#01Jul 30, 2026
cs.AI
OSReward: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Cross-Platform Computer-Use Reward Models
Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang and 20 more
Computer-using agents (CUAs) are advancing rapidly across the digital world. A CUA trajectory records the agent's actions, states, and reasoning. Verifying whether it fulfilled the task instruction is central to CUA evaluation, data curation, and reinforcement learning. Neither human-written verifiers nor human annotators can provide such verification at scale, so the field increasingly turns to vision-language models (VLMs) as judges of CUA trajectories. But a fundamental question has long gone unexamined: are these VLM judges reliable enough? To study it systematically, we introduce OSReward, a realistic, high-quality benchmark that evaluates VLM judges on CUA trajectories. The trajectories come from diverse agent backbones executing human-verified instructions across platforms, then rigorously labeled with ground-truth verdicts through multi-stage human annotation. Building on it, we derive OSReward-Hard, a challenge set concentrating genuinely hard cases, and OSReward-Multi for fine-grained efficiency and alignment scoring. The most comprehensive evaluation of VLM judges to date finds even state-of-the-art models fall short of an ideal judge, sharing a systematic leniency bias that mislabels failed runs as successes. The few reliable enough to trust are too expensive to run at scale, while affordable open models trail far behind. To close this gap, we construct and release OS-Shepherd-100K, an open corpus of reasoning-annotated trajectory judgments for the CUA community. On it, we train OS-Shepherd (9B and 35B), open reward models that supply low-cost, stable, and reliable reward signals, matching commercial judges at 30-60% lower cost than the frontier. Extensive analyses further inform the design of reliable CUA reward at scale. Our code, benchmark, dataset, and model checkpoints are available at https://os-copilot.github.io/OSReward-Home/.
#02Jul 30, 2026
cs.LG
Kohn-Sham Spectral Embedding on Sparse Graphs at the Nishimori Temperature for Image Classification
V. S. Usatyuk, D. A. Sapozhnikov, S. I. Egorov
We introduce Kohn--Sham Spectral Embedding (KSSE), a physics-inspired energy-based model replacing dense CNN classifiers with a sparse-graph spectral embedding evaluated at the Nishimori temperature of an associated Random-Bond Ising Model. By mapping pre-trained features onto quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check graphs and constructing a regularized Laplacian acting as a Kohn--Sham Hamiltonian, we solve $D$ independent channel spectral problems in $\mathcal{O}(N\log N + k^2_{\text{mode}} N)$ time via FFT on circulant blocks (leveraging Pontryagin self-duality of $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$) and low-order Rayleigh refinement. Graph topology is optimized using \emph{star-domain surgery}: rather than destroying information-carrying codewords by removing frustrated cycles, we construct edge shifts creating local convexity around codewords while bounding residual frustration to $ρ(B_γ)\leq 1+δ$. Multi-scale fractal analysis ($D_2$ spectrum) and fractal learning-rate landscape certifies a landscape transition from rough regimes ($D_2>3$) to star-domain basins ($D_2<1$), enabling Rayleigh refinement with $k_{\text{mode}}=5$ modes. We prove six theoretical results: a generalized Ihara--Bass identity linking belief propagation to the Laplacian; trapping-set eigenvalue correspondence; additive channel separability with an explicit exchange-correlation bound; a surgery theorem bounding frustration with attractor width $Ω(1/\sqrt{d_{\min}})$; a quasi-stationarity perturbation bound; and a fixed-point convergence theorem. In a transductive protocol on ImageNet-1000 with frozen EfficientNet-B4 features ($D=1792$), KSSE achieves \textbf{88.93\%} Top-1 accuracy using $\approx 21.24$M parameters, outperforming Swin-L (197M, 86.4--87.3\%) and matching ViT-H/14 (632M, 88.0--89.5\%) under standard inductive setups, while reducing model footprint by $10\times$ and $30\times$, respectively.
#03Jul 30, 2026
cs.CV
Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoning
Qixun Wang, Yang Shi, Letian Cheng and 11 more
The fundamental goal of agentic visual reasoning is to improve the success rate of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on complex tasks, rather than merely equipping them with a sophisticated yet inefficient reasoning paradigm. In this work, we rethink agentic visual reasoning through two key dimensions of tool use: Mode Adaptiveness (MA) and Tool Effect (TE). Mode Adaptiveness characterizes whether an MLLM can recognize when tools are truly necessary and invoke them accordingly, thereby avoiding unnecessary computational overhead while improving performance on challenging problems that require tool assistance. Tool Effect characterizes the actual impact of tool use: tools should extend the model's capabilities on problems unsolvable through text-only reasoning, while avoiding additional errors on problems that the model can already solve without tools. We conduct a comprehensive analysis to quantify these two properties and empirically reveal that existing agentic visual reasoning models exhibit limited Mode Adaptiveness, while the gains produced by tool use on hard examples are largely offset by the harm introduced on easy examples that the models can already solve. Motivated by these observations, we propose Beacon, a novel agentic visual reasoning model that achieves stronger overall performance, improved Mode Adaptiveness, and genuine tool-induced performance gains. At the core of Beacon are the Necessity-Aware Adaptive Reward and the Hint-Guided Capability Expansion mechanism in the reinforcement learning stage, which respectively encourage adaptive tool invocation based on task necessity and strengthen the model's tool-use capability on the most challenging problems. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate the strong overall performance of Beacon and its substantial improvements in both Mode Adaptiveness and Tool Effect.
#04Jul 30, 2026
cs.CV
Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer
Weiquan Lin, Yu Deng, Shiyang Liu and 6 more
Hand-object interaction (HOI) modeling remains challenging because it requires joint reasoning about hand articulation, object geometry, contact, semantics, and dynamics under severe visual uncertainty. Foundation models introduce transferable prior knowledge learned from large-scale cross-domain data, offering new ways to address these challenges beyond task-specific data and models. However, the rapidly growing literature remains fragmented, and existing studies typically describe these methods simply as ``using large models'' without systematically characterizing what knowledge is introduced, where it enters the HOI pipeline, or which HOI uncertainty it helps reduce. This survey presents the first systematic review of foundation-model priors for HOI. We organize the literature into six HOI tasks spanning reconstruction and generation. More importantly, we establish a taxonomy of eight foundation-model sub-priors grouped into geometric, semantic, and visual families. Geometric priors encompass shape retrieval, shape reconstruction, and spatial reconstruction; semantic priors include semantic grounding and language reasoning; and visual priors cover visual representation, image generation, and video generation. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically analyze how different priors are represented, injected, and adapted across HOI pipelines and tasks. Beyond how foundation models empower HOI, we further examine how HOI-derived knowledge is used in robot learning, including human-data pretraining, human-to-robot skill transfer, and HOI-to-robot data generation. Finally, we summarize datasets and evaluation protocols, and discuss limitations and future directions toward more generalizable HOI systems. To support long-term progress, we curate a live repository that continuously aggregates emerging methods and benchmarks.
#05Jul 30, 2026
cs.CV
Negative controls reveal volume-driven confounding in radiomics and imaging foundation model features
Katy L. Scott, Sejin Kim, Joshua Siraj and 6 more
Radiomics and imaging foundation models promise non-invasive biomarkers of tumour biology, yet predictive signatures may reflect tumour volume or acquisition artifacts rather than meaningful image structure. We introduce READII-2-ROQC, an open-source framework that uses volume-preserving negative controls to assess whether radiomic and deep imaging features capture independent spatial signals. READII-2-ROQC generates voxel-perturbed images across tumour, background and whole-image regions using configurable randomization strategies, then compares feature behaviour and model performance between original and control images. Applied to three public cancer imaging cohorts, the framework processed 3,552 tumour volumes and extracted PyRadiomics and foundation-model features from original images and nine matched controls. Reproducing published survival and HPV-status signatures, we show that multiple models retain performance after spatial structure is destroyed, revealing volume-driven or contextual confounding, whereas others show perturbation-sensitive signal. READII-2-ROQC provides a scalable quality-control strategy for developing interpretable, biologically grounded imaging biomarkers and reproducible radiomics workflows.