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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Unified Definition of Hallucination: It's The World Model, Stupid!

Despite numerous attempts at mitigation since the inception of language models, hallucinations remain a persistent problem even in today's frontier LLMs. Why is this? We review existing definitions of hallucination and fold them into a single, unified definition wherein prior definitions are subsumed. We argue that hallucination can be unified by defining it as simply inaccurate (internal) world modeling, in a form where it is observable to the user. For example, stating a fact which contradicts a knowledge base OR producing a summary which contradicts the source. By varying the reference world model and conflict policy, our framework unifies prior definitions. We argue that this unified view is useful because it forces evaluations to clarify their assumed reference "world", distinguishes true hallucinations from planning or reward errors, and provides a common language for comparison across benchmarks and discussion of mitigation strategies. Building on this definition, we also connect our framework to HalluWorld, a complementary benchmark that instantiates fully specified reference world models for stress-testing model hallucinations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

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

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.

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

An affordable hardware-aware neural architecture search for deploying convolutional neural networks on ultra-low-power computing platforms

arXiv:2606.16290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS) allows the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in microcontrollers devices by automatically designing neural architectures that can fit prearranged hardware constraints. However, state-of-the-art HW-NAS target high-performance microcontrollers, whose power consumption does not meet sensing nodes requirements. This work presents a HW-NAS generating tiny CNNs that can run on ultra-low-power microcontrollers, featuring a lightweight search procedure enabling its execution even on embedded devices. Empirical results on three well-known benchmarks for tiny computer vision proved that the proposed HW-NAS was able to generate tiny CNNs while preserving state-of-the-art classification accuracy.

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

Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset

Optical remote sensing imagery is frequently degraded by cloud and cloud-shadow contamination, which limits its reliability for near-real-time land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. Although synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide cloud-penetrating structural information, existing SAR-optical fusion methods often assume reliable optical observations and insufficiently address the semantic uncertainty introduced by cloud contamination. To address this issue, we propose CloudLULC-Net, an end-to-end heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion framework that directly predicts LULC maps from cloud-contaminated Sentinel-2 imagery and temporally adjacent Sentinel-1 SAR observations. The proposed network incorporates optical reliability modulation to suppress unreliable optical responses, heterogeneous information adaptive aggregation to model high-order spatial-channel interactions between optical and SAR representations, and a unified semantic mapping transformer to organize fused features in a LULC-oriented latent space. A semantic anchor-guided optimization strategy is further introduced to improve the consistency of intermediate semantic representations. To support this task, we construct CloudLULC-Set, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing 40,223 curated SAR-optical-label triplets with pixel-level LULC annotations across diverse geographic regions and cloud conditions. Experimental results show that CloudLULC-Net achieves an OA of 86.60%, an F1-score of 83.29%, and an mIoU of 73.51%, outperforming representative heterogeneous reconstruction-first and end-to-end SAR-optical mapping methods. Comparisons with existing global LULC products and analyses under different cloud-cover levels further demonstrate the robustness and practical value of CloudLULC-Net for target-date LULC mapping in cloud-prone regions.The project is publicly available at: https://github.com/RSIIPAC/CloudLULC

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Belief-Space Control for Personalized Cancer Treatment via Active Inference

arXiv:2606.10376v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cancer treatment is at the core a sequential decision-making problem with partial observability, latent patient heterogeneity, and explicit constraints on the budget for medical measurements. Unlike standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches that control state trajectories, cancer treatments permanently modify patients' transition dynamics, changing how states evolve over time. We model cancer treatment as a belief-space planning problem using active inference, deriving an expected free-energy objective that unifies goal-directed control and information acquisition under measurement budgets without. We implement this framework using real clinical cancer data from the AACR Project GENIE Biopharma Collaborative dataset. Results on clinical data demonstrate a simultaneous patient categorization and high treatment efficacy, under real measurement and treatment constraints.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field limits for stochastic particle systems on dense graphs

arXiv:2606.11369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic interacting particle systems whose interaction structure is described by dense weighted directed graphs converging to a graphon. In the thermodynamic limit, we prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure process and derive a deterministic nonlinear master equation describing the macroscopic evolution. The limiting equation retains the heterogeneous interaction structure of the microscopic system through the limiting graphon, allowing for spatially non-homogeneous behaviors such as localized or community-type interactions.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

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

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum optical photoelectron interferometry

arXiv:2606.13447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a general theoretical framework for multiphoton processes driven by quantum light fields, establishing a direct link between photon statistics and photoelectron observables. Our results show that the autocorrelation and cross-correlation functions, which quantify the underlying photon statistics, are directly mapped onto the resulting photoelectron spectra. Although our framework is broadly applicable, we demonstrate specifically in the example of reconstruction of attosecond beating by interference of two-photon transitions (RABBIT) the influence of the light statistical properties. In this approach, the amplitude, contrast and phase of the oscillations of the sideband signal as a function of pump-probe delay reveal the quantum nature of light. We analyze these observables across several quantum configurations, including correlated infrared and harmonic modes, as well as the uncorrelated case with non-classical harmonic statistics, thereby establishing a general framework for quantum-light RABBIT spectroscopy. We compare the analytical theory with numerical simulations for the case of classical harmonics and an infrared field in a squeezed coherent state, obtaining excellent agreement. Our results reveal how the interplay between classical and quantum correlations dictates the coherence of the photoemission process, providing a new window into the quantum-optical foundations of attosecond science.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Co-PLNet: A Collaborative Point-Line Network for Prompt-Guided Wireframe Parsing

Wireframe parsing aims to recover line segments and their junctions to form a structured geometric representation useful for downstream tasks such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing methods predict lines and junctions separately and reconcile them post-hoc, causing mismatches and reduced robustness. We present Co-PLNet, a point-line collaborative framework that exchanges spatial cues between the two tasks, where early detections are converted into spatial prompts via a Point-Line Prompt Encoder (PLP-Encoder), which encodes geometric attributes into compact and spatially aligned maps. A Cross-Guidance Line Decoder (CGL-Decoder) then refines predictions with sparse attention conditioned on complementary prompts, enforcing point-line consistency and efficiency. Experiments on Wireframe and YorkUrban show consistent improvements in accuracy and robustness, together with favorable real-time efficiency, demonstrating our effectiveness for structured geometry perception. Our code is available at https://github.com/GalacticHogrider/Co-PLNet.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Drug-Prot: A query system for statistical inference of drug effects and interactions in dynamic proteomic networks

Understanding drug effects and drug-drug interactions is essential for developing combination therapies. We present Drug-Prot, a computational framework that leverages large-scale perturbation proteomics to quantify causal drug effects, drug-drug interactions, and dynamic protein relationships. Using data from 63 single drugs and 59 drug combinations applied to 18 breast cancer cell lines at 6, 24, and 48 hours, Drug-Prot estimates drug effects on protein expression and reconstructs directed temporal protein dependency networks. The publicly available software enables targeted analyses of user-defined protein sets, substantially reducing the multiple-testing burden. Through an interactive web application, users obtain corrected p-values for single-drug and combination effects, directed temporal dependency networks, and downloadable results without requiring access to the underlying proteomic dataset. As a use case, we apply invariance-regularized Random Forests to triple-negative breast cancer cell lines to identify proteins associated with drug response. Querying these proteins in Drug-Prot reveals drug-specific and interaction effects at the protein-network level, illustrating how the framework links candidate causal protein features to actionable drug combinations.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

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

CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

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

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

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

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

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

MorphStrata: Layer-Specific Perturbations for Generating Morphence Students in Time-Series Moving Target Defense

arXiv:2606.17435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting models remain vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks while existing defense mechanisms typically incur a trade-off in robustness for bounded response and compute cost. The problem is pronounced in Moving Target Defense where maintaining multiple randomized model instances substantially exacerbates the training overhead. In this work, we introduce MorphStrata, a student generation strategy with selective, layer-specific stochastic noise injection that extends the traditional Morphence defense. MorphStrata uses a Transformer backbone as the teacher and perturbs randomly selected architectural blocks to create structured heterogeneity across student models in response to varied data distributions and threat models. We evaluate against vanilla Transformer and Morphence backbones on a suite of benchmarks including the Jena Climate, Electricity Load Diagrams, and Appliances Energy Prediction using FGSM, BIM and PGD attacks across multiple attack strengths. Across datasets and attack regimes, the proposed ensemble maintains comparable adversarial RMSE. Specifically, for high entropy, periodic datasets as in the case of the AEP data, MorphStrata achieves the lowest RMSE across all attacks and perturbation budgets, improving over the static baseline by up to 24.11% and 97.97% under FGSM and BIM respectively at an epsilon value of 0.5 over 30 randomized trials. Targeting the layers to generate MorphStrata students accounts for less than 1% increase in train-times over the Morphence MTD baseline for most of the experiments, while accounting for double digit gains in adversarial RMSE reduction. We also observe a positive correlation between higher pairwise L2 distance (among generated students) and overall defense effectiveness. In summary, MorphStrata maintains adversarial robustness as an MTD defense at marginal cost deltas when compared to existing baselines.

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

From Verdict to Process: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Stage Fact Verification

arXiv:2606.13262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent approaches combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented reasoning have shown promise for automated fact verification. To process complex claims, these verification pipelines typically execute multi-stage workflows that coordinate tightly coupled modules, including claim decomposition, evidence gathering, and verdict prediction. However, existing methods optimize individual stages in isolation or rely on fixed heuristics, which limits adaptive coordination among stages and can lead to suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose ProFact, an agentic reinforcement learning framework for end-to-end optimization of multi-stage fact verification trajectories. ProFact trains a unified policy to coordinate claim decomposition, evidence seeking, answer generation, and verdict prediction. To address the sparse and delayed supervision provided by final veracity labels, ProFact introduces process-aware rewards that provide stage-level learning signals throughout the verification process. Empirical evaluation shows that ProFact consistently outperforms strong baselines in both verification performance and inference efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of process-aware trajectory optimization for multi-stage fact verification.

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

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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

HyDRA: Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture for Heterogeneous LLM Pools

Production LLM deployments increasingly maintain heterogeneous model pools spanning order-of-magnitude cost differences. Existing routers make binary strong-vs-weak decisions and couple learned parameters to specific model identities, requiring retraining whenever the catalog changes. We present HyDRA (Hybrid Dynamic Routing Architecture), a framework that predicts fine-grained, multi-dimensional capability requirements per query and matches them against configuration-defined model profiles via shortfall matching. A ModernBERT encoder with K=4 independent sigmoid heads scores each query along reasoning, code generation, debugging, and tool use; a shortfall-matching algorithm then selects the cheapest model whose capabilities meet the predicted requirements. The deployed predictor runs at 86 ms median CPU inference latency in production, and is fully decoupled from the model catalog – adding or removing models requires only a configuration change, with zero retraining. On SWE-Bench Verified (5-model pool: GPT-5.4-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.3 Codex, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), HyDRA's tunable shortfall threshold spans three regimes: peak-quality exceeds the always-strong Claude Sonnet 4.6 baseline (75.4% vs. 74.2% resolution) at 12.9% cost savings; iso-quality matches Sonnet at 54.1% cost savings, a 6x improvement over our prior in-house binary router at 9.1%; aggressive pushes savings to 72.5% for a 3.2-point quality trade. Results generalize across LiveCodeBench, BigCodeBench, and tau-bench. HyDRA is deployed to all users in GitHub Copilot's VS Code Chat auto-mode and – to our knowledge for the first time in the LLM routing literature – demonstrates language-invariant routing across CJK, European, and other script families.

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

Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites

arXiv:2606.12667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations are placing increasing demands on terrestrial ground networks, motivating the development of more efficient ground station network designs. Current approaches select sites from predefined locations, limiting optimization to existing infrastructure and constraining performance. In contrast, free-placement optimization operates over a continuous spatial domain on Earth, broadening the search space and allowing higher-throughput configurations at the cost of potentially requiring new infrastructure deployment. In this work, we introduce SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation), a two-stage free-placement method for ground station design. SCORE combines sequential coordinate selection with cyclic refinement to manage high-dimensionality, non-convexity, and local minima that challenge global optimizers. We benchmark SCORE against one-shot methods such as differential evolution (DE) and integer programming approaches using locations from Kongsberg Satellite Services and the World Teleport Association. Tests across two commercial Earth observation constellations (Capella Space and ICEYE) and one synthetic Walker-Star constellation show that SCORE requires up to 5x fewer function evaluations to converge relative to DE while improving downlink throughput by up to 13%. Compared to fixed-site methods, unconstrained SCORE achieves up to 15% greater total downlink, establishing a strong empirical performance benchmark for flexible placement; infrastructure-constrained SCORE retains over 92% of this gain while restricting placement to within proximity of existing fiber and power infrastructure. We also explore trade-offs between expanding existing stations and deploying new sites, informing future ground network design for operational constellations.

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

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.