arXiv:2606.04238v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Aggressive weight quantization to 2-bit precision offers substantial throughput and memory gains for large language model (LLM) inference, but typically incurs severe accuracy degradation. These gains are particularly relevant for edge and on-device deployment, where memory capacity and bandwidth are primary constraints. In this work, we extend Recover-LoRA -- a lightweight, data-free accuracy recovery method originally developed for general model weight corruption -- to the setting of ultra-low-bit quantization. We propose a selective mixed-precision strategy in which only gate and up projection layers of the MLP are quantized to 2-bit (W2), while all other linear layers remain at higher precision, yielding a mixed-precision GateUp configuration. We demonstrate via roofline analysis across three model families (4B--20B) and two hardware platforms that a W4/W2-GateUp deployment (4-bit base with 2-bit gate/up) delivers 7.5--23.3\% TPS improvement over uniform W4 depending on model and context length, while confining quantization error to a predictable subset of layers. We then apply Recover-LoRA -- training low-rank adapters on the quantized layers via logit distillation with synthetic data -- to recover accuracy lost from 2-bit quantization of the gate and up layers. In a case study on Qwen3-4B, Recover-LoRA achieves 80--95\% accuracy recovery on 9 of 12 benchmarks, using only 10k synthetic training samples and no labeled data. We further demonstrate that synthetic data performs comparably to curated labeled data for distillation-based recovery, and that recovery generalizes to out-of-distribution evaluation tasks. Our results present Recover-LoRA as a practical post-quantization accuracy recovery tool for aggressive weight compression in deployment settings.
Science Journals
arXiv:2606.04825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Despite the importance of tactile sensing for reliable manipulation, most existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) datasets remain vision-only, and those that do incorporate tactile information typically lack the joint combination of task diversity, language conditioning, and action trajectories. Furthermore, existing teleoperation pipelines rarely provide haptic feedback to the operator, despite its established role in demonstration quality and manipulation stability. In this work, we present HapTile, a contact-grounded visuotactile manipulation dataset that advances beyond vision-only trajectory datasets by embedding physical interaction sensing at two levels: fingertip tactile feedback at the robot end-effector, and haptic-informed demonstrations at the teleoperator side. The data collection platform integrates haptic feedback directly into the teleoperation controller, enabling the operator to perceive contact interactions in real time. It is built around a standard and reproducible robotic system equipped with custom-designed fingertip tactile sensors. The dataset comprises everyday manipulation tasks spanning a broad range of contact-rich skills, including pick-and-place, folding, pressing, stacking, and other routine activities. Each task is paired with language instructions that condition the policy on the manipulation objective, together with synchronized visuotactile observations and action trajectories. In addition, we provide a benchmarking study on contact-rich policy learning using two baseline models to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed contact-grounded dataset. The dataset and additional details are available on our website: haptile-dataset.github.io.
arXiv:2606.04443v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Black-box tests for Fujisaki-Okamoto decapsulation observe the sampled execution seen by the harness, whereas the reencryption computation itself is visible only through the values that reach final key derivation. We study confirmation-code-augmented KEM variants under an honest-reference harness in which the reference encapsulation fixes a hidden final-key point $\langle good,B,W\rangle$, with $W$ the confirmation witness. For a $q$-localized system under test, acceptance is bounded by honest correctness error, adversarial aliasing, final-key freshness defects, a hit on the localized suffix list $Q_G(B)$, and $2^{-\kappa}$. A one-query construction from any predictor of $W$ matches this bound up to the fresh-key coincidence term, so the list-hit event is the black-box obstruction measured by the harness.
The list-hit term is bounded either by a cUP-faithful harness certificate, which transfers source confirmation-code unpredictability with a $q$-loss, or by an average conditional min-entropy bound, with separate RawEnt and TailEnt hypotheses for short diagnostic and truncation-tail codes. The same model proves a dependency-cone lower bound for non-certification claims. When the black-box observation of an honest-support harness factors through the confirmation-observable final-key target, every operation outside the support-active cone has a coupled erasure implementation with the same transcript distribution; over any implementation class containing that erasure, soundness and completeness errors of an execution certifier satisfy $\alpha+\beta\ge 1$. The ML-KEM and HQC case studies distinguish theorem-covered positive rows, finite-catalog artifact rows, and non-certification rows that carry a cone-inactivity certificate. The security of the standard KEM lines is the construction-level security supplied by the cited source analyses.
arXiv:2606.04337v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Light-matter interactions provide versatile routes for probing and controlling chemical reactivity, charge transport, and material properties. Time-periodic external fields can reshape electronic states and open new dynamical pathways beyond the field-free Born-Oppenheimer (BO) picture. Floquet nonadiabatic dynamics has consequently emerged as an important framework for describing coupled electron-nuclear dynamics under periodic driving. In this Perspective, we first discuss recent developments in Floquet nonadiabatic dynamics methods for closed and open quantum systems. We then highlight how this framework provides mechanistic insights into electron transfer at molecule-metal interfaces, quantum transport in molecular junctions, carrier dynamics in crystalline solids, and multicolor Floquet engineering. Finally, we outline key conceptual and computational challenges that must be addressed to transform Floquet nonadiabatic dynamics from model-based demonstrations into predictive, first-principles simulations of realistic light-driven processes.
arXiv:2606.05122v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own output? We find that the ability is largely present before any targeted training: prompted few-shot, a base model already predicts an external judge's multi-attribute quality scores on open-ended responses well above chance across three benchmarks. We introduce Self-Evaluation Elicitation (SEE), a method that surfaces this latent ability through a short cycle comprising a calibration-coupled reinforcement learning phase that improves the answer and predicts the judge, followed by a masked distillation phase that sharpens the prediction while leaving the answer untouched. From 160 unique examples, roughly 31x fewer than a reinforcement learning baseline, SEE improves held-out calibration across three benchmarks while preserving answer quality. The elicited self-evaluation is sharply localized within the model's own token distribution and stable across judges it was never trained against, indicating a transferable notion of quality rather than a single judge's preference. These results reframe judge-aligned self-evaluation as a problem of elicitation rather than acquisition.
arXiv:2606.04607v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: High density threading dislocations in SiC wafers facilitate reverse leakage and degradation, yet commercial defect inspection systems based on surface profiling and PL dark-contrast miss nanoscale TDs because they lack resolvable surface signatures and band-edge PL is uniformly quenched by background dopants or compensating defects. Here, we develop confocal subsurface backscattering microscopy to nondestructively detect TDs, based on the synergy of confocal filtering induced dark field configuration and strain induced photoelastic mechanism. By simultaneously suppressing specular reflection while enhancing optical scattering from TD induced refractive index perturbation, CSBM enables high contrast, high resolution TD imaging. Moreover, TD types can be distinguished by their distinct photoelastic scattering patterns. Our work establishes a simple but effective optical approach for direct TD identification that is more tolerant of surface imperfections, providing a practical route toward industrial in line inspection.
arXiv:2606.04604v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) represents a challenging retrieval task that targets locating specific images through multimodal inputs. Despite recent progress in CIR techniques, prior approaches often overlook cases where images appear visually alike yet differ in attributes, potentially undermining both multimodal feature fusion and similarity modeling. To mitigate this limitation, we design a unified representation of cross-modal features based on attribute prototypes. Nevertheless, the task is far from straightforward, owing to three core issues: (1) entanglement in attribute-level semantics, (2) inconsistency across modalities, and (3) supervised signal missing. To tackle the above obstacles, we introduce a COMposed image retrieval network guided By attrIbute-based NEighbor Relations (COMBINER). Specifically, we first design an Adaptive Semantic Disentanglement module, which is capable of disentangling attribute features based on multimodal primitive features. Secondly, we propose a Unified Prototype-based Composition module, which can construct cross-modal unified prototypes (CUP) and facilitate multimodal feature composition. Finally, we introduce a Dual Relations Modeling module, which can mine pairwise and neighbor relations based on attribute similarity. Compared to traditional neighbor relations modeling CIR methods, COMBINER represents the first study addressing the phenomenon of visually similar but attribute-unrelated samples. It achieves a more accurate understanding of the semantic relations among samples by employing an attribute prototype-based similarity metric. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed COMBINER. The implementation of our method will be accessed at https://github.com/Lee-zixu/COMBINER
arXiv:2606.04603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Approximate Nearest Neighbour search indices form the backbone of real-world recommender systems, enabling real-time candidate retrieval over million-item catalogues. Typically, a single point estimate embedding is learnt for every user and every item. At serving time, the user embedding queries the index for relevant items. Since these representations are learnt from sparse interaction data, they are noisy and might fail to capture all the nuances that contribute to ``relevance'' -- ignoring the fundamental uncertainty that is inherent to them. The result is a retrieval pipeline that is systematically biased toward the small minority of popular head items with well-estimated embeddings, at the expense of the long-tail majority of niche, diverse, and serendipitous content.
We propose DINOSAUR (Distributional Approximate Nearest Neighbour Search for Uncertainty-Aware Retrieval): a simple and infrastructure-compatible framework to incorporate embedding uncertainty into candidate generation. Rather than indexing point estimates, DINOSAUR samples $S_i$ embeddings per item and constructs an index on this augmented set. Analogously, at query time, a user embedding is sampled. This two-sided stochastic retrieval process implicitly marginalises over embedding uncertainty, without requiring changes to model architecture or ANN index infrastructure.
On the analytical side, we show that DINOSAUR recovers standard point-estimate retrieval as uncertainty vanishes, and we characterise how increased embedding variance expands the regions of latent space in which uncertain items are retrievable. Reproducible empirical observations align with these expectations, showing large coverage gains with small losses in offline recall.
arXiv:2606.04333v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We experimentally demonstrated a high-performance frequency upconversion detector for telecom-band photons based on a passively synchronized fiber laser system. The involved coincidence pumping technique enabled to spectrally convert the pulsed infrared photons into the visible regime with a conversion efficiency of 72\%. The overall detection efficiency of the upconversion detector reached to 30\% with a low noise equivalent power of $3\times10^{-17}\ \text{W/Hz}^{1/2}$. In contrast to previous demonstrations, the whole upconversion detection system was constructed in an all-polarization-maintaining fiber structure, thus favoring substantial improvement of compactness and robustness. Moreover, the long-term stability was manifested by at least ten-hour operation with a relative fluctuation of count rates as small as 0.26\%. The achieved features here would be desirable in many practical applications requiring efficient and robust coherent manipulation of pulsed optical fields by nonlinear frequency conversion.
arXiv:2606.04326v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Concept bottleneck models predict outcomes from high-level concepts detected in inputs. Although concepts provide a simple way to reap benefits from interpretability, very few datasets include concept labels. This limits researchers' ability to determine which problems are suitable for these models, isolate the factors that drive their performance or lead to failures, or uncover which algorithms perform well. In this paper, we develop synthetic benchmarks for concept-bottleneck models, focusing on their two main use cases: decision support, in which models assist humans in making better decisions, and automation, in which models handle routine tasks without supervision. Our benchmarks can generate labeled datasets while controlling for properties that affect performance, including data modality, concept choice, annotation quality, and completeness. We demonstrate how the benchmarks can be used to evaluate representative classes of concept bottleneck models. Our demonstrations show how the benchmarks can diagnose failure modes and guide follow-up testing.
arXiv:2606.05004v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: With the widespread deployment of public large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, protecting user prompt privacy has become an increasingly critical issue. Existing privacy-preserving inference methods sacrifice either utility or efficiency, and often require model-specific modifications that limit their compatibility. In this paper, we propose SharedRequest, a model-agnostic framework for privacy-preserving LLM inference that reformulates privacy protection at the batch level rather than the individual-prompt level. The key idea is to obscure sensitive information by mixing original prompts with noisy variants, while grouping semantically equivalent instructions to amortize the inference cost over a large batch of queries with minimal impact on LLM response quality. This design is independent of the LLM architecture, requiring no access to model parameters or architectural modification. Empirical results demonstrate that SharedRequest achieves over $20\%$ higher utility compared to prior differential privacy baselines, and its shared-prompt mechanism reduces query cost by up to $5\times$ compared to non-batched inference.
arXiv:2606.05003v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist in experimental design, yet fluent protocols often remain physically infeasible. We introduce PhysDox, a physical feasibility auditing benchmark for biomedical protocols comprising a 683-sample expert-curated Gold set and a 5,000-sample Silver set across six sensing domains. We formulate the task as a two-stage evaluation: severity detection classifying protocols as valid, minor, or fatal, followed by the constraint-level diagnosis of fatal violations. Evaluating 6 LLMs across 4 inference strategies yields a peak Stage-1 macro-F1 of only 53.0. Moreover, strong oracle diagnosis collapses during end-to-end evaluation due to correlated cascade errors. Error analysis reveals scaffold bias, where models conflate procedural completeness with physical validity. Consequently, implicit constraints exhibit a 2 times higher miss rate than explicit hardware violations, supported by strong statistical correlation at $\rho{=}0.81$ and $p{<}0.01$. Trace analysis of false negatives exposes a 54%--46% split between attention and judgment failures, ultimately demonstrating that protocol auditing demands calibrated feasibility reasoning rather than factual recall or longer rationales.
arXiv:2606.04903v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce the LLM agent architecture Agentic Redux, intended for use with nontrivial problem domains that require linear auditability. Using the typed lambda calculus, we prove that, run on appropriate domains, Agentic Redux executions are semantically guaranteed to be correct, with all decisions recorded in an append-only ledger. We present two production-grade appropriate domains, in healthcare billing compliance, and security vulnerability disclosure. Working code for Agentic Redux run on both domains is available in a supporting code repository. We also introduce Ontology-First Agent Design, a methodology for creation of agent frameworks on a problem domain, in which a human expert ontologizes the problem domain with Basic Formal Ontology, and then assigns an LLM to derive roles that agents and humans-in-the-loop can fill, in order to work the problems in the domain.
arXiv:2606.04992v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The handling and assembly of instruments during surgery imposes high cognitive demands on scrub nurses, particularly when instruments are unfamiliar. We present a supporting guidance system for surgical instrumentation that combines multi-camera 6D pose estimation with augmented reality in-situ visualization on a head-mounted display without the requirement for additional markers. Pose estimation and consecutive camera calibration are achieved through known objects. The 6D pose estimation network is trained purely on synthetic data, aiming for better generalizability and real-world applicability. The AR guidance displays tooltip localization cues and step-wise assembly animations. Via gaze-based selection and a foot pedal, users can switch between assembly steps in intraoperative use.
In a technical evaluation, our approach outperforms state-of-art 6D pose estimation. A user study with 29 scrub nurses was conducted in a surgical simulation of knee arthroplasty, comparing the system against a paper manual. AR guidance significantly reduced the perceived workload compared. Objectively, AR guidance reduced task completion time by 21.3\% (4.76 minutes). Specifically, scrub nurses less experienced with the instrument set benefited when using the system. Error frequencies were comparable between conditions. Qualitative feedback highlighted improved process clarity, reduced information overload, and perceived independence. To summarize, our marker-free multi-camera AR guidance approach for surgical instruments can, subjectively and objectively, improve intraoperative instrumentation performance, particularly for untrained scrub nurses.
arXiv:2511.15047v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Interacting Rydberg atoms constitute a versatile platform for the realization of non-equilibrium states of matter. Close to phase transitions, they respond collectively to external perturbations, which can be harnessed for technological applications in the domain of quantum metrology and sensing. Owing to the controllable complexity and straightforward interpretability of Rydberg atoms, we can observe and tune the emergent collective amplification. Here, we investigate the application of an interacting Rydberg vapour for the purpose of time series prediction. The vapour is driven by a laser field whose Rabi frequency is modulated in order to input the time series. We find that close to a non-equilibrium phase transition, where collective effects are amplified, the capability of the system to learn the input becomes enhanced. This is reflected in an increase of the accuracy with which future values of the time series can be predicted. Using the Lorenz time series and temperature data as examples, our work demonstrates how emergent phenomena enhance the capability of noisy many-body systems for data processing and forecasting.
arXiv:2606.04816v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly translate natural-language optimization problems into executable solver code. Yet for constraint-dense operations research (OR) problems, existing data-filtering and training pipelines largely rely on objective-equivalence signals such as differential testing and answer agreement, which a program can pass while adding spurious constraints or silently omitting required ones, whenever those constraints are non-binding on the tested instance. We propose constraint injection, which uses feasible probes to expose spurious over-constraint and one-constraint-violating probes to reveal silent constraint omission. Combined with differential testing, it forms a dual verifier. We instantiate and evaluate it on vehicle routing problems (VRPs), a representative constraint-dense combinatorial optimization testbed with coupled operational constraints. We develop VRPCoder, an 8B end-to-end model that translates natural-language VRP scenarios into Gurobi scripts, together with an expert-verified VRP benchmark suite covering 21 variants. The verifier is reused as a rejection-sampling filter during data synthesis and as a per-rollout reward in group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Across four VRP benchmarks, VRPCoder-GRPO reaches 93\% average Pass@1, outperforms Gemini-3.1-Pro Preview on three benchmarks, exceeds Claude-Sonnet-4.5 by 28 average points, and surpasses prior OR-LLMs by 78 average points.
arXiv:2606.04517v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph-based deep learning methods have been widely employed in encrypted traffic analysis to exploit latent correlations across different granularities. However, while complex preprocessing pipelines and sophisticated model structures often achieve strong performance, they may obscure inherent protocol semantics during representation learning. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of protocol layers and their corresponding fields, defined by protocol specifications and routinely utilized in manual traffic analysis, remains underexplored in existing learning frameworks. In this paper, we propose Protocol Tree Graph Attention with Mixture of Experts (PTGAMoE), a semantic-preserving hierarchical graph-based expert framework for encrypted traffic analysis. The field-based graph construction and expert committee design enable PTGAMoE to quantify the model's preferences for specific fields and protocols. Extensive experimental results on representative benchmark datasets under strict no-data-leakage settings demonstrate that PTGAMoE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Furthermore, the semantic-preserving design provides interpretable insights into protocol-level feature importance and expert-level contributions, reflecting the model's decision-making logic in encrypted traffic classification tasks.
arXiv:2606.04236v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models can generate text efficiently by updating multiple masked positions in parallel, but this parallelism introduces a quality-latency trade-off. Aggressive decoding may commit mutually dependent tokens too early, while conservative decoding requires many denoising steps. Existing methods address this tension by deciding which tokens are safe to reveal using confidence or dependency criteria. However, avoiding unsafe commits does not necessarily make the remaining masked sequence easy to decode, since uncertain tokens may depend on masked tokens, creating a bottleneck for denoising steps. We propose AXON, a training-free module that can be added on top of existing parallel decoding strategies for diffusion language models. Rather than replacing the base decoder, AXON monitors the remaining uncertain masked tokens and intervenes only when their current state suggests that additional context is needed. It then shifts the criterion from which tokens are safest to reveal to which confident reveals would best support later denoising. AXON selects anchors, confident masked tokens that uncertain positions attend to, using attention, uncertainty, and confidence signals. Experiments on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks across multiple diffusion language models show that AXON improves the quality-latency trade-off of existing parallel decoders, often reducing the number of function evaluations while maintaining or improving accuracy.
arXiv:2605.29280v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers a single scalar prediction from a large foundation model (FM) to compact vertical models (VMs), suffering from diminishing transfer ratio -- the fraction of FM improvement captured by the VM -- as a single scalar cannot convey the rich intermediate knowledge that larger FMs learn. To address this bottleneck, we propose LoopFM (Learning frOm HistOrical RePresentations of FM), a framework that opens a high-bandwidth transfer channel by structuring FM intermediate embeddings as input features (e.g., user history sequence) for downstream VMs, without requiring real-time FM inference at serving and architectural coupling between FM and VM. We provide a theoretical framework for LoopFM with a gain decomposition and transfer-ratio analysis. On three public benchmarks, LoopFM demonstrates strong AUC improvements (e.g., 6%+ on TaobaoAd) and complementary knowledge transfer capability with KD. On industrial-scale systems (billions of examples, trillion-parameter FMs), LoopFM approximately doubles the knowledge transfer ratio on top of KD, delivering a +0.5% conversion improvement in the first half after its initial launch, and +1.03% and +1.22% conversion improvement from two individual launches in the subsequent half.
arXiv:2606.04989v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Although much is known about the physical danger of cycling situations, less is understood about the perceived danger of cycling. Furthermore, perception of danger may be filtered at a subconscious level and therefore difficult for one to self-report. To this end, these subconscious perceptions can be revealed through physiological metrics such as eye gaze. This paper explores the perceived safety of cycling in Oxford, United Kingdom and explores the ability of wearable eye tracking glasses to produce insights about the differences in perception under different environments and events. This paper finds that eye gaze patterns change between using bike lanes, car lanes and shared bus lanes, representing different cognitive challenges of each lane type. This paper presents that different intersections have significantly different eye gaze patterns which may have implications for cyclist stress. Finally, eye gaze patterns differ in the presence of events such as passes and pedestrians in the road compared to when cycling with no events. This paper draws conclusions on the benefits and limitations of using wearable eye trackers to estimate stress and cyclist workload.
arXiv:2606.04982v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper analyzes the convergence of parallel overlapping domain-decomposition methods with impedance boundary conditions for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations in heterogeneous media. We prove that the parallel iterative method is well-posed in an appropriate function space, and characterize the error propagation operator through impedance-to-impedance maps that describe interactions between neighboring subdomains. For strip domain decompositions, we derive explicit convergence estimates in terms of the norms of the impedance-to-impedance maps. At the discrete level, we develop the finite-element counterpart of these results based on N\'{e}d\'{e}lec-element discretisations. Under the assumption that the discrete impedance-to-impedance maps approximate their continuous counterparts as the mesh is refined, we show that the discrete method inherits the convergence behavior of the continuous method. We illustrate this theory with numerical experiments for strip domain decompositions, and also present numerical experiments for checkerboard domain decompositions that go beyond our theory.
arXiv:2606.04516v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly advances LLM reasoning, yet it faces a dilemma: standard supervised scaling is throttled by high annotation costs, while unsupervised alternatives suffer from severe model collapse. Recent semi-supervised RLVR methods address this by using a small labeled set to guide unlabeled data, achieving a promising trade-off between training efficacy and annotation cost. However, they suffer from a severe data-efficiency bottleneck due to the reliance on coarse performance heuristics, leaving a vast majority of valuable instances underutilized. To this end, we propose GeoMin, which models global feature distributions on labeled data to decode the structural discrepancy between correct and incorrect rollouts, thereby establishing a robust prior to assess the reliability of self-reward signals and fully unleash the potential of unlabeled data. Empirically, GeoMin outperforms the strongest baselines by +4.1% and even surpasses fully supervised models with only 10% of the annotations, demonstrating remarkable data efficiency.
arXiv:2606.04514v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent LLM-based recommenders enhance language models with collaborative embeddings from user-item interactions, but making such embeddings available does not ensure their proper use during inference. Through a diagnostic attention analysis, we find that the utilization of collaborative embeddings is depth-dependent and alignment-sensitive, suggesting that LLMs need to balance their internal semantic knowledge with external collaborative knowledge. To address this issue, we propose SAILRec, an LLM-based recommender that improves this balance through dual-side semantic alignment and hierarchical attention steering. The former aligns item-side embeddings with item-text semantics and user-side embeddings with codebook-based semantic profiles, while the latter suppresses premature shallow-layer collaborative interference and strengthens collaborative evidence in deeper decision layers. Experiments on MovieLens-1M and Amazon-Book show that SAILRec consistently outperforms representative baselines, with ablation and masking analyses validating its key designs.
arXiv:2606.04511v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sparse attention reduces compute and memory bandwidth for long-context LLM inference. However, two key challenges remain: (1) KV cache capacity still grows with sequence length, and offloading to CPU memory introduces a PCIe transfer bottleneck; (2) the sparse selection step itself retains $O(T^2)$ complexity and can dominate attention cost at long contexts. We propose SparDA, a decoupled sparse attention architecture that introduces a fourth per-layer projection, the Forecast, alongside Query, Key, and Value. The Forecast predicts the KV blocks needed by the next layer, enabling lookahead selection that overlaps CPU-to-GPU prefetch with current-layer execution. Because Forecast is decoupled from the attention query, our GQA implementation uses one Forecast head per GQA group, reducing selection overhead versus the original multi-head selector. SparDA adds $<$0.5% parameters and trains only the Forecast projections by matching the original selector's attention distribution. On two sparse-pretrained 8B models, SparDA matches or slightly improves accuracy and delivers up to 1.25$\times$ prefill speedup and 1.7$\times$ decode speedup over the sparse-attention offload baseline. By enabling larger feasible batch sizes on a single GPU, SparDA further reaches up to 5.3$\times$ higher decode throughput than the non-offload sparse baseline. Our source code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/SparDA.
arXiv:2606.04233v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A robotics benchmark score measures success under one fixed evaluation setup, yet is routinely treated as evidence of general manipulation capability. We identify four failure modes, each of which weakens or invalidates a benchmark's role as a valid proxy for that capability: shortcut solvability, lack of statistical significance, creeping overfitting, and data-source dependence. We propose one diagnostic per failure mode. We audit LIBERO, CALVIN, SimplerEnv, RoboCasa, and RoboTwin 2.0 under these diagnostics. LIBERO and CALVIN fail multiple diagnostics. RoboCasa and RoboTwin 2.0 fail fewer, despite appearing far less often in recent progress claims. On LIBERO, a 0.09B probe with no language encoder scores at or near reported SOTA, and most reported gains are not provably statistically significant. On CALVIN, randomizing block poses within the training range drops performance for every tested policy. We release the four diagnostics with reference implementations for authors and reviewers to apply before treating a benchmark score as evidence of progress. Code and artifacts are available at https://ripl.github.io/manipulation_benchmark_audit/.