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5 papers

#01Jul 30, 2026

cs.CV

MixFrag: Fragility-Guided Mixed-Precision Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers

Md. Mehrab Hossain Opi, Robiul Islam Ryad, Md. Umar Faruk

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as an effective solution for deploying Vision Transformers (ViTs) on resource-constrained devices. However, existing PTQ methods typically employ uniform bit-widths across transformer components, overlooking their heterogeneous sensitivity to quantization and leading to inefficient precision allocation. In this paper, we propose {MixFrag, a fragility-guided mixed-precision PTQ framework for Vision Transformers. MixFrag first estimates component-level quantization fragility by measuring the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between full-precision and isolated quantized output distributions using a small calibration set. It then formulates bit allocation as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP), enabling adaptive layer-wise precision assignment under a target bit budget. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K across multiple Vision Transformer architectures demonstrate that MixFrag achieves competitive classification performance under practical mixed-precision settings. Furthermore, evaluations on COCO object detection and instance segmentation show that MixFrag achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing mixed-precision PTQ methods, improving the previous best method by up to 9.6 AP under the challenging MP3/MP3 setting. Additional analyses validate the proposed fragility metric and demonstrate its strong correlation with the learned bit allocation. These results establish MixFrag as an effective framework for mixed-precision post-training quantization of Vision Transformers.

#02Jul 30, 2026

cs.CL

ORCA-bench: How Ready Are Language Model Agents for Oncall?

Albert Gong, Kyuseong Choi, Abhineet Agarwal and 5 more

Large language models can write, patch, and search code, but oncall root cause analysis (RCA) demands something different: reasoning over noisy metrics, logs, traces, and source code, starting from ambiguous user-facing reports, often hours after the incident began. We introduce ORCA-bench, a benchmark that puts general-purpose coding agents in a production-fidelity oncall setting. ORCA-bench pairs a live OpenTelemetry-instrumented microservice system--exposing six days of metrics, logs, and traces through real telemetry interfaces (Prometheus, Jaeger, and OpenSearch via Grafana) and full source-code access--with 1,079 RCA tasks that systematically vary report specificity, time-to-detection, and co-occurring fault scenarios. Ground-truth symptoms are curated and signed off by expert SREs, and our LLM-as-judge is independently re-scored by humans (Cohen's $κ_w=0.90$). Across five frontier agents, the best RCA Accuracy is 25.3% on Medium-difficulty tasks (the realistic-input setting) and 10.0% on Hard--a gap that remains even with Claude Fable 5. The weakest model hallucinates an implausible root cause in 40% of incident reports, and removing source-code access degrades every metric. Crucially, these are performances on a curated 50 GB / six-day testbed with tasks investigated in isolation on a system whose code and instrumentation are public. Since real production systems are order of magnitudes larger, more dynamic, and more idiosyncratic, the gap we report is a lower bound on the engineering investment required before frontier coding agents can be safely entrusted with production reliability. We release the public set at https://hub.harborframework.com/datasets/orca-bench/ORCA-bench.

#03Jul 30, 2026

cs.LG

Stage-Replay Divergence Follows the KV Cache: Fixed-Prefix Precision Controls and Bidirectional Cache Transplantation

Alexander Boesgaard Lorup

Stage-replay diagnostics reconstruct intermediate token prefixes and treat fresh-prefill continuation as continuation from the decoder state that originally reached the prefix. We audit that assumption at a whole reasoning-stage boundary in a Qwen2.5-derived system. A matched 200-item experiment compares retained live cache with one-shot prefill of identical integer tokens and places an exact replica on both sides. In BF16, replicas remain exact while the constructions differ on 166 suffixes and 20 correctness labels; the accuracy difference is only one point (paired 95% CI [-3.5, +5.5]). A fixed-prefix 2x2 holds all 200 token states constant while crossing construction and precision. The BF16 disagreements recur, whereas FP32 produces no decoded disagreement (95% Wilson upper bound 1.88%). A prospective bridge makes token-by-token incremental and retained live caches bit-exact on 12/12 rows; an all-200 saved-ledger audit reproduces every retained trajectory and comparison fingerprint. Bidirectional transplantation of all 48 key/value layers makes every tested divergent continuation follow its cache donor, both on a selected set at the primary checkpoint (24/24) and an outcome-blind replication at a later checkpoint (43/43). Exact-token replay can therefore be repeatable without preserving live-state fidelity. On the tested states, boundary K/V cache is a causally sufficient carrier of the divergent trajectory, while numerical precision moderates its behavioral expression.

#04Jul 30, 2026

cs.LG

APO: Unsupervised Atomic Policy Optimization for 3D Structure Prediction of Atomic Systems

Shentong Mo, Yatao Bian

Predicting the 3D structures of atomic systems is fundamental to advancing material science and drug discovery. While flow-matching models (, FlowDPO) have recently shown promise in this domain, their performance relies heavily on alignment with ground-truth coordinates via supervised preference learning. However, obtaining experimental labels for novel crystal phases or de novo proteins is prohibitively expensive, creating a bottleneck for structural modeling in data-scarce regimes. In this work, we propose (Atomic Policy Optimization), a fully unsupervised alignment framework that eliminates the need for ground-truth reference structures. APO adapts group-relative policy optimization to 3D atomic environments, utilizing a novel dual-reward mechanism: (i) a that reinforces the policy's dominant latent structural modes through eigen-decomposition of sample similarities, and (ii) a that enforces thermodynamic stability. Our framework enables the model to ``self-correct'' by identifying physically plausible configurations within sampled groups. Extensive benchmarks on crystal and antibody structure prediction demonstrate that APO consistently outperforms fully supervised baselines, achieving a new state-of-the-art in match rates and structural fidelity. Furthermore, we show that APO effectively straightens probability paths, significantly improving inference efficiency. Our results suggest that intrinsic physical consistency can serve as a superior guide for alignment compared to noisy, supervised coordinate matching.

#05Jul 30, 2026

cs.CL

Sample More, Reflect Less: Self-Refine and Reflexion Lose to Repeated Sampling at Equal Token Cost, from 1.5B to 7B

Iliya Mirzaei

Methods that make a language model plan, criticise and rewrite its own answer, reflect on mistakes, pick the best of several attempts, or debate with copies of itself nearly all make it generate far more text than a single chain of thought. Because generating more text raises accuracy by itself, a gain over one chain of thought does not show the method's idea is what helped. Wang et al. (2024) reported that a simple baseline, sampling the same question repeatedly and keeping the most common answer, often wins once budgets are comparable, but gave point estimates with no confidence intervals or significance tests. We rerun that comparison as a designed experiment: seven methods, open models of 1.5B, 3B and 7B parameters, two mathematics benchmarks, 150 questions each. We count every generated token, including those spent on critiques, reflections, debate turns and checking, and compare each method against repeated sampling at its own measured cost. All 36 comparisons are paired by question, with bootstrap intervals and multiplicity correction. No method is reliably better than repeated sampling at equal cost anywhere. Ten are reliably worse, all of them methods where the model inspects its own output, and all 18 self-inspection comparisons are negative. The two kinds of self-inspection part company as models grow. Choosing stops hurting: taking Best-of-N's eight samples and just counting the most common answer beats letting the model pick by 8.0 and 11.3 points at 1.5B, but only 2.0 and 1.3 at 7B, no longer distinguishable from zero. Rewriting does not recover: Self-Refine and a forced Reflexion stay 3.6 to 10.1 points below baseline at 7B. Reflexion as published never triggered its own retry on the smallest model. It judged itself correct every time and silently became a single chain of thought. We release code, prompts, all generations, and our verification scripts.