Video Diffusion Transformers process long spatio-temporal sequences, making self-attention the main bottleneck in high-resolution video generation. Training-free sparse attention reduces this cost, but adaptive Top-$p$ routing creates uneven per-head workloads under multi-GPU sequence parallelism. The resulting workload heterogeneity turns sparse attention into a rank-level straggler problem. We present \method{}, a training-free sparse-attention system that improves the distributed execution efficiency of adaptive sparse attention under multi-GPU sequence parallelism. \method{} uses Top-$p$ routing, a Top-$k$ safety floor, and video-aware block organization as the sparse-routing frontend, then repairs the materialized mask at runtime. Runtime Load Balancing migrates a small number of heavy heads via P2P communication to shorten the current critical path. Slack-Aware Sparse Augmentation fills residual non-critical-rank slack with additional high-value blocks, while overlap hides scheduling and migration overhead behind existing computation. On step-distilled Wan2.2 I2V, \method{} reduces average load imbalance from 1.34 to 1.08 and delivers a $4.41\times$ attention speedup over FlashAttention, while achieving a $2.02$--$2.11\times$ DiT inference speedup with competitive video quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16190
While large language models (LLMs) can solve advanced reasoning problems in seconds, we show that even frontier models fail to perform a much simpler operation: exactly copying an input string that lies well within their context windows. We attribute this failure to positional encodings in Transformer architectures, whose inductive bias favors copying through a shortcut based on matching local contexts rather than carefully locating the corresponding input positions. To address this issue, we introduce 2D-RoPE, which organizes text into a 2D grid rather than a 1D sequence and assigns each token a row ID and a column ID. Under this view, copying becomes simply retrieving input tokens at a fixed column offset, which makes the task easy to learn. In synthetic copy experiments, shallow Transformers with 2D-RoPE achieve perfect copying at input lengths hundreds of times longer than those seen during training, whereas standard positional encodings fall far behind. We further show that the advantage of 2D-RoPE language models on copy tasks consistently holds in large-scale pretraining on DCLM with model sizes up to 1.4B parameters. Overall, our results suggest that viewing text in 2D can benefit language modeling, and we hope this encourages future work to further explore the potential of 2D positional encodings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16072
Over the past decade, responsible AI (RAI) has produced a substantial body of practice for identifying and mitigating the risks AI poses in high-stakes settings. Yet this work has not produced a market that rewards trustworthiness. Firms that invest seriously in safety, fairness, and oversight cannot consistently prove to consumers, regulators, and shareholders that their systems go beyond the bare minimum of compliance. What is missing is a way for society to recognize or compare the difference. The result is a trust gap: a structural condition in which responsible development efforts happen inside organizations but produce no external, independently recognized and verifiable signal of trustworthy outcomes. We argue this gap is sustained in part because of a focus on responsible AI (a matter of internal process) as opposed to trustworthy AI (a matter of independently verifiable real-world outcomes), and that it persists because of three compounding failures: (1) the market cannot distinguish trustworthy systems from their imitations; (2) evaluation targets models and outputs rather than deployed sociotechnical systems and their outcomes; (3) the measurement ecosystem is oriented toward avoiding harm rather than demonstrating benefit. Reviewing existing AI governance instruments and comparing them to certification regimes in healthcare, sustainability, and security, we show that none integrate a governance baseline, independently verified positive-outcome evidence, and market signaling in a single framework. We propose independent, outcome-oriented certification as the connective layer that can close the trust gap, complementing regulation and internal governance by making trustworthiness measurable, comparable, and commercially rewarded.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15992
Standard automation ROI misses four categories of systemic risk -- tacit knowledge erosion, resilience reduction, regulatory exposure, and socio-institutional capital degradation -- that affect long-term organizational performance. PHP-AIO (Protocol for Human Preservation in AI-Optimized Organizations) is a five-gate sequential decision protocol with a final composite check that quantifies these unpriced systemic risks at the role level and produces auditable automation decisions. A closed-form automation-debt measure ($\rho(P)$) formalises how role-level decisions accumulate across multi-step processes; its warning is neutralised only by a regulator-mandated human-in-the-loop anchor. Applied to stylised profiles of representative internal roles, PHP-AIO produces distinct outcomes -- automate, augment, hybrid, and preserve -- for candidates that standard cost-benefit analysis would uniformly automate. Threshold sensitivity analysis confirms the gate decisions are robust to upward perturbations of at least 14% in three of four representative cases. Keywords: AI governance, automation decision, human oversight, tacit knowledge, organizational resilience, financial services
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15944
Much empirical legal research depends on translating unstructured text into structured variables. In corporate governance research as elsewhere, this translation has traditionally relied on human coding of documents such as charters and bylaws, a process that is costly, difficult to scale, and often opaque. This paper introduces DECODEM, a set of benchmark datasets for evaluating the automated extraction of corporate governance variables from organizational documents. The benchmarks pair randomly sampled corporate charters and bylaws with high-quality human annotations covering a range of governance provisions commonly studied in empirical work. Using these datasets, the paper evaluates several large-language-model extraction pipelines that vary in prompt design, task decomposition, and document handling. The underlying task consists of a set of document-level binary classification problems, one for each governance variable. The results show that automated extraction is feasible at a high level of accuracy for many provisions, with median performance near the upper bound across approaches. At the same time, performance varies systematically across variables, with a small number of provisions accounting for most of the remaining errors. More elaborate prompting strategies and cascading pipelines do not consistently improve performance for frontier models, but substantially narrow the gap between frontier and efficiency-oriented models in some settings, suggesting that pipeline design can partly substitute for model capability. By providing a standardized benchmark and a systematic evaluation of extraction methods, the paper demonstrates that current frontier models can extract legally meaningful information from complex corporate documents with high accuracy and suggests an important future role for automated feature extraction in constructing corporate governance datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15879
Metaphor in Arabic is a culturally grounded mechanism for constructing meaning, encoding cultural knowledge that shapes interpretation. Yet current Arabic language models typically collapse lexical, cultural, and metaphorical information into a single representational space, a phenomenon we term "semantic smearing". We introduce CAMMAR (Culture-Aware Matryoshka for Metaphorical Arabic Representations), a representation learning framework that organizes meaning into nested lexical, cultural, and metaphorical embedding subspaces through a staged semantic curriculum. The design implements compositional principles of Al-Jurjani's theory of nazum, modeling figurative meaning as compositionally grounded in prior semantic relations, and yields a training-free geometric measure of metaphoricity based on the distance between lexical and metaphorical representations. Evaluated on a new span-annotated Arabic metaphor set as word-matched figurative/literal pairs, the geometric readout detects metaphor well above chance when the inter-layer geometry is shaped by paired supervision (AUC up to 0.84; figurative outscores its literal counterpart for the same word in 82.6\% of pairs), but sits at chance under an unsupervised domain contrast alone, a clean separation between a legible-under-supervision regime and a non-emergent one. A controlled ablation shows that grounding the lexical layer in morphological roots gives a small but consistent gain, an effect absent from direct probing that reflects the layer's quality as a measurement anchor. We will release the datasets, cultural concept inventory, and code upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15847
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for training LLM agents, yet popular methods such as GRPO/RLOO rely on multiple independently sampled complete trajectories for advantage estimation. In long-horizon agentic tasks, such a uniform rollout strategy can waste budget on uninformative dead-end attempts, while promising intermediate states do not receive sufficient exploration. The multi-turn structure of agentic trajectories, with interleaved actions and observations, naturally supports organizing a trajectory group as a tree, where each turn serves as a decision point for exploration. This perspective reframes effective exploration as the problem of deciding where to branch. We propose Process-Scorer Guided Adaptive Tree Rollout (PATR), a quality-aware rollout framework for multi-turn agent RL. PATR uses task-appropriate process feedback to score partial trajectories, selectively branches from promising states, reuses shared prefixes, and conservatively stops degenerate paths to reduce wasted sampling. The resulting rollout groups remain compatible with standard policy optimization while providing more efficient exploration under the same training budget. We evaluate PATR on FrozenLake and the challenging SWE-Bench, which is largely unexplored by prior tree-rollout agent RL methods. Experiments show that PATR improves performance by up to +5.0 points on SWE-Bench and +9.3 points on FrozenLake, highlighting process-guided tree rollouts as an effective strategy for scalable multi-turn RL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15610
Agent skills, this http URL files that package reusable procedural knowledge for an LLM agent, are a popular mechanism for extending agent capabilities. Public repositories now host them in large and growing numbers, yet these artifacts are fragmented, redundant, and uneven in quality, and their value in practice is unclear. A core question remains open, namely how to consolidate this open-source this http URL ecosystem into a single usable corpus, and what bounds its benefit on real-world agent tasks. We present SkillCorpus, a framework that aggregates, curates, matches, and evaluates the open skill ecosystem at scale. It filters ~821,000 crawled skills through a multi-stage pipeline into 96,401 skills organised by a 16-class taxonomy and three quality facets (utility, robustness, safety), and pairs them with a fine-tuned retrieval-and-selection stack that matches task-relevant skills. We evaluate end-to-end across three benchmarks (SkillsBench, GDPVal, QwenClawBench), two harnesses, and two open backbones with a frontier robustness check. Integrating SkillCorpus yields consistent gains across all three benchmarks, largest on SkillsBench (+7.5 pp). An operational analysis traces the gains to a coverage boundary and a harness boundary. SkillCorpus is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end account of when a curated, retrieval-served community corpus improves real agent tasks, and where it does not. The dataset, models, and code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15557
Generation of clear and accessible public health narratives is critical for communicating complex epidemiological projections to policymakers and the general public at large. Such narratives require more than simply reporting numbers: projections must be contextualized and quantitatively grounded across multiple dimensions. Further, projections are often derived from large ensemble datasets which combine intervention assumptions, geographic and demographic strata, outcomes, time horizons, and uncertainty quantiles. However, directly using large language models (LLMs) to summarize and contextualize such data often leads to inconsistencies, omissions, and fragile behavior. We introduce an agentic framework (EpiNarrate) for public health report generation that separates structured numerical reasoning from natural-language generation. The framework first extracts scenario axes and organizes them into a partial-order schema, enabling systematic traversal of the underlying multidimensional space. It then constructs an augmented dataset and derives valid quantitative statements through a comparison grammar that enforces semantic and arithmetic consistency. To balance coverage and non-redundancy, we introduce an interestingness-driven selection mechanism based on maximum-entropy principles. Experiments on the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub demonstrate that our model produces narratives with improved factual grounding and broader coverage of salient epidemiological patterns, while preserving the style of expert-written reports.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15544
Video models are evolving into vision foundation models, yet they still lack human-like multi-step reasoning. Streaming autoregressive diffusion models are efficient but limited in reasoning, while bidirectional diffusion enables global revision with high inference costs due to dense frame-level denoising. Both paradigms struggle to achieve logical consistency and low-latency streaming for complex reasoning tasks. We propose HDR (Hierarchical Denoising for Visual Reasoning), a unified framework that integrates hierarchical latents into causal video generation for multi-step reasoning. HDR organizes video latents into a tree-structured hierarchy, enabling coarse-to-fine reasoning before streaming output. Coarse denoising layers preserve uncertain hypotheses for global planning, while finer layers progressively refine them into concrete visual states. A sparse hierarchical attention pattern (SHAP) further reduces temporal attention costs. We introduce a level-stratified multi-step video reasoning benchmark with out-of-distribution cases, covering six tasks: maze navigation, Tower of Hanoi, one-line drawing, sliding puzzle, Sokoban, and water pouring. Compared with streaming autoregressive diffusion baselines, HDR improves success from 34.22 to 60.29 (76.2% relative gain) and increases average progress from 76.00 to 89.56, demonstrating more consistent reasoning trajectories. HDR maintains low-latency streaming at 0.70 seconds per latent, achieving 54.2 times faster inference than bidirectional diffusion. It also retains 82.9% of full-data performance with only 2% training data, compared with 52.0% for bidirectional diffusion. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate HDR's potential for physical interaction and world modeling. Project demo: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15278
Poisoning pretraining data can introduce harmful behaviors to LMs that are difficult to detect and mitigate. Prior work on poisoning pretraining data has largely exploited established data sources such as Wikipedia, which do not represent the large scale and heterogeneity typical of pretraining corpora, and has ignored the interaction between poisoned data and data curation pipelines. We demonstrate that poisoning attacks on pretraining data are feasible beyond this limited setting through an existing web-scale content injection mechanism: public discussion interfaces. Additionally, to measure whether malicious content is included after web crawling and data curation, we introduce HalfLife, a novel analysis for estimating adversarial content inclusion in web-crawl based LM training data. We use HalfLife to explore the feasibility of poisoning pretraining corpora at web scale through open discussion interfaces. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of estimating whether poison injections are included in pretraining data, and establishes third-party webpage content as a possible vector for attacking language model pretraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15267
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often introduce errors when generating image captions, resulting in misaligned image-text pairs. Our work focuses on a class of captioning errors that we refer to as systematic misalignments, where a recurring error in MLLM-generated captions is closely associated with the presence of a specific visual feature in the paired image. Given a vision-language dataset with MLLM-generated captions, our aim in this work is to detect such errors, a task we refer to as systematic misalignment detection. As our first key contribution, we present Symbal, which utilizes a structured, dual-stage setup with off-the-shelf foundation models to identify systematic misalignments and summarize results in natural language. As our second key contribution, we introduce SymbalBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate automated methods on our proposed task. SymbalBench consists of 1.7 million image-text pairs from two domains (natural and medical images), organized into 420 vision-language datasets with annotated systematic misalignments. Symbal exhibits strong performance on this benchmark, correctly identifying systematic misalignments in 63.8% of datasets, a nearly 4x improvement over the closest baseline. We supplement our evaluations on SymbalBench with real-world evaluations, showing that (1) Symbal can accurately surface systematic misalignments in captions generated by four MLLMs and (2) Symbal is a powerful tool for auditing off-the-shelf image-caption datasets. Ultimately, our novel task, method, and benchmark can aid users with auditing MLLM-generated captions and identifying critical errors, without requiring access to the underlying MLLM. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15216
The Internet taught us that the value of a network depends on \emph{how} its nodes connect: broadcast stars scale as $V\!\propto\!N$ (Sarnoff), fully-connected meshes as $N^2$ (Metcalfe), and group-forming networks as $2^{N}$ (Reed). We ask the analogous question for networks of AI agents. We model the net value of connection as a function of coordination-group size, derive from it the properties an optimal collaboration protocol must have, and introduce ANet Patu-1 -- a self-organizing consensus protocol in which the network continuously re-forms its own coalitions, adaptively riding the upper envelope of all three regimes at $O(1)$ parallel consensus rounds. To measure value without opinion-grading, we score an emergent protocol by formally specifying it and deriving its complexity, the way distributed algorithms are analyzed. Two results follow. (i)~Emergence -- a crowd of the \emph{cheapest} model, when heterogeneous, starts weak but its collective value compounds with $N$ and \emph{overtakes} a crowd of a far \emph{stronger} model that is homogeneous: a crossover that marks a scaling law for collaboration rather than for scale. (ii)~Reflexivity -- a heterogeneous network, given only its own problem and no design hints, converges on ANet Patu-1 itself, reconstructing the high-dimensional law that governs its own connective value.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15053
We present Wan-Streamer v0.3, which reframes our native-streaming interaction model under a single organizing view: a video is a world plus an event stream. The world is the persistent context in which a video unfolds, including the environment, scene, subjects, ambient acoustic conditions, voice characteristics, and other relatively stable conditions. The event stream is everything that changes over time within that world, including scene or environmental changes, subject behavior, speech, and other sounds. This yields a general-purpose pretraining task over large amounts of real video: given a world and incoming input, predict how the world moves, changes, and responds in real time. The resulting competence can be specialized to a broad family of real-time downstream tasks. We instantiate it on real-time full-duplex audio-visual interaction, where the event stream is the agent's speech together with free-form behavior. Functionally, the model's multimodal understanding process is vision-language-action-like: it maps multimodal user input to language-form speech and behavior actions. Wan-Streamer v0.3 preserves the v0.2 operating point: 640x368 video at 25 FPS, a 160 ms streaming unit, approximately 200 ms model-side response latency, and approximately 550 ms total interaction latency under a 350 ms bidirectional network budget.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15038
Channel foundation models (CFMs) are developing rapidly, with recent studies reporting benefits from pretraining across downstream wireless tasks. Yet CFMs are commonly evaluated in model-specific pipelines with different data, radio configurations, partitions, adaptation procedures, task definitions, and metrics. Reported comparisons therefore tend to show that pretraining improves over supervised training from scratch within one pipeline, but neither rank CFMs nor compare them fairly with task-specific models. We release CFM-Bench, a unified multi-domain, multi-task benchmark designed to address this gap. It curates six channel configurations spanning 3GPP statistical simulation, two independent ray-tracing pipelines, industrial and aerial measurements, and synchronized vehicular multimodal simulation. Official partitions isolate complete trajectories, measurement sessions, vehicle links, simulation realizations, or buffered spatial regions. CFM-Bench does not prescribe an external pretraining corpus or strategy; no benchmark split may be used for foundation-model pretraining, and the official training split is reserved exclusively for downstream fine-tuning. The benchmark additionally requires disclosure of all data used during model development and prohibits training-stage use of official test units. Six task groups are organized along three CFM application dimensions: physical-layer (PHY) channel intelligence, radio-access-network (RAN) decision intelligence, and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). They cover CSI feedback, frequency and temporal channel extrapolation, propagation-state classification, current- and future-beam prediction, and single-frame and temporal localization. CFM-Bench provides a common substrate for comparing the transferability of channel representations across models, domains, and tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14975
Grounded in human rights-based frameworks such as the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, the Global Index on Responsible AI (GIRAI) examines how countries translate responsible AI commitments into enforceable protections, institutional capacity, and redress mechanisms. GIRAI 2026 assesses these across five dimensions: Inclusion and Diversity, Ethics and Sustainability, Labour and Skills, Trust and Safety, and AI Use in Public Service. A global network of 135 country-level researchers collected and assessed 68,138 data points on 38 indicators organised across three pillars: government AI policy and implementation (17 indicators), civil society engagement (5), enabling conditions (15), and documented cases of government deployment of unacceptable-risk AI systems. The data covers November 2023 to September 2025. A score of 100 is derived from the indicators to rank all countries. Findings show that while responsible AI governance is expanding, with 126 of 135 countries having at least one government policy or initiative across the 17 AI Policy indicators, this does not often translate into meaningful protection. For instance, Global South countries account for 203 of 306 new cases of indicators with frameworks since the first edition, yet 78% of their frameworks remain non-binding compared with 42% in the Global North. Government commitment to AI governance also does not extend to their own algorithms: whereas Transparency and Explainability is the strongest performing indicator, with 58% of countries having some framework, only 18% require Public Disclosure of Government Algorithms. Credible evidence of government deployment of unacceptable-risk AI systems was also found in 35 countries. These findings show that responsible AI governance must move beyond framework adoption toward enforceable rights-based protections, resourced oversight institutions, and accessible redress.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14782
Tactile image generation significantly reduces the dependency on expensive and wear-prone sensors by synthesizing high-fidelity tactile data, offering an efficient solution for tactile information acquisition in robotic perception and human-machine interaction systems. However, existing methods depend on large-scale, diverse datasets from specific sensors and lack efficient data utilization and robust generalization capabilities, struggling in vision-limited environments. To address this, we introduce VQ-Touch, a tactile generation framework that supports both cross-sensor and multi-scenario applications. Specifically, to efficiently extract complex deformation and texture features from the data, we propose DM-VQGAN, an effective tactile representation learner. Furthermore, we introduce a discrete diffusion decoder with a unified conditioning interface, supporting multimodal generation tasks such as images and labels, and enhances the model's generalization capability through few-shot mixed training, thus achieving compatibility with current mainstream sensors and their variants. Experiments show that VQ-Touch surpasses state-of-the-art methods in multiple tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14728
Evaluations (Evals) are a deployment bottleneck for real-world AI applications: public benchmarks rarely match a team's users, context, or policies, and human review is often tedious to scale. Motivated by our work with AI applications in the public sector, this project addresses recurring evaluation challenges encountered when applications must satisfy local policy and governance requirements. We present Kaleidoscope, an integrated workflow for contextual functional evaluation that links persona-based test generation, contextualized rubrics, and human review for reliability-gated automated scoring. Generated test cases are scored against application-specific rubrics; human annotations provide reviewable labels; and LLM judges automate scoring only when their agreement with those labels meets a configured threshold. Kaleidoscope is therefore a practical, inspectable, iterative workflow for product teams. We report early evidence from a three-week pilot across four organizational use cases and custom-rubric judge experiments on 108 annotated Q\&A pairs spanning four domains and 14 evaluation dimensions. The results highlight useful features for end-to-end reliable, automated scoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14673
Deploying large language models (LLMs) as personal assistants on mobile devices demands privacy, low latency, and offline availability, yet the computational cost of giant models clashes with strict edge-hardware budgets. We argue that this tension cannot be resolved by model compression alone; it requires decomposing on-device intelligence into complementary functional roles. We present SmartRAG, a fully on-device framework that organizes an intelligent assistant around four coordinated modules -- Perception, Memory, Focus, and Thinking. At the core of SmartRAG is EvoNER, a continually learnable named-entity recognizer that incrementally expands its label inventory through teacher-distilled updates, enabling the system to absorb previously unseen entity types without retraining the backbone LLM. Extracted knowledge is stored in MRGraph, a three-layer provenance-preserving knowledge graph, and retrieved at query time through a hybrid pipeline combining graph traversal, lexical matching, and dense semantic search. The on-device LLM is invoked only for high-value semantic operations -- labeling, planning, and answer synthesis -- keeping inference costs bounded. Experiments on four QA benchmarks (TriviaQA, Natural Questions, HotpotQA, MultiHopQA) show that SmartRAG with a quantized 1.7B-parameter backbone achieves multi-hop reasoning performance competitive with models up to 18$\times$ larger, while running entirely on commodity smartphones within practical memory and latency envelopes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14661
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in general tasks, rigorous scientific reasoning remains challenging due to the limitations of monolithic, linear planning. Such sequential designs often suffer from visual-semantic misalignment, long-context hallucinations, and brittle execution under fixed task granularity. We propose TopoAgent, a self-evolving topological framework that replaces linear trajectories with dynamic, state-isolated graph evolution. TopoAgent first employs a front-end decomposer to fracture complex queries into visually-grounded atoms. These atoms are organized into a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based on their dependencies, enabling strict context isolation to shield the reasoning engine from irrelevant historical noise. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive atomic fission, which dynamically splits bottleneck nodes into finer-grained sub-atoms at runtime when tool capability boundaries are exceeded. Extensive experiments across mathematics, physics, and chemistry benchmarks demonstrate that TopoAgent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art linear agent frameworks, providing a robust, noise-resistant, and self-correcting paradigm for autonomous scientific reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14658