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

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

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

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

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

FusionRS: A Large-Scale RGB-Infrared Remote Sensing Dataset for Dual-Modal Vision-Language Foundation Models

Remote sensing vision-language models have advanced Earth observation understanding, but most existing work remains centered on RGB imagery, leaving the complementary information in infrared data underexplored. Infrared images provide distinctive cues, including thermal intensity structures, object boundaries, and illumination-invariant scene features, which can enrich visual-language learning beyond conventional RGB observations. However, a large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset for remote sensing vision-language modeling is still absent. To address this gap, we introduce FusionRS, the first large-scale RGB-infrared-text dataset designed for dual-modal vision-language learning in remote sensing. FusionRS is constructed by translating diverse public RGB remote sensing images into infrared-style counterparts, forming aligned RGB-IR image pairs. Each pair is associated with conventional scene captions and IR-aware captions that explicitly describe infrared-specific visual properties while preserving semantic content. Based on FusionRS, we train dual-modal vision-language foundation models for RGB-IR joint understanding. We first train CLIP-style models for RGB-IR-text alignment, and then fine-tune generative VLMs for dual-modal RGB-IR captioning. Experiments show that FusionRS improves RGB-IR alignment, infrared-to-text retrieval, and dual-modal captioning over RGB-only and non-IR-aware training settings. Ablation studies further verify that IR-aware captions are crucial for strengthening infrared-language alignment, highlighting the importance of modality-specific textual supervision for more scalable RGB-infrared remote sensing vision-language representation learning.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational costs. We identify two sources of redundancy. First, temporal redundancy: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) applies costly dual forward passes at every timestep, yet guidance matters only at specific steps, and variable scales at critical steps can compensate for skipping others. Second, spatial redundancy: under variable guidance, different transformer blocks exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity, yet uniform calibration across all blocks wastes computation while failing to address their varying requirements. We present RSTR, the first framework to jointly reduce spatiotemporal redundancy in diffusion transformers. Stage-1 addresses temporal redundancy through evolutionary search, discovering sparse guidance schedules with variable scales. Stage-2 addresses spatial redundancy through adaptive rank allocation, assigning calibration capacities to transformer regions based on their sensitivity. Experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-$\alpha$, FLUX, and state-of-the-art Qwen-Image demonstrate 50%-70% compute savings while maintaining or improving quality. On DiT-XL/2, RSTR achieves 57% savings with 15% FID improvement; on Qwen-Image, 3.43$\times$ speedup with preserved quality.

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

A Reproducible Log-Driven AutoML Framework for Interpretable Pipeline Optimization in Healthcare Risk Prediction

arXiv:2605.21528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate disease risk prediction is challenged by heterogeneous features, limited data, and class imbalance. This study presents yvsoucom-iterkit, a deterministic AutoML framework that models pipeline optimization as a configuration-level system with full reproducibility and traceable execution logs, enabling systematic analysis of component attribution, interactions, similarity, and cross-seed robustness. Experiments on the Pima Indians Diabetes and Stroke datasets across more than 18,000 pipeline configurations reveal a structured yet partially redundant search space, where performance is dominated by a small subset of interacting components. Ensemble models achieve stable performance, reaching a Weighted-F1 of 0.89 on Pima and 0.94 on Stroke. Macro-F1 reaches approximately 0.88 on Pima but drops to 0.6560 on Stroke due to severe imbalance. Cross-seed experiments show that ensembles reduce variance compared to single models. Friedman testing ($p < 0.05$) confirms significant ranking differences across configurations. Based on analysis of component attribution, interaction, and similarity, optimal configuration design reveals dataset-dependent behavior. For the Pima dataset, computational efficiency benefits from simplified search spaces where redundant components can be removed, with split ratio playing a key role. In contrast, the Stroke dataset requires enhanced imbalance-aware strategies, where RandomOverSampler improves Macro-F1 from 0.6560 to 0.6766. These findings demonstrate that effective AutoML optimization is achieved through optimal configuration design, where carefully constraining the search space to high-impact components can improve performance, stability, and interpretability while reducing unnecessary search complexity.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiST: A Hierarchical Sparse Transformer for Cross-Modal Spatial Transcriptomics Modeling

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links gene expression with tissue morphology but remains expensive and low-throughput, motivating surrogates that infer expression from routine histology. Whole-slide H&E-to-ST inference pairs a gigapixel image with gene measurements at a sparse, irregular set of locations, making multiscale modeling challenging without incurring dense-grid overhead or quadratic token mixing. We propose HiST, a hierarchical sparse transformer that treats measured locations as a lattice-indexed sparse field and builds a dyadic encoder–decoder directly on the active tissue footprint. HiST combines sparse window attention for local geometric correspondence with resolution-changing operators for rapid multiscale context integration. For a fixed window size, the dominant runtime and memory scale with the number of observed locations rather than the dense slide area. To mitigate slide-specific acquisition variation, HiST adds a bottlenecked global conditioning pathway via a slide calibration token that summarizes slide-level context and conditions local representations. On a multi-organ benchmark spanning diverse tissues and acquisition sources, HiST improves predictive performance over recent baselines while reducing runtime and peak memory.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

An alternative approach to well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov equations arising in Consensus-Based Optimization

arXiv:2512.19446v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work we study the mean-field description of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a derivative-free particle optimization method. Such a description is provided by a non-local SDE of McKean-Vlasov type, whose fields lack of global Lipschitz continuity. We propose a novel approach to prove the well-posedness of the mean-field CBO equation based on a truncation argument. The latter is performed through the introduction of a cut-off function, defined on the space of probability measures, acting on the fields. This procedure allows us to study the well-posedness problem in the classical framework of Sznitman. Through this argument, we recover the established result on the existence of strong solutions, and we extend the class of solutions for which pathwise uniqueness holds.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Stability of a Generalized Debiased Lasso with Applications to Resampling-Based Variable Selection

作者:

arXiv:2405.03063v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized debiased Lasso estimator based on a stability principle. When a single column of the design matrix is perturbed, the estimator admits a simple update formula that can be computed from the original solution. Under sub-Gaussian designs with well-conditioned covariance, this approximation is asymptotically accurate for all but a vanishing fraction of coordinates in the proportional growth regime. The proof relies on concentration and anti-concentration arguments to control error terms and sign changes. In contrast, establishing comparable distributional limits (e.g., Gaussianity) under similar assumptions remains open. As an application, we show that the approximation significantly reduces the computational cost of resampling-based variable selection procedures, including the conditional randomization test and a local knockoff filter.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

作者: 未知作者

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

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

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Extremal representations of functions of matrices and applications to multivariate prediction

arXiv:2606.19359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by two seminal results of multivariate prediction theory by Helson and Lowdenslager and by Wiener and Masani we prove extremal representations of functions of matrices and derive their prediction-theoretic consequences. We also sketch a way to obtain matricial inequalities from our results. The main goal of the paper is the computation of the infimum of a set of values of the form $tr(A \Delta A^*)$, where $\Delta$ is a given non-negative Hermitian $n \times n$ matrix and the choices for $A$ exhauste a certain set of $n \times n$ matrices. In particular, we focus on norm-bounded unit spheres with certain types of properties of unitary invariance, what allows an application of the theory of majorization.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stringalign: Moving beyond summary statistics with a transparent Unicode-aware tool for evaluating automatic transcription models

Comparing text strings is crucial when evaluating and understanding the performance of various text processing tasks such as document recognition and audio transcription. With an increasingly complex landscape of AI-based handwritten text recognition (HTR), optical character recognition (OCR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, there is a need for tools that facilitate evaluation in a flexible and reproducible way. This paper presents Stringalign, a Python library designed to simplify the evaluation process for automatic transcription projects and facilitate transparent evaluation. Stringalign's tools to examine and visualise both the rate of errors and the types of errors a model makes, give insights into possible improvements and help inform model selection for a particular task. Widely used string comparison metrics, such as the character and word error rates (CER and WER), although useful, can be ambiguous due to varying definitions of what constitutes a character and a word. Stringalign addresses this challenge by ensuring all preprocessing (i.e. normalisation and tokenisation) is transparent and easily replicable, and by providing tools to move beyond summary statistics and analyse common model errors. Moreover, Stringalign adheres to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles for research software while staying lightweight and easy to adapt into researchers existing workflows. In this paper, we discuss challenges with character and word level string comparisons and show through examples that where existing tools can yield opaque and sometimes confusing results, Stringalign provides an easy-to-use and unambiguous alternative.

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

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Probabilities

arXiv:2601.18853v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Probabilities is the English translation of the book Probabilités Tome 1 and Tome 2. The mathematic content is authored by Prof. Jean-Yves Ouvrard. The English version has been done by his eldest son Dr. Xavier Ouvrard. This probability theory book covers not only an introduction to this field, but also advanced concepts based on measure theory. The first part introduces the fundamentals of probability theory across 7 chapters, targeting bachelor level, including event algebras, random variables, independence, conditional probabilities, moments of discrete and continuous random variables, generating functions, and limit theorems. The second part contains 10 chapters and corresponds to master level. Following a brief introduction to measure theory, this part develops more advanced topics: probability measures and their complements, distributions and moments of random variables, modes of convergence, laws of large numbers, conditional expectation, Fourier transforms and characteristic functions, Gaussian random variables, convergence of measures, convergence in distribution, discrete-time stochastic processes, martingales, and Markov chains. The reader's work is greatly facilitated by the inclusion, in every chapter, of numerous exercises, all accompanied by detailed solutions that often provide substantial extensions to the theoretical material.

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

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

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

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

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

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases: A review

arXiv:2606.16598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Owing to rapid recent progress, ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases are now at a pivotal stage, evolving from established paradigms into increasingly versatile and programmable quantum simulators. In this review, we survey recent experimental advances across four major classes of platforms: optical lattices, including optical lattices with laser-assisted tunneling and optical Raman lattices; synthetic lattices in momentum or internal-state space; Floquet-engineered lattices; and optical tweezer arrays, all of which offer distinct capabilities for realizing and probing topological matter. For each class, we highlight representative experimental breakthroughs, the topological models that have been realized, and the advanced detection and characterization techniques employed, emphasizing how these complementary approaches collectively expand the frontier of quantum simulation. We also discuss emerging directions in strongly correlated and nonequilibrium topological phases, and conclude with an outlook on future prospects.

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

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall at 100% precision. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets. Experiments with seven state-of-the-art VPR techniques across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, enabling the underlying VPR technique to operate at 100% precision in approximately twice as many deployment scenarios (median improvement), while retrieving up to 29% more correct matches at that precision. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhyeyR-007/Quantile-Transfer-for-Reliable-VPR.

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

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Object Manipulation from Scratch via Contrastive Interaction

arXiv:2606.11525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) has seen recent success in a wide variety of goal-conditioned robotics tasks by learning structured representations of the dynamics. However, despite its success in locomotion and simpler control domains, CRL often struggles in interaction-rich manipulation. We argue that a key source of this difficulty is object-centric interaction, such as contact or grasping, that induces distinct changes in the underlying dynamic modes. In this work, we formulate manipulation dynamics as a piecewise-smooth Markov process and show that interaction-induced mode changes create piecewise nonlinear reachability structures that are difficult for standard CRL energy functions to represent and plan over. Based on this analysis, we introduce Interaction-weighted Resampling (IWR). IWR performs interaction-aware resampling around phases before, during, and after interactions, encouraging the learned representation to preserve the mode boundaries that determine future reachability to capture multi-modal and piecewise nonlinear reachability. Across interaction-centric environments, including 2D dynamic control, robotic manipulation, and robot air hockey, IWR improves both sample efficiency and overall performance over prior CRL methods, with 19.8% average improvement in simulation. Finally, using a sim-to-real pipeline with policies trained by IWR, we demonstrate the first real-world goal-conditioned robot air hockey agent capable of hitting goals, improving success from 25% to 60%. Project Page: IWR-arxiv.github.io.

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

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.