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IC3-Evolve: Proof-/Witness-Gated Offline LLM-Driven Heuristic Evolution for IC3 Hardware Model Checking

arXiv:2604.03232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: IC3, also known as property-directed reachability (PDR), is a commonly-used algorithm for hardware safety model checking. It checks if a state transition system complies with a given safety property. IC3 either returns UNSAFE (indicating property violation) with a counterexample trace, or SAFE with a checkable inductive invariant as the proof to safety. In practice, the performance of IC3 is dominated by a large web of interacting heuristics and implementation choices, making manual tuning costly, brittle, and hard to reproduce. This paper presents IC3-Evolve, an automated offline code-evolution framework that utilizes an LLM to propose small, slot-restricted and auditable patches to an IC3 implementation. Crucially, every candidate patch is admitted only through proof- /witness-gated validation: SAFE runs must emit a certificate that is independently checked, and UNSAFE runs must emit a replayable counterexample trace, preventing unsound edits from being deployed. Since the LLM is used only offline, the deployed artifact is a standalone evolved checker with zero ML/LLM inference overhead and no runtime model dependency. We evolve on the public hardware model checking competition (HWMCC) benchmark and evaluate the generalizability on unseen public and industrial model checking benchmarks, showing that IC3-Evolve can reliably discover practical heuristic improvements under strict correctness gates.

TABQAWORLD: Optimizing Multimodal Reasoning for Multi-Turn Table Question Answering

arXiv:2604.03393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal reasoning has emerged as a powerful framework for enhancing reasoning capabilities of reasoning models. While multi-turn table reasoning methods have improved reasoning accuracy through tool use and reward modeling, they rely on fixed text serialization for table state readouts. This introduces representation errors in table encoding that significantly accumulate over multiple turns. Such accumulation is alleviated by tabular grounding methods in the expense of inference compute and cost, rendering real world deployment impractical. To address this, we introduce TABQAWORLD, a table reasoning framework that jointly optimizes tabular action through representation and estimation. For representation, TABQAWORLD employs an action-conditioned multimodal selection policy, which dynamically switches between visual and textual representations to maximize table state readout reliability. For estimation, TABQAWORLD optimizes stepwise reasoning trajectory through table metadata including dimension, data types and key values, safely planning trajectory and compressing low-complexity actions to reduce conversation turns and latency. Designed as a training-free framework, empirical evaluations show that TABQAWORLD achieves state-of-the-art performance with 4.87% accuracy improvements over baselines, with 5.42% accuracy gain and 33.35% inference latency reduction over static settings, establishing a new standard for reliable and efficient table reasoning.

The Topology of Multimodal Fusion: Why Current Architectures Fail at Creative Cognition

arXiv:2604.04465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper identifies a structural limitation in current multimodal AI architectures that is topological rather than parametric. Contrastive alignment (CLIP), cross-attention fusion (GPT-4V/Gemini), and diffusion-based generation share a common geometric prior -- modal separability -- which we term contact topology. The argument rests on three pillars with philosophy as the generative center. The philosophical pillar reinterprets Wittgenstein's saying/showing distinction as a problem rather than a conclusion: where Wittgenstein chose silence, the Chinese craft epistemology tradition responded with xiang (operative schema) -- the third state emerging when saying and showing interpenetrate. A cruciform framework (dao/qi x saying/showing) positions xiang at the intersection, executing dual huacai (transformation-and-cutting) along both axes. This generates a dual-layer dynamics: chuanghua (creative transformation as spontaneous event) and huacai (its institutionalization into repeatable form). The cognitive science pillar reinterprets DMN/ECN/SN tripartite co-activation through the pathological mirror: overlap isomorphism vs. superimposition collapse in a 2D parameter space (coupling intensity x regulatory capacity). The mathematical pillar formalizes these via fiber bundles and Yang-Mills curvature, with the cruciform structure mapped to fiber bundle language. We propose UOO implementation via Neural ODEs with topological regularization, the ANALOGY-MM benchmark with error-type-ratio metric, and the META-TOP three-tier benchmark testing cross-civilizational topological isomorphism across seven archetypes. A phased experimental roadmap with explicit termination criteria ensures clean exit if falsified.

From Concept to Practice: an Automated LLM-aided UVM Machine for RTL Verification

arXiv:2504.19959v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verification presents a major bottleneck in Integrated Circuit (IC) development, consuming nearly 70% of the total development effort. While the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is widely used in industry to improve verification efficiency through structured and reusable testbenches, constructing these testbenches and generating sufficient stimuli remain challenging. These challenges arise from the considerable manual coding effort required, repetitive manual execution of multiple EDA tools, and the need for in-depth domain expertise to navigate complex designs.Here, we present UVM^2, an automated verification framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate UVM testbenches and iteratively refine them using coverage feedback, significantly reducing manual effort while maintaining rigorous verification standards.To evaluate UVM^2, we introduce a benchmark suite comprising Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs of up to 1.6K lines of code.The results show that UVM^2 reduces testbench setup time by up to UVM^2 compared to experienced engineers, and achieve average code and function coverage of 87.44% and 89.58%, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions by 20.96% and 23.51%, respectively.

Why Attend to Everything? Focus is the Key

arXiv:2604.03260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Focus, a method that learns which token pairs matter rather than approximating all of them. Learnable centroids assign tokens to groups; distant attention is restricted to same-group pairs while local attention operates at full resolution. Because all model weights stay frozen, Focus is purely additive: centroid-only training (as few as 148K parameters) improves domain perplexity with zero degradation on downstream benchmarks--from 124M to 70B parameters, across five attention architectures. No existing efficient attention method achieves this in the retrofit setting. At 124M, Focus surpasses full attention (30.3 vs 31.4 PPL); trained from scratch at 7B scale (2B tokens), Focus again beats full attention (13.82 vs 13.89 PPL). At inference, restricting each token to its top-k highest-scoring groups discretizes the soft routing into a hard sparsity pattern, yielding 2x speedup while beating the pretrained baseline (41.3 vs 42.8 PPL); decomposing this pattern into two standard FlashAttention calls reaches 8.6x wall-clock speedup at 1M tokens with no custom kernels. Unlike LoRA, centroid routing preserves alignment: instruction-tuned models retain TruthfulQA scores after adaptation, while LoRA degrades at every learning rate and rank. Sinkhorn normalization enforces balanced groups as a hard constraint, and the resulting groups discover interpretable linguistic categories without supervision.

3D-IDE: 3D Implicit Depth Emergent

arXiv:2604.03296v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging 3D information within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has recently shown significant advantages for indoor scene understanding. However, existing methods, including those using explicit ground-truth 3D positional encoding and those grafting external 3D foundation models for implicit geometry, struggle with the trade-off in 2D-3D representation fusion, leading to suboptimal deployment. To this end, we propose 3D-Implicit Depth Emergence, a method that reframes 3D perception as an emergent property derived from geometric self-supervision rather than explicit encoding. Our core insight is the Implicit Geometric Emergence Principle: by strategically leveraging privileged geometric supervision through mechanisms like a fine-grained geometry validator and global representation constraints, we construct an information bottleneck. This bottleneck forces the model to maximize the mutual information between visual features and 3D structures, allowing 3D awareness to emerge naturally within a unified visual representation. Unlike existing approaches, our method enables 3D perception to emerge implicitly, disentangling features in dense regions and, crucially, eliminating depth and pose dependencies during inference with zero latency overhead. This paradigm shift from external grafting to implicit emergence represents a fundamental rethinking of 3D knowledge integration in visual-language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses SOTA on multiple 3D scene understanding benchmarks. Our approach achieves a 55% reduction in inference latency while maintaining strong performance across diverse downstream tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of meticulously designed auxiliary objectives for dependency-free 3D understanding. Source code can be found at github.com/ChushanZhang/3D-IDE.

Can LLMs Learn to Reason Robustly under Noisy Supervision?

arXiv:2604.03993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively trains reasoning models that rely on abundant perfect labels, but its vulnerability to unavoidable noisy labels due to expert scarcity remains critically underexplored. In this work, we take the first step toward a systematic analysis of noisy label mechanisms in RLVR. In contrast to supervised classification, most RLVR algorithms incorporate a rollout-based condition: a label's influence on training is contingent on whether the current policy can generate rollouts that realize it, a property that naturally extends to noisy labels. Based on this observation, we distinguish two types of noise: inactive noisy labels, which reduce data efficiency, and active noisy labels, which are reinforced and risk skewing the model toward incorrect distributions. From experiments on training with noisy samples, we identify an Early Correctness Coherence phenomenon: although noisy samples begin to lag behind in later stages, accuracy on both clean and noisy samples increases similarly in early training. Motivated by this dynamic, we propose Online Label Refinement (OLR), which progressively corrects potentially noisy labels with majority-voted answers when two conditions hold: a positive slope in the majority answer's rollout pass rate and stable historical consistency across updates, enabling gradual self-correction as the policy improves. We evaluate OLR on six in-distribution mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AIME24/25, AMC, MATH-500, Minerva, and Olympiad) and three out-of-distribution tasks (ARC-c, GPQA-diamond, and MMLU-pro). Across noise ratios from 0.1 to 0.9, OLR consistently improves robustness under both inactive and active noisy-label settings, achieving average gains of 3.6% to 3.9% on in-distribution benchmarks and 3.3% to 4.6% on out-of-distribution evaluations.

Learning Robust Visual Features in Computed Tomography Enables Efficient Transfer Learning for Clinical Tasks

arXiv:2604.04133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There is substantial interest in developing artificial intelligence systems to support radiologists across tasks ranging from segmentation to report generation. Existing computed tomography (CT) foundation models have largely focused on building generalist vision-language systems capable of tasks such as question answering and report generation. However, training reliable vision-language systems requires paired image-text data at a scale that remains unavailable in CT. Moreover, adapting the underlying visual representations to downstream tasks typically requires partial or full backbone fine-tuning, a computationally demanding process inaccessible to many research groups. Instead, foundation models should prioritise learning robust visual representations that enable efficient transfer to new tasks with minimal labelled data and without backbone fine-tuning. We present VoxelFM, a 3D CT foundation model trained with self-distillation using the DINO framework, which learns semantically rich features without language supervision. We evaluated VoxelFM across seven categories of clinically relevant downstream tasks using frozen backbone representations with lightweight probes: classification, regression, survival analysis, instance retrieval, localisation, segmentation, and report generation. VoxelFM matched or outperformed four existing CT foundation models across all task categories. Despite receiving no language supervision during pre-training, VoxelFM surpassed models explicitly trained with language-alignment objectives, including on report generation. Our results indicate that current CT foundation models perform significantly better as feature extractors for lightweight probes rather than as vision encoders for vision-language models. Model weights and training code are publicly available.

GENFIG1: Visual Summaries of Scholarly Work as a Challenge for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2604.04172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In many science papers, "Figure 1" serves as the primary visual summary of the core research idea. These figures are visually simple yet conceptually rich, often requiring significant effort and iteration by human authors to get right, highlighting the difficulty of science visual communication. With this intuition, we introduce GENFIG1, a benchmark for generative AI models (e.g., Vision-Language Models). GENFIG1 evaluates models for their ability to produce figures that clearly express and motivate the central idea of a paper (title, abstract, introduction, and figure caption) as input. Solving GENFIG1 requires more than producing visually appealing graphics: the task entails reasoning for text-to-image generation that couples scientific understanding with visual synthesis. Specifically, models must (i) comprehend and grasp the technical concepts of the paper, (ii) identify the most salient ones, and (iii) design a coherent and aesthetically effective graphic that conveys those concepts visually and is faithful to the input. We curate the benchmark from papers published at top deep-learning conferences, apply stringent quality control, and introduce an automatic evaluation metric that correlates well with expert human judgments. We evaluate a suite of representative models on GENFIG1 and demonstrate that the task presents significant challenges, even for the best-performing systems. We hope this benchmark serves as a foundation for future progress in multimodal AI.

Agentization of Digital Assets for the Agentic Web: Concepts, Techniques, and Benchmark

arXiv:2604.04226v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic Web, as a new paradigm that redefines the internet through autonomous, goal-driven interactions, plays an important role in group intelligence. As the foundational semantic primitives of the Agentic Web, digital assets encapsulate interactive web elements into agents, which expand the capacities and coverage of agents in agentic web. The lack of automated methodologies for agent generation limits the wider usage of digital assets and the advancement of the Agentic Web. In this paper, we first formalize these challenges by strictly defining the A2A-Agentization process, decomposing it into critical stages and identifying key technical hurdles on top of the A2A protocol. Based on this framework, we develop an Agentization Agent to agentize digital assets for the Agentic Web. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we propose A2A-Agentization Bench, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentization quality in terms of fidelity and interoperability. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively activates the functional capabilities of digital assets and enables interoperable A2A multi-agent collaboration. We believe this work will further facilitate scalable and standardized integration of digital assets into the Agentic Web ecosystem.

GAIN: Multiplicative Modulation for Domain Adaptation

arXiv:2604.04516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting LLMs to new domains causes forgetting because standard methods (full fine-tuning, LoRA) inject new directions into the weight space. We propose GAIN, which re-emphasizes existing features through multiplicative modulation W_new = S * W. The learned diagonal matrix S is applied to the attention output projection and optionally the FFN. The principle mirrors gain modulation in neuroscience, where neurons adapt to context by scaling response strength while preserving selectivity. We evaluate GAIN on five models from four families (774M to 70B), adapting sequentially across eight domains. GAIN-FFN matches LoRA's in-domain adaptation, but their effects on previously trained domains are opposite: GAIN-FFN improves them by 7-13% (validation PPL), while LoRA degrades them by 18-36%. Downstream accuracy confirms the pattern: for example, after seven sequential adaptations on Qwen2.5, GAIN-FFN degrades BoolQ by only 0.8% while LoRA damages it by 14.9%. GAIN adds 46K-230K parameters per model and can be absorbed into the pretrained weights for zero inference cost.

SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents

arXiv:2604.04804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for building capable large language model (LLM) agents, yet prevailing self-evolving paradigms remain inefficient: agents learn in isolation, repeatedly rediscover similar behaviors from limited experience, resulting in redundant exploration and poor generalization. To address this problem, we propose SkillX, a fully automated framework for constructing a \textbf{plug-and-play skill knowledge base} that can be reused across agents and environments. SkillX operates through a fully automated pipeline built on three synergistic innovations: \textit{(i) Multi-Level Skills Design}, which distills raw trajectories into three-tiered hierarchy of strategic plans, functional skills, and atomic skills; \textit{(ii) Iterative Skills Refinement}, which automatically revises skills based on execution feedback to continuously improve library quality; and \textit{(iii) Exploratory Skills Expansion}, which proactively generates and validates novel skills to expand coverage beyond seed training data. Using a strong backbone agent (GLM-4.6), we automatically build a reusable skill library and evaluate its transferability on challenging long-horizon, user-interactive benchmarks, including AppWorld, BFCL-v3, and $\tau^2$-Bench. Experiments show that SkillKB consistently improves task success and execution efficiency when plugged into weaker base agents, highlighting the importance of structured, hierarchical experience representations for generalizable agent learning. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillX.

LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection

arXiv:2604.04815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed fake news detection and fact-checking tasks from simple classification to complex reasoning. However, evaluation frameworks have not kept pace. Current benchmarks are static, making them vulnerable to benchmark data contamination (BDC) and ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty. To address this, we introduce LiveFact a continuously updated benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" in misinformation detection. LiveFact uses dynamic, temporal evidence sets to evaluate models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information rather than on memorized knowledge. We propose a dual-mode evaluation: Classification Mode for final verification and Inference Mode for evidence-based reasoning, along with a component to monitor BDC explicitly. Tests with 22 LLMs show that open-source Mixture-of-Experts models, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B, now match or outperform proprietary state-of-the-art systems. More importantly, our analysis finds a significant "reasoning gap." Capable models exhibit epistemic humility by recognizing unverifiable claims in early data slices-an aspect traditional static benchmarks overlook. LiveFact sets a sustainable standard for evaluating robust, temporally aware AI verification.

InfBaGel: Human-Object-Scene Interaction Generation with Dynamic Perception and Iterative Refinement

arXiv:2604.04843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-object-scene interactions (HOSI) generation has broad applications in embodied AI, simulation, and animation. Unlike human-object interaction (HOI) and human-scene interaction (HSI), HOSI generation requires reasoning over dynamic object-scene changes, yet suffers from limited annotated data. To address these issues, we propose a coarse-to-fine instruction-conditioned interaction generation framework that is explicitly aligned with the iterative denoising process of a consistency model. In particular, we adopt a dynamic perception strategy that leverages trajectories from the preceding refinement to update scene context and condition subsequent refinement at each denoising step of consistency model, yielding consistent interactions. To further reduce physical artifacts, we introduce a bump-aware guidance that mitigates collisions and penetrations during sampling without requiring fine-grained scene geometry, enabling real-time generation. To overcome data scarcity, we design a hybrid training startegy that synthesizes pseudo-HOSI samples by injecting voxelized scene occupancy into HOI datasets and jointly trains with high-fidelity HSI data, allowing interaction learning while preserving realistic scene awareness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both HOSI and HOI generation, and strong generalization to unseen scenes. Project page: https://yudezou.github.io/InfBaGel-page/

VLBiasBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Bias in Large Vision-Language Model

arXiv:2406.14194v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) marks significant strides towards achieving general artificial intelligence. However, these advancements are accompanied by concerns about biased outputs, a challenge that has yet to be thoroughly explored. Existing benchmarks are not sufficiently comprehensive in evaluating biases due to their limited data scale, single questioning format and narrow sources of bias. To address this problem, we introduce VLBiasBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate biases in LVLMs. VLBiasBench, features a dataset that covers nine distinct categories of social biases, including age, disability status, gender, nationality, physical appearance, race, religion, profession, social economic status, as well as two intersectional bias categories: race x gender and race x social economic status. To build a large-scale dataset, we use Stable Diffusion XL model to generate 46,848 high-quality images, which are combined with various questions to creat 128,342 samples. These questions are divided into open-ended and close-ended types, ensuring thorough consideration of bias sources and a comprehensive evaluation of LVLM biases from multiple perspectives. We conduct extensive evaluations on 15 open-source models as well as two advanced closed-source models, yielding new insights into the biases present in these models. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Xiangkui-Cao/VLBiasBench.

Low-Bitrate Video Compression through Semantic-Conditioned Diffusion

arXiv:2512.00408v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional video codecs optimized for pixel fidelity collapse at ultra-low bitrates and produce severe artifacts. This failure arises from a fundamental misalignment between pixel accuracy and human perception. We propose a semantic video compression framework named DiSCo that transmits only the most meaningful information while relying on generative priors for detail synthesis. The source video is decomposed into three compact modalities: a textual description, a spatiotemporally degraded video, and optional sketches or poses that respectively capture semantic, appearance, and motion cues. A conditional video diffusion model then reconstructs high-quality, temporally coherent videos from these compact representations. Temporal forward filling, token interleaving, and modality-specific codecs are proposed to improve multimodal generation and modality compactness. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline semantic and traditional codecs by 2-10X on perceptual metrics at low bitrates.

ContextDrag: Precise Drag-Based Image Editing via Context-Preserving Token Injection and Position-Aligned Attention

arXiv:2512.08477v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Drag-based image editing enables intuitive visual manipulation through point-based drag operations. Existing methods mainly rely on diffusion inversion or pixel-space warping with inpainting. However, inversion inherently introduces approximation errors that degrade texture fidelity, whereas rigid pixel-space operations discard semantic context and produce unnatural deformations. To address these issues, we introduce ContextDrag, to our knowledge the first framework that brings drag-based manipulation into the in-context image editing paradigm. By leveraging the in-context capabilities of editing models (e.g., FLUX-Kontext), ContextDrag enables precise drag editing without inversion or fine-tuning. Specifically, we first propose Context-preserving Token Injection (CTI), which injects VAE-encoded reference features into attention layers at spatially aligned target positions, guided by latent-space correspondences estimated directly from user-specified control points. By operating on clean, directly encoded features rather than noisy inversion outputs, CTI preserves rich texture details and enables precise drag control. Second, we propose Position-Aligned Attention (PAA) to eliminate interference caused by spatial displacement of reference features. PAA re-encodes positional embeddings of displaced reference tokens to match their target locations, and masks overlapping regions between source and destination to prevent conflicting features from degrading visual consistency. Experiments on DragBench-SR and DragBench-DR demonstrate that ContextDrag achieves SOTA editing accuracy and overall quality, and comprehensive ablations validate the effectiveness of each proposed component. Code will be publicly available.

NSUN2/ALYREF-mediated RNA m5c modification promotes anoikis resistance of prostate cancer through activating autophagy

Oncogene, Published online: 07 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03762-4

NSUN2/ALYREF-mediated RNA m5c modification promotes anoikis resistance of prostate cancer through activating autophagy

SETDB2 induces abnormal SHP-1 splicing and promotes immunosuppression in hepatocellular carcinoma

Oncogene, Published online: 07 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03759-z

SETDB2 induces abnormal SHP-1 splicing and promotes immunosuppression in hepatocellular carcinoma

SRSF10 promotes cisplatin resistance in bladder cancer via BIN1 Exon 12 retention and ANXA1 activation

Oncogene, Published online: 06 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41388-026-03735-7

SRSF10 promotes cisplatin resistance in bladder cancer via BIN1 Exon 12 retention and ANXA1 activation
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