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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Scaling native entanglement generation in layered semiconductors with quasi-phase matching

arXiv:2606.14553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient generation of entangled photons typically relies on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in phase-matched macroscopic nonlinear media. However, generating entanglement under phase-matching constraints requires additional bulk optics or interferometers. In contrast, ultrathin van der Waals semiconductors - such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) - exhibit strong enough optical nonlinearities for SPDC to be observed from subwavelength-thick media, thereby bypassing conventional phase-matching constraints. In this microscopic domain, the intrinsic crystal symmetry governs the nonlinear optical response, enabling the native generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs. However, generating these states efficiently has been fundamentally restricted by the material's coherence length ($L_c$), which limits the attainable conversion efficiency. Here, we investigate periodically-poled TMDs (PPTMDs) designed to scale up this interaction via quasi-phase matching. We demonstrate that mechanically flipping the sign of the nonlinearity at precise intervals of $L_c$ introduces quasi-phase matching, that scales the pair-production rate while preserving the pristine, symmetry-generated polarization entanglement, with fidelities exceeding 99%. Backed by a rigorous theoretical model, our work clarifies the interplay between crystal symmetry and propagation effects in thin nonlinear media, providing a new avenue for engineering quantum light in nanophotonic systems.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

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

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

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

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606.19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose MetaResearcher, a novel framework that scales deep research agent training across four synergistic dimensions. First, we introduce an Evolving Virtual World that injects temporal dynamics and adversarial misinformation into the training environment, forcing agents to develop source credibility assessment and temporal conflict resolution skills. Second, we design Discovery-Oriented Tasks – including hypothesis generation and contradiction resolution – that transcend simple fact retrieval and push agents toward genuine research behaviors. Third, we propose a Self-Reflective Meta-Reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that jointly optimizes for answer correctness, search path efficiency, reflection depth, and tool call diversity, directly addressing the repetitive action loop problem observed in prior work. Fourth, we introduce a Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Swarm architecture comprising specialized Scout, Filter, and Synthesizer models that learn collaborative research strategies through coordinated reinforcement learning. Built upon the LiteResearcher infrastructure, MetaResearcher requires zero marginal API cost for training while targeting substantial improvements in both benchmark performance (GAIA, Xbench-DS) and epistemic robustness under adversarial conditions. We present the complete framework design, training methodology, and planned experimental validation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Mind-Studio: Executable World Models with Lookahead Evaluation for Partially Observable Games

arXiv:2606.16070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-model synthesis aims to turn interaction experience into an internal model of environment dynamics. Existing symbolic approaches often fit observed transitions or mixtures of local rules, but they do not produce a complete executable program that can run independently of the real environment. We present Mind-Studio, a framework that synthesizes executable pygame-style world models from state-action-next-state trajectories using large language models. Mind-Studio combines entropy-selected traces with a lightweight game skill file containing object, action, and static scene information extracted from screenshots. We evaluate synthesis quality with a K-step lookahead fidelity protocol that compares generated world-model rollouts against Real-ALE rollouts from the same state. On Montezuma's Revenge, Mind-Studio improves chosen-action next-state prediction from 0.3% for PoE-World to 48.7% while verifying 5 of 8 subgoals; across Alien, Assault, and Skiing, it achieves stronger branch-level fidelity than prior learned lookahead sources.

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

PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.12329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI coding assistants now support a growing share of software work, from quick scripts to production applications. Yet these agents remain largely stateless: each new session re-reads project files, re-derives prior decisions, and - most costly - may repeat debugging attempts that already failed. Reconstructing this context can consume an estimated 5,000-20,000 tokens per session; the bottleneck is often not model capability but missing project memory. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents. projectmem records development as an append-only, plain-text event log of typed events - issues, attempts, fixes, decisions, and notes - and deterministically projects that log into compact, AI-readable summaries served through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Beyond storage, projectmem adds a deterministic pre-action gate that warns an agent before it repeats a previously failed fix or edits a known-fragile file. We frame this as Memory-as-Governance: memory that does not merely answer the agent but acts on its next action. The system runs fully offline with no telemetry; its immutable log also serves as a provenance trail for reproducible, auditable AI-assisted development. projectmem ships as a three-dependency Python package (14 MCP tools, 19 CLI commands, 37 automated tests) and is evaluated through a two-month self-study across 10 projects comprising 207 logged events. Source code: https://github.com/riponcm/projectmem.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

Evaluations of social bias in LLMs largely focus on whether models generate or imply biased content. However, as LLMs are increasingly used as judges of bias, they may exhibit social biases in subtler ways in how they evaluate biased content, which current methods do not systematically capture. We call this second-order bias: social bias in an LLM's judgment about social bias, which we evaluate through a novel, philosophically grounded reasoning task. Drawing on entitlement epistemology, we conceptualize bias as misplaced foundational knowledge that shapes an agent's rational inquiry, and derive a logical reasoning task for LLMs to judge to whom a biased text is acceptable or non-acceptable. We develop two simple metrics to measure how biased LLM judges are in inferring demographics for acceptability without sufficient support, and how these inferences vary across groups targeted by biased texts. Evaluating open and closed models, we find that our task evades safety guardrails by surfacing bias in model judgment. It varies systematically across target groups, reflects implicit social maps, and shows how models are still triggered by demographic labels. Our work points to the need for LLM bias evaluation in judgment tasks and broadly, for more theoretically grounded approaches to bias evaluation in NLP. We release our code and model responses at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/second-order-bias.

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

Latent space mapping of interpretable structural coordinates from stochastic single-molecule signals

arXiv:2606.16950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nanopores are versatile single-molecular sensors, but their utility is fundamentally constrained by stochastic translocation dynamics warping any encoded information. We resolve it by shifting from time-domain analysis to a learned latent-space mapping via a contrastive encoder trained exclusively on simulated signals from a physics-informed model. This encoder maps solid-state nanopore signals of engineered DNA barcodes into an interpretable molecular coordinate system. The learned representation is responsive to structural barcode parameters while remaining invariant to acquisition conditions and translocation conformation, allowing data pooling across devices. Molecule identification requires a single pass through the encoder, reducing computational cost by three orders of magnitude relative to alignment-based methods. We experimentally validate through mixture quantification, rare-variant detection, consensus barcode reconstruction, and real-time signal acquisition. This shift from temporal analysis to mapping structural coordinates into a latent space changes the paradigm behind analyzing stochastic sensor signals by linking classification to interpretable encoded molecular information.

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

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Harness In-Context Operator Learning with Chain of Operators

arXiv:2606.12318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PHI-Reason: evidence-grounded species-level phage-host prediction from structured biological text profiles

Phage–host interaction (PHI) prediction is a fundamental problem in microbiology with applications in microbial ecology and microbiome engineering. Existing computational approaches typically convert phage and host information into numerical representations derived from sequence similarity, protein content, genome composition or reference databases, then score candidate hosts or train host-prediction models. Although effective, such representations often make it difficult to inspect which biological evidence supports a prediction. Here, we present PHI-Reason, a species-level PHI prediction framework that reformulates host prediction as constrained biological text reasoning. Instead of embedding phages and hosts directly as numerical vectors, PHI-Reason converts heterogeneous PHI-related evidence from phage genomes, host genomes, functional annotations, homology searches and biological metadata into modular natural-language profiles. A frozen large language model then performs species-level candidate-host ranking or pairwise PHI assessment by integrating the supplied evidence at inference time. Across species-level benchmarks, PHI-Reason achieved competitive host-prediction performance and recovered complementary correct assignments relative to established sequence- and reference-based methods. Its explicit profile design enabled systematic evidence perturbation and rationale-grounding analyses, showing that predictions depend on coherent multi-source biological evidence and that hallucination risk from unsupported or incomplete profiles can be made operationally measurable. These results position PHI-Reason as a constrained evidence-integration framework for species-level PHI prediction. Rather than replacing sequence-based predictors, it provides an interpretable layer that shows how far explicit biological evidence can support host inference, and where that evidence falls short.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

FLiP: Towards understanding and interpreting multimodal multilingual sentence embeddings

This paper presents factorized linear projection (FLiP) models for understanding pretrained sentence embedding spaces. We train FLiP models to recover the lexical content from multilingual (LaBSE), multimodal (SONAR) and API-based (Gemini) sentence embedding spaces in several high- and mid-resource languages. We show that FLiP can recall more than 75% of lexical content from the embeddings, significantly outperforming existing non-factorized baselines. Using this as a diagnostic tool, we uncover the modality and language biases across the selected sentence encoders and provide practitioners with intrinsic insights about the encoders without relying on conventional downstream evaluation tasks. Our implementation is public https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/FLiP.

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

TrajGenAgent: A Hierarchical LLM Agent for Human Mobility Trajectory Generation

arXiv:2606.12657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility data is important for transportation, urban planning, and epidemic control, but large-scale trajectory collection is often costly and privacy-constrained, motivating realistic synthetic trajectory generation. Existing LLM-based generators typically rely on either prompt engineering, which preserves zero-shot reasoning but lacks fine-grained spatiotemporal grounding, or trajectory-level fine-tuning, which improves statistical precision but incurs substantial computational cost and may weaken general reasoning. We propose TrajGenAgent, a semantic-aware hierarchical LLM-agent framework for human mobility trajectory generation without model fine-tuning. TrajGenAgent uses a two-stage orchestrator-worker design: an LLM first synthesizes an individual- and weekday-conditioned activity chain from historical evidence via in-context learning, and a deterministic workflow then grounds each activity into a complete visit using personalized POI retrieval, distance-aware location selection, kinematics-aware travel-time propagation, and LLM-based duration estimation. To evaluate realism beyond aggregate spatiotemporal statistics, we introduce an anomaly-detection-based evaluation framework using two complementary detectors to assess behavioral and semantic plausibility. Experiments on benchmark and large-scale simulation datasets show that TrajGenAgent improves spatiotemporal fidelity, semantic coherence, and individual-specific behavioral realism over representative neural and LLM-based baselines, while avoiding parameter updates.

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

DeepRoot: A KG-Coordinated Multi-Agent System for Therapeutic Reasoning over Historical Medical Texts

arXiv:2606.15931v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Historical medical archives and traditional medicines hold immense potential for drug discovery and remain a primary source for current drug development. However, pre-ontological prose and idiosyncratic taxonomies prevent the standardization and medical modernization of the data for use in current biomedical pipelines. Furthermore, no existing LLM agent system, whether tool-calling, retrieval-augmented, or agentic deep-research, can convert such text into verifiable drug-discovery leads at scale. We close this gap with DeepRoot, a multi-agent LLM system that jointly builds and utilizes a verified knowledge graph, showing that grounding and reasoning – often conflated – are separable axes the system can compose for therapeutic reasoning. Applied to the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, DeepRoot recovers $10$ of $21$ held-out compound-disease treatment pairs at R@$20$ ($47.6\%$ vs $4.8\%$ for a raw corpus LLM and $\sim\!2.4\%$ random) and dominates an LLM-as-judge audit for reasoning quality over baseline LLMs and LLMs with direct tool-call access to the same APIs DeepRoot itself queries. Tool-using LLMs hallucinate evidence on $87\%$ of claims, versus 7-10% for DeepRoot. Graph-only inference hallucinates $0\%$ but ranks lowest on reasoning coherence; DeepRoot KG+LLM is the only condition to win on both axes, pointing toward a route for systematic mining and repurposing of historical medical knowledge.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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

Knowledge-Based Zero-Replay Debugging of Multi-Agent LLM Traces

arXiv:2606.14805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable operation of multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems depends on debugging long execution traces, where the few causally decisive events are buried in unstructured logs of messages, routes, memory writes, and tool calls. The standard tool is counterfactual replay (rewind, edit, and re-run the trajectory to measure each event's effect), but its cost grows linearly with the number of candidate events, making exhaustive replay infeasible at scale. We frame trace debugging as a knowledge-based decision-support problem. Each trace is compiled into a structured event knowledge graph over routing, memory, tool-use, uncertainty, and latent evidence, and a calibrated predictor decides where a scarce replay budget should be spent. We do not propose a new replay oracle; we propose a method to predict its results without paying the replay cost. We formulate zero-replay counterfactual-effect prediction: given a trace under a fixed budget, predict which events the oracle would mark high-effect before any replay is performed. BranchPoint-Latent is a lightweight predictor over observable, structural, uncertainty, and latent features of the knowledge graph. Calibrated against a deterministic replay oracle across 37 trace families, a single learning-to-rank gradient-boosted predictor raises per-trace localization (Branch Recall@5) from 0.73 to 0.93 on held-out families at zero oracle-replay cost. Rather than claiming universal dominance, we characterize when cheap graph centrality suffices and when learned evidence is necessary. The result is an auditable, cost-efficient decision-support system for AI-reliability debugging, positioned explicitly on the cost-accuracy frontier with reproducible artifacts.

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

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion

arXiv:2606.16620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling has become the dominant lever for improving language-model reasoning, but existing methods derive rollout diversity from a single source: stochastic token-level sampling. We argue that this single-axis sampling space is fundamentally limiting, and identify a second, fully deterministic and complementary axis: the layer span $L$ at which a frozen model's top decoder layers are recursively re-applied at high-uncertainty tokens. Different choices of $L$ produce distinct rollouts that solve different subsets of problems, with no stochasticity. We instantiate this axis through Entropy-Gated Latent Recursion (EGLR), a training-free decoding procedure that re-applies the top-$L$ layers for at most $K_{\max}$ iterations until the next-token distribution converges. Combined with $T$ temperature samples, EGLR turns a single-axis stochastic rollout pool into an $L\times T$ Cartesian sampling space at almost the same per-rollout cost. We characterize this space across $8$ instruction-tuned models and $6$ math reasoning benchmarks, and show that the $L$-axis is genuinely complementary to temperature: on MATH-500 with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, the joint $L\times T$ oracle reaches $91.6\%$, $+8.2$ percentage points beyond the temperature-only oracle ($83.4\%$) and $+10.4$ points beyond the layer-only oracle ($81.2\%$), confirming that the two axes capture genuinely complementary problems. The expanded rollout pool provides richer per-prompt candidates for any downstream procedure that consumes rollouts, including self-consistency, best-of-$N$ with verifiers, and group-relative RL training (GRPO), opening a new direction for inference-time scaling that does not rely on stochastic noise.

21.
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.

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

Improving Generalization and Data Efficiency with Diffusion in Offline Multi-agent RL

arXiv:2307.01472v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel Diffusion Offline Multi-agent Model (DOM2) for offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Different from existing algorithms that rely mainly on conservatism in policy design, DOM2 enhances policy expressiveness and diversity based on diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a diffusion model into the policy network and propose a trajectory-based data-reweighting scheme in training. These key ingredients significantly improve algorithm robustness against environment changes and achieve significant improvements in performance, generalization and data-efficiency. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that DOM2 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in all multi-agent particle and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and generalizes significantly better to shifted environments {(in $28$ out of $30$ settings evaluated)} thanks to its high expressiveness and diversity. Moreover, DOM2 is ultra data efficient and requires no more than $5\%$ data for achieving the same performance compared to existing algorithms (a $20\times$ improvement in data efficiency).

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Conformal Path Reasoning: Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Path-Level Calibration

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) offers grounded, interpretable reasoning, but existing methods often fail to provide reliable coverage guarantees over retrieved answers. While Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for producing prediction sets with statistical guarantees, prior conformal KGQA methods suffer from two critical pitfalls: violated coverage guarantees due to invalid calibration, and weak score discriminability that yields excessively large prediction sets. We propose Conformal Path Reasoning (CPR), a novel trustworthy KGQA framework built on two key innovations. First, query-level conformal calibration over path-level scores preserves exchangeability to ensure valid coverage guarantees. Second, we introduce the Residual Conformal Value Network (RCVNet), a lightweight module trained via PUCT-guided exploration to learn discriminative path-level nonconformity scores. Extensive experiments show that CPR significantly improves the Empirical Coverage Rate by 45% while reducing prediction set size by 52% on average over conformal baselines across benchmark datasets, highlighting its effectiveness for reliable conformal reasoning over knowledge graphs.

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

Pre-Training for Simulation-Based Science: A Study on Jet Foundation Model Training Objectives

arXiv:2606.14870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) trained on large datasets and fine-tuned on downstream tasks have emerged as a powerful paradigm in AI for science. Industrial FMs are typically trained using self-supervision with masking due to the lack of labels. In many scientific domains, accurate simulations are plentiful and facilitate large, labeled datasets. This opens up new possibilities for pre-training. We present a systematic comparison of pre-training methods using the OmniLearned High Energy Physics FM framework. We test supervised classification, flow-matching generation, and self-supervised masked particle modeling. All models are pre-trained on the JetClass dataset and fine-tuned on two representative downstream tasks, top jet classification and JetNet conditional generation. Among other observations, for classification tasks, we find that pure classifier pre-training is optimal when downstream labels and model capacity are plentiful, but combining it with self-supervised masked particle modeling (MPM) is uniquely powerful in the low-finetuning label regime. Flow matching-based generative pre-training seems to provide little benefit for downstream classification, and interestingly, for downstream generation, we find that flow matching must be in the pre-training objective to see a significant finetuning advantage, hinting at the orthogonality of classification and generation tasks. That is, for a model to transfer to both generative and classification downstream tasks, it must be pre-trained on both. This study provides a template for controlled scaling analysis of pre-training objectives for foundation models in simulation-based sciences.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.