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arXiv2026

RLE-Bench: A Qualifying Exam for Coding Agents as Robot Learning Engineers

Coding agents are beginning to move beyond purely digital tasks to tackle physical-world challenges, particularly in robotics. Existing robotics benchmarks, however, primarily focus on the performance of individual artifacts, such as policies or controllers, offering limited coverage of coding agents' broader engineering capabilities. Real-world robotics extends beyond control: agents must build, integrate, diagnose, and improve heterogeneous artifacts under resource constraints and reason from multimodal feedback. To evaluate these broader capabilities, we introduce RLE-Bench, a benchmark of robot-learning tasks spanning four representative robotics development workflows: interactive control, policy learning, perception and estimation, and mechanical design. We use diverse task-specific metrics to evaluate the artifacts submitted by the coding agents, from the success rate the agents achieved to the policy agents trained, the harness agent built, and the mechanical structures the agent designed. We aggregate these metrics into an overall RLE Index and report workflow-specific capability profiles, enabling systematic comparison of coding agents' capabilities across multiple capability dimensions. Beyond performance ranks, we also conduct in-depth case studies examining agent behavior on representative tasks, highlighting both current capabilities and limitations, and pointing to the opportunities robotics tasks have to offer for future agent training.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Coherence-Aware Distributional Evaluation of Open-Ended Text Generation

Existing open-ended generation metrics measure likelihood, lexical diversity, or distributional similarity in generic representation space, yet can miss fundamental dimensions of quality. A prominent blind spot is global coherence: a generated passage may be locally fluent while remaining globally contradictory, causally inconsistent, or topically disconnected. We identify representation as a central bottleneck in detecting these failures and introduce CHORD (Coherence-aware Hidden-state Open-generation Reference Distance), a coherence-sensitive distributional metric. CHORD encodes generated and human-written corpora in the hidden-state space of a frozen LLM using a coherence-eliciting prompt, and compares the resulting distributions using RBF-MMD. To test coherence sensitivity and selectivity, we construct a counterfactual evaluation suite pairing graded coherence-degrading perturbations with meaning-preserving controls. CHORD selectively detects relation, discourse, structural, and mixture failures that perplexity, entropy, MAUVE, FBD, and MMD-based baselines either miss or cannot separate from benign rewriting. Factorial ablations show that representation is the primary source of coherence sensitivity, while RBF-MMD improves sample efficiency. Larger backbones capture finer-grained distinctions, but coherence prompting improves selectivity only when the backbone can follow the prompt. On unconditional generation and prefix continuation, CHORD yields model rankings that strongly align with human judgments of whether outputs make sense and appear human-written. Together, these results establish representation design as central to reliable distributional evaluation. Code: https://github.com/MAPS-research/CHORD. Experiments: https://github.com/MAPS-research/CHORD-Experiment.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Heddle: Learning Structural Templates for Parallelism Planning on Heterogeneous GPU Clusters

Training large machine learning models on shared GPU infrastructures faces two challenges: (1) GPU availability shifts dynamically with varying resource demands from tenants, and (2) hardware heterogeneity accumulates as datacenters continuously adopt new GPU generations. Due to the vast search space induced by heterogeneous GPU types and node sizes, training planners must prune it aggressively to remain tractable, yet must also derive high-throughput plans promptly as cluster configurations change. Heddle achieves this goal through a learning-based planner that reduces the full planning problem to a search over pipeline structures. Heddle encapsulates planning decisions in a structural template and learns to construct plans from templates over diverse cluster configurations offline. This design is effective because structural decisions constitute the performancecritical core of a parallelism plan, while the rest follows by rule or from a small priced candidate set once the plan structure is fixed. Evaluation shows that Heddle matches or exceeds the best plan found by five existing planners across clusters with varying GPU types and node sizes for three models of different sizes by up to 84.5% in throughput on dense models and 4.6x on MoE models.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Idempotents in the Temperley-Lieb Monoid and Other Categories

This paper examines idempotents in algebras and categories that arise from factorizations of the identity morphism. In the diagrammatic and combinatorial contexts considered here, these factorizations correspond to generalizations of meanders, where a meander is understood to be a curve in the plane that wanders transversely back and forth across a given straight line. By formulating the algebra of the Temperley-Lieb Monoid in terms of planar curve combinatorics, one can understand idempotents in the Temperley-Lieb Monoid in terms of meanders. Corresponding results are shown for the Brauer Monoid and for the Tangle Monoid and Tangle Category.

math.QA↗
arXiv2026

Emergence, Not Bandwidth: Physical Coupling and the Limits of Learned Multi-Agent Communication

Rate-limited multi-agent teams raise three questions the emergent-communication literature has answered only empirically: what an optimal message should encode, what compression costs over a horizon, and when a learned protocol is unique enough for a teammate to read. We answer them for rate-limited Dec-POMDPs, then measure how far reinforcement learning falls short of the optimum. Our theorems fix what is achievable independently of any learner, so a gap between an engineered and a learned sender at the same bit budget is an optimization fact, not an information-theoretic one. We instantiate this on three MuJoCo arenas spanning zero, partial and rigid physical coupling, charging every condition exactly 2 bits per decision, and create the discriminating regime by closing a physical side channel within one arena, holding bodies, task and reward fixed. Communication value is governed by coupling: under rigid coupling through a shared object, no channel beats silence (+0.001 +/- 0.001, p = 0.982, n = 25), since proprioception already carries that information; without coupling, every condition solves the task; under partial coupling, the engineered 2-bit sender reaches an interquartile mean of 1.000 but the learned one reaches 0.482, indistinguishable from silence (p = 0.400, n = 25). With a shared alphabet, bandwidth cannot explain the gap. Warm-starting from an engineered receiver localizes the failure: the same channel reaches 0.857 versus 0.562 cold-started (p < 0.001), so it is neither representational nor one of maintenance; reinforcement learning fails to discover the protocol. Cross-play shows learned protocols are individually meaningful but mutually unintelligible: self-play 0.980 collapses to 0.144 across seeds, and our best constructed alignment leaves at least 77% of that gap. All headline results use 25 seeds per arena and seven published baselines at matched rate.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CAR-VLA: Complexity-Aware and Risk-Adaptive Reasoning for Autonomous Driving

Existing adaptive reasoning methods for driving Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models primarily focus on whether to reason, overlooking how reasoning should differ across driving situations. Our key insight is that while scene complexity informs reasoning depth, dynamic risk is equally critical for deciding how to reason in time-critical situations. We therefore propose CAR-VLA, a unified driving VLA model that jointly considers scene complexity and dynamic risk to guide reasoning depth, urgency, and focus. CAR-VLA maps four complexity--risk categories to three reasoning modes: \textit{Fast Intuition} for direct trajectory generation in simple low-risk scenes, \textit{Slow Thinking} for deliberate reasoning in complex low-risk scenes, and \textit{Reflex Response} for compact, hazard-focused reasoning in high-risk scenes regardless of complexity. Rather than merely shortening deliberation, Reflex Response centers reasoning on the most critical hazard and the immediate safe response. We train CAR-VLA through progressive supervised learning that links scene assessment, reasoning-mode selection, and trajectory generation, followed by reasoning-augmented reinforcement learning to improve driving quality and reasoning behavior. Experiments on NAVSIM v1(91.1 PDMS), NAVSIM v2(90.3 EPDMS), and Navhard(35.0 EPDMS) demonstrate competitive driving performance. Qualitative comparisons on navtest and in-house high-risk scenarios further illustrate risk-aware reasoning and hazard-responsive trajectory generation. The code for this paper will be released publicly at: https://github.com/chenxl124578/CAR-VLA.git

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Q-learning Penalized Transformer for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning

This paper addresses the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning, which involves training a policy to satisfy safety constraints using an offline dataset. This problem is inherently challenging as it requires balancing three highly interconnected and competing objectives: satisfying safety constraints, maximizing rewards, and adhering to the behavior regularization imposed by the offline dataset. To tackle this trilogy challenge, we propose Q-learning Penalized Transformer policy (QPT), a \emph{training--inference consistent} framework that bridges conditional sequence modeling with constraint-aware value estimation. QPT trains a Transformer policy that generates actions conditioned on trajectory context and target return/cost, retaining strong behavior regularization. To inject explicit safety semantics during learning, we augment sequence-model training with a Q-shaped penalty using learned reward and cost Q-functions to favor high return under low constraint violation. At inference, the same Q-functions enforce the cost threshold and choose the highest-reward feasible action, closing the loop between training and deployment. We provide a principled analysis under stylized near-deterministic CMDPs, characterizing how Q-penalized conditional generation improve safety and performance. Empirically, QPT consistently outperforms strong safe offline RL baselines across 38 tasks on the DSRL benchmark, and exhibits robust zero-shot adaptation to different constraint thresholds.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Alignment-Guided Flow Transformer for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Policy Learning

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models point toward general-purpose robotic intelligence by unifying perception, instruction, and control. Despite impressive progress, existing VLA models often adapt poorly due to \emph{tri-modal misalignment} among vision, language, and action, which weakens action grounding and hurts generalization and fine-tuning efficiency. In this work, we present Alignment-Guided Flow Transformer (AGFT), a novel framework that explicitly enforces tri-modal alignment through a dedicated alignment loss, bridging the representational gap across modalities and enhancing task adaptation. While prior research has predominantly emphasized bi-modal vision--language alignment, we systematically formalize and study tri-modal alignment in VLA models, and provide both ablations and analysis to isolate its role in improving adaptation and robustness. To further accelerate deployment, we adopt a flow-matching objective, enabling substantially fewer inference steps than diffusion-based policies while maintaining accuracy. Theoretically, we establish a quantitative connection between the tri-modal alignment gap and the optimization tightness of flow matching; empirically, experiments on the extensive benchmark show that AGFT achieves superior success rates and lower inference latency compared to SOTA baselines, underscoring tri-modal alignment as a key ingredient for scaling robust VLA manipulation.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Using Graph Neural Networks for the segmentation of overlapping objects in high granularity calorimeters

High-granularity calorimeters at the High-Luminosity LHC require novel algorithms to resolve overlapping particle showers. We present an optimised Graph Neural Network (GNN) segmentation block that predicts node-level energy fractions to disentangle overlapping two-photon showers. By accelerating graph construction and convolution operations, our pipeline achieves competitive separation efficiency with significantly reduced algorithmic complexity.

hep-ex↗
arXiv2026

HALO: Enhancing Time Series Generation via Hyperspherical Latents and Masked AutoregRessive Modeling

Most existing time series generators rely on a two-stage modeling paradigm: the first stage learns discrete latent representations of time series; the second stage performs autoregressive modeling on these discrete latents through next token prediction. However, this paradigm suffers from two stage-specific limitations: the first stage can lead to information loss when discretizing continuous time series, while the second stage is prone to error accumulation during autoregressive generation. To address these limitations, our core idea is to perform generative modeling in a continuous latent space with a more efficient autoregressive framework. We propose HALO, which enhances time series generation via Hyperspherical Latents and Masked Autoregressive modeling to achieve this goal by tackling two key bottlenecks: (1) variance and scale heterogeneity of continuous latent representations; (2) the difficulty of balancing generation efficiency with temporal correlation modeling. HALO first introduces a hyperspherical VAE that constrains continuous latents to a fixed-radius hyperspherical shell, effectively stabilizing the numerical fluctuations of continuous latent representations. Secondly, we develop a masked autoregressive model that balances parallel decoding and temporal correlation learning, substantially reducing the number of inference steps required for generation and improving generation stability. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HALO achieves state-of-the-art generation performance while offering significantly improved inference efficiency over existing advanced baselines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

How to Tame a Multi-Headed Hydra? Adaptive Multi-Category Safety Steering for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly widespread, preventing unsafe responses to harmful prompts is essential for their safe deployment. Activation steering offers an approach to improving LLM safety by modifying internal activations during inference without updating model parameters. However, a single prompt can involve multiple harm categories, and steering toward safety in one category may leave harmful content from another unaddressed. Despite advances in adaptive steering, existing methods do not explicitly coordinate steering direction and strength when multiple harm categories co-occur within a single prompt. To address this problem, we propose CAM-Steer, a Category-Adaptive Multi-category Safety Steering framework. Specifically, it estimates the risk associated with each harm category by comparing the current hidden state with safe and unsafe prototypes. The estimated risks are then used to combine the safety directions for different harm categories into a single steering direction and to determine the strength of the intervention. Finally, it rotates the hidden state along the composed steering direction, with the rotation angle determined by the estimated risks, while preserving the hidden-state norm. Experiments across three LLM backbones and seven harm categories show that CAM-Steer outperforms the evaluated baselines in average defense success rate, including when categories co-occur. Further analyses support its component designs and informative risk scores, with negligible inference overhead.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

GenNVS: Geometry-enhanced Novel View Synthesis via Disentangled 3D Prior

Single-image novel view synthesis remains challenging because the underlying 3D geometry is highly ambiguous. Recent diffusion-based approaches produce plausible results, but they often struggle to preserve the geometric structure and spatial coherence of foreground objects. We present GenNVS, a framework for geometry-enhanced novel view synthesis via a disentangled 3D prior. Specifically, GenNVS models foreground objects and the background with 3D Gaussian Splatting and aligns them through a coarse-to-fine geometric optimization process to form a unified 3D scene. This scene conditions a video diffusion model through the proposed Dual-Stream Masking mechanism, which guides synthesis by jointly exploiting rendered validity masks and geometry-aware warping. Experimental results show that GenNVS performs favorably against recent methods in both visual quality and geometric accuracy, while naturally supporting flexible scene editing.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Counterfactual Attention Policy Distillation for Temporal Video Grounding

Temporal video grounding is a key capability of advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for the thorough understanding of video events, which is however often limited by repeated actions and visually similar contexts in long videos. In this paper, we study this issue from the perspective of On-policy distillation (OPD) and propose a new training regime for MLLMs termed Counterfactual Attention Policy Distillation (CAPD). In particular, OPD is a viable solution for MLLMs via providing dense teacher supervision on student-generated trajectories. But its next-token based teacher-student distillation is hard to identify the specific video segments supporting each predicted timestamp, which is critical for temporal grounding. In this case, CAPD measures how masking each temporal group changes the teacher's output distribution. The resulting counterfactual influence calibrates the teacher's attention and weights token-level distillation, allowing the student to learn the temporal evidence that affects boundary prediction. To validate CAPD, we trained it on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct using only 2,500 samples for one epoch, and evaluated it on the TimeLens and multiple general video benchmarks. Experimental results show that CAPD improves average recall by 12.0% relative to GRPO on TimeLens while preserving general video understanding, achieving comparable accuracy to the base model.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

After the Fix: Transfer of Corrected Agent Experience

Does repairing an episode make its experience a better memory for the next task? We transfer the same failed source before and after accepted repair to a fixed target, alongside independent execution. Our 3,300 runs cover 100 ThinkingBox pairs and the same 100 APEX pairs with and without source-state inheritance, under eleven conditions. ThinkingBox's Full/Skill/Hybrid correction gains are 44/29/32 percentage points, with corrected performance 25/22/18 points above independence; inference weakens at the task-family level. Yet 12 of Full's 15-point larger correction gap over Skill come from worse uncorrected performance, not better corrected memory. Moreover, 22 of Full's 46 upward transitions restore observed baseline success. Neither APEX regime establishes comparable aggregate correction benefits. Action evidence connects workflow gains with reusable obligations and convention conflicts with source-local choices. Text APEX's accepted execution reaches 52% versus its summary's 40%, without robust global/group-level superiority or an estab- lished advantage over independence. Smaller handoffs reduce input but increase calls. The value of repairing experience is therefore distinct from the value of reusing it: memory updates require both a previous-version reference and a fresh-start reference.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

DirectUV: Image-Conditioned UV Texture Generation with Surface-Aware Positional Encoding

Generating high-quality UV textures for 3D meshes remains challenging. Multi-view projection pipelines suffer from occlusion and view inconsistency, and recent methods that generate textures directly in UV space still rely on auxiliary modules to supply 3D information, leaving the attention mechanism tied to UV-grid positions rather than to the underlying surface geometry. This mismatch limits coherence across seams and disconnected UV islands. We propose DirectUV, an image-conditioned UV texture diffusion framework that operates in the latent UV space of a pretrained image VAE, in which a Diffusion Transformer denoises the UV latent given a single input image and a coarse UV map. At its core, Surface-Aware Positional Encoding (SAPE) replaces the standard 2D-grid positional encoding with encodings derived from per-token 3D surface coordinates obtained via UV-to-surface correspondence. As positional encodings define the distance metric used by attention, SAPE enables tokens to interact according to 3D positional proximity derived from surface correspondence rather than UV-grid distance, restoring coherence across seams and disconnected islands. A multi-level extension further assigns different attention heads to progressively finer subdivisions of the same latent UV patch, allowing the model to reason about surface structure at multiple granularities. Experiments show that DirectUV produces sharper and more globally consistent textures than other baselines, with the largest improvements in occluded and view-unseen regions where projection-based methods leave gaps or stretched textures.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

OmniTide: Co-Designing Algorithms and Systems for Efficient On-Device Omni-LLM Streaming

On-device streaming omni-modal inference safeguards user privacy and eliminates prohibitive per-token API costs, but faces a critical bottleneck: the continuous influx of multimodal data rapidly exhausts constrained memory and compute budgets via monotonic KV cache growth. Existing sparse attention methods fall short, either incurring prohibitive online estimation latency or destroying interleaved cross-modal context, while failing to resolve physical memory fragmentation. We present OmniTide, the first algorithm-system co-design tailored for efficient on-device streaming omni-modal inference. Driven by the observation of modality-aware structural sparsity, OmniTide adopts a unit-based abstraction with two components: (1) At the algorithm level, OmniPick logically retains critical multimodal context based on unit boundaries and modality importance to preserve task accuracy; (2) At the system level, OmniPage physically partitions the cache by retention likelihood and dynamically compacts surviving sparse tokens, minimizing both memory fragmentation and data-movement overhead. Extensive evaluations across three streaming benchmarks and two consumer-device architectures show that OmniTide achieves up to $12.72\times$ kernel speedups and $2.40\times$ lower stream-loop latency. On StreamingBench, it improves accuracy by up to 18.0 percentage points over sliding-window baselines at comparable session cost. OmniPage further reduces the physical KV span by up to 26.7% relative to native logical eviction, unlocking real-time, infinite-context streaming on edge devices.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

CapField-OPD: Learning Continuous Capability Fields via Joint-Anchored Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Flow Models

Reward-specialized post-training produces strong experts for flow-based generative models, while multi-teacher on-policy distillation (OPD) consolidates their capabilities into a single student. Existing methods, however, route each prompt to a single teacher according to its semantic category, implicitly binding the desired capability to prompt content. This coupling makes capability invocation vulnerable to prompt perturbations and prevents users from explicitly adjusting the strength of the desired capability at inference time. In this work, we introduce CapField-OPD, an OPD framework that integrates multiple teachers into a continuous capability field through explicit capability coordinates. We use teacher models as anchors to construct this field, with the coordinates determining how their outputs are combined. Each capability configuration thus receives a unique supervision target, and capability control no longer depends on prompt semantics. Since the training anchors may not be optimal at inference time, we further profile the learned field on a small calibration set. The coordinate with the highest mean reward serves as the recommended default, while coordinates that are frequently optimal offer a promising candidate set for test-time scaling. Extensive experiments on compositional generation, text rendering, and visual aesthetics demonstrate that CapField-OPD consolidates multiple specialized teachers into a single student while preserving or surpassing their performance, reliably invokes the desired capabilities under semantics-preserving prompt variations, and supports continuous capability control and coordinate-based test-time scaling.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

From Pixel Generation to Topological Inference: Structural Dual Super-Resolution for Trustworthy Cross-Physical-Domain Trabecular Morphology Learning

Clinical CT and UHRCT cannot resolve individual trabeculae, whereas synchrotron radiation microCT (SRuCT) provides high-resolution references but is not applicable for in vivo imaging. The two domains differ by a 32x resolution gap, are only coarsely paired, and exhibit severe physical differences including partial volume effects, noise, and artifacts. Existing super-resolution networks and pretrained-prior methods (GLEAN/StyleGAN2, Stable SR/LDM) underperform because they target pixel generation---diverse details and SSIM/PSNR---and do not model these physical differences. Pixel generation for a 32x resolution gap is intrinsically ill-posed. We propose a paradigm shift from pixel generation to topological inference: deterministically predicting invariant microstructures from macro-scale low-resolution inputs, evaluated by morphological parameters. The core of our 2D morphology learning lies in training on 2D slices while evaluating on 3D morphological parameters, ensuring that the learned representations capture true three-dimensional trabecular topology rather than 2D pixel statistics. We realize this paradigm via structural dual super-resolution, coupling forward physical degradation (micro-to-macro) with inverse structural inference (macro-to-micro) through structural duality constraints. The method is an end-to-end, few-shot, compact structural dual network (SDN), comprising a bidirectional modeling network, a multi-scale structural consistency discriminator, and four structural duality constraints. On the test set, SDN achieves morphological parameters largely consistent with SRuCT across six metrics, with SSIM reaching 0.8. Trained on 3.2 um SSRF data, the model generalizes well to 3.25 um isotropic BSRF data from an independent source, validating cross-source generalization and confirming trustworthy structural inference rather than pixel generation.

cs.CV↗