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FeynmanBench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Diagrammatic Physics Reasoning

arXiv:2604.03893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Breakthroughs in frontier theory often depend on the combination of concrete diagrammatic notations with rigorous logic. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in general scientific tasks, current benchmarks often focus on local information extraction rather than the global structural logic inherent in formal scientific notations. In this work, we introduce FeynmanBench, the first benchmark centered on Feynman diagram tasks. It is designed to evaluate AI's capacity for multistep diagrammatic reasoning, which requires satisfying conservation laws and symmetry constraints, identifying graph topology, converting between diagrammatic and algebraic representations, and constructing scattering amplitudes under specific conventions and gauges. To support large-scale and reproducible evaluation, we developed an automated pipeline producing diverse Feynman diagrams along with verifiable topological annotations and amplitude results. Our database spans the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions of the Standard Model, encompasses over 100 distinct types and includes more than 2000 tasks. Experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal systematic failure modes, including unstable enforcement of physical constraints and violations of global topological conditions, highlighting the need for physics-grounded benchmarks for visual reasoning over scientific notation. FeynmanBench provides a logically rigorous test of whether AI can effectively engage in scientific discovery, particularly within theoretical physics.

ShadowNPU: System and Algorithm Co-design for NPU-Centric On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2508.16703v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-device running Large Language Models (LLMs) is nowadays a critical enabler towards preserving user privacy. We observe that the attention operator falls back from the special-purpose NPU to the general-purpose CPU/GPU because of quantization sensitivity in state-of-the-art frameworks. This fallback results in a degraded user experience and increased complexity in system scheduling. To this end, this paper presents shadowAttn, a system-algorithm codesigned sparse attention module with minimal reliance on CPU/GPU by only sparsely calculating the attention on a tiny portion of tokens. The key idea is to hide the overhead of estimating the important tokens with a NPU-based pilot compute. Further, shadowAttn proposes insightful techniques such as NPU compute graph bucketing, head-wise NPU-CPU/GPU pipeline and per-head fine-grained sparsity ratio to achieve high accuracy and efficiency. shadowAttn delivers the best performance with highly limited CPU/GPU resource; it requires much less CPU/GPU resource to deliver on-par performance of SoTA frameworks.

DarwinNet: An Evolutionary Network Architecture for Agent-Driven Protocol Synthesis

arXiv:2604.01236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional network architectures suffer from severe protocol ossification and structural fragility due to their reliance on static, human-defined rules that fail to adapt to the emergent edge cases and probabilistic reasoning of modern autonomous agents. To address these limitations, this paper proposes DarwinNet, a bio-inspired, self-evolving network architecture that transitions communication protocols from a \textit{design-time} static paradigm to a \textit{runtime} growth paradigm. DarwinNet utilizes a tri-layered framework-comprising an immutable physical anchor (L0), a WebAssembly-based fluid cortex (L1), and an LLM-driven Darwin cortex (L2)-to synthesize high-level business intents into executable bytecode through a dual-loop \textit{Intent-to-Bytecode} (I2B) mechanism. We introduce the Protocol Solidification Index (PSI) to quantify the evolutionary maturity of the system as it collapses from high-latency intelligent reasoning (Slow Thinking) toward near-native execution (Fast Thinking). Validated through a reliability growth framework based on the Crow-AMSAA model, experimental results demonstrate that DarwinNet achieves anti-fragility by treating environmental anomalies as catalysts for autonomous evolution. Our findings confirm that DarwinNet can effectively converge toward physical performance limits while ensuring endogenous security through zero-trust sandboxing, providing a viable path for the next generation of intelligent, self-optimizing networks.

PROSPECT: Unified Streaming Vision-Language Navigation via Semantic--Spatial Fusion and Latent Predictive Representation

arXiv:2603.03739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced zero-shot end-to-end Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), yet robust navigation requires not only semantic understanding but also predictive modeling of environment dynamics and spatial structure. We propose PROSPECT, a unified streaming navigation agent that couples a streaming Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy with latent predictive representation learning. PROSPECT uses CUT3R as a streaming 3D foundation spatial encoder to produce long-context, absolute-scale spatial features, and fuses them with SigLIP semantic features via cross-attention. During training, we introduce learnable stream query tokens that query the streaming context and predict next-step 2D and 3D latent features (rather than pixels or explicit modalities), supervised in the latent spaces of frozen SigLIP and CUT3R teachers. The predictive branch shapes internal representations without inference overhead. Experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks and real-robot deployment demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and improved long-horizon robustness under diverse lighting. We will release code for the community soon.
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