diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index ad4d0c8..4c45f3d 100644 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -7,272 +7,384 @@ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification python-feedgen en - Mon, 11 May 2026 00:16:27 +0000 + Tue, 12 May 2026 00:18:00 +0000 - Balanced Aggregation: Understanding and Fixing Aggregation Bias in GRPO - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04077 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04077.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhiyuan Zeng, Jiameng Huang, Zhangyue Yin, Jiashuo Liu, Ziniu Li, Bingrui Li, Yuhao Wu, Yining Zheng, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Xipeng Qiu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a central paradigm for improving reasoning and code generation in large language models, and GRPO-style training is widely adopted for its simplicity and effectiveness. However, an important design choice remains underexplored: how token-level policy gradient terms are aggregated within each sampled group. Standard GRPO uses sequence aggregation, while recent work has advocated token aggregation as a better alternative. We show that these two rules induce different optimization biases: token aggregation introduces sign-length coupling, while sequence aggregation implicitly downweights longer responses through sequence-level equal weighting. To address this tension, we propose Balanced Aggregation (BA), a simple drop-in replacement that computes token-level means separately within the positive and negative subsets and then combines them with sequence-count-based weights. Experiments with Qwen2.5-Math-7B and Qwen3-1.7B on DAPO-17k and Polaris, evaluated on six reasoning and coding benchmarks, show that BA consistently improves training stability and final performance over standard token and sequence aggregation. Our analysis further shows that the relative effectiveness of token and sequence aggregation is largely governed by response-length variation and the positive-negative length gap, highlighting aggregation as a critical design dimension in GRPO-style RLVR.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04077 - Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + R^3-SQL: Ranking Reward and Resampling for Text-to-SQL + https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25325 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2604.25325.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hojae Han, Yeonseok Jeong, Seung-won Hwang, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern Text-to-SQL systems generate multiple candidate SQL queries and rank them to judge a final prediction. However, existing methods face two limitations. First, they often score functionally equivalent SQL queries inconsistently despite identical execution results. Second, ranking cannot recover when the correct SQL is absent from the candidate pool. We propose R^3-SQL, a Text-to-SQL framework that addresses both issues through unified reward for ranking and resampling. R^3-SQL first groups candidates by execution result and ranks groups for consistency. To score each group, it combines a pairwise preference across groups with a pointwise utility from the best group rank and size, capturing relative preference, consistency, and candidate quality. To improve candidate recall, R^3-SQL introduces agentic resampling, which judges the generated candidate pool and selectively resamples when the correct SQL is likely absent. R^3-SQL achieves 75.03 execution accuracy on BIRD-dev, a new state of the art among methods using models with disclosed sizes, with consistent gains across five benchmarks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25325 + Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - EDU-CIRCUIT-HW: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Real-World University-Level STEM Student Handwritten Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00095 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2602.00095.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weiyu Sun, Liangliang Chen, Yongnuo Cai, Huiru Xie, Yi Zeng, Ying Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold significant promise for revolutionizing traditional education and reducing teachers' workload. However, accurately interpreting unconstrained STEM student handwritten solutions with intertwined mathematical formulas, diagrams, and textual reasoning poses a significant challenge due to the lack of authentic and domain-specific benchmarks. Additionally, current evaluation paradigms predominantly rely on the outcomes of downstream tasks (e.g., auto-grading), which often probe only a subset of the recognized content, thereby failing to capture the MLLMs' understanding of complex handwritten logic as a whole. To bridge this gap, we release EDU-CIRCUIT-HW, a dataset consisting of 1,300+ authentic student handwritten solutions from a university-level STEM course. Utilizing the expert-verified verbatim transcriptions and grading reports of student solutions, we simultaneously evaluate various MLLMs' upstream recognition fidelity and downstream auto-grading performance. Our evaluation uncovers an astonishing scale of latent failures within MLLM-recognized student handwritten content, highlighting the models' insufficient reliability for auto-grading and other understanding-oriented applications in high-stakes educational settings. As a potential solution, we present a case study demonstrating that leveraging identified error patterns to preemptively detect and correct recognition errors, while requiring only minimal human intervention (e.g., routing 3.3% of assignments to human graders and the remainder to the GPT-5.1 grader), can effectively enhance the robustness of the deployed AI-enabled grading system. Code and dataset are available in this GitHub repo: https://gt-learning-innovation.github.io/CIRCUIT_EDU_HW_ACL.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00095 - Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - Recovering Hidden Reward in Diffusion-Based Policies - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00623 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.00623.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yanbiao Ji, Qiuchang Li, Yuting Hu, Shaokai Wu, Wenyuan Xie, Guodong Zhang, Qicheng He, Deyi Ji, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> This paper introduces EnergyFlow, a framework that unifies generative action modeling with inverse reinforcement learning by parameterizing a scalar energy function whose gradient is the denoising field. We establish that under maximum-entropy optimality, the score function learned via denoising score matching recovers the gradient of the expert's soft Q-function, enabling reward extraction without adversarial training. Formally, we prove that constraining the learned field to be conservative reduces hypothesis complexity and tightens out-of-distribution generalization bounds. We further characterize the identifiability of recovered rewards and bound how score estimation errors propagate to action preferences. Empirically, EnergyFlow achieves state-of-the-art imitation performance on various manipulation tasks while providing an effective reward signal for downstream reinforcement learning that outperforms both adversarial IRL methods and likelihood-based alternatives. These results show that the structural constraints required for valid reward extraction simultaneously serve as beneficial inductive biases for policy generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/sotaagi/EnergyFlow.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00623 + CGM-JEPA: Learning Consistent Continuous Glucose Monitor Representations via Predictive Self-Supervised Pretraining + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00933 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.00933.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hada Melino Muhammad, Zechen Li, Flora Salim, Ahmed A. Metwally</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) can detect early metabolic subphenotypes (insulin resistance, IR; β-cell dysfunction), but population-scale deployment faces two coupled problems. First, the same physiological state appears through multiple views (CGM time series, venous OGTT, Glucodensity summaries), so single-view representations fail to transfer when deployment shifts the modality or setting. Second, baselines perform inconsistently across these shifts. Both problems point to one remedy: representations that abstract away from any single view to capture higher-level temporal and distributional structure. We propose CGM-JEPA, a self-supervised pretraining framework which predicts masked latent representations rather than raw values, yielding abstraction that transfers across modalities. X-CGM-JEPA adds a masked Glucodensity cross-view objective for complementary distributional information. We pretrain on sim389k unlabeled CGM readings from 228 subjects and evaluate on two clinical cohorts (N=27 and N=17 public-release subsets) across three regimes (cohort generalization, venous-to-CGM transfer, home CGM) under 20-iteration times 2-fold cross-validation. X-CGM-JEPA ranks first or second on AUROC for both endpoints across all three regimes while no baseline does, exceeding the strongest baseline by up to +6.5 pp in cohort generalization and +3.6 pp in venous-to-CGM transfer (paired Wilcoxon, p<0.001). Under modality shift, it matches mean AUROC while redistributing toward weaker subgroups (ethnicity AUROC gap shrinks 25-54%); on sparse in-domain venous data, the distributional view lifts label-aware clustering (ARI +39%, NMI +40%). Code and weights: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/CGM-JEPA</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00933 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Prescriptive Scaling Laws for Data Constrained Training - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01640 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.01640.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Justin Lovelace, Christian Belardi, Srivatsa Kundurthy, Shriya Sudhakar, Kilian Q. Weinberger</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Training compute is increasingly outpacing the availability of high-quality data. This shifts the central challenge from optimal compute allocation to extracting maximum value from limited data. The widely adopted Chinchilla scaling law assumes every training token is unique. This limits its ability to guide pretraining decisions in data-constrained regimes. We model the excess loss under repetition with a simple additive overfitting penalty and find that it accurately describes model behavior. Our scaling law yields qualitatively new compute-optimal allocation advice. Beyond a point, further repetition is counterproductive and compute is better spent on model capacity. We show that following our law's recommended configuration improves performance in data-constrained regimes. Finally, because our one-parameter form isolates overfitting in a single coefficient, it enables direct comparison across training configurations. As a case study, we show that strong weight decay (λ=1.0) reduces this coefficient by approximately 70%, providing a scaling-law explanation for recent findings that optimal weight decay in data-constrained regimes is an order of magnitude larger than standard practice.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01640 - Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + Q-RAG: Long Context Multi-step Retrieval via Value-based Embedder Training + https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07328 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2511.07328.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Artyom Sorokin, Nazar Buzun, Alexander Anokhin, Oleg Inozemcev, Egor Vedernikov, Petr Anokhin, Mikhail Burtsev, Trushkov Alexey, Yin Wenshuai, Evgeny Burnaev</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 8</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods enhance LLM performance by efficiently filtering relevant context for LLMs, reducing hallucinations and inference cost. However, most existing RAG methods focus on single-step retrieval, which is often insufficient for answering complex questions that require multi-step search. Recently, multi-step retrieval approaches have emerged, typically involving the fine-tuning of small LLMs to perform multi-step retrieval. This type of fine-tuning is highly resource-intensive and does not enable the use of larger LLMs. In this work, we propose Q-RAG, a novel approach that fine-tunes the Embedder model for multi-step retrieval using reinforcement learning (RL). Q-RAG offers a competitive, resource-efficient alternative to existing multi-step retrieval methods for open-domain question answering and achieves state-of-the-art results on the popular long-context benchmarks BabiLong and RULER for contexts up to 10M tokens. Code is available at https://github.com/griver/Q-RAG</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07328 + Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05242 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05242.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Cong Wei, Pan Lu, Ping Nie, Yi Lu, Yuyang Bai, Shangbin Feng, Hangxiao Zhu, Ming Zhong, Yuyu Zhang, Jianwen Xie, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Jiawei Han, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin, Dongfu Jiang, Yu Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 79</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern retrieval systems, whether lexical or semantic, expose a corpus through a fixed similarity interface that compresses access into a single top-k retrieval step before reasoning. This abstraction is efficient, but for agentic search, it becomes a bottleneck: exact lexical constraints, sparse clue conjunctions, local context checks, and multi-step hypothesis refinement are difficult to implement by calling a conventional off-the-shelf retriever, and evidence filtered out early cannot be recovered by stronger downstream reasoning. Agentic tasks further exacerbate this limitation because they require agents to orchestrate multiple steps, including discovering intermediate entities, combining weak clues, and revising the plan after observing partial evidence. To tackle the limitation, we study direct corpus interaction (DCI), where an agent searches the raw corpus directly with general-purpose terminal tools (e.g., grep, file reads, shell commands, lightweight scripts), without any embedding model, vector index, or retrieval API. This approach requires no offline indexing and adapts naturally to evolving local corpora. Across IR benchmarks and end-to-end agentic search tasks, this simple setup substantially outperforms strong sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on several BRIGHT and BEIR datasets, and attains strong accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus and multi-hop QA without relying on any conventional semantic retriever. Our results indicate that as language agents become stronger, retrieval quality depends not only on reasoning ability but also on the resolution of the interface through which the model interacts with the corpus, with which DCI opens a broader interface-design space for agentic search.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05242 - Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - The Scaling Properties of Implicit Deductive Reasoning in Transformers - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04330 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04330.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Enrico Vompa, Tanel Tammet</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We investigate the scaling properties of implicit deductive reasoning over Horn clauses in depth-bounded Transformers. By systematically decorrelating provability from spurious features and enforcing algorithmic alignment, we find that in sufficiently deep models with a bidirectional prefix mask, implicit reasoning approaches explicit CoT performance across graph topologies and problem widths, though CoT remains necessary for depth extrapolation.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04330 + CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deployment + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06702 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06702.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siyuan Guo, Yali Du, Hechang Chen, Yi Chang, Jun Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) have become a central foundation of modern artificial intelligence, yet their lifecycle remains constrained by a rigid separation between training and deployment, after which learning effectively ceases. This limitation contrasts with natural intelligence, which continually adapts through interaction with its environment. In this paper, we formalise deployment-time learning (DTL) as the third stage in the LLM lifecycle that enables LLM agents to improve from experience during deployment without modifying model parameters. We present CASCADE (CASe-based Continual Adaptation during DEployment), a general and principled framework that equips LLM agents with an explicit, evolving episodic memory. CASCADE formulates experience reuse as a contextual bandit problem, enabling principled exploration-exploitation trade-offs and establishing no-regret guarantees over long-term interactions. This design allows agents to accumulate, select, and refine task-relevant cases, transforming past experience into actionable knowledge. Across 16 diverse tasks spanning medical diagnosis, legal analysis, code generation, web search, tool use, and embodied interaction, CASCADE improves macro-averaged success rate by 20.9% over zero-shot prompting while consistently outperforming gradient-based and memory-based baselines. By reframing deployment as an adaptive learning process, this work establishes a foundation for continually improving AI systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06702 Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Audio-Visual Intelligence in Large Foundation Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04045 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04045.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> You Qin, Kai Liu, Shengqiong Wu, Kai Wang, Shijian Deng, Yapeng Tian, Junbin Xiao, Yazhou Xing, Yinghao Ma, Bobo Li, Roger Zimmermann, Lei Cui, Furu Wei, Jiebo Luo, Hao Fei</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 26</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Audio-Visual Intelligence (AVI) has emerged as a central frontier in artificial intelligence, bridging auditory and visual modalities to enable machines that can perceive, generate, and interact in the multimodal real world. In the era of large foundation models, joint modeling of audio and vision has become increasingly crucial, i.e., not only for understanding but also for controllable generation and reasoning across dynamic, temporally grounded signals. Recent advances, such as Meta MovieGen and Google Veo-3, highlight the growing industrial and academic focus on unified audio-vision architectures that learn from massive multimodal data. However, despite rapid progress, the literature remains fragmented, spanning diverse tasks, inconsistent taxonomies, and heterogeneous evaluation practices that impede systematic comparison and knowledge integration. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of AVI through the lens of large foundation models. We establish a unified taxonomy covering the broad landscape of AVI tasks, ranging from understanding (e.g., speech recognition, sound localization) to generation (e.g., audio-driven video synthesis, video-to-audio) and interaction (e.g., dialogue, embodied, or agentic interfaces). We synthesize methodological foundations, including modality tokenization, cross-modal fusion, autoregressive and diffusion-based generation, large-scale pretraining, instruction alignment, and preference optimization. Furthermore, we curate representative datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, offering a structured comparison across task families and identifying open challenges in synchronization, spatial reasoning, controllability, and safety. By consolidating this rapidly expanding field into a coherent framework, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference for future research on large-scale AVI.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04045 + Discovering Reinforcement Learning Interfaces with Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03408 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.03408.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Akshat Singh Jaswal, Ashish Baghel, Paras Chopra</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning systems rely on environment interfaces that specify observations and reward functions, yet constructing these interfaces for new tasks often requires substantial manual effort. While recent work has automated reward design using large language models (LLMs), these approaches assume fixed observations and do not address the broader challenge of synthesizing complete task interfaces. We study RL task interface discovery from raw simulator state, where both observation mappings and reward functions must be generated. We propose LIMEN (Code available at https://github.com/Lossfunk/LIMEN), a LLM guided evolutionary framework that produces candidate interfaces as executable programs and iteratively refines them using policy training feedback. Across novel discrete gridworld tasks and continuous control domains spanning locomotion and manipulation, joint evolution of observations and rewards discovers effective interfaces given only a trajectory-level success metric, while optimizing either component alone fails on at least one domain. These results demonstrate that automatic construction of RL interfaces from raw state can substantially reduce manual engineering and that observation and reward components often benefit from co-design, as single-component optimization fails catastrophically on at least one domain in our evaluation suite.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03408 Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Generative Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Eigensolver - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04604 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04604.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yu-Cheng Lin, Yu-Chao Hsu, I-Shan Tsai, Chun-Hua Lin, Kuo-Chung Peng, Jiun-Cheng Jiang, Yun-Yuan Wang, Tzung-Chi Huang, Tai-Yue Li, Kuan-Cheng Chen, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Nan-Yow Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> High-performance computing (HPC) is increasingly important for scalable quantum chemistry workflows that couple classical generative models, quantum circuit simulation, and selected configuration interaction postprocessing. We present the generative quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold eigensolver (GQKAE), a parameter-efficient extension of the generative quantum eigensolver (GQE) for quantum chemistry. GQKAE replaces the parameter-heavy feed-forward network components in GPT-style generative eigensolvers with hybrid quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold network modules, forming a compact HQKANsformer backbone. The method preserves autoregressive operator selection and the quantum-selected configuration interaction evaluation pipeline, while using single-qubit DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN modules to provide expressive nonlinear mappings. Numerical benchmarks on H4, N2, LiH, C2H6, H2O, and the H2O dimer show that GQKAE achieves chemical accuracy comparable to the GPT-based GQE architecture, while reducing trainable parameters and memory by approximately 66% and improving wall-time performance. For strongly correlated systems such as N2 and LiH, GQKAE also improves convergence behavior and final energy errors. These results indicate that quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold networks can reduce classical-side overhead while preserving circuit-generation quality, offering a scalable route for HPC-quantum co-design on near-term quantum platforms.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04604 + SkCC: Portable and Secure Skill Compilation for Cross-Framework LLM Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03353 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.03353.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yipeng Ouyang, Yi Xiao, Yuhao Gu, Xianwei Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LLM-Agents have evolved into autonomous systems for complex task execution, with the SKILL.md specification emerging as a de facto standard for encapsulating agent capabilities. However, a critical bottleneck remains: different agent frameworks exhibit starkly different sensitivities to prompt formatting, causing up to 40% performance variation, yet nearly all skills exist as a single, format-agnostic Markdown version. Manual per-platform rewriting creates an unsustainable maintenance burden, while prior audits have found that over one third of community skills contain security vulnerabilities. To address this, we present SkCC, a compilation framework that introduces classical compiler design into agent skill development. At its core, SkIR - a strongly-typed intermediate representation - decouples skill semantics from platform-specific formatting, enabling portable deployment across heterogeneous agent frameworks. Around this IR, a compile-time Analyzer enforces security constraints via Anti-Skill Injection before deployment. Through a four-phase pipeline, SkCC reduces adaptation complexity from O(m times n) to O(m + n). Experiments on SkillsBench demonstrate that compiled skills consistently outperform their original counterparts, improving pass rates from 21.1% to 33.3% on Claude Code and from 35.1% to 48.7% on Kimi CLI, while achieving sub-10ms compilation latency, a 94.8% proactive security trigger rate, and 10-46% runtime token savings across platforms.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03353 + Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + DecodingTrust-Agent Platform (DTap): A Controllable and Interactive Red-Teaming Platform for AI Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04808 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04808.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhaorun Chen, Xun Liu, Haibo Tong, Chengquan Guo, Yuzhou Nie, Jiawei Zhang, Mintong Kang, Chejian Xu, Qichang Liu, Xiaogeng Liu, Tianneng Shi, Chaowei Xiao, Sanmi Koyejo, Percy Liang, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song, Bo Li</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> AI agents are increasingly deployed across diverse domains to automate complex workflows through long-horizon and high-stakes action executions. Due to their high capability and flexibility, such agents raise significant security and safety concerns. A growing number of real-world incidents have shown that adversaries can easily manipulate agents into performing harmful actions, such as leaking API keys, deleting user data, or initiating unauthorized transactions. Evaluating agent security is inherently challenging, as agents operate in dynamic, untrusted environments involving external tools, heterogeneous data sources, and frequent user interactions. However, realistic, controllable, and reproducible environments for large-scale risk assessment remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the DecodingTrust-Agent Platform (DTap), the first controllable and interactive red-teaming platform for AI agents, spanning 14 real-world domains and over 50 simulation environments that replicate widely used systems such as Google Workspace, Paypal, and Slack. To scale the risk assessment of agents in DTap, we further propose DTap-Red, the first autonomous red-teaming agent that systematically explores diverse injection vectors (e.g., prompt, tool, skill, environment, combinations) and autonomously discovers effective attack strategies tailored to varying malicious goals. Using DTap-Red, we curate DTap-Bench, a large-scale red-teaming dataset comprising high-quality instances across domains, each paired with a verifiable judge to automatically validate attack outcomes. Through DTap, we conduct large-scale evaluations of popular AI agents built on various backbone models, spanning security policies, risk categories, and attack strategies, revealing systematic vulnerability patterns and providing valuable insights for developing secure next-generation agents.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04808 Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - KernelBench-X: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Generated GPU Kernels - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04956 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04956.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Han Wang, Jintao Zhang, Kai Jiang, Haoxu Wang, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LLM-based Triton kernel generation has attracted significant interest, yet a fundamental empirical question remains unanswered: where does this capability break down, and why? We present KernelBench-X, a benchmark designed to answer this question through category-aware evaluation of correctness and hardware efficiency across 176 tasks in 15 categories. Our systematic comparison of five representative methods yields three main findings. First, task structure determines correctness more than method design. Category explains nearly three times more variance in semantic correctness than method (9.4% vs 3.3% explained deviance), and 72% of Fusion tasks fail across all five methods while Math tasks are solved consistently. Second, iterative refinement improves correctness, but not performance. Across GEAK iterations, compile rate rises from 52.3% to 68.8% while average speedup declines from 1.58times to 1.44times; newly rescued kernels consistently underperform persistently correct ones (1.16times vs 1.58times speedup in round~0to1). Third, correctness does not imply efficiency. 46.6% of correct kernels are slower than the PyTorch eager baseline, and cross-hardware speedup variance reaches 21.4times. Besides, quantization remains completely unsolved (0/30 successes) despite non-trivial compilation rates, revealing systematic misunderstanding of numerical computation contracts rather than surface-level syntax errors. These findings suggest that future progress depends on handling global coordination, explicitly modeling numerical precision, and incorporating hardware efficiency into generation. The code is available at https://github.com/BonnieW05/KernelBenchX</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04956 + Beyond Retrieval: A Multitask Benchmark and Model for Code Search + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04615 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04615.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siqiao Xue, Zihan Liao, Jin Qin, Ziyin Zhang, Yixiang Mu, Fan Zhou, Hang Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Code search has usually been evaluated as first-stage retrieval, even though production systems rely on broader pipelines with reranking and developer-style queries. Existing benchmarks also suffer from data contamination, label noise, and degenerate binary relevance. In this paper, we introduce CoREB, a contamination-limited, multitask code retrieval and reranking benchmark, together with a fine-tuned code reranker, that goes beyond retrieval to cover the full code search pipeline. CoREB is built from counterfactually rewritten LiveCodeBench problems in five programming languages and delivered as timed releases with graded relevance judgments. We benchmark eleven embedding models and five rerankers across three tasks: text-to-code, code-to-text, and code-to-code. Our experiments reveal that: \circone code-specialised embeddings dominate code-to-code retrieval ({sim}2{times} over general encoders), yet no single model wins all three tasks; \circtwo short keyword queries, the format closest to real developer search, collapse every model to near-zero nDCG@10; \circthree off-the-shelf rerankers are task-asymmetric, with a 12-point swing on code-to-code and no baseline net-positive across all tasks; \circfour our fine-tuned CoREB-Reranker is the first to achieve consistent gains across all three tasks. The data and model are released.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04615 Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - RemoteZero: Geospatial Reasoning with Zero Human Annotations - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04451 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04451.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Liang Yao, Fan Liu, Shengxiang Xu, Chuanyi Zhang, Rui Min, Shimin Di, Yuhui Zheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Geospatial reasoning requires models to resolve complex spatial semantics and user intent into precise target locations for Earth observation. Recent progress has liberated the reasoning path from manual curation, allowing models to generate their own inference chains. Yet a final dependency remains: they are still supervised by human-annotated ground-truth coordinates. This leaves the reasoning process autonomous, but not its spatial endpoint, and prevents true self-evolution on abundant unlabeled remote sensing data. To break this bottleneck, we introduce RemoteZero, a box-supervision-free framework for geospatial reasoning. RemoteZero is motivated by a simple asymmetry: an MLLM is typically better at verifying whether a region satisfies a query than at directly generating precise coordinates. Leveraging this stronger discriminative ability, RemoteZero replaces geometric supervision with intrinsic semantic verification and enables GRPO training without box annotations. The resulting framework further supports iterative self-evolution, allowing the model to improve from unlabeled remote sensing imagery through its own verification signal. Experiments show that RemoteZero achieves competitive performance against strong supervised methods, demonstrating the potential of self-verifying training for geospatial reasoning localization.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04451 - Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - TabEmbed: Benchmarking and Learning Generalist Embeddings for Tabular Understanding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04962 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04962.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Minjie Qiang, Mingming Zhang, Xiaoyi Bao, Xing Fu, Yu Cheng, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongqing Wang, Ningtao Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Foundation models have established unified representations for natural language processing, yet this paradigm remains largely unexplored for tabular data. Existing methods face fundamental limitations: LLM-based approaches lack retrieval-compatible vector outputs, whereas text embedding models often fail to capture tabular structure and numerical semantics. To bridge this gap, we first introduce the Tabular Embedding Benchmark (TabBench), a comprehensive suite designed to evaluate the tabular understanding capability of embedding models. We then propose TabEmbed, the first generalist embedding model that unifies tabular classification and retrieval within a shared embedding space. By reformulating diverse tabular tasks as semantic matching problems, TabEmbed leverages large-scale contrastive learning with positive-aware hard negative mining to discern fine-grained structural and numerical nuances. Experimental results on TabBench demonstrate that TabEmbed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models, establishing a new baseline for universal tabular representation learning. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed and https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiangminjie27/TabBench.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04962 - Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - ReflectDrive-2: Reinforcement-Learning-Aligned Self-Editing for Discrete Diffusion Driving - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04647 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04647.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Huimin Wang, Yue Wang, Bihao Cui, Pengxiang Li, Ben Lu, Mingqian Wang, Tong Wang, Chuan Tang, Teng Zhang, Kun Zhan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce ReflectDrive-2, a masked discrete diffusion planner with separate action expert for autonomous driving that represents plans as discrete trajectory tokens and generates them through parallel masked decoding. This discrete token space enables in-place trajectory revision: AutoEdit rewrites selected tokens using the same model, without requiring an auxiliary refinement network. To train this capability, we use a two-stage procedure. First, we construct structure-aware perturbations of expert trajectories along longitudinal progress and lateral heading directions and supervise the model to recover the original expert trajectory. We then fine-tune the full decision--draft--reflect rollout with reinforcement learning (RL), assigning terminal driving reward to the final post-edit trajectory and propagating policy-gradient credit through full-rollout transitions. Full-rollout RL proves crucial for coupling drafting and editing: under supervised training alone, inference-time AutoEdit improves PDMS by at most 0.3, whereas RL increases its gain to 1.9. We also co-design an efficient reflective decoding stack for the decision--draft--reflect pipeline, combining shared-prefix KV reuse, Alternating Step Decode, and fused on-device unmasking. On NAVSIM, ReflectDrive-2 achieves 91.0 PDMS with camera-only input and 94.8 PDMS in a best-of-6 oracle setting, while running at 31.8 ms average latency on NVIDIA Thor.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04647 - Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - RaguTeam at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Meno and Friends in a Judge-Orchestrated LLM Ensemble for Faithful Multi-Turn Response Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04523 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.04523.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ivan Bondarenko, Roman Derunets, Oleg Sedukhin, Mikhail Komarov, Ivan Chernov, Mikhail Kulakov</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 39</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We present our winning system for Task~B (generation with reference passages) in SemEval-2026 Task~8: MTRAGEval. Our method is a heterogeneous ensemble of seven LLMs with two prompting variants, where a GPT-4o-mini judge selects the best candidate per instance. We ranked 1st out of 26 teams, achieving a conditioned harmonic mean of 0.7827 and outperforming the strongest baseline (gpt-oss-120b, 0.6390). Ablations show that diversity in model families, scales, and prompting strategies is essential, with the ensemble consistently beating any single model. We also introduce Meno-Lite-0.1, a 7B domain-adapted model with a strong cost--performance trade-off, and analyse MTRAGEval, highlighting annotation limitations and directions for improvement. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/RaguTeam/ragu_mtrag_semeval</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04523 - Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - - - Sparkle: Realizing Lively Instruction-Guided Video Background Replacement via Decoupled Guidance - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06535 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06535.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ziyun Zeng, Yiqi Lin, Guoqiang Liang, Mike Zheng Shou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> In recent years, open-source efforts like Senorita-2M have propelled video editing toward natural language instruction. However, current publicly available datasets predominantly focus on local editing or style transfer, which largely preserve the original scene structure and are easier to scale. In contrast, Background Replacement, a task central to creative applications such as film production and advertising, requires synthesizing entirely new, temporally consistent scenes while maintaining accurate foreground-background interactions, making large-scale data generation significantly more challenging. Consequently, this complex task remains largely underexplored due to a scarcity of high-quality training data. This gap is evident in poorly performing state-of-the-art models, e.g., Kiwi-Edit, because the primary open-source dataset that contains this task, i.e., OpenVE-3M, frequently produces static, unnatural backgrounds. In this paper, we trace this quality degradation to a lack of precise background guidance during data synthesis. Accordingly, we design a scalable pipeline that generates foreground and background guidance in a decoupled manner with strict quality filtering. Building on this pipeline, we introduce Sparkle, a dataset of ~140K video pairs spanning five common background-change themes, alongside Sparkle-Bench, the largest evaluation benchmark tailored for background replacement to date. Experiments demonstrate that our dataset and the model trained on it achieve substantially better performance than all existing baselines on both OpenVE-Bench and Sparkle-Bench. Our proposed dataset, benchmark, and model are fully open-sourced at https://showlab.github.io/Sparkle/.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06535 + CPCANet: Deep Unfolding Common Principal Component Analysis for Domain Generalization + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05136 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05136.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yu-Hsi Chen, Abd-Krim Seghouane</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Domain Generalization (DG) aims to learn representations that remain robust under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts and generalize effectively to unseen target domains. While recent invariant learning strategies and architectural advances have achieved strong performance, explicitly discovering a structured domain-invariant subspace through second-order statistics remains underexplored. In this work, we propose CPCANet, a novel framework grounded in Common Principal Component Analysis (CPCA), which unrolls the iterative Flury-Gautschi (FG) algorithm into fully differentiable neural layers. This approach integrates the statistical properties of CPCA into an end-to-end trainable framework, enforcing the discovery of a shared subspace across diverse domains while preserving interpretability. Experiments on four standard DG benchmarks demonstrate that CPCANet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot transfer. Moreover, CPCANet is architecture-agnostic and requires no dataset-specific tuning, providing a simple and efficient approach to learning robust representations under distribution shift. Code is available at https://github.com/wish44165/CPCANet.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05136 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - When No Benchmark Exists: Validating Comparative LLM Safety Scoring Without Ground-Truth Labels - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06652 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06652.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sushant Gautam, Finn Schwall, Annika Willoch Olstad, Fernando Vallecillos Ruiz, Birk Torpmann-Hagen, Sunniva Maria Stordal Bjørklund, Leon Moonen, Klas Pettersen, Michael A. Riegler</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Many deployments must compare candidate language models for safety before a labeled benchmark exists for the relevant language, sector, or regulatory regime. We formalize this setting as benchmarkless comparative safety scoring and specify the contract under which a scenario-based audit can be interpreted as deployment evidence. Scores are valid only under a fixed scenario pack, rubric, auditor, judge, sampling configuration, and rerun budget. Because no labels are available, we replace ground-truth agreement with an instrumental-validity chain: responsiveness to a controlled safe-versus-abliterated contrast, dominance of target-driven variance over auditor and judge artifacts, and stability across reruns. We instantiate the chain in SimpleAudit, a local-first scoring instrument, and validate it on a Norwegian safety pack. Safe and abliterated targets separate with AUROC values between 0.89 and 1.00, target identity is the dominant variance component (η^2 approx 0.52), and severity profiles stabilize by ten reruns. Applying the same chain to Petri shows that it admits both tools. The substantial differences arise upstream of the chain, in claim-contract enforcement and deployment fit. A Norwegian public-sector procurement case comparing Borealis and Gemma 3 demonstrates the resulting evidence in practice: the safer model depends on scenario category and risk measure. Consequently, scores, matched deltas, critical rates, uncertainty, and the auditor and judge used must be reported together rather than collapsed into a single ranking.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06652 + Shallow Prefill, Deep Decoding: Efficient Long-Context Inference via Layer-Asymmetric KV Visibility + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06105 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06105.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jungsuk Oh, Hyeseo Jeon, Hyunjune Ji, Kyongmin Kong, Jay-Yoon Lee</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Long-context inference in decoder-only language models is costly because long prompts are processed during Prefill, cached at every layer, and repeatedly attended to during autoregressive Decode. We introduce Shallow Prefill, dEEp Decode (SPEED), a phase-asymmetric KV-visibility policy that materializes non-anchor prompt-token KV states only in lower layers while keeping Decode-phase tokens full-depth. Unlike previous approaches that make upper-layer prompt KV states cheaper to store or construct, SPEED removes prefill tokens from the upper-layer Decode visibility set altogether. With a minimal BoS anchor, this simple change preserves broad benchmark quality while reducing long-context cost. In a controlled Llama-3.1-8B instruction-tuning study, SPEED using only 75\% of layers for prefill tokens reaches 51.2 average score on OLMES-style benchmarks, compared with 51.4 for the full-depth baseline, while improving TTFT by 33\%, TPOT by 22\%, and reducing active KV memory by 25.0\% at 128K context. Layer-wise diagnostics suggest that this cutoff retains the main prompt-selection and representation-stabilization regions of the full-depth model. These results show that long-context prompt tokens need not always persist as full-depth KV-cache objects when Decode-phase tokens remain full-depth.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06105 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - GeoStack: A Framework for Quasi-Abelian Knowledge Composition in VLMs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06477 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06477.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pranav Mantini, Shishir K. Shah</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We address the challenge of knowledge composition in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), where accumulating expertise across multiple domains or tasks typically leads to catastrophic forgetting. We introduce GeoStack (Geometric Stacking), a modular framework that allows independently trained domain experts to be composed into a unified model. By imposing geometric and structural constraints on the adapter manifold, GeoStack ensures the foundational knowledge of the base model is preserved. Furthermore, we mathematically demonstrate a weight-folding property that achieves constant-time inference complexity (O(1)), regardless of the number of integrated experts. Experimental results across multi-domain adaptation and class-incremental learning show that GeoStack provides an efficient mechanism for long-term knowledge composition while significantly mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Code is available at https://github.com/QuantitativeImagingLaboratory/GeoStack.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06477 + PACEvolve++: Improving Test-time Learning for Evolutionary Search Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07039 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07039.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman, Ziqi Chen, Zhouhang Xie, Shuo Chen, Zhankui He, Noveen Sachdeva, Weili Wang, Ed H. Chi, Shivaram Venkataraman, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Beidou Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models have become drivers of evolutionary search, but most systems rely on a fixed, prompt-elicited policy to sample next candidates. This limits adaptation in practical engineering and research tasks, where evaluations are expensive, and progress depends on learning task-specific search dynamics. We introduce PACEvolve++, an advisor-model reinforcement learning framework for test-time policy adaptation in evolutionary search agents. PACEvolve++ decouples strategic search decisions from implementation: a trainable advisor generates, assesses, and selects hypotheses, while a stronger frontier model translates selected hypotheses into executable candidates. To train the advisor under non-stationary feedback, we propose a phase-adaptive approach that adapts its optimization strategy to different phases of the evolutionary process. Early in evolution, it uses group-relative feedback to learn broad search preferences; later, as reward gaps compress, it emphasizes best-of-k frontier contribution to support stable refinement. Across expert-parallel load balancing, sequential recommendation, and protein fitness extrapolation, PACEvolve++ outperforms the state-of-the-art evolutionary search framework with frontier models, achieving faster convergence and stabilizing test-time training during evolutionary search.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07039 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Think, then Score: Decoupled Reasoning and Scoring for Video Reward Modeling - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05922 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05922.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuan Wang, Ouxiang Li, Yulong Xu, Borui Liao, Jiajun Liang, Jinghan Li, Meng Wang, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wang, Kuien Liu, Xiang Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent advances in generative video models are increasingly driven by post-training and test-time scaling, both of which critically depend on the quality of video reward models (RMs). An ideal reward model should predict accurate rewards that align with human preferences across diverse scenarios. However, existing paradigms face a fundamental dilemma: Discriminative RMs regress rewards directly on features extracted by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) without explicit reasoning, making them prone to shortcut learning and heavily reliant on massive data scaling for generalization. In contrast, Generative RMs with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning exhibit superior interpretability and generalization potential, as they leverage fine-grained semantic supervision to internalize the rationales behind human preferences. However, they suffer from inherent optimization bottlenecks due to the coupling of reasoning and scoring within a single autoregressive inference chain. To harness the generalization benefits of CoT reasoning while mitigating the training instability of coupled reasoning and scoring, we introduce DeScore, a training-efficient and generalizable video reward model. DeScore employs a decoupled ``think-then-score'' paradigm: an MLLM first generates an explicit CoT, followed by a dedicated discriminative scoring module consisting of a learnable query token and a regression head that predicts the final reward. DeScore is optimized via a two-stage framework: (1) a discriminative cold start incorporating a random mask mechanism to ensure robust scoring capabilities, and (2) a dual-objective reinforcement learning stage that independently refines CoT reasoning quality and calibrates the final reward, ensuring that higher-quality reasoning directly translates to superior model performance.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05922 + Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06734 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06734.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kuo-Chung Peng, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Jiun-Cheng Jiang, Chen-Yu Liu, En-Jui Kuo, Yun-Yuan Wang, Prayag Tiwari, Andrea Ceschini, Chi-Sheng Chen, Yu-Chao Hsu, Chun-Hua Lin, Tai-Yue Li, Antonello Rosato, Massimo Panella, Simon See, Saif Al-Kuwari, Kuan-Cheng Chen, Nan-Yow Chen, Hsi-Sheng Goan</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06734 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Are We Making Progress in Multimodal Domain Generalization? A Comprehensive Benchmark Study - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06643 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06643.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Dong, Hongzhao Li, Shupan Li, Muhammad Haris Khan, Eleni Chatzi, Olga Fink</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Despite the growing popularity of Multimodal Domain Generalization (MMDG) for enhancing model robustness, it remains unclear whether reported performance gains reflect genuine algorithmic progress or are artifacts of inconsistent evaluation protocols. Current research is fragmented, with studies varying significantly across datasets, modality configurations, and experimental settings. Furthermore, existing benchmarks focus predominantly on action recognition, often neglecting critical real-world challenges such as input corruptions, missing modalities, and model trustworthiness. This lack of standardization obscures a reliable assessment of the field's advancement. To address this issue, we introduce MMDG-Bench, the first unified and comprehensive benchmark for MMDG, which standardizes evaluation across six datasets spanning three diverse tasks: action recognition, mechanical fault diagnosis, and sentiment analysis. MMDG-Bench encompasses six modality combinations, nine representative methods, and multiple evaluation settings. Beyond standard accuracy, it systematically assesses corruption robustness, missing-modality generalization, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. With 7, 402 neural networks trained in total across 95 unique cross-domain tasks, MMDG-Bench yields five key findings: (1) under fair comparisons, recent specialized MMDG methods offer only marginal improvements over ERM baseline; (2) no single method consistently outperforms others across datasets or modality combinations; (3) a substantial gap to upper-bound performance persists, indicating that MMDG remains far from solved; (4) trimodal fusion does not consistently outperform the strongest bimodal configurations; and (5) all evaluated methods exhibit significant degradation under corruption and missing-modality scenarios, with some methods further compromising model trustworthiness.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06643 + PrefixGuard: From LLM-Agent Traces to Online Failure-Warning Monitors + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06455 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06455.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinmiao Huang, Jinwei Hu, Rajarshi Roy, Changshun Wu, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language model (LLM) agents now execute long, tool-using tasks where final outcome checks can arrive too late for intervention. Online warning requires lightweight prefix monitors over heterogeneous traces, but hand-authored event schemas are brittle and deployment-time LLM judging is costly. We introduce PrefixGuard, a trace-to-monitor framework with an offline StepView induction step followed by supervised monitor training. StepView induces deterministic typed-step adapters from raw trace samples, and the monitor learns an event abstraction and prefix-risk scorer from terminal outcomes. Across WebArena, τ^2-Bench, SkillsBench, and TerminalBench, the strongest PrefixGuard monitors reach 0.900/0.710/0.533/0.557 AUPRC. Using the strongest backend within each representation, they improve over raw-text controls by an average of +0.137 AUPRC. LLM judges remain substantially weaker under the same prefix-warning protocol. We also derive an observability ceiling on score-based area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) that separates monitor error from failures lacking evidence in the observed prefix. For finite-state audit, post-hoc deterministic finite automaton (DFA) extraction remains compact on WebArena and τ^2-Bench (29 and 20 states) but expands to 151 and 187 states on SkillsBench and TerminalBench. Finally, first-alert diagnostics show that strong ranking does not imply deployment utility: WebArena ranks well yet fails to support low-false-alarm alerts, whereas τ^2-Bench and TerminalBench retain more actionable early alerts. Together, these results position PrefixGuard as a practical monitor-synthesis recipe with explicit diagnostics for when prefix warnings translate into actionable interventions.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06455 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05758 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05758.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xin Gao, Ruiyi Zhang, Meixi Du, Peijia Qin, Pengtao Xie</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) on general-purpose tasks, their performance in highly specialized domains such as biomedicine remains unsatisfactory. A key limitation is the inability of LLMs to effectively leverage biomedical tools, which clinical experts and biomedical researchers rely on extensively in daily workflows. While recent general-domain tool-calling datasets have substantially improved the capabilities of LLM agents, existing efforts in the biomedical domain largely rely on in-context learning and restrict models to a small set of tools. To address this gap, we introduce BioTool, a comprehensive biomedical tool-calling dataset designed for fine-tuning LLMs. BioTool comprises 34 frequently used tools collected from the NCBI, Ensembl, and UniProt databases, along with 7,040 high-quality, human-verified query-API call pairs spanning variation, genomics, proteomics, evolution, and general biology. Fine-tuning a 4-billion-parameter LLM on BioTool yields substantial improvements in biomedical tool-calling performance, outperforming cutting-edge commercial LLMs such as GPT-5.1. Furthermore, human expert evaluations demonstrate that integrating a BioTool-fine-tuned tool caller significantly improves downstream answer quality compared to the same LLM without tool usage, highlighting the effectiveness of BioTool in enhancing the biomedical capabilities of LLMs. The full dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/gxx27/BioTool</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05758 + Rethinking RL for LLM Reasoning: It's Sparse Policy Selection, Not Capability Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06241 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06241.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ömer Faruk Akgül, Rajgopal Kannan, Willie Neiswanger, Viktor Prasanna</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model already contains. In this work, we ask: if RL merely steers the model toward paths it already knows, is the RL optimization loop itself necessary? Through token-level analysis across multiple model families and RL algorithms, we find that RL's beneficial footprint is a sparse, predictable correction concentrated at high-entropy decision points where the model is uncertain which branch to take. Only 1--3\% of token positions are affected, the promoted token always lies within the base model's top-5 alternatives, and targeted corrections at those few positions causally recover a large fraction of RL's accuracy gain, while random corrections fail. The base model's own entropy identifies these positions without any RL-trained model, and the entire correction is low-dimensional, representable in a tiny fraction of model parameters. These findings reframe reasoning improvement as sparse policy selection, not capability acquisition. We translate this insight into ReasonMaxxer, a minimal RL-free method that applies contrastive loss only at entropy-gated decision points, using a few hundred base-model rollouts and no online generation. Across three model families, six scales, and six math reasoning benchmarks, ReasonMaxxer matches or exceeds full RL performance while requiring only tens of problems and minutes of single-GPU training, a reduction in training cost of roughly three orders of magnitude.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06241 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - PianoCoRe: Combined and Refined Piano MIDI Dataset - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06627 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06627.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ilya Borovik</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Symbolic music datasets with matched scores and performances are essential for many music information retrieval (MIR) tasks. Yet, existing resources often cover a narrow range of composers, lack performance variety, omit note-level alignments, or use inconsistent naming formats. This work presents PianoCoRe, a large-scale piano MIDI dataset that unifies and refines major open-source piano corpora. The dataset contains 250,046 performances of 5,625 pieces written by 483 composers, totaling 21,763 h of performed music. PianoCoRe is released in tiered subsets to support different applications: from large-scale analysis and pre-training (PianoCoRe-C and deduplicated PianoCoRe-B) to expressive performance modeling with note-level score alignment (PianoCoRe-A/A*). The note-aligned subset, PianoCoRe-A, provides the largest open-source collection of 157,207 performances aligned to 1,591 scores to date. In addition to the dataset, the contributions are: (1) a MIDI quality classifier for detecting corrupted and score-like transcriptions and (2) RAScoP, an alignment refinement pipeline that cleans temporal alignment errors and interpolates missing notes. The analysis shows that the refinement reduces temporal noise and eliminates tempo outliers. Moreover, an expressive performance rendering model trained on PianoCoRe demonstrates improved robustness to unseen pieces compared to models trained on raw or smaller datasets. PianoCoRe provides a ready-to-use foundation for the next generation of expressive piano performance research.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06627 + Empirical Evidence for Simply Connected Decision Regions in Image Classifiers + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06380 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06380.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Arjhun Swaminathan, Mete Akgün</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Understanding the topology of decision regions is central to explaining the inner workings of deep neural networks. Prior empirical work has provided evidence that these regions are path connected. We study a stronger topological question: whether closed loops inside a decision region can be contracted without leaving that region. To this end, we propose an iterative quad-mesh filling procedure that constructs a finite-resolution label-preserving surface bounded by a given loop and lying entirely within the same decision region. We further connect this construction to natural Coons patches in order to quantify its deviation from a canonical geometric interpolation of the loop. By evaluating our method across several modern image-classification models, we provide empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that decision regions in deep neural networks are not only path connected, but also simply connected.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06380 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - The Granularity Axis: A Micro-to-Macro Latent Direction for Social Roles in Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06196 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06196.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Chonghan Qin, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song, Xiaocheng Feng, Jing Xiong, Lingpeng Kong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are routinely prompted to take on social roles ranging from individuals to institutions, yet it remains unclear whether their internal representations encode the granularity of such roles, from micro-level individual experience to macro-level organizational, institutional, or national reasoning. We show that they do. We define a contrast-based Granularity Axis as the difference between mean macro- and micro-role hidden states. In Qwen3-8B, this axis aligns with the principal axis (PC1) of the role representation space at cosine 0.972 and accounts for 52.6% of its variance, indicating that granularity is the dominant geometric axis organizing prompted social roles. We construct 75 social roles across five granularity levels and collect 91,200 role-conditioned responses over shared questions and prompt variants, then extract role-level hidden states and project them onto the axis. Role projections increase monotonically across all five levels, remain stable across layers, prompt variants, endpoint definitions, held-out splits, and score-filtered subsets, and transfer to Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. The axis is also causally relevant: activation steering along it shifts response granularity in the predicted direction, with Llama moving from 2.00 to 3.17 on a five-point macro scale under positive steering on prompts that admit local responses. The two models differ in controllability, suggesting that steering depends on each model's default operating regime. Overall, our findings suggest that social role granularity is not merely a stylistic surface feature, but a structured, ordered, and causally manipulable latent direction in role-conditioned language model behavior.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06196 + Steering Visual Generation in Unified Multimodal Models with Understanding Supervision + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05781 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05781.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zeyu Liu, Zanlin Ni, Yang Yue, Cheng Da, Huan Yang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Gao Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Unified multimodal models are envisioned to bridge the gap between understanding and generation. Yet, to achieve competitive performance, state-of-the-art models adopt largely decoupled understanding and generation components. This design, while effective for individual tasks, weakens the connection required for mutual enhancement, leaving the potential synergy empirically uncertain. We propose to explicitly restore this synergy by introducing Understanding-Oriented Post-Training (UNO), a lightweight framework that treats understanding not only as a distinct task, but also a direct supervisory signal to steer generative representations. By incorporating objectives that encode semantic abstraction (captioning) and structural details (visual regression), we enable effective gradient flow from understanding to generation. Extensive experiments on image generation and editing demonstrate that understanding can serve as an effective catalyst for generation.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05781 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - SwiftI2V: Efficient High-Resolution Image-to-Video Generation via Conditional Segment-wise Generation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06356 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06356.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> YaoYang Liu, Yuechen Zhang, Wenbo Li, Yufei Zhao, Rui Liu, Long Chen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> High-resolution image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize realistic temporal dynamics while preserving fine-grained appearance details of the input image. At 2K resolution, it becomes extremely challenging, and existing solutions suffer from various weaknesses: 1) end-to-end models are often prohibitively expensive in memory and latency; 2) cascading low-resolution generation with a generic video super-resolution tends to hallucinate details and drift from input-specific local structures, since the super-resolution stage is not explicitly conditioned on the input image. To this end, we propose SwiftI2V, an efficient framework tailored for high-resolution I2V. Following the widely used two-stage design, it addresses the efficiency--fidelity dilemma by first generating a low-resolution motion reference to reduce token costs and ease the modeling burden, then performing a strongly image-conditioned 2K synthesis guided by the motion to recover input-faithful details with controlled overhead. Specifically, to make generation more scalable, SwiftI2V introduces Conditional Segment-wise Generation (CSG) to synthesize videos segment-by-segment with a bounded per-step token budget, and adopts bidirectional contextual interaction within each segment to improve cross-segment coherence and input fidelity. On VBench-I2V at 2K resolution, SwiftI2V achieves performance comparable to end-to-end baselines while reducing total GPU-time by 202x. Particularly, it enables practical 2K I2V generation on a single datacenter GPU (e.g., H800) or consumer GPU (e.g., RTX 4090).</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06356 + MDN: Parallelizing Stepwise Momentum for Delta Linear Attention + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05838 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05838.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yulong Huang, Xiang Liu, Hongxiang Huang, Xiaopeng Lin, Zunchang Liu, Xiaowen Chu, Zeke Xie, Bojun Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Linear Attention (LA) offers a promising paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) to long sequences by avoiding the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Recent LA models such as Mamba2 and GDN interpret linear recurrences as closed-form online stochastic gradient descent (SGD), but naive SGD updates suffer from rapid information decay and suboptimal convergence in optimization. While momentum-based optimizers provide a natural remedy, they pose challenges in simultaneously achieving training efficiency and effectiveness. To address this, we develop a chunkwise parallel algorithm for LA with a stepwise momentum rule by geometrically reordering the update coefficients. Further, from a dynamical systems perspective, we analyze the momentum-based recurrence as a second-order system that introduces complex conjugate eigenvalues. This analysis guides the design of stable gating constraints. The resulting model, Momentum DeltaNet (MDN), leverages Triton kernels to achieve comparable training throughput with competitive linear models such as Mamba2 and KDA. Extensive experiments on the 400M and 1.3B parameter models demonstrate consistent performance improvements over strong baselines, including Transformers, Mamba2 and GDN, across diverse downstream evaluation benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/HuuYuLong/MomentumDeltaNet .</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05838 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - TIDE: Every Layer Knows the Token Beneath the Context - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06216 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06216.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ajay Jaiswal, Lauren Hannah, Han-Byul Kim, Duc Hoang, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Minsik Cho</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We revisit a universally accepted but under-examined design choice in every modern LLM: a token index is looked up once at the input embedding layer and then permanently discarded. This single-injection assumption induces two structural failures: (i) the Rare Token Problem, where a Zipf-type distribution of vocabulary causes rare-token embeddings are chronically under-trained due to receiving a fraction of the cumulative gradient signal compared to common tokens; and (ii) the Contextual Collapse Problem, where limited parameters models map distributionally similar tokens to indistinguishable hidden states. As an attempt to address both, we propose TIDE, which augments the standard transformer with EmbeddingMemory: an ensemble of K independent MemoryBlocks that map token indices to context-free semantic vectors, computed once and injected into every layer through a depth-conditioned softmax router with a learnable null bank. We theoretically and empirically establish the benefits of TIDE in addressing the issues associated with single-token identity injection as well as improve performance across multiple language modeling and downstream tasks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06216 + LiVeAction: a Lightweight, Versatile, and Asymmetric Neural Codec Design for Real-time Operation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06628 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06628.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Dan Jacobellis, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 4</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern sensors generate rich, high-fidelity data, yet applications operating on wearable or remote sensing devices remain constrained by bandwidth and power budgets. Standardized codecs such as JPEG and MPEG achieve efficient trade-offs between bitrate and perceptual quality but are designed for human perception, limiting their applicability to machine-perception tasks and non-traditional modalities such as spatial audio arrays, hyperspectral images, and 3D medical images. General-purpose compression schemes based on scalar quantization or resolution reduction are broadly applicable but fail to exploit inherent signal redundancies, resulting in suboptimal rate-distortion performance. Recent generative neural codecs, or tokenizers, model complex signal dependencies but are often over-parameterized, data-hungry, and modality-specific, making them impractical for resource-constrained environments. We introduce a Lightweight, Versatile, and Asymmetric neural codec architecture (LiVeAction), that addresses these limitations through two key ideas. (1) To reduce the complexity of the encoder to meet the resource constraints of the execution environments, we impose an FFT-like structure and reduce the overall size and depth of the neural-network-based analysis transform. (2) To allow arbitrary signal modalities and simplify training, we replace adversarial and perceptual losses with a variance-based rate penalty. Our design produces codecs that deliver superior rate-distortion performance compared to state-of-the-art generative tokenizers, while remaining practical for deployment on low-power sensors. We release our code, experiments, and python library at https://github.com/UT-SysML/liveaction .</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06628 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - EMO: Pretraining Mixture of Experts for Emergent Modularity - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06663 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06663.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ryan Wang, Akshita Bhagia, Sewon Min</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models are typically deployed as monolithic systems, requiring the full model even when applications need only a narrow subset of capabilities, e.g., code, math, or domain-specific knowledge. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) seemingly offer a potential alternative by activating only a subset of experts per input, but in practice, restricting inference to a subset of experts for a given domain leads to severe performance degradation. This limits their practicality in memory-constrained settings, especially as models grow larger and sparser. We introduce EMO, an MoE designed for modularity-the independent use and composition of expert subsets-without requiring human-defined priors. Our key idea is to encourage tokens from similar domains to rely on similar experts. Since tokens within a document often share a domain, EMO restricts them to select experts from a shared pool, while allowing different documents to use different pools. This simple constraint enables coherent expert groupings to emerge during pretraining using document boundaries alone. We pretrain a 1B-active, 14B-total EMO on 1T tokens. As a full model, it matches standard MoE performance. Crucially, it enables selective expert use: retaining only 25% (12.5%) of experts incurs just a 1% (3%) absolute drop, whereas standard MoEs break under the same setting. We further find that expert subsets in EMO specialize at semantic levels (e.g., domains such as math or code), in contrast to the low-level syntactic specialization observed in standard MoEs. Altogether, our results demonstrate a path toward modular, memory-efficient deployment of large, sparse models and open new opportunities for composable architectures.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06663 + From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06716 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06716.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jinghao Luo, Yuchen Tian, Chuxue Cao, Ziyang Luo, Hongzhan Lin, Kaixin Li, Chuyi Kong, Ruichao Yang, Jing Ma</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence by integrating external tools and planning capabilities. While memory mechanisms have emerged as the architectural cornerstone of these systems, current research remains fragmented, oscillating between operating system engineering and cognitive science. This theoretical divide prevents a unified view of technological synthesis and a coherent evolutionary perspective. To bridge this gap, this survey proposes a novel evolutionary framework for LLM agent memory mechanisms, formalizing the development process into three stages: Storage (trajectory preservation), Reflection (trajectory refinement), and Experience (trajectory abstraction). We first formally define these three stages before analyzing the three core drivers of this evolution: the necessity for long-range consistency, the challenges in dynamic environments, and the ultimate goal of continual learning. Furthermore, we specifically explore two transformative mechanisms in the frontier Experience stage: proactive exploration and cross-trajectory abstraction. By synthesizing these disparate views, this work offers robust design principles and a clear roadmap for the development of next-generation LLM agents.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06716 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - UniPool: A Globally Shared Expert Pool for Mixture-of-Experts - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06665 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06665.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Minbin Huang, Han Shi, Chuanyang Zheng, Yimeng Wu, Guoxuan Chen, Xintong Yu, Yichun Yin, Hong Cheng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Modern Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures allocate expert capacity through a rigid per-layer rule: each transformer layer owns a separate expert set. This convention couples depth scaling with linear expert-parameter growth and assumes that every layer needs isolated expert capacity. However, recent analyses and our routing probe challenge this allocation rule: replacing a deeper layer's learned top-k router with uniform random routing drops downstream accuracy by only 1.0-1.6 points across multiple production MoE models. Motivated by this redundancy, we propose UniPool, an MoE architecture that treats expert capacity as a global architectural budget by replacing per-layer expert ownership with a single shared pool accessed by independent per-layer routers. To enable stable and balanced training under sharing, we introduce a pool-level auxiliary loss that balances expert utilization across the entire pool, and adopt NormRouter to provide sparse and scale-stable routing into the shared expert pool. Across five LLaMA-architecture model scales (182M, 469M, 650M, 830M, and 978M parameters) trained on 30B tokens from the Pile, UniPool consistently improves validation loss and perplexity over the matched vanilla MoE baselines. Across these scales, UniPool reduces validation loss by up to 0.0386 relative to vanilla MoE. Beyond raw loss improvement, our results identify pool size as an explicit depth-scaling hyperparameter: reduced-pool UniPool variants using only 41.6%-66.7% of the vanilla expert-parameter budget match or outperform layer-wise MoE at the tested scales. This shows that, under a shared-pool design, expert parameters need not grow linearly with depth; they can grow sublinearly while remaining more efficient and effective than vanilla MoE. Further analysis shows that UniPool's benefits compose with finer-grained expert decomposition.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06665 + IntentGrasp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Intent Understanding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06832 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06832.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuwei Yin, Chuyuan Li, Giuseppe Carenini</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 6</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Accurately understanding the intent behind speech, conversation, and writing is crucial to the development of helpful Large Language Model (LLM) assistants. This paper introduces IntentGrasp, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the intent understanding capability of LLMs. Derived from 49 high-quality, open-licensed corpora spanning 12 diverse domains, IntentGrasp is constructed through source datasets curation, intent label contextualization, and task format unification. IntentGrasp contains a large-scale training set of 262,759 instances and two evaluation sets: an All Set of 12,909 test cases and a more balanced and challenging Gem Set of 470 cases. Extensive evaluations on 20 LLMs across 7 families (including frontier models such as GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.1-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.7) demonstrate unsatisfactory performance, with scores below 60% on All Set and below 25% on Gem set. Notably, 17 out of 20 tested models perform worse than a random-guess baseline (15.2%) on Gem Set, while the estimated human performance is ~81.1%, showing substantial room for improvement. To enhance such ability, this paper proposes Intentional Fine-Tuning (IFT), which fine-tunes the models on the training set in IntentGrasp, yielding significant gains of 30+ F1 points on All Set and 20+ points on Gem Set. Tellingly, the leave-one-domain-out (Lodo) experiments further demonstrate the strong cross-domain generalizability of IFT, verifying that it is a promising approach to substantially enhancing the intent understanding of LLMs. Overall, by benchmarking and boosting intent understanding ability, this study sheds light on a promising path towards more intentional, capable, and safe AI assistants for human benefits and social good.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06832 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - AI Co-Mathematician: Accelerating Mathematicians with Agentic AI - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06651 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06651.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Daniel Zheng, Ingrid von Glehn, Yori Zwols, Iuliya Beloshapka, Lars Buesing, Daniel M. Roy, Martin Wattenberg, Bogdan Georgiev, Tatiana Schmidt, Andrew Cowie, Fernanda Viegas, Dimitri Kanevsky, Vineet Kahlon, Hartmut Maennel, Sophia Alj, George Holland, Alex Davies, Pushmeet Kohli</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We introduce the AI co-mathematician, a workbench for mathematicians to interactively leverage AI agents to pursue open-ended research. The AI co-mathematician is optimized to provide holistic support for the exploratory and iterative reality of mathematical workflows, including ideation, literature search, computational exploration, theorem proving and theory building. By providing an asynchronous, stateful workspace that manages uncertainty, refines user intent, tracks failed hypotheses, and outputs native mathematical artifacts, the system mirrors human collaborative workflows. In early tests, the AI co-mathematician helped researchers solve open problems, identify new research directions, and uncover overlooked literature references. Besides demonstrating a highly interactive paradigm for AI-assisted mathematical discovery, the AI co-mathematician also achieves state of the art results on hard problem-solving benchmarks, including scoring 48% on FrontierMath Tier 4, a new high score among all AI systems evaluated.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06651 + UniSD: Towards a Unified Self-Distillation Framework for Large Language Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06597 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06597.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yiqiao Jin, Yiyang Wang, Lucheng Fu, Yijia Xiao, Yinyi Luo, Haoxin Liu, B. Aditya Prakash, Josiah Hester, Jindong Wang, Srijan Kumar</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 10</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Self-distillation (SD) offers a promising path for adapting large language models (LLMs) without relying on stronger external teachers. However, SD in autoregressive LLMs remains challenging because self-generated trajectories are free-form, correctness is task-dependent, and plausible rationales can still provide unstable or unreliable supervision. Existing methods mainly examine isolated design choices, leaving their effectiveness, roles, and interactions unclear. In this paper, we propose UniSD, a unified framework to systematically study self-distillation. UniSD integrates complementary mechanisms that address supervision reliability, representation alignment, and training stability, including multi-teacher agreement, EMA teacher stabilization, token-level contrastive learning, feature matching, and divergence clipping. Across six benchmarks and six models from three model families, UniSD reveals when self-distillation improves over static imitation, which components drive the gains, and how these components interact across tasks. Guided by these insights, we construct UniSDfull, an integrated pipeline that combines complementary components and achieves the strongest overall performance, improving over the base model by +5.4 points and the strongest baseline by +2.8 points. Extensive evaluation highlights self-distillation as a practical and steerable approach for efficient LLM adaptation without stronger external teachers.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06597 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Can RL Teach Long-Horizon Reasoning to LLMs? Expressiveness Is Key - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06638 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06638.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianle Wang, Zhaoyang Wang, Guangchen Lan, Xinpeng Wei, Sipeng Zhang, Guanwen Qiu, Abulhair Saparov</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet the systematic study of how training scales with task difficulty has been hampered by the lack of controlled, scalable environments. We introduce ScaleLogic, a synthetic logical reasoning framework that offers independent control over two axes of difficulty: the depth of the required proof planning (i.e., the horizon) and the expressiveness of the underlying logic. Our proposed framework supports a wide range of logics: from simple implication-only logic ("if-then") towards more expressive first-order reasoning with conjunction ("and"), disjunction ("or"), negation ("not"), and universal quantification ("for all"). Using this framework, we show that the RL training compute T follows a power law with respect to reasoning depth D (T propto D^γ, R^{2} > 0.99), and that the scaling exponent γ increases monotonically with logical expressiveness, from 1.04 to 2.60. On downstream mathematics and general reasoning benchmarks, more expressive training settings yield both larger performance gains (up to +10.66 points) and more compute-efficient transfer compared to less expressive settings, demonstrating that what a model is trained on, not just how much it is trained, shapes downstream transfer. We further show that the power-law relationship holds across multiple RL methods, and curriculum-based training substantially improves scaling efficiency.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06638 + A^2RD: Agentic Autoregressive Diffusion for Long Video Consistency + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06924 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06924.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Do Xuan Long, Yale Song, Min-Yen Kan, Tomas Pfister, Long T. Le</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Synthesizing consistent and coherent long video remains a fundamental challenge. Existing methods suffer from semantic drift and narrative collapse over long horizons. We present A^2RD, an Agentic Auto-Regressive Diffusion architecture that decouples creative synthesis from consistency enforcement. A^2RD formulates long video synthesis as a closed-loop process that synthesizes and self-improves video segment-by-segment through a Retrieve--Synthesize--Refine--Update cycle. It comprises three core components: (i) Multimodal Video Memory that tracks video progression across modalities; (ii) Adaptive Segment Generation that switches among generation modes for natural progression and visual consistency; and (iii) Hierarchical Test-Time Self-Improvement that self-improves each segment at frame and video levels to prevent error propagation. We further introduce LVBench-C, a challenging benchmark with non-linear entity and environment transitions to stress-test long-horizon consistency. Across public and LVBench-C benchmarks spanning one- to ten-minute videos, A^2RD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 30% in consistency and 20% in narrative coherence. Human evaluations corroborate these gains while also highlighting notable improvements in motion and transition smoothness.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06924 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - A^2TGPO: Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06200 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06200.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Dingwei Chen, Zefang Zong, Zhipeng Ma, Leo Luo, Yang Li, Chengming Li, Peng Chen, Jie Jiang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 11</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning for agentic large language models (LLMs) typically relies on a sparse, trajectory-level outcome reward, making it difficult to evaluate the contribution of individual tool-calls within multi-turn interactions. Existing approaches to such process credit assignment either depend on separate external process reward models that introduce additional consumption, or tree-based structural rollout that merely redistributes the outcome signal while constraining trajectory diversity. A promising alternative leverages the per-turn change in the policy's predicted probability of the ground-truth, termed Information Gain (IG), as an intrinsic process signal without an external evaluator. However, prior work on leveraging IG signals within the RL training loop faces three systematic challenges: normalizing across turns that face heterogeneous positional contexts can distort the relative standing of individual turns, accumulating a variable number of terms causes advantage magnitudes to drift with trajectory depth, and a fixed clipping range governs policy updates identically for turns with vastly different IG signals. In this paper, we propose A^2TGPO (Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping), which retains IG as the intrinsic signal but re-designs how it is normalized, accumulated, and consumed: (i) turn-group normalization: normalizes IG within each (prompt, turn-index) group so that each turn is compared only against peers at the same interaction depth; (ii) variance-rescaled discounted accumulation: divides cumulative normalized IG by square root of accumulated terms to keep advantage magnitudes comparable across turn positions; and (iii) adaptive turn-level clipping: modulates each turn's clipping range based on its normalized IG, widening the update region for informative turns and narrowing it for uninformative ones.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06200 + 4DThinker: Thinking with 4D Imagery for Dynamic Spatial Understanding + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05997 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05997.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhangquan Chen, Manyuan Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Xiang An, Bo Li, Xin Xie, ZiDong Wang, Mingze Sun, Shuang Chen, Hongyu Li, Xiaobin Hu, Ruqi Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Dynamic spatial reasoning from monocular video is essential for bridging visual intelligence and the physical world, yet remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs). Prior approaches either verbalize spatial-temporal reasoning entirely as text, which is inherently verbose and imprecise for complex dynamics, or rely on external geometric modules that increase inference complexity without fostering intrinsic model capability. In this paper, we present 4DThinker, the first framework that enables VLMs to "think with 4D" through dynamic latent mental imagery, i.e., internally simulating how scenes evolve within the continuous hidden space. Specifically, we first introduce a scalable, annotation-free data generation pipeline that synthesizes 4D reasoning data from raw videos. We then propose Dynamic-Imagery Fine-Tuning (DIFT), which jointly supervises textual tokens and 4D latents to ground the model in dynamic visual semantics. Building on this, 4D Reinforcement Learning (4DRL) further tackles complex reasoning tasks via outcome-based rewards, restricting policy gradients to text tokens to ensure stable optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple dynamic spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that 4DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward 4D reasoning in VLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/4DThinker.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05997 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Auto Research with Specialist Agents Develops Effective and Non-Trivial Training Recipes - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05724 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05724.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jingjie Ning, Xiaochuan Li, Ji Zeng, Hao Kang, Chenyan Xiong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> We study auto research as a closed empirical loop driven by external measurement. Each submitted trial carries a hypothesis, an executable code edit, an evaluator-owned outcome, and feedback that shapes the next proposal. The output is not a generated paper or a single model checkpoint, but an auditable trajectory of proposals, code diffs, experiments, scores, and failure labels. We instantiate this loop with specialist agents that partition recipe surfaces and share measured lineage across trials. The central empirical finding is that lineage feedback lets agents turn evaluator outcomes, including crashes, budget overruns, size failures, and accuracy-gate misses, into later program-level recipe edits rather than one-shot suggestions. Across 1,197 headline-run trials plus 600 Parameter Golf control trials after one-time setup and launch, humans did not choose proposals, edit recipes, override scores, or repair failed trials during the search. In the three headline runs, the same submitted-trial loop reduces Parameter Golf validation bpb by 0.81%, raises NanoChat-D12 CORE by 38.7%, and reduces CIFAR-10 Airbench96 wallclock by 4.59%, with each task measured by its own external evaluator and legality checks. The trace includes a strict architecture-domain audit of 157 headline-run submissions and program rewrites such as a NanoChat attention-kernel path change. Within this scope the loop autonomously writes code, submits experiments, absorbs feedback, applies and combines known techniques inside each environment, and improves public starting recipes.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05724 + UniPrefill: Universal Long-Context Prefill Acceleration via Block-wise Dynamic Sparsification + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06221 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06221.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, they are becoming increasingly capable while simultaneously demanding ever-longer context lengths. To improve the inference efficiency of long-context processing, several novel low-complexity hybrid architectures have recently been proposed, effectively alleviating the computational burden of long-context inference. However, existing research on long-context prefill acceleration remains predominantly focused on sparse attention mechanisms, which achieve their maximum speedup only on full-attention models. When transferred to emerging architectures--such as linear/full attention hybrids or sliding window/full attention hybrids--these prefill acceleration approaches suffer significant performance degradation. Furthermore, such methods are generally incompatible with continuous batching, making them difficult to integrate into modern inference engines such as vLLM. To this end, we propose UniPrefill, a prefill acceleration framework applicable to virtually any model architecture, which directly accelerates the model's computation at the token level. We further implement UniPrefill as a continuous batching operator and extend vLLM's scheduling strategy to natively support prefill-decode co-processing and tensor parallel for UniPrefill, enabling its seamless integration into vLLM. UniPrefill achieves up to 2.1x speedup in Time-To-First-Token (TTFT), with the acceleration becoming increasingly pronounced as the number of concurrent requests grows.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06221 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - StraTA: Incentivizing Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Strategic Trajectory Abstraction - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06642 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06642.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiangyuan Xue, Yifan Zhou, Zidong Wang, Shengji Tang, Philip Torr, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Zhenfei Yin</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 18</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive agents, but optimizing them for long-horizon decision making remains difficult because current methods are largely purely reactive, which weakens both exploration and credit assignment over extended trajectories. In this work, we present Strategic Trajectory Abstraction (StraTA), a simple framework that introduces an explicit trajectory-level strategy into agentic reinforcement learning (RL). StraTA samples a compact strategy from the initial task state, conditions subsequent actions on that strategy, and trains strategy generation and action execution jointly with a hierarchical GRPO-style rollout design, further enhanced by diverse strategy rollout and critical self-judgment. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld show that StraTA consistently improves both sample efficiency and final performance over strong baselines. StraTA reaches success rates of 93.1% on ALFWorld and 84.2% on WebShop. On SciWorld, StraTA attains a 63.5% overall score, outperforming frontier closed-source models.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06642 + HumanNet: Scaling Human-centric Video Learning to One Million Hours + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06747 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06747.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yufan Deng, Daquan Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 40</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Progress in embodied intelligence increasingly depends on scalable data infrastructure. While vision and language have scaled with internet corpora, learning physical interaction remains constrained by the lack of large, diverse, and richly annotated human activity data. We present HumanNet, a one-million-hour human-centric video corpus that captures how humans interact with the physical world at scale. HumanNet spans both first-person and third-person perspectives and covers fine-grained activities, human-object interactions, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors across diverse real-world environments. Beyond raw video, the dataset provides interaction-centric annotations, including captions, motion descriptions, and hand and body-related signals, enabling motion-aware and interaction-aware learning. Beyond scale, HumanNet introduces a systematic data curation paradigm for embodied learning, where human-centric filtering, temporal structuring, viewpoint diversity, and annotation enrichment are treated as first-class design principles. This design transforms unstructured internet video into a scalable substrate for representation learning, activity understanding, motion generation, and human-to-robot transfer. We conduct a first-step validation on the value of this design through controlled vision-language-action ablation: under a fixed set of validation data, continued training from the Qwen VLM model with 1000 hours of egocentric video drawn from HumanNet surpasses the continued training with 100 hours of real-robot data from Magic Cobot, indicating that egocentric human video could be a scalable and cost-effective substitute for robot data. By building this project, we aim to explore the opportunity to scale embodied foundation models using human-centric videos, rather than relying solely on robot-specific data.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06747 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Continuous-Time Distribution Matching for Few-Step Diffusion Distillation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06376 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06376.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tao Liu, Hao Yan, Mengting Chen, Taihang Hu, Zhengrong Yue, Zihao Pan, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Bo Zheng, Yaxing Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 24</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Step distillation has become a leading technique for accelerating diffusion models, among which Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and Consistency Distillation are two representative paradigms. While consistency methods enforce self-consistency along the full PF-ODE trajectory to steer it toward the clean data manifold, vanilla DMD relies on sparse supervision at a few predefined discrete timesteps. This restricted discrete-time formulation and mode-seeking nature of the reverse KL divergence tends to exhibit visual artifacts and over-smoothed outputs, often necessitating complex auxiliary modules -- such as GANs or reward models -- to restore visual fidelity. In this work, we introduce Continuous-Time Distribution Matching (CDM), migrating the DMD framework from discrete anchoring to continuous optimization for the first time. CDM achieves this through two continuous-time designs. First, we replace the fixed discrete schedule with a dynamic continuous schedule of random length, so that distribution matching is enforced at arbitrary points along sampling trajectories rather than only at a few fixed anchors. Second, we propose a continuous-time alignment objective that performs active off-trajectory matching on latents extrapolated via the student's velocity field, improving generalization and preserving fine visual details. Extensive experiments on different architectures, including SD3-Medium and Longcat-Image, demonstrate that CDM provides highly competitive visual fidelity for few-step image generation without relying on complex auxiliary objectives. Code is available at https://github.com/byliutao/cdm.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06376 + Listwise Policy Optimization: Group-based RLVR as Target-Projection on the LLM Response Simplex + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06139 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06139.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Yixiu Mao, Heming Zou, Yuhang Jiang, Yingyue Li, Wutong Xu, Lizhou Cai, Weijie Liu, Clive Bai, Kai Yang, Yangkun Chen, Saiyong Yang, Xiangyang Ji</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 57</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for large language models (LLMs) post-training to incentivize reasoning capacity. Among existing recipes, group-based policy gradient is prevalent, which samples a group of responses per prompt and updates the policy via group-relative advantage signals. This work reveals that these optimization strategies share a common geometric structure: each implicitly defines a target distribution on the response simplex and projects toward it via first-order approximation. Building on this insight, we propose Listwise Policy Optimization (LPO) to explicitly conduct the target-projection, which demystifies the implicit target by restricting the proximal RL objective to the response simplex, and then projects the policy via exact divergence minimization. This framework provides (i) monotonic improvement on the listwise objective with bounded, zero-sum, and self-correcting projection gradients, and (ii) flexibility in divergence selection with distinct structural properties through the decoupled projection step. On diverse reasoning tasks and LLM backbones, LPO consistently improves training performance over typical policy gradient baselines under matched targets, while intrinsically preserving optimization stability and response diversity.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06139 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Nonsense Helps: Prompt Space Perturbation Broadens Reasoning Exploration - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05566 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05566.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Langlin Huang, Chengsong Huang, Jinyuan Li, Donghong Cai, Yuyi Yang, Jiaxin Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 32</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in complex tasks, GRPO frequently suffers from the ``zero-advantage problem'': when all sampled rollouts for a query fail, the relative advantage collapses to zero. Consequently, the model loses effective training signals for these questions, wasting the training data and computational budget. While simply increasing the sampling budget for these questions is a common remedy, the static sampling policy inherently constrains reasoning exploration, limiting the success rate. In this paper, we propose Lorem Perturbation for Exploration (LoPE), a simple yet effective training framework to break this exploration bottleneck. We posit that task-irrelevant prompt-space perturbations can shift the model's output distribution enough to unlock orthogonal reasoning pathways for hard questions. Specifically, LoPE prepends sequences stochastically assembled from Lorem Ipsum vocabulary (a pseudo-Latin placeholder text) to the prompts before resampling. Experiments across 1.7B, 4B, and 7B models demonstrate that LoPE significantly outperforms resampling with the original prompts. Further analysis reveals that other Latin-based random sequences with low perplexity are also effective perturbations. Our results establish LoPE as a strong baseline for broadening exploration in LLM reinforcement learning.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05566 + MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18181 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2512.18181.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Kaixing Yang, Jiashu Zhu, Xulong Tang, Ziqiao Peng, Xiangyue Zhang, Puwei Wang, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu, Hongyan Liu, Jun He</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 80</p><p><b>Summary:</b> With the rise of online dance-video platforms and rapid advances in AI-generated content (AIGC), music-driven dance generation has emerged as a compelling research direction. Despite substantial progress in related domains such as music-driven 3D dance generation, pose-driven image animation, and audio-driven talking-head synthesis, existing methods cannot be directly adapted to this task. Moreover, the limited studies in this area still struggle to jointly achieve high-quality visual appearance and realistic human motion. Accordingly, we present MACE-Dance, a music-driven dance video generation framework with cascaded Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). The Motion Expert performs music-to-3D motion generation while enforcing kinematic plausibility and artistic expressiveness, whereas the Appearance Expert carries out motion- and reference-conditioned video synthesis, preserving visual identity with spatiotemporal coherence. Specifically, the Motion Expert adopts a diffusion model with a BiMamba-Transformer hybrid architecture and a Guidance-Free Training (GFT) strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 3D dance generation. The Appearance Expert employs a decoupled kinematic-aesthetic fine-tuning strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in pose-driven image animation. To better benchmark this task, we curate a large-scale and diverse dataset and design a motion-appearance evaluation protocol. Based on this protocol, MACE-Dance also achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MACE-Dance.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18181 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06614 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06614.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siru Ouyang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Rui Meng, Chun-Liang Li, Yizhu Jiao, Kaiwen Zha, Maohao Shen, Vishy Tirumalashetty, George Lee, Jiawei Han, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 33</p><p><b>Summary:</b> LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to handle streaming tasks, yet they often remain one-off problem solvers that fail to learn from past interactions. Reusable skills distilled from experience provide a natural substrate for self-evolution, where high-quality skill curation serves as the key bottleneck. Existing approaches either rely on manual skill curation, prescribe heuristic skill operations, or train for short-horizon skill operations. However, they still struggle to learn complex long-term curation policies from indirect and delayed feedback. To tackle this challenge, we propose SkillOS, an experience-driven RL training recipe for learning skill curation in self-evolving agents. SkillOS pairs a frozen agent executor that retrieves and applies skills with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo from accumulated experience. To provide learning signals for curation, we design composite rewards and train on grouped task streams based on skill-relevant task dependencies, where earlier trajectories update the SkillRepo, and later related tasks evaluate these updates. Across multi-turn agentic tasks and single-turn reasoning tasks, SkillOS consistently outperforms memory-free and strong memory-based baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, with the learned skill curator generalizing across different executor backbones and task domains. Further analyses show that the learned curator produces more targeted skill use, while the skills in SkillRepo evolve into more richly structured Markdown files that encode higher-level meta-skills over time.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06614 + Mean Mode Screaming: Mean--Variance Split Residuals for 1000-Layer Diffusion Transformers + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06169 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06169.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Pengqi Lu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 102</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Scaling Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) to hundreds of layers introduces a structural vulnerability: networks can enter a silent, mean-dominated collapse state that homogenizes token representations and suppresses centered variation. Through mechanistic auditing, we isolate the trigger event of this collapse as Mean Mode Screaming (MMS). MMS can occur even when training appears stable, with a mean-coherent backward shock on residual writers that opens deep residual branches and drives the network into a mean-dominated state. We show this behavior is driven by an exact decomposition of these gradients into mean-coherent and centered components, compounded by the structural suppression of attention-logit gradients through the null space of the Softmax Jacobian once values homogenize. To address this, we propose Mean-Variance Split (MV-Split) Residuals, which combine a separately gained centered residual update with a leaky trunk-mean replacement. On a 400-layer single-stream DiT, MV-Split prevents the divergent collapse that crashes the un-stabilized baseline; it tracks close to the baseline's pre-crash trajectory while remaining substantially better than token-isotropic gating methods such as LayerScale across the full schedule. Finally, we present a 1000-layer DiT as a scale-validation run at boundary scales, establishing that the architecture remains stably trainable at extreme depth.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06169 Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - MARBLE: Multi-Aspect Reward Balance for Diffusion RL - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06507 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06507.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Canyu Zhao, Hao Chen, Yunze Tong, Yu Qiao, Jiacheng Li, Chunhua Shen</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 35</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning fine-tuning has become the dominant approach for aligning diffusion models with human preferences. However, assessing images is intrinsically a multi-dimensional task, and multiple evaluation criteria need to be optimized simultaneously. Existing practice deal with multiple rewards by training one specialist model per reward, optimizing a weighted-sum reward R(x)=sum_k w_k R_k(x), or sequentially fine-tuning with a hand-crafted stage schedule. These approaches either fail to produce a unified model that can be jointly trained on all rewards or necessitates heavy manually tuned sequential training. We find that the failure stems from using a naive weighted-sum reward aggregation. This approach suffers from a sample-level mismatch because most rollouts are specialist samples, highly informative for certain reward dimensions but irrelevant for others; consequently, weighted summation dilutes their supervision. To address this issue, we propose MARBLE (Multi-Aspect Reward BaLancE), a gradient-space optimization framework that maintains independent advantage estimators for each reward, computes per-reward policy gradients, and harmonizes them into a single update direction without manually-tuned reward weighting, by solving a Quadratic Programming problem. We further propose an amortized formulation that exploits the affine structure of the loss used in DiffusionNFT, to reduce the per-step cost from K+1 backward passes to near single-reward baseline cost, together with EMA smoothing on the balancing coefficients to stabilize updates against transient single-batch fluctuations. On SD3.5 Medium with five rewards, MARBLE improves all five reward dimensions simultaneously, turns the worst-aligned reward's gradient cosine from negative under weighted summation in 80% of mini-batches to consistently positive, and runs at 0.97X the training speed of baseline training.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06507 - Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + Delta-Adapter: Scalable Exemplar-Based Image Editing with Single-Pair Supervision + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07940 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07940.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiacheng Chen, Songze Li, Han Fu, Baoquan Zhao, Wei Liu, Yanyan Liang, Li Qing, Xudong Mao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Exemplar-based image editing applies a transformation defined by a source-target image pair to a new query image. Existing methods rely on a pair-of-pairs supervision paradigm, requiring two image pairs sharing the same edit semantics to learn the target transformation. This constraint makes training data difficult to curate at scale and limits generalization across diverse edit types. We propose Delta-Adapter, a method that learns transferable editing semantics under single-pair supervision, requiring no textual guidance. Rather than directly exposing the exemplar pair to the model, we leverage a pre-trained vision encoder to extract a semantic delta that encodes the visual transformation between the two images. This semantic delta is injected into a pre-trained image editing model via a Perceiver-based adapter. Since the target image is never directly visible to the model, it can serve as the prediction target, enabling single-pair supervision without requiring additional exemplar pairs. This formulation allows us to leverage existing large-scale editing datasets for training. To further promote faithful transformation transfer, we introduce a semantic delta consistency loss that aligns the semantic change of the generated output with the ground-truth semantic delta extracted from the exemplar pair. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Delta-Adapter consistently improves both editing accuracy and content consistency over four strong baselines on seen editing tasks, while also generalizing more effectively to unseen editing tasks. Code will be available at https://delta-adapter.github.io.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07940 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - When to Trust Imagination: Adaptive Action Execution for World Action Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06222 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06222.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Rui Wang, Yue Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Kuncheng Luo, Jianan Wang, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 37</p><p><b>Summary:</b> World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly predicting future visual observations and future actions. However, current WAMs typically execute a fixed number of predicted actions after each model inference, leaving the robot blind to whether the imagined future remains consistent with the actual physical rollout. In this work, we formulate adaptive WAM execution as a future-reality verification problem: the robot should execute longer when the WAM-predicted future remains reliable, and replan earlier when reality deviates from imagination. To this end, we propose Future Forward Dynamics Causal Attention (FFDC), a lightweight verifier that jointly reasons over predicted future actions, predicted visual dynamics, real observations, and language instructions to estimate whether the remaining action rollout can still be trusted. FFDC enables adaptive action chunk sizes as an emergent consequence of prediction-observation consistency, preserving the efficiency of long-horizon execution while restoring responsiveness in contact-rich or difficult phases. We further introduce Mixture-of-Horizon Training to improve long-horizon trajectory coverage for adaptive execution. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and in the real world demonstrate that our method achieves a strong robustness-efficiency trade-off: on RoboTwin, it reduces WAM forward passes by 69.10% and execution time by 34.02%, while improving success rate by 2.54% over the short-chunk baseline; in real-world experiments, it improves success rate by 35%.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06222 - Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07924 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07924.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Amin Karimi Monsefi, Dominic Culver, Nikhil Bhendawade, Manuel R. Ciosici, Yizhe Zhang, Irina Belousova</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 0</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Discrete flow matching generates text by iteratively transforming noise tokens into coherent language, but may require hundreds of forward passes. Distillation uses the multi-step trajectory to train a student to reproduce the process in a few steps. When the student underperforms, the usual explanation is insufficient capacity. We argue the opposite: the trajectory is the bottleneck, not the student. Each training trajectory is built through a chain of blind stochastic jumps with no evaluation of sequence quality; a single bad decision at an early midpoint propagates through subsequent steps, yet the student must imitate the result. Trajectory-Shaped Discrete Flow Matching (TS-DFM) replaces these blind jumps with guided navigation: a lightweight energy compass evaluates candidate continuations at each midpoint, selecting the most coherent. All shaping is training-only; inference cost is unchanged. On 170M-parameter language modeling, the shaped student at 8 steps achieves 32% lower perplexity than the 1,024-step teacher while being 128x faster, with gains consistent across source distributions and three evaluators of increasing scale. TS-DFM achieves the best perplexity of any discrete-generation baseline we compare against, including methods trained on 6x more data or using 5x larger models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07924 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - MiA-Signature: Approximating Global Activation for Long-Context Understanding - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06416 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06416.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yuqing Li, Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang, Jie Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 49</p><p><b>Summary:</b> A growing body of work in cognitive science suggests that reportable conscious access is associated with global ignition over distributed memory systems, while such activation is only partially accessible as individuals cannot directly access or enumerate all activated contents. This tension suggests a plausible mechanism that cognition may rely on a compact representation that approximates the global influence of activation on downstream processing. Inspired by this idea, we introduce the concept of Mindscape Activation Signature (MiA-Signature), a compressed representation of the global activation pattern induced by a query. In LLM systems, this is instantiated via submodular-based selection of high-level concepts that cover the activated context space, optionally refined through lightweight iterative updates using working memory. The resulting MiA-Signature serves as a conditioning signal that approximates the effect of the full activation state while remaining computationally tractable. Integrating MiA-Signatures into both RAG and agentic systems yields consistent performance gains across multiple long-context understanding tasks.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06416 - Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + Rubric-based On-policy Distillation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07396 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07396.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Junfeng Fang, Zhepei Hong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Gengsheng Li, Houcheng Jiang, Dan Zhang, Haiyun Guo, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to teacher logits, enabling OPD using only teacher-generated responses. To prove it, we introduce ROPD, a simple yet foundational framework for rubric-based OPD. Specifically, ROPD induces prompt-specific rubrics from teacher-student contrasts, and then utilizes these rubrics to score the student rollouts for on-policy optimization. Empirically, ROPD outperforms the advanced logit-based OPD methods across most scenarios, and achieving up to a 10x gain in sample efficiency. These results position rubric-based OPD as a flexible, black-box-compatible alternative to the prevailing logit-based OPD, offering a simple yet strong baseline for scalable distillation across proprietary and open-source LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Peregrine123/ROPD_official.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07396 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Continuous Latent Diffusion Language Model - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06548 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06548.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hongcan Guo, Qinyu Zhao, Yian Zhao, Shen Nie, Rui Zhu, Qiushan Guo, Feng Wang, Tao Yang, Hengshuang Zhao, Guoqiang Wei, Yan Zeng</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 61</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Large language models have achieved remarkable success under the autoregressive paradigm, yet high-quality text generation need not be tied to a fixed left-to-right order. Existing alternatives still struggle to jointly achieve generation efficiency, scalable representation learning, and effective global semantic modeling. We propose Cola DLM, a hierarchical latent diffusion language model that frames text generation through hierarchical information decomposition. Cola DLM first learns a stable text-to-latent mapping with a Text VAE, then models a global semantic prior in continuous latent space with a block-causal DiT, and finally generates text through conditional decoding. From a unified Markov-path perspective, its diffusion process performs latent prior transport rather than token-level observation recovery, thereby separating global semantic organization from local textual realization. This design yields a more flexible non-autoregressive inductive bias, supports semantic compression and prior fitting in continuous space, and naturally extends to other continuous modalities. Through experiments spanning 4 research questions, 8 benchmarks, strictly matched ~2B-parameter autoregressive and LLaDA baselines, and scaling curves up to about 2000 EFLOPs, we identify an effective overall configuration of Cola DLM and verify its strong scaling behavior for text generation. Taken together, the results establish hierarchical continuous latent prior modeling as a principled alternative to strictly token-level language modeling, where generation quality and scaling behavior may better reflect model capability than likelihood, while also suggesting a concrete path toward unified modeling across discrete text and continuous modalities.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06548 - Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + Learning Visual Feature-Based World Models via Residual Latent Action + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07079 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07079.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xinyu Zhang, Zhengtong Xu, Yutian Tao, Yeping Wang, Yu She, Abdeslam Boularias</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> World models predict future transitions from observations and actions. Existing works predominantly focus on image generation only. Visual feature-based world models, on the other hand, predict future visual features instead of raw video pixels, offering a promising alternative that is more efficient and less prone to hallucination. However, current feature-based approaches rely on direct regression, which leads to blurry or collapsed predictions in complex interactions, while generative modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces still remains challenging. In this work, we discover that a new type of latent action representation, which we refer to as *Residual Latent Action* (RLA), can be easily learned from DINO residuals. We also show that RLA is predictive, generalizable, and encodes temporal progression. Building on RLA, we propose *RLA World Model* (RLA-WM), which predicts RLA values via flow matching. RLA-WM outperforms both state-of-the-art feature-based and video-diffusion world models on simulation and real-world datasets, while being orders of magnitude faster than video diffusion. Furthermore, we develop two robot learning techniques that use RLA-WM to improve policy learning. The first one is a minimalist world action model with RLA that learns from actionless demonstration videos. The second one is the first visual RL framework trained entirely inside a world model learned from offline videos only, using a video-aligned reward and no online interactions or handcrafted rewards. Project page: https://mlzxy.github.io/rla-wm</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07079 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 - Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06130 - <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.06130.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Yaorui Shi, Yuxin Chen, Zhengxi Lu, Yuchun Miao, Shugui Liu, Qi GU, Xunliang Cai, Xiang Wang, An Zhang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 64</p><p><b>Summary:</b> A persistent skill library allows language model agents to reuse successful strategies across tasks. Maintaining such a library requires three coupled capabilities. The agent selects a relevant skill, utilizes it during execution, and distills new skills from experience. Existing methods optimize these capabilities in isolation or with separate reward sources, resulting in partial and conflicting evolution. We propose Skill1, a framework that trains a single policy to co-evolve skill selection, utilization, and distillation toward a shared task-outcome objective. The policy generates a query to search the skill library, re-ranks candidates to select one, solves the task conditioned on it, and distills a new skill from the trajectory. All learning derives from a single task-outcome signal. Its low-frequency trend credits selection and its high-frequency variation credits distillation. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that Skill1 outperforms prior skill-based and reinforcement learning baselines. Training dynamics confirm the co-evolution of the three capabilities, and ablations show that removing any credit signal degrades the evolution.</p> - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06130 - Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + BalCapRL: A Balanced Framework for RL-Based MLLM Image Captioning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07394 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07394.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Shaokai Ye, Vasileios Saveris, Yihao Qian, Jiaming Hu, Elmira Amirloo, Peter Grasch</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 1</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Image captioning is one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. Owing to its open-ended nature, it has received significant attention in the era of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In pursuit of ever more detailed and accurate captions, recent work has increasingly turned to reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing captioning-RL methods and evaluation metrics often emphasize a narrow notion of caption quality, inducing trade-offs across core dimensions of captioning. For example, utility-oriented objectives can encourage noisy, hallucinated, or overlong captions that improve downstream question answering while harming fluency, whereas arena-style objectives can favor fluent but generic descriptions with limited usefulness. To address this, we propose a more balanced RL framework that jointly optimizes utility-aware correctness, reference coverage, and linguistic quality. In order to effectively optimize the resulting continuous multi-objective reward formulation, we apply GDPO-style reward-decoupled normalization to continuous-valued captioning rewards and show that it improves performance over vanilla GRPO. Additionally, we introduce length-conditional reward masking, yielding a more suitable length penalty for captioning. Across LLaVA-1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL 3B and 7B base models, our method consistently improves caption quality, with peak gains of +13.6 DCScore, +9.0 CaptionQA, and +29.0 CapArena across different models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07394 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Who Prices Cognitive Labor in the Age of Agents? Compute-Anchored Wages + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05558 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.05558.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Siqi Zhu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> A natural intuition about the economics of AI agents is that, because agents can be replicated at very low marginal cost, agent labor may be supplied highly elastically, placing downward pressure on cognitive-labor wages when it closely substitutes for human labor. We argue this framing is wrong in mechanism but partially correct in conclusion, and that the correction matters for both theory and policy. Agents are not labor; they are a production technology that converts compute capital K_c into effective units of cognitive labor L_A. Once this is recognized, the elastic-supply margin that anchors the equilibrium wage migrates from the labor market to the compute capital market. Building on the classic factor-pricing framework mankiw2020, we derive a Compute-Anchored Wage (CAW) bound stating that, on tasks where human and agent-produced cognitive labor are substitutes, the competitive human wage is bounded above by λcdot k cdot r_c, where r_c is the rental rate of compute capital, k is the compute intensity of one effective agent-produced cognitive labor unit, and λ is the relative human-to-agent productivity. We generalize the result through constant elasticity of substitution (CES) aggregation, separate substitutable from complementary tasks, and discuss factor-share consequences. The conclusion is concise: the price-setter for cognitive labor is no longer the labor market.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05558 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Sparse Autoencoders as Plug-and-Play Firewalls for Adversarial Attack Detection in VLMs + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07447 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07447.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Hao Wang, Yiqun Sun, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh, Daisuke Kawahara</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 2</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, especially with the rise of agent-based systems. However, their safety has received relatively limited attention. Even the latest proprietary and open-weight VLMs remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, leaving downstream applications exposed to significant risks. In this work, we propose a novel and lightweight adversarial attack detection framework based on sparse autoencoders (SAEs), termed SAEgis. By inserting an SAE module into a pretrained VLM and training it with standard reconstruction objectives, we find that the learned sparse latent features naturally capture attack-relevant signals. These features enable reliable classification of whether an input image has been adversarially perturbed, even for previously unseen samples. Extensive experiments show that SAEgis achieves strong performance across in-domain, cross-domain, and cross-attack settings, with particularly large improvements in cross-domain generalization compared to existing baselines. In addition, combining signals from multiple layers further improves robustness and stability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore SAE as a plug-and-play mechanism for adversarial attack detection in VLMs. Our method requires no additional adversarial training, introduces minimal overhead, and provides a practical approach for improving the safety of real-world VLM systems.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07447 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + SpecBlock: Block-Iterative Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Tree Drafting + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07243 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07243.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Weijie Shi, Qiang Xu, Fan Deng, Yaguang Wu, Jiarun Liu, Yehong Xu, Hao Chen, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiangjun Huang, Jian Yang, Xiaofang Zhou</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 3</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3 preserve dependence along each draft path but call the drafter once per tree depth, making drafting a non-trivial share of per-iteration latency. Parallel drafters cut drafter calls by predicting multiple future positions in one forward, but each position is predicted without seeing the others, producing paths the verifier rejects. In this paper, we propose SpecBlock, a block-iterative drafter that combines path dependence with cheap drafting. Each drafter forward produces K dependent positions and we call this a block. The draft tree grows through repeated block expansions. Two mechanisms explicitly carry path dependence to keep later draft positions accurate. Within each block, a layer-wise shift carries the previous position's hidden state into every decoder layer. Across blocks, each new block can start from any position of the previous block, inheriting its hidden state to extend the path. To spend verifier budget where acceptance is likely, a co-trained rank head replaces the fixed top-k tree by allocating per-position branching during drafting. To avoid training the drafter on prefixes it never produces at inference, a valid-prefix mask drops the loss at later positions once an earlier one is wrong. Beyond static drafting, a cost-aware bandit at deployment uses free verifier feedback to update the drafter selectively, only when the expected throughput gain exceeds the update cost. Experiments show that SpecBlock improves mean speedup by 8-13% over EAGLE-3 at 44-52% of its drafting cost, and cost-aware adaptation extends this lead to 11-19%.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07243 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Fast Byte Latent Transformer + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08044 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08044.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Julie Kallini, Artidoro Pagnoni, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Christopher Potts, Xiaochuang Han, Srinivasan Iyer</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Recent byte-level language models (LMs) match the performance of token-level models without relying on subword vocabularies, yet their utility is limited by slow, byte-by-byte autoregressive generation. We address this bottleneck in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) through new training and generation techniques. First, we introduce BLT Diffusion (BLT-D), a new model and our fastest BLT variant, trained with an auxiliary block-wise diffusion objective alongside the standard next-byte prediction loss. This enables an inference procedure that generates multiple bytes in parallel per decoding step, substantially reducing the number of forward passes required to generate a sequence. Second, we propose two extensions inspired by speculative decoding that trade some of this speed for higher generation quality: BLT Self-speculation (BLT-S), in which BLT's local decoder continues generating past its normal patch boundaries to draft bytes, which are then verified with a single full-model forward pass; and BLT Diffusion+Verification (BLT-DV), which augments BLT-D with an autoregressive verification step after diffusion-based generation. All methods may achieve an estimated memory-bandwidth cost over 50% lower than BLT on generation tasks. Each approach offers its own unique advantages, together removing key barriers to the practical use of byte-level LMs.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08044 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07510 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07510.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Bohan Hou, Jiuning Gu, Jiayan Guo, Ronghao Dang, Sicong Leng, Xin Li, Xuemeng Song, Jianfei Yang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Existing benchmarks for multimodal agentic search evaluate multimodal search and visual browsing, but visual evidence is either confined to the input or treated as an answer endpoint rather than part of an interleaved search trajectory. We introduce InterLV-Search, a benchmark for Interleaved Language-Vision Agentic Search, in which textual and visual evidence is repeatedly used to condition later search. It contains 2,061 examples across three levels: active visual evidence seeking, controlled offline interleaved multimodal search, and open-web interleaved multimodal search. Beyond existing benchmarks, it also includes multimodal multi-branch samples that involve comparison between multiple entities during the evidence search. We construct Level 1 and Level 2 with automated pipelines and Level 3 with a machine-led, human-supervised open-web pipeline. We further provide InterLV-Agent for standardized tool use, trajectory logging, and evaluation. Experiments on proprietary and open-source multimodal agents show that current systems remain far from solving interleaved multimodal search, with the best model below 50% overall accuracy, highlighting challenges in visual evidence seeking, search control, and multimodal evidence integration. We release the benchmark data and evaluation code at https://github.com/hbhalpha/InterLV-Search-Bench</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07510 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + ModelLens: Finding the Best for Your Task from Myriads of Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07075 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07075.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Rui Cai, Weijie Jacky Mo, Xiaofei Wen, Qiyao Ma, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Muhao Chen, Zhe Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 5</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The open-source model ecosystem now contains hundreds of thousands of pretrained models, yet picking the best model for a new dataset is increasingly infeasible: new models and unbenchmarked datasets emerge continuously, leaving practitioners with no prior records on either side. Existing approaches handle only fragments of this in-the-wild setting: AutoML and transferability estimation select models from small predefined pools or require expensive per-model forward passes on the target dataset, while model routing presupposes a given candidate pool. We introduce ModelLens, a unified framework for model recommendation in the wild. Our key insight is that public leaderboard interactions, though scattered and noisy, collectively trace out an implicit atlas of model capabilities across heterogeneous evaluation settings, a signal rich enough to learn from directly. By learning a performance-aware latent space over model--dataset--metric tuples, ModelLens ranks unseen models on unseen datasets without running candidates on the target dataset. On a new benchmark of 1.62M evaluation records spanning 47K models and 9.6K datasets, ModelLens surpasses baselines that either rely on metadata alone or require running each candidate on the target dataset. Its recommended Top-K pools further improve multiple representative routing methods by up to 81% across diverse QA benchmarks. Case studies on recently released benchmarks further confirm generalization to both text and vision-language tasks.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07075 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Scaling Continual Learning to 300+ Tasks with Bi-Level Routing Mixture-of-Experts + https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03473 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2602.03473.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Meng Lou, Yunxiang Fu, Yizhou Yu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Continual learning, especially class-incremental learning (CIL), on the basis of a pre-trained model (PTM) has garnered substantial research interest in recent years. However, how to effectively learn both discriminative and comprehensive feature representations while maintaining stability and plasticity over very long task sequences remains an open problem. We propose CaRE, a scalable {C}ontinual Le{a}rner with efficient Bi-Level {R}outing Mixture-of-{E}xperts (BR-MoE). The core idea of BR-MoE is a bi-level routing mechanism: a router selection stage that dynamically activates relevant task-specific routers, followed by an expert routing phase that dynamically activates and aggregates experts, aiming to inject discriminative and comprehensive representations into every intermediate network layer. On the other hand, we introduce a challenging dataset, OmniBenchmark-1K, for CIL performance evaluation on very long task sequences with hundreds of tasks. Extensive experiments show that CaRE demonstrates leading performance across a variety of datasets and task settings, including commonly used CIL datasets with classical CIL settings (e.g., 5-20 tasks). To the best of our knowledge, CaRE is the first continual learner that scales to very long task sequences (ranging from 100 to over 300 non-overlapping tasks), while outperforming all baselines by a large margin on such task sequences. We hope that this work will inspire further research into continual learning over extremely long task sequences. Code and dataset are publicly released at https://github.com/LMMMEng/CaRE.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03473 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + What Matters for Diffusion-Friendly Latent Manifold? Prior-Aligned Autoencoders for Latent Diffusion + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07915 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07915.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhengrong Yue, Taihang Hu, Mengting Chen, Haiyu Zhang, Zihao Pan, Tao Liu, Zikang Wang, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng, Yali Wang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Tokenizers are a crucial component of latent diffusion models, as they define the latent space in which diffusion models operate. However, existing tokenizers are primarily designed to improve reconstruction fidelity or inherit pretrained representations, leaving unclear what kind of latent space is truly friendly for generative modeling. In this paper, we study this question from the perspective of latent manifold organization. By constructing controlled tokenizer variants, we identify three key properties of a diffusion-friendly latent manifold: coherent spatial structure, local manifold continuity, and global manifold semantics. We find that these properties are more consistent with downstream generation quality than reconstruction fidelity. Motivated by this finding, we propose the Prior-Aligned AutoEncoder (PAE), which explicitly shapes the latent manifold instead of leaving diffusion-friendly manifold to emerge indirectly from reconstruction or inheritance. Specifically, PAE leverages refined priors derived from VFMs and perturbation-based regularization to turn spatial structure, local continuity, and global semantics into explicit training objectives. On ImageNet 256x256, PAE improves both training efficiency and generation quality over existing tokenizers, reaching performance comparable to RAE with up to 13x faster convergence under the same training setup and achieving a new state-of-the-art gFID of 1.03. These results highlight the importance of organizing the latent manifold for latent diffusion models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07915 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + SCOPE: Structured Decomposition and Conditional Skill Orchestration for Complex Image Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08043 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08043.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tianfei Ren, Zhipeng Yan, Yiming Zhao, Zhen Fang, Yu Zeng, Guohui Zhang, Hang Xu, Xiaoxiao Ma, Shiting Huang, Ke Xu, Wenxuan Huang, Lionel Z. Wang, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Jie Huang, Feng Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> While text-to-image models have made strong progress in visual fidelity, faithfully realizing complex visual intents remains challenging because many requirements must be tracked across grounding, generation, and verification. We refer to these requirements as semantic commitments and formalize their lifecycle discontinuity as the Conceptual Rift, where commitments may be locally resolved or checked but fail to remain identifiable as the same operational units throughout the generation lifecycle. To address this, we propose SCOPE, a specification-guided skill orchestration framework that maintains semantic commitments in an evolving structured specification and conditionally invokes retrieval, reasoning, and repair skills around unresolved or violated commitments. To evaluate commitment-level intent realization, we introduce Gen-Arena, a human-annotated benchmark with entity- and constraint-level specifications, together with Entity-Gated Intent Pass Rate (EGIP), a strict entity-first pass criterion. SCOPE substantially outperforms all evaluated baselines on Gen-Arena, achieving 0.60 EGIP, and further achieves strong results on WISE-V (0.907) and MindBench (0.61), demonstrating the effectiveness of persistent commitment tracking for complex image generation.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08043 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + What if AI systems weren't chatbots? + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07896 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07896.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Sourojit Ghosh, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Sanjana Gautam, Avijit Ghosh</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 7</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The rapid convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) toward conversational chatbot interfaces marks a critical moment for the industry. This paper argues that the chatbot paradigm is not a neutral interface choice, but a dominant sociotechnical configuration whose widespread adoption reshapes social, economic, legal, and environmental systems. We examine how treating AI primarily as conversational assistants has extensive structural downsides. We show how chatbot-based systems often fail to adequately meet user needs, particularly in complex or high-stakes contexts, while projecting confidence and authority. We further analyze how the normalization of chatbot-mediated interaction alters patterns of work, learning, and decision-making, contributing to deskilling, homogenization of knowledge, and shifting expectations of expertise. Finally, we examine broader societal effects, including labor displacement, concentration of economic power, and increased environmental costs driven by sustained investment in large-scale chatbot infrastructures. While acknowledging legitimate benefits, we argue that the current trajectory of AI development reflects specific value choices that prioritize conversational generality over domain specificity, accountability, and long-term social sustainability. We conclude by outlining alternative directions for AI development and governance that move beyond one-size-fits-all chatbots, emphasizing pluralistic system design, task-specific tools, and institutional safeguards to mitigate social and economic harm.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07896 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Normalizing Trajectory Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08078 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08078.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiatao Gu, Tianrong Chen, Ying Shen, David Berthelot, Shuangfei Zhai, Josh Susskind</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Diffusion-based models decompose sampling into many small Gaussian denoising steps -- an assumption that breaks down when generation is compressed to a few coarse transitions. Existing few-step methods address this through distillation, consistency training, or adversarial objectives, but sacrifice the likelihood framework in the process. We introduce Normalizing Trajectory Models (NTM), which models each reverse step as an expressive conditional normalizing flow with exact likelihood training. Architecturally, NTM combines shallow invertible blocks within each step with a deep parallel predictor across the trajectory, forming an end-to-end network trainable from scratch or initializable from pretrained flow-matching models. Its exact trajectory likelihood further enables self-distillation: a lightweight denoiser trained on the model's own score produces high-quality samples in four steps. On text-to-image benchmarks, NTM matches or outperforms strong image generation baselines in just four sampling steps while uniquely retaining exact likelihood over the generative trajectory.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08078 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + STARFlow2: Bridging Language Models and Normalizing Flows for Unified Multimodal Generation + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08029 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08029.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ying Shen, Tianrong Chen, Yuan Gao, Yizhe Zhang, Yuyang Wang, Miguel Ángel Bautista, Shuangfei Zhai, Joshua M. Susskind, Jiatao Gu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 9</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Deep generative models have advanced rapidly across text and vision, motivating unified multimodal systems that can understand, reason over, and generate interleaved text-image sequences. Most existing approaches combine autoregressive language modeling with diffusion-based image generators, inheriting a structural mismatch between causal text generation and iterative visual denoising. We observe that autoregressive normalizing flows are autoregressive Transformers--sharing the same causal mask, KV-cache mechanism, and left-to-right structure as LLMs--making them the most natural paradigm for true unified multimodal generation. We present STARFlow2, built on the Pretzel architecture that vertically interleaves a pretrained VLM stream with a TarFlow stream via residual skip connections, both operating under the same causal mask. Combined with a deep-shallow flow design and a unified FAE latent space, STARFlow2 enables cache-friendly interleaved generation where both text and visual outputs directly enter the KV-cache without re-encoding. Experiments demonstrate strong performance across image generation and multimodal understanding benchmarks, validating autoregressive flows as a viable foundation for unified multimodal modeling.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08029 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + MISA: Mixture of Indexer Sparse Attention for Long-Context LLM Inference + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07363 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07363.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ruijie Zhou, Fanxu Meng, Yufei Xu, Tongxuan Liu, Guangming Lu, Muhan Zhang, Wenjie Pei</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 12</p><p><b>Summary:</b> DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) sets the state of the art for fine-grained inference-time sparse attention by introducing a learned token-wise indexer that scores every prefix token and selects the most relevant ones for the main attention. To remain expressive, the indexer uses many query heads (for example, 64 on DeepSeek-V3.2) that share the same selected token set; this multi-head design is precisely what makes the indexer the dominant cost on long contexts. We propose MISA (Mixture of Indexer Sparse Attention), a drop-in replacement for the DSA indexer that treats its indexer heads as a pool of mixture-of-experts. A lightweight router uses cheap block-level statistics to pick a query-dependent subset of only a few active heads, and only those heads run the heavy token-level scoring. This preserves the diversity of the original indexer pool while reducing the per-query cost from scoring every prefix token with every head to scoring it with only a handful of routed heads, plus a negligible router term computed on a small set of pooled keys. We further introduce a hierarchical variant of MISA that uses the routed pass to keep an enlarged candidate set and then re-ranks it with the original DSA indexer to recover the final selected tokens almost exactly. With only eight active heads and no additional training, MISA matches the dense DSA indexer on LongBench across DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-5 while running with eight and four times fewer indexer heads respectively, and outperforms HISA on average. It also preserves fully green Needle-in-a-Haystack heatmaps up to a 128K-token context and recovers more than 92% of the tokens selected by the DSA indexer per layer. Our TileLang kernel delivers roughly a 3.82 times speedup over DSA's original indexer kernel on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07363 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + MatryoshkaLoRA: Learning Accurate Hierarchical Low-Rank Representations for LLM Fine-Tuning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07850 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07850.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Ionut-Vlad Modoranu, Mher Safaryan, Dan Alistarh</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> With the rise in scale for deep learning models to billions of parameters, the computational cost of fine-tuning remains a significant barrier to deployment. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard for parameter-efficient fine-tuning, the need to set a predefined, static rank r requires exhaustive grid searches to balance efficiency and performance. Existing rank-adaptive solutions such as DyLoRA mitigate this by sampling ranks during the training from a predefined distribution. However, they often yield sub-optimal results at higher ranks due to lack of consistent gradient signals across the full hierarchy of ranks, thus making these methods data-inefficient. In this paper, we propose MatryoshkaLoRA, a general, Matryoshka-inspired training framework for LoRA that learns accurate hierarchical low-rank representations by inserting a fixed, carefully crafted diagonal matrix P between the existing LoRA adapters to scale their sub-ranks accordingly. By introducing this simple modification, our general framework recovers LoRA and DyLoRA only by changing P and ensures all sub-ranks embed the available gradient information efficiently. Our MatryoshkaLoRA supports dynamic rank selection with minimal degradation in accuracy. We further propose Area Under the Rank Accuracy Curve (AURAC), a metric that consistently evaluates the performance of hierarchical low-rank adapters. Our results demonstrate that MatryoshkaLoRA learns more accurate hierarchical low-rank representations than prior rank-adaptive approaches and achieves superior accuracy-performance trade-offs across ranks on the evaluated datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/MatryoshkaLoRA.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07850 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Rethinking State Tracking in Recurrent Models Through Error Control Dynamics + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07755 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07755.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiwan Chung, Heechan Choi, Seon Joo Kim</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 15</p><p><b>Summary:</b> The theory of state tracking in recurrent architectures has predominantly focused on expressive capacity: whether a fixed architecture can theoretically realize a set of symbolic transition rules. We argue that equally important is error control, the dynamics governing hidden-state drift along the directions that distinguish symbolic states. We prove that affine recurrent networks, a class of models encompassing State-Space Models and Linear Attention, cannot correct errors along state-separating subspaces once they preserve state representations. Consequently, practical affine trackers do not learn robust state tracking; rather, they learn finite horizon solutions governed by accumulated state-relevant error. We characterize the mechanics of this failure, showing that tracking remains readable only while the accumulating within-class spread remains small relative to the initial between-class separation. We demonstrate empirically on group state-tracking tasks that this breakdown is predictable: tracking collapses when the distinguishability ratio crosses the readability threshold of the trained decoder. Across trained models, the point of this crossing predicts the horizon at which downstream accuracy fails. These results establish that robust state tracking is determined not only by an architecture's theoretical expressivity but crucially by its error control.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07755 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + AEM: Adaptive Entropy Modulation for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00425 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.00425.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Haotian Zhao, Songlin Zhou, Yuxin Zhang, Stephen S. -T. Yau, Wenyu Zhang, Lun Tian, Tianshu Zhu, Yifeng Huang, Yucheng Zeng, Jingnan Gu, Daxiang Dong, Jianmin Wu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 16</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards provide limited guidance for assigning credit to individual steps within long interaction trajectories. Existing approaches often introduce dense intermediate supervision, such as process reward models or auxiliary self-supervised signals, which increases supervision and tuning complexity and may limit generalization across tasks and domains. We present AEM, a supervision-free credit assignment method that adaptively modulates entropy dynamics during RL training to improve the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Since in agentic RL the environment is typically affected by a complete response, rather than an individual token, our analysis lifts entropy dynamics from the token level to the response level, aligning uncertainty estimation with the effective action granularity of LLM agents and reducing sensitivity to token-level sampling noise. We further show that entropy drift under natural-gradient updates is governed by the interaction between the sampled-response advantage and its relative surprisal. Motivated by this result, AEM derives a practical response-level uncertainty proxy and uses it to rescale advantages, leveraging the evolving balance between positive and negative samples to naturally transition from exploration to exploitation. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SWE-bench-Verified with models ranging from 1.5B to 32B demonstrate that AEM consistently improves strong RL baselines, including a +1.4\% gain when integrated into a state-of-the-art software-engineering RL training framework.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00425 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + TextLDM: Language Modeling with Continuous Latent Diffusion + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07748 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07748.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Jiaxiu Jiang, Jingjing Ren, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Haoze Sun, Yijun Yang, Jianhui Liu, Yanbing Zhang, Shenghe Zheng, Yuan Zhang, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan, Wangmeng Zuo</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 19</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Diffusion Transformers (DiT) trained with flow matching in a VAE latent space have unified visual generation across images and videos. A natural next step toward a single architecture for both generation (visual synthesis) and understanding (text generation) is to apply this framework to language modeling. We propose TextLDM, which transfers the visual latent diffusion recipe to text generation with minimal architectural modification. A Transformer-based VAE maps discrete tokens to continuous latents, enhanced by Representation Alignment (REPA) with a frozen pretrained language model to produce representations effective for conditional denoising. A standard DiT then performs flow matching in this latent space, identical in architecture to its visual counterpart. The central challenge we address is obtaining high-quality continuous text representations: we find that reconstruction fidelity alone is insufficient, and that aligning latent features with a pretrained language model via REPA is critical for downstream generation quality. Trained from scratch on OpenWebText2, TextLDM substantially outperforms prior diffusion language models and matches GPT-2 under the same settings. Our results establish that the visual DiT recipe transfers effectively to language, taking a concrete step toward unified diffusion architectures for multimodal generation and understanding.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07748 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Anisotropic Modality Align + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07825 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07825.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Xiaomin Yu, Yijiang Li, Yuhui Zhang, Hanzhen Zhao, Yue Yang, Hao Tang, Yue Song, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Shuicheng Yan, Hui Xiong</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 22</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Training multimodal large language models has long been limited by the scarcity of high-quality paired multimodal data. Recent studies show that the shared representation space of pretrained multimodal contrastive models can serve as a bridge, enabling models to perform multimodal training with unimodal data. However, the key premise of this paradigm remains insufficiently understood: can representations from different modalities be reliably interchanged? The core obstacle lies in the persistent Modality Gap in the shared space. In this work, we revisit the geometric nature of the modality gap. We find that modality representations already share compatible dominant semantic geometry. What truly hinders modality interchangeability is not a simple global shift, but an anisotropic residual structure concentrated along a small number of dominant directions. Based on this finding, we further propose the principle of anisotropic modality gap alignment: effective modality alignment should align with the target-modality distribution while preserving the semantic structure of the source modality. Guided by this principle, we propose an anisotropic geometric correction framework, AnisoAlign, for unpaired modality alignment. This framework leverages the internal geometric prior of the target modality and performs bounded correction on source-modality representations, thereby constructing substitute representations in the target modality. Experiments confirm its benefits in both geometric diagnostics and text-only MLLM training. Overall, this work recasts the modality gap from an empirical observation into a correctable, structured geometric phenomenon and provides a new representation alignment perspective for training multimodal models with unimodal data.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07825 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08083 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08083.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Tong Zheng, Haolin Liu, Chengsong Huang, Huiwen Bao, Sheng Zhang, Rui Liu, Runpeng Dai, Ruibo Chen, Chenxi Liu, Tianyi Xiong, Xidong Wu, Hongming Zhang, Heng Huang</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 53</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Test-time scaling (TTS) has become an effective approach for improving large language model performance by allocating additional computation during inference. However, existing TTS strategies are largely hand-crafted: researchers manually design reasoning patterns and tune heuristics by intuition, leaving much of the computation-allocation space unexplored. We propose an environment-driven framework, AutoTTS, that changes what researchers design: from individual TTS heuristics to environments where TTS strategies can be discovered automatically. The key to AutoTTS lies in environment construction: the discovery environment must make the control space tractable and provide cheap, frequent feedback for TTS search. As a concrete instantiation, we formulate width--depth TTS as controller synthesis over pre-collected reasoning trajectories and probe signals, where controllers decide when to branch, continue, probe, prune, or stop and can be evaluated cheaply without repeated LLM calls. We further introduce beta parameterization to make the search tractable and fine-grained execution trace feedback to improve discovery efficiency by helping the agent diagnose why a TTS program fails. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the discovered strategies improve the overall accuracy--cost tradeoff over strong manually designed baselines. The discovered strategies generalize to held-out benchmarks and model scales, while the entire discovery costs only $39.9 and 160 minutes. Our data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/AutoTTS.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08083 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + HyperEyes: Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Parallel Multimodal Search Agents + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07177 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.07177.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Guankai Li, Jiabin Chen, Yi Xu, Xichen Zhang, Yuan Lu</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 57</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Existing multimodal search agents process target entities sequentially, issuing one tool call per entity and accumulating redundant interaction rounds whenever a query decomposes into independent sub-retrievals. We argue that effective multimodal agents should search wider rather than longer: dispatching multiple grounded queries concurrently within a round. To this end, we present HyperEyes, a parallel multimodal search agent that fuses visual grounding and retrieval into a single atomic action, enabling concurrent search across multiple entities while treating inference efficiency as a first-class training objective. HyperEyes is trained in two stages. For cold-start supervision, we develop a Parallel-Amenable Data Synthesis Pipeline covering visual multi-entity and textual multi-constraint queries, curating efficiency-oriented trajectories via Progressive Rejection Sampling. Building on this, our central contribution, a Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework, operates at two levels. At the macro level, we propose TRACE (Tool-use Reference-Adaptive Cost Efficiency), a trajectory-level reward whose reference is monotonically tightened during training to suppress superfluous tool calls without restricting genuine multi-hop search. At the micro level, we adapt On-Policy Distillation to inject dense token-level corrective signals from an external teacher on failed rollouts, mitigating the credit-assignment deficiency of sparse outcome rewards. Since existing benchmarks evaluate accuracy as the sole metric, omitting inference cost, we introduce IMEB, a human-curated benchmark of 300 instances that jointly evaluates search capability and efficiency. Across six benchmarks, HyperEyes-30B surpasses the strongest comparable open-source agent by 9.9% in accuracy with 5.3x fewer tool-call rounds on average.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07177 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 + + + Flow-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Flow Matching Models + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08063 + <p><img src="https://cdn-thumbnails.huggingface.co/social-thumbnails/papers/2605.08063.png" alt="Paper thumbnail" style="max-width: 300px; height: auto;" /></p><p><b>Authors:</b> Zhen Fang, Wenxuan Huang, Yu Zeng, Yiming Zhao, Shuang Chen, Kaituo Feng, Yunlong Lin, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Shaosheng Cao, Feng Zhao</p><p><b>Upvotes:</b> 75</p><p><b>Summary:</b> Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing heterogeneous objectives, which together give rise to a 'seesaw effect' of competing metrics and pervasive reward hacking. Inspired by the success of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) in the large language model community, we propose Flow-OPD, the first unified post-training framework that integrates on-policy distillation into Flow Matching models. Flow-OPD adopts a two-stage alignment strategy: it first cultivates domain-specialized teacher models via single-reward GRPO fine-tuning, allowing each expert to reach its performance ceiling in isolation; it then establishes a robust initial policy through a Flow-based Cold-Start scheme and seamlessly consolidates heterogeneous expertise into a single student via a three-step orchestration of on-policy sampling, task-routing labeling, and dense trajectory-level supervision. We further introduce Manifold Anchor Regularization (MAR), which leverages a task-agnostic teacher to provide full-data supervision that anchors generation to a high-quality manifold, effectively mitigating the aesthetic degradation commonly observed in purely RL-driven alignment. Built upon Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium, Flow-OPD raises the GenEval score from 63 to 92 and the OCR accuracy from 59 to 94, yielding an overall improvement of roughly 10 points over vanilla GRPO, while preserving image fidelity and human-preference alignment and exhibiting an emergent 'teacher-surpassing' effect. These results establish Flow-OPD as a scalable alignment paradigm for building generalist text-to-image models.</p> + https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08063 + Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000