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

OmniDrive: An LLM-Choreographed Multi-Agent World Model with Unified Latent Co-Compression for Multi-View Driving Video Generation

Generative world models for autonomous driving face two unresolved tensions: heterogeneous control injection, where free-form language, HD-maps, trajectories, and camera poses reside in incompatible representational spaces, and post-hoc cross-view fusion, where per-camera latents fail to encode global 3-D geometry. We trace both to a single root cause: the absence of a shared symbolic interlingua aligning language, geometry, and pixels at the latent-token level. We present DRIVE-CHOREO, an LLM-choreographed multi-agent world model that recasts controllable multi-view video generation as latent choreography. Three Qwen2.5-VL agents - a Director parsing user intent into a structured WorldScript, a Cartographer grounding it into spatially-anchored layout tokens, and an Auditor feeding cross-view critiques back as auxiliary supervision - jointly author a single position-aware token sequence. This sequence is co-compressed with the multi-view video via a view-time permutation that enforces inter-camera geometry within the convolutional receptive field of a 3-D VAE. On nuScenes, DRIVE-CHOREO sets new state-of-the-art multi-view consistency and BEV mAP (21.6) with competitive FVD (45.7); a detector trained purely on our synthetic data gains +2.4 NDS on the real validation split, validating downstream utility.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Multipartite reference-frame-independent quantum cryptographic communication

arXiv:2606.12284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reference frame mismatch among communication parties introduces errors in quantum cryptographic protocols. As the number of participants increases, aligning reference frames becomes increasingly difficult, complicating multipartite quantum cryptographic implementations. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate multipartite reference-frame-independent (RFI) quantum cryptographic communication using Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. We generalize the bipartite RFI security parameter $C$ to an $N$-party parameter $C_N$ and derive the asymptotic secret key rate expressed solely in terms of experimentally accessible quantities. We analyze the key rate under global and local depolarizing noise models and find that increasing the number of parties $N$ enhances robustness against global depolarizing noise while increasing vulnerability to local channel noise. We also present a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of four-party RFI quantum cryptographic communication using four-photon GHZ states, confirming the reference-frame invariance of both the $C_4$ parameter and the secret key rate under various reference frame rotations.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606.14737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings. Designing descriptors that are both expressive and broadly applicable, however, remains challenging. We study persistent homology (PH) as a general-purpose representation for MD and introduce the masked Flood complex, a protein-tailored modification of a recently introduced simplicial complex construction that emphasizes inter-residue structure at low computational cost. Vectorized persistence diagrams then provide information-rich, geometry-aware summaries of protein conformations, which we evaluate on protein class prediction, frame-level observable regression, and Markov state model (MSM) estimation from learned low-dimensional coordinates in a single shared representation space. Results on the mdCATH dataset show that PH-based descriptors are competitive across tasks, with masked Flood PH yielding the most consistent overall performance. Further, when using topologically-informed MSMs as a drop-in replacement within the recent MarS-FM framework for generative modeling of protein conformations, we obtain consistently better ensemble statistics than MSMs based on physical observables. Finally, we explore the transferability of the generative model to qualitatively different, fast folding, proteins.

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

Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation of Language Models

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence, encouraging the student to match the teacher's high-confidence predictions. However, we show that the mode-seeking property of reverse KL reduces generation diversity and yields unstable learning signals when the teacher distribution has high entropy. To address this, we introduce Entropy-Aware On-Policy Distillation. Our key idea is augmenting the standard reverse KL objective with forward KL when teacher entropy is high, capturing the full range of plausible outputs while retaining precise imitation elsewhere. It balances mode-seeking precision with mode-covering robustness without sacrificing on-policy training efficiency. Experiments show that our method maintains generation diversity (sustained token-level entropy) and improves student-teacher alignment (lower forward KL on high-entropy tokens). Across six math reasoning benchmarks, this yields Pass@8 accuracy gains of +1.37 for Qwen3-0.6B-Base, +2.39 for Qwen3-1.7B-Base, and +5.05 for Qwen3-4B-Base compared to baseline on-policy distillation methods. These results demonstrate that accounting for teacher uncertainty is essential for maintaining diversity and achieving effective knowledge transfer.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-performance gates on trapped ion qubits using counterpropagating pulse-shaped laser beams

arXiv:2606.15672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly-localized light-matter interactions are necessary for scaling trapped-ion architectures. In hyperfine qubits, counterpropagating beams generate entangling gates by coupling with motion, but this effect is undesirable during single-qubit operations. For that reason, single-qubit gates are traditionally implemented with copropagating beams, and the coexistence of two beam geometries adds hardware and computational overhead. In an effort towards collective performance improvement with minimal overhead, we design and implement pulse-amplitude and dephasing robust dynamically corrected gates using Space Curve Quantum Control (SCQC) and compare them against the constant-amplitude gate implementation. We perform gate set tomography on a four-qubit trapped-ion register, and we discover more than 50% error reduction when robust pulses are used. We find that counterpropagating robust gates often outperform their copropagating counterparts and reach error rates as low as $(3.59 \pm 1.25)\cdot 10^{-3}$, using diamond distance as a metric. This value establishes a laser-driven-gate error reference and is merely an order of magnitude higher than the best reported $microwave$ gate on a $single$ ion. Additional experiments reveal that robust pulses can effectively suppress non-Markovian errors that grow during runtime. Our work challenges the widely accepted belief that copropagating gates should be preferred for their weak motional coupling and invites the adoption of high-performance robust pulses that suppress multiple noise sources of the trapped-ion error budget.

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

The Token Is a Group Element: On Lie-Algebra Attention over Matrix Lie Groups

arXiv:2606.20547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We place the attention token on the group: a token is an element $g_i$ of a matrix Lie group $G$ – a bare transformation, with no feature payload and no external action $\rho(g)$ carrying it. To our knowledge this is the first attention construction whose tokens are bare matrix Lie group elements: their score is the closed-form algebra norm of the relative pose rather than a learned kernel, and it reaches the affine full-frame groups that every irrep- or surjective-exp-based method must exclude. We call it Lie-Algebra Attention. Once tokens are group elements, the rest follows with none of the usual representation-theoretic machinery. The relative geometry of a pair is canonical, $g_i^{-1} g_j$, so the pairwise invariant $w_{ij} = \log(g_i^{-1} g_j)$ is intrinsic rather than designed; equivariance under the diagonal $G$-action is tautological, and the cocycle condition holds automatically. The attention score is the negative squared algebra norm, $s_{ij} = -\|\log(g_i^{-1} g_j)\|_\lambda^2/\tau$: the canonical proximity kernel under a block-weighted Frobenius inner product, with no irreducible representations, spherical harmonics, Clebsch-Gordan products, or learned kernel. The construction applies to any matrix Lie group on a chosen logarithm chart containing the relative poses, including the non-compact non-abelian affine groups with scale and shear that no vector-token attention method reaches: neither the irrep tradition nor surjective-exp methods. Three sequence-completion experiments, on SE(2), SO(3), and Aff(2), bear this out: the closed-form score matches a learned MLP kernel on the same invariant and outperforms it on SE(2), using 50 to 80x fewer score parameters, while a vector-token baseline breaks invariance by five to twelve orders of magnitude.

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

Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?

Recent advances in mobile agents are dominated by the GUI paradigm, in which agents perceive UI information and emit screen interactions. However, mobile platforms also expose a command-line interface (CLI) that provides direct access to device services and data. We argue CLI deserves first-class consideration alongside GUI. We evaluate three coding agents (Claude Code, Terminus-2, mini-swe-agent) across four model APIs on AndroidWorld and MobileWorld without any mobile-specific post-training, comparing against three reproducible GUI baselines (GUI-Owl-1.5-32B, MAI-UI, Qwen3-VL-32B). Claude Code (Opus 4.7) reaches 71.8\% and 51.9\%, outperforming every reproducible GUI baseline (69.3/68.1/57.8\% on AndroidWorld; 43.2/26.3/13.3\% on MobileWorld), while every other CLI configuration remains competitive. To establish the paradigm's ceiling, we provide oracle CLI solutions that reach 88.8\% on AndroidWorld (103/116 tasks CLI-solvable) and 86.3\% on MobileWorld (101/117 tasks CLI-solvable), indicating substantial room for future improvement. To cover everyday user intents beyond the GUI scope, we introduce the CLI-Advantage Task Suite, comprising 45 templates across five categories: bulk operations, multi-condition filtering, aggregation, cross-app workflows, and hidden device state. Every CLI agent outperforms every GUI baseline in all five categories, with substantially fewer steps per task (10.7 vs.\ 18.6). To support future research on mobile CLI agents, we will open-source agent implementations, oracle solutions, the CLI-Advantage suite, and evaluation infrastructure.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Point-Identification of a Robust Predictor Under Latent Shift with Imperfect Proxies

arXiv:2603.15158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Addressing the domain adaptation problem becomes more challenging when distribution shifts across domains stem from latent confounders that affect both covariates and outcomes. Existing proxy-based approaches that address latent shift rely on a strong completeness assumption to uniquely determine (point-identify) a robust predictor. Completeness requires that proxies have sufficient information about variations in latent confounders. For imperfect proxies the mapping from confounders to the space of proxy distributions is non-injective, and multiple latent confounder values can generate the same proxy distribution. This breaks the completeness assumption and observed data are consistent with multiple potential predictors (set-identified). To address this, we introduce latent equivalent classes (LECs). LECs are defined as groups of latent confounders that induce the same conditional proxy distribution. We show that point-identification for the robust predictor remains achievable as long as multiple domains differ sufficiently in how they mix proxy-induced LECs to form the robust predictor. This domain diversity condition is formalized as a cross-domain rank condition on the mixture weights, which is substantially weaker assumption than completeness. We introduce the Proximal Quasi-Bayesian Active learning (PQAL) framework, which actively queries a small, targeted set of diverse domains that satisfy this rank condition. PQAL can recover the point-identified predictor, demonstrates robustness to varying degrees of shift and outperforms previous methods on synthetic data and semi-synthetic dSprites, IHDP, ACS Folktables datasets.

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

Runtime Enforcement of Hybrid System Properties

arXiv:2606.12022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime enforcement has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring the safety of autonomous and cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional runtime verification, runtime enforcement actively intervenes during execution to prevent property violations by modifying unsafe system behaviors. Existing enforcement frameworks primarily focus on untimed or discrete-time specifications and are often limited to delaying or suppressing events, making them inadequate for reactive systems exhibiting complex continuous dynamics. In this paper, we propose a runtime enforcement framework where safety requirements are modeled using Hybrid Automata (HA). The framework combines discrete-event editing with continuous-time monitoring to support enforcement actions such as suppression, delay, and insertion of events at arbitrary time instants. Upon observing environmental inputs, the automaton is initialized, and runtime reachability analysis is used to synthesize safe corrective actions. We formally define the enforcement problem for safety hybrid automata, establish enforceability conditions, and present an online enforcement algorithm for reactive systems. A detailed case study on an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in maintaining safety properties under unsafe controller behaviors. Experimental results show that the framework introduces minimal computational overhead while ensuring continuous compliance with safety requirements in real time.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?

Authors:

Hybridization is an important evolutionary process, commonly modeled by the network multispecies coalescent. Reconstructing evolutionary histories under this model is notoriously costly, even for level-1 networks where hybridization events are isolated from each other. The widely used methods that combine speed with statistical guarantees rely on quartet concordance factors computed for all subsets of four species, resulting in an o(n^4k) bottleneck that severely limits scalability to large numbers of species (n) and genes (k). Among quartet-based methods, NANUQ+ is notable because it decomposes the problem into two steps: first reconstructing a tree of blobs, which compresses each non-treelike part of the network, called a blob, into a single vertex, and second reconstructing the internal structure of each level-1 blob, specifically its circular order and hybrid vertex. Here, we investigate whether level-1 blob reconstruction is difficult once the tree of blobs is known. We present a fast and statistically consistent algorithm, called NetCS, based on two simple primitives: majority voting and merge sort, circumventing the bottleneck of computing all quartet concordance factors. In simulations, NetCS achieved comparable accuracy to NANUQ+ and was dramatically faster, enabling analyses of 200 taxa and 1000 genes in only a few minutes. Both methods attained near-perfect accuracy when given the true tree of blobs; however, their performance degraded in end-to-end pipelines due to errors in tree of blobs reconstruction. Strikingly, even methods that reconstruct level-1 networks directly struggled to accurately predict hybrid ancestry. Our results suggest that reconstructing level-1 blobs is unexpectedly easy once the tree of blobs is known, and that a major challenge for phylogenetic network inference lies in accurate tree of blobs reconstruction.

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

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

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

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

arXiv:2509.07150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve correctness in LLMs, however, in many scientific problems, the objective is not necessarily to produce the correct answer, but instead to produce a diverse array of candidates which satisfy a set of constraints. We study this challenge in the context of materials generation. To this end, we introduce PLaID++, an LLM post-trained for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We find that performance hinges on our crystallographic representation and reward formulation. First, we introduce a compact, symmetry-informed Wyckoff text representation which improves computational efficiency and encourages generalization from physical priors. Second, we demonstrate that temperature scaling acts as an entropy regularizer which counteracts mode collapse and encourages exploration. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a $\sim$50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

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

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.

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

Towards Graph-Based Deep Learning for Map Generalization: Insights from Building Footprints Simplification and Aggregation

arXiv:2606.19956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Map generalization remains one of the fundamental tasks in cartography, especially for the simplification and aggregation of complex building footprints. This study presents the first exploratory application of graph-based deep learning to both tasks, reformulating simplification as node movement prediction and aggregation as link prediction within a unified graph learning framework. We evaluate representative graph neural network architectures (GCN, GAT, and GraphSAGE) on multi-scale building datasets, showing that GraphSAGE demonstrates relative strengths in link prediction accuracy, while also revealing persistent challenges in precise node movement prediction. Beyond quantitative performance, the results highlight that aggregation poses greater complexity and challenges than simplification, underscoring the difficulty of capturing higher-level spatial relationships in map generalization with current deep learning approaches. Although limitations such as data imbalance and the need for post-processing remain, the study provides valuable insights and methodological directions for advancing automated map generalization with deep learning approaches.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

Authors:

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.

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

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

Authors:

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Creative Collision: Directorial Persona Steering and Competition in Large Language Models

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping the behaviour of large language models at inference time, yet most prior work injects a single semantic direction into the residual stream. We study the richer setting in which two semantically opposing steering vectors are superimposed – a regime we call Creative Collision. Concretely, we construct directorial persona vectors for Steven Spielberg (optimistic, redemptive moral valence) and Martin Scorsese (dark, morally ambiguous) via mean-difference activation contrast on curated screenplay-derived corpora, then interpolate between them with a scalar mixing parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and a steering coefficient $\lambda$. Across five evaluation axes – moral valence, generation coherence, surface style, directional dominance, and vector geometry – three principal findings emerge: (i)~Spielberg's representational signature exhibits robust directional dominance, suppressing Scorsese's moral influence across almost the entire interpolation range; (ii)~intermediate collision points paradoxically improve generation coherence relative to pure single-director steering at high $\lambda$; and (iii)~both personas localise maximally to layer~28 of a 40-layer decoder-only transformer, revealing a shared moral-tone substrate. These results illuminate the geometry of competing semantic directions in transformer residual streams and have direct implications for controllable creative generation and value-aligned narrative synthesis.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

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

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

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

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Efficient Neural Network Model Selection for Few-Class Application Datasets

arXiv:2606.19712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While much effort has focused on developing and benchmarking high-performance neural networks, less attention has been given to how dataset properties, known to practitioners, can guide efficient model selection. Neural models are typically evaluated on datasets with thousands of classes, yet many real-world applications involve fewer than ten. To address this understudied but common setting, we develop a measure of classification difficulty based on data-side properties and show how it enables more efficient model selection for few-class datasets, where traditional approaches are less effective. We term this phenomenon "few-class distinctiveness". Our metric allows comparison of models and datasets 6 to 29$\times$ faster than repeated training and testing. Leveraging this insight, we extend scaled model families below the smallest published models, achieving greater efficiency at similar accuracy, for example models up to 42% smaller than YOLOv5-nano for a mobile robot task. Targeting resource-constrained applications, we demonstrate few-class model selection across mobile robot, drone, and IoT scenarios, highlighting practical gains in efficiency without sacrificing performance.

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

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

Authors:

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.