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Kun Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Kun Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Force Sensing in a Recoverable Bosonic Quantum Memory

In continuous-variable quantum information, sensing and quantum error correction in the same mode face an intrinsic trade-off: sensors must accumulate weak external displacements, whereas bosonic codes typically suppress such shifts as errors. Here, we establish compatibility by constructing finite-energy bosonic codes that enable a single oscillator to sense an external force while actively protecting an unknown logical qubit. By encoding logical amplitudes across discrete wave-packet sites and capturing the force signal in a shared internal coordinate, we achieve an endpoint probe readout that is independent of the logical state under continuous photon loss $γ$. Crucially, binomial site recovery cancels packet-dependent probe distortions alongside logical errors: for a $(2r+2)$-packet code, memory infidelity is suppressed to $O(γ^{r+1})$ while residual memory-probe correlations scale as $O(γ^{r+2})$. Finally, superconducting quantum circuit benchmarks under competing photon-number dephasing and Kerr nonlinearity identify preferred encoding regimes for hardware implementation.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2026

Anisotropic overlap reduction functions for arbitrary equal-arm TDI channels: A fully analytic framework and efficient evaluation

We establish a unified analytic framework for anisotropic overlap reduction functions (ORFs) of arbitrary finite-delay time-delay interferometry (TDI) channels in a static, reciprocal, equal-arm equilateral constellation. The construction combines the polynomial constraints for laser-noise cancellation, constellation symmetries, and directional-projection integration. A free basis of the admissible channel module separates channel generation from angular integration; two families of elementary angular kernels then generate all channel-pair intensity ORFs. The channel algebra is independent of gravitational-wave polarization, and the intensity-kernel reduction applies to tensor, vector, breathing, and longitudinal sectors. Tensor multipoles illustrate the framework here. Complete propagation effects are retained at arbitrary fixed finite angular order, with explicit examples through $\ell=5$. Prepared frequency batches, shared multiprecision expressions, and local expansions at removable delay points provide stable evaluation. In the prepared-batch benchmark, the analytic implementation is approximately 50 to 5000 times faster than optimized sky quadrature at matched error tolerances. Independent multiprecision sky integrations also validate prescribed mixed error targets down to $10^{-100}$ in the tested cases. The resulting kernels and generation rules supply reusable inputs for anisotropic multichannel background models.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

DISCERN: Can AI Agents Work Like Scientists and Guide Discovery?

Reliable automated research requires agents to vet data, verify analyses, and generate hypotheses grounded in trustworthy evidence, potentially reducing routine scientific workload while allowing scientists to focus on interpretation and discovery. Existing benchmarks often only assess analytical task completion or hypothesis generation separately rather than testing whether reliable evidence supports valid and novel claims. We introduce DISCERN (Data Integrity and Scientific Capability: Evidence, Reasoning, and Novelty), a controlled benchmark on real, publicly available datasets that evaluates three key levels of an automated research workflow. The first two levels test data integrity and analysis verification under confounds and tool traps, while the third tests hypothesis generation and revision under adversarial review, including counterfactual cases in which evidence consistent with real data and documented scientific phenomena conflicts with established expectations, motivating alternative explanations and testable hypotheses. Across 203 tasks, eight life-science tracks, and eight models, DISCERN shows that strong aggregate performance can mask level-specific weaknesses. Agents earn perfect scores in only 60.8% of Level 1, 34.2% of Level 2, and 0.6% of Level 3 evaluations, with penalties attributed to rejection of sound data, failure to carry recognized limitations into conclusions, and wide variation in hypothesis production. Cross-track rankings by token and code use are substantially more stable than rankings by evidence judgment, suggesting greater consistency in computational effort than in evidence-based reasoning. These profiles identify opportunities for supervised scientific assistance, but current agents do not yet demonstrate reliable autonomous analysis or discovery. Code and data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/discern-bench-anon/discern-benchmark

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

RobotAgentBench: Towards Open-world Robot Autonomy

Recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) have significantly improved robotic manipulation, yet deploying robots in the open world demands a higher level of autonomy beyond executing predefined tasks. Robot agents offer a promising paradigm for this transition, integrating task discovery, contextual reasoning, physical execution, and adaptive recovery into a closed interaction loop. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate isolated capabilities, failing to capture the complexity of open-world robot autonomy. We introduce RobotAgentBench (RAB), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating robot agents in realistic, open-world household environments. Through an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop real-to-sim pipeline, RAB constructs 50 diverse household layouts with interactive objects and physically grounded tasks, encompassing 90 atomic tasks, 18 short-horizon tasks, 8 long-horizon tasks, and 4 open-ended scenarios. RAB provides a multi-level evaluation of robot agent capabilities: (1) task-level assessments systematically examine five complementary dimensions: task discovery, context reasoning, manipulation, failure recovery, and robustness; (2) scenario-level evaluation assesses how agents integrate these capabilities to autonomously fulfill high-level user needs. Furthermore, RAB enables systematic comparisons of standalone VLA/WAM models and diverse robot agent architectures under a unified planning-execution-verification framework. Extensive experiments reveal substantial gaps between manipulation and autonomy, demonstrate the advantages of agentic architectures and recursive self-improvement, and highlight the remaining challenges toward open-world robot autonomy.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Agentic Image Generation in the Wild

Agentic image generation pairs an image generator with a search agent that retrieves references from the web, extending generation beyond the generator's training data. Real-world requests, however, often concern entities that appeared only days ago. We call this setting Image Generation in the Wild. In this setting, the web offers limited visual evidence, search results are crowded with easily confused entities, and the target is rarely shown on its own. To study this setting, we build an automated pipeline that synthesizes prompts from recent headlines and keeps only those whose real search results are highly confusing, yielding requests that are hard to solve yet natural to ask. With it, we construct Savanna, a benchmark of 500 prompts across 16 subcategories. On Savanna, even harness frameworks built on the frontier models retrieve a correct reference for only about half of the prompts. We then propose Locate-Corroborate-Isolate, a paradigm in which the agent first pins down the target's identity through text search, then verifies candidate images against multiple sources, and finally crops a clean reference for the generator. Trained on 15K trajectories that follow this paradigm, Ranger-8B achieves a search score of 67.2, outperforming harnesses equipped with frontier models. It also achieves the best generation quality with every generator we test, and surpasses prior agentic methods on other image generation benchmarks. We release the pipeline, benchmark, training data and model at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Agentic-ImageGen-Wild.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Video2World: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Interactive World Modeling from Embodied Videos

Building interactive simulators from real-world observations is a promising way to scale embodied data, but current pipelines still rely heavily on manual environment construction and calibration. We study whether frontier foundation models and coding agents can automate this process end to end. We formulate \emph{autonomous video-to-simulation} as a software engineering task in which an agent observes an embodied video, constructs the corresponding simulated environment and robot behavior, and iteratively refines the result through execution feedback. To evaluate this capability, we introduce \textbf{Video2World}, a benchmark comprising 222 reconstruction instances derived from 189 robot and human demonstration videos. Video2World measures reconstructed worlds along geometric fidelity, dynamic fidelity, and functional correctness, capturing spatial perception, physical reasoning, and executable interaction. Evaluating 9 frontier coding-agent systems reveals a sharp improvement in Task success beginning with Claude Opus 5, rising from below 5\% to over 15\%, while substantial gaps to human-assisted reconstruction remain. We further find that worlds that look better could work worse: better visual fidelity does not always lead to higher task success. This echoes the broader gap between perceptual realism and factual correctness observed in generative models.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Residual-Stream Burden Shapes Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

In diffusion-based generation, a neural network can be trained to predict the clean data, the noise, or the velocity from a noisy input. These prediction targets are interconvertible and describe the same generative process, yet plain Diffusion Transformers operating on large pixel patches succeed with clean prediction and fail with noise or velocity prediction. We argue that this asymmetry arises because noisy targets require the residual stream to preserve noise-dependent input variation through depth for the final readout, forcing subsequent layers to compute on noisy representations. A spectrally concentrated clean target imposes a lighter demand, leaving greater freedom to organize hidden representations for subsequent computation. We call this preservation requirement *residual-stream burden* and show how it shapes representation learning in Diffusion Transformers. Controlled experiments indicate that the exploitable structure is spectral concentration in patch space and that the bandwidth of the persistent residual state is a key resource for noisy prediction. We further show that this account is consistent with recent decoupled pixel-space architectures, whose diverse designs all reduce the residual-stream burden on the main pathway. To examine this understanding from a complementary direction, we expand and reorganize the residual-stream bandwidth directly, introducing Spatially Indexed Hyper-Connections (SiHC) that reach FID 1.71 on ImageNet $256^2$. Together, these results identify residual-stream burden as a mechanism through which prediction targets and architecture jointly shape representation learning in Diffusion Transformers.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Can LLMs Discover Scientific Laws in Real and Parallel Worlds?

Scientific law discovery has long been central to scientific progress, proceeding through iterative cycles of generating hypotheses, testing them against empirical evidence, and refining them under scientific constraints. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly involved in scientific research, whether they can discover scientific laws and how to evaluate this ability remain open questions. A central evaluation challenge is to move beyond familiar published equations while keeping discovery tasks grounded in scientific data and constraints. We introduce SciLaws-Bench, a curated collection of scientific task packages grounded in the source literature, each linking a scientific problem, supporting data, published reference equations, and scientific-validity rubrics. Through agent-assisted curation and human verification, we assemble 118 problems spanning six disciplines, drawing on 381 papers, 291 candidate laws, and roughly 8M data points. Each problem supports two complementary evaluation settings. SciLaws-Real uses fixed scientific data to evaluate proposed laws for held-out predictive fit and scientific validity. SciLaws-Parallel evaluates recovery of a newly synthesized structural variant of a published equation through active queries to a simulator calibrated to the source data. Our evaluation reveals three limitations: good predictive fit need not imply scientific validity, recovering a published formula does not establish recovery of its new structural terms, and candidate selection remains a bottleneck in scientific law discovery. Project page: https://yiyihum.github.io/SciLaws-Bench

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Distortion-Free High-Resolution PROPELLER-DWI: Technical Advances and Initial Demonstration for the Prostate

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an integrated acquisition and reconstruction framework for distortion-free, high-resolution prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). Methods: PROPELLER-DWI combines pulsed-gradient spin-echo diffusion preparation, an interleaved gradient-and-spin-echo PROPELLER acquisition with golden-angle blade rotation, and self-supervised joint reconstruction and denoising. It was compared with conventional NUFFT reconstruction and MPPCA denoising in a NIST/QIBA diffusion phantom, 25 volunteers, and 4 clinical patients undergoing 3T prostate MRI across three spatial-resolution settings and two b-values (50 and 1000 s/mm2). Reader studies compared geometric fidelity, image quality, and overall preference with clinical single-shot EPI-DWI. Results: PROPELLER-DWI preserved prostate geometry in cases where EPI-DWI showed susceptibility-induced distortion, signal loss, and metal-related artifacts. Self-supervised reconstruction improved noise suppression, with the greatest benefit at higher spatial resolution. Across all resolutions, PROPELLER-DWI had significantly higher geometric fidelity than EPI-DWI, and radiologist preference increased with the severity of EPI distortion. ADC measurements remained consistent across resolutions and comparable to clinical EPI-DWI, whereas EPI-DWI ADC varied with increasing resolution. Retrospective reduced-shot reconstruction also supported shorter scan times. Conclusion: PROPELLER-DWI enables distortion-free, high-resolution prostate DWI while preserving quantitative diffusion measurements, providing a practical alternative for technically challenging prostate MRI and applications requiring improved geometric fidelity.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2026

RSIGame: Autonomous Agentic Game Development with Recursive Self-improvement

Recent advances in large language models have made automatic game generation increasingly feasible, yet reliably improving generated games beyond a playable version remains challenging. Naive iterative refinement can easily overfit a small set of test cases, producing fragile games with unresolved bugs, missing behaviors, and poor generalization to broader player interactions. We introduce RSIGame, an autonomous agentic game development framework with recursive self-improvement. RSIGame organizes development into complementary local and global loops. Concretely, a local explore-diagnose-improve loop broadly explores the executable game, diagnoses and prioritizes discovered issues, and performs evidence-grounded revision, where an evolving checklist continually accumulates new testing and improvement guidance. A global loop tracks overall quality, preserves the best checkpoint, and detects saturation or regression over long-horizon development. Beyond test-time improvement, RSIGame further internalizes successful development experience into the generator through training. Across 140 GameCraft-Bench tasks, two game engines, and five generators, RSIGame consistently improves game quality under matched development budgets. Notably, experience internalization enables Qwen3.8-27B to reach 61.38 on Godot and 58.53 on Phaser, exceeding GPT-5.5 one-shot scores while reducing Qwen's generation tokens by 11 times.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

RRG-SLAM: Real-time Reflection-aware Gaussian SLAM for Indoor Scenes

We introduce the first real-time reflection-aware Gaussian SLAM system for indoor scenes. The system features a reflection-aware TSDF-Gaussian hybrid representation that explicitly separates diffuse scene appearance from reflection components. The base scene is modeled by a TSDF volume and a set of base Gaussians capturing geometry and diffuse appearance, while planar reflections are represented by reflection Gaussian groups associated with detected reflective planes. The rendering is performed in three passes: TSDF raycasting first yields surface color, depth, plane IDs and reflection masks; base Gaussians are then rendered order-independently with depth culling and combined with the TSDF output to form the base image; finally, under the guidance of the plane ID map, reflection Gaussians from different reflection groups are rasterized only into their corresponding planar regions to generate the reflection image, which is subsequently composited with the base image via the reflection mask to produce the final output. For online reconstruction, our system first estimates the camera pose through reflection-aware tracking to suppress interference of reflection-dominated regions. It then identifies reflective planes using geometric, semantic, and temporal cues, and fuses the observations into the augmented TSDF volume with reflection-aware attributes. Afterwards the base and reflection Gaussians are initialized, optimized, and pruned online to maintain both reconstruction quality and efficiency. Experiments on a variety of datasets show that our method outperforms existing SLAM systems in reconstruction quality, tracking robustness, and novel-view rendering for indoor environments with reflections, while preserving real-time performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

BOOKMARKS: Efficient Active Storyline Memory for Role-playing

Memory systems are critical for role-playing agents (RPAs) to maintain long-horizon consistency. However, existing RPA memory methods (e.g., profiling) mainly rely on incremental summarization, whose compression discards details which become inaccessible to subsequent grounding. To address this issue, we propose a search-based memory framework called \textbf{\underline{BOOKMARKS}} for \textbf{active grounding}, which retains access to the full preceding storyline and collects task-relevant information on demand. Since summarizing the preceding storyline anew for each grounding request incurs substantial redundant computation, BOOKMARKS introduces \textbf{passive updating} to reuse earlier search results as checkpoints. Each \textbf{bookmark} represents the \textbf{content} about a particular aspect (\textbf{section}) of story information at a specific synchronization \textbf{point}. For current task, BOOKMARKS searches for only useful contents, reuses existing semantically equivalent bookmarks or initializes new ones, and synchronizes the selected ones from their stored checkpoints to the current scene. A reused bookmark thus only needs to process the newly observed storyline suffix, avoiding repeated synchronization. We evaluate BOOKMARKS across six narrative artifacts involving 47 characters and 9,537 test cases against non-active grounding baselines, covering next-action prediction and challenging, human-authored reasoning questions from a mystery game. BOOKMARKS improves next-action fidelity in a five-dimensional evaluation (emotion, intent, causality, position, and content) and raises mystery-game reasoning accuracy from 39.44\% to 45.42\% over the strongest baseline.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Causally Debiased Latent Action Model for Embodied Action-Conditioned World Models

Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from videos without executable action labels, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual confounders. With such objectives, LAM favors visual context over action dynamics, therefore downstream ACWMs exhibit residual motion under zero actions and fail to reproduce supplied dynamics. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three debiasing objectives: embodiment-centric reconstruction, action-centric contrastive learning, and latent space calibration, which together encourage embodiment-focused, action-aware, and well-calibrated representations. CD-LAM reduces action-following error by up to 42% and 35% when conditioned on latent and robot actions, while improving fidelity, and matching DreamDojo reference with over 12$\times$ fewer adaptation updates. CD-LAM also adapts LTX-2.3-22B into an ACWM with competitive quality using only 3.2% of DreamDojo-14B's sample exposures. On X-VLA, pretraining with CD-LAM instead of baseline LAM consistently improves success rates by up to 5 percent point across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin C2R.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TimeBraid: Unifying Time Series and Language for Understanding and Forecasting

We present TimeBraid, a series of unified time-series and language models that align pretrained language models and pretrained time-series foundation models through interleaved global residual attention layers. Each model inherits knowledge, instruction following, and reasoning from one side, continuous-signal perception and zero-shot forecasting from the other, and fuses the two in a shared representation space where both modalities are understood and generated. We study the design choices that make such unified modeling work: where to align the two representation spaces, how to ground language in temporal structure, how to balance understanding with generation, and how to keep joint optimization stable. The resulting recipe combines a unified prompting scheme for diverse time-series and text tasks, stabilized joint training, and supervision from 2.2M curated series--text pairs and 4.9M instruction-tuning samples. Across benchmarks spanning time-series perception, understanding, reasoning, and both context-aided and unimodal forecasting, TimeBraid remains competitive with far larger general-purpose models and task-specific counterparts.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CausalWM: Causal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Embodied World Model

Embodied world models learn to predict future physical dynamics from visual observations and control signals, where physical knowledge is implicitly entangled within latent representations. We introduce CausalWM, a 16B embodied world model that performs explicit causal chain-of-thought reasoning before future video prediction. CausalWM organizes useful variables into a reasoning trajectory, allowing the model to progressively capture causal dependencies underlying physical evolution. To train CausalWM, we collect 31K hours embodied data and develop a three-stage paradigm consisting of large-scale video pre-training, causal CoT mid-training, and multi-objective RL post-training. Despite using only a limited set of supervised CoT variables, CausalWM exhibits emergent in-context learning capabilities, enabling contextual visual feature guidance and efficient few-step generation. CausalWM achieves state-of-the-art performance across language-conditioned, action-conditioned, single-view and multi-view benchmarks, including Top-1 performance on TriWorldBench leaderboard.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Slot-ID: Identity-Preserving Video Generation from Reference Videos via Slot-Based Temporal Identity Encoding

Human identity-preserving text-to-video generation remains challenging under large changes in viewpoint, facial expression, illumination, and motion. Existing methods condition the generator on a single reference portrait, but a static image cannot capture how identity-bearing cues evolve across views and expressions, leading to face deformation, pose locking, identity drift, or over-smoothed faces. We observe that a short reference clip naturally provides richer temporal and multi-view identity cues than any single image, motivating a video-referential formulation. This richer signal, however, introduces a new challenge: identity evidence is distributed across many frames and must be distilled into a compact, stable representation under a limited token budget. To this end, we propose Slot-ID, a lightweight identity-conditioning framework built on a frozen text-to-video backbone. Slot-ID employs a slot-based temporal identity encoder with Sinkhorn-routed iterative reading to distill a compact, stable set of identity tokens from the reference clip, complemented by an image-anchor stream for dual-source conditioning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Slot-ID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity preservation and visual naturalness while remaining competitive in prompt following, with particularly large gains under challenging pose, expression, and motion variations.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

RSIAgent: Autonomous Exploration for Recursive Self-improvement in New Environments

Digital agents must often adapt to new environments whose interfaces, tools, and failure modes are not fully captured by pretrained models. We introduce \textbf{RSIAgent}, a training-free multi-agent framework for recursive self-improvement through autonomous memory construction. RSIAgent coordinates curriculum, actor, and verifier agents to continually explore the environment, validate outcomes, and retain environment-specific knowledge, including reusable causal relationships between actions, conditions, and consequences. It further adopts a \textbf{broad-then-deep} exploration strategy, combining parallel broad recursive self-exploration for discovering diverse environment structures with focused deep self-exploration for uncovering hard cases, hidden constraints, boundary conditions, and previously unknown causal dependencies. The resulting memory is frozen and can be directly reused for downstream tasks without updating model parameters. Experiments on OSWorld-v2 and Agent's Last Exam show that RSIAgent substantially improves strong open-source models, enabling Kimi-K3 and GLM-5.3 to outperform frontier closed-source models including GPT-6.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

PrimeScientist: Strategic Allocation of Research Effort in Autonomous Research

Autonomous research agents aim to automate scientific workflows, from proposing ideas to conducting experiments and analyzing results. Yet current AI and research agents can propose more directions than available resources allow them to pursue. Moreover, each attempt could consume substantial resources, requiring agents to reconsider how to invest in subsequent research. Thus, deciding how to invest research effort strategically should be a defining capability of autonomous research agents. Accordingly, we introduce PrimeScientist, which jointly determines research direction and resource investment across successive research attempts. Specifically, we formulate this challenge of strategic research effort allocation as a sequential decision problem where remaining resources should explicitly guide the research policy. We first introduce an executable plan tree that preserves competing plans and their outcomes across attempts. Building on this representation, we propose an adaptive MCTS-based allocation policy that balances exploration and exploitation using experimental feedback and remaining resources. Comprehensive evaluations across AI research, systems and code optimization, and machine learning engineering show that strategic allocation improves research quality and sample efficiency together. Across 12 AI research tasks, PrimeScientist improves average reward by 10.3% with 50.6% fewer research attempts than AutoResearch under the same resource budget. We believe making research effort allocation an explicit optimization target establishes effective resource use as a core research capability for autonomous agents to drive scientific breakthroughs at scale.

cs.CL↗