arXiv subjects

Kai Han

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Han.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) requires a concrete mechanism through which an AI system observes its capabilities and converts that evidence into the next round of learning. We present NeoHorse-1, a family of agent-native models developed to explore this path through agentic post-training. Our system combines a heterogeneous model pool with intelligent routing, recording the predicted capability demand, selected service tier, and subsequent interaction for each user turn. These records are converted into training examples that preserve interleaved reasoning, tool calls, and harness context, and are admitted through structural validation, six-dimensional semantic evaluation, and subscene-level labeling. Routing signals organize supervised fine-tuning into a three-stage curriculum and extend to routing-guided on-policy distillation, where a teacher supervises student-generated responses under the same progression. Capability-guided allocation then converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop in which what the system learns to do shapes what it learns from next. Across eleven benchmarks covering harness-based agents, tool use, coding, and instruction following, post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B, substantially narrowing the aggregate gap between the post-trained 4B model and the 9B base model. NeoHorse-1 provides an initial prototype of this feedback-driven process and a path toward harness-mediated RSI across successive iterations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CloSeR: Unified Relational Distillation from Closed-Set Teachers for Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention: given partially labelled data, the goal is to correctly recognize known classes while discovering coherent novel categories from unlabelled samples. Recent GCD methods typically adapt foundation models by jointly optimizing supervised classification and unsupervised discovery objectives on mixed labelled and unlabelled data. While effective, this coupled training can entangle closed-set recognition and open-set discovery, leading to objective conflict and biased predictions, and may disturb the semantic geometry of pretrained representations under limited labels and noisy pseudo-labels. We propose CloSeR, a simple plug-and-play framework that injects Closed-Set Relational knowledge into GCD training. CloSeR first builds a domain-adapted closed-set teacher by tuning lightweight block-wise adapters on labelled known-class data while keeping the foundation model backbone frozen, thereby preserving pretrained priors at low training cost. It then transfers the teacher's knowledge to downstream GCD via Unified Relational Distillation (URD), which distills complementary global sample-to-prototype relations to anchor known-class semantics and local sample-to-sample relations to preserve neighborhood structure, using separate feature pathways to reduce optimization interference. CloSeR is head-agnostic and readily integrates with both parametric and non-parametric GCD methods. Extensive experiments with DINO and DINOv2 backbones on six benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet-100, CUB, Stanford-Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft) show consistent gains over GCD baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/closer/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Learning Implicit Constitutive Laws for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Videos

We present GCA (Gaussian Constitutive Alignment), a framework for learning implicit constitutive laws from monocular dynamic video of deformable objects represented by 3D Gaussians. Given a static multi-view scan for geometric initialization, our method learns intrinsic physical dynamics solely from a single fixed-viewpoint video of the moving object. Existing implicit methods often suffer from local minima under noisy supervision and lack physical interpretability, while explicit approaches rely on predefined constitutive equations, limiting generalizability and becoming unstable in monocular settings. To address these challenges, our framework unifies LoRA-based adaptation with two key alignment modules. First, we propose Rank-based Depth-Geometric Anchors (RDGA) to establish robust geometric constraints from monocular dynamic observations via scale-invariant rank-based depth alignment, reducing the reliance on unreliable pixel-level color supervision. Second, a Constitutive Prior Regularizer (CPR) integrates classical constitutive models as soft differentiable priors, regularizing the optimization while preserving the flexibility of implicit modeling---even when the actual material is absent from the hypotheses. Extensive experiments on synthetic, real-to-sim, and real-world datasets demonstrate that GCA outperforms existing methods, achieving 48% lower Chamfer Distance than the strongest baseline on synthetic benchmarks while remaining robust under monocular supervision.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Single Expert: Harmonizing Diverse Visual Priors in MLLMs for Spatial Understanding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated substantial promise in spatial understanding. Existing works typically incorporate prior knowledge extracted from a pre-trained foundation model to further enhance the spatial awareness of MLLMs. In this paper, we first reveal that when integrating diverse foundation models into MLLMs, different models provide complementary spatial priors that benefit different tasks. Motivated by this, we propose $\textbf{ViPS}$, a novel multi-model prior framework designed to fully unleash the potential of incorporating multiple $\textbf{Vi}$sual $\textbf{P}$riors from diverse models into MLLMs for $\textbf{S}$patial understanding. Specifically, ViPS introduces an Efficient Prior Proxy to generate multiple foundational priors with minimal inference overhead, and a Dynamic Prior Fusion mechanism to achieve harmonious and context-aware prior fusion and injection from the prior proxies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViPS successfully harmonizes diverse visual priors, establishing new state-of-the-art performance across multiple complex spatial reasoning and 3D spatial understanding benchmarks. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vips

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Routing: The Harness-Native Data Flywheel

Large language model agents are increasingly executed not by a single model call, but by an execution harness that manages observation, context, control, action, state, and verification. At the same time, frontier and open models are becoming structurally specialized: a model that is strong at code editing, long-context recovery, tool use, mathematical reasoning, or low-latency response may not dominate on the other axes. This makes model selection inside an agent a core systems problem rather than a per-query serving trick. Existing routing methods mostly optimize single-turn cost-quality trade-offs and therefore miss the execution state, intermediate failures, and feedback loops that make agents different from chat completion. We propose Harness-Native agentic routing, a step-level routing paradigm that selects either a single best-fit model for cost-effective execution or multiple complementary models for ensemble-style accuracy improvement, conditioned on the full harness state. The key insight is that every routing decision naturally produces a structured data record -- consisting of the query, harness state, model choice or model set, execution trace, outcome, and cost -- whose labels are supplied by the environment rather than by the router itself. These records form a harness-native data flywheel: execution traces train better routers and harness-native models, which improve cost-quality trade-offs and generate more traces under the same budget. We instantiate this idea in OpenSquilla with a four-layer routing stack, an open LightGBM cold-start ranker, and a staged router-model path that turns logged arena records into progressively stronger routing policies. The report studies singleton and multi-model routing on agentic benchmarks including DRACO and PinchBench, and argues that agentic routing is not merely cost control, but a data engine for agent-native training.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Geometric Reciprocity: Unlocking Self-Supervision for Stereoscopic Video Generation

Monocular-to-stereo conversion synthesizes stereoscopic content from 2D videos for immersive 3D experiences. In modern Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) approaches, stereo inpainting of disocclusions is the critical bottleneck. Training-based methods achieve superior quality but rely on scarce stereo pairs or synthetic data with domain gaps. We address this through the first self-supervised framework learning from monocular videos via cycle consistency. Our key contribution is the Geometric Reciprocity Theorem (GRT): under the nearest-neighbor DIBR formulation, the disocclusion mask when synthesizing a target view equals the mask of pixels lost when warping back from target to source, enabling analytical computation of test-time disocclusion masks directly from monocular images. This yields train-test consistency for the stated warping formulation, supporting self-supervised learning from unlimited monocular videos and substantial improvements over training-free and supervised state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/grt/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Holo-Captioning: Toward the Text Equivalent of 3D Scenes

This work introduces holo-captioning, a novel task that strives to seek the text equivalent of 3D scenes. As the initial step, we formulate holo-captioning as generating a structured textual description that comprehensively depicts all entities within a 3D scene -- including their semantic tags, spatial locations, attributes, and inter-entity relations. To tackle this challenging task, we first develop an effective captioning engine to produce detailed descriptions of individual entity instances and instance pairs, and contribute a large-scale benchmark comprising over 15K scenes for training and evaluation. Building upon this foundation, we propose HoloScribe, a novel model that features an instance-aware decoupled pipeline for generating structured holo-captions, and further incorporates anchor-aware instance linking to identify relational instance pairs. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive evaluation metric named HoloScore, and provide a human-curated test set to ensure reliable model assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that HoloScribe significantly outperforms state-of-the-art 3D dense captioners and 3D LLM generalists, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/holocap/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers

The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios. To improve efficiency, existing approaches often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. However, these strategies typically lead to substantial performance degradation on tasks requiring precise long-range recall. In this work, we propose MATCH, a scalable and efficient framework that augments sparsified attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on both synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. These findings highlight the versatility of MATCH as a general approach for enhancing in-context retrieval capabilities while maintaining the efficiency benefits of sparse attention architectures.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SCoPE: Sightline-Coordinate Positional Encoding for Video Diffusion Transformers

Video diffusion transformers address their tokens by position on the pixel-time grid: an address in the tensor, not in the world. The address we would want, the world point a token depicts, lies on a surface not yet generated, while its camera ray is fixed once the user specifies a trajectory. SCoPE therefore treats the ray as a second positional coordinate, and camera control becomes a property of the coordinate system, not an added module. The ray is added to the pretrained attention's queries and keys, and the score gains a term that reads the two rays alone. Its canonical form, the reciprocal product of line geometry, measures how nearly two lines of sight meet. Normalize-Gate-Inject makes a single encoding trainable across metric and up-to-scale pose sources. The retrofit keeps RoPE bit-exact, starts from the unchanged pretrained DiT, and adds under 0.1/% new parameters. On Wan2.2 at 5B and 14B under matched data and budget, SCoPE improves every camera-controllability and fidelity metric, leads all closed-loop revisit metrics, and shows widening margins with model size. At 14B, rotation error falls 29/% and FVD 43/% below the strongest baseline.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Scene-Level Heterogeneous Physics Simulation with 3D Gaussian Splats

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved state-of-the-art photorealistic rendering, but the representation gap prevents these assets from being physically interactive. Production-grade physics engines do not understand the 3DGS representation, while prior physics-for-3DGS methods are monolithic silos. These prior works are fundamentally limited, demonstrating only object-centric physics in isolated environments, such as on an ideal plane. They are incapable of interacting with complex static collision geometry or heterogeneous assets. We propose a novel framework that, for the first time, bridges this gap by enabling 3DGS assets to participate in scene-level, heterogeneous, multi-solver physical simulations. Our core contribution is a Representation Abstraction Framework that translates all diverse assets, including 3DGS, virtual meshes, and fluids, into a unified physical particle set. This abstraction is key to enabling complex behaviors, such as the non-rigid deformation of 3DGS assets, within a unified physics pipeline. This particle set, along with the static scene collision boundaries derived from scene capture, is processed within a solver-agnostic physics kernel. The physical results are then mapped back to drive each asset's specific visual reconstruction. This architecture unlocks capabilities impossible with prior art. We demonstrate complex, two-way interactions between deformable 3DGS assets, standard CG assets such as fluids and meshes, and large-scale captured static environments, showcasing realistic coupled phenomena that were previously unattainable.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2026

From Question Answering to Task Completion: A Survey on Agent System and Harness Design

LLM-based agents mark a shift from passive question answering to active task completion: they perceive environments, invoke tools, maintain state, and act over extended horizons. As agent systems have evolved from prompt engineering to workflows and context engineering, harness engineering, and agent-native training with co-evolution, a central question has become increasingly important: where does the bottleneck in agent performance reside, in the foundation model, in the execution harness, or in the coupling between them? This survey examines LLM-based agents through a model-harness lens. We first clarify the functional definition of agents and the implementation view of an LLM-based agent as a foundation model coupled with an execution harness. We then analyze the limits of model-centric scaling, trace four paradigms of agent engineering, and decompose the execution harness into six coupled runtime responsibilities: observation, context, control, action, state, and verification. Using this decomposition, we map task properties and domain pressures to harness configurations, review benchmark and evaluation practices, and synthesize model-harness evidence on how runtime design affects long-horizon task completion, efficiency, and reliability. Finally, we identify open challenges in value-aware evaluation, safety, harness generalization, and model-harness co-evolution. Rather than treating agents as models with auxiliary tools, this survey argues that agent quality -- including success, efficiency, safety, and generalization -- emerges from the interaction between model capability, runtime infrastructure, task structure, and evaluation design. A collection of papers discussed in this survey is provided in https://github.com/ggjy/Awesome-Agent-Engineering.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator. The full benchmark contains 350 GitHub issue-resolution instances across 8 languages and 43 repositories, drawn from SWE-bench-Multilingual and SWE-bench-Verified-Mini after future-commit cleanup. We also release Claw-SWE-Bench Lite for faster validation, which is an 80-instance subset selected by a cost-aware, rank-aware procedure over 17 calibration columns. On the full benchmark, OpenClaw with a minimal direct-diff adapter scores only $19.1\%$ Pass@1, whereas the full adapter reaches $73.4\%$ with the same GLM 5.1 backbone, showing that adapter design is essential for enabling OpenClaw-style harnesses to perform coding tasks effectively. Across an OpenClaw $\times$ nine-model sweep and a five-claw $\times$ two-model sweep, model choice changes Pass@1 by $29.4$ pp and harness choice by $27.4$ pp under fixed models; systems with similar accuracy can differ substantially in total API cost. Claw-SWE-Bench therefore treats harness and cost accounting as first-class axes of SWE-style coding-agent evaluation, providing both a full benchmark and a low-cost reference set for reproducible comparison. The data is available at https://github.com/opensquilla/claw-swe-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/TokenRhythm/Claw-SWE-Bench.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

FGRPO: Federated GRPO with Adaptive Aggregation on Non-IID Data

Recent advances in language models have established reinforcement learning as the primary paradigm for eliciting self-correction and long-chain reasoning. While group relative policy optimization (GRPO) offers superior scalability by eliminating the critic network, deploying it on a central infrastructure entails collecting a large volume of data from distributed owners, which poses significant privacy risks. To address these concerns, we introduce federated GRPO (FGRPO), a framework designed to decentralize the fine-tuning of reasoning models across heterogeneous data owners. To effectively mitigate the instability caused by divergent reward scales across heterogeneous tasks, FGRPO incorporates an adaptive aggregation mechanism based on relative performance gain. By characterizing each client's improvement relative to its personalized historical baseline, the framework dynamically prioritizes effective learning trajectories regardless of local task difficulty. FGRPO ensures robust convergence on non-IID data while preserving data privacy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

DECA: Decentralizing Block-Wise Adam for Efficient LLM Full-Parameter Fine-Tuning on Non-IID Data

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) in privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained environments remains challenging. Since training data are often distributed across multiple clients, decentralized fine-tuning offers a natural paradigm for collaborative adaptation without a central server. However, enabling full-parameter fine-tuning (FPFT) in this decentralized setting is difficult: FPFT provides strong adaptation capacity but incurs prohibitive resource consumption for billion-scale models. Existing decentralized LLM fine-tuning methods therefore mainly rely on parameter-efficient updates, which improve efficiency but may restrict downstream performance. Moreover, client data are typically non-IID, making decentralized optimization more vulnerable to client drift and unstable convergence. To address these challenges, we propose DECA, a resource-efficient decentralized FPFT framework for LLMs on non-IID data. DECA partitions model parameters into disjoint blocks and performs sequential block-wise Adam optimization, reducing resource consumption while preserving decentralized full-parameter adaptation. To stabilize training, DECA further introduces first- and second-order block-wise moment estimates with fresh local gradient statistics and consensus-derived discrepancy signals. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, showing that DECA achieves fast convergence, strong downstream performance, and significant resource efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders

Vision foundation models are bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of self-attention, which limits usable resolution and increases the cost of large-scale pretraining. Subquadratic alternatives such as linear attention and state-space models reduce this cost, but often serialize images into 1D token streams and weaken the 2D spatial structure important for vision. Generalized Spatial Propagation Networks (GSPN) instead propagate context directly on the 2D grid through line-scan recurrences, achieving near-linear complexity without positional embeddings, but have seen little use as foundation-scale encoders. We present C-GSPN, a foundation-scale vision encoder based on 2D spatial propagation. C-GSPN makes the operator practical through three improvements: (1) a fast GSPN CUDA kernel that fuses per-step launches into a single warp-specialized implementation with shared-memory tiling, coalesced access, and a compact multi-channel propagation, reaching over 90% of peak memory bandwidth and running up to 40--52x faster than the original GSPN implementation; (2) a compressed latent-space propagation block with fused normalization, which turns kernel-level speed into block- and model-level efficiency; and (3) a two-stage cross-operator distillation recipe that trains the new architecture from an attention teacher without the cost of from-scratch foundation-scale training. Distilled with 600M image-text pairs, C-GSPN matches an isomorphic ViT baseline with 15% fewer parameters, improves ADE20K segmentation by +2.1%, transfers to high resolution with a fraction of the data needed from scratch, and delivers a 4x end-to-end block speedup at 2K with single-pass, tiling-free inference.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

iVGR: Internalizing Visually Grounded Reasoning for MLLMs with Reinforcement Learning

While visually grounded Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance fine-grained perception in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), its efficacy during the inference phase remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically find that mandating explicit object boxes in visually grounded CoT during inference often degrades performance compared to standard textual CoT, which reasons without explicit visual grounding. We hypothesize that the visual localization capability can be internalized into the textual CoT and that the mandatory explicit grounding introduces unnecessary interference with the model's primary objective of answer prediction. To address this problem, we propose Internalizing Visually Grounded Reasoning (\textbf{iVGR}), a novel reinforcement learning framework that transfers localization capabilities into the textual reasoning process. We employ a dual-stream training strategy, where a textual stream is aligned with a high-quality visually grounded stream via a proposed consistency reward, enabling the model to localize accurately without explicit grounding during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines on fine-grained benchmarks, while maintaining the flexibility to support tool-assisted inference workflows.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CodeBind: Decoupled Representation Learning for Multimodal Alignment with Unified Compositional Codebook

Multimodal representation alignment is pivotal for large language models and robotics. Traditional methods are often hindered by cross-modal information discrepancies and data scarcity, leading to suboptimal alignment spaces that overlook modality-unique features. We propose CodeBind, a framework that optimizes multimodal representation spaces through a modality-shared-specific codebook design. By incrementally aligning target and bridging modalities, CodeBind bypasses the need for fully paired data. Unlike traditional hard alignment, CodeBind decomposes features into shared components for semantic consistency and specific components for modality-unique details. This design utilizes a compositional vector quantization scheme, where a shared codebook bridges modality gaps and modality-specific codebooks mitigate representation bias by preventing dominant modalities from overshadowing others. Validated across nine modalities (text, image, video, audio, depth, thermal, tactile, 3D point cloud, EEG), CodeBind achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal classification and retrieval tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

VAGS: Velocity Adaptive Guidance Scale for Image Editing and Generation

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is the primary control over how strongly text semantics move a flow-based sampler, yet standard practice holds its scale fixed across the entire ODE trajectory. This is a fundamental mismatch: early steps are noise-dominated and carry weak semantic signal, while late steps commit image structure and demand stronger directional commitment; more critically, the value of any guidance strength depends on whether the guided velocity is consistent with the model's current dynamics or working against them. We propose \textit{Velocity-Adaptive Guidance Scale} (VAGS), a training-free replacement that multiplies the nominal scale by a bounded factor combining a temporal signal-level term with the cosine similarity between task-relevant velocity fields. For inversion-free editing, VAGS measures the alignment between source- and target-guided velocities, so edit strength at each step reflects local compatibility between preservation and transformation. For generation, VAGS-Gen uses the alignment between unconditional and conditional velocities as the analogous signal. Neither variant requires fine-tuning, auxiliary networks, or extra forward passes, and fixed CFG is recovered as a special case. On PIE-Bench and DIV2K for editing, and COCO17, CUB-200, and Flickr30K for generation, VAGS consistently improves structural fidelity and generation quality over fixed CFG and recent training-free guidance variants. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/Velocity_Adaptive_Guidance_Scale.

cs.CV↗