bot: update RSS feed

2026-03-16 00:06:02 +00:00
parent 48808ceaad
commit 20fac681c0
1 changed files with 32 additions and 32 deletions
--- a/feed.xml
+++ b/feed.xml
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
    <docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
    <generator>python-feedgen</generator>
    <language>en</language>
-    <lastBuildDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:04:40 +0000</lastBuildDate>
+    <lastBuildDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:06:02 +0000</lastBuildDate>
    <item>
      <title>A Mixed Diet Makes DINO An Omnivorous Vision Encoder</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24181</link>
@@ -39,14 +39,14 @@
    <item>
      <title>Accent Vector: Controllable Accent Manipulation for Multilingual TTS Without Accented Data</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07534</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.07534.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Thanathai Lertpetchpun, Thanapat Trachu, Jihwan Lee, Tiantian Feng, Dani Byrd, Shrikanth Narayanan&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Accent is an integral part of society, reflecting multiculturalism and shaping how individuals express identity. The majority of English speakers are non-native (L2) speakers, yet current Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems primarily model American-accented English due limited accented data. We propose Accent Vector, a controllable representation that enables accent manipulation in multilingual TTS without requiring accented training data. Accent Vector is derived by fine-tuning a TTS system on native speech of a different language (i.e. non-English) and computing task vectors capturing accent characteristics (i.e. in English). By scaling and interpolating the vector, we achieve fine-grained control over accent strength and generate mixed-accent speech. In addition, it generalizes beyond English, enabling accent control across multiple languages. Objective and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of Accent Vector for fine-grained and compositional accent control.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.07534.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Thanathai Lertpetchpun, Thanapat Trachu, Jihwan Lee, Tiantian Feng, Dani Byrd, Shrikanth Narayanan&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Accent is an integral part of society, reflecting multiculturalism and shaping how individuals express identity. The majority of English speakers are non-native (L2) speakers, yet current Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems primarily model American-accented English due limited accented data. We propose Accent Vector, a controllable representation that enables accent manipulation in multilingual TTS without requiring accented training data. Accent Vector is derived by fine-tuning a TTS system on native speech of a different language (i.e. non-English) and computing task vectors capturing accent characteristics (i.e. in English). By scaling and interpolating the vector, we achieve fine-grained control over accent strength and generate mixed-accent speech. In addition, it generalizes beyond English, enabling accent control across multiple languages. Objective and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of Accent Vector for fine-grained and compositional accent control.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07534</guid>
      <pubDate>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:48:42 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>SoundWeaver: Semantic Warm-Starting for Text-to-Audio Diffusion Serving</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07865</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.07865.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Ayush Barik, Sofia Stoica, Nikhil Sarda, Arnav Kethana, Abhinav Khanduja, Muchen Xu, Fan Lai&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Text-to-audio diffusion models produce high-fidelity audio but require tens of function evaluations (NFEs), incurring multi-second latency and limited throughput. We present SoundWeaver, the first training-free, model-agnostic serving system that accelerates text-to-audio diffusion by warm-starting from semantically similar cached audio. SoundWeaver introduces three components: a Reference Selector that retrieves and temporally aligns cached candidates via semantic and duration-aware gating; a Skip Gater that dynamically determines the percentage of NFEs to skip; and a lightweight Cache Manager that maintains cache utility through quality-aware eviction and refinement. On real-world audio traces, SoundWeaver achieves 1.8--3.0 times  latency reduction with a cache of only {sim}1K entries while preserving or improving perceptual quality.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.07865.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Ayush Barik, Sofia Stoica, Nikhil Sarda, Arnav Kethana, Abhinav Khanduja, Muchen Xu, Fan Lai&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Text-to-audio diffusion models produce high-fidelity audio but require tens of function evaluations (NFEs), incurring multi-second latency and limited throughput. We present SoundWeaver, the first training-free, model-agnostic serving system that accelerates text-to-audio diffusion by warm-starting from semantically similar cached audio. SoundWeaver introduces three components: a Reference Selector that retrieves and temporally aligns cached candidates via semantic and duration-aware gating; a Skip Gater that dynamically determines the percentage of NFEs to skip; and a lightweight Cache Manager that maintains cache utility through quality-aware eviction and refinement. On real-world audio traces, SoundWeaver achieves 1.8--3.0 times  latency reduction with a cache of only {sim}1K entries while preserving or improving perceptual quality.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07865</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:38:02 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -60,28 +60,28 @@
    <item>
      <title>WaDi: Weight Direction-aware Distillation for One-step Image Synthesis</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08258</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.08258.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Lei Wang, Yang Cheng, Senmao Li, Ge Wu, Yaxing Wang, Jian Yang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 0&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)-a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.08258.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Lei Wang, Yang Cheng, Senmao Li, Ge Wu, Yaxing Wang, Jian Yang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Despite the impressive performance of diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) in image generation, their slow inference limits practical deployment. Recent works accelerate inference by distilling multi-step diffusion into one-step generators. To better understand the distillation mechanism, we analyze U-Net/DiT weight changes between one-step students and their multi-step teacher counterparts. Our analysis reveals that changes in weight direction significantly exceed those in weight norm, highlighting it as the key factor during distillation. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Low-rank Rotation of weight Direction (LoRaD), a parameter-efficient adapter tailored to one-step diffusion distillation. LoRaD is designed to model these structured directional changes using learnable low-rank rotation matrices. We further integrate LoRaD into Variational Score Distillation (VSD), resulting in Weight Direction-aware Distillation (WaDi)-a novel one-step distillation framework. WaDi achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on COCO 2014 and COCO 2017 while using only approximately 10% of the trainable parameters of the U-Net/DiT. Furthermore, the distilled one-step model demonstrates strong versatility and scalability, generalizing well to various downstream tasks such as controllable generation, relation inversion, and high-resolution synthesis.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08258</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:27:28 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Training Language Models via Neural Cellular Automata</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10055</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10055.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Dan Lee, Seungwook Han, Akarsh Kumar, Pulkit Agrawal&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Pre-training is crucial for large language models (LLMs), as it is when most representations and capabilities are acquired. However, natural language pre-training has problems: high-quality text is finite, it contains human biases, and it entangles knowledge with reasoning. This raises a fundamental question: is natural language the only path to intelligence? We propose using neural cellular automata (NCA) to generate synthetic, non-linguistic data for pre-pre-training LLMs--training on synthetic-then-natural language. NCA data exhibits rich spatiotemporal structure and statistics resembling natural language while being controllable and cheap to generate at scale. We find that pre-pre-training on only 164M NCA tokens improves downstream language modeling by up to 6% and accelerates convergence by up to 1.6x. Surprisingly, this even outperforms pre-pre-training on 1.6B tokens of natural language from Common Crawl with more compute. These gains also transfer to reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K, HumanEval, and BigBench-Lite. Investigating what drives transfer, we find that attention layers are the most transferable, and that optimal NCA complexity varies by domain: code benefits from simpler dynamics, while math and web text favor more complex ones. These results enable systematic tuning of the synthetic distribution to target domains. More broadly, our work opens a path toward more efficient models with fully synthetic pre-training.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10055.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Dan Lee, Seungwook Han, Akarsh Kumar, Pulkit Agrawal&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Pre-training is crucial for large language models (LLMs), as it is when most representations and capabilities are acquired. However, natural language pre-training has problems: high-quality text is finite, it contains human biases, and it entangles knowledge with reasoning. This raises a fundamental question: is natural language the only path to intelligence? We propose using neural cellular automata (NCA) to generate synthetic, non-linguistic data for pre-pre-training LLMs--training on synthetic-then-natural language. NCA data exhibits rich spatiotemporal structure and statistics resembling natural language while being controllable and cheap to generate at scale. We find that pre-pre-training on only 164M NCA tokens improves downstream language modeling by up to 6% and accelerates convergence by up to 1.6x. Surprisingly, this even outperforms pre-pre-training on 1.6B tokens of natural language from Common Crawl with more compute. These gains also transfer to reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K, HumanEval, and BigBench-Lite. Investigating what drives transfer, we find that attention layers are the most transferable, and that optimal NCA complexity varies by domain: code benefits from simpler dynamics, while math and web text favor more complex ones. These results enable systematic tuning of the synthetic distribution to target domains. More broadly, our work opens a path toward more efficient models with fully synthetic pre-training.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10055</guid>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:14:26 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>RubiCap: Rubric-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Dense Image Captioning</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09160</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.09160.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Tzu-Heng Huang, Sirajul Salekin, Javier Movellan, Frederic Sala, Manjot Bilkhu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 9&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Dense image captioning is critical for cross-modal alignment in vision-language pretraining and text-to-image generation, but scaling expert-quality annotations is prohibitively expensive. While synthetic captioning via strong vision-language models (VLMs) is a practical alternative, supervised distillation often yields limited output diversity and weak generalization. Reinforcement learning (RL) could overcome these limitations, but its successes have so far been concentrated in verifiable domains that rely on deterministic checkers -- a luxury not available in open-ended captioning. We address this bottleneck with RubiCap, a novel RL framework that derives fine-grained, sample-specific reward signals from LLM-written rubrics. RubiCap first assembles a diverse committee of candidate captions, then employs an LLM rubric writer to extract consensus strengths and diagnose deficiencies in the current policy. These insights are converted into explicit evaluation criteria, enabling an LLM judge to decompose holistic quality assessment and replace coarse scalar rewards with structured, multi-faceted evaluations. Across extensive benchmarks, RubiCap achieves the highest win rates on CapArena, outperforming supervised distillation, prior RL methods, human-expert annotations, and GPT-4V-augmented outputs. On CaptionQA, it demonstrates superior word efficiency: our 7B model matches Qwen2.5-VL-32B-Instruct, and our 3B model surpasses its 7B counterpart. Remarkably, using the compact RubiCap-3B as a captioner produces stronger pretrained VLMs than those trained on captions from proprietary models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.09160.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Tzu-Heng Huang, Sirajul Salekin, Javier Movellan, Frederic Sala, Manjot Bilkhu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 12&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Dense image captioning is critical for cross-modal alignment in vision-language pretraining and text-to-image generation, but scaling expert-quality annotations is prohibitively expensive. While synthetic captioning via strong vision-language models (VLMs) is a practical alternative, supervised distillation often yields limited output diversity and weak generalization. Reinforcement learning (RL) could overcome these limitations, but its successes have so far been concentrated in verifiable domains that rely on deterministic checkers -- a luxury not available in open-ended captioning. We address this bottleneck with RubiCap, a novel RL framework that derives fine-grained, sample-specific reward signals from LLM-written rubrics. RubiCap first assembles a diverse committee of candidate captions, then employs an LLM rubric writer to extract consensus strengths and diagnose deficiencies in the current policy. These insights are converted into explicit evaluation criteria, enabling an LLM judge to decompose holistic quality assessment and replace coarse scalar rewards with structured, multi-faceted evaluations. Across extensive benchmarks, RubiCap achieves the highest win rates on CapArena, outperforming supervised distillation, prior RL methods, human-expert annotations, and GPT-4V-augmented outputs. On CaptionQA, it demonstrates superior word efficiency: our 7B model matches Qwen2.5-VL-32B-Instruct, and our 3B model surpasses its 7B counterpart. Remarkably, using the compact RubiCap-3B as a captioner produces stronger pretrained VLMs than those trained on captions from proprietary models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09160</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:51:27 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>CREATE: Testing LLMs for Associative Creativity</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09970</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.09970.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Manya Wadhwa, Tiasa Singha Roy, Harvey Lederman, Junyi Jessy Li, Greg Durrett&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 11&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; A key component of creativity is associative reasoning: the ability to draw novel yet meaningful connections between concepts. We introduce CREATE, a benchmark designed to evaluate models' capacity for creative associative reasoning. CREATE requires models to generate sets of paths connecting concepts in a model's parametric knowledge. Paths should have high specificity (distinctiveness and closeness of the concept connection) and high diversity (dissimilarity from other paths), and models are scored more highly if they produce a larger set of strong, diverse paths. This task shares demands of real creativity tasks like hypothesis generation, including an extremely large search space, but enables collection of a sizable benchmark with objective answer grading. Evaluation of frontier models shows that the strongest models achieve higher creative utility than others, with the high multiplicity of answers and complexity of the search making benchmark saturation difficult to achieve. Furthermore, our results illustrate that thinking models are not always more effective on our task, even with high token budgets. Recent approaches for creative prompting give some but limited additional improvement. CREATE provides a sandbox for developing new methods to improve models' capacity for associative creativity.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.09970.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Manya Wadhwa, Tiasa Singha Roy, Harvey Lederman, Junyi Jessy Li, Greg Durrett&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 13&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; A key component of creativity is associative reasoning: the ability to draw novel yet meaningful connections between concepts. We introduce CREATE, a benchmark designed to evaluate models' capacity for creative associative reasoning. CREATE requires models to generate sets of paths connecting concepts in a model's parametric knowledge. Paths should have high specificity (distinctiveness and closeness of the concept connection) and high diversity (dissimilarity from other paths), and models are scored more highly if they produce a larger set of strong, diverse paths. This task shares demands of real creativity tasks like hypothesis generation, including an extremely large search space, but enables collection of a sizable benchmark with objective answer grading. Evaluation of frontier models shows that the strongest models achieve higher creative utility than others, with the high multiplicity of answers and complexity of the search making benchmark saturation difficult to achieve. Furthermore, our results illustrate that thinking models are not always more effective on our task, even with high token budgets. Recent approaches for creative prompting give some but limited additional improvement. CREATE provides a sandbox for developing new methods to improve models' capacity for associative creativity.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09970</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:58:44 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -95,7 +95,7 @@
    <item>
      <title>Video-Based Reward Modeling for Computer-Use Agents</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10178</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10178.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Linxin Song, Jieyu Zhang, Huanxin Sheng, Taiwei Shi, Gupta Rahul, Yang Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Jian Kang, Jieyu Zhao&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 33&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Computer-using agents (CUAs) are becoming increasingly capable; however, it remains difficult to scale evaluation of whether a trajectory truly fulfills a user instruction. In this work, we study reward modeling from execution video: a sequence of keyframes from an agent trajectory that is independent of the agent's internal reasoning or actions. Although video-execution modeling is method-agnostic, it presents key challenges, including highly redundant layouts and subtle, localized cues that determine success. We introduce Execution Video Reward 53k (ExeVR-53k), a dataset of 53k high-quality video--task--reward triplets. We further propose adversarial instruction translation to synthesize negative samples with step-level annotations. To enable learning from long, high-resolution execution videos, we design spatiotemporal token pruning, which removes homogeneous regions and persistent tokens while preserving decisive UI changes. Building on these components, we fine-tune an Execution Video Reward Model (ExeVRM) that takes only a user instruction and a video-execution sequence to predict task success. Our ExeVRM 8B achieves 84.7% accuracy and 87.7% recall on video-execution assessment, outperforming strong proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro across Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, and Android, while providing more precise temporal attribution. These results show that video-execution reward modeling can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic evaluator for CUAs.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10178.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Linxin Song, Jieyu Zhang, Huanxin Sheng, Taiwei Shi, Gupta Rahul, Yang Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Jian Kang, Jieyu Zhao&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 35&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Computer-using agents (CUAs) are becoming increasingly capable; however, it remains difficult to scale evaluation of whether a trajectory truly fulfills a user instruction. In this work, we study reward modeling from execution video: a sequence of keyframes from an agent trajectory that is independent of the agent's internal reasoning or actions. Although video-execution modeling is method-agnostic, it presents key challenges, including highly redundant layouts and subtle, localized cues that determine success. We introduce Execution Video Reward 53k (ExeVR-53k), a dataset of 53k high-quality video--task--reward triplets. We further propose adversarial instruction translation to synthesize negative samples with step-level annotations. To enable learning from long, high-resolution execution videos, we design spatiotemporal token pruning, which removes homogeneous regions and persistent tokens while preserving decisive UI changes. Building on these components, we fine-tune an Execution Video Reward Model (ExeVRM) that takes only a user instruction and a video-execution sequence to predict task success. Our ExeVRM 8B achieves 84.7% accuracy and 87.7% recall on video-execution assessment, outperforming strong proprietary models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 Pro across Ubuntu, macOS, Windows, and Android, while providing more precise temporal attribution. These results show that video-execution reward modeling can serve as a scalable, model-agnostic evaluator for CUAs.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10178</guid>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:17:22 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -109,28 +109,28 @@
    <item>
      <title>Geometric Autoencoder for Diffusion Models</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10365</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10365.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hangyu Liu, Jianyong Wang, Yutao Sun&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Latent diffusion models have established a new state-of-the-art in high-resolution visual generation. Integrating Vision Foundation Model priors improves generative efficiency, yet existing latent designs remain largely heuristic. These approaches often struggle to unify semantic discriminability, reconstruction fidelity, and latent compactness. In this paper, we propose Geometric Autoencoder (GAE), a principled framework that systematically addresses these challenges. By analyzing various alignment paradigms, GAE constructs an optimized low-dimensional semantic supervision target from VFMs to provide guidance for the autoencoder. Furthermore, we leverage latent normalization that replaces the restrictive KL-divergence of standard VAEs, enabling a more stable latent manifold specifically optimized for diffusion learning. To ensure robust reconstruction under high-intensity noise, GAE incorporates a dynamic noise sampling mechanism. Empirically, GAE achieves compelling performance on the ImageNet-1K 256 times 256 benchmark, reaching a gFID of 1.82 at only 80 epochs and 1.31 at 800 epochs without Classifier-Free Guidance, significantly surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Beyond generative quality, GAE establishes a superior equilibrium between compression, semantic depth and robust reconstruction stability. These results validate our design considerations, offering a promising paradigm for latent diffusion modeling. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/freezing-index/Geometric-Autoencoder-for-Diffusion-Models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10365.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hangyu Liu, Jianyong Wang, Yutao Sun&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Latent diffusion models have established a new state-of-the-art in high-resolution visual generation. Integrating Vision Foundation Model priors improves generative efficiency, yet existing latent designs remain largely heuristic. These approaches often struggle to unify semantic discriminability, reconstruction fidelity, and latent compactness. In this paper, we propose Geometric Autoencoder (GAE), a principled framework that systematically addresses these challenges. By analyzing various alignment paradigms, GAE constructs an optimized low-dimensional semantic supervision target from VFMs to provide guidance for the autoencoder. Furthermore, we leverage latent normalization that replaces the restrictive KL-divergence of standard VAEs, enabling a more stable latent manifold specifically optimized for diffusion learning. To ensure robust reconstruction under high-intensity noise, GAE incorporates a dynamic noise sampling mechanism. Empirically, GAE achieves compelling performance on the ImageNet-1K 256 times 256 benchmark, reaching a gFID of 1.82 at only 80 epochs and 1.31 at 800 epochs without Classifier-Free Guidance, significantly surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Beyond generative quality, GAE establishes a superior equilibrium between compression, semantic depth and robust reconstruction stability. These results validate our design considerations, offering a promising paradigm for latent diffusion modeling. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/freezing-index/Geometric-Autoencoder-for-Diffusion-Models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10365</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:29:16 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>FireRedASR2S: A State-of-the-Art Industrial-Grade All-in-One Automatic Speech Recognition System</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10420</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10420.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Kaituo Xu, Yan Jia, Kai Huang, Junjie Chen, Wenpeng Li, Kun Liu, Feng-Long Xie, Xu Tang, Yao Hu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; We present FireRedASR2S, a state-of-the-art industrial-grade all-in-one automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. It integrates four modules in a unified pipeline: ASR, Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Spoken Language Identification (LID), and Punctuation Prediction (Punc). All modules achieve SOTA performance on the evaluated benchmarks: FireRedASR2: An ASR module with two variants, FireRedASR2-LLM (8B+ parameters) and FireRedASR2-AED (1B+ parameters), supporting speech and singing transcription for Mandarin, Chinese dialects and accents, English, and code-switching. Compared to FireRedASR, FireRedASR2 delivers improved recognition accuracy and broader dialect and accent coverage. FireRedASR2-LLM achieves 2.89% average CER on 4 public Mandarin benchmarks and 11.55% on 19 public Chinese dialects and accents benchmarks, outperforming competitive baselines including Doubao-ASR, Qwen3-ASR, and Fun-ASR. FireRedVAD: An ultra-lightweight module (0.6M parameters) based on the Deep Feedforward Sequential Memory Network (DFSMN), supporting streaming VAD, non-streaming VAD, and multi-label VAD (mVAD). On the FLEURS-VAD-102 benchmark, it achieves 97.57% frame-level F1 and 99.60% AUC-ROC, outperforming Silero-VAD, TEN-VAD, FunASR-VAD, and WebRTC-VAD. FireRedLID: An Encoder-Decoder LID module supporting 100+ languages and 20+ Chinese dialects and accents. On FLEURS (82 languages), it achieves 97.18% utterance-level accuracy, outperforming Whisper and SpeechBrain. FireRedPunc: A BERT-style punctuation prediction module for Chinese and English. On multi-domain benchmarks, it achieves 78.90% average F1, outperforming FunASR-Punc (62.77%). To advance research in speech processing, we release model weights and code at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRedASR2S.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10420.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Kaituo Xu, Yan Jia, Kai Huang, Junjie Chen, Wenpeng Li, Kun Liu, Feng-Long Xie, Xu Tang, Yao Hu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; We present FireRedASR2S, a state-of-the-art industrial-grade all-in-one automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. It integrates four modules in a unified pipeline: ASR, Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Spoken Language Identification (LID), and Punctuation Prediction (Punc). All modules achieve SOTA performance on the evaluated benchmarks: FireRedASR2: An ASR module with two variants, FireRedASR2-LLM (8B+ parameters) and FireRedASR2-AED (1B+ parameters), supporting speech and singing transcription for Mandarin, Chinese dialects and accents, English, and code-switching. Compared to FireRedASR, FireRedASR2 delivers improved recognition accuracy and broader dialect and accent coverage. FireRedASR2-LLM achieves 2.89% average CER on 4 public Mandarin benchmarks and 11.55% on 19 public Chinese dialects and accents benchmarks, outperforming competitive baselines including Doubao-ASR, Qwen3-ASR, and Fun-ASR. FireRedVAD: An ultra-lightweight module (0.6M parameters) based on the Deep Feedforward Sequential Memory Network (DFSMN), supporting streaming VAD, non-streaming VAD, and multi-label VAD (mVAD). On the FLEURS-VAD-102 benchmark, it achieves 97.57% frame-level F1 and 99.60% AUC-ROC, outperforming Silero-VAD, TEN-VAD, FunASR-VAD, and WebRTC-VAD. FireRedLID: An Encoder-Decoder LID module supporting 100+ languages and 20+ Chinese dialects and accents. On FLEURS (82 languages), it achieves 97.18% utterance-level accuracy, outperforming Whisper and SpeechBrain. FireRedPunc: A BERT-style punctuation prediction module for Chinese and English. On multi-domain benchmarks, it achieves 78.90% average F1, outperforming FunASR-Punc (62.77%). To advance research in speech processing, we release model weights and code at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRedASR2S.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10420</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:11:06 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10444</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10444.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fanqi Yu, Ruijun Huang, Fang Dong, Xin Zhang, Jixian Zhou, Anrui Chen, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Li Shang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Large language models trained on natural language exhibit pronounced anisotropy: a small number of directions concentrate disproportionate energy, while the remaining dimensions form a broad semantic tail. In low-bit training regimes, this geometry becomes numerically unstable. Because blockwise quantization scales are determined by extreme elementwise magnitudes, dominant directions stretch the dynamic range, compressing long-tail semantic variation into narrow numerical bins. We show that this instability is primarily driven by a coherent rank-one mean bias, which constitutes the dominant component of spectral anisotropy in LLM representations. This mean component emerges systematically across layers and training stages and accounts for the majority of extreme activation magnitudes, making it the principal driver of dynamic-range inflation under low precision. Crucially, because the dominant instability is rank-one, it can be eliminated through a simple source-level mean-subtraction operation. This bias-centric conditioning recovers most of the stability benefits of SVD-based spectral methods while requiring only reduction operations and standard quantization kernels. Empirical results on FP4 (W4A4G4) training show that mean removal substantially narrows the loss gap to BF16 and restores downstream performance, providing a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10444.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fanqi Yu, Ruijun Huang, Fang Dong, Xin Zhang, Jixian Zhou, Anrui Chen, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Li Shang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 7&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Large language models trained on natural language exhibit pronounced anisotropy: a small number of directions concentrate disproportionate energy, while the remaining dimensions form a broad semantic tail. In low-bit training regimes, this geometry becomes numerically unstable. Because blockwise quantization scales are determined by extreme elementwise magnitudes, dominant directions stretch the dynamic range, compressing long-tail semantic variation into narrow numerical bins. We show that this instability is primarily driven by a coherent rank-one mean bias, which constitutes the dominant component of spectral anisotropy in LLM representations. This mean component emerges systematically across layers and training stages and accounts for the majority of extreme activation magnitudes, making it the principal driver of dynamic-range inflation under low precision. Crucially, because the dominant instability is rank-one, it can be eliminated through a simple source-level mean-subtraction operation. This bias-centric conditioning recovers most of the stability benefits of SVD-based spectral methods while requiring only reduction operations and standard quantization kernels. Empirical results on FP4 (W4A4G4) training show that mean removal substantially narrows the loss gap to BF16 and restores downstream performance, providing a hardware-efficient path to stable low-bit LLM training.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10444</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:59:12 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Understanding by Reconstruction: Reversing the Software Development Process for LLM Pretraining</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11103</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11103.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Zhiyuan Zeng, Yichi Zhang, Yong Shan, Kai Hua, Siyuan Fang, Zhaiyu Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Haozhe Wang, Yining Zheng, Ming Ding, Ke Shen, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Xipeng Qiu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in code generation, they often struggle with the deep, long-horizon reasoning required for complex software engineering. We attribute this limitation to the nature of standard pre-training data: static software repositories represent only the terminal state of an intricate intellectual process, abstracting away the intermediate planning, debugging, and iterative refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel paradigm: understanding via reconstruction. We hypothesize that reverse-engineering the latent agentic trajectories -- the planning, reasoning, and debugging steps -- behind static repositories provides a far richer supervision signal than raw code alone. To operationalize this, we introduce a framework that synthesizes these trajectories using a multi-agent simulation. This process is grounded in the structural realities of the source repositories (e.g., dependency graphs and file hierarchies) to ensure fidelity. Furthermore, to guarantee the logical rigor of the synthetic data, we employ a search-based optimization technique that iteratively refines the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to maximize the likelihood of the ground-truth code. Empirical results demonstrate that continuous pre-training on these reconstructed trajectories significantly enhances Llama-3-8B's performance across diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding, coding proficiency, and agentic capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11103.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Zhiyuan Zeng, Yichi Zhang, Yong Shan, Kai Hua, Siyuan Fang, Zhaiyu Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Haozhe Wang, Yining Zheng, Ming Ding, Ke Shen, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Xipeng Qiu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 8&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in code generation, they often struggle with the deep, long-horizon reasoning required for complex software engineering. We attribute this limitation to the nature of standard pre-training data: static software repositories represent only the terminal state of an intricate intellectual process, abstracting away the intermediate planning, debugging, and iterative refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel paradigm: understanding via reconstruction. We hypothesize that reverse-engineering the latent agentic trajectories -- the planning, reasoning, and debugging steps -- behind static repositories provides a far richer supervision signal than raw code alone. To operationalize this, we introduce a framework that synthesizes these trajectories using a multi-agent simulation. This process is grounded in the structural realities of the source repositories (e.g., dependency graphs and file hierarchies) to ensure fidelity. Furthermore, to guarantee the logical rigor of the synthetic data, we employ a search-based optimization technique that iteratively refines the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to maximize the likelihood of the ground-truth code. Empirical results demonstrate that continuous pre-training on these reconstructed trajectories significantly enhances Llama-3-8B's performance across diverse benchmarks, including long-context understanding, coding proficiency, and agentic capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11103</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:23:20 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@
    <item>
      <title>Are Video Reasoning Models Ready to Go Outside?</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10652</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10652.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yangfan He, Changgyu Boo, Jaehong Yoon&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; In real-world deployment, vision-language models often encounter disturbances such as weather, occlusion, and camera motion. Under such conditions, their understanding and reasoning degrade substantially, revealing a gap between clean, controlled (i.e., unperturbed) evaluation settings and real-world robustness. To address this limitation, we propose ROVA, a novel training framework that improves robustness by modeling a robustness-aware consistency reward under spatio-temporal corruptions. ROVA introduces a difficulty-aware online training strategy that prioritizes informative samples based on the model's evolving capability. Specifically, it continuously re-estimates sample difficulty via self-reflective evaluation, enabling adaptive training with a robustness-aware consistency reward. We also introduce PVRBench, a new benchmark that injects real-world perturbations into embodied video datasets to assess both accuracy and reasoning quality under realistic disturbances. We evaluate ROVA and baselines on PVRBench, UrbanVideo, and VisBench, where open-source and proprietary models suffer up to 35% and 28% drops in accuracy and reasoning under realistic perturbations. ROVA effectively mitigates performance degradation, boosting relative accuracy by at least 24% and reasoning by over 9% compared with baseline models (QWen2.5/3-VL, InternVL2.5, Embodied-R). These gains transfer to clean standard benchmarks, yielding consistent improvements.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.10652.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yangfan He, Changgyu Boo, Jaehong Yoon&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 7&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; In real-world deployment, vision-language models often encounter disturbances such as weather, occlusion, and camera motion. Under such conditions, their understanding and reasoning degrade substantially, revealing a gap between clean, controlled (i.e., unperturbed) evaluation settings and real-world robustness. To address this limitation, we propose ROVA, a novel training framework that improves robustness by modeling a robustness-aware consistency reward under spatio-temporal corruptions. ROVA introduces a difficulty-aware online training strategy that prioritizes informative samples based on the model's evolving capability. Specifically, it continuously re-estimates sample difficulty via self-reflective evaluation, enabling adaptive training with a robustness-aware consistency reward. We also introduce PVRBench, a new benchmark that injects real-world perturbations into embodied video datasets to assess both accuracy and reasoning quality under realistic disturbances. We evaluate ROVA and baselines on PVRBench, UrbanVideo, and VisBench, where open-source and proprietary models suffer up to 35% and 28% drops in accuracy and reasoning under realistic perturbations. ROVA effectively mitigates performance degradation, boosting relative accuracy by at least 24% and reasoning by over 9% compared with baseline models (QWen2.5/3-VL, InternVL2.5, Embodied-R). These gains transfer to clean standard benchmarks, yielding consistent improvements.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10652</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:10:52 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -158,42 +158,42 @@
    <item>
      <title>PACED: Distillation at the Frontier of Student Competence</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11178</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11178.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou, Ran He, Zhipeng Wang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Standard LLM distillation wastes compute on two fronts: problems the student has already mastered (near-zero gradients) and problems far beyond its reach (incoherent gradients that erode existing capabilities). We show that this waste is not merely intuitive but structurally inevitable: the gradient signal-to-noise ratio in distillation provably vanishes at both pass-rate extremes. This theoretical observation leads to Paced, a framework that concentrates distillation on the zone of proximal development -- the frontier of a student model's competence -- via a principled pass-rate weight w(p) = p^α(1 - p)^β derived from the boundary-vanishing structure of distillation gradients. Key results: (1) Theory: We prove that the Beta kernel w(p) = p^α(1-p)^β is a leading-order weight family arising from the SNR structure of distillation, and that it is minimax-robust -- under bounded multiplicative misspecification, worst-case efficiency loss is only O(δ^2). (2)Distillation: On distillation from a larger teacher to a smaller student model with forward KL, Paced achieves significant gain over the base model, while keeping benchmark forgetting at a low level. (3)Self-distillation: On instruction-tuned models with reverse KL, gains are exceeding baselines as well. (4)Two-stage synergy: A forward-KL-then-reverse-KL schedule yields the strongest results in our setting, reaching substantial improvements on standard reasoning benchmarks -- supporting a mode-coverage-then-consolidation interpretation of the distillation process. All configurations require only student rollouts to estimate pass rates, need no architectural changes, and are compatible with any KL direction.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11178.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou, Ran He, Zhipeng Wang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Standard LLM distillation wastes compute on two fronts: problems the student has already mastered (near-zero gradients) and problems far beyond its reach (incoherent gradients that erode existing capabilities). We show that this waste is not merely intuitive but structurally inevitable: the gradient signal-to-noise ratio in distillation provably vanishes at both pass-rate extremes. This theoretical observation leads to Paced, a framework that concentrates distillation on the zone of proximal development -- the frontier of a student model's competence -- via a principled pass-rate weight w(p) = p^α(1 - p)^β derived from the boundary-vanishing structure of distillation gradients. Key results: (1) Theory: We prove that the Beta kernel w(p) = p^α(1-p)^β is a leading-order weight family arising from the SNR structure of distillation, and that it is minimax-robust -- under bounded multiplicative misspecification, worst-case efficiency loss is only O(δ^2). (2)Distillation: On distillation from a larger teacher to a smaller student model with forward KL, Paced achieves significant gain over the base model, while keeping benchmark forgetting at a low level. (3)Self-distillation: On instruction-tuned models with reverse KL, gains are exceeding baselines as well. (4)Two-stage synergy: A forward-KL-then-reverse-KL schedule yields the strongest results in our setting, reaching substantial improvements on standard reasoning benchmarks -- supporting a mode-coverage-then-consolidation interpretation of the distillation process. All configurations require only student rollouts to estimate pass rates, need no architectural changes, and are compatible with any KL direction.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11178</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:00:05 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reflection for Agentic Search</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11327</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11327.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Hamish Ivison, Huaisheng Zhu, Faeze Brahman, Nathan Lambert, Pradeep Dasigi, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; This paper introduces MR-Search, an in-context meta reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for agentic search with self-reflection. Instead of optimizing a policy within a single independent episode with sparse rewards, MR-Search trains a policy that conditions on past episodes and adapts its search strategy across episodes. MR-Search learns to learn a search strategy with self-reflection, allowing search agents to improve in-context exploration at test-time. Specifically, MR-Search performs cross-episode exploration by generating explicit self-reflections after each episode and leveraging them as additional context to guide subsequent attempts, thereby promoting more effective exploration during test-time. We further introduce a multi-turn RL algorithm that estimates a dense relative advantage at the turn level, enabling fine-grained credit assignment on each episode. Empirical results across various benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of MR-Search over baselines based RL, showing strong generalization and relative improvements of 9.2% to 19.3% across eight benchmarks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tengxiao1/MR-Search.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11327.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Hamish Ivison, Huaisheng Zhu, Faeze Brahman, Nathan Lambert, Pradeep Dasigi, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; This paper introduces MR-Search, an in-context meta reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for agentic search with self-reflection. Instead of optimizing a policy within a single independent episode with sparse rewards, MR-Search trains a policy that conditions on past episodes and adapts its search strategy across episodes. MR-Search learns to learn a search strategy with self-reflection, allowing search agents to improve in-context exploration at test-time. Specifically, MR-Search performs cross-episode exploration by generating explicit self-reflections after each episode and leveraging them as additional context to guide subsequent attempts, thereby promoting more effective exploration during test-time. We further introduce a multi-turn RL algorithm that estimates a dense relative advantage at the turn level, enabling fine-grained credit assignment on each episode. Empirical results across various benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of MR-Search over baselines based RL, showing strong generalization and relative improvements of 9.2% to 19.3% across eight benchmarks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tengxiao1/MR-Search.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11327</guid>
      <pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:40:26 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>ShotVerse: Advancing Cinematic Camera Control for Text-Driven Multi-Shot Video Creation</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11421</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11421.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Songlin Yang, Zhe Wang, Xuyi Yang, Songchun Zhang, Xianghao Kong, Taiyi Wu, Xiaotong Zhao, Ran Zhang, Alan Zhao, Anyi Rao&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 27&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Text-driven video generation has democratized film creation, but camera control in cinematic multi-shot scenarios remains a significant block. Implicit textual prompts lack precision, while explicit trajectory conditioning imposes prohibitive manual overhead and often triggers execution failures in current models. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a data-centric paradigm shift, positing that aligned (Caption, Trajectory, Video) triplets form an inherent joint distribution that can connect automated plotting and precise execution. Guided by this insight, we present ShotVerse, a "Plan-then-Control" framework that decouples generation into two collaborative agents: a VLM (Vision-Language Model)-based Planner that leverages spatial priors to obtain cinematic, globally aligned trajectories from text, and a Controller that renders these trajectories into multi-shot video content via a camera adapter. Central to our approach is the construction of a data foundation: we design an automated multi-shot camera calibration pipeline aligns disjoint single-shot trajectories into a unified global coordinate system. This facilitates the curation of ShotVerse-Bench, a high-fidelity cinematic dataset with a three-track evaluation protocol that serves as the bedrock for our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotVerse effectively bridges the gap between unreliable textual control and labor-intensive manual plotting, achieving superior cinematic aesthetics and generating multi-shot videos that are both camera-accurate and cross-shot consistent.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11421.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Songlin Yang, Zhe Wang, Xuyi Yang, Songchun Zhang, Xianghao Kong, Taiyi Wu, Xiaotong Zhao, Ran Zhang, Alan Zhao, Anyi Rao&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 28&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Text-driven video generation has democratized film creation, but camera control in cinematic multi-shot scenarios remains a significant block. Implicit textual prompts lack precision, while explicit trajectory conditioning imposes prohibitive manual overhead and often triggers execution failures in current models. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a data-centric paradigm shift, positing that aligned (Caption, Trajectory, Video) triplets form an inherent joint distribution that can connect automated plotting and precise execution. Guided by this insight, we present ShotVerse, a "Plan-then-Control" framework that decouples generation into two collaborative agents: a VLM (Vision-Language Model)-based Planner that leverages spatial priors to obtain cinematic, globally aligned trajectories from text, and a Controller that renders these trajectories into multi-shot video content via a camera adapter. Central to our approach is the construction of a data foundation: we design an automated multi-shot camera calibration pipeline aligns disjoint single-shot trajectories into a unified global coordinate system. This facilitates the curation of ShotVerse-Bench, a high-fidelity cinematic dataset with a three-track evaluation protocol that serves as the bedrock for our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotVerse effectively bridges the gap between unreliable textual control and labor-intensive manual plotting, achieving superior cinematic aesthetics and generating multi-shot videos that are both camera-accurate and cross-shot consistent.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11421</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:27:08 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Attention Sinks Are Provably Necessary in Softmax Transformers: Evidence from Trigger-Conditional Tasks</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11487</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11487.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yuval Ran-Milo&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Transformers often display an attention sink: probability mass concentrates on a fixed, content-agnostic position. We prove that computing a simple trigger-conditional behavior necessarily induces a sink in softmax self-attention models. Our results formalize a familiar intuition: normalization over a probability simplex must force attention to collapse onto a stable anchor to realize a default state (e.g., when the model needs to ignore the input). We instantiate this with a concrete task: when a designated trigger token appears, the model must return the average of all preceding token representations, and otherwise output zero, a task which mirrors the functionality of attention heads in the wild (Barbero et al., 2025; Guo et al., 2024). We also prove that non-normalized ReLU attention can solve the same task without any sink, confirming that the normalization constraint is the fundamental driver of sink behavior. Experiments validate our predictions and demonstrate they extend beyond the theoretically analyzed setting: softmax models develop strong sinks while ReLU attention eliminates them in both single-head and multi-head variants.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11487.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yuval Ran-Milo&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Transformers often display an attention sink: probability mass concentrates on a fixed, content-agnostic position. We prove that computing a simple trigger-conditional behavior necessarily induces a sink in softmax self-attention models. Our results formalize a familiar intuition: normalization over a probability simplex must force attention to collapse onto a stable anchor to realize a default state (e.g., when the model needs to ignore the input). We instantiate this with a concrete task: when a designated trigger token appears, the model must return the average of all preceding token representations, and otherwise output zero, a task which mirrors the functionality of attention heads in the wild (Barbero et al., 2025; Guo et al., 2024). We also prove that non-normalized ReLU attention can solve the same task without any sink, confirming that the normalization constraint is the fundamental driver of sink behavior. Experiments validate our predictions and demonstrate they extend beyond the theoretically analyzed setting: softmax models develop strong sinks while ReLU attention eliminates them in both single-head and multi-head variants.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11487</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:13:28 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Tiny Aya: Bridging Scale and Multilingual Depth</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11510</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11510.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Alejandro R. Salamanca, Diana Abagyan, Daniel D'souza, Ammar Khairi, David Mora, Saurabh Dash, Viraat Aryabumi, Sara Rajaee, Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Ananya Sahu, Thomas Euyang, Brittawnya Prince, Madeline Smith, Hangyu Lin, Acyr Locatelli, Sara Hooker, Tom Kocmi, Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Phil Blunsom, Nick Frosst, Joelle Pineau, Beyza Ermis, Ahmet Üstün, Julia Kreutzer, Marzieh Fadaee&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11510.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Alejandro R. Salamanca, Diana Abagyan, Daniel D'souza, Ammar Khairi, David Mora, Saurabh Dash, Viraat Aryabumi, Sara Rajaee, Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Ananya Sahu, Thomas Euyang, Brittawnya Prince, Madeline Smith, Hangyu Lin, Acyr Locatelli, Sara Hooker, Tom Kocmi, Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, Phil Blunsom, Nick Frosst, Joelle Pineau, Beyza Ermis, Ahmet Üstün, Julia Kreutzer, Marzieh Fadaee&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11510</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 03:53:13 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Mobile-GS: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Devices</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11531</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11531.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Xiaobiao Du, Yida Wang, Kun Zhan, Xin Yu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for high-quality rendering across a wide range of applications.However, its high computational demands and large storage costs pose significant challenges for deployment on mobile devices. In this work, we propose a mobile-tailored real-time Gaussian Splatting method, dubbed Mobile-GS, enabling efficient inference of Gaussian Splatting on edge devices. Specifically, we first identify alpha blending as the primary computational bottleneck, since it relies on the time-consuming Gaussian depth sorting process. To solve this issue, we propose a depth-aware order-independent rendering scheme that eliminates the need for sorting, thereby substantially accelerating rendering. Although this order-independent rendering improves rendering speed, it may introduce transparency artifacts in regions with overlapping geometry due to the scarcity of rendering order. To address this problem, we propose a neural view-dependent enhancement strategy, enabling more accurate modeling of view-dependent effects conditioned on viewing direction, 3D Gaussian geometry, and appearance attributes. In this way, Mobile-GS can achieve both high-quality and real-time rendering. Furthermore, to facilitate deployment on memory-constrained mobile platforms, we also introduce first-order spherical harmonics distillation, a neural vector quantization technique, and a contribution-based pruning strategy to reduce the number of Gaussian primitives and compress the 3D Gaussian representation with the assistance of neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mobile-GS achieves real-time rendering and compact model size while preserving high visual quality, making it well-suited for mobile applications.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11531.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Xiaobiao Du, Yida Wang, Kun Zhan, Xin Yu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 8&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for high-quality rendering across a wide range of applications.However, its high computational demands and large storage costs pose significant challenges for deployment on mobile devices. In this work, we propose a mobile-tailored real-time Gaussian Splatting method, dubbed Mobile-GS, enabling efficient inference of Gaussian Splatting on edge devices. Specifically, we first identify alpha blending as the primary computational bottleneck, since it relies on the time-consuming Gaussian depth sorting process. To solve this issue, we propose a depth-aware order-independent rendering scheme that eliminates the need for sorting, thereby substantially accelerating rendering. Although this order-independent rendering improves rendering speed, it may introduce transparency artifacts in regions with overlapping geometry due to the scarcity of rendering order. To address this problem, we propose a neural view-dependent enhancement strategy, enabling more accurate modeling of view-dependent effects conditioned on viewing direction, 3D Gaussian geometry, and appearance attributes. In this way, Mobile-GS can achieve both high-quality and real-time rendering. Furthermore, to facilitate deployment on memory-constrained mobile platforms, we also introduce first-order spherical harmonics distillation, a neural vector quantization technique, and a contribution-based pruning strategy to reduce the number of Gaussian primitives and compress the 3D Gaussian representation with the assistance of neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mobile-GS achieves real-time rendering and compact model size while preserving high visual quality, making it well-suited for mobile applications.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11531</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:33:04 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -214,21 +214,21 @@
    <item>
      <title>Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11665</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11665.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Junjie Wu, Xuan Kan, Zihao He, Shunwen Tan, Bo Pan, Kaitai Zhang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely adopted as MLLM-as-a-Judges due to their strong alignment with human judgment across various visual tasks. However, most existing judge models are optimized for single-task scenarios and struggle to generalize to diverse contexts, which is a critical requirement for reliable evaluation. To address this limitation, we propose Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for MLLM-as-a-Judge (MT-RL-Judge), a framework that jointly optimizes the judge model across multiple tasks, leveraging the generalization capabilities of RL. Experimental results against several strong baselines demonstrate that MT-RL-Judge outperforms strong baselines in both judgment consistency and correlation with human preferences. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization on out-of-distribution tasks, further validating its effectiveness.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.11665.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Junjie Wu, Xuan Kan, Zihao He, Shunwen Tan, Bo Pan, Kaitai Zhang&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely adopted as MLLM-as-a-Judges due to their strong alignment with human judgment across various visual tasks. However, most existing judge models are optimized for single-task scenarios and struggle to generalize to diverse contexts, which is a critical requirement for reliable evaluation. To address this limitation, we propose Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for MLLM-as-a-Judge (MT-RL-Judge), a framework that jointly optimizes the judge model across multiple tasks, leveraging the generalization capabilities of RL. Experimental results against several strong baselines demonstrate that MT-RL-Judge outperforms strong baselines in both judgment consistency and correlation with human preferences. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization on out-of-distribution tasks, further validating its effectiveness.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11665</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:32:38 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Dr. SHAP-AV: Decoding Relative Modality Contributions via Shapley Attribution in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12046</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12046.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Umberto Cappellazzo, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) leverages both acoustic and visual information for robust recognition under noise. However, how models balance these modalities remains unclear. We present Dr. SHAP-AV, a framework using Shapley values to analyze modality contributions in AVSR. Through experiments on six models across two benchmarks and varying SNR levels, we introduce three analyses: Global SHAP for overall modality balance, Generative SHAP for contribution dynamics during decoding, and Temporal Alignment SHAP for input-output correspondence. Our findings reveal that models shift toward visual reliance under noise yet maintain high audio contributions even under severe degradation. Modality balance evolves during generation, temporal alignment holds under noise, and SNR is the dominant factor driving modality weighting. These findings expose a persistent audio bias, motivating ad-hoc modality-weighting mechanisms and Shapley-based attribution as a standard AVSR diagnostic.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12046.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Umberto Cappellazzo, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) leverages both acoustic and visual information for robust recognition under noise. However, how models balance these modalities remains unclear. We present Dr. SHAP-AV, a framework using Shapley values to analyze modality contributions in AVSR. Through experiments on six models across two benchmarks and varying SNR levels, we introduce three analyses: Global SHAP for overall modality balance, Generative SHAP for contribution dynamics during decoding, and Temporal Alignment SHAP for input-output correspondence. Our findings reveal that models shift toward visual reliance under noise yet maintain high audio contributions even under severe degradation. Modality balance evolves during generation, temporal alignment holds under noise, and SNR is the dominant factor driving modality weighting. These findings expose a persistent audio bias, motivating ad-hoc modality-weighting mechanisms and Shapley-based attribution as a standard AVSR diagnostic.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12046</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:22:27 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>XSkill: Continual Learning from Experience and Skills in Multimodal Agents</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12056</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12056.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Guanyu Jiang, Zhaochen Su, Xiaoye Qu, Yi R., Fung&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 20&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal agents can now tackle complex reasoning tasks with diverse tools, yet they still suffer from inefficient tool use and inflexible orchestration in open-ended settings. A central challenge is enabling such agents to continually improve without parameter updates by learning from past trajectories. We identify two complementary forms of reusable knowledge essential for this goal: experiences, providing concise action-level guidance for tool selection and decision making, and skills, providing structured task-level guidance for planning and tool use. To this end, we propose XSkill, a dual-stream framework for continual learning from experience and skills in multimodal agents. XSkill grounds both knowledge extraction and retrieval in visual observations. During accumulation, XSkill distills and consolidates experiences and skills from multi-path rollouts via visually grounded summarization and cross-rollout critique. During inference, it retrieves and adapts this knowledge to the current visual context and feeds usage history back into accumulation to form a continual learning loop. Evaluated on five benchmarks across diverse domains with four backbone models, XSkill consistently and substantially outperforms both tool-only and learning-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that the two knowledge streams play complementary roles in influencing the reasoning behaviors of agents and show superior zero-shot generalization.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12056.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Guanyu Jiang, Zhaochen Su, Xiaoye Qu, Yi R., Fung&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 22&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal agents can now tackle complex reasoning tasks with diverse tools, yet they still suffer from inefficient tool use and inflexible orchestration in open-ended settings. A central challenge is enabling such agents to continually improve without parameter updates by learning from past trajectories. We identify two complementary forms of reusable knowledge essential for this goal: experiences, providing concise action-level guidance for tool selection and decision making, and skills, providing structured task-level guidance for planning and tool use. To this end, we propose XSkill, a dual-stream framework for continual learning from experience and skills in multimodal agents. XSkill grounds both knowledge extraction and retrieval in visual observations. During accumulation, XSkill distills and consolidates experiences and skills from multi-path rollouts via visually grounded summarization and cross-rollout critique. During inference, it retrieves and adapts this knowledge to the current visual context and feeds usage history back into accumulation to form a continual learning loop. Evaluated on five benchmarks across diverse domains with four backbone models, XSkill consistently and substantially outperforms both tool-only and learning-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that the two knowledge streams play complementary roles in influencing the reasoning behaviors of agents and show superior zero-shot generalization.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12056</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:25:57 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -242,42 +242,42 @@
    <item>
      <title>EmbTracker: Traceable Black-box Watermarking for Federated Language Models</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12089</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12089.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Haodong Zhao, Jinming Hu, Yijie Bai, Tian Dong, Wei Du, Zhuosheng Zhang, Yanjiao Chen, Haojin Zhu, Gongshen Liu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 1&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Federated Language Model (FedLM) allows a collaborative learning without sharing raw data, yet it introduces a critical vulnerability, as every untrustworthy client may leak the received functional model instance. Current watermarking schemes for FedLM often require white-box access and client-side cooperation, providing only group-level proof of ownership rather than individual traceability. We propose EmbTracker, a server-side, traceable black-box watermarking framework specifically designed for FedLMs. EmbTracker achieves black-box verifiability by embedding a backdoor-based watermark detectable through simple API queries. Client-level traceability is realized by injecting unique identity-specific watermarks into the model distributed to each client. In this way, a leaked model can be attributed to a specific culprit, ensuring robustness even against non-cooperative participants. Extensive experiments on various language and vision-language models demonstrate that EmbTracker achieves robust traceability with verification rates near 100\%, high resilience against removal attacks (fine-tuning, pruning, quantization), and negligible impact on primary task performance (typically within 1-2\%).&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12089.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Haodong Zhao, Jinming Hu, Yijie Bai, Tian Dong, Wei Du, Zhuosheng Zhang, Yanjiao Chen, Haojin Zhu, Gongshen Liu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 2&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Federated Language Model (FedLM) allows a collaborative learning without sharing raw data, yet it introduces a critical vulnerability, as every untrustworthy client may leak the received functional model instance. Current watermarking schemes for FedLM often require white-box access and client-side cooperation, providing only group-level proof of ownership rather than individual traceability. We propose EmbTracker, a server-side, traceable black-box watermarking framework specifically designed for FedLMs. EmbTracker achieves black-box verifiability by embedding a backdoor-based watermark detectable through simple API queries. Client-level traceability is realized by injecting unique identity-specific watermarks into the model distributed to each client. In this way, a leaked model can be attributed to a specific culprit, ensuring robustness even against non-cooperative participants. Extensive experiments on various language and vision-language models demonstrate that EmbTracker achieves robust traceability with verification rates near 100\%, high resilience against removal attacks (fine-tuning, pruning, quantization), and negligible impact on primary task performance (typically within 1-2\%).&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12089</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:57:32 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Automatic Generation of High-Performance RL Environments</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12145</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12145.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Seth Karten, Rahul Dev Appapogu, Chi Jin&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Translating complex reinforcement learning (RL) environments into high-performance implementations has traditionally required months of specialized engineering. We present a reusable recipe - a generic prompt template, hierarchical verification, and iterative agent-assisted repair - that produces semantically equivalent high-performance environments for &lt;$10 in compute cost. We demonstrate three distinct workflows across five environments. Direct translation (no prior performance implementation exists): EmuRust (1.5x PPO speedup via Rust parallelism for a Game Boy emulator) and PokeJAX, the first GPU-parallel Pokemon battle simulator (500M SPS random action, 15.2M SPS PPO; 22,320x over the TypeScript reference). Translation verified against existing performance implementations: throughput parity with MJX (1.04x) and 5x over Brax at matched GPU batch sizes (HalfCheetah JAX); 42x PPO (Puffer Pong). New environment creation: TCGJax, the first deployable JAX Pokemon TCG engine (717K SPS random action, 153K SPS PPO; 6.6x over the Python reference), synthesized from a web-extracted specification. At 200M parameters, the environment overhead drops below 4% of training time. Hierarchical verification (property, interaction, and rollout tests) confirms semantic equivalence for all five environments; cross-backend policy transfer confirms zero sim-to-sim gap for all five environments. TCGJax, synthesized from a private reference absent from public repositories, serves as a contamination control for agent pretraining data concerns. The paper contains sufficient detail - including representative prompts, verification methodology, and complete results - that a coding agent could reproduce the translations directly from the manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12145.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Seth Karten, Rahul Dev Appapogu, Chi Jin&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 4&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Translating complex reinforcement learning (RL) environments into high-performance implementations has traditionally required months of specialized engineering. We present a reusable recipe - a generic prompt template, hierarchical verification, and iterative agent-assisted repair - that produces semantically equivalent high-performance environments for &lt;$10 in compute cost. We demonstrate three distinct workflows across five environments. Direct translation (no prior performance implementation exists): EmuRust (1.5x PPO speedup via Rust parallelism for a Game Boy emulator) and PokeJAX, the first GPU-parallel Pokemon battle simulator (500M SPS random action, 15.2M SPS PPO; 22,320x over the TypeScript reference). Translation verified against existing performance implementations: throughput parity with MJX (1.04x) and 5x over Brax at matched GPU batch sizes (HalfCheetah JAX); 42x PPO (Puffer Pong). New environment creation: TCGJax, the first deployable JAX Pokemon TCG engine (717K SPS random action, 153K SPS PPO; 6.6x over the Python reference), synthesized from a web-extracted specification. At 200M parameters, the environment overhead drops below 4% of training time. Hierarchical verification (property, interaction, and rollout tests) confirms semantic equivalence for all five environments; cross-backend policy transfer confirms zero sim-to-sim gap for all five environments. TCGJax, synthesized from a private reference absent from public repositories, serves as a contamination control for agent pretraining data concerns. The paper contains sufficient detail - including representative prompts, verification methodology, and complete results - that a coding agent could reproduce the translations directly from the manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12145</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:45:47 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Strategic Navigation or Stochastic Search? How Agents and Humans Reason Over Document Collections</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12180</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12180.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Łukasz Borchmann, Jordy Van Landeghem, Michał Turski, Shreyansh Padarha, Ryan Othniel Kearns, Adam Mahdi, Niels Rogge, Clémentine Fourrier, Siwei Han, Huaxiu Yao, Artemis Llabrés, Yiming Xu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Hao Zhang, Anupam Datta&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 47&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal agents offer a promising path to automating complex document-intensive workflows. Yet, a critical question remains: do these agents demonstrate genuine strategic reasoning, or merely stochastic trial-and-error search? To address this, we introduce MADQA, a benchmark of 2,250 human-authored questions grounded in 800 heterogeneous PDF documents. Guided by Classical Test Theory, we design it to maximize discriminative power across varying levels of agentic abilities. To evaluate agentic behaviour, we introduce a novel evaluation protocol measuring the accuracy-effort trade-off. Using this framework, we show that while the best agents can match human searchers in raw accuracy, they succeed on largely different questions and rely on brute-force search to compensate for weak strategic planning. They fail to close the nearly 20% gap to oracle performance, persisting in unproductive loops. We release the dataset and evaluation harness to help facilitate the transition from brute-force retrieval to calibrated, efficient reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12180.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Łukasz Borchmann, Jordy Van Landeghem, Michał Turski, Shreyansh Padarha, Ryan Othniel Kearns, Adam Mahdi, Niels Rogge, Clémentine Fourrier, Siwei Han, Huaxiu Yao, Artemis Llabrés, Yiming Xu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Hao Zhang, Anupam Datta&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 51&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Multimodal agents offer a promising path to automating complex document-intensive workflows. Yet, a critical question remains: do these agents demonstrate genuine strategic reasoning, or merely stochastic trial-and-error search? To address this, we introduce MADQA, a benchmark of 2,250 human-authored questions grounded in 800 heterogeneous PDF documents. Guided by Classical Test Theory, we design it to maximize discriminative power across varying levels of agentic abilities. To evaluate agentic behaviour, we introduce a novel evaluation protocol measuring the accuracy-effort trade-off. Using this framework, we show that while the best agents can match human searchers in raw accuracy, they succeed on largely different questions and rely on brute-force search to compensate for weak strategic planning. They fail to close the nearly 20% gap to oracle performance, persisting in unproductive loops. We release the dataset and evaluation harness to help facilitate the transition from brute-force retrieval to calibrated, efficient reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12180</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:11:22 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>IndexCache: Accelerating Sparse Attention via Cross-Layer Index Reuse</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12201</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12201.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yushi Bai, Qian Dong, Ting Jiang, Xin Lv, Zhengxiao Du, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 35&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) is a representative production-grade solution: a lightweight lightning indexer selects the top-k most relevant tokens per query, reducing core attention from O(L^2) to O(Lk). However, the indexer itself retains O(L^2) complexity and must run independently at every layer, despite the fact that the resulting top-k selections are highly similar across consecutive layers. We present IndexCache, which exploits this cross-layer redundancy by partitioning layers into a small set of Full layers that run their own indexers and a majority of Shared layers that simply reuse the nearest Full layer's top-k indices. We propose two complementary approaches to determine and optimize this configuration. Training-free IndexCache applies a greedy search algorithm that selects which layers to retain indexers by directly minimizing language modeling loss on a calibration set, requiring no weight updates. Training-aware IndexCache introduces a multi-layer distillation loss that trains each retained indexer against the averaged attention distributions of all layers it serves, enabling even simple interleaved patterns to match full-indexer accuracy. Experimental results on a 30B DSA model show that IndexCache can remove 75% of indexer computations with negligible quality degradation, achieving up to 1.82times prefill speedup and 1.48times decode speedup compared to standard DSA. These positive results are further confirmed by our preliminary experiments on the production-scale GLM-5 model (Figure 1).&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12201.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yushi Bai, Qian Dong, Ting Jiang, Xin Lv, Zhengxiao Du, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 39&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) is a representative production-grade solution: a lightweight lightning indexer selects the top-k most relevant tokens per query, reducing core attention from O(L^2) to O(Lk). However, the indexer itself retains O(L^2) complexity and must run independently at every layer, despite the fact that the resulting top-k selections are highly similar across consecutive layers. We present IndexCache, which exploits this cross-layer redundancy by partitioning layers into a small set of Full layers that run their own indexers and a majority of Shared layers that simply reuse the nearest Full layer's top-k indices. We propose two complementary approaches to determine and optimize this configuration. Training-free IndexCache applies a greedy search algorithm that selects which layers to retain indexers by directly minimizing language modeling loss on a calibration set, requiring no weight updates. Training-aware IndexCache introduces a multi-layer distillation loss that trains each retained indexer against the averaged attention distributions of all layers it serves, enabling even simple interleaved patterns to match full-indexer accuracy. Experimental results on a 30B DSA model show that IndexCache can remove 75% of indexer computations with negligible quality degradation, achieving up to 1.82times prefill speedup and 1.48times decode speedup compared to standard DSA. These positive results are further confirmed by our preliminary experiments on the production-scale GLM-5 model (Figure 1).&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12201</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:27:21 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Neural Thickets: Diverse Task Experts Are Dense Around Pretrained Weights</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12228</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12228.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yulu Gan, Phillip Isola&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Pretraining produces a learned parameter vector that is typically treated as a starting point for further iterative adaptation. In this work, we instead view the outcome of pretraining as a distribution over parameter vectors, whose support already contains task-specific experts. We show that in small models such expert solutions occupy a negligible fraction of the volume of this distribution, making their discovery reliant on structured optimization methods such as gradient descent. In contrast, in large, well-pretrained models the density of task-experts increases dramatically, so that diverse, task-improving specialists populate a substantial fraction of the neighborhood around the pretrained weights. Motivated by this perspective, we explore a simple, fully parallel post-training method that samples N parameter perturbations at random, selects the top K, and ensembles predictions via majority vote. Despite its simplicity, this approach is competitive with standard post-training methods such as PPO, GRPO, and ES for contemporary large-scale models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12228.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yulu Gan, Phillip Isola&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 6&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Pretraining produces a learned parameter vector that is typically treated as a starting point for further iterative adaptation. In this work, we instead view the outcome of pretraining as a distribution over parameter vectors, whose support already contains task-specific experts. We show that in small models such expert solutions occupy a negligible fraction of the volume of this distribution, making their discovery reliant on structured optimization methods such as gradient descent. In contrast, in large, well-pretrained models the density of task-experts increases dramatically, so that diverse, task-improving specialists populate a substantial fraction of the neighborhood around the pretrained weights. Motivated by this perspective, we explore a simple, fully parallel post-training method that samples N parameter perturbations at random, selects the top K, and ensembles predictions via majority vote. Despite its simplicity, this approach is competitive with standard post-training methods such as PPO, GRPO, and ES for contemporary large-scale models.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12228</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:49:30 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>One Model, Many Budgets: Elastic Latent Interfaces for Diffusion Transformers</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12245</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12245.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Moayed Haji-Ali, Willi Menapace, Ivan Skorokhodov, Dogyun Park, Anil Kag, Michael Vasilkovsky, Sergey Tulyakov, Vicente Ordonez, Aliaksandr Siarohin&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 12&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Diffusion transformers (DiTs) achieve high generative quality but lock FLOPs to image resolution, limiting principled latency-quality trade-offs, and allocate computation uniformly across input spatial tokens, wasting resource allocation to unimportant regions. We introduce Elastic Latent Interface Transformer (ELIT), a drop-in, DiT-compatible mechanism that decouples input image size from compute. Our approach inserts a latent interface, a learnable variable-length token sequence on which standard transformer blocks can operate. Lightweight Read and Write cross-attention layers move information between spatial tokens and latents and prioritize important input regions. By training with random dropping of tail latents, ELIT learns to produce importance-ordered representations with earlier latents capturing global structure while later ones contain information to refine details. At inference, the number of latents can be dynamically adjusted to match compute constraints. ELIT is deliberately minimal, adding two cross-attention layers while leaving the rectified flow objective and the DiT stack unchanged. Across datasets and architectures (DiT, U-ViT, HDiT, MM-DiT), ELIT delivers consistent gains. On ImageNet-1K 512px, ELIT delivers an average gain of 35.3% and 39.6% in FID and FDD scores. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/elit/&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12245.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Moayed Haji-Ali, Willi Menapace, Ivan Skorokhodov, Dogyun Park, Anil Kag, Michael Vasilkovsky, Sergey Tulyakov, Vicente Ordonez, Aliaksandr Siarohin&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 14&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Diffusion transformers (DiTs) achieve high generative quality but lock FLOPs to image resolution, limiting principled latency-quality trade-offs, and allocate computation uniformly across input spatial tokens, wasting resource allocation to unimportant regions. We introduce Elastic Latent Interface Transformer (ELIT), a drop-in, DiT-compatible mechanism that decouples input image size from compute. Our approach inserts a latent interface, a learnable variable-length token sequence on which standard transformer blocks can operate. Lightweight Read and Write cross-attention layers move information between spatial tokens and latents and prioritize important input regions. By training with random dropping of tail latents, ELIT learns to produce importance-ordered representations with earlier latents capturing global structure while later ones contain information to refine details. At inference, the number of latents can be dynamically adjusted to match compute constraints. ELIT is deliberately minimal, adding two cross-attention layers while leaving the rectified flow objective and the DiT stack unchanged. Across datasets and architectures (DiT, U-ViT, HDiT, MM-DiT), ELIT delivers consistent gains. On ImageNet-1K 512px, ELIT delivers an average gain of 35.3% and 39.6% in FID and FDD scores. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/elit/&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12245</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:57:04 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -298,7 +298,7 @@
    <item>
      <title>DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12250</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12250.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hongfei Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Chenfei Liao, Jing He, Zixin Zhang, Haodong Li, Yihao Liang, Kanghao Chen, Bin Ren, Xu Zheng, Shuai Yang, Kun Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Nicu Sebe, Ying-Cong Chen&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 16&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12250.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Hongfei Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Chenfei Liao, Jing He, Zixin Zhang, Haodong Li, Yihao Liang, Kanghao Chen, Bin Ren, Xu Zheng, Shuai Yang, Kun Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Nicu Sebe, Ying-Cong Chen&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 18&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12250</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:58:06 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -312,7 +312,7 @@
    <item>
      <title>Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12255</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12255.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Fangfu Liu, Diankun Wu, Jiawei Chi, Yimo Cai, Yi-Hsin Hung, Xumin Yu, Hao Li, Han Hu, Yongming Rao, Yueqi Duan&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 68&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12255.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Fangfu Liu, Diankun Wu, Jiawei Chi, Yimo Cai, Yi-Hsin Hung, Xumin Yu, Hao Li, Han Hu, Yongming Rao, Yueqi Duan&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 73&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12255</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:58:58 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
@@ -333,14 +333,14 @@
    <item>
      <title>OmniStream: Mastering Perception, Reconstruction and Action in Continuous Streams</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12265</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12265.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yibin Yan, Jilan Xu, Shangzhe Di, Haoning Wu, Weidi Xie&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 8&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Modern visual agents require representations that are general, causal, and physically structured to operate in real-time streaming environments. However, current vision foundation models remain fragmented, specializing narrowly in image semantic perception, offline temporal modeling, or spatial geometry. This paper introduces OmniStream, a unified streaming visual backbone that effectively perceives, reconstructs, and acts from diverse visual inputs. By incorporating causal spatiotemporal attention and 3D rotary positional embeddings (3D-RoPE), our model supports efficient, frame-by-frame online processing of video streams via a persistent KV-cache. We pre-train OmniStream using a synergistic multi-task framework coupling static and temporal representation learning, streaming geometric reconstruction, and vision-language alignment on 29 datasets. Extensive evaluations show that, even with a strictly frozen backbone, OmniStream achieves consistently competitive performance with specialized experts across image and video probing, streaming geometric reconstruction, complex video and spatial reasoning, as well as robotic manipulation (unseen at training). Rather than pursuing benchmark-specific dominance, our work demonstrates the viability of training a single, versatile vision backbone that generalizes across semantic, spatial, and temporal reasoning, i.e., a more meaningful step toward general-purpose visual understanding for interactive and embodied agents.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12265.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Yibin Yan, Jilan Xu, Shangzhe Di, Haoning Wu, Weidi Xie&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 10&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Modern visual agents require representations that are general, causal, and physically structured to operate in real-time streaming environments. However, current vision foundation models remain fragmented, specializing narrowly in image semantic perception, offline temporal modeling, or spatial geometry. This paper introduces OmniStream, a unified streaming visual backbone that effectively perceives, reconstructs, and acts from diverse visual inputs. By incorporating causal spatiotemporal attention and 3D rotary positional embeddings (3D-RoPE), our model supports efficient, frame-by-frame online processing of video streams via a persistent KV-cache. We pre-train OmniStream using a synergistic multi-task framework coupling static and temporal representation learning, streaming geometric reconstruction, and vision-language alignment on 29 datasets. Extensive evaluations show that, even with a strictly frozen backbone, OmniStream achieves consistently competitive performance with specialized experts across image and video probing, streaming geometric reconstruction, complex video and spatial reasoning, as well as robotic manipulation (unseen at training). Rather than pursuing benchmark-specific dominance, our work demonstrates the viability of training a single, versatile vision backbone that generalizes across semantic, spatial, and temporal reasoning, i.e., a more meaningful step toward general-purpose visual understanding for interactive and embodied agents.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12265</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:59:55 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation</title>
      <link>https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12267</link>
-      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12267.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Tianwei Xiong, Jun Hao Liew, Zilong Huang, Zhijie Lin, Jiashi Feng, Xihui Liu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 10&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Autoregressive (AR) video generative models rely on video tokenizers that compress pixels into discrete token sequences. The length of these token sequences is crucial for balancing reconstruction quality against downstream generation computational cost. Traditional video tokenizers apply a uniform token assignment across temporal blocks of different videos, often wasting tokens on simple, static, or repetitive segments while underserving dynamic or complex ones. To address this inefficiency, we introduce EVATok, a framework to produce Efficient Video Adaptive Tokenizers. Our framework estimates optimal token assignments for each video to achieve the best quality-cost trade-off, develops lightweight routers for fast prediction of these optimal assignments, and trains adaptive tokenizers that encode videos based on the assignments predicted by routers. We demonstrate that EVATok delivers substantial improvements in efficiency and overall quality for video reconstruction and downstream AR generation. Enhanced by our advanced training recipe that integrates video semantic encoders, EVATok achieves superior reconstruction and state-of-the-art class-to-video generation on UCF-101, with at least 24.4% savings in average token usage compared to the prior state-of-the-art LARP and our fixed-length baseline.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
+      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2603.12267.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Authors:&lt;/b&gt; Tianwei Xiong, Jun Hao Liew, Zilong Huang, Zhijie Lin, Jiashi Feng, Xihui Liu&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Upvotes:&lt;/b&gt; 11&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;b&gt;Summary:&lt;/b&gt; Autoregressive (AR) video generative models rely on video tokenizers that compress pixels into discrete token sequences. The length of these token sequences is crucial for balancing reconstruction quality against downstream generation computational cost. Traditional video tokenizers apply a uniform token assignment across temporal blocks of different videos, often wasting tokens on simple, static, or repetitive segments while underserving dynamic or complex ones. To address this inefficiency, we introduce EVATok, a framework to produce Efficient Video Adaptive Tokenizers. Our framework estimates optimal token assignments for each video to achieve the best quality-cost trade-off, develops lightweight routers for fast prediction of these optimal assignments, and trains adaptive tokenizers that encode videos based on the assignments predicted by routers. We demonstrate that EVATok delivers substantial improvements in efficiency and overall quality for video reconstruction and downstream AR generation. Enhanced by our advanced training recipe that integrates video semantic encoders, EVATok achieves superior reconstruction and state-of-the-art class-to-video generation on UCF-101, with at least 24.4% savings in average token usage compared to the prior state-of-the-art LARP and our fixed-length baseline.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12267</guid>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:59:59 +0000</pubDate>
    </item>