised by frame injection), in which detection signals such as per-ID inter-arrival statistics are readily available. We instead address the harder masquerade setting[b37], in which an internal adversary substitutes a legitimate frame in-situ at its original transmission slot, preserving traffic periodicity and rendering traffic-statistic defences ineffective. We propose the Mamba Intrusion Detection System (MIDS), an innovative dual-stream framework that processes CAN identifiers and payloads in parallel and reconstructs their joint temporal semantics through bidirectional selective state-space modelling. To evaluate MIDS, we collected over 100 million CAN frames from a physical Tesla Model 3 across three driving regimes and synthesised 54 masquerade attack variants spanning ID-only, data-only, and combined modifications. MIDS attains an F1 of 96.94\% on this dataset, exceeding the strongest reproducible baseline by more than 8 percentage points, while sustaining a 1.147~ms single-window inference latency – ample headroom for real-time onboard deployment. To verify generalisation, we further evaluate MIDS on four public benchmarks (ROAD, CrySyS, OTIDS, CT\&T) covering both masquerade and injection scenarios; MIDS attains F1 from 93.70\% to 99.61\%, outperforming the strongest of eight reproduced baselines by up to 13.94 percentage points under a unified 5-fold protocol.

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

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

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

ToolSense: A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Parametric Tool Knowledge in LLMs

arXiv:2606.12451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed as agents over large tool catalogs face a critical tool-retrieval bottleneck. As embedding-based retrieval approaches rely on compact encoders that may under-capture specialized tool semantics, parametric tool retrieval addresses this by encoding each tool as a virtual token appended to the LLM vocabulary, fine-tuned in two stages (memorization then retrieval SFT) to use the LLM as a retriever, achieving strong performance on standard ToolBench retrieval benchmarks. Yet these benchmarks use verbose, fully-specified queries, and their evaluation applies constrained decoding that restricts outputs to valid token paths, neither reveals whether the model actually understands its tools. We introduce ToolSense, an open-source LLM-powered diagnostic framework that takes any tool catalog as input and automatically generates three benchmarks: a Realistic Retrieval Benchmark (RRB) with queries at three ambiguity tiers, an MCQ probing benchmark, and a QA probing benchmark. Applying ToolSense to ToolBench (~47k tools) and evaluating five parametric model training configurations reveals a knowledge-retrieval dissociation: on RRB queries, several configurations collapse by ~50-64 percentage points compared to fully-specified ToolBench benchmarks, falling below the embedding-model baseline. Additionally, despite strong retrieval performance, some models score near-random on factual probes, suggesting a knowledge-retrieval dissociation. We open-source the ToolSense framework and the ToolBench diagnostic benchmarks at https://github.com/SAP/toolsense.

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

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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

Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

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

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

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

Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RL

arXiv:2606.15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with massively parallel simulations has become a standard framework for developing robust, deployable policies; however, most existing approaches still rely on simple Gaussian policy parameterizations. Diffusion models provide a more expressive policy class and have shown strong performance on challenging control problems, yet most diffusion-based RL methods are designed for offline or off-policy training. In this work, we ask whether diffusion policies can be trained effectively in the massively parallel, on-policy regime. To this end, we introduce Trust-region Diffusion Policies (TruDi), which enables diffusion policies for on-policy RL with massively parallel simulations. This setting is particularly challenging because the data distribution changes quickly across updates, making stable training with complex policies difficult. TruDi addresses this by integrating a trust-region optimization rule to enforce a KL-divergence constraint over the entire diffusion trajectory. Empirically, we evaluate TruDi on a diverse set of 4 massively parallel RL benchmarks comprising a total of 73 tasks. Across these tasks, TruDi consistently outperforms or is on-par with strong baselines on standard tasks and achieves clear gains on more challenging humanoid control tasks, establishing a strong new baseline for massively parallel on-policy RL.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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

From Argument Components to Graphs: A Multi-Agent Debate with Confidence Gating for Argument Relations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly assessed and utilized in the field of Argument Mining (AM), thanks to their strong general reasoning capabilities. However, standard training-free models often miss sophisticated details, specifically in contexts where two parts of the text have to be analyzed together. Furthermore, self-correction mechanisms tend to reinforce initial hallucinations in reasoning. Overcoming these limitations typically requires expensive, domain-specific supervised fine-tuning. Recent work has shown that a multi-agent paradigm can address such weaknesses for the component classification task through dialectical refinement with a Proponent-Opponent-Judge architecture, setting a promising direction for training-free approaches in the field. In this paper, we extend and evaluate this framework on the Argument Relation Identification and Classification (ARIC) task, reformulating it as a debate over component pairs. Besides that, we introduce a confidence gating mechanism that enables debating only on the uncertain cases and accepting the initial prediction when confidence is high. On the UKP Argument Annotated Essays v2 corpus, we demonstrate that the selective debate achieves the highest Macro F1 among all training-free methods, while debate over all samples degrades performance below that of one of the baselines. All generative approaches also outperform fine-tuned RoBERTa models on Macro F1, suggesting that the under-representation of the Attack class was more damaging to supervised fine-tuning than to inference-only models. Additionally, our framework produces human-readable debate transcripts, offering interpretability absent from both single-agent and supervised classifiers.