arXiv:2606.23805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The 2025 Iberian blackout has renewed concerns about the resilience of power grids with high shares of renewable generation. This commentary argues that renewable generation can not only advance decarbonization but also strengthen grid stability through synthetic inertia, advanced inverter-based control, and coordinated transmission planning. Rapid advances in energy storage and power electronics make this transition increasingly viable.
Science Journals
arXiv:2606.23891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rise in GPU compute speed has outpaced improvements in host-to-device memory transfer speeds, despite the advent of shared-memory superchips. Consequently, memory transfer times now constitute an increasingly large fraction of total time-to-solution, compelling developers to compress GPU kernel input and output data into compact, minimal formats prior to GPU-offloading. This complements existing work on GPU- and compute-friendly data arrangements. We study a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics solver and propose memory layout strategies for host-side particle data that are particularly well-suited to GPU-offloading. Specifically, we advocate splitting classic array-of-struct data structures into a split array-of-struct arrangement, in which each logical struct decomposes into substructs determined by kernel read/write access patterns and attribute types. Splitting a monolithic particle struct into several bespoke, finer-grained structs can reduce the time required to pack data to and from buffers by ~20% - 40%, lowering total time spent on GPU-offloading by ~12% - 25%.
arXiv:2606.23901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of robust formation control by introducing Topological Online Learning for Displacement-based (TOLD) formation control, a real-time edge-level adaptation framework. Unlike conventional node-level robust controllers that regulate individual robot inputs without modifying the interaction topology, TOLD updates the interaction topology weights online to directly minimize formation distortion. Two strategies are proposed under the TOLD formation control framework: Online Gradient Flow (OGF) with unconstrained weights and Online Exponential Gradient Flow (OExpGF) with non-negative convex weights. Theoretical analysis establishes that, for single-integrator agents over directed graphs, OExpGF guarantees asymptotic consensus, while OGF ensures bounded formation distortion. Simulations with twelve robots under intermittent disturbances show 1.2%-33.14% median cumulative Root Mean Distortion Error reduction when augmenting TOLD with node-level controllers. Hardware experiments with Crazyflie 2.0 quadrotors demonstrate over 62% (OGF) and 31.4% (OExpGF) reduction in median formation distortion compared to fixed-weight consensus.
arXiv:2606.24404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.
arXiv:2606.24418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data augmentation is a simple and model-agnostic approach for exploiting known invariances in learning problems. Given a group acting on the input space, one augments the training set with transformed copies of each sample. Because it exploits symmetries without modifying the underlying learning algorithm, data augmentation can be applied broadly across learning methods. However, this universality comes at a computational cost: when the group is large, full group-sized augmentation quickly becomes computationally infeasible. This raises a fundamental question: Can partial data augmentation achieve the same statistical benefits as full augmentation in terms of generalization and sample complexity? We develop a general framework for investigating this question using Fourier analysis and the representation theory of finite groups. We show that, for a broad class of classical learning problems, partial data augmentation based on a randomly sampled subset of group elements achieves the same minimax rates as full augmentation, up to an approximation error that vanishes as the subset size increases. Our results provide a theoretical explanation for why partial augmentation can retain the statistical benefits of full augmentation despite enforcing symmetry only approximately, and shed light on a recently raised question in learning with symmetries: whether statistically optimal learning under general group invariances can be achieved using computationally scalable methods. Moreover, we prove a complementary impossibility result: enforcing exact invariance via data augmentation requires averaging over the entire group, and cannot be achieved by any strict subset when the hypothesis space is sufficiently expressive. Together, these results provide a unified perspective on full and partial data augmentation, as well as exact and approximate symmetry enforcement.
arXiv:2606.24473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove new error bounds for finite Carleman truncations of polynomial ordinary differential equations. The analysis works directly in the original monomial basis and for selected observables, such as state coordinates. Using a Dyson--Duhamel expansion, we separate the degree-preserving linear part from the degree-raising nonlinear part and track how truncation errors can propagate back to the observable. The resulting bounds are degree-aware and retain logarithmic-norm information from the original linear dynamics. We obtain explicit finite-degree estimates and geometric convergence over certified time horizons. Comparisons with existing bounds, in particular those of Forets--Pouly, are given on the Stuart--Landau and Van der Pol systems.
arXiv:2606.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As classroom cohorts expand, team teaching is increasingly used to integrate the expertise and pedagogical perspectives of multiple teachers. Yet, there is limited empirical understanding of how team teaching unfolds in practice, particularly regarding differences in teachers' contributions across experience levels, student cohorts, and learning task design. Prior research on team teaching has largely relied on retrospective self-reports or small-scale observations, offering limited insight into the micro-level processes through which team teaching is enacted. Teacher talk offers a scalable lens on these processes. While research in individual teaching contexts shows that acoustic features of speech (e.g., voice quality, intonation, and loudness) can shape student learning, evidence from team-teaching settings remains scarce. Moreover, capturing such features through manual observation or transcription is especially challenging in team-teaching classrooms, where multiple teachers speak across extended sessions and spatial locations, limiting scalability without automation. Grounded in spatial pedagogy theory and team-teaching research, this paper presents an AI-based speech processing approach to analyse classroom talk in team-teaching settings. We analysed 36 recorded undergraduate and postgraduate sessions involving 12 teachers. Spatial pedagogy behaviours were coded and acoustic features extracted to examine variation across teachers' experience, student cohorts, and the learning task design. The results reveal systematic differences, most notably in loudness dynamics: high-experience teachers, undergraduate classes and collaborative learning tasks exhibited greater loudness variation, suggesting more frequent modulation of volume to foreground key information and support classroom interaction and engagement.
arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.
arXiv:2606.24437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) architectures improve inference-time scaling by organizing multiple LLM agents into layered reasoning pipelines. However, existing MoA variants fail to sustain gains as depth increases, exhibiting degradation, early plateauing, or saturation. We propose ReM-MoA, a memory-augmented MoA framework that sustains scaling through two mechanisms: (1) a Ranked Reasoning Memory that persistently stores and ranks reasoning traces from all layers using a comparative Reviewer Agent, and (2) a Curated Diversified Memory Routing scheme that exposes different agents to distinct combinations of successful and failed traces, preserving exploration diversity while propagating high-quality reasoning. We further introduce an optional multi-domain Reviewer distillation pipeline that improves ranking quality through frontier-model supervision. Across five reasoning benchmarks spanning math, formal logic, code, knowledge, and commonsense, ReM-MoA consistently outperforms prior MoA variants across both depth and width scaling, and its advantage widens with depth, establishing structured cross-layer reasoning memory as a key missing mechanism for scalable multi-agent inference.
arXiv:2606.11129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce WorldOlympiad, a benchmark for diagnosing video-based world models across physical faithfulness, geometric consistency, and interaction fidelity. While existing benchmarks often focus on visual quality, semantic alignment, or short-term temporal coherence, they provide limited insight into whether generated videos obey physical rules, preserve coherent 3D structure, and sustain controllable interactions over long horizons. To address this gap, WorldOlympiad decomposes world-model evaluation into three complementary dimensions. The physical track uses object segmentation and MLLM-as-judge to assess whether generated videos follow interpretable rules in mechanics, thermal phenomena, and material properties. The geometry track reconstructs generated videos with Gaussian splatting and evaluates structural consistency, cross-view coherence, and camera-trajectory alignment. The interaction track assesses whether generated rollouts follow complex action prompts and maintain smooth, coherent transitions across consecutive video chunks. WorldOlympiad further covers three major downstream scenarios, including gaming, robotics, and general real-world videos, capturing diverse challenges from interactive control and embodied manipulation to open-domain motion and camera dynamics. Together, these tracks and scenarios form a scalable and interpretable evaluation suite that exposes failure modes beyond generic video quality. Experiments on state-of-the-art models reveal substantial gaps in physical reasoning, 3D consistency, and long-horizon interaction, underscoring the need for more structured evaluation protocols for generative world models.
arXiv:2606.24450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/
arXiv:2606.24457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in stereo matching have achieved remarkable accuracy, but often rely on large models, heavy computation, or additional foundation-model priors, making them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained platforms. In contrast, efficient stereo models offer faster inference but are commonly considered less capable of strong zero-shot generalization. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by introducing Lite Any Stereo V2 (LAS2), an ultra-fast model series designed for efficient zero-shot stereo matching. LAS2 is developed from both architecture and training perspectives. Architecturally, we revisit efficient stereo design under practical deployment settings and propose a 2D-only cost aggregation framework, optimized for real inference latency rather than theoretical MACs alone. For training, we develop a three-stage strategy that combines synthetic supervision, self-distillation, and real-world knowledge distillation. To improve the reliability of real-world pseudo supervision, we further introduce pseudo-label filtering and an error-clamping operation, enabling smoother synthetic-to-real transfer. We instantiate LAS2 as a family of models, including feed-forward variants for different efficiency budgets and an iterative variant for higher accuracy. Extensive experiments show that LAS2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among efficient stereo methods while maintaining significantly lower latency. Specifically, LAS2-H achieves stronger overall zero-shot performance than the iterative method Fast-FoundationStereo, with 1.8x and 2.7x faster inference on H200 and Orin, respectively. The project page, demos, and code are available at https://tomtomtommi.github.io/LiteAnyStereoV2/.
arXiv:2606.24462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a scalable framework for multi-robot task allocation in complex environments where estimating task execution costs is computationally expensive. While combinatorial auction-based approaches offer reliable solutions, the exponential complexity of bundle generation typically renders them intractable for real-time reactive applications, particularly when accurate path planning is required for cost validation. We address this through a distributed, two-stage multi-fidelity bundle generation approach. Agents utilize a local search tree guided by a low-fidelity heuristic (such as euclidean distance) to rapidly explore the bundle space, applying high-fidelity path planning only to the most promising candidates in a best-first manner. These refined bids are then submitted to a central coordinator that solves a set packing problem to ensure global feasibility and maximize the overall utility. Simulation results in multiple environments demonstrate that the framework is able to improve the performance of reactive auction-based task allocation. Overall, the presented framework is shown to enable reactive task allocation with dynamic bundle sizes in multiple settings without exposing the agents' state and internal cost estimation models.
arXiv:2605.19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The great success of neural networks primarily arises from the presence of the large number of weight parameters combined with nonlinearities in the input-output relationship of single neurons. In this work, we study the relationship between the statistical properties of the weights and the nonlinearity of the hidden unit in Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) on the one side, and the distribution induced on binary visible units. We do this for four commonly used activation functions: Linear, Step, ReLU, and Exponential, and make qualitative predictions about the ability of these models to learn distributions with strong higher order interactions over the visible nodes. We show that in general, in an ensemble of RBMs with Gaussian weights, these distributions are rare and hard to learn, except when the hidden unit activation function is an Exponential.
arXiv:2604.00208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Comparing internal representations is a central goal in neuroscience and machine learning, but standard linear alignment metrics (Representational Similarity Analysis, Centered Kernel Alignment, and linear regression) are frequently applied to neural activity coordinates rather than on the underlying features. We show this matters when neural systems operate in superposition, encoding more features than they have neurons via linear compression. Closed-form derivations prove that these metrics depend on the Gram matrices of each system's projection, not on the latent features themselves: alignment thus combines what a system represents with how it is encoded. For those interested in what features two systems share, this is a problem: Two networks can have identical feature content yet appear more dissimilar than networks exhibiting partial feature overlap. This apparent misalignment need not reflect lost information as compressed sensing guarantees sparse features remain recoverable from the compressed activity. We confirm this by training supervised TopK sparse autoencoders that realize solvable compressed sensing by construction, finding alignment on recovered latents restored even when raw-activation alignment remains deflated. We extend the result to unsupervised SAEs trained without ground-truth latents, and to pretrained vision and language model SAEs, where SAE-latent alignment exceeds raw-activation alignment, consistent with superposition in real systems.
arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.
arXiv:2606.11839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is a widely adopted standard unifying train management in the EU. While the standard allows for use cases like fully autonomous driving, cybersecurity has been an afterthought. Risk analysis enables the systematic assessment and prioritization of threats and mitigations. To date, it remains unclear which threats are most significant in ERTMS. This study systematically models components of ERTMS and analyzes their security in light of threats identified in the underlying technologies. The results suggest a concerning state of ERTMS, despite its critical role in railway safety. The use of legacy standards like EuroBalises and GSM-Railway (GSM-R) introduces vulnerabilities that persist across minimal ERTMS implementations, deployments incorporating various optional safety measures, and prospective future evolutions of the system, e.g., adopting Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS). Fully transitioning to European Train Control System (ETCS) level 2 was identified as the most significant measure for advancing ERTMS cybersecurity. The results indicate that a shift of ERTMS toward security is required to ensure availability and safe operation. While the chosen methodology proved its feasibility and shows remaining weaknesses of ERTMS, future work is needed to develop railway-centric adaptations to improve the quantification and evaluation of the computed risks.
arXiv:2606.12212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into mobile applications has introduced a new class of credential security risk: leaked credentials that grant unauthorized access to LLM inference services, causing financial damage to developers. Prior work on credential leakage has focused primarily on Android apps; to date, no empirical study has systematically investigated LLM API key leakage in iOS applications. We present the first in-depth empirical study of API key leakage in LLM-integrated apps. We construct a high-quality dataset of 444 iOS applications, filtered from 1092 candidates through a standardized process, and develop LLMKeyLens, a dynamic analysis framework that detects LLM API key leakage via traffic interception, provider-specific key extraction, and active validity confirmation, requiring neither source code access nor binary decryption. Our analysis reveals that 282 applications expose exploitable LLM API credentials in network traffic, spanning at least ten providers. We identify three leakage patterns: JWT-based token leakage (48%), unauthenticated backend proxy access (33%), and plaintext API key transmission (19%). To assess remediation, we re-analyzed the same 282 vulnerable applications three months after responsible disclosure; only 28% had remediated the reported vulnerability, while 72% remained exploitable, with persistent issues stemming from unauthenticated backends and broken JWT implementations. Our findings show that LLM API key leakage is both prevalent and persistent in the iOS ecosystem, exposing a systemic gap between developer practice and secure integration principles, and suggest that secure LLM integration requires not only developer awareness but also explicit security guidance from providers and platform-level enforcement.
arXiv:2606.12440v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are rhetorically flirting with the idea that AI systems might have interests or moral rights. While there has been a large volume of research on whether AI deserves rights, there has been less exploration of what AI rights would mean in practice. This paper explores the institutional dimension of AI rights: what it would take to recognize moral or legal rights for AIs, and the attendant opportunities and dangers. Unlike all other nonhuman entities to which humanity has extended rights, AI systems are in principle capable of acquiring and wielding institutional power without human aid and mediation. AIs with rights would be able to legitimately, and AIs with power able to unpreventably, abridge human interests. Accordingly, giving rights even to rather dumb AI systems would entail binding the fate of humanity to potentially unpredictable nonhumans. Accordingly, I defend the rather grandiose claim that to empower AI to claim or to exercise inherent rights would be a world-historical gamble with human self-determination, which no individual researcher, firm, state, or even international organization has the moral right to authorize.
arXiv:2606.13189v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target--text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution--abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.
arXiv:2606.13609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symmetry is a powerful way to control coupling between photonic mode families. In spatially periodic structures, glide symmetry can protect band contacts and suppress stop bands. Here we show a different role for temporal glide, a spatiotemporal counterpart combining reflection with a half-period time translation. In a scalar time-modulated trilayer waveguide, temporal glide imposes an exact selection rule linking frequency conversion to transverse-mode symmetry: the parity content of every Floquet eigenstate alternates with sideband index, up to a state-dependent sign. In scattering, this means that a mode of definite parity can emit only into the opposite transverse parity at odd sidebands and into the same parity at even sidebands. We verify the rule directly in bulk Floquet eigenstates and in finite-section time-domain simulations. An incident odd waveguide mode is converted into an even frequency sideband, while all symmetry-forbidden output channels at the analysed sidebands are suppressed to numerically negligible values. Rather than acting as a temporal copy of spatial-glide band sticking, temporal glide provides a distinct symmetry principle for converting electromagnetic energy between selected modes and frequencies.
arXiv:2606.24312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-size scaling and the renormalization group form the central toolkit for analyzing quantum phase transitions (QPTs). In this Letter, we introduce a novel Hilbert-space tailoring scheme to probe quantum critical phenomena. Applied to the second-order QPT of the one-dimensional (1D) XY model, our method yields precise critical points and exponents on lattices containing merely 50 unit cells. We further establish the universal applicability of this framework via investigations of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the 1D XXZ chain: critical parameters are recovered with as few as 12 lattice sites. This technique may open an alternative, efficient route to universally characterize QPT across many-body lattice systems.
arXiv:2606.15280v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most existing anomaly detection methods rely on estimating a probability density or learning an enclosing decision boundary, implicitly assuming that normal data occupies a region of non-zero volume in the ambient space. In contrast, structural anomaly detection considers data that lies near a low-dimensional manifold, creating a mismatch between the inductive bias of existing methods and the structure of the data, often resulting in degraded performance. To address this mismatch, we introduce a geometric perspective. Specifically, we learn a projection operator onto the manifold of normal samples and define a sample as anomalous if it is altered by this projection. This formulation naturally integrates the inductive bias of manifold-supported data and reframes anomaly detection in terms of a projection residual, thereby resolving issues arising from modeling degenerate distributions. Notably, it provides a unifying interpretation of reconstruction-based methods by explaining their success and failure in terms of projection quality. In particular, it explains the strong generalization ability of projection-aligned models as a consequence of contraction behavior toward the manifold. Moreover, by decoupling anomaly detection from probabilistic modeling, it reduces the tendency to misclassify rare but normal samples, a widely recognized limitation of existing approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that projection-aligned methods achieve strong performance, outperforming boundary-based methods while improving upon existing reconstruction-based approaches.
arXiv:2606.16333v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most existing approaches either fix the container in advance or optimize only a single container dimension through an outer search loop, leaving the remaining dimensions as a manual tuning problem. We present a differentiable packing framework that jointly optimizes all 6N object pose parameters and all three container side lengths inside a single gradient-based loop. The formulation combines six physics-inspired, differentiable loss terms computed directly on triangle meshes through axis-aligned bounding-box proxies. An adaptive squeezing mechanism periodically tightens the container whenever the overlap loss falls below a pair-count-scaled threshold, producing a large initial drop in container volume, followed by small refinements. All pairwise computations are written in tensor-broadcasting form, giving a 3.4 to 54 times speedup over a reference loop-based implementation. The pipeline is implemented in Python and PyTorch, with no physics engine, FFT library, or convex decomposition. On multiple object categories, the method produces containers that are 11 to 32 percent smaller than time-matched DBLF and simulated-annealing baselines at N =100, while running in under 4 minutes per instance on a single consumer GPU.
arXiv:2606.24484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WordArt (artistic text) features highly customized fonts, textures, and layouts, making WordArt-oriented scene TExt Recognition (WATER) substantially more challenging than general Scene Text Recognition (STR). Existing STR datasets and methods, typically built around regular scene text and fixed-template inputs, struggle to scale to WATER. Thus, we aim to advance this task from both data and model perspectives. On the data side, we construct a 2M synthetic dataset, WATER-S, with the scale improved by hundreds of times compared to existing artistic text data. WATER-S consists of two complementary subsets. One rendered by an upgraded rendering pipeline (SynthWordArt), which provides highly accurate and controllable synthetic WordArt data. The other is generated by combining Qwen3-VL for prompt mining and Z-Image for image synthesis, which improves the coverage of realistic and diverse data. On the model side, we propose WATERec. It adopts an visual encoder supporting arbitrary-shaped inputs and an autoregressive decoder to model complex layouts, structurally breaking the bottleneck of fixed-template STR on WordArt. Experiments show that this architecture outperforms prior STR methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance on irregular texts such as WordArt. Together with WATER-R, carefully reorganized from existing real STR data, our strong baseline with the new synthetic data and model design reaches 90.40% accuracy on WordArt-Bench, surpassing both general-purpose and OCR-specialized vision-language models by a large margin. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/WATER.