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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

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

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

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

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

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

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SpikeDecoder: Realizing the GPT Architecture with Spiking Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.12287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Transformer architecture is widely regarded as the most powerful tool for natural language processing, but due to a high number of complex operations, it inherently faces the issue of high energy consumption. To address this issue, we consider Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their naturally event-driven approach to processing information. However, this inherently makes them difficult to train. Often, many SNN-based models circumvent this issue by converting pre-trained ANNs. More recently, attempts have been made to design directly trainable SNN-based adaptations of the Transformer model structure. Although the results showed great promise, the application field was computer vision. Moreover, the proposed model incorporates only encoder blocks. In this paper, we propose SpikeDecoder, a fully SNN-based implementation of the Transformer decoder block, for applications in natural language processing. In a series of experiments, we analyze the impact of exchanging different blocks of the ANN model with spike-based alternatives to identify trade-offs and significant sources of performance loss. We further investigate the role of residual connections and the selection of SNN-compatible normalization techniques. Besides the work on the model architecture, we formulate and compare different embedding methods to project text data into spikes. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based decoder block reduces the theoretical energy consumption by 87% to 93% compared to the ANN baseline.

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

DRFLOW: A Deep Research Benchmark for Personalized Workflow Prediction

arXiv:2606.18191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research (DR) systems are increasingly used for complex information-seeking tasks, but existing works mainly focus on generating reports and summaries. In contrast, many enterprise tasks instead require an agent to identify concrete workflows which is a sequence of action-steps. For example, rather than summarizing budgeting policies, an agent should be able to determine the steps needed to answer a question such as: "How do I request new headcount given a fixed budget?". Therefore, we introduce DRFLOW, a benchmark for evaluating personalized workflows predicted by agents from heterogeneous sources. Each task requires the agent to identify relevant evidence from scattered sources, then use that evidence to predict the correct action-step sequence for the user's task. DRFLOW contains 100 tasks across five domains, with 1,246 reference workflow steps grounded in more than 3,900 sources. We define seven diagnostic metrics covering factual grounding, step recovery, structural ordering, condition resolution, and personalization. We further present DRFLOW-Agent (DRFA), a workflow-oriented reference agent to predict personalized workflow. We show that although DRFA improves over strong baseline agents (upto 10.02% average F1 score), there is substantial room for improvement remains across these workflow metrics, indicating that predicting complete and correct personalized workflows remains a challenging frontier for deep research.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reconstructing Template-Memorized Images from Natural Prompts

arXiv:2507.07947v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative models, such as diffusion models, have raised concerns related to privacy, copyright infringement, and data stewardship. To better understand and control these risks, prior work has introduced techniques and attacks that reconstruct images, or parts of images, from training data. While these results demonstrate that training data can be recovered, existing methods often rely on high computational resources, partial access to the training set, or carefully engineered prompts. In this work, we present a new attack that requires low resources, assumes little to no access to the training data, and identifies seemingly benign prompts that can lead to potentially risky image reconstruction. We further show that such reconstructions may occur unintentionally, even for users without specialized knowledge. For example, we observe that for one existing model, the prompt ``blue Unisex T-Shirt'' generates the face of a real individual. Moreover, by combining the identified vulnerabilities with real-world prompt data, we discover prompts that reproduce memorized visual elements. Our approach builds on insights from prior work and leverages domain knowledge to expose a fundamental vulnerability arising from the use of scraped e-commerce data, where templated layouts and images are closely tied to pattern-like textual prompts. The code for our attack is publicly available at https://github.com/TheSolY/lr-tmi.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When Do LLMs Reason? A Dynamical Systems View via Entropy Phase Transitions

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking paradox: CoT often provides marginal or even negative gains on factual and open-ended tasks while multiplying token consumption. In this work, we show that LLM reasoning is not a static property of tasks or models, but a dynamic decoding state that emerges during generation. Through systematic analysis, we find early-stage entropy dynamics provide a reliable signal of this state: tasks benefiting from CoT exhibit consistent entropy reduction, while others display unstable or increasing patterns. This behavior can be interpreted as a phase-transition-like shift from a high-entropy exploratory regime to a low-entropy structured reasoning regime. Based on these insights, we propose EDRM (Entropy Dynamics-based Reasoning Manifold), a lightweight and training-free routing framework that leverages early decoding entropy to adaptively select inference strategies. EDRM embeds entropy trajectories into a compact and interpretable manifold representation, enabling both zero-shot deployment and fine-grained instance-level adaptation. Across 15 benchmarks and 4 LLMs of varying scales and architectures, EDRM consistently outperforms static baselines. At the dataset level, EDRM achieves 41–55\% token reduction while improving accuracy with as few as 50 calibration samples. At the instance level, it further improves accuracy by up to 4.7\% while maintaining 27–45\% token savings. These results suggest that reasoning should be invoked selectively rather than by default, and demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy-driven decoding control for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.

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

Self-Supervised Learning as Discrete Communication

Most self-supervised learning (SSL) methods learn continuous visual representations by aligning different views of the same input, offering limited control over how information is structured across representation dimensions. In this work, we frame visual self-supervised learning as a discrete communication process between a teacher and a student network, where semantic information is transmitted through a fixed-capacity binary channel. Rather than aligning continuous features, the student predicts multi-label binary messages produced by the teacher. Discrete agreement is enforced through an element-wise binary cross-entropy objective, while a coding-rate regularization term encourages effective utilization of the constrained channel, promoting structured representations. We further show that periodically reinitializing the projection head strengthens this effect by encouraging embeddings that remain predictive across multiple discrete encodings. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over continuous agreement baselines on image classification, retrieval, and dense visual prediction tasks, as well as under domain shift through self-supervised adaptation. Beyond backbone representations, we analyze the learned binary codes and show that they form a compact and informative discrete language, capturing semantic factors reusable across classes.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins

作者:

How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered. Unicellular relatives of animals exhibit simple multicellularity through clonal division, formation of multinucleate coenocytes, or aggregation. 1 Therefore, animal multicellularity may have evolved from one (or a combination) of these behaviours. Aggregation has classically been dismissed as a means to complex multicellularity. 2 However, aggregation occurs in many extant animal cells and has also been recently described in three close unicellular relatives of animals (the choanoflagellates Salpingoeca rosetta and Choanoeca flexa, and the filasterean Capsaspora owczarzaki). 3-5 It is unclear whether aggregation in these species is derived or ancestral, and its relevance for animal origins remains unknown. To fill this gap, we investigated whether an additional close unicellular relative of animals can undergo aggregation. We discovered that the marine free-living bacterivorous filasterean Ministeria vibrans 6 forms homogeneous aggregates with reproducible kinetics that have long-term stability, and that improved feeding and mating may be evolutionary drivers of this aggregation. Notably, we found that homologs of many animal multicellularity genes involved in cell adhesion, signalling, and transcriptional regulation were deployed during the aggregation process, indicating that they may have been used for aggregation in the unicellular ancestors of animals before being co-opted into animal multicellular development. Thus, our results imply that aggregative multicellularity was key to the development of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VOID: Defeating Unauthorized Mimicry in Latent Diffusion Models

While Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized visual synthesis, they are increasingly exploited for unauthorized mimicry of individuals. Existing defenses inject deceptive perturbations to steer the generated images toward irrelevant targets. However, this approach hinges on an ungrounded assumption: subtle perturbations can maintain their deceptive efficacy throughout an LDM's extensive generation process. In reality, the model's innate restoration mechanism will remove such perturbations and cause individual identities to re-emerge in the images generated. We propose VOID, a defense framework that overcomes this conundrum by manipulating an LDM's intrinsic stochasticity. VOID perturbs the diffusion pipeline in two novel ways: 1) amplifying the latent encoding errors to shatter an image's semantic structure, and 2) counteracting the target guidance signals to suppress the model's restoration capabilities. This results in a semantic corruption that thwarts any unauthorized mimicry. Notably, the security gain does not come at the price of visual utility, as VOID simultaneously manages to confine perturbations to human-imperceptible regions of protected images. Our comprehensive evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art defenses against 10 mimicry attacks on 5 datasets demonstrates VOID's unprecedented protection power: it increases the average Frechet Inception Distance (FID) from 113 to 365, a 223% improvement over the strongest defense to date.

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

Beyond Text-to-SQL: An Agentic LLM System for Governed Enterprise Analytics APIs

Enterprise analytics aims to make organizational data accessible for decision-making, yet non-technical users still face barriers when using traditional business intelligence tools or Text-to-SQL systems. While recent Text-to-SQL approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) promise natural language access to structured data, they fall short in enterprise settings where analytics pipelines rely on governed APIs rather than raw databases. In practice, these APIs encapsulate complex business logic to ensure consistency, auditability, and security. However, delegating mathematical or aggregation logic to an LLM introduces reliability and compliance risks. To this end, we present Analytic Agent, an LLM-based agentic system that translates natural language intents into secure interactions with enterprise analytics APIs. Evaluated on 90 real enterprise use cases constructed by domain experts, it reliably interprets user goals, validates permissions, executes governed queries, and generates compliant visualizations through multi-step reasoning and policy-aware orchestration.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Deterministic Integrity Gates for LLM-Assisted Clinical Manuscript Preparation: An Auditable Biomedical Informatics Architecture

arXiv:2606.09500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous research agents and AI co-scientist systems push large language models (LLMs) from drafting toward end-to-end manuscript production, the bottleneck shifts from generation to verification. Fluent LLM output can hide fabricated citations, numbers that drift from source tables, and unmet reporting-guideline items; existing tools generate without verifying, and self-critique inherits the blind spots that produce confident fabrication. We describe an architecture pairing generation with verification, resting on three principles: decompose the workflow into self-contained skills, gate every stage transition with halt-on-failure, and resolve each integrity question with the cheapest sufficient mechanism, a deterministic, re-executable check where one suffices and a prose-level probe only where interpretation is unavoidable. This determinism-where-possible split, organized as an integrity-gate taxonomy, is the core contribution. It is realized as MedSci Skills, an open-source toolkit of 43 skills with a 21-detector deterministic tier, evaluated on three public-dataset pipelines (STARD, PRISMA, STROBE) and a seeded-defect ablation. Across the three pipelines every content-hash manifest verified clean and the gates surfaced real defects; on 27 identical injected defects the deterministic gates detected all 27 with no false positives on the matched clean fixtures, whereas a single-prompt LLM reviewer detected 11, its misses in code, bibliography, and style defects the prose hides. Determinism-where-possible verification yields an auditable, re-executable trail that exposes the evidence a human needs to check an LLM-assisted manuscript: feasibility and reproducibility evidence, not a claim of human-competitive quality, which a separate blinded study addresses. MedSci Skills is MIT-licensed and archived (v3.8.0).

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

Diffusion-based Cumulative Adversarial Purification for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, yet their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations poses a significant threat to their reliability in real-world applications. Despite often being imperceptible to humans, these perturbations can drastically alter model outputs, leading to erroneous interpretations and decisions. This paper introduces DiffCAP, a novel diffusion-based purification strategy that can effectively neutralize adversarial corruptions in VLMs. We theoretically establish a provable recovery region in the forward diffusion process and meanwhile quantify the convergence rate of semantic variation with respect to VLMs. These findings manifest that adversarial effects monotonically fade as diffusion unfolds. Guided by this principle, DiffCAP leverages noise injection with a similarity threshold of VLM embeddings as an adaptive criterion, before reverse diffusion restores a clean and reliable representation for VLM inference. Through extensive experiments across six datasets with three VLMs under varying attack strengths in three task scenarios, we show that DiffCAP outperforms existing defense techniques by a substantial margin. Notably, DiffCAP significantly reduces both hyperparameter tuning complexity and the required diffusion time, thereby accelerating the denoising process. Equipped with theorems and empirical support, DiffCAP provides a robust and practical solution for securely deploying VLMs in adversarial environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/JasonFu1998/DiffCAP.

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

A Machine Learning Framework for Real-Time Personalized Ergonomic Pose Analysis

This paper introduces a new methodology for real-time prediction of ergonomic and non-ergonomic human poses using volumetric video data in three dimensions. Although the methodology was designed for ergonomic assessments, it can be adapted to other applications requiring real-time analysis of human posture. One aspect that makes this system stand out is its ability to analyze 3D point clouds during the assessment, enabling computation from multiple angles. This overcomes a critical limitation of cameras which provide often a fixed viewpoint, thereby restricting the data available for a thorough postural evaluation, especially when occlusions occur. The system continuously and automatically performs pose inference using the chosen perspective on the real-time streaming data; however, only the poses manually selected and labeled by the user are used to train the personalized deep learning classifier. The methodology has been refined through a case study in which RGB-D cameras captured subjects performing load-lifting tasks, enabling real-time skeletal labeling. The model was trained on this data and, following the training phase, performs inference on new streaming data in real time. This research offers a scalable and pragmatic approach for real-time ergonomic evaluation by combining state-of-the-art 3D data technologies and traditional 2D pose estimation algorithms. It addresses the increasing need for safety and health monitoring in workplace environments, marking a notable contribution to the domain.

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

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lyapunov-Based Sample Complexity Analysis for Weakly-Coupled MDPs

arXiv:2606.14095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the sample complexity of learning in average-reward weakly-coupled Markov decision processes (WCMDPs) and Restless Bandits (RBs) under a generative model. Naive reduction to a tabular MDP leads to high complexity bounds as the state-action space is exponentially large in the number of arms $N$. By exploiting the weakly coupled structure, we show that near-optimal policies can be learned with sample and computational complexities that are polynomial in $N$. Specifically, we analyze the plug-in approach, which applies an efficient planning algorithm to an empirical model estimated from data. For fully heterogeneous WCMDPs, we establish the first finite-sample PAC guarantee with polynomial complexity and an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. For homogeneous RBs, we further prove that a smaller optimality gap is achievable under mild structural assumptions. A primary technical contribution of our work is a novel Lyapunov-based analysis framework. Unlike classical approaches that rely on the difficult-to-control bias function, our framework uses an explicitly constructed Lyapunov function along with a drift transfer technique between the true and empirical models. A key step of independent interest in our framework is a fine-grained perturbation analysis for the underlying linear programming (LP) relaxation, which provides a general tool for analyzing LP-based policies and weakly-coupled systems.

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

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Emergent de Sitter Space and Non-Unitary Tensor Networks from Non-Hermitian Quantum Criticality

arXiv:2606.17983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extending the holographic principle to de Sitter (dS) spacetimes remains one of the most vital open frontiers in quantum gravity, where a microscopic, bottom-up tensor-network framework that relates boundary quantum data to emergent de Sitter spacetime is still lacking. In this work, we first show the emergence of de Sitter spacetime from boundary entanglement by formulating a non-unitary continuous multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (cMERA) for a concrete non-Hermitian critical fermion chain. Within this emergent spacetime, we analyze the associated geodesics and show that they act as extremal Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surfaces undergoing a smooth timelike-to-null transition. Remarkably, we demonstrate that this continuum trajectory dictates a distinct tensor-network architecture in which the bond-counting contribution naturally truncates at the discrete timelike-to-null transition toward the deep infrared. In the resulting architecture, the null ray along the horizon is represented by zero-cost links, since the associated cut severs no tensor legs. This network structure successfully reproduces the logarithmic scaling of non-unitary critical entanglement entropy, offering a bond-counting picture for the de Sitter RT formula. Our results provide the long-sought dS/(c)MERA correspondence at the level of both emergent spacetime and discrete holographic entanglement.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

arXiv:2606.20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and ``Flat'' RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.

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

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

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

A First-Principles Derivation of LLM Policy Optimization: From Expected Reward to GRPO and Its Structural Extensions

arXiv:2606.16733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy gradient algorithms for language models optimize the same objective $J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}*{\tau \sim p*\theta(\tau)}[R(\tau)]$, which has exactly two factors: the trajectory probability $p_\theta(\tau)$ and the reward $R(\tau)$. Every method from REINFORCE to PPO to GRPO and their descendants modifies one or both factors to address a specific failure in the preceding formulation. Existing surveys organize these methods by domain or chronology, which obscures the rationale behind each design choice and the precise location of its intervention within the gradient estimator. This survey revisits the landscape of LLM policy optimization from $J(\theta)$ on first principles and uses the trajectory side, induced by $p_\theta(\tau)$, and the reward side, induced by $R(\tau)$, as the two axes along which methods are located. It covers the path from REINFORCE and PPO to GRPO, as well as post-GRPO variants, Agentic RL, and GRPO-OPD. The resulting framework is unified, diagnostic, and extensible: it analyzes methods from a shared objective, identifies which side each method modifies and why, and applies the same trajectory and reward axes across these settings. Across these settings, the framework also exposes compound failures that no single-side fix resolves and that therefore require joint design of the trajectory side and the reward side. The boundary cases and coupled failures identified by this map mark where existing solutions run out and provide a principled starting point for designing the next generation of LLM policy optimization algorithms.