# Research Papers — 2026-06 · bundle page 99 of 260 > Full-text markdown of papers #4901–4950 of 12993 published in 2026-06, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12993-paper 2026-06 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/99 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/98.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-06/page/100.md) ### Modularity-Free Conflict-Averse Training for Generalized PINNs Authors: Heejo Kong, Beomchul Park, Sung-Jin Kim, Seong-Whan Lee Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20156v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have become a powerful framework for solving PDEs by embedding physical laws into differentiable objectives. Despite their advances, training PINNs remains fragile: recent conflict-averse optimization schemes alleviate gradient interference between residual and boundary losses, but we show that their effectiveness deteriorates as model capacity increases. In this paper, we identify a capacity-induced failure mode, where overparameterized networks undergo functional modularity, self-partitioning into task-exclusive modules that suppress cross-objective interaction and hinder convergence toward Pareto-stationary points. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Modular-Sparsity Synchronization (ModSync), which integrates structural optimization into conflict-averse training by penalizing task-exclusive connections while preserving interaction-promoting pathways. Extensive experiments across diverse PDE benchmarks demonstrate that ModSync consistently prevents capacity-driven failures, sustains robust cross-objective coupling, and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/heejokong/ModSync}. --- ### NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models Authors: Morris Alper, Vasudha Varadarajan, Moran Yanuka, Angelina Wang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20155v2 Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between memorized and unrecognized names, while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families. --- ### From Texts to Scores: Tracing the Emergence of Essay Quality Representations in Large Language Models Authors: Jiaxu Zuo, Mu You, Kaixin Lan, Tao Fang, Yujia Huo, Henghua Shen, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20152v1 Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially transformed Automated Essay Scoring (AES), yet the internal mechanisms underlying LLM-based scoring remain poorly understood. In this work, we systematically analyze the hidden representations of eight LLMs across two English essay datasets (ASAP++, CSEE) and one Portuguese dataset (ENEM). Using linear probing, cross-prompt generalization, dimensionality reduction, and neuron-level analyses, we find consistent evidence that essay quality information is encoded in a linearly accessible form within LLM representations. These representations emerge progressively across layers, remain robust across prompting strategies, and partially transfer across essay prompts despite differences in scoring rubrics. In addition, nonlinear probes provide only marginal and inconsistent improvements over linear probes, suggesting that most essay quality information is already linearly decodable. We further identify individual ``essay scoring neurons'' whose activations strongly correlate with essay scores and whose behavior is sensitive to targeted intervention. Moreover, the layer-wise distribution of these neurons systematically shifts with essay length, with longer essays relying more heavily on deeper layers. Overall, our findings provide evidence that LLMs encode structured representations related to essay quality and offer new insights into the interpretability of LLM-based AES systems. --- ### Hybrid ANN-SNN Pipeline with Local Plasticity Authors: Denis Larionov, Khairutin Shtanchaev, Mikhail Kiselev, Mikhail Korovin, Ivan Tugoy Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20151v2 This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs). The architecture couples a pretrained EfficientNet encoder with a CoLaNET spiking classifier. We convert the encoder's activations into spike trains via rate-coding and train the subsequent SNN classifier using local, biologically inspired learning rules, bypassing end-to-end gradient propagation. This approach achieves 99.09% accuracy on a 64-class ImageNet benchmark, demonstrating performance on par with conventional deep networks. The work presents a biologically plausible and efficient framework for adapting powerful pretrained encoders to downstream spiking neural network tasks. --- ### Hybrid ANN-SNN Pipeline with Local Plasticity Authors: Denis Larionov, Khairutin Shtanchaev, Mikhail Kiselev, Mikhail Korovin, Ivan Tugoy Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20151v1 This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs). The architecture couples a pretrained EfficientNet encoder with a CoLaNET spiking classifier. We convert the encoder's activations into spike trains via rate-coding and train the subsequent SNN classifier using local, biologically inspired learning rules, bypassing end-to-end gradient propagation. This approach achieves 99.09% accuracy on a 64-class ImageNet benchmark, demonstrating performance on par with conventional deep networks. The work presents a biologically plausible and efficient framework for adapting powerful pretrained encoders to downstream spiking neural network tasks. --- ### BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling Authors: Bharathi Kannan Nithyanantham, Clemens Kujat, Tobias Sesterhenn, Stefan Telgmann, Ashwin Nedungadi, Jörn Plönnigs, Christian Bartelt, Stefan Lüdtke Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20146v3 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows. --- ### HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT Authors: Numan Saeed, Salma Hassan, Shahad Hardan, Lishan Cai, Xinglong Liang, Moona Mazher, Abdul Qayyum, Yansong Bu, Mengye Lyu, Yue Lin, Mingyuan Meng, Chuanyi Huang et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20143v1 Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems. --- ### RACL: Reasoning-Agent Control Layers for Continuous Metaheuristic Learning Authors: Antón Asla Manzárraga Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20142v1 This paper introduces RACL, a Reasoning-Agent Control Layer for metaheuristics. RACL places a reasoning agent above an existing optimizer. The agent does not replace the optimizer and does not modify business constraints. Instead, it controls the optimizer's internal search behavior by observing operational memory, reasoning over past behavior, formulating bounded hypotheses, testing interventions, evaluating outcomes, applying guardrails, consolidating useful policies and explaining its decisions. The experiment uses vehicle routing as a testbed, but the contribution is not a new routing solver, a particular ALNS configuration or a specific set of routing rules. The contribution is the RACL method: a way for a reasoning agent to discover, validate, consolidate and explain algorithmic control rules for a metaheuristic. In the current experimental setting, RACL improves or ties the Operational Memory Policy in 21 of 21 feasible cases and improves or ties a non-reasoning Stagnation-Triggered Policy in 18 of 21 feasible cases, with an average RACL vs STP cost delta of -0.641%. In the Sevilla-9/10 runtime sample, RACL improves average cost by -8.337% versus Fixed and -1.605% versus STP without showing material computational overhead. During the proof-of-concept, Codex was used as an in-the-loop reasoning agent observing executions, interpreting logs and proposing live bounded interventions. The policy proxy was later used only to make quantitative evaluation reproducible. --- ### SA-VIS: Sparse frame Annotations for training Video Instance Segmentation Authors: Edoardo Mello Rella, Ajad Chhatkuli, Shipra Jain, Ender Konukoglu, Luc Van Gool Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20140v2 Recent online video instance segmentation (VIS) methods have achieved impressive results, thus becoming the preferred approach to segment instances in videos. Despite the resurgence of impressive single image models, the online (or semi-online) VIS approaches outperform single-image models (e.g., based on SAM) by using long sequences of densely annotated frames during training. However,such a training setup of VIS is expensive in the sense of compute as well as dense annotations required. In order to solve these major flaws, we argue that the effective modeling of the instances and their evolution in videos do not require densely annotated frames. To that end, we propose a simple and effective module, called Past-frames Feature Propagation (PFP) which aggregates low-dimensional features from the image encoder of multiple frames. This simple low-compute module provides tremendous learning capability in using sparse video frame labels for end-to-end training. Combined with a light-weight frame-specific Instance Queries, our Sparse frame Annotation VIS (SA-VIS) significantly improves performance over its baseline. Most interestingly, our simple design that avoids complexities effectively bridges the gap in accuracy between training on sparsely and densely annotated video sequences. This translates to a mere 0.4% drop in performance of SA-VIS when using annotations for only 1/5 of the images in the dataset. Empirically, SA-VIS shows strong improvements over the baseline on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS) and an over 1% improvement in AP on the state-of-the-art in a limited annotations scenario. --- ### Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring Authors: Po-Chin Chang, Nicholas Hogan, Aske Plaat, Michiel T. van der Meer Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20138v2 LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p<0.001$). A/B testing ($N=656$ conversations from 359 students) shows sim-to-real transfer where the model switches from analytical to scaffolding learning strategies. Our adaptive prompt selection mechanism improves instructional efficiency, maintains pedagogical quality and reduces interactions by around 3 turns ($p=0.007$). While a greedy router achieves a comparable exercise conversion rate with the baseline ($19.1\%$ vs. $19.6\%$), a stochastic router that samples strategies leads to a higher conversion rate ($28.1\%$). --- ### Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring Authors: Po-Chin Chang, Nicholas Hogan, Aske Plaat, Michiel T. van der Meer Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20138v1 LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p<0.001$). A/B testing ($N=656$ conversations from 359 students) shows sim-to-real transfer where the model switches from analytical to scaffolding learning strategies. Our adaptive prompt selection mechanism improves instructional efficiency, maintains pedagogical quality and reduces interactions by around 3 turns ($p=0.007$). While a greedy router achieves a comparable exercise conversion rate with the baseline ($19.1\%$ vs. $19.6\%$), a stochastic router that samples strategies leads to a higher conversion rate ($28.1\%$). --- ### PASQA: Pitch-Accent-Focused Speech Quality Assessment Model Trained on Synthetic Speech with Accent Errors Authors: Masaya Kawamura, Yuma Shirahata, Kentaro Mitsui, Reo Shimizu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20137v1 Existing mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models typically predict utterance-level naturalness MOS and can be insensitive to localized pitch-accent errors. We propose Pitch-Accent-focused Speech Quality Assessment (PASQA), which explicitly targets pitch-accent correctness. To train our model, we construct a controlled Japanese accent-error dataset by changing accent patterns using an accent-controllable text-to-speech system, and compute a pseudo accent-quality score from the accent-error rate. PASQA builds on self-supervised representations and employs mora-conditioned fusion, ranking loss, an auxiliary accent-error localization task, and speaker-invariant training. Experiments show that conventional models fail to preserve the ordering by accent-error severity, whereas PASQA achieves high ordering accuracy on both seen and unseen speakers. Further, PASQA shows stronger agreement with human accent-correctness judgments. The code is available at https://github.com/lycorp-jp/PASQA. --- ### Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation Authors: Jianing Guo, Fangzheng Chen, Zihao Mao, Wong Lik Hang Kenny, Zhenhong Wu, Yu Li, Yishuai Cai, Yuanpei Chen, Yikun Ban, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yaodong Yang et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20135v1 Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM. --- ### TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields Authors: Haoxuan Li, Ziya Erkoç, Daniele Sirigatti, Vladislav Rosov, Lei Li, Angela Dai, Matthias Nießner Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20131v3 We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup. --- ### TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields Authors: Haoxuan Li, Ziya Erkoç, Daniele Sirigatti, Vladislav Rosov, Lei Li, Angela Dai, Matthias Nießner Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20131v2 We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup. --- ### SAM3 Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation Authors: Xuesong Wang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20130v1 We describe our 4th-place entry to the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which reached a composite mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 69.73% on the official 1,815-image test set. Our model adapts the image encoder of a recent visual foundation model, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), with a lightweight decoder. Beyond this, we contribute two techniques and one empirical finding: (i) a self-distillation scheme that re-uses SAM3 itself, prompted with ground-truth boxes, as a teacher on the classes where it outperforms our own model; (ii) an image-level multi-scale test-time augmentation scheme that restores multi-scale inference for a fixed-input-size model by rescaling the image rather than the model input; and (iii) the finding that an aggressive photometric distortion from a winning 2025 GOOSE 2D entry, transplanted onto our pipeline, is its single largest source of improvement. --- ### The Correctness Illusion in LLM-Generated GPU Kernels Authors: Dipankar Sarkar Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.SE, cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20128v2 Benchmarks for LLM-generated GPU kernels (KernelBench, TritonBench, GEAK) score correctness through fixed-shape, small-sample allclose-style checks. The number of inputs varies between benchmarks. The shape, dtype, and tolerance are fixed for each kernel. We test that oracle empirically. We construct a controlled corpus of 24 Triton and CPU stand-in kernels (15 correct controls and 9 LLM-style buggy variants seeded with documented transcription errors) and re-evaluate it under op-schema-aware seeded fuzzing with a high-precision (fp64) CPU reference and per-(op, dtype) absolute tolerances. The seeded oracle flags 9 of 9 buggy kernels and passes 15 of 15 correct controls, at zero precision cost on controls. We extend the corpus to 26 ops (adding a flash-attention pair) and re-run the same protocol on five GPU classes (RTX 3060, A10, L40S, A100 SXM4, H100 NVL). The verdicts are identical across all five GPUs: 10 of 10 illusions caught and 16 of 16 controls clean. The corpus result is about LLM-style transcription bugs that the allclose-on-one-shape oracle certifies as correct, not about the bug rate of any specific deployed LLM. Every flagged failure replays byte-for-byte from a stored seed. --- ### ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research Authors: Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Yuzhen Xiao, Ruizhe Zhang, Yue Fang, Xinfei Wan, Zhengxing Song, Yuxuan Liu, Yuheng Huang, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang, Xu Chu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20122v2 Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents. --- ### ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research Authors: Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Yuzhen Xiao, Ruizhe Zhang, Yue Fang, XinFei Wan, Zhengxing Song, Yuxuan Liu, Yuheng Huang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20122v1 Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents. --- ### Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform Authors: Hyeonna Choi, Jung Yup Kim, Hyuneui Lim, Seunggyu Jeon Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20120v1 Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories. --- ### Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation Authors: Jonghoon Lee, Seong Hyeon Park, Byungwoo Jeon, Minha Lee, Jinwoo Shin Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20118v2 Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization. --- ### When Average Calibration Fails: Site-Conditional Federated Conformal Risk Control Authors: Nafis Fuad Shahid Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20115v3 Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free segmentation guarantees by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores into a single threshold. We quantify, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), a critical failure: naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. We trace this failure to a hidden design choice: the aggregation weights implicitly determine whose coverage is protected. Sample-size weighting optimizes patient-level validity but can sacrifice institution-level reliability; equal-site weighting improves institution-level reliability on this benchmark at comparable efficiency, using only a single scalar per site. We propose risk-curve shrinkage as a principled mechanism: each site transmits its empirical risk curve (G scalars) and a single hyperparameter n0 smoothly interpolates between site-specific local calibration and sample-size-weighted pooled calibration. Leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. Direct Lagrangian budget optimization fails by concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals; the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site. --- ### When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Elroy Galbraith Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20113v2 Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) hides tool latency by issuing retrieval queries in parallel with the user's still-arriving input, before the utterance is complete. Speculation can only help, though, when the correct query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing -- a property of the query, not the system. We name and measure this property, tool-intent stabilization: the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges on the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) characterize how stabilization is distributed across queries; (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the share of tool latency hideable behind the remaining input, given tool latency L and input cadence delta; (iii) validate it against a working streaming pipeline; and (iv) ask which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. Stabilization is typically early: at a realistic operating point a 73.9% streamable fraction of the benchmark admits latency hiding, and H acts as a conservative aggregate floor that realized savings meet or exceed -- though it does not predict savings query by query. Question type yields a statistically significant but small early/late split. The study needs no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware; a dense-retriever replication confirms the early-stabilization effect is not a BM25 lexical artifact. --- ### Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer: Scalable 3D CT Volume Generation Authors: Zhenkai Zhang, Markus Hiller, Krista A. Ehinger, Tom Drummond Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20112v1 Generating high-resolution 3D CT volumes with fine details remains challenging due to substantial computational demands and optimization difficulties inherent to existing generative models. In this paper, we propose the Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer (PRDiT), a scalable generative framework that synthesizes high-quality 3D medical volumes directly at voxel-level. PRDiT introduces a two-stage training architecture comprising 1) a local denoiser in the form of an MLP-based blind estimator operating on overlapping 3D patches to separate low-frequency structures efficiently, and 2) a global residual diffusion transformer employing memory-efficient attention to model and refine high-frequency residuals across entire volumes. This coarse-to-fine modeling strategy simplifies optimization, enhances training stability, and effectively preserves subtle structures without the limitations of an autoencoder bottleneck. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIDC-IDRI and RAD-ChestCT datasets demonstrate that PRDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as HA-GAN, 3D LDM and WDM-3D, achieving significantly lower 3D FID, MMD and Wasserstein distance scores. --- ### FrozenDrive: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Driving Scene Generation and Data Augmentation with Parameter-Free Frozen Diffusion Model Authors: Yuhwan Jeong, Hyeonseong Kim, Daehyun We, Seonkyu Song, Jinnyeong Yang, Hyun-Kurl Jang, Youngho Yoon, Kuk-Jin Yoon Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20110v1 Synthetic data for autonomous driving is surging, powered by diffusion models that promise scalable scene generation. Yet key obstacles remain, as enforcing multi-view and temporal consistency often relies on backbone fine-tuning or added layers, which erodes pre-trained knowledge and weakens text alignment. Models also stay close to the training distribution, struggling under adverse weather and unseen configurations, and fidelity favors frequent over rare classes. We address these gaps with FrozenDrive, a controllable generative framework that preserves a pretrained diffusion models knowledge while achieving strong consistency. FrozenDrive conditions on rich driving-stack signals and text prompts, and introduces knowledge-preserving spatio-temporal attention to impose cross-view alignment and temporal coherence in a single pass within a parameter-free frozen diffusion backbone. An additional object-focused constraint improves per-object fidelity for rare categories. Without any weather- or scene-specific fine-tuning, our model synthesizes globally coherent multi-view driving scenes from text, particularly under adverse and rare conditions, and surpasses prior baselines. On nuScenes, FrozenDrive augmented data significantly improves AD models performance, especially at night and in rain, demonstrating stronger robustness when trained with our scenario-targeted data. --- ### EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors Authors: Pengwei Wang, José Morano, Qian Wan, Hrvoje Bogunović Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20108v1 Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications. --- ### Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning Authors: Asaf Cassel, Aviv Rosenberg Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20107v1 Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL. --- ### Sensorimotor World Models: Perception for Action via Inverse Dynamics Authors: Petr Ivashkov, Randall Balestriero, Bernhard Schölkopf Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20104v1 Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions. At the same time, latent JEPA-style world models advocate learning compact predictive states from high-dimensional observations to facilitate the prediction of future states, but end-to-end training of these models is nontrivial because representations may collapse if our only goal is to construct a latent state that is easy to predict. We introduce a sensorimotor world model (SMWM): a latent world model trained end-to-end with inverse dynamics regularization. This single regularizer addresses both issues: it prevents representation collapse and induces action-aligned representations. By forcing latent states to preserve information about the action underlying a transition, it biases the model toward the controllable degrees of freedom of the environment while discarding uncontrollable distractors. This yields stable latent world models trained from offline, reward-free trajectories, without frozen encoders, exponential moving averages, or complex latent regularizers. Empirically, SMWM learns compact, interpretable latent spaces and enables competitive planning performance across simple 2D and 3D control tasks. --- ### Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration Authors: Kyoleen Kwak, Daeho Kim, Jeong Woon Lee, Hyoseok Hwang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20103v1 Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy. --- ### RFM-Editing 2: Text-Guided Audio Editing with Rectified Flow Matching and Coarse-to-Fine Diffusion Transformers Authors: Liting Gao, Yonggang Zhu, Yaru Chen, Dongyu Wang, Shubin Zhang, Zhenbo Li, Jean-Yves Guillemaut, Wenwu Wang Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20101v3 Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a text instruction or description while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of diffusion transformer blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a novel instruction-guided audio editing framework based on rectified flow matching (RFM), named RFM-Editing 2, built on a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer. The proposed model performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at the low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at the high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency. --- ### WeGenBench: A Multidimensional Diagnostic Benchmark towards Text-to-Image Model Optimization Authors: Qian Liang, Xiaomin Li, Ying Zhang, Jia Xu, Lihao Ni, Hongrui Li, Jingjing Li, Jing Lyu, Chen Li Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20100v1 Recent text-to-image generation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing highly realistic images from text inputs alone. Although existing benchmarks can evaluate the generation capabilities of various models to some extent, they struggle to comprehensively and accurately measure performance across multiple dimensions, often failing to reveal the inherent deficiencies of models in specific categories. To address these limitations, we propose WeGenBench, a novel benchmark designed for the comprehensive, multi-perspective evaluation of text-to-image generation capabilities. Our benchmark comprises a total of 4,000 test prompts across two primary categories, meticulously balanced between Chinese and English to evaluate bilingual and cross-cultural generation capabilities. Beyond macroscopic scene classification, we annotate each prompt with multi-dimensional tags tailored to the distinct content and challenges of each language, thereby refining the generation tasks into more specific sub-categories. Through a cross-dimensional evaluation mechanism leveraging both scene classifications and multi-dimensional tags, WeGenBench can precisely pinpoint model shortcomings in specific generation categories. Furthermore, to measure generation quality more accurately, we design and validate several novel evaluation metrics by integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which assess model performance on domain-specific tasks from three core aspects. Crucially, our approach yields both the assessment outcomes and the detailed reasoning trajectories, facilitating a rigorous verification of the accuracy and soundness of the evaluation results. Finally, we conduct systematic benchmarking on current state-of-the-art methods and provide an in-depth analysis of the limitations present in existing models. --- ### HydraHead: From Head-Level Functional Heterogeneity to Specialized Attention Hybridization Authors: Zhentao Tan, Wei Chen, Jingyi Shen, Yao Liu, Xu Shen, Yue Wu, Jieping Ye Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20097v1 The quadratic complexity of attention poses a critical bottleneck for long-context processing, spurring interest in hybrid attention designs. Most open-source hybrid models adopt a layer-wise strategy. Yet, prior work has noted the inherent difficulty of integrating Linear Attention (LA) with Full Attention (FA), suggesting that the design space of attention hybridization remains underexplored. To probe this space, we conduct interpretability analysis and observe that layers exhibit block-wise functional similarity, while individual heads within the same layer display distinct functional specialization despite sharing input features. This head-level heterogeneity suggests that the head dimension provides a natural and principled granularity for fusing heterogeneous attention signals. Building on this insight, we introduce HydraHead, a novel architecture that hybridizes FA and LA along the head axis. HydraHead features two key innovations: (1) an interpretability-driven selection strategy that identifies retrieval-critical heads and preserves FA only for them, and (2) a scale-normalized fusion module that reconciles the distributional gap between FA and LA head outputs. By leveraging a three-stage transfer pipeline with parameter reuse and distillation, we achieve high-performance hybrid models with minimal training overhead. Under a unified training setup, HydraHead outperforms other hybrid designs in long-context tasks while maintaining strong general reasoning. With interpretability-driven head selection, it matches a 3:1 layer-wise hybrid's long-context performance at a 7:1 LA-to-FA ratio. Crucially, trained on only 15B tokens, HydraHead achieves over 69% improvement over the baseline at 512K context length, approaching Qwen3.5, a leading model of comparable size with a native context length of 256K. This highlights the significant scaling potential of head-level hybridization. --- ### Stitching and dimensionality effects on large artificially generated volume datasets Authors: Lucas von Chamier, Jan Philipp Albrecht, Dagmar Kainmüller Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20095v1 Generating large images via deep learning requires patching input data to accommodate hardware memory limitations, then assembling output patches, a process that can introduce stitching artifacts when neighboring patches do not align at borders. While these artifacts are known to affect segmentation tasks, their impact on generative models for style-transfer remains poorly understood. We investigated three stitching approaches and two patch dimensionalities (2D vs 3D) using cycleGAN models trained on cryo-electron microscopy datasets. We evaluated both perceptual quality and performance on downstream mitochondria segmentation. Our key findings reveal that: (1) FID scores fail to detect subtle stitching artifacts that significantly impact downstream segmentation performance, (2) 3D models with artifact-free stitching marginally outperform 2D models on downstream tasks, though the improvement barely justifies the computational cost, and (3) 2D models train more stably due to larger batch sizes. Additionally, we demonstrate that ensembling predictions from three orthogonal directions can improve low-quality volumes but provides no benefit for high-quality outputs. These results demonstrate that maximizing generative model performance on large scientific datasets requires careful consideration and mitigation of stitching artifacts, and that perceptual metrics alone are insufficient for evaluating domain adaptation quality in biomedical imaging. --- ### MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer Authors: Nefeli Andreou, Angel Martínez-González, Sabine Sternig, Matthieu Guillaumin, Epameinondas Antonakos, Michael Opitz Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20094v1 Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria. --- ### Self-Preference Is Weak or Absent in Verifiable Instruction-Following Revision: A Four-Model Test Under Genuine Authorship Authors: William Guey, Pierrick Bougault Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20093v1 Large language models (LLMs) increasingly review and revise text, including their own. A documented self-preference bias (models favoring their own generations when acting as judges) raises the question of whether models also resist valid corrections to their own writing. We test this in a setting where "valid" is decided not by another model but by a deterministic verifier: instruction-following revision on IFEval. A model writes a draft; the official IFEval checker confirms the draft violates a constraint and that a candidate edit fixes it; the model then accepts or rejects that edit either as the genuine in-context author or as a fresh model that sees the draft neutrally. Across four mid-tier model families and 85 author-versus-fresh comparisons, we find no detectable self-preference: authors reject verified-good fixes to their own drafts at essentially the same rate as fresh models judging the same drafts (gap -5.1 pp, 95% CI (-12.9, +2.7)). A self-skepticism hint from a smaller pilot did not replicate at scale. The one robust observation is qualitative: when authors do reject a verified-good fix, 97% of their stated reasons are flaw-catching rather than preference, that is, about the character of rejections, not an elevated rate. Effects smaller than ~13 pp cannot be excluded at this sample size. --- ### EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies Authors: Ganlin Yang, Zhangzheng Tu, Yuqiang Yang, Sitong Mao, Junyi Dong, Tianxing Chen, Jiaqi Peng, Jing Xiong, Jiafei Cao, Jifeng Dai, Wengang Zhou, Yao Mu et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20092v3 Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs. --- ### EventVLA: Event-Driven Visual Evidence Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Policies Authors: Ganlin Yang, Zhangzheng Tu, Yuqiang Yang, Sitong Mao, Junyi Dong, Tianxing Chen, Jiaqi Peng, Jing Xiong, Jiafei Cao, Jifeng Dai, Wengang Zhou, Yao Mu et al. Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20092v2 Memory remains a critical bottleneck for long-horizon robotic manipulation, as standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies often fail when task-relevant cues become occluded or unobservable over time. While existing memory-augmented methods utilize historical context, they either suffer from severe information bottlenecks, incur high latency via decoupled dual systems, or rely on unselective buffers that accumulate massive visual redundancies. To address these limitations, we introduce EventVLA, an end-to-end framework founded on the concept of sparse visual evidence memory that comprises two core components: foundational visual anchors to retain initial and short-term contexts, and a dynamic Keyframe Evidence Memory (KEM) module. Specifically, KEM directly predicts future keyframe probabilities from the VLA's latent embeddings to autonomously capture and store sparse, task-critical visual events. This foresight-driven mechanism empowers the policy to dynamically evaluate the future causal utility of current observations, preserving transient visual evidence before it becomes unobservable. Furthermore, we propose RoboTwin-MeM, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate non-Markovian manipulation tasks with interactive visual evidence. Extensive evaluations show that across 17 memory-requiring simulation tasks and 4 real-world bimanual tasks, EventVLA achieves an average success rate improvement of +40% over state-of-the-art memory-augmented VLAs. --- ### IHUBERT: Vector-Based Semantic Deduplication and Domain-Balanced Pretraining for Persian Resources Authors: Arash Ghafouri, Mahdi Firouzmandi, Hossein Saberi, Mohammad Reza Hasani Ahangar Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20089v1 Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks. We present IHUBERT, a monolingual Persian PLM trained from scratch with the RoBERTa-base encoder (125M parameters) on a 45 GB curated subset of the Sepahr-Danesh collection (about 7-8B tokens). To improve corpus quality and reduce redundancy, we employ a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline that includes normalization, exact and near-duplicate removal, anonymization, and vector-database-based semantic deduplication for distribution balancing control across domains and registers. We additionally train a 139k-vocabulary BPE tokenizer on the full pretraining corpus to better capture Persian morphology and orthographic variation. IHUBERT is evaluated on seven Persian NLU benchmarks covering NER, sentiment analysis, topic classification, NLI, extractive question answering, and relation extraction, using task-standard metrics (entity-level F1, Macro-F1, EM/F1). IHUBERT achieves its strongest gains on extractive QA, ranking first on both PQuAD (F1 88.3542) and ParsiNLU-RC (F1 49.0987), and attains the best result on FarsTail (Macro-F1 0.8350). On NER and topic classification, it remains competitive (e.g., 0.8308 F1 on ParsTwiNER; 0.7953 Macro-F1 on DigiMag), while relation extraction remains the main remaining gap (0.6684 Macro-F1 on PERLEX). A controlled tokenizer ablation on the IHUBERT pretraining corpus shows that BPE yields slightly lower subword fragmentation than WordPiece at matched vocabulary size, supporting our tokenization design. Overall, IHUBERT advances Persian language modeling through semantically curated large-scale pretraining and broad evaluation across both classification and comprehension-oriented tasks. --- ### Multi-Head Attention-Based Feature Extractor Integration with Soft Actor-Critic for Porosity Prediction and Process Parameter Optimization in Additive Manufacturing Authors: Kianoush Aqabakee, Leonardo Stella Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20087v1 Additive manufacturing process optimization requires precise parameter control to minimize defects such as porosity. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches using discrete action spaces suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to local optima, limiting their effectiveness for high-precision manufacturing tasks. This study addresses these limitations by employing a continuous action space combined with a novel architecture that integrates a multi-head attention mechanism with the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The attention-based feature extractor enhances the agent's ability to capture subtle variations in low-dimensional input features, enabling more effective exploration-exploitation balance for navigating value spaces with local minima. We validate our approach on porosity prediction and process parameter optimization in laser powder bed fusion, demonstrating faster convergence and higher final reward values compared to standard RL methods including DQN, PPO, TD3, and vanilla SAC. The proposed methodology achieves a convergence value of 322.79 within 14 episodes, outperforming existing approaches while maintaining stability throughout training. --- ### Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models Authors: Zhuo Cao, Lena Krieger, Fernanda Nader, Xuan Zhao, Hanno Scharr, Ira Assent Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20084v1 Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration--exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains. --- ### Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model Authors: Xiangchen Yin, Wenzhang Sun, Jiahui Yuan, Zijie Liu, Yinda Chen, Wei Li, Dachun Kai, Chunfeng Wang, Xiaoyan Sun Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20083v4 Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls the scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object controls with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather states, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/. --- ### Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model Authors: Xiangchen Yin, Wenzhang Sun, Jiahui Yuan, Zijie Liu, Yinda Chen, Wei Li, Dachun Kai, Chunfeng Wang, Xiaoyan Sun Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20083v3 Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls the scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object controls with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather states, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/ --- ### Beyond Averaging in John Ellipsoid Approximation: High-Accuracy Algorithms in the Leverage-Score Model Authors: Xiaoyu Li, Junwei Yu, Jiaojiao Jiang, Junbin Gao, Andi Han Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: math.OC, cs.DS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20082v1 The John ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope $P=\{\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^d:\|\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}\|_\infty\le1\}$, $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, is computed by a long line of leverage-score algorithms, from Cohen, Cousins, Lee and Yang (COLT 2019) to its successors (WY24, CLS+25), all reaching a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $Θ(\varepsilon^{-1}\log(n/d))$ iterations. We separate this complexity into three costs the modern line conflates (certification, identification, and accuracy) and locate the historical $\varepsilon^{-1}$ in the first alone. In the equivalent D-optimal-design form $\min_{\mathbf{p}\inΔ_n}-\log\det(\sum_i p_i\mathbf{a}_i\mathbf{a}_i^\top)$, the leverage-score oracle is exactly the first-order oracle and the $(1+\varepsilon)$-John guarantee the Frank-Wolfe gap $g(\mathbf{p})\le\varepsilon d$; through this dictionary the costs come apart. The $\varepsilon^{-1}$ is a certification artifact: the uniform average of the iterates, the certificate used throughout the line, has gap exactly $Θ(1/T)$, however cheap each iteration is made. Pointed instead at the last iterate the same oracle is fast: a warm-started accelerated method reaches the guarantee in $C(\mathbf{A})+O(\sqrtκ\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries after an $\varepsilon$-independent setup $C(\mathbf{A})$, and once the optimal face is identified the facial problem is an unconstrained self-concordant minimization whose Hessian the oracle recovers exactly, so damped Newton needs only $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ steps, for a total of $C(\mathbf{A})+O(d^2\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries. The accuracy dependence is thus doubly logarithmic after an $\varepsilon$-independent, condition-dependent setup; the open problem is the remaining identification cost (a condition-free bound on reaching the optimal face) and lower bounds. Accuracy is not the obstruction. --- ### The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM Authors: Wish Suharitdamrong, Tony Alex, Xiatian Zhu, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20077v2 Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer. --- ### The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM Authors: Wish Suharitdamrong, Tony Alex, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20077v1 Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer. --- ### Variable-Length Tokenization via Learnable Global Merging for Diffusion Transformers Authors: Dong Hoon Lee, Seunghoon Hong Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20076v1 Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have become dominant in visual synthesis, but their quality-compute trade-off is largely constrained by the tokenizer's fixed compression ratio. Variable-length tokenizers (VLTs) promise adaptive compression by varying token counts, allowing diffusion models to flexibly balance quality and compute. However, conventional VLTs modulate length by truncating ordered token sequences, which makes token semantics depend on token position and breaks representational alignment across lengths. This leads to a cross-length shift in the latent distribution that hinders a single variable-length diffusion model from operating effectively. To address this, we propose a novel variable-length tokenizer that modulates length by merging tokens. We show that encouraging similar tokens to merge enables direct cross-length representation alignment when the diffusion transformer operates according to the merging pattern. Since conventional merging methods are data-dependent, making the merging pattern inaccessible during generation, we introduce learnable global merging, which is data-independent, to ensure compatibility with diffusion transformers. On ImageNet 256$\times$256 generation, our merging-based variable-length tokenizer integrated with a diffusion transformer achieves a superior gFID-compute trade-off compared to prior VLT methods. Code is available at (this https URL)(https://github.com/movinghoon/lgm) --- ### What Makes Effective Supervision in Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Information-Theoretic Analysis Authors: Xinghao Chen, Chak Tou Leong, Wenjin Guo, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20075v1 Latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) internalizes reasoning within continuous hidden states, offering a promising alternative to verbose discrete reasoning traces. However, robust latent reasoning remains difficult because outcome supervision provides weak learning signals and leaves latent trajectories prone to semantic drift. In this work, we analyze Latent CoT from an information-theoretic perspective and identify this failure as a dual collapse: gradient attenuation along the optimization path and representational drift in the latent space. We further decompose process supervision into two complementary dimensions: Trajectory Supervision, which injects dense stepwise reasoning signals, and Space Supervision, which preserves the semantic structure of the latent manifold. Our analysis shows that rigid geometric compression can collapse the reasoning space, whereas generative reconstruction provides a more flexible semantic anchor that better preserves information capacity. To measure these effects, we introduce the Unified Latent Probe (ULP), which quantifies the mutual information between latent trajectories and explicit reasoning steps. Experiments reveal a clear Information-Performance Binding: reasoning accuracy depends on the information fidelity preserved in the latent chain. These findings provide a principled framework for latent reasoning supervision and suggest shifting from geometric imitation toward mutual information maximization. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Supervision-in-Latent-CoT}{this repository}. --- ### Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models for Event-Based Burst-Suppression Detection in ICU Authors: Elisa Vasta, Thorir Mar Ingolfsson, Andrea Cossettini, Luca Benini, Tilman Beck, Emanuela Keller, Una Pale Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: eess.SP, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20074v1 Burst suppression (BS) is a clinically relevant electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern used to monitor sedation depth and brain activity in critically ill patients, particularly during induced coma in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Automatic burst detection remains challenging because BS patterns vary substantially between patients and annotated datasets are scarce. Recently, EEG Foundation Models (FMs) have shown promise across several downstream EEG applications, but their usefulness for BS detection remains unexplored. We present the first study to evaluate EEG FMs for burst detection in reduced-montage ICU EEG without patient-specific calibration. We compare REVE-base, LUNA-large and LuMamba-Tiny with an adaptive thresholding baseline and a task-specific EEGNet baseline. Additionally, we complement conventional EEG window-based classification with event-based burst detection evaluation. This helps assessing clinically whether burst episodes are correctly detected, reducing the impact of expected annotation variability. The best model, REVE-base, achieved the highest event-based F1-score ($0.868 \pm 0.167$) and reduced burst-per-minute error by 52.1% and 36.2% compared to EEGNet and adaptive thresholding respectively, supporting FMs for scalable EEG monitoring in ICU. Ablation experiments showed that full fine-tuning was the most effective adaptation strategy with respect to frozen-backbone training, two-step fine-tuning, and LoRA-based adaptation, improving event-based F1-score over frozen-backbone training by up to $+0.102$ for LUNA-large. With reduced labeled datasets, pretrained REVE-base outperformed random initialization by $+0.723$ event-based F1 points at 25% of the cohort, demonstrating the benefit of pretraining FM representations when adapted to burst detection with limited labeled data. --- ### Source-Grounded Data Generation for Text-to-JSON Learning Authors: Sunghee Ahn, Guijin Son, Youngjae Yu Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20072v1 From financial filings to clinical records, legacy industries rely heavily on long, unstructured documents to store high-value information. Reliably extracting this information into structured, machine-readable representations is a key prerequisite to making the contents accessible to automated systems. JSON is a natural target for such structured extraction, yet constructing reliable and scalable text-to-JSON training data remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose STAGE (Spreadsheet-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEneration), a source-grounded data generation pipeline that constructs reports and JSON schema by using LLMs for scalable synthesis while validating ground-truth values against the underlying spreadsheet. Evaluations on STAGE-Eval, our source-grounded benchmark with an 851-example test set, show that STAGE produces stronger training data than existing approaches. This improves Qwen3-4B exact match from 31.37% to 74.27% and value accuracy from 45.46% to 90.69%. --- ### Process-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Theorem Proving via Lean Authors: Minsu Kim, Se-Young Yun Published: 2026-06-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20068v1 While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically has relied on a single binary verification signal, symbolic proof assistants in formal reasoning offer rich, fine-grained structured feedback. This gap between structured processes and unstructured rewards highlights the importance of feedback that is both dense and sound. In this work, we demonstrate that the Lean proof assistant itself can serve as a symbolic process oracle, supplying both outcome-level and fine-grained tactic-level verified feedback during training. Proof attempts are parsed into tactic sequences, and Lean's elaboration marks both locally sound steps and the earliest failing step, yielding dense, verifier-grounded credit signals rooted in type theory. We incorporate these structured rewards into a GRPO-style reinforcement learning objective with first-error propagation and first-token credit methods that balances outcome- and process-level advantages. Experiments with STP-Lean and DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 show that tactic-level supervision outperforms outcome-only baselines in most settings, delivering improvements on benchmarks such as MiniF2F and ProofNet. Beyond empirical gains, our study highlights a broader perspective: symbolic proof assistants are not only verifiers at evaluation time, but can also act as process-level reward oracles during training. This opens a path toward reinforcement learning frameworks that combine the scalability of language models with the reliability of symbolic verification for formal reasoning. ---