Physical AI Brief

Diffusion transformer (DiT) research on image generation has converged to a single evaluation setup: class-conditional generation on ImageNet. While methods improve the FID and related metrics, it is increasingly unclear whether they reflect real progress in generative modeling. The natural alternative, i.e., text-to-image (T2I) generation, is perceived as too costly or inconvenient to train and evaluate and is often skipped. We argue that this perception no longer holds. We introduce NanoGen, a unified DiT training and evaluation framework. NanoGen matches state-of-the-art DiT baselines on ImageNet and, with 12 lines of configuration change, also trains competitive text-to-image models. It currently supports RAE, VAE, pixel-space, and MeanFlow diffusion methods under both ImageNet and T2I setups. Under NanoGen, training T2I requires comparable compute to ImageNet. After training 21 latent diffusion models with NanoGen, we observe that method ranking shows no strong correlation between ImageNet and T2I generation: Pearson correlation is between -0.377 and -0.580 across three metrics. This suggests that a method which improves class-conditional ImageNet FID may show no corresponding improvement on T2I, clearly indicating the necessity of evaluating DiTs on both tasks. To this end, we summarize ImageNet and text-to-image results, which yields DiffusionBench, a holistic benchmark for DiT research. We recommend reporting DiffusionBench in place of ImageNet alone: methods that improve DiffusionBench are more likely to reflect broader progress.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.g., "move gripper to the bowl", "lift upward", "pour the bottle"). InSight consists of two primary stages: (1) an automated segmentation pipeline that partitions demonstrations into labeled primitives via VLM plan decomposition and end-effector poses to enable VLA primitive steerability, and (2) a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives required to accomplish a novel task, autonomously attempts demonstrations of the missing primitives with VLM-proposed low-level control, and automatically labels, stores, and integrates successful demonstrations into the VLA training set. We evaluate InSight across simulation and real-world manipulation tasks, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring, without any human demonstrations of these target skills. Once learned, these primitives can be composed to execute novel, long-horizon tasks without additional human demonstrations. Our findings demonstrate that primitive steerability provides a practical foundation for continual skill acquisition in VLA policies. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, but it is widely recognized that these models often perform inconsistently across real-world clinical settings. Such inconsistencies occur when patient demographics and imaging protocols vary, for example, in detecting small tumors, analyzing scans from different contrast phases, or evaluating patients of different ages or sexes. To quantify these inconsistencies, we develop a large-scale, open benchmark of 85,355 CT scans that systematically evaluates 12 tumor-detection AI models across tumor size, location, patient subgroup, and imaging protocol. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract and organize subgroup information from clinical data, which makes the analysis both scalable and reproducible. Our benchmark reveals that current state-of-the-art AI models, optimized for average accuracy, perform poorly in rare or underrepresented subgroups, such as young, female African Americans. However, collecting sufficient annotated data for these rare cases is often impractical. The benchmark provides a foundation for building more reliable and robust AI models for tumor detection and highlighting the need for rigorous, subgroup-level evaluation in medical imaging and computer vision. Datasets, code

Generating explorable 3D scenes from a single image requires strong generative priors and accurate geometric representations suitable for downstream use. Current video diffusion models offer high-quality generation and implicitly encode multi-view geometric structure in latent space. However, existing feedforward latent scene decoders typically output volumetric 3D Gaussians that lack a well-defined surface, limiting their use in simulation or standard graphics pipelines. This motivates decoding surface-aligned primitives that are not only renderable but also closer to explicit geometric assets. We ask whether compressed video diffusion latents can be mapped directly to explicit surface primitives in a single pass. To this end, we introduce FLAT and, for the first time, show that triangle splats can be decoded directly from video diffusion latents. Compared with decoding 3D Gaussians, predicting flat primitives is notoriously more challenging due to high sensitivity to primitive orientations, oftentimes leading to poor gradient flow. FLAT solves with two key ingredients: a ray-centered rotation parameterization for triangle regression and a novel product window function that improves gradient flow during differentiable triangle rendering. On standard benchmarks, FLAT achieves significantly better geometric accuracy while maintaining competitive visual quality compared to state-of-the-art feedforward baselines. We further show that a lightweight test-time refinement step converts the predicted triangle soup into a fully opaque, game-engine-ready representation that supports real-time rendering. By evaluating 3DGS, 2DGS, and triangle splatting variants under an identical training setup, we provide the first systematic analysis of representation tradeoffs in feedforward scene generation. The project page is available at https://flat-splat.github.io

Sparse voxel representation has emerged as a scalable foundation for image-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) generation, yet current methods struggle to preserve high-frequency visual details of input images due to two structural bottlenecks. First, they adopt discriminative 2D features optimized for semantic abstraction to construct sparse voxel latents, which suppress reconstructive cues and induce a representation bottleneck. Second, in the generation stage, standard diffusion transformers lack effective mechanisms to align dense 2D image tokens with sparse 3D voxel latents, resulting in a cross-modal correspondence bottleneck. To address these issues, we propose FLUX3D, a scalable image-to-3DGS framework that boosts both representation learning and cross-modal alignment during generation. We first revisit 2D feature selection for sparse-voxel-based 3D representation learning, propose Diffusion-Aligned Structured Latents (DA-SLAT) and couple it with a decoder-only architecture to improve 3DGS reconstruction fidelity. We also design a sparse-structure-aware diffusion framework, which integrates the Sparse-structure Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (SMDiT) and Modal-Aware Rotary Positional Embedding (MARoPE) to achieve geometry-agnostic 2D-3D alignment. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that FLUX3D yields substantial improvements in appearance fidelity and significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in generating high-quality 3DGS assets.

Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents. Existing open efforts such as SWE-Smith, SERA, and Nemotron-Terminal typically target a single benchmark, leaving open the question of how to train models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks. The OpenThoughts-Agent (OT-Agent) project addresses this gap with a fully open data curation pipeline for training agentic models. We conduct more than 100 controlled ablation experiments to systematically investigate each stage of the pipeline, yielding insights on the importance of task sources and diversity. We then assemble a training set of 100K examples from our pipeline and fine-tune Qwen3-32B on this dataset, which yields an average accuracy of 44.8% across seven agentic benchmarks and a 3.9 percentage point improvement over the strongest existing open data agentic model (Nemotron-Terminal-32B, 40.9%). Moreover, our training data exhibits strong scaling properties, outperforming alternative open datasets at every training set size in compute-controlled comparisons. We publicly release our training sets, data pipeline, experimental data, and models at openthoughts.ai to support future open research on agentic model training.

Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) learn solution operators of partial differential equations by parameterizing global convolutions in the complex Fourier domain. For real-valued PDE solutions, the complex FFT carries representational redundancy through conjugate symmetry. We introduce the Hartley Neural Operator (HNO), the exact real-valued mirror of FNO: it replaces the FFT with the purely real Discrete Hartley Transform and learns a single real multiplier per retained spectral mode, with no complex arithmetic. Because the real Hartley spectrum is not halved by conjugate symmetry, HNO retains twice as many frequency corners as FNO but one real weight where FNO carries a complex pair, so the two operators are iso-parametric at equal width and differ only in spectral basis. Our central thesis is that the best basis is a property of the operator. Self-adjoint elliptic operators (Poisson, biharmonic) have real, symmetric Green's functions that the real Hartley multiplier diagonalizes exactly, and HNO is favored there. Time-dependent operators carry phase, from oscillation in the wave equation to transport in advection, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes, which a real diagonal multiplier cannot represent, so FNO is favored there, and increasingly so with the operator's phase content, leaving the phaseless heat equation as the borderline case. Training both operators identically and benchmarking across PDE classes, initial-condition families, and boundary conditions, we find an elliptic-versus-time-dependent split that is monotone in operator phase content and matches the Green's-function theory we develop. Rather than a universal winner, our findings give a predictive rule: match the spectral basis to the symmetry of the solution operator.

In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(δ)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$δ$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

Agentic data analysis systems produce rich outputs, including code, numerical results, and verbal diagnostics. This makes them more challenging to evaluate than single-turn LLM responses. It is therefore necessary to distinguish genuine disagreement between an agent's output and a ground-truth answer from grading artifacts. We investigate how reliably automated graders assess such a system and what strategies improve grading quality by applying LAMBDA, a multi-agent data-analysis system, on 153 numerical QRData tasks from DSGym. We develop and evaluate a three-layer human-AI grading cascade: strict regex matching, LLM-based lenient grading, and snippet-based human inspection, which combines non-GenAI and GenAI strategies with different failure profiles. Both automated graders achieve 100% observed precision (0/70 false positives). The lenient grader's recall is 97% against human labels. A keyword-anchored extraction pipeline raises the strict grader's recall by 60 percentage points over a last-number heuristic; the lenient grader is architecturally parser-independent. An iterative nudge mechanism raises grading run success from 36% to 97% and lenient-pass rates from 16% to 46%; comparing nudging with and without original-question re-injection shows that re-injection offers no benefit, confirming the nudge as an answer template cue. We further observe in this case study that variable type is the task metadata field most consistently associated with grading pipeline dynamics and observed outcome grades.

LLM-based dialogue assistants have become mainstream tools for software developers, yet current evaluation benchmarks focus exclusively on functional correctness. This leaves a critical gap in assessing the quality and accuracy of these conversations when handling Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), which are inherently vague, context-dependent, and involve many parts of a program. Evaluating how well these systems support collaborative reasoning about NFRs requires methods that go beyond single-turn accuracy to capture both the correctness of the system's outputs and the quality of the multi-turn interaction. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy and quality of multi-turn conversations between developers and an LLM-based agent in the domain of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulatory compliance. We hired 49 programmers to interact with GitHub Copilot to assess 148 HIPAA-derived NFRs against the iTrust codebase, a system designed to comply with HIPAA regulations, across three dimensions: requirement satisfaction level, reasoning, and code localization. We find that developers tend to agree with LLM assessments, but accuracy against expert ground truth is low. We model user satisfaction and find that longer system responses and more information-providing turns negatively affect user satisfaction, whereas proactive interactions positively affect it. Our findings provide insights for designing LLM-based dialogue systems that support NFR assessment.

Camera-prompted text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly used to synthesize virtual camera captures, such as orbiting objects or moving through static scenes. For these outputs, visual plausibility is insufficient: the generated frames should also provide coherent multi-view evidence for a single static 3D scene. We introduce GeoT2V-Bench, a reconstruction-based diagnostic benchmark for evaluating whether camera-prompted T2V clips can support explicit rigid 3D reconstruction. Our pipeline estimates per-frame camera intrinsics and poses with VGGT-style geometry estimation, fits DeformableGS, derives a static MedianGS proxy by temporal-median aggregation, and renders this proxy along the estimated camera path. Instead of producing a pass/fail label or a single scalar score, GeoT2V-Bench reports a continuous reconstruction profile covering apparent image motion, estimated trajectory behavior, MedianGS static rendering error, static-render flow agreement, and the gap between flexible and static fits. On a fair-format four-seed evaluation with 3,840 completed reconstructions from 12 open-weight model configurations and 80 GeCo-Eval static-scene prompts, we find that visible motion, static rendering error, flow agreement, and flexible-vs-static behavior often disagree. GeoT2V-Bench therefore captures complementary failure modes that emerge when generated videos are tested as global static-scene acquisitions.

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a foundational NLP task underpinning machine translation, information extraction, and syntactic parsing. Despite Marathi being spoken by over 83 million people and ranking among the top twenty most spoken languages worldwide, it remains severely under-resourced in annotated corpora and standardised evaluation benchmarks. Marathi presents unique challenges for computational modelling owing to its rich morphology, relatively free word order, lack of capitalisation conventions, and pervasive code-mixing with Hindi and English. We introduce L3Cube-MahaPOS, a gold-standard POS tagging dataset for Marathi comprising 32,354 manually annotated sentences drawn from news text. Annotation was performed entirely manually by a team of Marathi-proficient annotators following a 16-tag Universal Dependencies-aligned scheme. A structured preprocessing pipeline covering Unicode normalisation, Devanagari-aware tokenisation, and noise filtering ensures label consistency across all splits. We benchmark the dataset across six model families spanning HMM, CRF, BiLSTM, BiLSTM+CharCNN, MuRIL, and the Marathi-specific transformer MahaBERT-v2. The best system achieves 88.67\% token-level accuracy and a macro-F1 of 81.67% over 15 evaluated tag classes. We release the dataset, annotation guidelines, and trained model checkpoints to foster further research in Marathi NLP.

LLM agents solve repository-level coding tasks through multi-turn tool use, but utilize half their budget on locating faults before editing. Dedicated localization frameworks have emerged, yet are still evaluated as file retrieval rather than actionable diagnosis, producing locations without the diagnostic context a repair agent needs. We introduce SHERLOC (Structured Hypothesis-driven Exploration and Reasoning for Localization), a training-free framework pairing a reasoning LLM with compact repository tools and self-recovery, without fine-tuning or multi-agent orchestration. SHERLOC reaches state-of-the-art localization across model scales: 84.33% accuracy@1 on SWE-Bench Lite and 81.27% recall@1 on SWE-Bench Verified; at ~30B parameters, it matches or outperforms other agentic methods. Injecting our locations and diagnostic findings into repair agents yields, on average, +5.95 pp resolve rate on SWE-Bench Verified while cutting localization and total tokens by 36.7% and 23.1%.

Stereo-based 3D object detection still faces two critical safety challenges: real-time performance and open-set generalization. Existing stereo 3D methods typically achieve twice the accuracy of monocular methods but suffer from significantly lower inference speeds, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. Meanwhile, recent advances in open-world detection have introduced open-set and open-vocabulary algorithms in monocular 2D and 3D settings, yet stereo-based open-set detection remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DDStereo, a novel Dual-Decoder Stereo Transformer for real-time open-set 3D object detection. DDStereo features two lightweight decoder branches: one for open-set foreground 2D detection and the other for 3D attribute regression. These decoders share object-level queries to achieve unified target-level alignment. To enhance inference efficiency, we designed a compact disparity feature extractor and a streamlined decoder architecture. Experiments on public stereo 3D benchmarks demonstrate that DDStereo achieves state-of-the-art accuracy under both closed-set and open-set protocols. Notably, our method surpasses existing stereo 3D detectors in inference speed and, for the first time, achieves real-time performance comparable to monocular approaches.

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has garnered significant attention in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) due to its advances in capturing fine-grained geometry features and synthesizing novel views. For SLAM in large-scale scenes, such as autonomous driving, 3DGS-SLAM faces a critical limitation: memory consumption increases continuously over time as Gaussian points accumulate, leading to poor memory efficiency and limiting its applicability. In this work, we propose a rendering-area-aware pruning strategy that selectively removes Gaussians based on their contribution to the effective rendering area, rather than solely relying on Gaussian-level heuristics such as opacity or gradient magnitude. This perspective directly targets the sources of memory redundancy, effectively reducing the peak memory footprint of 3DGS-SLAM during runtime. Evaluations on the EuRoC and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing pruning approaches in large-scale outdoor scenes, achieving over 60% memory reduction and more than 2 times FPS improvement while preserving localization and mapping accuracy. These results highlight rendering-area-aware pruning as a promising direction for scaling 3DGS-SLAM to real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UMN-ZhaoLab/Pocket-SLAM.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating hallucinations. Detecting these hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A benchmarks across both hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.

Counting individual trees is a fundamental task for environmental monitoring, yet remains largely unexplored with satellite imagery. At these resolutions, isolated trees may still be identifiable, but crown boundaries become ambiguous in dense forests, making the notion of an individual tree inherently ill-defined. Moreover, large-scale manual annotations of individual trees are prohibitively expensive. While scalable supervision can be derived from airborne LiDAR, the resulting annotations are noisy and difficult to exploit effectively. We address these challenges by formulating tree counting as a spatial density matching problem supervised through Unbalanced Optimal Transport. This formulation naturally accommodates both precise localization of isolate trees and robust density estimation in dense forests. We further introduce a self-correction mechanism that leverages transport residuals to progressively refine noisy supervision during training. We evaluate our approach on TinyTrees, a new benchmark spanning three continents and three satellite sensors, comprising over 215 million tree annotations (including 773K manually verified instances) across 23,000 sq.km. Our method consistently outperforms detection-based, regression-based, and transport-based distribution-matching baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of unbalanced transport and reliability-aware supervision for large-scale tree counting from satellite imagery. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/dgominski/treematch.

Commercial NLP treats the shopping chatbot as a recommender or a conversion tool: its job is to match a user to a catalogue entry and close a sale. We argue that the arrival of agent-native micro-payment rails (e.g., x402, AP2) changes what is scarce. When the buyer is an autonomous agent that can investigate exhaustively, the bottleneck is no longer matching products but acquiring trustworthy, decision-relevant information about them. We envision agentic e-commerce as a micro-transaction market for verified information: buyer agents spend fractions of a cent to progressively unlock seller- and reviewer-supplied data -- service histories, third-party test reports, bills of materials, audited sales and support metrics -- paid for a la carte under a freemium model, with reviewer trust scored reputationally. We sketch the architecture of such a market and argue that it rewards genuine product quality and yields truer competition than ranking-based storefronts. We then translate the vision into concrete NLP problems -- cost-optimal information acquisition, data pricing and negotiation, real-time entity resolution, grounded value exchange, and privacy-preserving persona modelling -- and argue that these, not chat fluency, deserve the field's attention.

While the field of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) continues to draw interest from researchers and advance in important ways, some key challenges remain. One of the most difficult aspects of building HAR models that show good performance in real-world settings is dealing with data diversity from device and sensor heterogeneity, and contextual changes that are intrinsic to real-world applications. While data diversity in HAR has been well-acknowledged in the literature, there remains a gap in understanding the effect of various types of distribution shifts on HAR models and the domain generalization problem that arises. Towards that end, this paper systematically evaluates 4 different types of distribution shifts, including variations in device type, sensor placement, sampling rate, and user behavior. Quantifying their effects, we illustrate that diversity shifts predominantly define all types of shifts, indicating the existence of unique features that are not shared across different domains. We then introduce a uniform HAR-based distribution shift benchmarks and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of up to 28 domain generalization methods. Our analysis exposes the limitations of current domain generalization algorithms in achieving model generalizability, marginally outperforming the empirical risk minimization baseline. This work represents the first systematic exploration of domain generalization and adaptation concerning specific distribution shifts in sensor-based HAR, offering an open-source benchmark platform and datasets to spur further research.

Progress in deep learning is, at scale, more a matter of systems engineering than of modelling: the behaviour of a model in training (its throughput, its memory footprint, and the numerical fidelity of the result) is determined less by the architecture itself than by how that architecture is expressed on the hardware. To achieve absolute control over this hardware expression while abstracting away systems complexity to make modelling seamless and eliminating the need for repetitive orchestration logic, BluTrain was architected from first principles as a robust, lightweight, and architecture-general training framework in standard C++ and the core CUDA programming model. Every layer is implemented natively: a typed tensor module with reverse-mode autograd, a linear-algebra library, a caching allocator, a multi-mode distributed-execution module, and an MLIR-based deep-learning compiler. In formal evaluations training a 124M-parameter GPT-2 baseline in FP32 on an 8-GPU 6000 Ada system, BluTrain outperforms industry-standard baselines in both throughput (sustaining an average of 407K tokens/s versus PyTorch's 395K tokens/s) and memory efficiency (achieving up to a 22% footprint reduction), while strictly preserving numerical fidelity and converging to a marginally lower final validation loss. With every layer explicitly open to native tuning, the performance ceiling is the framework's own to raise.

Birth defects are a major cause of fetal loss, neonatal morbidity and long-term disability. In the subset with suspected genetic etiologies, exome and genome sequencing have moved many cases from variant detection to post-sequencing interpretation: clinicians must rank patient-specific candidate variants under incomplete fetal or infant phenotypes and heterogeneous evidence from population genetics, variant-effect prediction, gene-disease validity, phenotype ontologies, cellular and pathway context, protein structure and clinical literature. We present DeepBD, a grounded agentic workflow for variant prioritization and diagnostic interpretation of genetic birth defects. DeepBD organizes the workflow into LLM-assisted case structuring, a pretrained evidence engine, specialist evidence modules and a grounded diagnostic review layer. The evidence engine learns patient-specific variant scores from structured rule evidence, sequence and variant-effect representations and phenotype-conditioned biological context, whereas specialist modules and the agentic layer provide tool-based refinement, candidate-pool review and diagnosis-oriented synthesis from ranked candidates. Developed using an in-house fetal and infant cohort comprising 18,622 cases, DeepBD achieved Recall@1/3/5/10 of 0.658/0.882/0.912/0.929 on an internal held-out solved-case benchmark, outperforming standalone Exomiser, DeepRare and prompted LLM reranking baselines evaluated on Exomiser-derived top-20 candidate variants. Ablation and overlap analyses show that rule evidence, mechanistic context, and specialist refinement provide complementary signals. These findings support a grounded agentic workflow that separates evidence integration, tool-based refinement, and LLM-assisted diagnostic review for retrospective variant prioritization in genetic birth defects.

Memory for large language model (LLM) agents has rapidly evolved from simple retrieval-augmented mechanisms into a data management system that supports persistent information storage, retrieval, update, consolidation, and dynamic lifecycle governance throughout agent execution. Despite this evolution, existing evaluations still benchmark agent memory mainly through end-to-end task success metrics (e.g., F1, BLEU), while treating the underlying system as a monolithic black box. As a result, critical system-level concerns, including operational costs, architectural trade-offs across memory modules, and robustness under dynamic knowledge updates, remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we present a systematic experimental study of agent memory from a data management perspective. We propose an analytical framework that decomposes agent memory into four core modules: memory representation and storage, extraction, retrieval and routing, and maintenance. Under this framework, we evaluate 12 representative memory systems and two reference baselines across five benchmark workloads spanning 11 datasets. Our extensive end-to-end evaluation shows that no single architecture dominates across all scenarios; instead, effectiveness depends heavily on how well the memory structure aligns with the workload bottleneck. Furthermore, through fine-grained ablation studies, we quantify their individual effects on representation fidelity, retrieval precision, update correctness, and long-horizon stability. Finally, we reveal cost-performance trade-offs under realistic workloads, showing localized maintenance is more cost-efficient than global reorganization. Based on these findings, we identify promising directions towards building truly agent-native memory systems. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/MemoryData.

Non-autoregressive generation offers a powerful paradigm for iterative refinement, allowing models to recursively critique, erase and regenerate arbitrary subsets of tokens. However, existing non-autoregressive models fail to realize this potential. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) suffer from factorization error, causing sample quality to collapse when generating multiple tokens simultaneously. Flow Map Language Models (FMLMs) circumvent this bottleneck via joint sequence transport for excellent few-step generation, but sacrifice the inference-time flexibility of MDMs. We introduce FMLM+, a framework that bridges this gap by equipping FMLM with masking-style noise schedules. While generating the full sequence in a single step, FMLM+ simultaneously scores the global consistency of each token a posteriori. We leverage this to introduce Posterior Refinement, a novel inference-time refinement strategy that enables the model to adaptively self-correct its outputs, matching the performance of discrete baselines with 32x fewer NFEs. Across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that FMLM+ with Posterior Refinement improves the speed--quality tradeoff over both MDM and FMLM families, providing a scalable foundation for high-fidelity language modeling.

Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified visual-language and grounding framework for interpretable risk understanding in autonomous driving. UniDrive combines a temporal reasoning branch that models scene dynamics from multi-frame visual input with a high-resolution perception branch that preserves fine-grained spatial details from the latest frame. The two branches are integrated through a gated cross-attention fusion module, enabling dynamic context to be aligned with precise spatial evidence. Based on the fused representation, UniDrive jointly generates natural-language risk descriptions and grounded bounding-box outputs for risk objects. Experiments on the DRAMA-Reasoning benchmark show that UniDrive outperforms representative image-based and video-based baselines in both captioning and risk-object grounding. In particular, UniDrive achieves the best overall performance on the validation split and demonstrates clear advantages in small-object localization, zero-shot generalization to NuScenes and BDD100K, and human-rated interpretability and trustworthiness. These results suggest that explicitly combining temporal semantics and high-resolution perception provides a stronger foundation for interpretable and safety-oriented autonomous driving systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/unidrive-dev.

Handling repeated characters in text can be tricky, since they can represent either the correct spelling of a word or informal character elongation often seen in social media posts. We present CANDLE, a lightweight system for character-level Arabic noise deduplication that addresses this challenge without relying on handcrafted rules, dictionaries, or morphological analyzers. At the heart of CANDLE is a novel application of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to this task, a formulation not previously explored for character deduplication, which frames normalization as a sequence alignment problem over a character-based encoder. Evaluated on three benchmarks spanning clean newspaper, manually curated ambiguous cases, and real-world social media text, the CTC model achieves a Sentence Error Rate (SER) as low as $5.37\%$ and consistently outperforms a classification-based baseline by a large margin. To reduce inference overhead, we distill the 6-layer CTC model into a 2-layer student, achieving a $3\times$ depth reduction with minimal performance degradation. Beyond deduplication accuracy, normalization yields a practical downstream benefit: a relative reduction in tokenizer fertility of up to $12.8\%$ across a diverse set of Arabic LLM tokenizers, directly lowering inference costs and improving context window utilization. We release all code and models publicly to support reproducibility and advance future research\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/candle}.

Few-shot image recognition requires models to adapt to new classes from a small labeled support set. Hebbian fast-weight memory can provide temporary associative information during an episode, but fixed memory behavior may not be appropriate for every few-shot task. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hebbian Routing for few-shot Vision Transformers. The method uses a lightweight MLP router to control the contribution of Hebbian memory, the strength of memory updates, and the retention of previous memory from support-set features. We study Adaptive Placement, Adaptive Plasticity, and Fully Adaptive Hebbian Routing. Experiments use ViT-Small, DeiT-Small, and Swin-Tiny under 5-way 1-shot evaluation on Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, and cross-domain transfer from CIFAR-FS to Omniglot. In the direct Swin comparison, fixed and adaptive Hebbian variants use the same memory location. Adaptive Plasticity improves the fixed Hebbian result from 96.74\% to 96.92\%, while Fully Adaptive Routing achieves the best result at 96.94\%. The fully adaptive Swin model also reduces inference time from 16.51 ms to 14.05 ms relative to fixed Hebbian Swin. On CIFAR-FS, adaptive variants improve performance across all three backbones, and the multi-shot evaluation shows that these gains remain useful as the number of support examples increases. These results show that adaptive plasticity and adaptive memory activation can improve few-shot Transformer representations beyond fixed Hebbian behavior.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across a growing range of domains, yet their scale poses deployment challenges in applications where latency and cost constraints are critical. This paper derives empirical scaling laws for domain-specific LLM compression, quantifying how in-domain and general knowledge performance scale with dataset size, compression ratio, supervision format, and iterative pruning schedule. Using quantitative finance as our application domain, we compare logit-based and LoRA-based distillation under iterative structural pruning, introducing a blended chain-of-thought supervision loss that stabilizes KL-divergence distillation over reasoning traces. In-domain task quality degrades predictably under compression while general-knowledge benchmarks collapse well before the same point; supervision format is the key driver of this tradeoff, with chain-of-thought supervision actively recovering general knowledge that pruning erases. We release the headline dataset FinHeadlineMix, scaling law results, and practical recommendations to provide a reusable framework for domain-specific compression decisions.

Generalist value models play a pivotal role in scaling robotic policy learning from large-scale, mixed-quality data. Mathematically, accurate value estimation demands deep temporal understanding, requiring models to both ground the current belief using historical context and plan over future outcomes. However, most existing robotic value models are built on Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbones that are pretrained primarily on static or temporally sparse visual observations, lacking the requisite temporal modeling capabilities for value estimation. Unlike VLMs, world models naturally excel at temporal modeling and future planning, making them ideal foundations for learning generalizable value functions. Driven by this insight, we marry world models with value estimation to construct a new generalist robotic value model, World Value Model (WVM), that offers accurate task progressions to assess data quality. On standard benchmarks, WVM delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) Value-Order Correlation (VOC) results. Complementing standard evaluation suites that contains only expert data, we further introduce Suboptimal-Value-Bench, a multi-embodiment benchmark consisting of 800 suboptimal trajectories with high-fidelity, human-labeled frame annotations. Our evaluations show that WVM maintains its SOTA performance on Suboptimal-Value-Bench, establishing its robustness in handling both expert and suboptimal data. When deployed for policy learning, WVM improves manipulation performance across various policy extraction approaches in both simulated and real-world deployment, providing robust guidance for learning from mixed-quality data.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have demonstrated strong generalization across natural-image domains. However, adapting these models to biomedical imaging is non-trivial: full-model fine-tuning is computationally expensive, while medical data are often scarce and exhibit subtle, fine-grained inter-class differences, making parameter-efficient adaptation particularly critical. Visual Reprogramming (VR) offers a parameter-efficient alternative by injecting learnable perturbations into the input space, but existing VR approaches for VLMs mainly focus on positive class prompts and overlook confusing negatives, leading to miscalibrated predictions in fine-grained medical scenarios. We present BioMedVR, the first VR-based framework for biomedical imaging, enabling few-shot adaptation of pretrained VLMs through compact learnable VR modules. To mitigate class confusion, we introduce a Confusion Minimization Mechanism that leverages LLM-generated confusion-aware attributes together with a Confusion-Suppression Loss to explicitly reduce false-positive alignment. Moreover, the designed Mixture-of-Prompt Experts combines a positive expert for main-class discrimination and a negative expert for confusion suppression, balanced via adaptive gating. Extensive experiments on 18 datasets, including 11 biomedical datasets and 7 natural image benchmarks, demonstrate that BioMedVR achieves superior accuracy and generalization, effectively bridging VR and VLMs in biomedical domains.

Video MLLMs often struggle with fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, sometimes generating correct answers based on irrelevant frames or objects. Although outputting spatio-temporal evidence during reasoning is a promising direction, existing RL frameworks typically rely on geometry-only (IoU) rewards, which can be sensitive to boundary perturbations and overlook semantic alignment. To address this, we propose Semantic Evidence Reward (SER), which reformulates spatio-temporal evidence grounding as a constrained verification task. Instead of computing pixel-level overlap, SER uses a referee VLM as a local checker to evaluate model-generated evidence claims across two dimensions: relevance and localization quality, combined with a temporal penalty. This design reduces the reliance on dense box annotations and enables training directly on standard video QA data. On the V-STAR benchmark, SER achieves 49.6% mLGM, improving by 3.0 points over the strong evidence-grounded baseline Open-o3-Video, demonstrating its potential in enhancing both answer accuracy and evidence grounding.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this intervention-style evaluation in vision, we construct synCUB and synCOCO, synthetic benchmarks of paired images that differ in exactly one attribute. We introduce Fully-Binary Matching Pursuit (FBMP), a coalition-based matching procedure that supports many-to-one mappings between SAE latents and annotated concepts, and consistently outperforms one-to-one baselines. For functional validation, we propose a Targeted Attribute Perturbation Alignment Score (TAPAScore), which tests whether matched concepts respond selectively and in the expected direction under targeted image-level attribute perturbations. Under sanity checks, our matching and TAPAScore are the only evaluated metrics that reliably distinguish trained SAEs from untrained ones. Across SAEs trained on CLIP and DINOv2 embeddings, we find that increased overcompleteness can reduce perturbation alignment, indicating a reduction in interpretability. Our evaluation framework suggests that moderate dictionary sizes provide the best trade-off, yielding the most interpretable SAEs. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval.

Chinese news text contains dense written forms such as scores, hyphenated model names, ranges, unit symbols, percentages, English abbreviations, and mixed Chinese-Latin-digit names. These forms are frequent in real listening workflows, and a text-to-speech (TTS) system can preserve the written string while changing the spoken meaning. We introduce CN-NewsTTS Bench v0.1, an open target-level benchmark for evaluating whether Chinese news TTS products pronounce such targets correctly from raw text, without user-side rules, LLM rewriting, SSML hints, or manual edits. The release contains a 200-record development set, an 800-record public test set, 992 public auto-evaluable targets, fixed transcripts from a three-ASR ensemble, an automatic target scorer, and initial results for seven product TTS systems. We additionally report ASR-route diagnostics, ASR-subset ablations, category-level results, confidence intervals, and provider configuration metadata. The best system reaches 0.879 strict accuracy, while several systems remain below 0.60.

Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision. In contrast, robotic systems rely heavily on vision and struggle with autonomous tactile exploration and object identification. We present TACTFUL, a vision-free tactile exploration framework that enables a multi-fingered robot to autonomously explore confined workspaces, discover objects through contact, and identify them via tactile reconstruction. Trained entirely on real hardware without simulation, our system learns a single policy that balances global workspace exploration with local surface refinement through a dynamic reward schedule. Our results demonstrate that tactile sensing, when paired with structured learning, can serve as an effective primary modality for object-level reasoning, achieving 77% success with 0.015 m average reconstruction error and outperforming baseline approaches on real-world objects.

Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed Fourier-wavelet transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral, transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of $2.70 \times 10^{-4}$, compared with $4.02 \times 10^{-4}$ for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.

In assembly line balancing, tasks are assigned to stations in order to satisfy a required cycle time. When production conditions change, the line must be rebalanced by modifying the current task allocation, typically aiming to move as few tasks as possible between stations. Similarity measures are commonly used to control such changes, but they generally evaluate configuration preservation by treating all tasks equally, which may not reflect their different practical importance. In this work, a \emph{pruned Mean Similarity Factor} is proposed for assembly line rebalancing, evaluating similarity only over a subset of structurally relevant tasks identified through a relevance score. The proposed measure is integrated into a compact mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation that considers practical aspects of manual assembly, specifically workload balance, ergonomic exposure, multi-worker stations, and positional constraints. Computational experiments on extended benchmark instances derived from the literature show that the proposed approach can obtain optimal rebalancing solutions within reasonable computational times, while maintaining high task colocation and balanced workload and ergonomic distributions. In particular, focusing the similarity evaluation on relevant tasks helps reduce the computational effort.

Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment, dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two benchmark suites with 74 real-world datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.

The potential to precisely control both the linear and nonlinear index of refraction through optical manipulation of the atomic states has recently pushed warm alkali vapors to the forefront of research in the field of quantum sensors, quantum memories, and quantum fluids of light. Rubidium (Rb) vapor in centimeter-scale glass cells or millimeter-scale MEMS cells has proven to be a very promising platform for these applications, yet only a handful of research works have been dedicated to the investigation of the (non)linear refractive index of Rb vapor. We present results of theoretical calculations of the (non)linear refractive index of warm Rb vapor, based on the optical Bloch equations for 6-level Rb atoms interacting with a probe laser. They are compared to the experimental results obtained using an interferometric technique, showing excellent quantitative agreement. A Kerr nonlinear refractive index $n_2$ of up to $10^{-4}$ cm$^2$/W is obtained. Python scripts for all theoretical calculations presented in this work are provided, including the refractive index calculation, that can readily be used in practical implementations for simulating the (non)linear refractive index of Rb vapor including the effects of Doppler broadening, transit time broadening, pressure broadening, saturation, optical pumping, and spin-exchange collisions.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for planning and sequential decision-making, but prior work often relies on using them as direct controllers, which requires precise action generation and can be unreliable in practice. This paper proposes Latent Action Guidance for Online Reinforcement Learning (LaGO), a framework that uses a pretrained LLM as a latent action prior to softly guide online policy optimization, rather than treating the LLM as an explicit planner or controller. Experiments on both a discrete-control benchmark, CLEVR-Robot, and a continuous-control benchmark, Meta-World, demonstrate that LaGO consistently improves both reward and success rate over Vanilla PPO. In particular, LaGO increases the average success rate from 15.1% to 27.2% on CLEVR-Robot and from 2.7% to 15.2% on Meta-World. Our analysis further shows that stronger pretrained LLMs provide more effective guidance, suggesting that LLM knowledge can improve planning and online decision-making.

Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.

The explosive growth and complexity of product data within the dynamic Brazilian e-commerce landscape demand robust and specialized methods for structured information extraction. Traditional approaches to Product Attribute Value Extraction (PAVE) often struggle with the linguistic nuances and sheer diversity of product descriptions in Portuguese. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces two major contributions. First, we present AI-PAVEBr, a specialized system engineered with Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform high-accuracy PAVE specifically for Brazilian e-commerce catalogs. Second, to facilitate reproducible research and provide a definitive benchmark, we introduce and share the Golden Set, a new, meticulously curated, and manually annotated dataset for PAVE in Portuguese. We detail the creation process and structure (Entity, Category, Subcategories) of this high-quality reference set. Our experiments conclusively show that AI-PAVE-Br, leveraging targeted prompt engineering, dramatically outperforms conventional Named Entity Recognition (NER) baselines. This work not only delivers a superior, scalable solution for a major non-English market but also enriches the NLP community with a valuable, publicly available resource for future PAVE research.

Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1\% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored. We introduce ParaPairAudioBench, a pairwise benchmark of 5,175 audio pairs across five paralinguistic dimensions: Style, Rate, Emphasis, Age, and Gender. Our experiments show that current LALM judges still lag behind human judgments by 32%p on average and exhibit severe calibration failures, particularly in Tie cases where the correct decision is to abstain. To further analyze lexical versus acoustic reliance, the benchmark includes both same-transcript and cross-transcript conditions. ParaPairAudioBench enables multi-dimensional, calibration-aware assessment of the reliability of LALM-as-a-Judge for paralinguistic speech evaluation.

Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle. This capability is important for fine-grained video understanding and controllable movie-quality video generation, yet remains underexplored in existing multimodal large language models. Unlike question-answering-based evaluation of cinematic understanding, cinematographic captioning requires a unified open-form description over multiple cinematographic dimensions. This task is challenging for two main reasons: the model must infer professional cinematographic concepts from subtle visual evidence, and it must generate captions that are both comprehensive and accurate. Accordingly, we propose CineCap, a framework that combines structured reasoning with spatio-temporal anchors and reinforcement learning with comprehensiveness, accuracy, and gated coverage rewards. The former grounds professional cinematographic descriptions in explicit visual evidence and organizes them into compact atomic reasoning for supervised fine-tuning, while the latter improves the balance between descriptive completeness and factual correctness. In addition, we construct CineCap Bench, a benchmark of 472 manually annotated video-caption pairs for systematic evaluation. Extensive experiments show that CineCap consistently outperforms strong proprietary and open-source baselines, establishing a new state of the art for cinematographic captioning. The code, model checkpoint, and benchmark are publicly available in https://github.com/Hectormxy/CineCap.git.

Human demonstrations for robot imitation learning often contain mistakes and corrective behaviors, such as imprecise grasps, object misalignment, unstable contact, and repeated attempts. While these segments are commonly treated as noisy or suboptimal data, they provide valuable evidence about when execution deviates from a desirable path and how task feasibility can be restored. However, existing reward and value models often rely on monotonic progress assumptions, which capture coarse task advancement but may overlook local execution errors and corrective behaviors in imperfect demonstrations. In this work, we propose ReTVL (ReTry-Supervised Value Learning), a framework for learning mistake-sensitive value functions from mixed-quality robot demonstrations by leveraging retry events as sparse supervision. ReTVL captures the local degradation-and-recovery structure around mistakes by combining global progress calibration with local pairwise preference learning induced by sparsely annotated retry keypoints. The learned value model is then used to reweight demonstration chunks for downstream behavior cloning, reducing the influence of harmful execution errors while preserving useful corrective behaviors. Experiments on real-robot manipulation tasks show that ReTVL produces more fine-grained value estimates than progress-based baselines and improves imitation learning from imperfect demonstrations.

Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problems are at the heart of linear control theory and Model Predictive Control (MPC). While performant, standard approaches to solving such problems are inherently serial, limiting real-time scalability despite the parallel computing power available on modern multi-core CPUs. Contributing to addressing this challenge and motivated by ``divide and conquer'' strategies, we present a parallel-in-time approach that solves computationally demanding conic optimal control problems through the use of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In particular, we formulate the inner primal update of ADMM as an LQ problem and split the reformulated problem along the time horizon. This enables us to derive a variant of the Riccati recursion using dynamic programming to solve each subproblem in parallel. Numerical benchmarks on two real-world applications demonstrate as much as a 5x speedup compared to existing related approaches on multi-core CPU hardware.

Recent advances in robotics have enabled robots to operate in shared human environments, emphasizing the importance of effective human robot interaction HRI. Prior studies indicate that anthropomorphism, defined as the incorporation of human like features into robotic systems, facilitates more natural interaction and enhances both task performance and user experience. In robotic arm teleoperation, however, user controlled motions often deviate from human like kinematic characteristics due to intrinsic limitations of teleoperation systems. In this work, we propose a real time framework that generates human like end effector trajectories based on the two thirds power law of voluntary human hand movements, while preserving the operators intended control inputs. The proposed approach is validated through real world experiments conducted on a 6 degree of freedom Dobot CR10 robotic arm. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that the generated trajectories exhibit significantly stronger adherence to human like kinematic profiles compared to conventional teleoperation, with the estimated beta coefficient moving 39.7% closer on average to the theoretical value of 1/3. Furthermore, the method achieves an approximate 34% improvement in motion smoothness, measured by RMS torque rate reduction, with 80% of evaluated motion patterns showing statistically significant improvements while maintaining comparable task completion times.

Deploying robots in unstructured real-world environments needs accurate, interactive models of the objects. Constructing these models at scale remains a critical bottleneck for robotic system integration. We present ArtiTwinSplat, a framework that automatically constructs articulated, photo-realistic digital twins of objects directly from RGB-D videos, requiring no CAD models, simulation assets, or manual annotations. Our method is built on 3D Gaussian Splatting that preserve geometric fidelity and photometric realism, coupled with an unsupervised articulation discovery pipeline that recovers part structure and joint kinematics from observed motion alone. With tracking and optimization stages our method provides stable, queryable digital twins that support real-time rendering, viewpoint control, and interactive manipulation. Unlike prior methods confined to simulation, ArtiTwinSplat operates directly on real-world observations and produces twins that are immediately usable by downstream robot planning and learning systems. This method offers a practical, scalable pathway toward digital twin construction, lowering the integration barrier for articulated object manipulation in embodied AI and human-robot collaboration contexts.

Fact-checking systems built on LLMs achieve high verdict accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet routinely output Supports labels whose cited evidence does not license the claim. Structured decomposition is the natural way to inspect those warrants, but rigid extraction protocols strip the full-claim context that facets need. We introduce SIFT -- claim-conditioned re-scoring of extracted evidence spans against the full claim -- paired with WSP (Warranted Supports Proportion), an automatic NLI check that the cited warrant entails the claim. We evaluate on FEVER, SciFact, 5PILS, and DP across four open-source backbones. SIFT recovers accuracy on cells where naive decomposition costs up to 27.6 points, while raising WSP above direct prompting; WSP itself calibrates against human gold evidence at AUC 0.92 and precision 0.98.

As autonomous agents tackle increasingly complex multi-step, multi-agent tasks, their execution trajectories have scaled beyond the constraints of even the largest context windows. Current methods for effectively diagnosing agent failures load the full trajectory into an LLM's context window, which suffers from attention dilution and fails when agentic traces inevitably exceed context limits. To address this, we introduce SAFARI (Scaling long-horizon Agentic Fault AttRibution via active Investigation), a framework that replaces linear context loading with a tool-augmented diagnostic loop. By equipping LLMs with a specialized toolbox to read and search trajectory segments alongside a persistent Short-Term Memory (STM) for cross-turn reasoning, SAFARI effectively decouples diagnostic accuracy from architectural context limits. Our experiments demonstrate that SAFARI outperforms state-of-the-art results by 20% on the Who&When dataset within a 1M token budget, and by 19% on TRAIL GAIA subset on a 25K token budget. Most significantly, SAFARI maintains a 0.58 precision even when the target fault resides 5x beyond the model's native context window, a scenario where traditional evaluators fail entirely.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, but deploying it in sensitive scenarios risks privacy leakage via malicious prompts. To address this, we propose a multi-agent framework that sanitizes retrieved content through semantic rewriting. By employing three specialized agents for privacy extraction, semantic analysis, and reconstruction, our approach collaboratively removes sensitive identifiers while preserving the semantic core. We evaluate the framework on the ChatDoctor and Wiki-PII datasets across six large language models. Experimental results demonstrate a significant reduction in privacy leakage under targeted attacks. For instance, we reduced targeted information exposure in LLaMA-3-8B from 144 instances in the baseline to just 1. Furthermore, we maintain strong contextual fidelity with a BLEU-1 score of 0.122, outperforming the existing SAGE method's 0.117. Finally, the framework operates as an asynchronous preprocessing module, introducing no additional latency to online inference, as all rewriting is executed as a one-time offline preprocessing step. To promote reproducibility, the source code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/foursoils/Privacy-Preserving-RAG.

Training safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems is inherently challenging, with no guarantee of avoiding unwanted behaviors. The most effective defenses against this are (i) transparency through explainability and (ii) alignment via human feedback. While both show promising results, no publicly available framework currently combines them. To address this, we introduce Themis, an XAI-enabled testing and evaluation framework for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Themis supports over 200 widely used environments and is easily configurable for experiments in RL, transparency, and alignment. Our results show that Themis can train reward models that match or outperform the environment's true reward signal using human preferences. We also provide a cloud-based platform for collecting human feedback and managing experiments. It is user-friendly, auto-scalable, and supports large participant groups across multiple experiments without extra development overhead. Tests show Themis can support one thousand users in back-to-back experiments on a modest commercial machine.

Large language models (LLMs) are proposed as natural-language interfaces to power system analysis, yet existing frameworks are validated almost exclusively on synthetic benchmarks and support only deterministic studies. We present CONDUCTOR, an LLM-orchestrated digital twin for distribution grid operations. An open-weights LLM orchestrates power system analysis and optimization solvers and, unlike prior systems, also performs uncertainty-aware studies: probabilistic security assessment, robust corrective dispatch, and flexibility-envelope and hosting-capacity characterization. We test it on the Bornholm 60 kV distribution network - a real Danish island power system - using one year of smart-meter measurements. An operator case study spans deterministic assessment, probabilistic risk quantification, and robust dispatch. Across a 68-prompt behavioral catalog scoring tool use, evidence consistency, state-mutation discipline, and refusal calibration, the orchestrator answers 98.5% of tasks correctly on the first attempt - the lone failure being a missing answer, not a wrong one. The full pipeline is released open source.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.

A world model predicts environment dynamics based on current observations and actions, serving as a core cognitive mechanism for reasoning and planning. In this work, we investigate how world modeling based on language models can further push the boundaries of general agents. (i) We first focus on building foundation models for agentic environment simulation. We introduce Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B and Qwen-AgentWorld-397B-A17B, the first language world models capable of simulating agentic environments covering 7 domains via long chain-of-thought reasoning. Leveraging more than 10M environment interaction trajectories of 7 domains in real-world environments, we develop Qwen-AgentWorld through a three-stage training pipeline: CPT injects general-purpose world modeling capabilities from the state transition dynamics and augmented professional corpora, SFT activates next-state-prediction reasoning, and RL sharpens simulation fidelity through a tailored framework with hybrid rubric-and-rule rewards. To evaluate language world models, we present AgentWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from real-world interactions of 5 frontier models on 9 established benchmarks. Empirical results demonstrate that Qwen-AgentWorld significantly outperforms existing frontier models. (ii) Beyond foundation models, we further investigate two complementary paradigms through which world modeling enhances general agents. First, as a decoupled environment simulator, Qwen-AgentWorld supports scalable and controllable simulation of thousands of real-world environments for agentic RL, yielding gains that surpass real-environment training alone. Second, as a unified agent foundation model, world-model training acts as a highly effective warm-up that improves downstream performance across 7 agentic benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-AgentWorld

As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions. This stems largely from ignoring the structural framing of benchmark-level evaluations. To resolve this, we introduce a unified and controllable framework that standardizes heterogeneous benchmarks to systematically contrast isolated demographic assessments with forced-choice comparative settings. Crucially, this allows us to disentangle the confounding effects of Chain-of-Thought reasoning, neutral fallback options, and other structural artifacts in social bias evaluations. Our evaluation across multiple model families reveals a massive, systematic paradigm gap: while isolated assessments limit prejudice activation, comparative settings act as aggressive catalysts for latent discrimination, a shift primarily driven by underspecified contexts. Alarmingly, CoT reasoning exacerbates social biases under comparative settings, and this systemic bias persists as a deterministic prejudice even when models are provided neutral fallback options or claim to answer randomly. Finally, we demonstrate that this comparative prejudice is a generalized phenomenon that scales positively with model size. Ultimately, we offer a crucial methodological guideline: while researchers must leverage comparative settings to robustly audit hidden biases, practitioners cannot safely rely on comparative deployments in ambiguous real-world tasks.

Long-term memory promises LLM agents that grow more capable across sessions, maintaining an accurate, evolving understanding of the user that interaction forms. In practice, however, this memory is evaluated mostly through downstream behavior, such as later answers, personalization quality, or task success, which tests that understanding only indirectly and leaves the memory artifact itself largely unaudited. We argue that long-term memory should instead be evaluated as an auditable post-interaction artifact: after ordinary assistance, what structured user state can be reconstructed from the memory the agent leaves behind? We instantiate this view in MEMPROBE, a benchmark in which a memory-equipped agent assists simulated users, each carrying a hidden, taxonomy-anchored user-state bank, across a trajectory of leak-controlled tasks, after which that bank is reconstructed from the agent's resulting memory under both full-store and top-k access. Built on synthetic ground truth for efficient, scalable measurement, MEMPROBE spans 50 simulated users with 31 hidden dimensions each (1,550 recovery targets) and tests 5 representative memory systems. Testing state-of-the-art memory agents, we find that successful assistance and recoverable memory behave as distinct capabilities. Task completion nearly saturates, even for a memoryless baseline, while category-balanced recovery stays moderate (about 0.6) and drops further under top-k retrieval. MEMPROBE is the first benchmark to study memory recovery directly, reconstructing the user state a system retains and scoring it against ground truth. We see recovery as a concrete objective for future memory agents to optimize, and MEMPROBE as a step toward an environment where agents are trained to remember their users, growing more faithful the longer they know them.

Scaling adversarial evaluation of large language models requires both a method for generating hard inputs and a reliable way to confirm that resulting failures are real. We present AdversaBench, an end-to-end red-teaming pipeline that mutates seed prompts with five structured operators, queries a target model, and confirms failures through a three-judge panel with a meta-judge tiebreaker. We report experiments on 45 seeds across three categories: reasoning, instruction-following, and tool use. Every seed produced a confirmed failure. Four findings stand out. First, operator effectiveness varies sharply by category: inject_distractor scores 0.00 mean reward on instruction-following seeds but 0.80-0.83 on reasoning and tool-use. Second, binary failure rate hides difficulty: instruction-following seeds required 2.4 attacker iterations on average versus 1.1 for other categories, a gap visible in survival curves. Third, pairwise judge agreement of 80-87% coexists with near-zero Cohen's kappa due to label skew; category-level disagreement rates are more informative. Fourth, adversarial prompts generated against Llama 3.1 8B transfer zero-shot to Llama 3.3 70B, suggesting the mutations exploit general behavioral patterns rather than model-specific weaknesses. Code, dataset, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/khanak0509/AdversaBench .

Deep learning approaches to biometric verification are commonly trained by optimizing indirect objectives, creating a misalignment between the optimization process and the primary evaluation metric, typically the Equal Error Rate (EER). This paper introduces EERLoss: a subdifferentiable, arbitrarily accurate approximation to EER for training deep biometric models. Furthermore, this framework has the potential to be adapted to optimize any specific operating point on the DET curve, enhancing its generalizability. To validate this approach, EERLoss is evaluated on a particularly demanding behavioral biometric modality: keystroke dynamics verification. This task is characterized by its high intra-class and low inter-class variability. Experiments are conducted on the large-scale KVC-onGoing benchmark, incorporating data from over 185,000 subjects across different scenarios. A comprehensive ablation study initially demonstrates the superiority of EERLoss in comparison to existing state-of-the-art loss functions. It also converges substantially faster compared to other losses, reducing the overall training cost. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed loss and the KVC-winning architecture by re-training it with EERLoss, demonstrating that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original SoTA, achieving a relative EER reduction of up to approx. 30\%. This improvement on a challenging, large-scale benchmark validates the effectiveness of EERLoss as a task-aligned training objective specifically suited for high-variance biometric traits.

Parametric knowledge in Large Language Models is not equally accessible across languages. As a result, standard inference techniques often struggle to surface localized facts, leading to failures in cross-lingual knowledge transfer and consistency. In this work, we investigate techniques for accessing hidden factual knowledge by exploring cross-lingual prompting strategies. We identify four inherent dimensions of cross-lingual exploration that directly govern parametric knowledge retrieval and evaluate them on multilingual factual benchmarks covering 17 typologically diverse languages. Our results demonstrate that cross-lingual exploration significantly improves knowledge transfer and factual recall, representing a more efficient compute Pareto frontier than native-language scaling. Furthermore, we observe corresponding improvements in cross-lingual consistency, exceeding what can be explained by accuracy gains alone. Overall, our work establishes multilingual prompt exploration as a highly effective inference-time strategy for unlocking latent parametric knowledge.

Freestanding all-diamond color-center photonics is a promising platform for optical integration of spin-based quantum defects. Within this geometry, we realize a key building block for quantum-network interconnects: a directional coupler that acts as an on-chip beam splitter. We design and simulate directional couplers with triangular cross sections using eigenmode and finite-difference time-domain simulations and target near-50:50 splitting at visible wavelengths. We fabricate the devices directly from bulk single-crystal diamond by angled oxygen reactive-ion-beam etching followed by a dry post-release hard-mask removal process. Room-temperature measurements at $λ_0\approx 637 \mathrm{nm}$ yield a mean coupling ratio of $C^\mathrm{meas}=46(16) \%$. Finally, we integrate SnV$^{-}$ centers into the nanophotonic structures and observe near-lifetime-limited optical linewidths and coherent optical Rabi oscillations without post-fabrication annealing, identifying the platform as a viable route towards integrated diamond quantum photonics.

Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.

Individual level daily activity schedules are essential for a wide range of applications, including infectious disease control, urban transportation planning, and policy design. In practice, such schedules are typically generated by combining population data with travel survey data. These data sources are used because they are often publicly available, whereas observed individual activity schedules are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. However, because of the complexity of mobility modelling, it is difficult to generate realistic activity schedules that also preserve travel times consistent with those reported in travel surveys. To address this issue, we propose a framework for generating activity schedules that iteratively applies a dynamic programming method to allocate activity locations based on simulated travel times. Numerical experiments with dummy data show that the proposed method reduces the discrepancy between simulated travel times and those reported in travel surveys by 52.2% relative to the first iteration through iterative refinement.

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.

Simulator-in-the-loop optimization offers a promising inference-time mechanism for robot manipulation. It uses a physical simulator as a backend rollout engine to evaluate candidate trajectories in parallel and refine nominal actions online, a paradigm proven effective in rigid-body manipulation where state and contact are relatively tractable. We bring this paradigm to real-world cloth manipulation from a single RGB input through three pillars. (i) We design a scalable synthetic-data generation and inference-time rollout pipeline built on FLASH, a deformable-object simulator that provides a practical balance among physical fidelity, numerical stability, and rollout efficiency. (ii) We develop a real-to-sim module, trained purely on synthetic data, that maps a single RGB observation to simulation-compatible cloth state by fusing pretrained visual features with learnable canonical tokens. (iii) We perform online planning by coupling a sparse-mesh rollout backend with prior-guided MPPI, anchored at an offline-distilled policy trajectory, preserving manipulation-relevant deformation and contact while enabling sufficient parallel rollout batches. Real-robot experiments show higher success rates and stronger robustness than baseline methods.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell's inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to investigate whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate both open-source and closed-source T2I models using a Vision Language Model (VLM)-based evaluator (CF-Eval). Furthermore, we introduce two metrics: Prior Resistance Rate (PRR), which measures a model's ability to overcome entrenched real-world priors, and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR), which assesses whether models can maintain reasoning-dependent counterfactual generation without explicit visual cues. Experiments show that all models exhibit sharp degradation from factual to counterfactual settings. Further analyses suggest that these failures arise because current T2I models encode world knowledge and visual appearances as tightly coupled patterns. Consequently, their heavy reliance on frequent visual co-occurrences within the training data forces them to default to familiar commonsense priors when tasked with rendering counterfactual worlds.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as autoregressive generators. However, from the perspective of collective computation, they function as high-dimensional Dense Associative Memories that store complex reasoning patterns as latent attractors. In this work, we investigate the energy landscape of mathematical reasoning. We posit that correct reasoning chains correspond to deep, wide attractor basins ("flat minima") in the model's output distribution, whereas hallucinations manifest as sharp, unstable local minima. To exploit this geometry, we introduce a retrieval mechanism based on a Gibbs measure of the trajectory's spectral entropy. By sampling multiple reasoning paths and weighting them by their inverse energy ($P \propto e^{-βE}$), we approximate the equilibrium distribution of the associative memory, effectively ``relaxing'' the system into a robust solution. Empirically, this physics-inspired mechanism improves Microsoft Phi-3.5 performance on GSM8K by 5.38\% (84.7\% $\to$ 90.1\%), demonstrating that inference is better modeled as a dynamic settling process into an attractor basin rather than greedy next-token prediction.

We consider a class of pursuit-evasion games in which multiple defenders and attackers move in the plane with bounded speeds, while each defender observes the states of other agents with a constant time delay. For the one-attacker-one-defender case, we derive an explicit analytical characterization of the attacker's delayed attack region and prove its convexity under mild assumptions. When the defender can guarantee capture, we formulate a convex optimization problem to compute the capture point and derive optimal strategies for both players. These strategies are shown to constitute a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium by exploiting the sequential structure induced by the information delay. The analysis is further extended to the one-attacker-multiple-defender scenario and to the general multiplayer setting. In the latter case, delay-aware pairwise winning relations are incorporated into a maximum matching formulation to address the defender-attacker assignment. Numerical simulations for one-on-one, one-vs-multiple, and multi-agent cases validate the theoretical results and illustrate the impact of information delay on game outcomes and optimal strategies.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer powerful reasoning for forensic tasks, yet existing approaches utilizing exogenous segmentation decoders often suffer from suboptimal localization. The reliance on stitched pipelines introduces information bottlenecks during backpropagation, which dilutes spatial signals and is limited by semantic priors of the segmentor. To address these limitations, we propose ForensicsTok, which reformulates image manipulation localization as an autoregressive sequence generation task. ForensicsTok directly generates spatially grounded token sequences, enabling precise mask prediction without intermediary supervision. Specifically, we introduce a Token Splatting Decoder (TSD) to map tokens to binary masks via codebook-aware code smoothing, which mitigates sharp gradients from deterministic detokenizers. Furthermore, to capture diverse tampering clues, we propose a Hierarchical Expert Fusion (HEF) module that injects multi-scale features from a forensic expert model. This unified architecture effectively compensates for the lack of forensic priors in standard MLLMs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that ForensicsTok substantially improves over existing MLLM-based baselines and slightly improves over strong forensic expert baselines, while exhibiting stronger robustness to perturbations.

Multi-agent LLM environments require robust mechanisms for shared knowledge management. This paper formalizes the fleet-memory problem and identifies four foundational failure modes: unauthorized leakage, stale propagation, contradiction persistence, and provenance collapse. To address these, we define explicit systems-level primitives: scoped retrieval, temporal supersession, provenance tracking, and policy-governed memory propagation. These primitives are implemented in MemClaw, a production multi-tenant memory service, and evaluated via ArgusFleet, a reproducible harness testing four governance dimensions. Rather than a baseline comparison, this study measures a live production service, emphasizing real-world architectural insights and negative results. Key Evaluation Results Provenance: Successfully reconstructed 100% of depth-four derivation chains with correct writer identity at sub-second per-hop latency. Propagation: Demonstrated high intra-fleet visibility with zero cross-fleet leakage. Under strong write mode, write-to-visible latency was optimized to a single search round-trip. Production Architectural Issues Discovered Asymmetric Scope Enforcement: Tenant isolation held, but sub-tenant scope was initially bypassed on direct GET-by-id requests for agent-scoped credentials (disclosed and remediated during the study). Pipeline Ordering Conflict: While contradiction supersession works for admitted writes, a synchronous near-duplicate gate can prematurely reject contradictory writes before the asynchronous contradiction detector can evaluate them. Conclusion: Long-context retrieval alone is insufficient for production multi-agent memory. Governed shared memory demands explicit systems-level abstractions, and live evaluation is vital to expose enforcement and pipeline-ordering failures missed by design-only treatments.

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study archive-grounded reasoning: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce Agora, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model's context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.

GUI agents powered by vision-language models show strong potential for automating digital tasks, yet frequently fail in long-horizon scenarios due to the absence of step-level verification. Existing process reward models verify actions through textual reasoning alone, missing the visual nature of GUI state changes. We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies agent actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots in visual feature space. VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head that jointly evaluates action success, task progress, and error type. A critic-training data construction pipeline generates weakly supervised samples from existing trajectories without additional human labels for critic training. Experiments and offline analyses across five benchmarks demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents, generally improving benchmark metrics while providing visual diagnostic cues.

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) execute high-level user goals by perceiving and acting directly within graphical user interfaces. However, reinforcement learning for CUAs remains difficult because open-ended desktop environments rarely provide scalable, machine-readable reward signals: task success is often visually grounded and hard to specify with handcrafted reward functions or dense manual labels. We propose an RL fine-tuning framework that uses autonomous vision-language evaluation as a scalable supervision signal for GUI agents. Given a final screenshot and the original instruction, a Vision-Language Model judges task completion and provides terminal feedback without task-specific heuristics or manual labels during policy optimization. Because autonomous evaluators are imperfect, we model their feedback as a noisy binary reward channel and derive a noise-corrected reward estimator for Proximal Policy Optimization. Experiments across macOSWorld, Windows Agent Arena, and OSWorld show that corrected evaluator rewards outperform both zero-shot baselines and raw evaluator rewards, improving success rates by an average of 12.6 percentage points over zero-shot performance and 5.1 points over raw evaluator fine-tuning. These results suggest that autonomous evaluation can serve as a practical reward signal for RL in GUI environments when evaluator noise is explicitly modeled and corrected.

Rare diseases affect millions of individuals worldwide, yet timely diagnosis remains a major public health challenge due to scarcity of specialized clinical expertise. While large language models (LLMs) show promise to support rare disease diagnosis, current models are constrained by insufficient clinical deployability, limited clinically grounded evidence, and scarcity of training data. Here we present RaDaR (Rare Disease navigatoR), an open-source, compact reasoning LLM (32B parameters) for rare disease diagnosis. RaDaR was trained with 49,170 publicly available free-text cases and 104,666 synthetic cases with reasoning-enhanced training. RaDaR showed the strongest performance among evaluated open-source models, including the 671B DeepSeek-R1, across public benchmarks and four external validation centers. In a retrospective cohort, RaDaR prioritized the final diagnosis before documented clinical suspicion in 61.06 percent of cases, corresponding to a potential lead time of 1.87 months and 50.18 percent of the within-center interval. In a randomized physician-assistance trial, RaDaR assistance improved physicians' rare-disease diagnostic accuracy by 21.44 percentage points compared with internet search alone. Synthetic-data ablations suggested that phenotype-anchored narratives provide useful training signal for long-tail rare diseases, with a monotonic scaling trend within the tested data range. Together, RaDaR and its development and validation framework provide a deployable rare-disease reasoning model and a reproducible development framework for diagnostic AI under data scarcity.

Emerging LLM services increasingly host many sparse MoE models, yet most models receive sparse requests and remain cold. This creates a GPU memory problem: model weights are stable and model-determined, while KV-cache is transient and demand-determined. Because cold models rarely reach peak KV-cache demand at the same time, reserving worst-case KV capacity per model wastes memory; a shared KV-cache pool can instead provision aggregate active demand. However, KV-cache sharing is not sufficient when weights and KV-cache remain in a monolithic GPU memory pool. Static weights compete with dynamic KV-cache, and KV-head-limited attention under cold, low-concurrency traffic exposes only a fraction of replicated KV capacity, leading to low GPU memory utilization and weak long-context support. We present CrossPool, a serving engine for cold MoE models that separates FFN weights and KV-cache into two GPU memory pools: a weights pool that consolidates FFN weights across cold models, and a KV-cache pool that dynamically serves active requests while keeping attention local to KV-cache. CrossPool combines a KV-cache planner and virtualizer, a layer-wise pipeline scheduler that hides hidden-state transfers, and persistent kernels with control lowering to reduce CPU-GPU control overhead. With efficient GPU memory pooling, CrossPool underpins bursty long-context requests and outperforms the state-of-the-art kvcached-based multi-LLM serving system, reducing P99 TBT by up to $10.4\times$.

Existing automotive event datasets rely on appearance-based annotations from frame pipelines, making them poorly suited for motion-aware event perception. We present a geometry-driven, annotation-free framework that classifies detected objects as static or independently moving by exploiting ego-motion structure directly from the event stream. A Focus of Expansion model with yaw compensation estimates global background motion, while objects are labeled as moving when local motion deviates from this prediction, as quantified by a scale-invariant residual. Temporal stabilization improves robustness across consecutive event windows. The method requires no learning, no manual motion labels, and works with any input bounding boxes. Experiments on MVSEC and the Prophesee 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection dataset demonstrate consistent performance across diverse driving scenarios, with yaw compensation improving results during turns and a simple translational local model offering a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

The use of agentic systems to perform offensive security operations has moved from a theoretical possibility to a commoditized capability. However, while the community has focused on creating more and more capable agents, less attention has been allocated to assessing the security of those systems. In this work, we present the first in-depth security analysis of the most widely used agentic systems for offensive security operations. We show that most of these tools share common design flaws that enable an active adversary to exfiltrate API keys, establish persistent footholds, and fully compromise the operator's machine, even when the agent operates inside a sandboxed container. To support our analysis, we introduce a full cyber kill chain for such agentic systems, capturing the progression from initial LLM manipulation to lateral movement, persistence, guardrail bypass, and sandbox escape. Building on our security analysis, we derive a robust architecture for agentic offensive-security tools and propose actionable, broadly applicable design principles that mitigate the disclosed attack paths at the architectural level.

Pose graph optimization (PGO) is a key back-end component for state estimation in networked multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In object-based multi-robot SLAM, the problem becomes more tightly coupled because robots must jointly estimate both their trajectories and the poses of persistent objects observed by multiple agents. Existing decentralized solutions often assume that the communication graph closely matches the physical interaction topology, which is restrictive in realistic deployments where communication is sparse, intermittent, or time-varying. This paper presents a fully decentralized Riemannian optimization framework for object-based multi-robot PGO that decouples the coupled estimation problem via a consensus mechanism, enabling flexible communication topologies. To improve convergence under limited communication budgets, we further develop a distributed approximate-Newton scheme that exploits local second-order information while operating directly on the SE(d) manifold to preserve geometric consistency, and we establish the convergence to Riemannian first-order stationary points and provide a local condition-number analysis explaining the benefit of approximate second-order information over first-order Riemannian descent. The resulting method reduces iteration count and communication overhead without sacrificing estimation accuracy. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks, large-scale simulations, and real-world multi-robot experiments demonstrate improved accuracy, runtime efficiency, scalability across network topologies, and robustness to communication failures.

Learning causal models from fragmented biomedical data is challenging because clinical, molecular, and imaging variables are often incomplete or not jointly observed. We propose RetiSEM, a domain-constrained structural equation modelling (SEM) framework for causal graph recovery and mediation analysis under limited multimodal resources. This proposed work organises variables into biologically informed blocks, applies forbidden-edge constraints, and decomposes pathway-level effects into TE, NDE, and NIE components. We evaluate RetiSEM across ten synthetic benchmark scenarios that vary in dimensionality, nonlinearity, causal depth, and pathway structure, together with a fragmented real-world setting that combines NHANES clinical variables with externally derived retinal representations. This approach achieves lower structural error and higher causal accuracy than unconstrained baselines across the synthetic benchmarks. In the real-data analysis, retinal variables behave mainly as downstream biomarker-like indicators, with smaller but detectable indirect effects. These findings support our strategy as an interpretable framework for testing structured causal hypotheses in limited-resource biomedical AI. The code and resources for this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/ReitSEM.

Video large language models (LLMs) are often constrained by computation and memory budgets, leading them to use reduced frame rates and spatial resolutions, which may cause them to miss critical information for question answering (QA). A practical and efficient solution is a two-stage paradigm: first perform coarse video understanding to localize relevant segments, and then re-watch these segments at higher temporal or spatial fidelity. In this paper, we present video-SALMONN-R$^3$, the first end-to-end video-LLM that enables re-watch through reinforcement learning without relying on chain-of-thought (CoT) cold-start. This design removes the need for costly CoT data annotations and avoids CoT-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which can otherwise degrade the pretrained video understanding abilities. To address the mismatch between the reasoning-first behavior induced by re-watch and the answer-first tendency of pretrained video-LLMs, we propose a re-answer strategy, in which the model first produces a direct answer in the first watch and then refines it after re-watching. Finally, to improve question adherence during re-watching, we propose a re-ask mechanism that re-injects the query when revisiting localized segments. Experimental results show that video-SALMONN-R$^3$ consistently outperforms both the base model and the QA-SFT baseline, while surpassing prior re-watch-based approaches with significantly lower computational cost. Code, models, and data will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras -- a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images. We propose G$^3$VLA, a camera-aware geometric module that injects calibrated structure into the visual-token stream of a pretrained VLA without altering its action space or imitation objective, combining intrinsic-conditioned ray embeddings, projective positional encoding (PRoPE), and bidirectional cross-view fusion. Geometric supervision is provided either from ground-truth point maps when available, or from confidence-gated $π^3$X teacher predictions, requiring no depth sensors or manual annotations. Instantiated on $π_0$, G$^3$VLA yields consistent gains across the LIBERO suites, RoboCasa24, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot settings, with the largest improvements on spatially and object-sensitive tasks. We further validate on $π_{0.5}$ and GR00T 1.5, with results suggesting that geometric transfer is most effective when geometry-aware tokens have direct access to the action generation pathway. Our project page is at https://sites.google.com/view/g3vla

A real-time agent for general computer use - with games as the most demanding case - must act within tens of milliseconds while still planning over seconds. These two regimes sit at opposite ends of the latency-quality tradeoff. A reasoning VLM (Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking) deliberates effectively but requires ~1.5 s per response - far too slow for a 15 Hz control loop. In contrast, a reactive VLM (MiniCPM-o 4.5) acts in milliseconds but underperforms on planning-heavy tasks. We couple two frozen models of matched scale (9B reactive, 8B reasoning), leaving the communication channel as the sole trainable component. The standard coupling is a Text Bridge (T): the slow model writes a suffix the fast model reads. We introduce a learned continuous Latent Bridge (L) that projects the slow model's residuals into the fast model's input-embedding space in a LLaVA-style manner, avoiding any text round-trip; both are compared against Fast-Only (F). On 7 Atari games and a driving domain (MetaDrive), tuning the action decoder per channel on held-out seeds, the Latent Bridge matches or beats the Text Bridge in every domain: it significantly improves two games (MsPacman +57%, RoadRunner +28%) and is a safe drop-in elsewhere. Combining both channels interferes destructively (RoadRunner -96%), so only one should be used. The benefit is highly predictable: the bridge helps if and only if slow reasoning already beats fast reaction (T > F) - the Latent and Text gains over Fast-Only move together at r=0.93. MetaDrive is the controlled negative, where the Latent Bridge is demonstrably inert because the Text Bridge adds no value. We release replay recordings and reproducible pipelines.

Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs. These methods ignore the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrading the performance of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose CompressKV, a resource-efficient KV-cache compression framework for GQA-based LLMs. Instead of aggregating attention scores from all heads, CompressKV identifies Semantic Retrieval Heads (SRHs) that capture both the initial and final tokens of a prompt and semantically important mid-context evidence, and uses them to select tokens whose KV pairs should be retained. Furthermore, CompressKV allocates cache budgets across layers according to offline estimates of layer-wise eviction error. Experiments on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack show that CompressKV consistently outperforms existing KV-cache eviction methods across memory budgets. Notably, it preserves over 97\% of full-cache performance using only 3\% of the KV cache on LongBench question-answering tasks and achieves 90\% accuracy with just 0.7\% KV storage on Needle-in-a-Haystack. These results demonstrate an improved resource--performance trade-off for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV

Legged manipulators combine the mobility of legged platforms with the manipulation capability of robotic arms. However, arm-induced Center-of-Mass shifts and dynamic disturbances make the system more prone to instability under actuator failures, potentially leading to falls, task failures, or safety risks. Existing fault-tolerant control methods mainly focus on locomotion alone, leaving the coupled problem of whole-body stability and arm reachability in fault-tolerant loco-manipulation largely unaddressed. To bridge this gap, we propose FT-WBC, a fault-tolerant loco-manipulation framework for robust whole-body control of legged manipulators under actuator failures. FT-WBC adopts a decoupled upper- and lower-body policy architecture and introduces two key modules: a Fault Estimator (FE) and a Posture Adaptation Module (PAM). The FE predicts faulty joints from lower-body proprioceptive histories, while the PAM uses this fault information to adapt the base posture plan generated by the arm policy, converting potentially unstable posture requests into safe and executable base posture commands. Through this fault-aware posture adaptation mechanism, FT-WBC synthesizes compensatory gaits under actuator failures and preserves as much arm workspace as possible while maintaining whole-body stability. Simulation and real-world experiments show that FT-WBC significantly improves survival rate and workspace under weakening or locked failures, and transfers zero-shot to a real legged manipulator in the real world.

Text-driven Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to locate and segment target objects in videos given natural language. However, existing models are typically trained on 2D image or video datasets with naive segmentation losses, which overlooks the geometric consistency across frames and leads to weak spatial understanding. In this paper, we propose Geometry-enhanced Language-guided Video segmentation (GeoLaV), a two-stage framework that distills 3D geometric knowledge from images to enhance text-driven video segmentation. In the first stage, we perform monocular geometry pretraining with monocular novel-view synthesis, enabling the model to acquire geometry-consistent visual representations via spatial alignment on large-scale single-image datasets. In the second stage, we introduce geometry-aware distillation and fine-tune the model on video segmentation datasets, transferring 3D structural knowledge from a general 3D prior model. This process reinforces 3D awareness and improves both spatiotemporal coherence and language grounding in segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our method using only image segmentation data already provides notable zero-shot generalization in RVOS. When combined with geometry-aware distillation for fine-tuning on videos, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple RVOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Tony1882880/GeoLaV.

This paper presents a scalable framework for multi-robot task allocation in complex environments where estimating task execution costs is computationally expensive. While combinatorial auction-based approaches offer reliable solutions, the exponential complexity of bundle generation typically renders them intractable for real-time reactive applications, particularly when accurate path planning is required for cost validation. We address this through a distributed, two-stage multi-fidelity bundle generation approach. Agents utilize a local search tree guided by a low-fidelity heuristic (such as euclidean distance) to rapidly explore the bundle space, applying high-fidelity path planning only to the most promising candidates in a best-first manner. These refined bids are then submitted to a central coordinator that solves a set packing problem to ensure global feasibility and maximize the overall utility. Simulation results in multiple environments demonstrate that the framework is able to improve the performance of reactive auction-based task allocation. Overall, the presented framework is shown to enable reactive task allocation with dynamic bundle sizes in multiple settings without exposing the agents' state and internal cost estimation models.

Commercial large language models bill, scale latency, and budget context per token. Yet tokenizers assign more subword tokens to the same meaning in some languages than in others, so speakers of languages with high token-fertility pay a structural penalty before a model is ever invoked. This penalty is documented for multilingual settings in general, but it has not been measured systematically for African languages at the level of enterprise deployment economics and cognitive context capacity. We measure it across 20 African languages spanning five language families and three scripts (Latin, Ge'ez/Ethiopic, N'Ko; 19 appear in the primary FLORES-200+ corpus, with Nigerian Pidgin measured via MAFAND-MT only), using parallel corpora so that the language effect is isolated from content. Across 11 frontier and open tokenizers on FLORES-200+, every African language carries a tokenization premium above English (median 1.88x on GPT-5 / o200k_base, up to 8.92x for N'Ko); the penalty is largest for Ethiopic and N'Ko scripts (reaching 7-9x) and is near-invariant across corpora (FLORES vs SIB-200 Pearson r = 0.9998). Translated into deployment terms, this results in up to 8.9x inference cost and an equivalent generation-latency multiplier (N'Ko vs English on GPT-5; 7.4x for Amharic), and as little as 11% of English's effective context window. The best currently available tokenizer for African languages, Gemma 4, reduces the mean premium from 3.31x (cl100k_base) to 2.38x, but no tokenizer eliminates the penalty. We release an open measurement tool (afri-fertility), a public leaderboard, a results dataset, and mitigation guidance for African builders. The penalty falls hardest on the languages whose speakers can least afford it, a digital divide encoded directly into the subword vocabulary.

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nine coding benchmarks, Bayesian control proves to be most valuable when verification is costly and critics are informative but imperfect. Beyond control, the belief state yields an interpretable correctness score that outperforms token-probability and raw tool-success baselines for uncertainty quantification.

Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

We revisit the memory update mechanism in SAM2-based visual object tracking and identify confidence-only mask selection as the dominant cause of drift under occlusion, rapid motion, and distractors. We introduce SENTRY, a training-free, plug-and-play, refine-before-write module that validates each memory update for short-horizon temporal consistency before committing it. SENTRY aggregates diverse segmentation hypotheses per frame, backtracks them into short tracklets, and uses neighbor-aware cycle-consistent matching against recent trajectories to favor temporally and geometrically consistent masks. It leaves the base architecture untouched, replacing confidence-driven writes with consistency-validated ones. For fair evaluation, we re-evaluate major open-source SAM2-based trackers across all available scales and datasets, filling gaps in prior reports. Integrated into five strong baselines, SENTRY delivers consistent gains across nine benchmarks, achieving new zero-shot SOTA on LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, GOT-10k, VOT20, VOT22, and DiDi. Despite these checks, the SAM2-L version runs at 32.8 FPS on an A100, and across compatible hosts adds only about 0.4--0.6 GB VRAM. Our results provide the first unified all-scale evaluation of SAM2-based trackers and show that enforcing temporal validity at write time stabilizes memory-augmented tracking without retraining.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models require large-scale video-action pairs, yet real teleoperation remains scarce. While generated robot videos offer a scalable alternative, existing methods treat them as real robot data by recovering pseudo-actions from synthesized pixels. We argue that deriving low-level control from generated visuals is a mismatched abstraction. A video captures only \emph{geometry}: the spatial trajectory representing the \emph{where} of a task. A real demonstration captures \emph{control}: the exact motor commands representing the \emph{how}. Human-to-robot video generation preserves these unequally: the visible geometry survives the generation process, while the underlying control signals are lost. This \textbf{Asymmetric Preservation Principle} dictates a clean rule: this surviving geometry should solely supervise visual perception, leaving control to real demonstrations. Following this principle, we propose \textbf{GRA} (\textbf{G}eometry-guided \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{A}lignment), which extracts the geometric content as future 2D end-effector waypoints, computed from the source human video through pose estimation, retargeting, simulation, and calibrated projection, and routes them to the VLA vision backbone via an auxiliary 2D head. The action head is trained on real demonstrations only. During fine-tuning, the waypoint loss persists as a \textbf{spatial representation anchor} that prevents the backbone from losing its geometric grounding. On real-robot tasks, GRA outperforms pseudo-action baselines under matched data budgets and narrows the gap to policies trained with substantially more real demonstrations, suggesting that correctly routed geometry bridges generated videos to robot policies more reliably than recovered actions.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized document parsing by enabling end-to-end mapping from images to structured text, imposing a significant latency bottleneck, particularly for token-dense documents. While Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating inference, its potential is constrained by optimization instability when scaling to deeper look-ahead depth. In this paper, we propose \textbf{P-MTP}, a framework that leverages \textbf{Progressive Multi-Token Prediction} with a lightweight MTP module to scale the look-ahead depth for high-throughput document parsing. Specifically, we introduce Progressive Curriculum Loss that adaptively re-weights different look-ahead depths using cumulative path reliability and retrospective target consistency. By effectively suppressing gradient noise in long-range predictions, P-MTP, facilitates an automated easy-to-hard optimization transition, enabling the model to master increasingly distant look-ahead depths. Furthermore, we propose Confidence-Gated Dynamic Drafting to maximize the effective look-ahead depth and acceptance rate by adaptively calibrating speculative length during inference, thereby minimizing computational waste and further pushing the boundaries of inference speedup. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks and architectures demonstrate that P-MTP, achieves up to a $5\times$ speedup with negligible loss in accuracy, providing the first successful validation of extensive look-ahead MTP in the document parsing domain.

Effective robot-to-human communication can increase transparency and trust, reduce uncertainty, and contribute to safer collaboration in shared workspaces. Designing and validating an effective robot communication strategy is challenging due to the varying and often limited communication modalities across robots, differences in how diverse recipients interpret messages, and the underexplored virtual-to-real gap in studies of communication legibility. We present a systematic, large-scale comparative validation of existing communication strategies for a mobile non-humanoid robot across message types and settings (online and in-person). Based on the prescribed message types in the existing standards for industrial robots, we realize and compare a low-expressive, unimodal LED-based strategy with a highly expressive, multimodal one that leverages robotic gaze, gestures, and voice. For each strategy, we analyze the communication of a turning intention, an attention request, error status, whether the robot is stuck, and whether it is functioning normally. We evaluate these strategies in replicated online and in-person experiments. We find strong evidence that highly expressive multimodal communication is perceived as more legible and intuitive than unimodal LED-based communication. Comparing the online and real-world study findings, we observe a notable decrease in overall legibility, particularly for signaling with LEDs. Similarly, confidence in message interpretation decreases during the real-world evaluation.

We present S1-Omni-Image, an open-weight unified multimodal model for scientific image understanding, generation, and editing. Unlike general-purpose image generation models, scientific image tasks require not only high-fidelity synthesis, but also robust understanding of scientific semantics, structural relations, domain knowledge, and task intent. To this end, S1-Omni-Image builds on the scientific multimodal reasoning backbone S1-VL-32B and couples its understanding capability with an image generation module under a unified think-before-generate paradigm. Given a user instruction, the model first produces a task-oriented reasoning trace, a textual answer, and a task special token; their hidden states are then injected into the generation module to condition image generation or editing. S1-Omni-Image supports scientific image understanding, generation, and editing in a unified framework. For generation, it focuses on scientific illustrations and text rendering, including logical diagrams, relational comparisons, data charts, and realistic scientific visualizations. For editing, it casts segmentation and other domain-specific vision tasks as native image editing problems, enabling multi-turn illustration editing, medical and geographic image segmentation, medical image translation, and scientific image super-resolution. We construct SciGenEdit, a 314K-sample training dataset, and release the model weights, inference code, and SciGenEdit-10K. Experiments show that S1-Omni-Image substantially improves scientific image generation and editing while preserving the scientific image understanding capability inherited from S1-VL-32B. It outperforms open-source models on GenExam and TechImage-Bench, achieves state-of-the-art results on four editing benchmarks including MSD, cigRockSEM, SynthRAD2025, and IXI, and maintains stable performance on scientific image understanding evaluations.

Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) architectures improve inference-time scaling by organizing multiple LLM agents into layered reasoning pipelines. However, existing MoA variants fail to sustain gains as depth increases, exhibiting degradation, early plateauing, or saturation. We propose ReM-MoA, a memory-augmented MoA framework that sustains scaling through two mechanisms: (1) a Ranked Reasoning Memory that persistently stores and ranks reasoning traces from all layers using a comparative Reviewer Agent, and (2) a Curated Diversified Memory Routing scheme that exposes different agents to distinct combinations of successful and failed traces, preserving exploration diversity while propagating high-quality reasoning. We further introduce an optional multi-domain Reviewer distillation pipeline that improves ranking quality through frontier-model supervision. Across five reasoning benchmarks spanning math, formal logic, code, knowledge, and commonsense, ReM-MoA consistently outperforms prior MoA variants across both depth and width scaling, and its advantage widens with depth, establishing structured cross-layer reasoning memory as a key missing mechanism for scalable multi-agent inference.

Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse. To address this issue, we propose EDV, an Execute-Distill-Verify framework for reliable experience learning. In the Execute stage, multiple heterogeneous agents explore the same task space in parallel to generate diverse candidate trajectories. In the Distill stage, a dedicated third-party agent comparatively analyzes these trajectories to produce candidate experiences, reducing executor-centric summarization bias. In the Verify stage, the execution group validates candidates via a consensus mechanism, and only approved experiences are written into shared or private memory. By decoupling the three stages, EDV transforms experience learning from isolated self-reflection into collaborative construction, filtering erroneous and noisy content before memory insertion. We evaluate EDV on three challenging long-horizon benchmarks: tau2-bench, Mind2Web and MMTB. Results show EDV consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating that reliable experience construction is essential for robust agent self-evolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/shidingz/EDV.

We introduce EgoSAT, the first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric video reasoning in streaming settings, designed to evaluate the capabilities of modern vision-language models (VLMs). The benchmark targets streaming interaction understanding, where video frames arrive sequentially and models must continuously interpret evolving visual context. EgoSAT unifies several previously distinct tasks within a single streaming framework. In this formulation, queries about completed events correspond to retrospective reasoning, queries about ongoing activities require online understanding, and queries about future actions involve prospective anticipation. This unified setting requires models to reason about the past, present, and future while operating under the constraint that only previously observed frames are available. EgoSAT contains 1,997 unique videos spanning 165 hours of egocentric footage and around 4,800 high-quality question-answer pairs, carefully designed to probe reasoning across varying temporal contexts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of both open-weight and closed-weight VLMs, providing a systematic assessment of their ability for streaming interaction understanding. By distinguishing answerability and conducting diagnostics on confidence of models, we find existing models not only struggle with prospective and retrospective modeling, but also exhibit severe mis-calibration: confidence often fails to track inherent answerability, leading to dangerous "confidently wrong" behaviors. Project page: https://leiyj23.github.io/EgoSAT/

Spectral filtering recently delivered substantial pruning for \emph{static} subgraph matching: Laplacian interlacing rejects candidates whose neighborhoods cannot host the query. We study whether such aggregate structural tests can accelerate \emph{continuous} subgraph matching (CSM) over dynamic graphs, and answer in three parts. First, lazily maintained spectral bounds are infeasible exactly where spectral pruning has value: we characterize the tightest safe rule over a formalized perturbation relaxation and show that even it loses essentially all pruning power within four touching updates. Second, exact maintenance is affordable when selective: pruning utility and recomputation cost are anti-correlated across vertices -- hubs provably never prune -- so recomputing small-neighborhood spectra on touch sustains exact local spectra at microseconds per update, complete by construction. Third, integrated into a decoupled CSM benchmark against an identical-minus-spectra control, the tests remove up to $51\%$ of candidates or safely skip up to $47\%$ of update enumerations, yet enumeration intermediates remain unchanged -- beyond the gates' skipped first-level bindings, typically zero -- across two engines, four real graphs, two stream types, and $77$ solved queries; a constructed radius-stratified workload confirms the instrument detects the exception when one exists ($-99.9\%$ intermediates, $748\times$ faster). Aggregate tests accelerate what scales with candidate sets -- construction, list scans -- never adjacency-guided exploration. We distill an intermediate-invariance methodology for evaluating CSM filters and release a reusable dynamic local-spectra index.

In high-stakes document processing pipelines, including financial reconciliation, compliance verification, and procurement automation, an LLM extraction that is silently wrong is more dangerous than one that is visibly absent. The central challenge is not extraction accuracy alone but reliable confidence estimation: knowing, field by field, whether an extraction can be trusted for automation or deferred to human review. Token-level log-probabilities, verbalized confidence, and multi-sample self-consistency all collapse toward all-positive behaviour at practical thresholds, offering no reliable separation between trustworthy and untrustworthy extractions. We present ExtractConf, a cross-domain, field-agnostic confidence engine that grounds confidence estimation in two structurally different readings of the same document. A field-guided Hunter call extracts each field under schema-slot completion pressure; a document-guided Mapper call scans holistically and surfaces values grounded in document content. This asymmetry yields different failure modes: Hunter hallucinates values for absent fields, while Mapper misses visually non-salient ones. Their disagreement is independently informative. ExtractConf fuses cross-call disagreement, LLM-internal uncertainty, OCR, image quality, and spatial layout into a classifier requiring no domain-specific rules or retraining. On DocILE (55-field invoices, 26% failure rate), it achieves 0.928 ROC AUC and reduces selective prediction risk by 70% over logprob-mean. At 80% coverage, accuracy reaches 99.1%, enabling a practical human-in-the-loop workflow. Zero-shot transfer to CORD receipts achieves 0.858 AUC; lightweight Lasso recalibration reduces ECE by 89% and Brier by 43%, confirming the signals generalise across document domains.

Network operators' changing policies, service requirements, and stringent real-time constraints render existing methods designed with fixed objectives and constraints ineffective. This paper presents Agentic long-term performance optimization (Agentic-LTPO), a nested bilevel optimization framework that can be applied to adaptive physical layer problem configuration. The key idea is to employ agentic AI to generate upper-level configurations in a bilevel optimization structure, where evolving operator policies, environment summaries, and historical experiences are translated into structured lower-level optimization problem configurations. The lower level solves the problems with updated configurations for real-time physical-layer decisions. Considering cell-free MIMO beamforming as a use case, we embody Agentic-LTPO by designing a new multi-agent decision process with retrieval-augmented experience-based verification in the upper level, together with a closed-form beamformer in the lower level. Experiments demonstrate that Agentic-LTPO exhibits strong adaptability to dynamic operator policies and effectively enhances the system's long-term performance by 57.2% compared to traditional methods.

The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.

Object interaction tasks have been a focus of advances in imitation learning. End-to-end methods, dominated by diffusion and flow-based variants have shown leaps in performance while sacrificing interpretability. Object-centric and pose-informed variants have had a role in learning from demonstration in manipulation tasks. In this paper, we revisit a few modern imitation learning benchmarks for object interactions, with the aim of composing a framework that repurposes principled theories of manipulation, preserving both performance and interpretability. For image observations, lightweight training is proposed for model-free pose estimation of the target object, using self-supervision over the demonstration data available for imitation learning. This information is then used to inform a manipulation mode-aware retrieval of a demonstration, a mode-aware transformation, a replan step that connects to the retrieval point while preserving mode constraints, and finally rolling out the transformed demonstration. These compose four key steps of the proposed RE4 framework, evaluated over state-based and image-based benchmarks in Push-T and Robomimic. An adversarial benchmark that evaluates sparse data regions of image-based Push-T showcases the robustness, further bolstered by indications from low-data regime experiments. The current work shows promise in using simple interpretable building blocks to learn manipulation skills.

Large Transformer models function as Dense Associative Memories (DAMs), retrieving knowledge via high-dimensional attractor dynamics driven by the self-attention mechanism \citep{ramsauer2020hopfield, wu2024attention}. However, adapting these frozen memory systems to new tasks presents a fundamental ``Plasticity-Stability'' dilemma. Current methods either risk catastrophic interference by modifying synaptic weights directly (e.g., LoRA) \citep{hu2021lora} or degrade associative capacity by clogging the retrieval buffer with static prompt tokens (e.g., VPT) \citep{jia2022vpt}. In this work, we propose \textbf{H-Res} (Hierarchical Residual Steering), a mechanism that modulates the effective energy landscape of the Transformer without altering its global equilibrium or expanding its sequence length. By formulating adaptation as a control problem on the activation manifold \citep{chen2018neuralode}, H-Res learns a state-dependent vector field that steers token trajectories into task-specific basins of attraction. We formally prove that H-Res preserves the attention entropy of the foundation model and facilitates Neural Collapse \citep{papyan2020prevalence}. Empirically, Manifold Steering outperforms global weight modification by 26\% on associative retrieval tasks and eliminates the computational overhead of prompt-based methods, scaling effectively to structured domains \citep{zha2023vtab}.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

Existing ECG report generation is tightly coupled -- interpretation and reporting fused end-to-end, so errors propagate without stage-level recourse -- while agent-based systems decouple tasks but remain single-pass, never revisiting earlier outputs. Clinical ECG reporting instead unfolds iteratively, requiring progressive context integration and bidirectional editing. We present \textsc{ATRIA}, a multi-agent ECG reporting system that mirrors the clinician's iterative workflow: it binds every report claim to its supporting evidence, flags statements unsupported by that evidence, incorporates additional context mid-session, and lets clinicians verify and revise individual findings rather than accept one opaque output. Because its agents use ECG analysis models already in clinical use, the underlying findings are clinically trustworthy; and as a cloud-based web service, \textsc{ATRIA} is ready for immediate deployment. We demonstrate \textsc{ATRIA} through four interaction cases, with a live demo and video available.

We introduce Age of LLM, a turn-based 1v1 benchmark in which two LLMs face off on a 13x7 grid to destroy the enemy base. Three stressors are deliberate: fog of war, full diplomacy (messages, ceasefires, ultimatums; uranium kept secret), and a reliability dimension where every turn must follow a strict JSON schema and an illegal action is silently discarded. The engine is private and each match uses a fresh random map seed and opponent, mitigating the data contamination that affects public benchmarks. Models receive a (near) rule-only prompt with no build-order advice (two tactical seed phrases were present during data collection; see Section 2.7). We benchmark 15 reasoning models across 54 matches and 5,258 actions. Findings: (1) the nuclear rush dominates (78% on the rules-coherent v0.11+ sub-corpus; 85% corpus-wide) with a sole-launcher signature that is largely mechanical under secret-simultaneous launch rules, not a cognitive deterrence failure; (2) military conquest is rare but faster (12.3 vs 18.9 turns); (3) diplomacy is prolific yet almost never consummated; (4) ~58% of illegal actions are fog/state errors, making the illegal-action rate a measure of belief-tracking; (5) -- the least established, and the only one we label exploratory -- a weak link associates reliability with winning. The corpus is small, unbalanced and not side-swapped, so the ranking is a preliminary descriptive view, not a contribution. Beyond ranking, the turn-by-turn traces of actions and messages make the corpus a lens on how LLMs reason under adversarial uncertainty -- their belief-tracking, spontaneous deception, and per-model cognitive "personas" -- which we frame as a future research direction. We release the replay format, an isometric viewer and all replays; engine source on request.

We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 adversarial samples, generated using state-of-the-art attack strategies from recent literature. Our work complements existing efforts by consolidating and extending prior benchmarks from multiple established sources, resulting in 7 826 intents, and introduce an additional category to broaden coverage. This provides realistic evaluation resources for studying model robustness and alignment. Our dataset intends to enable researchers and practitioners to systematically evaluate the robustness and safety of VLMs, fine-tune attack-generation models, and develop or stress-test defensive guardrails under diverse adversarial conditions. By releasing this resource, we aim to lower the barrier to adversarial research and foster more reproducible, comprehensive, and comparable evaluations of VLM safety.

Vehicle advertisements contain rich specification information, but automotive NER resources remain limited. We introduce AutoSpecNER, an expert-annotated dataset for fine-grained entity recognition in vehicle listings. The dataset includes 659 advertisements from a popular car-selling website, with over 10,000 entities annotated across 15 categories, including MODEL, ENGINE_SPEC, and BATTERY_CAPACITY. Annotation quality was validated through inter-annotator agreement, achieving an average score of 91.5%. We benchmark rule-based extraction, fine-tuned transformer encoders, and large language models. DeBERTa achieves the best performance with a 90% micro-F1 score, outperforming the rule-based baseline (43%) and the strongest large language model (77.8%).

Prompt-based interaction has become a dominant paradigm for using large language models (LLMs), where multiple candidate prompts are evaluated and the top-ranked one is selected for downstream use. This workflow implicitly assumes that prompt rankings are stable under minor variations in evaluation conditions. In this paper, we systematically study prompt ranking stability under common sources of variability, including random seeds and limited evaluation subsets. Across three open-weight LLMs and two benchmark tasks, we find that while overall rank correlations are often moderate to high, the identity of the top-performing prompt frequently changes, leading to unreliable selection decisions. To address this issue, we propose a simple stability-aware selection strategy based on a lower confidence bound, which accounts for both performance and variance. Our results show that this approach improves robustness in unstable settings while remaining competitive in more stable regimes. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for evaluation uncertainty in prompt selection and LLM benchmarking.

Compliant joints can embed safety and adaptability into dexterous hands, but achieving large-stroke anthropomorphic motion while maintaining joint-specific, directiondependent stiffness and reliable proprioception remains challenging. This paper presents the PDS joint, a parametric doublespiral (PDS) compliant joint that enables systematic shaping of directional stiffness across multiple deformation modes, including flexion/extension, abduction/adduction, and pronation/supination. We instantiate the joint using Archimedean and logarithmic spiral templates for different hand joints and introduce an asymmetry ratio to tailor stiffness distributions for both grasp stability and hyperextension resistance. To make the joint practically usable under large deformation, we co-design embedded inductive proprioception and propose a learningbased calibration pipeline that maps raw inductive signals to joint states using ArUco-marker tracking. Experiments characterize the stiffness landscapes across geometric parameters and demonstrate a non-monotonic dependence of lateral support on asymmetry, indicating the importance of principled parameter tuning. For joint-state estimation in the most challenging abduction/adduction motion, a learned multilayer-perceptron (MLP) mapping reduces the error compared with conventional curve fitting by 41.6%. Finally, we integrate the proposed joints into an open-source dexterous hand as a demonstration platform, on which the hand grasps a set of nine everyday objects and performs safe, contact-rich human-involved interactions.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to practical advisory contexts. Using an evaluation rubric inspired by Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (the PCH score), we conducted experiments on four high-performance LLMs -- Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro -- across 480 trials. Causal Caution maintenance rates were 91.7--100.0% in academic contexts but dropped to 6.7--18.3% in practical advisory contexts (Fisher's exact test, p < .001 across all models). Furthermore, when restricted to practical prompts requesting concrete recommendations or explanatory rationales, only 1 of 200 responses (0.5%) maintained Causal Caution. A brief self-correction prompt -- "Please reconsider this judgment from the perspective of causal relationships" -- restored the expression of Causal Caution to maintenance rates of 71.4--100.0% (McNemar's test, p < .001 across all models). These results suggest that helpfulness-oriented response patterns may suppress the expression of Causal Caution in practical advisory contexts, with important implications for organizational governance. The findings indicate that this suppression reflects context-dependent variation in expression rather than an underlying capability limitation, suggesting that multi-agent architectures that separate proposal generation from causal auditing may offer a promising governance design.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, driving the emergence of high-performance RL systems such as veRL for autoregressive large language models (LLMs). In parallel, diffusion-oriented RL algorithms, e.g., DanceGRPO and FlowGRPO, have rapidly expanded the scope of RL from language reasoning to diffusion-based visual and flow-based generation. However, efficient RL systems for diffusion generative LLMs remain underexplored. Existing implementations, e.g., veRL-Omni, still rely on colocated execution, which simplifies synchronization but couples rollout and training resources, limits heterogeneous deployment, and constrains independent scaling. To this end, we introduce DigenRL, a disaggregated RL framework for diffusion-based generative LLMs that supports flexible resource allocation, accommodates heterogeneous GPUs, and facilitates efficient task scheduling. To maximally reduce the execution bubbles in the disaggregated architecture, we propose: 1) a generation-axis pipeline (GAP) and time-step parallelism (TSP) in the diffusion architecture to enable finer-grained pipelining between rollout and training; 2) an elastic trainer-assisted generation (TAG) approach to enable the trainer GPU resources to dynamically assist in executing rollout generations; and 3) a tightly one-step constrained asynchronous strategy to further utilize the tail bubble in the pipeline. Extensive experiments are conducted on three hardware testbeds with 16-32 GPUs using HunyuanVideo-13B, Wan2.1-14B, FLUX.1-12B, and QwenImage-20B generative models. Experimental results show that DigenRL achieves 1.56-2.10x throughput improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion RL systems, veRL-Omni and GenRL.

Sign language models are typically trained on datasets captured under constrained conditions, with limited viewpoint, background, and signer-identity diversity, leading to poor robustness under real-world distribution shifts. We introduce SignNet-1M, a large-scale augmented dataset spanning ASL, CSL, and German Sign Language (DGS). SignNet-1M synthesizes realistic variations along three axes: (i) novel-view rendering (rotation and zoom) via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), (ii) scene/identity editing via diffusion models for background replacement and signer substitution while preserving sign motion and linguistic content, and (iii) post-rendering augmentations that emulate capture and compression artifacts (e.g., pose/temporal perturbations and video-level corruptions) to better match in-the-wild recordings. Beyond data release, we provide a unified benchmark suite across downstream tasks (e.g., translation and recognition) and ablations that isolate each augmentation component. Experiments across backbones show that training with SignNet-1M consistently improves generalization under cross-view, cross-background, cross-identity, and post-rendering shifts, while maintaining strong in-distribution performance. The dataset, full augmentation pipeline, and benchmark are available at https://signnet.chatsign.ai/.

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception fuses multi-camera images into a unified top-down representation for autonomous driving. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art methods remain confined to closed-set scenarios, making them vulnerable to unpredictable real-world environments. In this work, we introduce open-vocabulary BEV segmentation (OVBS), which leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize categories beyond the training set while maintaining precise BEV perception and real-time efficiency. A key challenge in OVBS lies in the 3D geometric inconsistency inherent in the ill-posed lifting of 2D VLM semantics into BEV. To address this, we propose OVBEVSeg, a geometry-aware OVBS framework that enhances efficient Gaussian splatting (GS)-based unprojection by leveraging robust 3D geometric constraints across three progressive stages: (1) 2D-to-BEV pseudo-labeling via reliable 3D projection for OV generalization; (2) joint 2D-BEV per-scene optimization with BEV structural constraints for 3D geometric consistency; and (3) 3D geometric distillation for online efficiency. On the nuScenes dataset, OVBEVSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming closed-set methods by 15.3 mIoU on unseen categories. Remarkably, even with no novel-class ground-truth labels, it remains competitive with self- and semi-supervised baselines trained with up to 40% of ground-truth annotations. Furthermore, it achieves 2.5x faster inference with only 0.22x the memory consumption of projection-based methods. Project page: https://hchoi256.github.io/projects/ovbevseg/.

Legged robots rely on accurate ground interaction awareness to traverse variable terrains, such as slippery surfaces. Existing slip detection methods often rely on kinematics and proprioception, which lack the sensitivity to detect early-stage slips that occur prior to catastrophic instability. Thus, this paper presents SlipSense, a novel framework for online force-based slip detection using a custom lightweight sensorized foot for quadrupeds to detect slip. The framework integrates a multimodal sensor design with a LSTM-based model to infer ground reaction forces and detect slip-indicative anomalies during locomotion. The proposed framework is deployed on a Unitree Go1 quadruped to demonstrate blind online slip detection over a slippery terrain. Our method detects early-stage slips down to an average displacement of 24.1 +/-6.4mm with an overall accuracy of 85.9%. This represents a 3.3-fold finer detection resolution and a 24% relative accuracy improvement over a standard kinematic baseline that uses foot velocity inferred through state estimation. The work in this paper serves as a foundation for force-aware gait adaptation in legged robotic locomotion, allowing future controllers to estimate terrain friction and adjust constraints, thus improving the overall stability of the system.

Petroleum-engineering search exposes a supervision gap for strong general retrievers: relevant evidence exists in public web text, but domain relevance labels are scarce. To address this gap, we propose PETRA, a large-scale Petroleum Engineering Text for Retrieval Adaptation dataset and pipeline that converts noisy public web data into a curated domain corpus and synthetic supervision for dense retrieval and reranking. PETRA contains 1.36M curated chunks, approximately 2B token equivalents, $\approx$859k, embedding training rows from $\approx$224k anchors, and roughly 400k teacher-scored reranker candidate rows. Its construction combines high-recall energy-domain curation, an energy-domain classifier with 98.4% test accuracy, chunk-grounded query generation, LLM-written hard negatives, and retrieval-mined candidate lists. PETRA improves first-stage in-domain Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) from 0.703 to 0.763 through score fusion. Reranker adaptation improves the public Earth Science benchmark by 44% relative and a six-task reasoning-intensive panel by 23%. Failed training recipes show that high train-holdout accuracy on synthetic labels does not predict retrieval gains; retrieval-mined data helps only after being repackaged as teacher-scored candidate lists sampled from the inference-time candidate distribution.

ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been shifting toward batteryless, energy-harvesting architectures. Sustaining reliable operation in these systems requires intelligent management of highly volatile stored energy. As edge applications grow in complexity, traditional energy-aware schedulers struggle with unpredictable workloads due to their reliance on static execution thresholds or pre-measured, hardware-specific task profiles. To overcome this, we propose two novel, hardware-agnostic dynamic scheduling strategies treating applications as a "black box," requiring no prior energy information: a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and an on-the-fly Approximated Prediction (AP) method. We evaluate these methods against an adaptive task rate approach (AsTAR) and optimized static thresholds using a custom-built, physically accurate simulation framework driven by real-world solar data and dynamic LoRa transmission profiles. Rather than claiming universal superiority, our analysis exposes the distinct operational trade-offs of each method: the AP approach delivers lightweight, near-oracle task throughput; the RL agent provides tunable survival-execution balancing; and AsTAR excels at execution pacing across long energy gaps. Finally, we demonstrate that while these advanced strategies provide critical resilience for severely constrained systems with small capacitors, devices with larger energy buffers can efficiently rely on simpler, less computationally expensive static policies.

Despite rapid progress, embodied reasoning under real-world variability remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on demonstration-driven sequential biases, limiting flexibility in open-ended and long-horizon tasks that require structured reasoning over evolving states. We introduce RoBoSR, an intermediate structural representation that formulates manipulation as step-wise state transitions over semantically grounded, object-centric scene graphs. By modeling object states and their spatial relations at the perception-action interface, RoBoSR disentangles high-level task reasoning from raw inputs and enables structured reasoning over preconditions, effects, and goal states. This representation endows the agent with causal reasoning capability, enforcing subtask dependencies and supporting coherent long-horizon task planning. To learn such structure-aware reasoning, we construct Manip-Cognition-1.6M, an open-world dataset that jointly supervises scene understanding, instruction interpretation, and subtask planning across diverse tasks. Across several benchmarks and real-world demonstrations, our method consistently outperforms prompting-based methods and classical TAMP baselines in zero-shot generalization and long-horizon tasks. The results underscore structured intermediate representations as a critical inductive bias for scalable embodied reasoning.

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

Transformer-based language models have become the default substrate for natural language processing and the pace of new releases has made it hard for practitioners to separate durable ideas from the noise of incremental announcements. This review works at two levels. At the level of mechanism, we organise the main transformer families into a working taxonomy, covering encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, long-context, permutation-based, and generator-discriminator variants. We then extend the discussion to post-2023 developments that changed the picture in practice: instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, direct preference optimisation, mixture-of-experts scaling, retrieval augmentation and the current flagship model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the level of use, we survey deployments across healthcare, finance, legal, education, customer service, creative writing and scientific work. Based on this we link each to the specific capabilities that make a transformer the appropriate tool. The contribution of this paper is a critical assessment that is based on the survey. We compare architectures on four axes that matter to deployment decisions, we quantify the trade-off between parameter count and energy cost. We also discuss how alignment methods, data provenance and benchmark saturation change what it means to call a model "state of the art". The final section lists the research questions that we think deserve more attention.

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs. Consequently, current frameworks typically freeze VFMs and shift the entire burden of rotation generalization to the downstream decoder. To break this architectural bottleneck, we propose REDI-Match, an efficient framework driven by a novel Rotation-Equivariant Distillation (REDI) paradigm. Instead of relying on rotation data augmentation to establish rotational correspondences, REDI distills the non-equivariant semantic representations of a VFM into a lightweight, strictly rotation-equivariant encoder, leveraging an equivariant geometric architecture to constrain robust high-dimensional semantics. To fully exploit these features, we equip the decoder with an entropy-driven spatial alignment module. By evaluating discrete rotation hypotheses, this mechanism explicitly locks onto the canonical coordinate system, eliminating global ambiguity before continuous refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REDI-Match establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across multiple benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a 13.89% absolute pose accuracy improvement on the highly challenging SatAst dataset while operating 1.9x faster than the current SOTA (RoMa v2), enabling real-time inference (~41 FPS) on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Code: https://github.com/YinjiGe/REDI-Match.

We present ZONOS2 8B, our latest TTS model, which achieves state-of-the-art naturalness, prosody, and voice cloning fidelity. We improve upon Zonos-v0.1 across scale, data, and training recipe. We scale the model from 1.6B to 8B total parameters (900M active) with a novel mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, improving inference latency and throughput. We expand our training corpus from 200K to over 6M hours using a new data processing pipeline, and we simplify our post-training and conditioning recipes to improve naturalness and voice cloning fidelity. We evaluate ZONOS2 8B on quality, speaker similarity, WER, and ZTTS1-Eval, our novel TTS benchmark, where it performs competitively with state-of-the-art systems while maintaining good streaming latency. We release our model weights and example inference code under an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face.

Data-driven model predictive control (MPC) has become an attractive approach for controlling unknown systems, especially when data are corrupted by noise. However, most existing data-driven MPC methods focus on linear systems, and little attention has been given to nonlinear dynamics under disturbances. To fill this gap, we propose a robust data-driven min-max MPC scheme for unknown nonlinear systems with process disturbances. We represent the unknown nonlinear dynamics using vector fields built from a dictionary of basis functions, yielding an equivalent linear form with unknown matrices. These unknown matrices are characterized by a set-membership representation derived from noisy input-state data. Using this uncertainty description, we formulate a min-max MPC problem. Two online scenarios are studied: i) when state measurements are noise-free, and, ii) when they are corrupted by process disturbance. For each case, we derive a Lyapunov-based semidefinite program (SDP) to compute a stabilizing state-feedback controller. The resulting schemes are shown to guarantee recursive feasibility and either exponential or robust stability of the closed-loop system depending on whether there is process disturbance. Simulation studies on benchmark examples illustrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of the proposed approach compared to existing data-driven and model-based controllers.

As large language model (LLM) agents are applied to longer tasks, they increasingly modify workspace state across multiple rounds of iteration. However, agents typically observe only tool outputs and log fragments, while the actual state changes occur in the file system. Without explicit workspace boundaries, state-changing operations such as file writes and temporary artifact generation may scatter changes across paths. Over time, these weakly constrained changes accumulate, making states such as modified files difficult to track. This paper presents LemonHarness, an integrated execution framework for long-horizon agents. LemonHarness establishes an explicit execution boundary by constraining state-changing operations within a clearly defined workspace and bringing model invocation, tool execution, and rule knowledge within a single controlled boundary. State-changing operations, including file writes, dependency installation, and temporary artifact creation, are executed through structured tool interfaces, with execution feedback recorded as observations available to subsequent model decisions. The system also introduces a reusable rule knowledge base, which turns recurring execution rules and acceptance criteria into runtime knowledge. LemonHarness further adds a time-aware execution mechanism that exposes elapsed and remaining budget to the model, so it can rebalance exploration, implementation, and validation effort as time pressure shifts and avoid timeouts from long waits or excessive verification. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, LemonHarness_GPT-5.3-CodeX reached 84.49% accuracy over 445 trials; pairing the same framework with the stronger GPT-5.5 backbone raised the average accuracy to 86.52% across five jobs. The results suggest that a unified runtime boundary, callable rule knowledge, and time-aware execution can improve the stability of long-horizon agent execution.

Fine-tuning transformer-based handwritten text recognition (HTR) models on medieval manuscripts is challenging because these models are pre-trained on modern text and must adapt to a very different visual domain. This paper studies how three controllable fine-tuning choices (contrast normalization, data augmentation, and layer freezing) affect recognition accuracy when adapting TrOCR to small historical datasets. We run controlled experiments on a 13th-century Italian manuscript (I-CT 91 "Cortonese") and replicate the same experimental grid on the public READ-16 benchmark as robustness evidence. On Cortonese, our best configuration achieves 8.03% character error rate (CER). Statistical comparisons across 13 configurations show that freezing up to three encoder layers or six decoder layers does not significantly harm accuracy, while deeper freezing becomes progressively detrimental. Removing contrast normalization (CLAHE) yields 7.84% CER, comparable to a domain-specialized baseline, suggesting strong optimization can reduce reliance on image preprocessing. Cross-dataset validation on READ-16 shows that decoder freezing thresholds transfer more robustly than encoder thresholds, and combined freezing strategies require dataset-specific re-validation. Finally, we use Grad-CAM gradient attributions and decoder cross-attention maps to diagnose error patterns and failure modes revealed by the ablations. Source code is available at https://github.com/LaudareProject/TrOCR-analysis

The increasing interest in data-driven methods for power system protection is accompanied by a lack of standardized, publicly available high-voltage waveform datasets that enable transparent and reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, this paper introduces the PROTECT-90 dataset, an open electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulated reference benchmark for high-voltage fault studies with consistent digital-fault-recorder-like measurements, publicly released with this work. The dataset comprises 9,022 physically consistent short-circuit simulation episodes generated on a standardized 90 kV double-line topology with systematically documented domain randomization of grid operating points, line parameters, and fault conditions. For each episode, synchronized three-phase voltage and current waveforms are recorded at eight measurement locations and released together with structured, machine-readable metadata describing fault type, fault location, inception time, and operating conditions. All modeling assumptions, parameter ranges, and data-generation procedures are explicitly documented to ensure transparency and cross-study comparability. By combining physically grounded EMT simulation, balanced scenario coverage, and open accessibility, PROTECT-90 establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible benchmarking of protection-oriented signal processing and learning-based methods.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive vision-language understanding, yet still struggle with fine-grained perception in high-resolution images. While existing training-free methods typically rely on attention-based localization or coarse-to-fine search, they are often misled by distractors and fail to locate multiple targets. Our investigation attributes these failures to Contextual Dominance, where salient distractors overwhelm target attention and cause inaccurate localization, and Semantic Bias, where global semantics cause the model to fixate on the most salient concept, resulting in incomplete localization in multi-object scenarios. Built on these insights, we propose ActiveScope, a training-free framework that enhances MLLMs by actively seeking and correcting perception. ActiveScope features two modules. The Semantic Anchor Localization (SAL) utilizes fine-grained semantic anchors to independently localize key targets, thereby mitigating semantic bias. The Interference-Suppressed Refinement (ISR) refines localization by suppressing attention on salient distractions to overcome contextual dominance. Extensive experiments on high-resolution image understanding benchmarks demonstrate that ActiveScope outperforms existing training-free methods (e.g., 96.34 percent accuracy on $V^{*}$ Bench), validating the superiority of the active search and self-correction paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/jasmine-ww/ActiveScope.

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress in short-form audio-video understanding, yet long-form audio-video comprehension remains challenged by limited context windows and severe information redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we propose AVOC, a framework for long-form audio-video understanding in Omni-modal Large Language Models. AVOC introduces a learnable token compression module between the modality encoders and the LLM backbone. We reframe multimodal token compression as a top-$K$ retrieval problem: given a fixed context budget, the module must retrieve a compact subset of tokens that best supports answering the user query. We draw inspiration from three classical Information Retrieval criteria for selecting informative units from a large candidate pool: relevance, importance, and diversity. AVOC instantiates each criterion as a tailored mechanism for audio-video understanding, and integrates them into a unified retrieval-style compression pipeline. Experiments show that AVOC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form audio-video benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.9 and 5.5 points in average accuracy on OmniVideoBench and LVOmniBench, respectively. Moreover, AVOC maintains robust performance on Audio-Video Needle-in-a-Haystack task at durations up to one hour.

High frame-rate RGB-D videos are crucial for a variety of downstream tasks, including motion analysis, dynamic scene understanding, and 3D reconstruction. However, due to hardware and sensing constraints, practical RGB-D cameras are typically limited to low frame rates, making it difficult to capture rapid scene dynamics. Existing video interpolation methods have achieved strong performance on RGB data, but they are not readily applicable to RGB-D scenarios, where they often yield blurry boundaries, visible artifacts, and degraded geometric consistency. Furthermore, motion estimation from only two boundary frames is inherently under-constrained in complex dynamic scenes. Event cameras, by contrast, provide asynchronous measurements with ultra-high temporal resolution, offering dense motion cues. In this paper, we propose a unified multimodal framework for RGB-D video interpolation that jointly exploits RGB appearance, depth geometry, and event-based temporal cues. Specifically, it first extracts and fuses RGB, depth and event cues, then estimates bidirectional flow with motion basis refinement for RGB and Z-axial refinement for depth, and finally synthesizes the target RGB-D frame via bidirectional warping and soft blending. In addition, we construct a new RGB-D-Event dataset to alleviate the scarcity of tri-modal training data. Extensive experiments on a public benchmark and the proposed dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior photometric fidelity for RGB interpolation and stronger geometric accuracy for depth interpolation than existing approaches.

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This distinction determines the appropriate supervision target: prompt-level success should supervise confidence estimates made after seeing the prompt, while individual answer-level correctness should supervise confidence estimates made after answering. We introduce CALIBER (Calibration Before and After Reasoning), which elicits both estimates and supervises each with the target matched to its information state. Under this unified protocol, CALIBER reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 52.5% over the strongest single-confidence baseline on BigMathDigits for the 7B model, while achieving the best Brier score and AUROC, and remains within 2.1 points of the best accuracy. Further, on a larger 30B model, CALIBER achieves the best ECE on BigMathDigits while remaining competitive in Brier score and AUROC. Out of distribution, it achieves the best ECE and Brier score on GPQA and TriviaQA, and remains competitive on SimpleQA. Ablations further show that this position-target alignment is most beneficial under distribution shift where it consistently reduces calibration error across all out-of-distribution benchmarks.

Physical interactions follow a long-tailed distribution: a set of common and regular interactions dominates human experience and visual data, while a broad spectrum of rare and irregular interactions remains underrepresented. Although recent visual world models, including image and video generation models, achieve impressive realism on existing benchmarks, they primarily focus on simulating common physical interactions. This raises a central question: Do current visual world models internalize and generalize physical principles? In this work, we introduce Tailor-Bench, a benchmark that challenges world models to simulate irregular physical interactions. To enable systematic evaluation, we design three scenario modes that progressively challenge model reasoning: Regular scenarios reflect common tool-task pairs, Unconventional scenarios replace conventional tools with attribute-compatible substitutes to test affordance generalization, and Impossible scenarios introduce attribute-violating tools to probe constraint awareness. Additionally, we design two complementary settings under a unified evaluation protocol: predictive generation requires inferring outcomes without guidance, while descriptive generation specifies the target outcome for faithful realization. Our experimental results reveal a clear long-tail gap in physical world modeling: performance degrades from Regular to Unconventional and Impossible scenarios, indicating limited generalization beyond common interactions. Failure analysis further shows that models rely on superficial visual patterns: image models fail to realize correct state changes, while video models further suffer from temporal inconsistencies.

Although text-to-motion generation has achieved strong progress in synthesizing realistic single-person motions from language, extending it to text-driven 3D human-human interaction (HHI) remains non-trivial, as HHI requires modeling the underlying \textbf{social structure} that governs phase progression, actor roles, and inter-actor coordination. In this paper, we formulate HHI generation as a social structure modeling and grounding problem: the model must first infer how an interaction unfolds and how the two actors coordinate their roles, and then realize this structure as continuous, physically plausible, and partner-aware 3D motion. To study how such structure should be modeled, we first examine the capability boundary of large language models (LLMs) for HHI generation. Our analysis shows that LLMs can \textit{think} by recovering phase decompositions and partner-aware roles, but cannot directly \textit{move}, as they fail to generate dynamic, physically plausible, and interaction-aware motion. This motivates our planner-executor paradigm, \textbf{Think with LLM, Move with Motion Skill}. The LLM planner converts implicit interaction semantics into motion-aligned social supervision by decomposing interactions into phases, assigning partner-aware actor roles, and aligning them with motion sequence. The motion executor then grounds the planned social structure into coordinated two-person motion by adapting a pretrained solo motion model with LoRA, previous-phase self-conditioning, and ego-relative partner conditioning. Together, our Solo-to-Social framework bridges social organization and motion realization, producing 3D HHI with improved phase consistency, role alignment, and partner-aware coordination.

Modern VLMs and VLA systems commonly adopt off-the-shelf ViTs such as SigLIP2 as visual encoders, but diverse downstream requirements in latency, temporal modeling, and VLM integration often call for customized SOTA-level ViTs. Training such encoders remains beyond the reach of much of the community, as it requires massive image-text data, while standard softmax attention makes high-resolution or dynamic-resolution pretraining prohibitively costly and often forces low-resolution pretraining followed by post-hoc adaptation. TuringViT addresses these challenges with three key designs: Turing Linear Attention (TLA) for efficient sequence modeling, VISTA-Curation to construct supervision-rich image-video training data, and native dynamic-resolution pretraining that supports flexible inputs from the start and transfers seamlessly to downstream VLMs. As a result, TuringViT outperforms leading open-source ViT baselines with only 10% of the data, achieves stronger downstream VLM performance, and delivers substantially better latency scaling on high-resolution inputs. Our scaling-law analysis further shows that TuringViT continues to improve predictably with curated data scale, far from saturation. Its fast adaptation, hardware-friendly design, and efficient deployment have made it a unified visual foundation across XPeng's AI systems. More broadly, TuringViT provides a reproducible pipeline that dramatically lowers the cost for the community to train, customize, and deploy SOTA-level ViTs, moving toward making such Vision Transformers accessible to all.

Large language models exhibit a growing range of misaligned behaviors such as strategic deception, sandbagging, and self-preservation. As they are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, it is critical to reliably detect such behaviors to ensure safe and responsible use. In this work, we propose to monitor misalignment by decomposing it into fine-grained cognitive processes -- misalignment indicators -- and detecting their presence in a model's internal activations via linear probes. We develop a taxonomy of 18 indicators spanning different misaligned behaviors, paired with an automated, meta-plan-guided pipeline that generates multi-turn training conversations. To rigorously evaluate generalization, we construct an out-of-distribution suite combining automated behavioral elicitation, established misalignment benchmarks, and natural benign conversations. Across 5 misaligned behaviors, our probes match a strong LLM judge with 0.935 AUROC on out-of-distribution benchmarks while keeping a low false positive rate on benign traffic. We further perform in-depth analysis to understand the probes and the model's internal representations of misalignment indicators.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex tasks by integrating language models with external tools and environments. However, their autonomy poses significant safety risks: agents may execute destructive commands, leak sensitive data, or violate domain constraints. Existing safety approaches face a fundamental tradeoff: hand-crafted rules are interpretable but brittle, with overly conservative rules blocking safe operations (high false positives) while permissive rules miss unsafe behaviors (high false negatives). Neural classifiers lack the interpretability required for safety-critical deployments. We present AutoSpec, a framework that automatically evolves deployed expert-designed safety rules from user safe/unsafe annotations through counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) guided by inductive logic programming (ILP). Starting from the expert rules and a stream of annotated traces, AutoSpec iteratively evaluates rules, mines false-positive and false-negative counterexamples, uses ILP to learn which predicates discriminate them, generates candidate rule edits, and verifies candidates to select the best revision. The key insight is that ILP efficiently identifies predicates that appear frequently in false negatives but rarely in false positives (or vice versa), dramatically pruning the exponential search space of rule edits. This continues until convergence, producing interpretable rules that balance precision and recall. We evaluate AutoSpec on 291 execution traces spanning code execution and embodied agent domains. AutoSpec raises rule F1 to 0.98 and 0.93 across the two domains, achieving up to 94% false positive reduction while maintaining high recall, and converges within 4-5 iterations. The ILP-guided approach achieves up to 4.8x higher F1 than heuristic CEGIS. The learned rules are human-readable, auditable, and generalize to unseen scenarios.

Federated Graph Learning facilitates collaborative graph modeling across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, real-world data categories frequently exhibit long-tailed distributions. Such statistical scarcity severely degrades performance in two ways: it biases the global model toward majority classes, and it structurally isolates minority nodes by submerging them in heterophilic, head-dominated neighborhoods. While existing methods attempt topology-agnostic statistical compensations, they often fail under data scarcity. Instead of recovering tail nodes, they overfit the structural noise from adjacent dominant classes, leading to representation degradation. To address these limitations, we propose FedEPD, a framework built on a dual decoupling paradigm that separates topological purification from semantic recalibration. Specifically, FedEPD utilizes distribution-aware Dirichlet energy pruning to filter spatial heterophilic edges. It then overcomes Non-IID distribution shifts by extracting robust global prototypes from topologically central nodes, which are incorporated into local representations via a spatial low-pass prototype injection. Furthermore, a two stage alternating optimization strategy strictly protects majority decision boundaries while improving minority accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedEPD achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed benchmarks, yielding absolute improvements of up to 4.97% in Accuracy and 5.48% in Macro-F1.

Spatial proteomics enables single-cell-resolution characterization of protein expression within tissue architecture, playing a critical role in understanding tumor microenvironments and guiding precision medicine. However, current analysis workflows remain fragmented, requiring expert manual orchestration of heterogeneous tools and limiting research scalability and reproducibility. We present SP-Mind, the first autonomous AI agent designed to unify the spatial proteomics analysis pipeline, from raw multiplexed tissue imaging to downstream phenotype discovery. Equipped with expert-curated biological analysis skills and specialized computational tools, SP-Mind converts natural-language queries into end-to-end analytical workflows without task-specific fine-tuning. To rigorously evaluate its capabilities, we introduce SP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning diverse tissue types, comprising 102 tasks across 18 distinct categories. Through extensive evaluation on SP-Bench and established downstream tasks, SP-Mind achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing open-source biomedical agent baselines.

The integration of visual evidence has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large multimodal models. However, this integration predominantly relies on generating discrete outputs (etc., code or box coordinates) to invoke external tools, a process that introduces rigid dependencies and substantial latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose {EVA} (LatEnt Visual StAtes), a novel framework that natively generates continuous latent visual representations. These internal representations manifest as an adaptive sequence of Latent\_slot tokens, serving as intermediate visual thoughts during the reasoning process. These Latent\_slot tokens are then trained end-to-end with the discrete text tokens. This co-optimization, notably, causes extreme policy deviation in the 'transition window' following the Latent\_slot tokens. We develop D-GSPO (Decouple-GSPO) to target this root cause by decoupling the optimization of latent and discrete components. To support SFT, we construct EVA-230K, a high-quality text-image interleaved CoT dataset encompassing a diverse range of real-world scenes, documents, charts and OCR tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm that EVA achieves significant performance gains while enhancing inference efficiency.

Multimodal driving planning faces a long-standing tension between two paradigms: scoring-based methods benefit from dense reward supervision but are confined to a fixed action vocabulary, while anchor-based methods generate proposals dynamically yet suffer from sparse supervision constrained to a single ground-truth trajectory. In this work, we propose FlowR2A, which resolves this tension by reframing simulation-based rewards from discriminative targets into generative conditions. By learning the reward-conditioned action distribution from dense trajectory-reward pairs with a flow-matching decoder, FlowR2A unifies the dense supervision of scoring-based methods with the proposal generation of anchor-based methods in a single generative model, forcing the model to internalize the correlation between an action and its outcomes in safety, progress, comfort, and rule compliance. To balance hard safety constraints against soft progress objectives, we introduce fine-grained per-timestep reward conditioning and reward noise augmentation. The generative formulation naturally supports controllable test-time sampling via reward guidance and anchored sampling, producing high-quality proposals. FlowR2A achieves state-of-the-art results on the NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, with multimodal proposals of substantially higher quality than prior methods.

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

Diffusion models sample effectively from high-dimensional, multimodal distributions, but their outputs may violate deployment constraints. For task-space robot policies, generated grasps, waypoints, or trajectories can be distributionally valid yet infeasible, violating reachability, collision-avoidance, or closed-loop executability requirements. This embodiment gap limits zero-shot deployment across robots, even when the task-space behavior itself is transferable. We propose an inference-time optimization framework that couples the behavior generation to physical feasibility by formulating diffusion guidance as a constrained optimization problem. Our key insight is to replace the sampling perturbation in the backward process with an optimized correction, allowing hard constraints or soft penalties to be imposed during sampling without the need to retrain the diffusion model, while keeping samples close to the learned prior. We evaluate the method on dexterous grasp synthesis with reachability and collision-avoidance constraints, and dynamic manipulation with controller-level trackability constraints. Across settings and robot embodiments, optimization-guided denoising matches the feasibility of projection- and gradient-guidance baselines while better preserving grasp quality, and improving controller-level executability and task success, with task success improving by up to 20pp. on dexterous grasping and 23pp. on visuomotor manipulation over the best baseline.

A recent unified treatment of PID tuning for time-delay plants (An, Tang, Sun, Zhang and Chen, Automatica, 2026) combines the D-partition method with a boundary gradient vector (BGV) to orient the boundaries of stabilizing, relative-stability and stability-margin regions. That method answers a feasibility question, namely where admissible gains lie, and it leaves a manual interior-point test to fix the unstable-pole count in each cell, with the choice of a single controller left to the user. This note makes three contributions. First, the one operation the BGV leaves manual, the absolute unstable-pole count, is available analytically: exactly for delay-free designs through a companion-matrix or Routh count, and through an argument-principle (Mikhailov) evaluation for retarded-type delay loops. Labelling every cell with its analytic count removes the interior-point test and decides the whole partition. Second, we add the step the BGV framework cannot reach, a time-domain selection rule that returns one certified controller: among monotone step responses we choose the minimum-settling-time PI gains, characterized by a tangency condition, with monotonicity guaranteed by external positivity (a nonnegative closed-loop impulse response). Third, we flag a neutral-type pitfall that the unified analysis never delimits: an ideal PID with derivative action on a first-order-plus-dead-time (FOPTD) plant is of neutral type, with a root chain on the imaginary axis when k Kd = T. We reproduce the authors' delay-free benchmark exactly, recovering both admissible Kp intervals, and demonstrate the full pipeline on a FOPTD plant, delivering a certified monotone, fast-settling PI controller that the region-only method can neither locate nor justify; the selected gains match an independent closed-form tangency rule to within one percent. All claims are validated numerically.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle these axes across 6 languages and three structurally heterogeneous tasks: (1) cross-lingual medical QA retrieval with 6,127 queries grounded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), (2) concept discrimination over 4,975 confusion sets at three difficulty tiers, and (3) multilingual evidence retrieval for RAG with 2,040 quality-assured queries. The three tasks share zero concept and query overlap by design, ensuring that aggregate scores reflect genuine capability breadth. Evaluation of ten systems across six paradigm families reveals severe cross-lingual failure: biomedical encoders that score 0.818 nDCG@10 in English drop to 0.056 in Japanese, a gap that English-only benchmarks cannot detect.

Long video understanding remains a daunting challenge for \emph{Multimodal Large Language Models} (MLLMs) due to the excessive computation and memory footprint. Thus, \emph{keyframe selection} is often adopted to mitigate this shortcoming, which however still suffers from low flexibility and high noise due to its hard sampling principle. In this paper, we define video frame selection as a problem of \emph{Quasi-Gaussian Sampling}, and propose an adaptive and training-free approach termed \textbf{\emph{AdaQ}}. Inspired by the $3$-$σ$ rule of Gaussian distribution, the objective of AdaQ is to achieve the optimal $3$-$σ$ interval for different examples, \emph{i.e.}, a smaller $3$-$σ$ interval for the local query and a larger one for the global query, thereby facilitating robust and adaptive frame sampling. To validate AdaQ, we apply it to four MLLMs with three embedding models. The extensive experimental results not only show its obvious performance gains over the default MLLMs and the SOTA keyframe selection methods, \emph{e.g.}, helping Qwen3-VL-8B outperform GPT4o by 15.8\% on average by using only 64 frames, but also confirm its superior robustness and high efficiency for long-video understanding, \emph{e.g.}, \textbf{only 1 hyper-parameter} needs to be set. \textbf{Our code project} is given at \href{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}.

Retrosynthetic planning seeks to connect a target molecule to commercially available starting materials through a multistep route. Classical planners construct such routes by iteratively applying single-step reaction models within a search procedure; constrained variants often require specialized algorithms or architectural changes. Direct route generation reframes retrosynthesis as sequence generation, but existing direct-generation methods still train separate models for different planning specifications. We introduce Ariadne, a decoder-only route generator that represents the target, optional constraints, and route in one prompt-completion sequence. On the RetroCast/PaRoutes mkt-cnv-160 benchmark family, one 24-layer checkpoint follows route-depth and required-starting-material prompts: adding the corresponding prompt fields raises Solv-0 by 13.7 points for depth constraints and 31.2 points for required-leaf constraints. Ariadne also improves over DESP, a bidirectional search planner, on required-leaf Top-10 and Solv-0 in 24 GPU-minutes versus 6.8 GPU-hours. On standard reconstruction, Ariadne is comparable to DMS Explorer XL at about half the reported inference time. Across additional target-only benchmarks, Ariadne's clearest gains are on route-holdout reconstruction, whereas AiZynthFinder MCTS remains stronger on several Solv-0 comparisons. These results extend sequence generation from specialist retrosynthesis models to prompt-conditioned structural route generation. We release the codebase and training scripts to support further work, but do not introduce Tier-1--3 route checkers; those remain the main bottleneck before models of this kind can become useful to experimental chemists.

Pretrained vision models often misclassify inputs that are rotated, scaled, or sheared, even though these affine transformations leave the object class unchanged. Robustness is usually restored either by building equivariance into the architecture or by retraining with augmentation, both of which require changing or retraining the model. Test-time canonicalization instead leaves the classifier untouched. It undoes the transformation of each input, mapping it to a canonical form near the training distribution before classification. Existing canonicalizers, however, rely on a narrow set of logit-based energy scores and bespoke search procedures, leaving the design space of scoring functions and optimizers unexplored. We reframe canonicalization as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which lets any OOD score serve as the energy minimized over transformations. Across benchmarks ranging from handwritten characters and sketches to natural images and 3D point clouds, we systematically evaluate around twenty OOD scores and nine search algorithms, finding that distance-based scores paired with random search and local refinement perform best overall. Because canonicalizing an already-aligned input can hurt accuracy, we add a gated mechanism that transforms an input only when its OOD score indicates this is needed, preserving most in-distribution accuracy while retaining the robustness gains on transformed inputs. Code is available at github.com/johschm/its.

Reliable structural health monitoring (SHM) of offshore wind turbine (OWT) support structures requires fast state estimation from sparse measurements. Repeated high fidelity finite element or aeroelastic analyses are difficult to use directly in online monitoring loops, while purely data-driven surrogates can require large training sets. This paper presents Digi Turbine, a synthetic reliability-aware Physics Informed Neural Network (PINN) benchmark for OWT monopile support structure monitoring. The workflow embeds a simplified Euler Bernoulli beam equation with Winkler soil foundation in the training objective, couples it with Bayesian-prior-informed inverse identification, and adds First Order Reliability Method (FORM) screening. All validation uses synthetic configurations with analytical or finite-difference ground truth motivated by the NREL 5MW reference turbine context.

While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.

On-device fault detection enables real-time diagnostics without cloud dependency, but deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained hardware demands careful tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and model size. We present a benchmark comparing traditional ML methods (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, Logistic Regression) against lightweight transformer architectures (DistilBERT, TinyBERT-6L, TinyBERT-4L, MobileBERT) for binary fault detection across three public datasets: NASA C-MAPSS turbofan degradation, SECOM semiconductor manufacturing, and UCI AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance. We evaluate classification performance (F1-score, AUC), model size, and CPU inference latency, and further assess INT8 dynamic quantization and a two-stage adaptive inference pipeline. Our results reveal that on well-separated sensor data (C-MAPSS), lightweight transformers match traditional ML at 87.8% F1 but at 100x the model size and 9000x the latency. TinyBERT-4L emerges as the most deployment-friendly transformer at 55 MB and 18 ms CPU latency. INT8 quantization reduces size by 25% while preserving 86.9% F1. Our adaptive pipeline, routing 97.9% of predictions through a quantized triage model and only 2.1% to a larger expert, achieves 87.6% F1 at 19.5 ms average latency. On severely imbalanced datasets (SECOM, UCI-PM), both traditional and transformer methods struggle significantly, highlighting fundamental limitations of current approaches for extreme class imbalance in fault detection. All code is publicly available.

More than a billion people communicate in Indic languages, yet the natural language processing infrastructure serving them remains fragmented and underdeveloped. The cause is structural: the field organizes its tools and benchmarks around individual languages or small subsets of genealogical language families, building separate analyzers, parsers, and datasets for each language and starting over for the next. This overlooks a deep regularity. Through more than two millennia of convergence around Sanskrit, Indic languages came to share a morphosyntactic architecture formalized in Pānini's grammar, the Astādhyāyī. This cuts across genealogical lines, uniting languages through a common framework. We argue that this Pāninian framework supplies a unifying computational architecture the field has lacked, and that benchmarks grounded explicitly in it would make Indic language systems more accurate, more data-efficient, and more transferable, effectively merging many apparently disparate and sparse Indic language resources into a single high-resource metalanguage bedrock. We propose a four-part benchmark suite to render this shared architecture explicit, measurable, and ready to be leveraged for practical applications. Moreover, we underscore the question it raises for interpretability research: whether neural models trained on these languages come to represent Pānini's categories on their own.

Reducing visual token redundancy is critical for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) without degrading cross-modal reasoning performance. Existing token pruning methods typically rely on single-layer signals, such as attention scores or token similarities, which overlook the cross-layer transformation of visual representations and may exhibit positional bias in multimodal token sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free token pruning framework based on Cross-Layer Spectral Evolution (CLSE). Instead of measuring token importance from single-layer feature magnitudes, CLSE quantifies how token representations evolve across Transformer layers in the frequency domain. This evolution reflects the transition from high-frequency structural details to low-frequency semantic abstractions. We observe that tokens with stronger spectral redistribution across layers are more likely to be semantically active and should therefore be preserved. By modeling cross-layer token dynamics, CLSE provides a stable importance criterion that mitigates positional bias. Extensive experiments on both image and video benchmarks demonstrate that CLSE achieves a superior trade-off between efficiency and accuracy under aggressive token reduction. Across multiple MLLMs, CLSE reduces FLOPs, KV cache memory, and latency while maintaining competitive or improved performance.

Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop Be.FM-1.5, extending the Be.FM family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, Be.FM-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate Be.FM-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and Be.FM-1.5 models can be accessed via https://umich-foreseer.github.io/behaviorbench/.

Foundation models trained on biased datasets often rely on spurious correlations between target labels and non-causal attributes, resulting in poor generalization on minority groups. Bias mitigation remains challenging due to two fundamental issues. First, when group labels are unavailable, existing group-unsupervised methods typically infer spurious attributes implicitly from model behavior, making it difficult to identify spurious factors that are semantically aligned with real-world biases. Second, even with pseudo spurious supervision, most existing debiasing methods follow a single-branch design that operates within a single shared feature space, where target and spurious attributes are intrinsically entangled. To address the first challenge, we introduce Confidence-guided Bias Concept Mining (CBCM), which leverages diffusion-disentangled, semantically grounded concept representations to identify reliable spurious attributes without attribute annotations. To address the second challenge, we propose Dual-branch Cross-projection Debiasing (DCD), a prompt-tuning framework that separates target and spurious representations into two branches and explicitly removes spurious information through cross null-space projection while preserving target-relevant semantics. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art worst group accuracy among group-unsupervised approaches, while tuning at most 0.22% of the model parameters. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

Existing medical AI benchmarks lack process visibility, atomic skill evaluation, and integrated hallucination detection. We introduce MedBench v5, a redesigned benchmark for clinical multimodal models (language, vision-language, and agent systems) that moves from static QA to dynamic, process-oriented evaluation. MedBench v5 features: (1) a dual-dimensional framework combining Clinical Cognitive Responsiveness (14 sub-dimensions) and Medical Atomic Skills (4 agent environments), covering 63 tasks; (2) three switchable information-flow stressors (omission, contradiction, evidence delay) for factorized degradation analysis; (3) a dynamic process audit protocol with five reasoning nodes that produces model-specific failure fingerprints; (4) hallucination propagation monitoring across initiation, propagation, anchoring, and contradiction interaction-capturing silent hallucination. Experiments on frontier models show that strong overall task performance does not guarantee process stability: stressors mainly disrupt contradiction detection, diagnosis updating, hallucination propagation, and contradiction-based self-correction, while final evidence grounding can remain superficially stable. MedBench v5 provides a unified infrastructure for capability profiling, controllable stress testing, process auditing, and hallucination trajectory analysis in clinical AI evaluation.

Existing literature claims that video generation essentially is world modelling. On the one hand, the claim is productive because it pushes generative AI beyond static images and toward temporally extended physical scenes. On the other hand, this claim dangerously relies on the belief that scaling visual prediction alone will automatically yield physical agents. We prefer a more accurate statement: video generation models learn a partial, implicit spatiotemporal world model, but not a fully grounded or controllable one. The reason is as follows: a model may generate a plausible video of a drone crossing a forest or a robot arm manipulating a cup, yet still fail to know which variables are controllable, which constraints belong to a particular body and which futures remain valid under intervention. The frontier in essence is not predictive realism alone, instead it emphasizes a self-evolving generative nature that requires the decisive criterion to be counterfactual controllability: the capability of asking what would happen under an action, to test whether the generated future can survive embodiment constraints and to feed the resulting action knowledge back into future imagination (generation). Therefore, in this paper we present a new perspective, i.e., autonomous video generation with counterfactual controllability is one promising way to realize self-evolving world models.

Self-evolving agents improve over time by distilling experience from past executions and reusing it in future tasks. Existing systems represent such experience either as natural-language text injected into the agent context or as code exposed as callable tools. However, the choice between these representations is typically made at design time rather than derived from the characteristics of the experience itself, leaving the trade-offs between them poorly understood. We present the first controlled study that isolates text memory and code memory over an identical set of experiences. Our results show that the two forms exhibit complementary trade-offs in construction cost, execution efficiency, and transferability, such that neither representation alone is sufficient. Guided by these findings, we propose Metis, a self-evolving agent system built on a hierarchical dual-representation memory. Metis organizes textual experience into execution plans, environment facts, and common pitfalls, and selectively crystallizes recurring plans into validated callable tools. This design combines the broad applicability of text memory with the execution efficiency of code memory while incurring tool-generation cost only when justified by repeated reuse. We evaluate Metis on AppWorld, a challenging benchmark for interactive agents. The results show that Metis improves task accuracy by up to 20.6% over ReAct while reducing execution cost by up to 22.8%. Compared with representative self-evolving agent systems, Metis consistently achieves a better balance between accuracy, execution efficiency, and memory-construction cost.

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training. Like reinforcement learning (RL), however, OPD faces an on-policy systems bottleneck, as rollouts can dominate training time for reasoning workloads. Asynchronous training pipelines can alleviate this bottleneck by decoupling rollout generation from learner updates, but doing so introduces stale-policy data. While prior work has studied stale data in asynchronous RL, its effects in OPD remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of staleness in asynchronous OPD, focusing on a practical setting where teacher feedback is implemented through local KL losses and full-vocabulary teacher logits are too expensive to store or transfer, necessitating finite teacher-score caches. We first show that KL direction changes the stale-data problem: teacher-weighted forward KL is more robust to stale rollouts, whereas student-weighted reverse KL is vulnerable. Second, for this vulnerable reverse-KL case, we study whether methods designed to stabilize asynchronous RL can mitigate OPD staleness. In our experiments, they do not improve over a simpler OPD-specific surrogate: recomputing the reverse-KL signal under the current student at learner time. Third, we analyze how finite teacher-score caches create a bias-variance tradeoff for sparse and sampled reverse-KL OPD estimators. This motivates multi-sample Monte Carlo (MC), which preserves MC correctability while reducing one-sample variance. Finally, we present and open-source AsyncOPD, a fully asynchronous OPD training pipeline built from these estimator choices. Experiments show that AsyncOPD improves training throughput by $1.6\times$ to $3.8\times$ over strict synchronous training while reaching comparable accuracy.

Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $τ$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $τ$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.

Generating explicit 3D city assets from a single satellite image is important for digital twins, urban simulation, and geospatial intelligence. Unlike satellite-to-street-view synthesis, the task requires a reusable textured mesh with plausible geometry and controllable appearance rather than a 3D proxy optimized only for rendering a small set of images or videos. The ICCV Sat2City framework made a first step by conditioning cascaded sparse-voxel latent diffusion on satellite-derived height maps, but its appearance was random, its training data were synthetic, and its task-specific VAE did not scale well to noisy real-world reconstructions. We present Sat2City v2, a journal extension that adapts a pretrained native structured-latent 3D foundation model to weakly aligned satellite images and textured meshes. We build a real-world dataset with 16,241 satellite-mesh pairs across 24 regions in 9 cities. Instead of learning a 3D representation from noisy city meshes, Sat2City v2 encodes each mesh into a pretrained native 3D latent space, fine-tunes a satellite-conditioned geometry flow, and uses the decoded shape to anchor satellite-conditioned texturing. This retains Sat2City's geometry-to-appearance cascade while enabling appearance-controllable generation from the satellite input. Experiments on metric-scale DSM reconstruction and generative city-asset benchmarks for geometry and appearance show that Sat2City v2 achieves the best overall performance among evaluated baselines. Overall, Sat2City v2 advances satellite-to-city generation from rendering-oriented 3D proxies to explicit textured mesh assets, supported by, to the best of our knowledge, the first documented satellite-mesh paired dataset collected from matched geographic crops for this asset-level task. Project page: https://ai4city-hkust.github.io/Sat2City-v2/

The composition of training data, governed by the diversity of sources and their mixing strategy, is a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training. Online Data Mixing (ODM), the technique of adaptively adjusting data mixtures during training, has emerged as a promising direction to improve efficiency. However, existing methods are constrained by their reliance on a singular optimization perspective, which fundamentally overlooks the need for complex LLM pre-training to consider the dynamic data composition from multiple dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Holistic Data Scheduler (HDS), a novel online data mixing framework. HDS formulates the data scheduling challenge as a reinforcement learning problem in a continuous control space and leverages the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm for its stability and sample efficiency in exploring the high-dimensional policy space. At the core of HDS lies a novel multi-objective, holistic reward function that integrates three critical perspectives: a data-driven reward for quality, a loss-driven reward capturing inter-domain influence, and a model-driven reward based on weight norms. To validate our design and determine its optimal configuration, we conducted systematic experiments on LLMs of various sizes. On The Pile benchmark, HDS reaches the final validation perplexity of the next best method with 44% fewer training iterations. Furthermore, it achieves a 7.2% improvement on the MMLU 0-shot task along with consistent gains on other benchmarks, showcasing its ability to enhance both training efficiency and final model capability.

Visual grounding in documents is a crucial ability for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in areas such as document understanding, deep research and document error detection. However, existing approaches exhibit poor grounding precision in text-rich document images, often failing to accurately locate the critical document elements needed for reliable reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce PreciseDoc, an LMM specifically designed for precise element grounding and can be further optimized for Document VQA tasks. Specifically, to enhance the basic localization capability, we construct challenging training data by two pipelines capable of mass-producing high-quality documents with paired metadata of fine-grained coordinates, including synthetic hand-filled documents with camera effects. The model develops more real-world functions beyond straightforward localization of single text, such as locating personal information from CVs. Furthermore, we introduce a training paradigm for visual grounded reasoning where the grounding and reasoning are supervised jointly with reinforcement learning to improve the contribution of the grounded evidence. A comprehensive evaluation on various benchmarks demonstrates the advantage of the proposed data and methods in document spatial grounding and document understanding.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucination, which remains a major barrier to their safe deployment in clinical practice. To date, most hallucination detection methods have been evaluated on radiology benchmarks such as MIMIC-CXR and VQA-RAD, while gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we benchmark nine hallucination detection methods on the Gut-VLM dataset, a GI diagnostic Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset with 4,392 test VQA pairs, across five VLMs (MedGemma-4B, MedGemma-27B, LLaVA-Med-7B, LLaVA-v1.6-7B, and Lingshu-32B). The methods span three categories: black-box methods (RadFlag, SelfCheckGPT-NLI), gray-box methods (AvgProb, AvgEnt, MaxProb, MaxEnt, Semantic Entropy, and VASE), and a white-box method (ReXTrust). Our results show that ReXTrust, a white-box method, achieves the highest AUC across all five models, outperforming the strongest alternative method on each VLM by a statistically significant margin (paired permutation test, p < 0.001 in all cases), reaching a peak AUC of 93.0 on MedGemma-4B. White-box hidden-state access provides a consistent advantage of 19.5 AUC points on average (range: 9.5--33.5), with ReXTrust maintaining strong performance even on LLaVA-v1.6-7B (AUC 79.9), where black-box methods and clustering-based gray-box methods collapse to near-chance performance. Among non-white-box methods, token-level gray-box statistics (MaxEnt, MaxProb) are the strongest alternatives, outperforming both clustering-based gray-box methods (Semantic Entropy, VASE) and black-box approaches on average. We further identify confident confabulation, a failure mode in which models hallucinate with high inter-sample consistency or high token-level probability, as a systemic failure for both consistency and uncertainty-based methods.

Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots indexed by depth and pose. DramaDirector decouples each shot into static visual and dynamic narrative conditions, trains the planner with schema-constrained SFT and GRPO under a learned text-visual alignment reward, and retrieves depth-pose references to guide first-frame generation and image-to-video synthesis. We also introduce DramaBoard, a benchmark built from 35 live-action dramas, 2.8K episodes, and 81K shots, with structured storyboards and multi-dimensional evaluation protocols. Experiments show that DramaDirector improves over representative multi-agent and video generation baselines on faithfulness, consistency, and controllability. Our code is released at: https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/DramaDirector

Conventional visual navigation policies often struggle with myopic decision-making and mode collapse in complex environments. While world models offer a promising alternative, existing paradigms typically isolate perception, generation, and control, failing to capture their shared spatio-temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose NavWM, a unified navigation world model that seamlessly integrates latent world reasoning, multimodal action prediction, and controllable visual generation. At its core, NavWM leverages latent world tokens to distill geometric and semantic priors, endowing the agent with robust structural understanding. To overcome the limitations of deterministic policies, we introduce an anchor-based multimodal trajectory forecasting framework that generates a diverse action space. This inherent diversity explicitly empowers the generative world model to act as a robust closed-loop planner, utilizing visual foresight to evaluate and select the optimal path. Extensive experiments across diverse robotics datasets demonstrate that NavWM significantly advances the state-of-the-art, delivering remarkable improvements in both high-fidelity future state generation and zero-shot navigation success.

Recent advances in control have enabled bipedal-wheeled robots to traverse slopes and single-step obstacles, yet long staircase traversal remains challenging as current teacher-student frameworks suffer from weakened dynamics-aware representations and incomplete terrain geometry encoding. To bridge this gap, we propose DynaWM, a dynamics-aware representation learning framework. To enhance terrain encoding capability and enable transparent assessment, we introduce a world model as a regularizer to enforce forward-dynamics awareness, preserving comprehensive terrain geometry while facilitating hierarchical encoding visualization. To stabilize knowledge transfer, we employ a momentum target encoder to provide consistent distillation targets, preventing dimensional collapse from non-stationary teacher updates. Evaluation of the learned representations through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) visualization and quantitative metrics reveals that our encoder hierarchically captures terrain geometry with higher terrain encoding capability, leading to enhanced terrain adaptability and motion smoothness. Experimental results in simulation and real hardware demonstrate that our method achieves superior terrain adaptability and motion smoothness, enabling bipedal-wheeled robots to overcome diverse continuous stairs, as shown in Fig. 1.

Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student policy using teacher signals computed on trajectories sampled by the student itself. Recent work shows that sampled-token OPD can be fragile on long-horizon reasoning tasks and that local teacher-support matching is a simple and effective repair. This paper introduces blockwise policy-drift gating, a lightweight student-only old-current drift controller for OPD under rollout reuse. The method computes log-probability shifts between the behavior student and the current student on the sampled token path, aggregates these shifts over fixed blocks or spans, and uses the resulting detached, mean-normalized gates to reweight OPD position losses. It does not change teacher targets, teacher top-K supports, or the rollout policy. In a six-variant Qwen3 math reasoning benchmark with a uniform 200-step training budget for all trained variants, we use pass@8 as the primary problem-level solve-rate metric. Fixed 64-token block gating improves sampled-token OPD mean pass@8 from 0.4978 to 0.5160 across AIME24, AIME25, MATH500, and AMC23. On Teacher-TopK/LSM, Block64 gives the best four-benchmark mean pass@8 among trained students. The results identify local old-current policy drift as a practical control signal for reused OPD rollouts and motivate block-level gating as a simple default for improving solve-rate robustness.

"Talk short. Drop grammar. Save token." This caveman style is widely promoted as a way to cut inference cost, but whether it actually saves anything depends on which channel (the user's prompt or the model's response) is being compressed. We present Cavewoman, a two-channel evaluation protocol that scores every generation on task accuracy, realized per-item cost, and reference-text agreement against the model's unconstrained reference. We evaluate eight models on five datasets at five reduction levels, with both channels measured on the same items. Output compression cuts realized cost on most API models (1.4-2.4x per model, up to 3x in the best case) and on all four open-weight models under public-tier pricing. Input compression has the opposite effect, a strict lose-lose: it raises net cost rather than lowering it (~1.15x on the five-benchmark mean, up to 1.8x on the worst dataset and 2.7x under stronger compression), because models compensate with longer responses even as accuracy collapses. Under the same setting, surface text diverges from the unconstrained reference: on the non-reasoning models, roughly half of all generations are correct yet their surface text no longer entails the model's own unconstrained baseline generation. The divergence survives length-controlled re-scoring, multiple-comparisons correction, and replication under complementary semantic measures. Code and data are available at https://github.com/danielle34/cavewoman.

Imitation learning enables robots to acquire complex manipulation skills from demonstrations, but its effectiveness is limited by the cost of collecting high-quality data. Trajectory-level data augmentation methods alleviate this challenge by recombining expert demonstrations under varied initial states. However, such methods typically insert interpolations or other non-expert transition segments between disjoint parts, and such non-expert segments could reduce the quality of the generated data. This paper introduces Minimizing Interpolation (MinInter), an effective trajectory selection method that, for each sampled initial configuration, chooses the source demonstration requiring the least interpolation to form a complete trajectory. By explicitly minimizing interpolations during data generation, MinInter produces higher-quality synthetic demonstrations while remaining compatible with existing data generation frameworks. Experiments on 12 manipulation tasks with 26 variants from the MimicGen benchmark show that MinInter consistently improves both data generation success rates and policy success rates, with the largest gains on contact-rich, long-horizon and high-variance settings. Compared to the recent SkillGen framework, MinInter achieves higher policy success rates despite its conceptual simplicity, underscoring the value of interpolation minimization for data augmentation.

Embodied reasoning and exploration are increasingly considered crucial abilities for robots operating in complex and unfamiliar environments. To accomplish tasks in such settings, an agent must identify and acquire the information necessary for the task through exploration. We propose ObsGraph, an observation-centric hierarchical scene graph that unifies scene representation, retrieval, and exploration. It retains visual evidence and organizes it into room-view-object layers: rooms provide coarse semantic anchors, views preserve contextual object covisibility, and objects store fine-grained details. On top of this representation, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical retrieval under a bounded budget, and crucially use retrieval outcomes to structure the exploration candidate space--activating room-level exploration, view refinement, or frontier exploration--thereby tightly coupling representation, retrieval, and adaptive multi-scale exploration. Experiments across embodied reasoning and exploration benchmarks demonstrate improved success and efficiency, highlighting the benefits of structured scene representation and more targeted information gathering driven by identified evidence gaps.

Modern spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where specific functionalities may need to be removed due to policy or safety constraints. In SLU, a functionality corresponds to an intent and its associated slot-generation behavior. However, in autoregressive models, suppressing a target intent does not eliminate the conditional mapping that generates slots conditioned on that intent. When the intent prefix is externally supplied, the model can reconstruct the original intent-slot structure. We identify this structural failure as \textbf{\emph{capability persistence}}. We propose \textit{\underline{B}inding \underline{S}ubspace (BSU)}, a representation-level framework that isolates and attenuates intent-conditioned directions underlying this mapping. Across SLU benchmarks, BSU substantially reduces forced-prefix recoverability while preserving retained performance.

Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying optimal look-back of non-stationary price processes. We propose the Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network (RAVEN), a Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to adaptively determine the temporal context for each input sample. Instead of relying on a fixed look-back horizon, RAVEN constructs a hierarchy of nested contiguous windows whose lengths are determined by the data itself. Specifically, RAVEN scores patches by learned importance in reverse chronological order and applies the Cumulative Importance Thresholding (CIT) mechanism to derive nested prefix windows, each routed to a scale-specialized expert. A Global Compressed Representation (GCR) branch runs in parallel over the full context, preserving global temporal coherence that local experts cannot guarantee. Because the nested routing induces structured overlap among expert inputs, we introduce a Correlation-Aware Weighting (CAW) to align variable-length expert outputs and penalize pairwise cosine similarity prior to aggregation. Experiments on cumulative log-return prediction (HS300, S&P500) and fund sales forecasting demonstrate that RAVEN achieves SOTA performances, improves Pearson correlation by 9.2% on HS300 and 20.2% on S&P500, and reduces MSE by 18.2% on fund sales forecasting, while achieving the best results in 14 of 16 metrics on four PEMS traffic benchmarks.

MeMo proposes language models with explicit multi-layer correlation matrix memories (CMMs), where memorization, retrieval, and forgetting are architectural operations. This paper asks how such memories can reduce the need for retraining when knowledge changes. For changes expressible as MeMo memory associations, the model's accessible knowledge can be updated by editing explicit memories rather than retraining the whole model. We propose a version-aware operation layer in which high-level operations such as replace, obsolete, keep-history, rollback, and trace are compiled into MeMo-native primitive calls over sequences and tokens. The key observation is that a version-aware operation is rarely a single MeMo association. It is an ordered transaction of primitive edits, for example forgetting one sequence-token chain, memorizing another, preserving a historical chain, and recording an inverse program. The framework introduces two auxiliary CMMs: a Version CMM (V-CMM) for mapping version transitions to transaction handles, and a Transaction CMM (T-CMM) for storing reusable change contents and inverse programs. It supports both direct sequence-level edits and structured diff-level inputs, and outlines an evaluation route for update success, rollback, traceability, locality, and transaction reuse.

Robotics increasingly relies on GPUs for parallel simulation, large-scale learning, and neural-network inference. For model predictive control (MPC) to scale with this paradigm, solvers must run efficiently on this hardware while remaining fast, differentiable, and compatible with expressive MPC formulations used in robotics. We present TurboMPC, a differentiable MPC solver that runs entirely on the GPU and supports state and control inequality constraints, implicit integrators, cross-time-coupled costs, and slack variables. TurboMPC combines sequential quadratic programming (SQP), an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver, implicit differentiation, and a co-designed JAX-CUDA implementation for efficiency and ease of use. In simulation, we validate TurboMPC on constrained planning, humanoid imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with neural-network cost function tasks, achieving up to $15\times$ and $58\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art CPU and GPU differentiable solvers, respectively. We deploy TurboMPC on a full-scale car for minimum-time racing and find that batched, GPU-accelerated tuning of MPC parameters via Bayesian optimization yields significantly faster driving than a hand-tuned baseline. TurboMPC also scales to planning horizons of over $8000$ knot points while maintaining control of the vehicle. We open-source TurboMPC at: https://github.com/ToyotaResearchInstitute/turbompc

This note describes an integration of the sim-to-real performance estimate with betting (from Chen et al.) and the safe anytime-valid inference (from Ramdas et al.). Using the scaled simulators. The method produces efficient, reliable certificates for the mean estimate, an approach that is especially valuable in robot performance testing. This note gives a primary, self-contained account of the construction; preliminaries of the respective methods are kept at a minimum, and one shall refer to the original works for full detail. Some synthetic examples demonstrating the proposed algorithm can be found at https://github.com/ISUSAIL/Bet4Sim2Real-EProcess.

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

A modern model release reports scores on 40+ benchmarks and the same evaluations were run many more times before it: to track training progress, compare design choices, and select the checkpoint for the release. But do we need to run every eval? We compile a public score matrix of 84 frontier models on 133 benchmarks (2,604 cells, 23.3% filled) and find it is approximately rank-2: a model's scores across all 133 benchmarks are largely determined by just two numbers. We confirm this in two ways: scores hidden from the matrix are best recovered using two factors, and two factors already explain over 90% of the variation among models on the benchmarks they share. Building on this, we design BenchPress: a logit-space rank-2 matrix completion method that recovers held-out scores to within 4.6 points, and a confidence layer that says when each prediction can be trusted. Using BenchPress, we find a subset of five benchmarks {GPQA-D, HLE, Codeforces, MMLU-Pro, ARC-AGI-1} that can recover the rest of a model's public scorecard to within 3.93 points. For a tighter inference budget, a cheaper set {GPQA-D, MMLU-Pro, Aider Polyglot, MATH-500, AIME 2026} can predict a model's evals to within 4.55. We release the score matrix, the BenchPress code, and an interactive tool that predicts any model's score on any benchmark.

As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse and high-stakes settings, model alignment must generalize beyond the tasks and domains seen during training. This is especially important for reinforcement learning (RL), which can introduce unexpected misalignment through reward hacking, deception, or other unintended strategies. We study whether RL on beneficial behavior, instantiated in realistic domains, can produce broad and persistent alignment generalization beyond the training distribution. We construct a dataset of realistic situations designed to measure and train beneficial traits, such as truthfulness, fairness, risk awareness, and corrigibility, spanning varied domains, including health, science, and education. We then train models with RL on this dataset and evaluate them on more than 50 independent benchmarks of alignment and beneficial behavior. Compared to a compute-matched baseline, beneficial trait RL improves performance on over 80% of these out-of-distribution benchmarks. We observe substantial out-of-distribution alignment transfer: a beneficial-behavior RL intervention entirely limited to one domain, health, produces broad improvements on non-health alignment evaluations, including reduced reward hacking, deception, and general misalignment. Finally, we study alignment persistence: whether behavior remains robustly aligned under attempts to steer models towards misalignment. Models trained with beneficial trait RL show improved persistence, including greater resistance to adversarial prompting and harmful finetuning; further work is required to isolate the sources of these effects. These results suggest that RL to reinforce beneficial behavior in realistic domains can produce models that are more robustly aligned with human flourishing.

Recent work has established that regularized policy gradient methods such as PPO, when used in self-play, can match or exceed specialized game-theoretic algorithms for solving two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games. The uniform distribution has emerged as a strong policy regularization target for this purpose, but it regularizes equally toward all actions regardless of their viability. We introduce EMAgnet, which instead regularizes toward an exponential moving average (EMA) of the last-iterate policy's parameters, providing an adaptive regularization target that evolves with the agent's improving strategy. We evaluate EMAgnet on both standard two-player zero-sum benchmarks and modified benchmarks with exploration challenges and large numbers of strictly dominated strategies. Relative to PPO self-play with uniform-magnet regularization under both linear and power-law annealing schedules, EMAgnet achieves lower exploitability in the majority of tested environments, with consistent performance gains across games containing strictly dominated strategies.

High-throughput scientific facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider depend on real-time event filtering (\textit{triggering}) under tight constraints on bandwidth, latency, and storage. In practice, trigger menus are largely static and hand-tuned and can become suboptimal as detector conditions, pileup, and background composition drift over time. We cast online threshold tuning as a sequential decision-making problem: a reinforcement learning agent ingests streaming summaries of recent rates and signal-sensitive features and updates trigger thresholds to maximize signal efficiency while tracking a target background rate within a tolerance band. We adapt Group-Filtered Policy Optimization (GFPO) to streaming control and introduce two variants (GFPO-F, GFPO-FR) that enforce background rate feasibility during training. On a benchmark that emulates realistic collider operation, we study two representative triggers: a total transverse energy ($H_{T}$) trigger sensitive to pileup variation, and an anomaly-detection (AD) trigger based on reconstruction loss for rare or non-standard signatures. On Monte Carlo streams, our agent increases the fraction of in-tolerance time intervals by 48\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD), with a cumulative gain of up to 2\% in signal efficiency on those in-tolerance intervals. Transferring from simulation to \emph{real} collision data (CMS Run 283408), the same agent, without fine-tuning, achieves a 56\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD) in-tolerance improvement over baselines, with further signal-efficiency gain on both triggers. To our knowledge, this is the \emph{first} demonstration of RL-based trigger control on real Large Hadron Collider collision data. Code is available at https://github.com/Zixind/GFPO\_LHC.

Clinical value sets define the standardized terminology codes used in quality measurement, phenotyping, cohort construction, and clinical decision support. The recently introduced Retrieval-Augmented Set Completion (RASC) benchmark showed that direct zero-shot large language model (LLM) generation is poorly suited to this task: clinical code systems are large, version-controlled, and not reliably memorized by language models. We study a stage-wise alternative in which candidate-pool construction is optimized for recall and a constrained LLM adjudicator is optimized for candidate selection. On the full 3,744-value-set RASC test split, Qwen3-based retrieval with vocabulary-aware expansion and code-display rescue retrieval increases candidate-pool recall from the original RASC retrieval baseline of 0.553 to 0.730; on the held-out-publisher stratum, pool recall is 0.655. The higher-recall pool alone is not sufficient: applying the original SAPBert cross-encoder to this expanded pool gives full-test macro F1 of 0.287 and held-out-publisher macro F1 of 0.233. Replacing the stage-2 selector with blinded GPT-5 adjudication over the same pool increases full-test macro F1 to 0.549 and held-out-publisher macro F1 to 0.533. These results show that retrieval-constrained LLM adjudication can substantially improve value set completion while preserving the safety constraint that all returned codes must come from an auditable candidate pool.

What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be \emph{internalized within the system itself} rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between \emph{agentic} systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and \emph{agentive} systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

End-to-end large language models (LLMs) produce fluent multi-document summaries but remain prone to hallucination, and the attributions they offer are typically coarse (whole documents or passages) and generated post hoc, leaving each summary statement hard to verify. We revisit the modular Extract--Select--Rewrite paradigm and recast its intermediate representation as the unit of attribution. We present CAMS, a Claim-Anchored Multi-document Summarization framework that (i) extracts atomic claims with token-level provenance from every source document, (ii) clusters equivalent claims across documents while flagging inter-source conflicts, (iii) selects a support-aware and salient subset, and (iv) rewrites the selection into a summary in which every sentence is anchored to a support-checked claim that links back to one or more source spans. Because content is localized before it is realized, the pipeline is attribution-oriented by construction and faithfulness-oriented by construction: it structurally preserves fine-grained, multi-source traceability while using support-aware selection, constrained rewriting, and verification to encourage, rather than guarantee, factual faithfulness. We evaluate quality, faithfulness, and localization on MultiNews, analyze conflict handling on DiverseSumm, and test zero-shot transfer on WCEP, using a two-regime protocol that separates reference-free citation quality from gold-aligned localization accuracy, and we add an evaluator-decoupled audit that tests citation precision with a support model never used for selection or verification. CAMS matches strong end-to-end and span-attribution baselines on summary quality while substantially improving faithfulness and citation precision, lifting multi-source attribution accuracy by roughly two-thirds, and exposing a controllable faithfulness--coverage trade-off that end-to-end models leave implicit.

Efficient sorter diversion control of automated material handling systems (MHS) is critical for optimizing operational efficiency in large-scale warehouse environments. In this study, we use an inbound receiving sorter at a high-volume e-commerce warehouse as our primary use case, where the sorter diversion system relies on cost functions with static weight configurations that fail to adapt to highly dynamic system contexts, such as volume mode, congestion level, equipment physical status, and upstream/downstream dependencies. To address this real-time sorter diversion optimization challenge, we conducted a comparative study of three candidate hybrid machine learning frameworks: Linear Regression with Gradient Descent Optimization (LR+GDO), XGBoost with Bayesian Optimization (XGB+BO), and Bayesian Contextual Bandits (BCB). Model training and evaluation were enabled by leveraging a high-fidelity physics-aware emulator to overcome the cold-start problem and allow a safe transition from offline to online learning. We performed comprehensive evaluations including reward model predictive accuracy, contextual sensitivity, action distribution, and projected reward uplift. Our results demonstrate that while tree-based reward models offer slightly better predictive power, the BCB framework achieved overall higher performance with 2.03% reward uplift over the heuristic baseline. Furthermore, BCB exhibits several superior characteristics, such as its decisive time-optimal policy backed by Bang-Bang control theory, continuous online learning capability, strategic balance between exploration and exploitation, and significantly shorter inference latency. These results demonstrate the potential of the BCB framework for real-time control optimization in large-scale warehouse environments, motivating further investigation toward operational deployment.

Long-context and agentic LLM workloads push the KV cache past any fixed memory budget, forcing the inference stack to permanently evict tokens at every step of a continuous-inference stream. Existing methods all share the same template, a per-step direct-attention score followed by deterministic top-$K$ selection, which converts a single below-cutoff step into an irreversible verdict and permanently erases any subtly important token that direct attention cannot single out from noise. To address this challenge, we propose Nexus Sampling, a training-free eviction method that pairs Nexus scoring, an iterative walk over direct attention that surfaces bridge tokens, with weighted reservoir sampling, which retains tokens with inclusion probability in place of deterministic top-$K$. Theoretically, we show that Nexus Sampling dominates deterministic top-$K$ in long-run survival of subtly important tokens. Empirically, at 80% KV cache eviction, Nexus Sampling matches dense attention within 1% on LongBench while outperforming top-$K$ baselines on retrieval-heavy tasks, with up to 10x smaller per-sequence cache memory.

Learning Koopman operators with autoencoders enables linear prediction in a latent space, but long-horizon rollouts often drift off the learned manifold, leading to phase and amplitude errors on systems with switching, continuous spectra, or strong transients. We introduce two complementary components that make Koopman predictors more robust. First, we add an attention-free latent memory (AFT) block that aggregates a short window of past latents to produce a corrected latent before each Koopman update. Unlike multi-head attention, AFT operates in linear time and adds only $\approx$30k parameters ($3d^2 + T^2$, fewer than matched multi-head attention), yet captures the local temporal context needed to suppress error divergence. Second, we propose dynamic re-encoding: lightweight, online change-point triggers (EWMA, CUSUM, and sequential two-sample tests) that detect latent drift and project predictions back onto the autoencoder manifold. Across three benchmark systems -- Duffing oscillator, Repressilator, IRMA -- our model consistently reduces error accumulation compared to a Koopman autoencoder and matched-capacity multi-head attention. We also compare against GRU and Transformer autoencoders, evaluated both from initial conditions and with a 50-step context, and find that Koopman+AFT (with optional re-encoding) attains markedly lower long-horizon error while maintaining lower inference latency. We report improvements over horizons up to 1000 steps, together with ablations over trigger policies. The result is a fast, compact predictor that stays on the learned manifold over long horizons.

Tokenization is a foundational step in NLP pipelines, yet standard evaluation metrics such as fertility rate fail to capture morphological correctness for agglutinative languages. We present QuechuaTok, a systematic benchmark comparing four tokenization strategies - BPE, Unigram LM, WordPiece, and a morphology-aware PRPE tokenizer - for Southern Quechua (quz), a low-resource agglutinative language spoken by 8-10 million people in South America. Using a 200k-sentence corpus and the SQUOIA finite-state morphological analyzer (Rios, 2016) as silver standard, we evaluate three metrics: fertility rate, OOV rate, and morphological boundary accuracy (MorphAcc). Our results show that BPE achieves the lowest fertility rate (1.636 at 16k vocab) by memorizing surface word forms, while achieving only 6.67% MorphAcc. PRPE achieves 83.33% MorphAcc - the highest of all systems - demonstrating that fertility rate alone is insufficient to evaluate tokenizers for agglutinative languages. All code and models are publicly available at kaggle.com/code/macmaky/quechuatok

We present a large-scale empirical study isolating the contributions of the Derivative Regularization penalty (DREG). Across a fully-crossed factorial sweep of 960 experiments spanning 4 activations, 6 regularizers, 8 datasets, and 5 random seeds, we ask: when, where, and why does DREG work? Our results establish three principal findings. First, DREG achieves the highest overall and clean-regime accuracy among all regularizers evaluated (significantly so against the unregularized baseline, Weight Decay, and IGPen; Wilcoxon $p \leq 0.031$). It ranks second in noise robustness behind Spectral Normalization (SN) - the only two layer-wise regularizers in the study. Second, DREG is globally the best-performing regularizer under GELU, the default activation in modern transformer architectures, particularly on both messy vision and messy NLP benchmarks, suggesting direct applicability to frontier deep learning settings. Third, DREG's advantage over competing regularizers is most pronounced under data scarcity, consistent with its role as a geometric inductive bias that substitutes for the regularizing effect of data volume. Throughout, DREG is applied with a single fixed hyperparameter $λ= 10^{-2.5}$ and no per-dataset tuning, supporting its characterization as a plug-and-play regularizer for neural networks with nontrivial Jacobian structure. These findings are consistent with DREG's design: concentrating regularization pressure on layers where the activation derivative is largest, rather than constraining the network uniformly.

Driving VLA models incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning are attractive because they leverage pretrained VLM representations and expose intermediate decisions in natural language, yet current rationales often lack the step-by-step decision semantics needed to keep the rationale causally connected to the planned motion. We introduce Neuro-Symbolic Drive, a neuro-symbolic driving framework that supervises a driving VLA with rule-grounded reasoning traces extracted directly from classical rule-based planners. Our key observation is that rule-based planners are symbolic AI systems that already function as executable reasoning engines: they reason about active safety constraints, search over candidate maneuvers, and select a final trajectory. We instrument these planners in simulation to capture both the executed trajectory and the internal decision trace at each rule-evaluation step. Each trace is serialized into structured rule-grounded reasoning and paired with the trajectory to fine-tune Qwen3.5-4B as a driving VLA. Because these traces are derived directly from the planner states that determine the action, they ensure reasoning is structurally coupled to motion generation by construction, rather than by post-hoc alignment. On our simulator-generated benchmark, detailed rule-grounded reasoning reduces ADE@3s from 0.47 to 0.26 and miss rate from 8.30% to 6.40% under three-camera perception, and from 0.54 to 0.26 and 10.13% to 5.99% under eight-camera perception. Neuro-Symbolic Drive thus converts neuro-symbolic planning logic into structured supervision. Code base: https://github.com/XiangboGaoBarry/Neural-Symbolic-Drive.

Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.

We study non-stationary linear contextual bandits where the reward model drifts over time, rendering classical contextual bandit algorithms brittle because historical data becomes systematically biased. We propose Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling (fcTS), a Bayesian method that reuses experience by transporting past rewards to the present using an explicit drift model and incorporating each transported observation with a confidence weight that reflects transport reliability. This yields a unified template that specializes in (i) linear parameter drift via online slope estimation and reward correction, (ii) periodic variation via phase-aware reuse across cycles, and (iii) recurring regime switches via changepoint detection and regime-specific posterior memory. The resulting posterior updates remain closed-form under a linear Gaussian model and can be implemented efficiently with truncated, incrementally updated sufficient statistics. Across five controlled case studies and a semi-synthetic portfolio-selection benchmark with multiple overlapping non-stationarities, fcTS outperforms standard forgetting-based baselines (discounting, sliding windows, and periodic restarts), with the largest gains in settings exhibiting recurring temporal structure. These results demonstrate that when non-stationarity is structured, correcting and reweighting historical observations can be substantially more sample-efficient than uniformly discarding them.

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is the standard policy-gradient algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning. The literature presents it in two forms, a clipped surrogate that bounds the importance ratio between successive policies and a Kullback-Leibler penalty between them. These forms are treated as separate algorithms with their own gradients, their own hyperparameters, and their own reference implementations, and a sizeable body of empirical work compares them. We show that the gradient of the clipped surrogate is reproduced exactly by a Kullback-Leibler surrogate whose coefficient varies per sample, with closed-form dependence on the importance ratio and the advantage. The identity holds at every minibatch step and across the entire inner loop, and on five MuJoCo continuous-control benchmarks the two losses produce indistinguishable training curves. The reformulation exposes a structural feature of the clipped surrogate that the min notation hides. PPO-Clip's implicit per-sample penalty is a step function at the boundary of the trust region, and the shape of this coefficient is the natural design axis for generalising the algorithm. We sketch the resulting follow-up directions in the discussion.

At the core of most socio-technical systems lies a scarce resource that is allocated among agents: highway lanes, public transit, road space, water rights, energy access, grid capacity, user attention, pollution rights, etc. With further automation of the underlying allocation processes, control engineers are increasingly tasked to make decisive assumptions regarding what society wants. In practice to date, design choices are largely driven by industry norms and conventions rather than a result of conscientiously responsible and ethical design. In this paper, we look at tools available to control engineers to design systems in a more principled manner in order to match the societal mandate. We consider three control design paradigms: online feedback optimization, control of Markov decision processes, and model predictive control. Beginning with aggregating individual agents' preferences into control design objectives, subsequently ensuring and certifying the fulfillment of those specifications, we argue that the feedback nature of control systems enables appropriate allocation of the shared resources in ways hitherto unparalleled.

Practice often treats automatic metrics for attribution in LLM retrieval-augmented generation as interchangeable. We audit eight automatic scorers -- lexical, embedding, and BERTScore baselines alongside entailment/grounding-trained models (clean and FEVER NLI, the checker MiniCheck) -- across three evaluation constructs (provenance/topicality, generated-answer attribution, and fact-check entailment), asking whether any scorer transfers: stays within the 95% confidence interval of the best audited scorer on every dataset of a multi-dataset construct. In the construct with the most multi-dataset human-labeled coverage -- generated-answer attribution (AttributionBench's four source datasets, n = 1,610, with independent HAGRID, n = 2,150) -- none does: the per-dataset metric rankings invert (Kendall tau = -0.64, p = 0.031 on AttributedQA vs. LFQA), and an off-the-shelf NLI scorer that is best on short-claim AttributedQA (AUROC 0.90) collapses to AUROC 0.53 (chance) on long-form LFQA, where BERTScore wins (0.91); the flip is not a length or truncation artifact. This instability has a concrete decision cost: a naive "best-on-average" rule for choosing an evaluator fails leave-one-dataset-out (mean held-out regret 0.172 AUROC, worse than fixing one scorer), so metric choice must be validated on the target dataset rather than learned from others. A prompt-based LLM judge avoids the chance-level collapses the automatic scorers suffer (no LFQA collapse) but is not uniformly best, ~100x costlier, and non-deterministic -- relocating, not removing, the validation burden.

This article develops an architecture that creates a formally verifiable reward signal to train legal AI, adapting the LLM proposes, verifier disposes paradigm from mathematical AI to the distinctive demands of law. We present an architecture comprising LLM-driven autoformalization into a formal legal calculus extending Catala, a verification kernel, and explanation generation grounded in formal proof traces. For the computational components of law, the architecture provides provable correctness. For open-textured legal analysis, it provides structural guarantees: every required stage of the legal argument is addressed, argumentation is exercised at the correct stages and not omitted, and the deductive links between steps are valid. We demonstrate the architecture on procedural deadline calculations in German law, Commerce Clause analysis in U.S. constitutional law, and cross-jurisdictional sanction proportionality. We further show that the same architecture has a structural advantage for legal AI training: a deterministic external verifier supplies verifiable outcomes for legal problems and thereby closes the traditional reinforcement-learning loop gap in law.

This paper addresses the problem of robust formation control by introducing Topological Online Learning for Displacement-based (TOLD) formation control, a real-time edge-level adaptation framework. Unlike conventional node-level robust controllers that regulate individual robot inputs without modifying the interaction topology, TOLD updates the interaction topology weights online to directly minimize formation distortion. Two strategies are proposed under the TOLD formation control framework: Online Gradient Flow (OGF) with unconstrained weights and Online Exponential Gradient Flow (OExpGF) with non-negative convex weights. Theoretical analysis establishes that, for single-integrator agents over directed graphs, OExpGF guarantees asymptotic consensus, while OGF ensures bounded formation distortion. Simulations with twelve robots under intermittent disturbances show 1.2%-33.14% median cumulative Root Mean Distortion Error reduction when augmenting TOLD with node-level controllers. Hardware experiments with Crazyflie 2.0 quadrotors demonstrate over 62% (OGF) and 31.4% (OExpGF) reduction in median formation distortion compared to fixed-weight consensus.

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health-related conversations, yet safety safeguards remain inadequate and inconsistent across clinical conditions. This study evaluates six proprietary LLMs across 16 DSM-5 conditions using four adversarial attack variants, introducing an eight-dimension harm taxonomy and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework. Results show that safeguards hold reliably only for suicide and self-harm, while conditions such as eating disorders, substance use disorder, and major depressive disorder exhibit failure rates of up to 100%. We argue that ethical design and deployment of these LLMs demand clearly defined harm categories across clinical conditions and implementation of safeguards accordingly. Until such safeguards are in place, these models pose significant risks to vulnerable populations, making their growing integration into educational settings a particularly concerning.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires grounding visual queries to external knowledge beyond directly observable content in images. While recent multi modal large language models (MLLMs) show strong perceptual abilities, they struggle on KB-VQA tasks requiring groundings from both fine-grained entity and evidence levels. Most existing multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (MM-RAG) methods tightly couple entity discrimination and section-level evidence ranking into a single re-ranking stage, leading to high cost and limited generalization. In this work, we revisit existing MM-RAG solutions from a workflow perspective and argue both entity-level and fact-level groundings are key bottlenecks. We observe that although MLLMs often fail under open-ended entity naming, they can better identify the correct entity when selecting from a small set of candidate names. Based on this insight, we propose a simple and training-free identify-before-answer IBA framework that decouples entity identification from section-level re-ranking. Our approach prompts an MLLM to select high-confidence entities using only candidate names, followed by an off-the-shelf textual re-ranker for evidence selection. Experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuned multi-modal re-ranking baselines while reducing training and inference complexity. Additional analyses reveal that the improvements arise not only from better entity identification, but also from selecting more informative evidence once correct entity is fixed. Our implementation is made public to ease reproducibility.

From climate teleconnections to gene regulation, modern time-series datasets encompass tens or hundreds of interacting variables, making causal discovery increasingly challenging. Constraint-based methods offer statistical rigor but their nonlinear CI tests are infeasible at scale, while score-based alternatives avoid CI testing but require arbitrary thresholds to binarize continuous edge scores. We propose GRACE ($\textbf{G}$ated $\textbf{R}$efinement for $\textbf{A}$ccurate $\textbf{C}$ausal $\textbf{E}$dge discovery), which refines constraint-based discovery using Hard Concrete gates with $L_0$ regularization: each candidate edge has an independent gate whose values concentrate near 0 or 1, yielding a clean bimodal separation that makes the binary decision robust, unlike the narrow, overlapping score distributions produced by $L_1$ and attention-based methods. A fast linear CI skeleton provides high-recall candidates; a single gated model then prunes false positives by learning which edges genuinely improve prediction, with automatic regularization adapted to problem dimensions and skeleton density. Systematic experiments on synthetic benchmarks, spanning diverse graph topologies (scale-free, Erdős-R'enyi, small-world) and dimensionalities up to $d=100$, show that GRACE substantially improves F1 over its base CI method while maintaining high precision, and outperforms attention-based and score-based alternatives. GRACE matches or exceeds expensive nonlinear CI tests at a fraction of the cost ($75\times$ faster). On a real-world river flow dataset, where rainfall confounders, variable propagation lags, and distributional shifts violate standard assumptions, a temporal bootstrap variant of GRACE recovers 9 of 11 causal edges along the Elbe River with only 1 false positive ($F_1 = 0.86$, AUROC${} = 0.99$), reducing the skeleton's 106 false positives by 99%.

PLCverif is the most mature open-source platform for PLC formal verification, developed at CERN and in production use since 2019. Yet it has two fundamental limitations: no support for Ladder Diagram (LD) programs, the dominant PLC notation, and reliance on CBMC as its primary backend, which restricts verification to bounded proofs. The PLCverif authors themselves identified ESBMC as the appropriate backend improvement. Prior work established ESBMC-PLC (a textual LD frontend with k-induction) and ESBMC-GraphPLC (graphical PLCopen XML support); together, they cover LD with unbounded proofs but not Structured Text (ST), and graphical LD with timer/counter function blocks remains unverifiable. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC+, a unified framework that closes both gaps: (1) an ST/SCL frontend via the MATIEC IEC 61131-3 compiler, routing C-compiled ST to ESBMC with nondeterministic input modeling and YAML property injection; (2) function block state semantics for graphical LD, extending the DFS resolver to model TON/TOF/TP timers, CTU/CTD counters, and R_TRIG/F_TRIG edge triggers as persistent scan-cycle state variables in the GOTO IR. ESBMC-PLC+ is the first open-source PLC verification framework to support all three major IEC 61131-3 input formats via a single ESBMC backend, enabling k-induction-unbounded safety proofs. A feature comparison with PLCverif and experimental evaluation on 8 benchmark programs, including programs with up to 8 integer timers, shows that ESBMC-PLC+ matches PLCverif's input coverage while providing stronger guarantees. Against nuXmv's BDD backend, ESBMC-PLC+ is 400-2,000x faster on timer programs and completes proofs where nuXmv BDD times out at 120s.

The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis--Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.

A primary challenge in AI safety is the existence of adversarial examples -- slightly distorted inputs that cause a neural network (NN) to misclassify. To mitigate this problem, recent research focuses on the computation of robustness certifications, which, for a given input, determine the largest distortion the input may receive without breaking the network's prediction. Robustness certifications can be interpreted as an axis-aligned hyper-rectangle (multi-dimensional intervals). Most existing approaches focus on maximizing the certification's volume, but recent intractability results prohibit the computation of volume-optimal certifications in reasonable time. We introduce the apothem measure and show how to compute apothem-optimal certifications in a linear number of calls to a NN verifier (oracle) w.r.t. the input domain's diameter. Moreover, we prove that we cannot have a volume-optimal, oracle-based algorithm, even if we discard the oracle costs. Also, we introduce dual certifications -- an interval including all instances of a class -- thus providing apothem-minimum upper bounds to a robustness certification. Further, we present the ParallelepipedoNN system, which we evaluate on the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST benchmarks. A preliminary comparison with existing work on the same datasets reveals at least two-fold improvement w.r.t. the minimum edge length.

This work investigates the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for real-time monitoring in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing. We developed a binary image classification framework for distinguishing normal and abnormal melt pool images using a balanced dataset of 1,200 images collected from Nickel superalloy 625 on the NIST AMMT platform. The study evaluates accuracy and inference time based on control requirements and hardware limitations of open-architecture LPBF machines. We benchmark three transfer learning architectures (ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, and MobileNetV2) against two Random Forest approaches: one trained on EfficientNetB0 feature embeddings (hybrid) and one trained on raw pixel features (baseline). Images are stratified into 80/20 train-test splits, with a further 90/10 validation split on the training set, and undergo standardized resizing, normalization, and label-preserving data augmentation to emulate realistic process variability. Each model is evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), along with training time, inference latency, and CPU & GPU usage to capture deployability constraints relevant to factory-floor monitoring. The hybrid EfficientNetB0-plus-Random Forest approach achieves the best performance on the held-out test set, with an F1 score of 0.9451, accuracy of 0.9458, and AUC of 0.9904, while maintaining sub-millisecond per-image inference (1.15 ms). In contrast, purely deep learning models exhibit significantly higher inference times with lower accuracy. These results demonstrate that combining pre-trained convolutional features with classical ensemble methods provides a robust, computationally efficient route to real-time melt pool anomaly detection in data-limited additive manufacturing environments.

Reinforcement learning can train bimanual dexterous hands to play piano in physics simulation with high note accuracy, but for high-DoF dexterous hands, relying solely on task rewards or IK inversion often leads to unnatural postures and joint overextension. We propose \textit{Adversarial Posture Regularization (APR)}. It avoids expensive, song-aligned expert demonstration data and instead uses a small amount of casual human playing data. By matching the distribution of the posture of the policy with the human prior through an adversarial objective, APR encourages more human-like hand shapes. Meanwhile, we collect and release unstructured hand motion data of piano playing using a consumer-grade Meta Quest 3, and retarget the key motion information to the Shadow Hand. Finally, we achieve significantly better performance than prior methods on all three human-likeness metrics (cPSI, BSE, and FAC) as well as in visual quality. Project repository: https://github.com/APRProject/APRPianist.

Molecular surfaces encode the geometric and physicochemical patterns that determine antibody-antigen recognition, central to epitope prediction. However, existing methods rely on sequences or backbone structures and struggle to capture discontinuous, surface-driven epitopes. This study presents SurfBind, a surface-centric learning framework for epitope prediction that operates directly on molecular surface representations. SurfBind integrates geometric and physicochemical cues through a Transformer-based architecture with patch-level surface modeling, binder-aware cross-attention, and a hierarchical coarse-to-fine prediction paradigm. Experiments on challenging epitope identification benchmarks, including SAbDab and DB5.5, demonstrate that SurfBind achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization across unseen antibodies and conformational states, highlighting the value of interaction-aware surface modeling for understanding the crucial mechanisms of protein-protein interactions.

Graph and multi-agent orchestration frameworks make production large language model (LLM) workflows practical, but they do not by themselves solve conversational continuity when users maintain several interdependent objectives. This conceptual systems paper focuses on the high-complexity end of that design space, where goals can be suspended, resumed, revised, and invalidated by actions in other goals. We introduce the Goal-Oriented Dialogue Runtime (GODR), a framework-neutral design pattern that treats goals, task frames, lifecycle state, invalidation rules, and resumption contracts as first-class runtime objects while delegating bounded execution to graph runtimes, agents, tools, or application programming interfaces (APIs). GODR is not proposed as a replacement for workflow graphs in simple guided processes; it is intended for complex, multi-domain, interruptible conversations where objective continuity cannot be recovered reliably from agent identity, chat history, or execution-graph position alone. The paper formalizes the problem, proposes runtime objects and architecture-selection criteria, and frames evaluation as an agenda for future empirical validation rather than as a measured performance claim.

Learning robust dexterous grasping requires real-world data that records the physical outcomes of grasp attempts. Such data is hard to obtain at scale: teleoperation yields valid physical outcomes but is slow and operator-biased, while simulation-based generation is cheap and scalable but cannot certify contact validity. A natural solution is to generate candidate grasps and verify them on real hardware, but this scales only if the entire collection loop (perception, execution, labeling, and reset) runs without human intervention. We present AutoDex, an automated real-world data-collection system that closes this loop: for each candidate from a replaceable generator, it localizes the object under severe hand-object occlusion with dense 20-camera perception, executes collision-monitored robot motions, labels lift-and-hold success or failure, and actively resets the object between trials to expose additional candidates across stable poses. The result is a reusable database of physically labeled grasp trials that downstream systems can query by retrieval and feasibility filtering. Using AutoDex, we collect 3,593 grasp trials across Allegro and Inspire hands on 100 diverse objects, with synchronized multi-view observations and robot-state logs. For a matched 500-trajectory collection, AutoDex requires 10.3 h versus 49.4 h for teleoperation, yielding a 4.8x throughput improvement, and grasps retrieved from the AutoDex-validated database succeed 76% versus 34% for simulation-only validation. Code and data will be publicly released.

Despite the impressive manipulation capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, their operational safety under strict constraints remains largely unverified. To address this, we introduce a parametric safety benchmark to procedurally generate safety-critical scenarios with comprehensive stochasticity. To overcome the scalability bottlenecks of human teleoperation, we develop a novel keypose-driven data generation pipeline. Leveraging this infrastructure, we curate a large-scale dataset of 19,664 strictly collision-free demonstrations with extensive domain randomization. We then conduct a systematic cross-paradigm evaluation of eight VLA and two embodied foundation models. Our analysis reveals a critical generalization-safety tension: although high-diversity training fosters safer trajectories, task success remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sub-optimal trajectory synthesis and semantic misalignment. By providing a scalable pipeline, a robust dataset, and profound failure-mode insights, LIBERO-Safety establishes a crucial foundation for developing safe and reliable VLA models.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically pretrained on short sequences and then extended to work on longer sequences with additional training. However, such LLMs still struggle to further generalize to very long sequences. We propose Randomized YaRN, a training method that improves length generalization by combining YaRN-based positional extrapolation with randomized positional encoding and a length curriculum. During training on short context data, tokens are assigned YaRN positional encodings sampled from a larger position range, exposing the model to out-of-distribution positional representations even on short-context inputs. We evaluate Randomized YaRN on two challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, BABILong and Multi-Round Coreference Resolution (MRCR). When training on data with <8K context, Randomized YaRN consistently improves reasoning performance on context lengths from 16K to 128K and outperforms standard fine-tuning, with the largest gains appearing at far out-of-distribution lengths. Our results suggest that progressively exposing models to OOD positional distributions provides an effective recipe for generalizable long-context reasoning.

Human-hand demonstrations provide a direct and scalable source of physical interaction data for robot learning. While manual retargeting is indispensable for establishing kinematic action correspondence across different morphologies, robust transfer requires going beyond geometry to address the underlying alignment of physical dynamics between human and robot manipulation. To address this, we introduce LaST-HD, a novel human-to-robot action learning paradigm that extends reasoning-before-acting VLA by aligning human-hand and robot demonstrations in a shared latent reasoning space. Rather than mimicking human kinematics, LaST-HD trains an auxiliary action-conditioned world model on unpaired human-hand and robot trajectories to synthesize unified latent targets. After aligning cross-embodiment representations in this shared forward-dynamics space, these targets supervise LaST-HD's latent reasoning process, enabling it to internalize shared physical dynamics and drive efficient human-hand action learning. Moreover, we develop Out-of-Lab (OOL) Glove, a low-cost motion-capture glove tailored to LaST-HD for human-hand data collection. The captured human data provide precise keypoints and serve as universal action supervision across grippers and dexterous hands. Armed with the aligned latent space and high-fidelity human-hand data, we develop a progressive mixed-to-human training recipe comprising mixed human-robot co-training and human-hand online correction post-training. Through mixed co-training, LaST-HD improves generalization to novel objects, scenes, and positions using only human-hand demonstrations. With online correction, LaST-HD further adapts to novel environments and achieves over 90\% accuracy using only 20 minutes of OOL glove data.

Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive. We introduce CoorDex, a learning pipeline that converts high-dimensional body and dexterous hand control into coordinated latent residual control, enabling high-DoF dexterous loco-manipulation on the move. Starting from simulated whole-body and hand demonstrations, CoorDex trains privileged motion tracking teachers for the humanoid body and dexterous hand, distills them into proprioception-conditioned latent priors, and uses the frozen priors as the action space for downstream residual reinforcement learning. A coordinated latent residual policy composes these priors through shared task context and separate body-hand residual heads, preserving natural whole-body motion while improving finger-level contact reliability. CoorDex enables a Unitree G1 humanoid with a 20-DoF WUJI hand to execute dexterous manipulation while in motion, including non-stop bottle grasping and carrying, fridge door opening on the move, and cube pick-and-turn. Ablations on the walk-grasp-carry task show that joint-space PPO, joint-space hand control, and monolithic latent prediction all fail under the same reward budget, while the latent-prior interface and coordinated residual structure make high-dimensional contact-rich loco-manipulation trainable. Project Page: https://skevinci.github.io/coordex/

Modern text-to-image models excel in visual fidelity and prompt adherence. However, this strict adherence comes at the cost of diversity: generated samples tend to collapse into a single visual interpretation. Existing methods to improve diversity produce outputs driven by incidental variations rather than meaningful design choices. This motivates a new variant of the diversity task where structure is enforced on the generated samples. We introduce a method for controlled diversity that enables Semantic Browsing, where users can navigate structured image galleries and experience creative exploration through a systematic traversal of meaningful, interpretable axes of variation. Achieving this level of semantic control requires a deep understanding of the scene. We exploit the fact that recent text-to-image models are trained on elaborated captions, effectively decoupling semantic decision-making from pixel generation. This enables a paradigm shift: instead of relying on stochastic variation within the text-to-image model, we induce diversity directly at the text level. By leveraging rich textual representations, we allow a Vision Language Model (VLM) to operate on the full scene context. To overcome the generic outputs typical of standard VLMs, we employ an agentic workflow that explicitly enforces structured variation attuned to the original prompt. We demonstrate that our method produces diverse and navigable design spaces where every variation corresponds to a specific, user-understandable semantic decision.

AdamW is the de facto optimizer for training large language models (LLMs), yet the theory behind it still lives mostly in finite-variance regimes. This is increasingly unsatisfying, as empirical evidence indicates that stochastic gradient noise in LLM pretraining is typically heavy-tailed. Recent work shows that sign-based optimizers such as Lion and Muon achieve sharp heavy-tailed rates, and that AdaGrad can also converge under heavy-tailed noise. However, no rigorous convergence theory for AdamW has yet been established in this regime. Can AdamW converge under the same heavy-tailed assumptions, or does its second-moment accumulator create a genuine obstruction? We formulate this as an open problem, prove a positive weighted-metric benchmark, and give a corridor lower-bound mechanism showing how denominator memory can hide large gradients.

Prior work shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit introspective capability on benign tasks. We extend the question to safety contexts and examine how reliably a model can recognize that its own prior response was elicited by an adversarial prefill attack. Across ten open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs (3B to 70B) and four safety benchmarks, no model reliably recognizes its own compromised outputs, with models claiming intent on prefilled responses at an average rate of $27.3\%$. Introspective signal stems largely from safety- and refusal-related reasoning. Orthogonalizing models' weights against the refusal direction collapses the gap between claiming rates on prefilled and natural outputs to near zero, though the direction is not its unique mediator. The signal is also probe-dependent: framing the question as internal intention versus external tampering elicits qualitatively different responses on the same models. We test three LoRA finetuning methods (SFT, GRPO, DPO) on eight models from 3B to 27B; all three widen the intention-probe gap on every model from 8B to 27B, with method ranking varying by model. The intervention does not transfer to the tampering probe and counterintuitively raises attack success rate under adversarial prefill on most models, amounting to a partial mitigation. These findings outline mechanisms underpinning the observed introspective signals in safety contexts and highlight risks in the reliability of LLM self-reports.

Modern language models, including transformer, recurrent, and memory-based variants, share a common chassis: a stack of identical layers in which parameters are allocated uniformly across depth. This is a default inherited from the original transformer and largely unchanged since, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that layers contribute non-uniformly to the final output, with later layers refining the residual stream rather than transforming it. We ask whether parameter capacity should reflect this asymmetry. Our controlled experiment shows that, under a fixed budget, allocating more capacity to earlier layers and less to later layers improves perplexity over a uniform-width baseline, while the reverse allocation hurts. Building on this result, we introduce Tapered Language Models (TLMs), an architectural principle in which a parameter-bearing component is monotonically tapered across depth under a fixed total budget. MLPs are the natural site for this instantiation: they dominate parameter count across all modern LM families and expose width as a single, clean axis of variation. Across three model scales and four architectures (Transformer, Gated Attention, Hope-attention, and Titans), tapering MLP width via a smooth cosine schedule consistently improves perplexity and downstream benchmark performance over uniform baselines, at no additional parameter or compute cost. These findings establish depth-aware capacity allocation as a simple, architecture-agnostic axis of language model design, a free lever hidden in plain sight.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently portrayed as general-purpose solvers capable of solving arbitrary tasks. We argue that this view overlooks a fundamental constraint: language is a compressed and capacity-limited interface for conveying task information. Modelling User--System interaction as a bilevel \emph{cheap-talk} game, we analyse how latent tasks are encoded into prompts and reinterpreted under alignment and safety constraints. We introduce a conceptual decomposition separating task inference from execution and derive PAC-Bayes bounds that distinguish finite-sample estimation error from irreducible structural limitations. Our first main result establishes an \emph{expressivity floor}: language acts as a capacity-limited communication channel, and whenever the informational complexity of a task family exceeds the capacity of that channel, distinct tasks become unavoidably indistinguishable to the Solver, inducing a strictly positive error floor that cannot be eliminated by additional data, optimisation, or model scaling alone. We then establish an \emph{objective-misalignment floor}: when alignment constraints restrict the admissible output set, the User-ideal distribution may lie outside the feasible class, inducing an irreducible distortion. Together, these results yield a formal negative conclusion: prompt-conditioned LLMs are not universal problem solvers through prompting alone, as there exist task families for which correct behaviour is provably unattainable even in the infinite-data regime. More broadly, our analysis shows the limits of prompt-based generalisation arise from information-constrained communication and alignment-constrained objectives. This suggests that interfaces beyond natural language, including multimodal observations and, external memory, may reduce the inherent LLM limitations by increasing the task-relevant information available to the System.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a scalable path forward for agentic AI, comprising multiple LLM-based agents, each assigned a system prompt and a position within a workflow that governs inter-agent coordination and output aggregation. System prompts thus form a critical and accessible optimization surface: they specify agents' roles and behaviors, enabling system-level improvements without model finetuning. Although prompt optimization has shown substantial potential for single LLMs, extending it to MAS poses distinct challenges, notably an exponentially growing search space. It remains unclear whether, when, and by how much prompt optimization improves MAS performance, and how sensitive such gains are to system configuration. In this work, we systematically study system-prompt optimization across a broad range of MAS setups varying in task, workflow, communication protocol, and team size, benchmarking two prompt optimizers that naturally extend state-of-the-art single-agent methods. The results reveal its potential to unlock significant gains while exposing open challenges, characterizing when and how much prompt optimization helps across diverse MAS settings.

Enterprise agents increasingly operate inside workspaces: they read heterogeneous files, invoke tools, and deliver business artifacts. We introduce EnterpriseClawBench, an enterprise agent benchmark constructed from proprietary, real-world agent sessions. Starting from a large archive of workplace sessions, the EnterpriseClawBench produces 852 reproducible tasks, each paired with recovered fixtures, rewritten prompts, role classes, skill subclasses, hard rules, and semantic rubrics. Because the sessions contain internal enterprise content, we do not release the benchmark data; instead, our reusable contribution is the construction and evaluation protocol. On EnterpriseClawBench, the best configuration reaches only 0.663 (Codex with GPT-5.5). These results show that enterprise agent evaluation must report harness--model combinations, artifact delivery, visual quality, cost, runtime, and skill-transfer behavior, rather than collapsing performance into a single score. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/EnterpriseClawBench

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have the potential for open-world generalization by leveraging pretrained vision-language representations, yet downstream finetuning on limited robot data often degrades these representations, leading to brittle policies that ignore language instructions in favor of visual shortcuts, a failure mode we term instruction blindness. We hypothesize that standard finetuning with limited data applies gradients to a sparse set of points, which manifests as a sharp loss landscape with high-curvature minima. We propose to address this directly through flatness-preserving optimization while finetuning on the exact same data, where learning a flatter landscape results in a model more robust to perturbations in the weight space. Specifically, we demonstrate that simply applying sharpness-aware minimization during VLA finetuning significantly improves instruction following by over 60% across multiple simulation and real-world benchmarks without additional data, architectural modification, or retraining. We further analyze the effect of selective sharpness, quantify its effects, and show that our approach is complementary to existing guidance techniques. Project page can be found at https://haochenz11.github.io/papers/flatness-vla/.

In many modern applications of reinforcement learning (RL), the natural reward for a task of interest is inherently sparse: a reward of 0 is given everywhere except when the task is completed, when a reward of +1 is given. Training a policy to maximize such a sparse reward requires solving a challenging credit assignment problem, leading to slow or ineffective RL improvement. We propose a simple approach to transform a sparse outcome reward into a dense process reward. Our approach relies on training a discriminator to distinguish between previous successful and unsuccessful episodes, and using this discriminator to incentivize the RL-learned policy to match the state-action visitations of successful episodes, while avoiding those of unsuccessful episodes. By incentivizing the policy to match the visitations over all states, not just those that correspond to task success, this reward provides dense feedback on whether progress is being made towards task completion, and, we show, provably achieves this without changing the optimal policy. Focusing on finetuning of robotic control policies, we demonstrate that our approach leads to significantly faster RL finetuning performance on both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, as compared to simply maximizing the sparse outcome reward.

Most imitation learning methods assume full observability in table-top settings. In practice, objects are often occluded, requiring robots to both search and act, and learning this coupled behavior from limited demonstrations remains challenging. We propose See2Act, an imitation learning approach that conditions action prediction on a sequence of actively-inferred viewpoints at test time, by coupling action denoising with viewpoint refinement. The policy is trained using camera poses anchored to keyframe actions from offline demonstrations, enabling implicit learning of where to see, while learning how to act. We empirically demonstrate that in Ravens the policy recovers informative viewpoints under severe occlusions, and on RLBench tasks it improves performance by up to 34% over prior methods. In the real world, we collect 50 demonstrations in a digital twin and achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on pick-and-place tasks using depth observations. The policy handles significant occlusions, showing that learned viewpoint reasoning enables robust manipulation under partial observability.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have established a powerful paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation by grounding control into the semantic reasoning of VLMs. Prevailing architectures typically model actions continuously via diffusion or flow processes, or discretely through either autoregressive generation or parallel decoding. Recently, Discrete Diffusion VLAs (dVLAs) have emerged as a distinct alternative, unifying vision, language, and action into a single discrete token space via masked generative modeling. While combining iterative refinement with unified representations, its training has thus far been restricted to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), leaving the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for further policy refinement largely unexplored. A fundamental challenge in RL for dVLAs is that the marginal probability of the final action generated by dVLAs remains intractable. To solve this problem, we propose \textbf{dVLA-RL}, shifting the learning objective from the marginal action probability to the joint probability of the sampled generation path. Specifically, by modeling the denoising process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), we mathematically formulate this path probability as a product of step-wise transitions. This trajectory-level objective provides a unified formulation that natively accommodates variable denoising steps. Leveraging this intrinsic fexibility, we introduce a unified step scheduling approach for complex multi-task learning, tailoring denoising steps to specific task complexities to maximize both success rates and computational effciency. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves a success rate of \textbf{99.7\%} on LIBERO. Furthermore, it establishes strong VLA-based results on RoboTwin 2.0 by delivering a \textbf{30.6\%} improvement over the SFT baseline, remaining competitive with strong World-Action Model baselines.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are commonly fine-tuned through passive imitation learning, where additional demonstrations are collected for tasks where the policy performs poorly. This approach incurs several downsides: it requires the robot to fail before data collection is triggered, provides little guidance about which states require supervision, and wastes demonstrator effort on redundant parts of the task where the policy already performs well. In this paper, we propose an active, continual learning paradigm for VLAs. We demonstrate that active, uncertainty-guided data collection leads to more efficient fine-tuning than when using passively-collected demonstrations. However, we also find that fine-tuning only on actively-collected recovery data leads to catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate techniques for continual learning, including replay-based data mixing and elastic weight consolidation, and identify tradeoffs between plasticity to uncertainty-guided recovery data and retention of previously learned behaviors. Overall, our work contributes an empirical study of active continual learning for autoregressive VLAs, establishing that uncertainty-guided recovery demonstrations can improve adaptation efficiency while also revealing open challenges when targeted new data is incorporated into large robot policies.

Long-horizon robot manipulation remains challenging because similar observations may occur at different execution stages, while the appropriate action depends on previously completed operations. Memory can address this ambiguity by enabling policies to infer task progress from execution history. However, existing memory-augmented approaches often either retain dense histories that require compression or rely primarily on recent context that may discard earlier task-relevant events. In this work, we propose propose KEMO, a lightweight plug-in memory framework that automatically selectively preserves keyframes associated with task-relevant state changes for VLA policies. KEMO combines robot kinematics with visual filtering to detect events, encodes the selected keyframes as compact temporally ordered memory tokens, and integrates them with current visual features through cross-attention and gated residual fusion for VLA training. The detected events also define higher-weight training samples near critical transitions. We evaluate KEMO on various real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks spanning 2 to 6 scored subtasks, and trajectory length ranging from 830 steps to 2846 execution steps (durations from 28 to 95 seconds). Compared with the memory-free baseline (e.g., $π_{0.5}$), KEMO improves aggregate Task Success Rate by 23.6\% and Stage Completion Rate by 34.1\%. Ablations show that event-driven keyframe selection outperforms uniform sampling and recent-frame retention, while the proposed gated fusion and keyframe-aligned loss weighting provide complementary gains.

As autonomous aircraft are introduced at scale and traffic density increases, centralized management becomes insufficient to coordinate the large numbers of crewed and uncrewed aircraft. Dedicated Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) corridors have therefore been proposed for organizing high-density autonomous traffic flows. The desire to scalably provide autonomous aircraft flexibility in trajectory planning motivates the development of decentralized approaches to traffic management in AAM corridors. In this work, we extend a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to address the challenge of decentralized traffic flow management in air corridor networks. We test policies trained in a single-corridor setting on increasingly complex multi-corridor networks with combinations of merges and splits in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that learned behaviors transfer well to scenarios with varying traffic density, network geometry, and heterogeneous vehicle performance, without needing centralized coordination or model retraining. We evaluate system-level performance in terms of conformance to corridor boundaries, completion rates, average speeds, distance traveled, and maintenance of inter-aircraft separation. We find that although our policies require only locally coordinated entry, traversal, and exit behaviors, they collectively produce desirable traffic flows through the corridor network.

Safety benchmarks assume that test-condition behavior predicts deployment behavior, an assumption that fails if models detect evaluation cues and adapt. This opens a gap between benchmark performance and deployment behavior: compliance measured under test conditions becomes an optimistic upper bound that overstates how safely a model behaves once the evaluation harness is removed. We characterize this evaluation awareness through eight experiments across 37 open-weight models and seven families. (i)Detection is moderate and training-driven (24/37 models exceed chance, best AUROC 0.714 vs.0.819 human, with instruction tuning dominating over scale). (ii)Detection shifts safety behavior (hard refusal drops 5.8 percentage points under hypothetical framing, and 21/140 HarmBench framing effects are significant, with compliance rising up to +30 percentage points. (iii)Representations survive behavioral collapse (probes retain AUROC 0.98 under rewrites that drive behavior below chance, and multi-layer steering causally moves three downstream tasks while random controls do not). (iv)These axes are weakly coupled (only 1/15 correlations are significant, the sole robust link being behavioral detection versus framing resistance, $ρ=-0.79$, $p<0.001$). We call this gap the benchmark illusion: because detectability, behavioral manifestation, and controllability vary independently, it is multivariate rather than a single number, so no single awareness score is a reliable proxy for deployment safety.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAM) are the generative models now driving general-purpose robot control, turning raw camera input directly into motor commands. They are increasingly deployed as black-box services, where a partner runs the policy through an interface while the owner keeps the weights private. Training such a model takes proprietary data and heavy computational power, making the deployed model itself a valuable intellectual property. To address this, we propose the \emph{keyed latent-provenance verification} method, which fingerprints the policy through the seed of the Gaussian noise vector that the models draw before generation. At the injection stage, the owner swaps this seed for a keyed one with the same distribution as ordinary noise, so the fingerprinted actions are statistically identical to those of an ordinary run and an adversary watching the output finds no signal to detect or remove. At the verification stage, the owner runs the suspect model under authorized access and records the action channels the robot executes, a partial and possibly post-processed view of the policy's output. From this view, the verifier recovers the seed by gradient-based maximum a posteriori (MAP) optimization, tests it for the secret key to score each rollout, and aggregates these scores into a single decision on whether the suspect model belongs to the owner. We evaluate the method on two representative models across two robot suites. The experiments cover detection of the fingerprint, identification of which of several keys a suspect carries, robustness to a range of attacks, and an analysis of why the design works. Across both models, the fingerprint can be detected reliably with little change to task performance, and it remains detectable under output-side removal attacks and weight-level edits.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their deployment is constrained by substantial memory and compute requirements. Low-rank compression via singular value decomposition (SVD) is an effective remedy, but existing methods focus on how to factorize and which components to keep. We introduce SVD-Surgeon, a training-free method that brings the Optimal Brain Surgeon (OBS) framework to the singular-value basis. Treating each singular value as a parameter, it computes a closed-form update of the retained singular values that compensates, to second order in the model loss, for those removed by truncation. The same analysis yields a saliency for choosing which values to prune. As it operates directly on the singular-value factorization, SVD-Surgeon can be layered on top of existing SVD compressors. Applied to SVD-LLM, a leading SVD-based method, it improves the perplexity-compression trade-off on the OPT family and LLaMA 2-7B without any retraining.

LLM agents follow a practical execution loop in digital environments: they reason over structured states, invoke tools, inspect feedback, and revise actions. Extending this loop to physical robots is difficult because physical execution is continuous, embodiment-dependent, uncertain, and constrained by safety. Existing embodied-AI systems have advanced manipulation, spatial understanding, navigation, and humanoid control, but these capabilities often remain specialized modules or loosely coupled decision loops. In this work, we introduce HoloAgent-0, a unified embodied agent framework for real-world robot deployment. Embodied AgentOS converts language instructions into executable skill graphs, schedules robot resources, monitors execution, and triggers clarification or re-planning from runtime feedback. HoloAgent-0 organizes heterogeneous robot models and controllers through three coupled layers: Embodied AgentOS for closed-loop execution, 3D spatial memory for physical world grounding, and embodied skills for robot action. We deploy HoloAgent-0 on real hardware and evaluate its spatial memory, long-horizon navigation, and closed-loop execution across motion generation, object search, cross-robot coordination, and mobile manipulation.

Transformer-based models underpin modern natural language processing but incur rapidly growing computational and energy costs. As training scales in both model size and parallelism, accurately predicting energy consumption has become critical for sustainable and cost-aware system design. We present a framework for modeling the energy consumption of Transformer training on multiple GPUs. Using controlled architectural sweeps of BERT models, we relate measured energy to lightweight proxies for compute, memory traffic, and hardware efficiency. Inspired by roofline models, our approach incorporates a speedup-based hardware-efficiency factor that captures the effects of tensor parallelism and fully sharded data parallelism. We derive a scaling law model that accurately predicts training energy across heterogeneous configurations.

Scaling reinforcement learning for visual mathematical reasoning requires more than generating harder questions: as data volume grows, the reward labels themselves must remain reliable. Yet existing data pipelines scale supervision while trusting the labeller, and policy-side methods assume the underlying answers are already correct. We instead treat scaling as a verifiable data-construction problem and decouple two axes before any policy update: prompt difficulty, expanded by route-specific evolution operators, and answer reliability, enforced by offline hypothesis-test falsification. We instantiate this as VeriEvol, an iterative framework with two extensible components: a type-aware evolution module that rewrites low-difficulty image-question seeds into harder, image-grounded prompts; and HTV-Agent, a verifier that accepts an answer only after multi-source counter-evidence has failed to refute it. The resulting verified data scales in volume, extends by adding evolution routes or verifier channels, and plugs directly into existing GRPO-style RL recipes. On a five-benchmark visual-math suite, scaling evolved SFT data from 10K to 250K samples raises the mean accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73; then, with backbone, SFT initialization, and GRPO recipe held fixed, VeriEvol adds a cumulative +3.88 over an un-evolved RL baseline, of which +1.82 comes from evolved prompts and +2.06 from the HTV-Agent verifier. We release the prompts, data, models, code, and the full verifier trace of every sample, so that downstream work can scale and audit the pipeline rather than only inspect its outputs.

Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) demands precise endoscopic navigation and stable biliary cannulation within a narrow monocular field characterized by specular reflections, partial occlusions, and frequent tissue contact. Although recent robotic systems and vision-based assistance techniques improve operator ergonomics and provide perceptual cues, their performance degrades under pronounced anatomical variability and safety-critical visual artifacts, which hinders reliable autonomy in cannulation-grade procedures. Here, we present BiliVLA, a scene-aware Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that formulates biliary endoscopic navigation as an instruction-conditioned visuomotor learning problem. Given an endoscopic observation and a stage-specific language instruction, BiliVLA jointly predicts the target category, a grounded bounding box, and a discrete three degrees of freedom (DoF) motor command for a continuum endoscope. The proposed framework incorporates scene-aware supervision to enhance semantic target consistency and safety-aware recovery supervision to induce conservative retreat behaviors under luminal wall contact. A key component of BiliVLA is a two-stage training paradigm that combines grounding-enhanced supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which significantly improves action reliability and decision consistency during closed-loop navigation. Across three ERCP subtasks, BiliVLA achieves an average action precision of 91.96\% and an overall success rate (SR) of 84.85\% in real-world phantom experiments. These results indicate that integrating semantic grounding, scene-aware learning, and reward-guided optimization improves perception-action alignment and enables robust autonomous endoscopic navigation.

Long agent traces composed of chains of thought and tool calls accumulate stale content that anchor subsequent generations, and eventually outgrow the context window. Existing scaffolds mitigate it with fixed-interval compaction triggered at a token threshold. Such triggers pay no heed to trajectory structure, risking discard of partial results mid-derivation or mid-search. We propose SelfCompact, a scaffold that allows the model itself to decide when and how to compact. Specifically, it pairs two inference-time elements: (i) a compaction tool the model invokes to summarize the accumulated context, and (ii) a lightweight rubric specifying when to fire (a sub-task has resolved, or the trajectory is converging) and when to suppress (mid-derivation, or when stuck). Both are needed. The tool alone is unevenly used across open-weight models, often invoked at unhelpful moments or not at all; the rubric alone cannot act. Together, they elicit effective adaptive compaction without any fine-tuning or external supervision. We present empirical results on six benchmarks (competitive math and agentic search) and seven models. Our results show that SelfCompact matches or exceeds fixed-interval summarization at a fraction of the token cost, improving over a no-summarization baseline by up to 18.1 points on math and 5-9 points on agentic search at 30-70% lower per-question cost. Our results expose a meta-cognitive gap: although unprompted models cannot reliably tell when their own context is rotting, a lightweight rubric closes this gap, reframing when to compact as a capability that scaffolds can supply without training.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long interactions, existing evaluations focus predominantly on retrospective memory (RM) via explicit queries. Prospective memory (PM), the critical ability to spontaneously recall and act on latent constraints without direct prompts, remains largely unevaluated. We introduce TriggerBench, a comprehensive PM benchmark spanning five dimensions across both daily assistants and professional workflows. TriggerBench pairs scenarios with matched RM controls, contrastive positive/negative variants, and overloaded triggers, enabling fine-grained measurement of proactive recall, false-alarm rate, and attentional robustness under a single protocol. Our evaluation yields three key findings. (i) PM shows a precision-recall trade-off and attentional fragility. Though enhanced reasoning significantly improves proactive recall, models may overfit to an "always-remind" heuristic. Furthermore, PM accuracy degrades substantially under implicit constraints or triggers overloaded by concurrent user requests, indicating that robust PM remains an open challenge. (ii) PM is notably harder than RM: on identical contexts, RM near-saturates up to 100K tokens, while PM decays sharply as context length scales. (iii) PM may serve as a behavioral probe of spare reasoning capacity. Pairing PM scenarios with AIME-2025 math problems reveals that successful trajectories yield higher PM accuracy than failed ones at the same context length, showing PM tracks spare reasoning budget that token count obscures. Project page: https://github.com/KristenZHANG/TriggerBench-Official.

Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions.

Optical knots are topologically structured light fields whose phase or polarization singularities trace linked or knotted trajectories during propagation, making them promising candidates for high-dimensional optical information carriers. Their use in communication or quantum-information protocols, however, requires a practical readout method that can distinguish a chosen knot alphabet with low crosstalk. Here, we demonstrate a proof-of-principle full-field sorter for optical knots using one or two optimized phase-only elements. The sorter maps each input knot to a predefined output region and is optimized directly from the output intensity distributions to enhance correct assignment, suppress crosstalk, and avoid degenerate mappings between distinct knots. We apply the method to an alphabet composed of the Hopf link, trefoil, and cinquefoil optical knots. Two optimized phase planes improve the sorting performance relative to a single plane and enable high distinguishability for the three-knot alphabet. We further benchmark the sorter under common experimental imperfections. These results extend full-field optical mode sorting to topologically structured light and provide a readout route for knot-based high-dimensional optical communication.

Fine-grained, bimanual dexterous manipulation remains a foundational challenge in robotics. Traditional teleoperation systems often fail in contact-rich tasks because embodiment gaps hinder accurate kinematic mapping, while tactile and force feedback remain absent. Consequently, data collection efficiency for high-precision tasks remains prohibitively low. To address these limitations, we propose a tactile-driven adaptation strategy designed to enable fine-grained manipulation on top of teleoperation pipelines. Instantiated within our bimanual dexterous framework, DexTeleop-0, this strategy introduces a real-time optimization loop that bridges the embodiment gap by translating coarse human tracking intents into precise, force-compliant robotic commands with tactile sensing. By estimating accurate contact points and leveraging a tactile-enabled fingertip force-sensing profile, the system dynamically computes localized corrections using the operational space Jacobian with respect to joint angle updates. We rigorously evaluate this tactile-driven adaptation strategy across both simulated environments and real-world hardware. Compared with representative baselines, the proposed method consistently achieves higher task success rates and improved execution efficiency in robust grasping, disturbance-resilient manipulation, and complex dexterous tasks.

Flow matching has recently become a new standard for behavior cloning in robotic manipulation. However, state-of-the-art flow matching policies suffer from a systematic structural mismatch: they rely on a globally fixed isotropic source distribution despite the strongly fragmented and heteroscedastic structure of robotic action spaces. This agnostic initialization forces the model to learn highly entangled vector fields, bottlenecking training efficiency and limiting overall policy performance. To address this limitation, we introduce Latent Action Guided Flow Matching (LAFM), a novel framework that replaces the monolithic Gaussian with an adaptive library of learned prior distributions. By grounding these distributions using a latent action model, LAFM maps current observations to discrete motion primitives, selecting a specialized base distribution that provides an informed, structurally aligned initialization for the denoising process. This dynamic adaptivity naturally accommodates heteroscedasticity in human demonstrations and makes transport trajectories shorter and less entangled. Empirically, LAFM substantially outperforms standard flow matching formulations, increasing task success rates by 23.4% in real-world robotic deployments and by 10.4% on the LIBERO-90 benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LAFM achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing massively pre-trained vision-language-action models while utilizing significantly smaller architectures.

Fei Xiaotong's Differential Order Pattern characterizes rural society as egocentric and relationally graded, with cooperation attenuating over social distance. Although often treated as culturally specific, its mechanistic basis remains under-operationalized, and prior LLM-based simulations have mainly addressed short-term coordination rather than long-horizon social structure. We propose CAREB-MAS, a multi-agent framework grounded in Affect Control Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Durkheimian collective affect. Agents reason through an emotion-ethics-belief chain and maintain dynamically evolving egocentric identities, while the macro environment specifies only individual production, preference-based allocation, and minimal interaction protocols. Across long-horizon simulations, agents spontaneously reproduce five core Differential Order phenomena: stable labor specialization, guanxi-based economic ethics, relational decay of cooperation, emergent relational authority, and clan-based center-periphery stratification. These patterns shift with production structure from kin-centered integration toward greater functional interdependence. Extensive experiment results support interpreting Differential Order as a structure-sensitive emergent outcome of general social mechanisms, with LLM-based multi-agent simulation providing an interdisciplinary framework for studying social structure and change.

For imitation learning in robotic manipulation, high data collection costs result in the scarcity of high quality data. In this paper, we leverage the inherent heterogeneity of trajectories to address this challenge. Based on our observations of manipulation tasks, we categorize motions into transitional, precise, and agile types, defining the latter two as trajectory saliency due to their criticality to task success in contrast to the prevalent but less relevant transitional motions. Therefore, we propose the Trajectory Saliency Detector (TSD), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to identify trajectory saliency. TSD employs two physically-grounded metrics: spatial entropy to capture fine-grained manipulation and centripetal acceleration to detect agile maneuvering. We further leverage TSD to develop a dataset compression method that reduces training costs and a dataset expansion strategy that improves data collection efficiency. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that models trained on TSD-condensed datasets achieve comparable or even superior performance with 25% less data on average. These results validate the effectiveness of our dataset compression and expansion strategies, thereby confirming the utility of TSD. Consequently, TSD offers a scalable and cost-effective pathway to synthesize information-dense datasets for efficient robot learning. Project page: https://trajectory-saliency-detector.github.io/trajectory-saliency-detector/

Human-robot interaction (HRI) evaluation relies almost exclusively on human-completed questionnaires, leaving the robot's perspective unexamined. We propose an \textit{inverted evaluation}, in which LLM-powered robots complete the same standardized instruments from their own perspective, and test whether these ratings agree with human ground truth. In Study~1, five LLMs completed HRI-CUES, Godspeed, and RoSAS questionnaires for 25~interactions ($N = 1{,}522$ evaluations) from the HRI-CUES dataset. LLMs achieved moderate-to-strong agreement on engagement dimensions (satisfaction $r$ up to $.65$ and enjoyment $r$ up to $.72$) with excellent test-retest reliability (ICC $\geq .82$), but \textit{systematically inverted} the comfort/strangeness dimension ($r = -.44$ to $-.67$, all $p < .05$), conflating engagement with comfort. In Study~2, a Nao robot running Claude~Sonnet~4.5 replicated these patterns in live interactions ($N = 4$), including real-time turn-by-turn assessment. The strangeness failure persisted across five models, synthetic controls, and embodied deployment for two participants. We argue that current LLM-based robots lack access to the internal affective states needed to assess constructs like strangeness, and that inverted evaluation requires supplementary modalities (e.g., physiological signals, gaze, proxemics) to move beyond behavioral proxies. These findings establish boundary conditions for using LLMs as interaction evaluators in HRI.

Controlled, reproducible generation of luminescent defect centres in hBN remains a key challenge for scalable quantum-photonic technologies. Here, we report Kr$^{+}$ ion implantation as a tunable, annealing-free, and chemically inert route to room-temperature near-infrared luminescent spin defects in hBN, requiring no pre- or post-implantation annealing. SRIM Monte Carlo simulations were used to optimise the parameters for 40 keV Kr$^{+}$ irradiation of hBN flakes. The implanted samples exhibit a stable near-infrared photoluminescence (PL) band centred at $\sim$830 nm whose intensity increases with implantation fluence over $10^{11}$-$10^{15}$ions/cm$^{2}$. Temperature-dependent PL measurements (20-300 K) reveal a linewidth broadening well described by a $T^{3}$ dependence, consistent with acoustic-phonon-mediated dephasing. Raman spectra show the characteristic $E_{2g}$ mode of pristine hBN at $\sim$1366 cm$^{-1}$ alongside an implantation-induced defect feature at $\sim$1295 cm$^{-1}$, confirming irradiation-induced lattice disorder. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) measurements reveal a paramagnetic centre with a $g$-factor of 2.003, and density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicate that a spatially separated $V_{\mathrm{N}}$-$C_{\mathrm{B}}$ donor-acceptor pair complex is a viable origin of the observed optical and magnetic signatures. Overall, Kr$^{+}$ implantation offers an effective, annealing-free, and scalable platform for generating stable room-temperature luminescent defects, providing a promising route toward quantum photonics.

Operating in complex real-world environments requires robots to understand their surroundings on a functional semantic level. This demands a detailed multi-layer world model capturing the complex relations of its surroundings. Hierarchical 3D scene graphs address this challenge by integrating geometric, semantic, and relational data within a unified spatial framework. However, current 3D scene graph approaches often restrict themselves to rigid structures of pre-determined relationship classes, mostly neglecting important semantic connections, like causal connections or environmental contexts. This paper explores the potential of foundation models to build forests of 3D scene graphs with open semantic relationships to improve scene understanding and robotic task execution. We propose a method where instance-specific concept-nodes and relationships are first identified by a VLM and extended upon by a LLM, inferring broader, more abstract concept-nodes and relationships through reasoning. These object-nodes, concept-nodes, and relationships are then assembled into a forest of hierarchical 3D scene graphs, enhanced with concept-nodes to represent abstract concepts. Evaluations were conducted on the uHumans2 and ScanNet indoor dataset, validating the accuracy and relevance of the generated relationships. Downstream suitability of scene-graph forests for robotics applications is demonstrated in an open-vocabulary object-retrieval task utilizing both ScanNet data and a real-world indoor deployment using a Boston Dynamics Spot. This paper leverages foundation models to create more expressive, semantically deep 3D hierarchical scene graphs and demonstrates their potential to advance semantic and environmental understanding in robotics.

Developing generalist embodied agents requires interactive environments providing visually realistic feedback and accurate action-conditioned dynamics. Interactive world models address this by simulating such complex dynamics. However, purely data-driven methods struggle to ensure precise control alignment and physically plausible visual feedback due to a lack of explicit structural constraints. To address this, we propose IOI, a hybrid interactive world model integrating analytical kinematic priors with learned physical dynamics. Unlike data-driven approaches prone to spatiotemporal drift, IOI introduces explicit kinematic guidance, computing forward kinematics from action sequences for accurate motion trajectories. These trajectories are rendered into synchronized front, side, and top orthographic projections, eliminating the need for extrinsic camera calibration. A Multi-view Kinematic Aggregation and Injection module fuses these geometric cues and injects them into the video generator, providing geometry-consistent guidance. Conditioning video generation on these deterministic trajectories establishes a synergy between the analytical simulator and the world model. Decoupling deterministic motion into the kinematic prior frees the generator to model stochastic physical interactions. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark validate IOI across kinematic fidelity, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, and policy evaluation. IOI achieves state-of-the-art simulation performance and robust zero-shot generalization to unseen OOD tasks. Furthermore, IOI serves as a reliable policy evaluator, yielding success rates closely aligning with ground-truth physics simulators. On real-world platforms, policies trained on IOI-synthesized data match those trained on teleoperation demonstrations, solidifying its practical value for embodied policy learning.

6D pose estimation is a key task in computer vision and embodied AI, widely used in robotic manipulation, augmented reality, etc. Existing methods directly regress in a high-dimensional continuous space, facing two key challenges in category-level pose estimation: limited accuracy due to noise and local optima, and inefficient search over an infinite space that hinders real-time performance. This paper proposes Flow6D, a hierarchical flow matching framework with a two-stage discrete latent space localization-continuous pose regression strategy. Rotation and translation parameters are first discretized into bins, with a discrete flow matching model locking the latent space around the true pose to reduce search complexity. Then, by sampling in the latent space, a continuous flow matching model predicts local pose residuals to optimize the estimate and regress to an accurate pose. The framework also naturally extends to articulated objects, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real datasets with real-time inference at 70 FPS. Project website: https://flow6d.github.io/.

Automated Reward Design (ARD) aims to replace manual reward engineering in reinforcement learning with language-driven reward function synthesis. However, existing approaches based on large language models (LLMs) remain inherently correlation-driven, relying on iterative environmental feedback to refine reward hypotheses for each specific task. This paradigm not only results in inefficient reasoning but also makes LLMs susceptible to semantically plausible yet causally spurious reward components, leading to ineffective optimization. To address these limitations, we propose the Causal Reward World Model (CRWM), which explicitly models the causal topological relationships between candidate reward components and task-targeted physical variables through offline pre-training on multi-task interaction data. Based on a coarse-to-fine pre-training strategy, we introduce a joint optimization module that integrates Explicit Mechanism Decoupling with Confidence-Aware Soft Fusion to refine coarse structural priors using micro-level trajectories, thereby constructing a robust and interpretable causal skeleton. During inference, LLMs leverage CRWM as a task-irrelevant causal prior to constrain the reward generation, enabling zero-shot reward function design. Our work opens up a new white-box paradigm for the ARD problem. Extensive experiments on complex continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that CRWM generates executable reward functions without feedback-driven reward refinement, significantly reducing the design latency for acquiring new robotic skills while matching or surpassing state-of-the-art performance, and further exhibits strong generalization capabilities across unseen tasks and diverse robotic embodiments.

Humanoid local navigation in cluttered environments must jointly resolve obstacle avoidance, sparse-goal recovery, and stable whole-body locomotion under short-range and partially observable sensing. Explicit planner-control decompositions introduce latency and can mismatch agile humanoid command-tracking limits, while purely reactive controllers may lose the goal after obstacle occlusion. We present LP-NavOA, a limited-perception navigation and obstacle-avoidance framework for humanoid robots. A raycast-conditioned perception-action proximal policy optimization (PPO) locomotion backbone is first trained with a robot-centered circular heading-speed command and a shared command-side safety filter. With this backbone frozen, A-star and waypoint teachers generate rollouts for distilling a recurrent local planner that overwrites only the heading command at deployment, leaving the whole-body policy intact. At runtime, LP-NavOA uses proprioception, short-range local range sensing, and a body-frame goal direction, requiring no global map, waypoint stream, or external planner. In MuJoCo open-wall and indoor layouts, the distilled planner produces obstacle bypassing and post-avoidance goal recovery, raising teacher-calibrated on-time arrival from 38--40\% to 85--97\% and reducing brush/contact-heavy progress relative to a backbone-only controller. Ablations show that dynamic route shaping, teacher-active data collection, and the circular command interface are important for navigation efficiency and for training the 3.0\,m/s backbone. A Unitree G1 deployment analysis demonstrates hardware executability without continuous joystick steering.

Incidents in chemical plants can pose a high level of risk and harsh environments for first responders. Contamination and explosion hazards can deny human access to the affected infrastructure, underscoring the need for capable robot systems. This field report documents the successful deployment of a robotic task force to neutralize an explosive gas hazard at a chemical plant after a fire incident. An Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) with a custom manipulation tool opened a critical valve under hazardous conditions, averting the threat of a large-scale explosion. We provide insights into robot deployment and use the mission results to highlight both the importance of rescue robotics and limitations of using research platforms in real emergency deployments, such as communication constraints and the need for enhanced operator-assistance functions.

Silicon-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) filters are essential for scaling optical communication capacity in data centers and telecommunications networks.However, extending silicon WDM systems beyond 32 channels with 100 GHz spacing poses significant challenges due to limitations in conventional filter architectures. Here we present the first silicon 64$\times$100 GHz WDM filter by introducing a novel ring-Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) cascade architecture. Our design utilizes third-order polynomial interconnected circular (TOPIC) bends to construct low-loss half-ring waveguides, facilitating an MZI configuration where the arm length difference is determined entirely by half of the ring structure. This approach ensures precise alignment between the MZI interference peaks and the ring resonator wavelengths, with the MZI FSR being exactly double that of the ring, eliminating the need for dynamic tuning between the MZI and the ring. We demonstrate the concept through a 16$\times$400 GHz WDM filter with insertion loss of 1.3$\pm$0.6 dB and channel isolation $\geq$14.3 dB. The 64$\times$100 GHz implementation, realized using a 4-channel interleaver followed by four 16$\times$400 GHz WDM filter, achieves insertion loss of 3.2$\pm$1.1 dB and channel isolation $\geq$10.7 dB. This work opens new possibilities for high-density silicon photonic WDM systems, addressing the growing bandwidth demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.

Photonic computing has emerged as a promising platform for accelerating artificial intelligence workloads by enabling low-latency and energy-efficient linear operations such as vector-matrix multiplication. However, scalable on-chip high-order nonlinear processing remains challenging, limiting the functional versatility of current photonic hardware. Here, we present an optoelectronic approach for approximating high-order and high-dimensional nonlinear functions. The key to this approach lies in optical random Fourier feature mapping, which transforms nonlinear function evaluation into an equivalent linear computation. This approach enables nonlinear computing within a linear photonic framework, eliminating the need for complex optical nonlinear or active materials while preserving scalability and computational throughput in a simple silicon photonic circuit. We experimentally demonstrate a broad class of nonlinear functions, including tenth-order Legendre polynomials, computationally demanding special functions (Voigt, Fermi-Dirac, and Fresnel), neural-network activation functions, two-dimensional nonlinear functions, and a 10-dimensional softmax layer. This work establishes a general and scalable strategy for nonlinear computing in photonic integrated hardware and opens a pathway toward fully functional optical accelerators for next-generation computing systems.

Evolutionary agent-based markets (ABMs) couple several mechanisms -- who reproduces, how price forms, how biased the agents are, how consensus propagates -- yet these are usually fixed by convention, so it is unclear which mechanism controls which emergent property. In a coevolving, endogenous-price simulator with 120 heterogeneous behavioral agents, we make four mechanisms pluggable and run matched 3x20-seed interventions. We find the levers are largely separable. (1) Selection -> diversity: a Quality-Diversity (QD/MAP-Elites) operator robustly raises strategy-mix entropy over truncation top-k (paired Delta entropy +0.27 to +1.12 bits; sign-test p<0.001; CIs exclude 0) and sustains more strategy cycling (strongest in crisis: Delta=+0.070, p=0.0004). (2) Selection does not improve realism: even a per-agent realism reward that provably steers selection does not raise 5-fact realism (Delta_5=-0.11,-0.08,+0.03; not significant). (3) Microstructure -> realism: enabling reflexive price feedback does raise realism (Delta_5=+0.13,+0.20,+0.20; crisis/bull p<0.05, all CIs positive). (4) Behavior -> fragility: amplifying behavioral bias raises a genomic fragility proxy (Delta=+10.5,+11.1,+14.4; bull p<0.001, all CIs positive) while leaving realism flat. The remaining mechanism -- consensus network topology -- shows no robust effect (honest null). The contribution is a decomposition: in these single-mechanism sweeps the mechanisms behave as approximately distinct control knobs over diversity, realism, and fragility.

This paper presents a modular training-free framework for zero-shot, language-guided robotic manipulation in semi-structured environments. The architecture bridges the gap between high-level reasoning and low-level kinematics by decomposing the vision-action pipeline into three stages: visual perception, semantic interpretation, and task execution. To overcome the spatial ambiguity and semantic hallucinations inherent in standard Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the perception module employs FastSAM and Set-of-Mark (SoM) prompting to dynamically generate grounded, alphanumeric visual anchors. The same foundation model then operates purely as a Large Language Model (LLM) to act as a semantic router, translating unconstrained human directives into verifiable, reconfigurable configurations. Finally, these configurations are dynamically parsed by a Task Orchestrator into MoveIt Task Constructor (MTC) to generate collision-free trajectories. The framework is evaluated across two zero-shot experimental setups: unconstrained open-world sequential manipulation and dense relational spatial reasoning, achieving a 62% end-to-end task success rate across both scenarios, demonstrating its capacity to reliably execute complex physical actions without domain-specific training or manual coordinate programming.

Animal collectives navigate cluttered environments through local coordination, yet robot swarms still struggle to reproduce this capability in the physical world. End-to-end learning offers a route to such coordination, but scaling it to embodied swarms remains difficult: standard sampling-based reinforcement learning becomes inefficient when visual perception, dense robot-robot interaction, and contact-rich locomotion must be learned together. Here we show that asymmetric physics enables efficient end-to-end learning of vision-based, decentralized control in large swarms of quadrupedal robots. During training, quadrupeds interact in shared environments, where a high-fidelity, non-differentiable simulator generates realistic motion and contact dynamics, and differentiable surrogate models provide gradients for navigation and locomotion policies. This separation enables up to 512 quadrupeds to learn coordinated navigation policies in obstacle-rich environments. At deployment, each robot acts from a single forward-facing depth camera, without explicit communication, centralized planning, or global maps. The policies generalize across forests, bridges, enclosures, narrow passages, and mazes, and zero-shot transfer to six physical quadrupeds across five real-world scenarios. The resulting swarms exhibit predictive avoidance, right-side yielding, pausing before bottlenecks, and wall following, showing that asymmetric physics enables efficient training of scalable decentralized control policies for quadrupedal robot swarms.

We propose Assistron, a shared autonomy model that leverages Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to assist the user in daily activities. Our approach is grounded in two core principles: (1)~minimizing human cognitive and physical effort by leveraging VLA-driven autonomy for macro-movements, and (2)~prioritizing human intervention specifically at critical failure points. Driven by the user's verbal language commands, Assistron utilizes the VLA to autonomously execute macro-reaching trajectories, saving users' effort. In contact-rich interactions where VLAs tend to fail, Assistron employs a phase-aware interaction detection mechanism and solicits the user to intervene, in turn adjusting the VLA's action generation via flow matching guidance. Critically, our formulation eliminates the need for VLA fine-tuning, protecting its broad behavioral priors from catastrophic forgetting and ensuring the model does not become a narrow specialist. We validate our approach on a comprehensive multi-task scene recovery benchmark encompassing diverse daily manipulation skills. Empirical results demonstrate that Assistron significantly improves task success rates over pure autonomous baselines while significantly reducing human cognitive and physical workload compared to traditional teleoperation, offering a scalable, smooth, and effortless paradigm for assistive manipulation. The code is available in https://github.com/mousecpn/Assistron.git.

Cross-embodiment data have become central to training robotic foundation models. To leverage such heterogeneous data, we focus on flow-based object manipulation, where robot flows (robot velocity fields) serve as embodiment-agnostic motion representations. Previous studies do not formulate robot flows as dense velocity fields, but as displacements of sparse keypoints, while such velocity fields better match the continuous-time nature of motions. We propose Flow as Flow, a framework that models robot flows as probability flows based on a flow matching formulation. By naturally modeling such velocity fields within this formulation, our method achieves efficient and high-quality robot flow generation. Across standard benchmarks, our method outperforms representative baseline methods on standard metrics, while achieving approximately 33$\times$ faster generation. Furthermore, through real-world experiments evaluating 9 methods with 260 trials per method across 13 manipulation tasks, we show that our method achieves a higher average success rate than the baseline methods. Our project page is available at https://flow-as-flow-u0n5y.kinsta.page.

Long-horizon tasks are common in real-world robotic deployments, yet failure detection for such tasks remains underexplored. Detecting failures in long-horizon robotic tasks is particularly challenging because failure onset is often ambiguous and dense temporal annotations are typically unavailable. We present Foresight, a failure detection framework that monitors manipulation trajectories using latent representations from an action-conditioned world model. Foresight is trained using only final task-level success or failure labels. By leveraging predictive world-model embeddings, our method provides a unified framework for failure detection across different policies. We further use functional conformal prediction (FCP) to calibrate detection thresholds adaptively. We evaluate Foresight with state-of-the-art vision-language-action policies in simulation on LIBERO-Long, ManiSkill-Long, and BEHAVIOR-1K, compare it against state-of-the-artfailure detection methods, and validate it on real robots with three long-horizon tasks on a ReactorX-200 arm and one task on a Franka arm. Our results suggest that action-conditioned world-model embeddings provide a scalable representation for reliable failure monitoring in long-horizon manipulation.

Neural world models coupled with model predictive control (MPC) replan at every environment step to bound accumulated prediction error, but this incurs substantial computational overhead. Reusing a cached plan reduces this overhead, yet its effectiveness depends on how prediction mismatch propagates through the local dynamics. We analyze this trade-off with a perturbation-based dynamic-regret framework and show that stale-plan penalties scale with the reuse tolerance, the accumulated mismatch since the last replanning step, and the local dynamics sensitivity. Based on this structure, we propose AdaReP, a training-free wrapper that adapts the replanning tolerance online using the current deviation from the cached rollout and a local sensitivity estimate, without modifying the learned world model or planner. Across image-space planning, latent-space control, and real-world robotic manipulation, AdaReP substantially reduces planner-side computation while maintaining comparable task performance, including over 80% fewer queries on a 50-trial physical robot study.

This work presents a method for constructing nonlinear reduced-order models from input-output time-domain data. The proposed approach, termed Mixed Interpolatory Inference with Variable Projection (MIIvp), exploits the fact that the considered class of nonlinear state-space models is linear in the output equation parameters. By applying the Variable Projection (VarPro) algorithm, the optimization is restricted to the state equation parameters alone, while the output equation parameters are recovered via linear least squares. As a consequence, the output dimension does not enter the nonlinear optimization parameter vector, making the method well suited for systems with very high-dimensional outputs, a setting where many other approaches become computationally prohibitive. Under mild assumptions, it is shown that MIIvp can recover the true model parameters up to similarity. The method is first validated on a synthetic bilinear system, where it achieves machine-precision accuracy and recovers the true eigenvalues. MIIvp is then compared with existing methods on two experimental benchmarks from the nonlinear system identification literature. These numerical experiments showcase both the validity and the limitations of the proposed approach. Finally, directions for improvements and future work are outlined.

This paper presents a data-driven framework for decentralized Nash equilibrium (NE) seeking in multi-agent systems with unknown linear dynamics subject to exogenous disturbances, operating under partial-decision information (where agents lack direct access to the decisions of all others) and equality constraints. The proposed framework integrates an NE model, a distributed communication protocol, an internal model for disturbance rejection, and a data-driven stabilization strategy. By reformulating the problem as a cooperative output regulation problem, we synthesize controllers directly from noisy input-state data via semi-definite programs (SDPs), providing formal guarantees for closed-loop stability and asymptotic convergence to the NE. The approach is further extended to a class of nonlinear systems with constant disturbances by leveraging integral control and describing nonlinearities via quadratic constraints. Numerical simulations involving unmanned aerial vehicle networks and a rotary-wing aerial vehicle formation validate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed method.

Text-conditioned motion generation is a promising interface for programming humanoid robots, yet current generators are often trained on human motion datasets retargeted to robot morphologies. Although such data provides rich semantic and kinematic priors, it fails to capture the nuances of whole-body tracking controllers, including balance, contact dynamics, actuation limits, and controller-specific failure modes. As a result, generated motions can be semantically plausible but difficult or impossible for the robot to execute. We introduce TEXEDO, a test-time scaling framework for humanoid motion generation that improves motion quality without requiring a stronger underlying generator. Given a text prompt, TEXEDO samples multiple candidate motions from a pretrained text-conditioned generator and selects the best motion that is both executable and task-aligned. The reward model combines a dynamic feasibility verifier, distilled from whole-body tracking rollouts to predict physical executability, with a semantic alignment verifier that measures text-motion alignment in a learned co-embedding space. Our pipeline treats dynamic feasibility as a hard constraint and semantic alignment as the selection objective within the feasible set. Through large-scale simulation studies and real-world deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, we show that TEXEDO consistently improves both tracking fidelity and text alignment. These results demonstrate that grounded verification is an effective path toward deployable language-guided humanoid motion generation. Project website: https://jianuocao.github.io/TEXEDO/

Single-view mesh reconstruction predicts object meshes and spatial layouts from a single observation, making it attractive for fast robot spatial reasoning and real-to-sim digital twins. However, robot-mounted cameras naturally rotate during manipulation and navigation, while learned single-view reconstruction models often rely on view-dependent priors and may generalize poorly to out-of-distribution camera rotations. Such rotations can introduce 3D inconsistencies, incorrect layouts, and violations of physical constraints, but this failure mode remains under-evaluated. We introduce an evaluation protocol with controlled axis-wise roll, pitch, and yaw sweeps to trace errors in monocular depth estimation (MDE), canonical object meshes, camera-space layout, and physical plausibility within a representative SAM3D-style pipeline. On the Aria Digital Twin dataset and a real Franka wrist-camera sequence, camera rotations induce MDE distortion, layout drift, and collision penetration, while canonical mesh predictions remain relatively stable. A two-stage SAM3D+FoundationPose pipeline is more robust than one-stage feed-forward layout prediction, and our Gravity-Aware Refinement reduces one-stage pairwise ICP-based layout-orientation error by 47.1$\%$. Our evaluation reveals that current single-view mesh reconstruction methods generalize poorly to robot camera rotation, and suggests that explicit gravity cues are important for reliable robotic single-view mesh reconstruction.

Multi-arm manipulation demands precise spatiotemporal coordination, yet many centralized approaches scale poorly as team size increases. To address this, we propose CLS-DP, a decentralized multi-agent framework that enables implicit coordination under partial observability without shared global views, explicit state information, or inter-agent communication. Under the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, CLS-DP distills privileged multi-agent dynamics into a latent space. At deployment, each agent infers a collaborative latent from its local RGB observation and a shared task instruction; it then conditions the diffusion denoising process on this latent. This design enables implicit coordination with a per-agent cost independent of team size. Across six RoboFactory benchmark tasks spanning two to four agents, CLS-DP achieves a 38% mean success rate, outperforming the best centralized baseline (20%) and a decentralized ablation without the collaborative latent (9%). It also maintains superior parameter efficiency across all agent configurations. Attribution maps show that an agent conditioned on the collaborative latent places high attribution on the joints and grippers of both itself and its teammates throughout execution. This suggests that the learned latent efficiently encodes collaborative dynamics from local observation, which facilitates implicit coordination in realistic settings characterized by partial observability.

Occupancy prediction at voxel-level granularity is essential for safe robotic navigation and interaction in complex environments. Existing occupancy datasets, however, are predominantly designed for autonomous driving with vehicle-centric biases -- forward-facing cameras, far-field geometry, and static road priors -- limiting their applicability to embodied humanoid perception. We present Humanoid-OmniOcc, a large-scale panoramic stereo-based occupancy dataset tailored for humanoid robots. The dataset encompasses 15 diverse simulated indoor scenes and 5 real-world environments, yielding over 155K samples with broad scene and style diversity. Importantly, the dataset is designed around a Real2Sim2Real closed-loop paradigm: real sensor specifications drive physically accurate simulation, simulation produces large-scale annotated training data, and models trained in simulation are directly evaluated on real-world captures -- enabling iterative refinement of the sim-to-real pipeline. We further propose \textbf{H}umanoid \textbf{S}urround \textbf{S}tereo-guided \textbf{Occ}upancy model (Humanoid-OmniOcc) that exploits robust depth priors for accurate 2D-to-3D lifting. Extensive experiments show that Humanoid-OmniOcc consistently outperforms monocular baselines and generalizes well to both unseen simulated test scenes and real-world environments, validating the effectiveness of the Real2Sim2Real design. Code and data will be available upon acceptance at https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/humanoid-omniocc.

Vine robots, a class of soft, growing robots, are suitable for navigating complex and confined environments due to their compliant bodies and self-supporting growth mechanism. However, hysteresis, tether interactions, and deformations make them difficult to predict and model, which in turn limits the effectiveness of conventional planning and control approaches. In this work, we present a data-driven, vision-based control framework for the first autonomous vine robot system. Our system integrates 19 cameras distributed along the robot's body to provide comprehensive feedback of both the robot state and the surrounding environment. Using this rich whole-body vision feedback, we train an end-to-end visuomotor policy from demonstrations for closed-loop autonomous control in complex environments. The policy efficiently aggregates information from distributed sensing while maintaining robustness to inaccurate robot states and actuation. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned policy enables robust navigation and manipulation in challenging scenarios, including steering through branched structures, climbing up slopes, traversing unsupported terrain, reaching objects precisely, and maneuvering through confined spaces and obstacles. Project website https://panovine-bot.github.io

Multi-zone HVAC control is a spatial decision problem in which indoor thermal evolution and control decisions depend not only on outdoor conditions and internal heat gains but also on zone layout, physical adjacency, and delayed thermal interactions across the building. Recent LLM-based HVAC controllers have shown that prompt-based control is feasible. However, these methods typically rely on task descriptions, observation values, short textual feedback, or unstructured retrieval, which limits their ability to reason about zone coupling, thermal response, and building dynamics. This paper presents a thermodynamics-aware LLM control framework for a five-zone EnergyPlus building simulation. The controller is grounded in a physics-informed spatial knowledge graph derived from Brick-style building semantics and linked with recent interaction history. At each control step, the model receives the current building state, graph-structured spatial context, and recent environment-controller history, enabling it to make decisions that reflect both building structure and short-term thermal evolution. We evaluate the framework against standard control baselines and several LLM-based alternatives. Results show that the proposed approach achieves the best overall energy-comfort trade-off and the lowest PMV violation while maintaining energy-efficient operation.

Imitation learning for robotic manipulation relies on large sets of human demonstration trajectories, which are often noisy and temporally irregular due to variable operator speed, intermittent pauses, and inconsistent action density. A common preprocessing strategy is time-uniform downsampling to shorten sequences, but it cannot effectively remove speed-induced non-uniformity or redundant pauses. This mismatch degrades data quality and hinders policy learning. To address this issue, we propose Information-Standardized Trajectory Resampling (ISR), an offline preprocessing method for effective imitation learning. ISR resamples each trajectory by enforcing approximately equal information distance between adjacent points. Specifically, we map trajectories onto an information-modulated Riemannian manifold and perform geodesic-equidistant parameterization. We construct an information-intensity field from velocity and acceleration norms: the velocity term removes small-motion redundancy, while the acceleration term preserves high-curvature and fine-manipulation phases. We evaluate ISR on three real-world manipulation tasks with mainstream imitation learning policies. Compared with the baseline time-uniform 3x downsampling, ISR improves task success rates by about 25%, remains robust across datasets collected from different operators, and reduces both dataset size and training cost. The code and videos are publicly available at https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/isr.page.

Fixed-Position Antennas (FPAs) are constrained by static physical topologies and struggle to adapt to rapidly varying wireless environments. By dynamically reconfiguring the antenna positions, Fluid Antenna Systems (FASs) introduce additional spatial Degrees of Freedom (DoF) for wireless optimization. This paper investigates the joint optimization of Fluid Antenna System (FAS) topology reconfiguration and active beamforming for mobile Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems. To enable real-time decision making, an end-to-end optimization framework based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves an online inference latency of only 4 ms. Compared to the widely used alternating optimization, it improves communication performance by 42%. Moreover, it achieves performance comparable to the SCA-SDR benchmark while requiring 57% fewer antennas, demonstrating superior hardware efficiency.

Waveguide-integrated single-photon avalanche detectors (SPADs) are essential components of integrated photonics platforms for scalable extreme-low-light applications without the use of cryogenics. Here, we demonstrate an integrated SPAD for visible light operating at room temperature in a free-running mode without gating. The device is based on a doped silicon diode end-fire-coupled to a silicon nitride (SiN) photonic integrated circuit (PIC). We investigate a range of lateral and vertical doping profile designs, and operate the devices with a simple current-mode passive quenching circuit. The optimal device is a laterally-doped p-i-n+ SPAD with a maximum photon detection efficiency (PDE) of 1.95 +/- 0.32% for input light at 685 nm wavelength, when reverse-biased at an excess of 1.5 V beyond the breakdown voltage of 15.0 V. We identify promising avenues for improving device performance, which would enable such integrated SPADs to be an attractive choice for cutting-edge integrated photonics solutions in quantum technologies, low-light imaging, and high-speed communications at visible wavelengths.

Recent advancements in generative imitation learning have significantly propelled the field of robotic manipulation. However, the majority of existing models rely heavily on Behavior Cloning (BC), a paradigm that suffers from compounding errors and distributional shift. Consequently, the efficacy of these models in practical industrial deployments remains limited. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel, plug-and-play fine-tuning pipeline designed to facilitate the robust deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in real-world environments. In contrast to contemporary reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning strategies, which are often constrained by specific model architectures, our proposed framework is model-agnostic and adaptable to a diverse range of VLA models. We conceptualize VLA-generated actions as a unified interface, upon which we train a residual policy. This policy is designed to rectify suboptimal actions and address the distributional shift inherent in imitation learning. Additionally, we incorporate human-in-the-loop guidance to ensure safe exploration and maximize training efficiency. We conduct experiments directly in real-world robotic settings. The results demonstrate that within only 1.5 hour of real-world online RL training, the average success rate exceeds 95% on real robots. Our work presents a practical solution for deploying behavior cloning models in industrial scenarios.

Long-term memory has become increasingly important for LLM agents that operate across extended interactions and evolving task contexts. Recent memory systems have made past experiences more persistent, compact, and retrievable, but retrieval alone does not ensure that a memory provides valid evidence for the current query. When experiences are compressed into reusable fragments, memories from different situations may appear equally relevant if they involve recurring entities or user states. We refer to this failure as context collapse: memories lose the surrounding context needed to judge whether they provide valid evidence for the current query. To address this problem, we propose Contextual Reinstatement for Agentic Memory (RaMem), a framework that turns retrieved memory fragments into contextually verifiable evidence. RaMem operates through four coordinated stages: (i) evidence anchoring grounds each memory in its original episodic conditions, especially event time, mention time, session span, and participants; (ii) recall condition induction derives the evidence conditions implied by the query; (iii) validity-aware retrieval uses these conditions to prioritize context-compatible memories while retaining content-relevant candidates as fallback evidence; and (iv) context-preserved synthesis keeps the selected memories' structured context available to the generator. Experiments on long-term memory benchmarks show that RaMem consistently improves performance over strong memory baselines, with average F1 gains of more than 10% across several backbones.

We present Cloak, a training recipe that endows a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer by cloaking the end-effector from its own wrist camera. The end-effector occupies a large and consistent region of the wrist view and masking it allows for embodiment-agnostic visual reasoning. Cloak renders a mask in simulation from the robot's known geometry, accurately and in real time, with no segmentation or generative models. During training, we augment the mask so the model generalizes to embodiments unseen at training time. We demonstrate the recipe with Cloak-VLA, a VLA trained with Cloak on a single parallel-jaw gripper dataset. No data of new embodiments is ever collected. Cloak-VLA transfers zero-shot to various unseen embodiments, including another gripper, another arm, and a five-fingered hand, while preserving the source embodiment's performance. By decoupling the wrist view from its own embodiment, Cloak allows data to outlive the hardware it was collected on.

Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full foundation-model backbone. This makes formal analysis tractable with existing tools while preserving the Controller's expressive power for task reasoning. To show that the decomposed policy remains capable of solving diverse tasks, we evaluate FEARL on three simulated robotic domains using multiple Controller backbones and training procedures, including pretrained off-the-shelf vision-language-action models. We further transfer the learned policy from one of our simulated tasks to a physical robot, suggesting that the low-dimensional safety interface supports practical sim-to-real transfer.

Mainstream Fast-Slow dual system vision-language-action models decouple a high-frequency action expert from a low-frequency vision-language model for efficiency, yet they face a fundamental frequency dilemma: large update gaps cause semantic drift from stale context, while small gaps erode the intended computational savings. Moreover, because the action expert receives only the VLM's final-layer representation at a single fixed frequency, rich intermediate features are discarded, limiting both information coupling and manipulation precision. Inspired by multi-timescale neural processing in the human brain, we introduce UniFS, a unified fast-to-slow architecture that resolves these challenges through three key designs. First, we stratify the VLM layers into groups with progressively decreasing update frequencies, enabling shallow layers to capture fast-changing dynamics while deeper layers cache stable semantic context. Second, a latent vector inversion mechanism re-routes the interaction order between multi-scale VLM features and the action expert, aligning fast-varying representations with fine-grained action decoding and slow-varying ones with coarse planning. Third, a multi-level supervision strategy enforces a coarse-to-fine learning hierarchy across temporal scales. Together, these designs enable richer cross-frequency information transfer within a single backbone, while the low-frequency pathways additionally preserve temporal context across steps. Experiments on LIBERO show that UniFS achieves state-of-the-art performance (98.3\% average success rate, a 2.5\% gain over VLA-Adapter baseline) while reducing average inference latency from 36.5~ms to 17.8~ms (2.1$\times$ speedup). Real-robot experiments on a Franka platform further validate its practical applicability. Code is opensourced at https://github.com/linsun449/UniFS.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing material research and discovery. However, its development in metamaterials is bottlenecked by a shortage of high-quality and executable structure-response databases, which are locked within scientific literatures as a mixture of text and images. Converting the rapidly growing body of scientific literatures into executable and reusable databases for machine-driven discovery is still a fundamental challenge. Here, we propose MetaDataGenAgent, a multimodal multi-agent framework that autonomously converts unstructured scientific literatures directly into metamaterial structure-response databases. MetaDataGenAgent establishes a complete literature-to-simulation pipeline through the coordinated operation of specialized agents for multimodal parameter extraction, physics-guided validation, topology-aware structural analysis, and solver-executable encoding. The framework introduces a closed-loop plan-execute-reflect mechanism that enables dynamic task decomposition, iterative validation, and feedback-driven model construction. Experimental results validate that MetaDataGenAgent can generate high-fidelity structure-response data for representative meta-atoms, which are further used to realize diverse electromagnetic functions, including far-field beam deflection, near-field holographic imaging and topologically protected surface-wave transport. By establishing an autonomous route from scientific literatures to AI-ready databases, the framework provides a general and efficient strategy that could be extended to a broad range of data-scarce scientific domains, including photonics, materials science, chemistry, computational science, and scientific automation.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a problem that requires computing collision-free paths for a set of agents from their start locations to designated goal locations. The problem has broad applications in domains where teams of robots must operate in a coordinated manner. ORCA* is a real time MAPF solver that assigns for each timestep a velocity for each agent. Due to its real time nature, it is myopic to future deadlocks that result from current decisions. ORCA*-MAPF attempts to remedy this limitation by introducing fallback mechanisms when deadlocks are detected. However, post hoc interventions often introduce significant flowtime overhead. In this paper, we introduce C-ORCA* and C-ORCA*-MAPF, continuous space MAPF algorithms that incorporate agents' entire spatial trajectory and their spatial dependencies to proactively prevent deadlocks from occurring, thus avoiding the high flowtime overhead associated with post hoc corrections in ORCA*-MAPF. The C-ORCA* family of algorithms significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art in terms of solve rate, runtime, and flowtime.

We present HERCULES, an open-source simulator and data-collection pipeline for heterogeneous multi-robot autonomy. Built upon the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5)-based simulators AirSim and Cosys-AirSim, HERCULES resolves key architectural limitations of prior frameworks to enable concurrent unmanned aerial and ground vehicle (UAV-UGV) operation in large-scale, photorealistic, dynamic environments. It introduces a new waypoint-tracking UGV controller that mirrors existing UAV control interfaces, and provides a shared navigation stack for mapping, traversability analysis, planning, and control across heterogeneous platforms. Expanding inherited sensor suites, it adds physics-based long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras and configurable night-vision modes for degraded visual environments. HERCULES provides lightweight APIs, ROS 2 wrappers, and rigorous time synchronization across sensors and platforms, and brings state-of-the-art game-engine capabilities into robotics simulation, integrating intelligent agents such as pedestrians, traffic, and wildlife with high-fidelity dynamic phenomena, including fire, flooding, and crop disease spread. HERCULES runs in two modes: passively, replaying offline-designed trajectories to generate reproducible multi-modal datasets, and actively, running an online planner in closed loop from live observations. Our experiments in heterogeneous multi-robot SLAM, collaborative perception, and exploration, using both HERCULES-generated data and active closed-loop execution, demonstrate its utility for advancing heterogeneous multi-robot autonomy. We publicly release our source code, experiment code, documentation, and datasets, including a heterogeneous multi-robot SLAM benchmark collected with two UAVs and two UGVs across kilometer-scale desert, forest, and city environments, at https://lunarlab-gatech.github.io/HERCULES-website.

Wave energy converters (WECs) require system-level techno-economic analysis to balance power production, cost, and survivability. Existing simulation tools are either too computationally costly for large-scale optimization or too narrow in disciplinary scope to support integrated design studies. This work presents MDOcean, a novel open-source WEC simulation framework for rapid early-stage design exploration, parametric analysis, and multidisciplinary optimization. MDOcean integrates hydrodynamics, dynamics, structures, and economics in a computationally efficient architecture based on analytical and semi-analytical methods that substantially reduce runtime while maintaining near-numerical accuracy. The framework includes an eigenfunction-based linear hydrodynamic solver, a quasi-linearized frequency-domain dynamics engine capable of modeling drag and saturation nonlinearities, a structural sizing module incorporating realistic yield, ultimate, buckling, storm, and fatigue design criteria, and a simple cost model for techno-economic assessment. Particular emphasis is placed on the linearized pseudo-spectral optimal control formulation, which extends frequency-domain constraint-handling approaches with a unified describing-function and analytical quadratically-constrained quadratic program framework. This formulation efficiently treats nonlinearities and constraints while preserving compatibility with optimization and frequency-domain analysis techniques. Validation and benchmarking demonstrate that MDOcean's 151 ms runtime is orders of magnitude faster than leading WEC simulation tools while maintaining agreement with higher-fidelity baselines to within a few percent in most cases. The framework also provides insight into limiting behaviors, scaling laws, subsystem interactions, and key tradeoffs governing WEC design and techno-economic performance.

Reading out a qubit often requires coupling it to a resonator, but that same resonator can also give the qubit an extra path to decay. Here, we study a way to reduce this loss using a built-in permanent electric dipole. The dipole shifts the cavity field in different directions for the qubit ground and excited states. This shift makes the relevant wave functions overlap less, which weakens the transverse qubit--cavity exchange that causes Purcell decay. In a simplified displaced rotating-wave model, this exchange vanishes at $η=\sqrt{2}$. In the full transverse model, this exact zero is lifted, but strong suppression remains at a larger dipole-induced displacement. Using dressed open-system decay rates, we find an operating point where the cavity-mediated decay is strongly reduced while the longitudinal readout signal remains finite. For the benchmark studied here, at fixed pointer separation, the normalized lifetime increases from $κT_1=11.1$ to $47.3$, and the estimated single-shot readout error drops from $0.21$ to $0.07$. These results show that permanent electric dipoles can provide an internal, channel-selective form of Purcell protection.

Closed-loop Auto Research extends automated machine learning from fixed-dataset fitting to changing the research workflow, with language-model agents editing representations and model code and acquiring external evidence. Molecular property prediction spans many small endpoints. We ask whether this action space yields improvements generalizing beyond the validation signal selecting them. We isolate three Auto Research axes, features, models, and external evidence, under a file-level ablation lock attributing each gain to one axis over a strong baseline. Across 36 endpoints in three benchmark suites we score each selected configuration once on a held-out test whose labels the search never read. A routed pipeline taking each endpoint's best validation axis reaches positive held-out gains of 0.013, 0.011, and 0.042, the transferable axis differing by suite, data on TDC, model on Polaris, feature and model on MoleculeNet. The largest model-search gain falls from 0.041 on validation to 0.003 on test, while curated data reaches 0.022 but negative 0.019 on test, two non-transfer signatures. Curated external data raises held-out CYP2C9-substrate performance by 0.17 and half-life by 0.08, admitted through a contamination filter rejecting same-source files overlapping 64 to 89 percent of test structures, necessary but not sufficient for transfer. A matched-trial automated machine learning control did not reproduce the agent's code-level model intervention, reaching 0.006 against 0.042, and the pipeline stays competitive with an 84M-parameter pretrained 3D model on the shared training split. The experiments stay within molecular property prediction, but separating discovery from held-out certification is a domain-agnostic lesson for any closed-loop system optimising a proxy for a held-out quantity.

Diffusion policies enable multimodal robot behavior but offer limited ability to choose among behavior modes at inference time, even though such control is desirable in human-robot settings. Prior solutions to this lack of control have utilized Signal Temporal Logic (STL) to express human intentions and provide corresponding guidance for diffusion policy inference. However, these approaches can only guide diffusion policies that jointly generate future actions and states, increasing both complexity and runtime. We propose a novel guidance method for action-only diffusion policies that uses a separate learned world model to enable differentiable evaluation of STL robustness, with its gradient then injected into the diffusion process. This steers behavior toward constraint satisfaction without retraining, improving constraint adherence while preserving task performance. On the Can Transport task from Robomimic, our method maintains 100% task success while reducing constraint violations from over 80% for baseline methods to 4%. We also discuss extensions toward improved robustness and more complex constraints.

High harmonic generation (HHG) is a highly nonlinear optical process in which radiation from a strong driving field is up-converted into its high-order harmonics. In atomic systems, this nonlinearity manifests itself through the intensity scaling of the emitted harmonics with the driving field strength. Despite the highly nonlinear nature of HHG, when the driving field is prepared in a classical Gaussian state and atomic depletion remains negligible, the quantum statistical properties of the generated harmonics retains classical Gaussian quantum statistics. Driving HHG with bright squeezed vacuum (BSV) light challenges this paradigm, as its enhanced field fluctuations can modify the statistical properties of the generated harmonics. In this work, we investigate the conditions under which BSV-driven HHG gives rise to non-classical Gaussian states, and identify the regimes where this Gaussian description breaks down. For bichromatic driving by a strong coherent field at frequency $ω$ and a perturbative BSV field at $2ω$, the even-harmonic response is approximately linear in the BSV quadrature, leading to non-classical multimode Gaussian entanglement in the harmonic field. We show that this state can be described as a distributed collective squeezed mode over the even-harmonic manifold, and characterize its covariance matrix, entanglement structure, and quantum teleportation fidelity as an operational benchmark. Our results highlight the potential of non-classically driven HHG as a platform for engineering Gaussian and non-Gaussian states of light in the extreme ultraviolet regime.

Self-play with naive gradient ascent cycles in two-player zero-sum games: the last iterate orbits the equilibrium. Modern methods restore last-iterate convergence by regularizing toward a reference policy -- MMD a fixed one (reaching only the regularized equilibrium), R-NaD a periodic snapshot (the engine of DeepNash). We study GARIP, which anchors to the running average, and isolate what the choice of reference controls. Our central result is a mechanism: collapse tracks the peak lag of the reference, and among causal convex averages of a fixed mean lag the running average (flat profile, peak $=$ mean) uniquely minimizes that peak, while a snapshot's sawtooth has peak $= 2\times$ mean (a one-line theorem). Two consequences follow. Convergence: we prove local last-iterate convergence at constant anchor strength -- the anchor scales the base map's rotation by $1-β$, crossing the stability boundary and turning a recurrent base into a contraction (global convergence is conjectured at small $β$; we characterize a large-$β$ consensus failure). Robustness: GARIP matches R-NaD's peak performance -- on matrix games, the Coin Game, and the board games Connect Four/Othello, both moving references are far more robust than fixed-magnet and magnet-free baselines -- but is the better hyperparameter default; we report it both ways: over the full grid collapse rates are statistically indistinguishable, yet at conventional parameterizations a matched-mean-lag setting collapses in 0/40 vs 10/40 seeds (a snapshot matches it only by knowing to shorten $K$). The boundaries: an anticipatory (negative-weight) reference does better still on the stale side, and the advantage appears only where naive self-play cycles (five deep self-play loops). All experiments are pure JAX and reproducible.

Forecasting chaotic dynamical systems such as the Lorenz attractor is notoriously difficult: small numerical errors are amplified exponentially over long autoregressive rollouts. We study seven recurrent and convolutional architectures for the AI-DEEDS 2026 Chaotic Systems Challenge: a vanilla LSTM, an LSTM with additive attention, a Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), a BiLSTM trained with the Huber loss, a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), a CNN front-end followed by an LSTM, and a CNN front-end followed by a BiLSTM. All models share the same pre-processing, sequence length, and rollout procedure, isolating the contribution of each design choice. The challenge scores predictions on a 0-100 scale where higher is better. We obtain leaderboard scores between 45.72 and 58.81, with the BiLSTM trained with Huber loss being the strongest configuration. Two findings stand out: (i) adding additive attention to the unidirectional baseline degraded performance by over ten points, and (ii) prepending a CNN front-end to either an LSTM or a BiLSTM did not help and slightly hurt the score. Per-pair RMSE measurements confirm that the BiLSTM family generalizes better in the harder pairs (6-7), while the LSTM + Attention model collapses there (RMSE up to 8.94 on pair 6). We discuss why bidirectional context and a robust loss help in chaotic regimes while attention and CNN front-ends fail in this setting.

We report the fabrication and characterization of an integrated quantum photonic device consisting of an electrically driven whispering-gallery-mode micropillar laser evanescently coupled to a ridge waveguide, both incorporating InGaAs quantum dots (QDs). The lasing characteristics of microlasers are systematically investigated as a function of the pillar-waveguide gap distance. Coherent emission from the whispering-gallery-mode microlaser coupled into the waveguide enables on-chip optical excitation of QDs embedded in an electrically contacted micropillar at the end of the waveguide. Under continuous-wave on-chip excitation, we observe single-photon emission with $g^{(2)}(0) = (3.49 \pm 0.01) \%$ for a QD integrated in the outcoupling micropillar which can be spectrally tuned-by the quantum confined Stark effect. These results constitute an important step toward low-footprint, deterministic, and scalable single-photon sources for QD-based integrated quantum photonic circuits.

Integrated structured-light sources usually obtain high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) states by encoding each channel into separate gratings, waveguides or metasurfaces, which ties modal capacity to structural complexity. Here we show that intrinsic material anisotropy can instead act as a built-in angular-momentum coupler. In an X-cut thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) microring vortex emitter, the in-plane optical axis causes a circulating whispering-gallery mode to sample a periodically varying effective index, producing continuous azimuthal phase modulation. This modulation converts each resonance from a nominal single-charge emitter into a coherent topological sideband lattice with charges l=l_p+2n and Bessel-weighted amplitudes. Broadband measurements resolve a representative principal-charge series from l_p=-13 to +13, while additional devices with 100 and 200 GHz free spectral ranges (FSRs) show scalable resonance addressability. The emitted lattices are reproduced by a forward-calculated Fourier--Bessel model, supported by OAM projection measurements, and exhibit focusing into annular perfect-vortex fields and self-healing after obstruction. Waveguide-induced circular polarization further adds a vectorial spin--orbit channel. These results turn TFLN anisotropy from a material constraint into a compact mechanism for resonance-addressed high-dimensional structured-light generation.

Classical uncertainty sets for robust optimisation impose fixed geometric shapes that cannot represent the complex dependencies present in real-world data. We propose Generative Robust Optimisation (GRO), a framework in which a deep generative model defines the uncertainty set as the image of a neural network decoder over a calibrated latent set, naturally accommodating nonlinear correlations, asymmetry, and multimodality. A five-point evaluation framework (reconstruction fidelity, distribution matching, latent regularity, robust relevance, and computational tractability) provides systematic, model-agnostic criteria for assessing any neural network-based uncertainty set. We instantiate this framework with a Wasserstein Adversarial Autoencoder employing Gaussian mixture model-guided training for latent regularity and constraint-consistency regularisation for robust relevance. Restricting the decoder to ReLU activations enables exact worst-case verification through mixed-integer programming embedding. Extensive experiments on a production planning problem across six uncertainty distributions and six generative architectures, together with a multi-period facility location study, validate the framework and demonstrate that systematic attention to all five criteria yields uncertainty sets that are simultaneously expressive, well-calibrated, and optimisation-tractable.

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling sustainable connectivity in battery-limited low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs). This paper investigates a SWIPT-enabled LAWN system in which a multi-antenna base station (BS) simultaneously delivers control information and wireless energy to a fleet of uncrewed aircraft systems (UASs) via power splitting. In particular, the BS remotely guides the UASs to accurately track predefined reference trajectories toward their destinations while avoiding multiple mobile no-fly zones (NFZs). To guarantee collision-free path planning, we first construct smooth and safe reference trajectories using stream function theory. Then, a real-time optimization problem is formulated, which jointly takes into account the wireless control cost and energy sustainability by optimizing control inputs, transmit beamforming vectors, and the power splitting ratios. To address the resultant non-convex problem, a two-stage optimization framework is proposed. First, we develop a model predictive control (MPC)-based method to generate predictive control inputs. Subsequently, we derive a computationally efficient iterative algorithm to optimize the beamforming vectors and power splitting ratios by applying semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques. We further prove that the SDR is tight for our formulation. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that our proposed design significantly outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of tracking accuracy and harvested energy, thereby validating its effectiveness for sustainable implementation in LAWN systems.

Thermal management in a battery-electric vehicle (BEV) is a coupled, vehicle-level problem: the battery pack, the passenger cabin, the heat pump, and cabin air quality compete for shared actuation and energy, yet most studies optimise a single subsystem on proprietary models, which prevents fair, reproducible comparison. We present OpenEV-ThermoSciML, an open and reproducible benchmark that couples a battery electro-thermal-aging model, a two-node cabin model, a heat-pump/HVAC model, and a CO$_2$/ventilation model under real driving cycles (EPA) and real weather (NREL TMY3, NASA POWER), scored by a multi-objective suite spanning battery health, PMV/PPD comfort, cabin air quality, and HVAC energy. The benchmark's battery thermal core is anchored and validated on real BEV battery-management-system (BMS) data; the reduced battery (two-state) and cabin (two-node) models are validated against converged higher-fidelity references and, for the cabin, independently cross-checked against EnergyPlus 25.2.0. On top of the benchmark we develop a physics-informed scientific-machine-learning (Sci-ML) surrogate -- a nominal-physics prior plus a learned residual with conservation penalties -- that is exact on conserved quantities and dominates black-box and Koopman surrogates out-of-distribution (overall rollout RMSE 0.014 vs 1.168 and 3.991). A shielded Sci-ML model-predictive controller (MPC) delivers statistically significant, all-positive improvements over a production-like rule-based controller across six scenarios -- including a real hot-day US06 trip (energy $-15\%$, comfort RMSE $-47\%$, peak CO$_2$ $-25\%$, battery thermal-gradient $-78\%$) -- and these gains transfer to an independently exported OpenModelica 8-node co-simulation plant.

We present a design agent which is a Large Language Model (LLM) that orchestrates, but does not perform, the numerical simulations to design a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) $2\times2$ directional coupler. We choose a symmetric phase-matched coupler where a lot of analytical results are available that help the design strategy. The LLM proposes candidate gap values (a geometrical dimension size) and judges convergence, while all physics is owned by deterministic solvers: a frequency-domain eigenmode solver estimates the coupling coefficient~$κ$ for the current design, and an independent Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) stage validates it. Both solvers operate on a common slab-projected two-dimensional (2D) effective-index reduction of the silicon film, so the design~$κ$ and the FDTD response are consistent by problem design; the residual between them is shown to be a single constant phase offset~$φ$, attributable to a fixed excess coupling length $L_{\mathrm{extra}}=\SI{2.837(11)}{\micro\meter}$ that we find invariant across a factor-of-two range in~$κ$. Folding this offset into a closed-loop length correction, the agent delivers a $50/50$ splitter whose FDTD-measured cross fraction is $0.498$ (target $0.500$), a residual of $0.0017$. Results are made self-consistent within the 2D effective-index model; and the LLM succeeds in delivering a suitable design over a number of attempts.

Distribution networks with high penetrations of distributed energy resources (DERs) must repeatedly allocate limited network capability in two directions: under import scarcity, which flexible demand is served, and under export congestion, which generation is curtailed. Dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) enforce hard feasibility bounds but lack intertemporal correction, while dynamic network prices (DNPs) provide an allocative signal but cannot guarantee constraint satisfaction. This paper develops a stateful cyber-physical coordination mechanism, termed an Automatic Market Maker (AMM), as an additive coordination layer for machine-to-machine DER access. The mechanism combines dual fairness states for import and export, bounded bilateral prices driven by a voltage-aware deficit signal, and feasibility-constrained matching within a two-tier MV/LV architecture. Experiments on the CSIRO MV+33LV feeder dataset compare five mechanisms and benchmark the fair-over-time DOE formulations of Moring et al. (FET, FOT, FUH). Relative to equal-allocation DOE, the AMM reduces unserved flexible demand by 76% (96.0 MWh to 23.2 MWh) with zero thermal violations and reduces export curtailment from 85.4 MWh to 64.5 MWh. Near-identical DOE and DOE-GREEDY performance confirms that heuristic choice alone does not improve repeated constrained outcomes. The AMM reaches an annual inter-feeder Jain index of 0.9998, outperforming all DOE variants from month 6 onwards. Direct benchmarking against FET/FOT/FUH shows that these mechanisms achieve higher worst-feeder equity through an explicit max-min MV objective, but operate offline over predetermined horizons and do not provide bilateral scarcity signals, real-time operation, or participant-level intertemporal correction. The two approaches address different objectives and may be combined in future work.

Smart home automation increasingly relies on user-defined rules across heterogeneous IoT devices. While these rules appear harmless in isolation, their concurrent execution creates hidden, cross-rule interactions via shared devices, environmental variables, and physical topology. These interactions result in unsafe, wasteful, or privacy-threatening behaviors that are completely invisible to text-only analysis. Existing conflict detectors remain siloed, catching either static syntactic conflicts or specific environment-mediated interactions without unifying the two or providing actionable repairs for non-expert users. This paper presents SHACR, a smart home conflict resolution framework that anchors Large Language Model (LLM) unpredictability by grounding its reasoning in a formal, directed knowledge graph. SHACR encodes devices, capabilities, physical states, and Trigger-Condition-Action rules as typed, traversable entities. By elevating physical cause-effect relationships to first-class graph edges, SHACR transforms conflict detection from fragile text inference into deterministic multi-hop graph traversal, unifying logical, semantic, and physical conflict classes. It drives a closed-loop Scan-Explain-Repair-Validate workflow that uses the graph to bound the LLM's action space. We evaluated SHACR on a testbed of 203 rules deployed across 70 apartments within a smart building. By holding the underlying LLM fixed and introducing SHACR's knowledge graph, classification errors drop by 36.7\%, F1 rises from 0.59 to 0.79, and few-shot calibration further lifts F1 to 0.95, whereas the same calibration barely helps a graph-free LLM. Ultimately, this work challenges the current AI paradigm, establishing that structured knowledge representation is a far more critical factor for dependable IoT automation management than prompt engineering or underlying model architecture.

This paper investigates control-aware attacks against ArduPilot-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), inwhich an adversary exploits the sensitivity of flight-controller dynamics to parameter changes to cause loss of control and crashes. It describes six attacks that exploit interactions among multi-layer controllers by modifying Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) gains, altering Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) estimation configuration, and violating failsafe assumptions, thereby forcing ArduPilot into unsafe operating conditions. We evaluate the attacks in Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) simulation and validate them on a Pixhawk 2.4.8 hardware platform. The results show that short sequences of well-formed MAVLink messages can exploit controller sensitivity to parameter values and updates frequency, affecting controller states and degrading attitude stability, angular-rate behavior, trajectory tracking, and estimator health. We demonstrate that when multiple effects are combined, the vehicle can enter an unsafe state and crashes. These findings show that security gaps in input-parameter handling, command trust, and controller-state validation can be exploited to cause loss of control and crashes in UAVs.

Ensuring safety of learning-enabled robotic manipulation across diverse embodiments and tasks still requires significant manual engineering. Existing approaches typically rely on heuristically designed fallback controllers or complex forward invariance assessments. These methods are often too conservative for task success, too computationally expensive for real-time execution, too heuristic to provide useful safety guarantees, or too engineering-heavy to transfer between setups. In this paper, we propose a universal safeguarding approach, X-Safe, which reasons directly in the robot's configuration space to provide formal probabilistic guarantees for collision avoidance. By operating in the configuration space, our method transfers across embodiments while relying solely on an object-based, quasi-static scene representation and a forward kinematics model of the robotic manipulator. Thus, X-Safe provides useful formal safety guarantees without requiring additional data, or engineering effort for different embodiments or scenes. We demonstrate X-Safe for diverse embodiments and policies, both in simulation and on hardware. We observe less degradation in task performance compared to state-of-the-art safeguarding, no collisions on hardware experiments, and empirically corroborate our formal guarantees.

Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a significant threat even for projects with extensive fuzzing and manual auditing. Recent results suggest that large language models hold great promise for detecting such vulnerabilities, but they are unreliable, at risk of hallucination, and challenging to scale to repository-size codebases. This paper presents Revelio, a cost-efficient end-to-end agentic framework for memory-safety vulnerability discovery. Revelio addresses the problem of hallucination by generating an executable Proof-of-Vulnerability, which is checked with a deterministic sanitizer. It reduces cost using inexpensive LLMs and lightweight static analysis to help generate and rank vulnerability hypotheses, reporting vulnerabilities only when they can be reproduced and confirmed by a sanitizer. We evaluated Revelio on seven production-quality projects that had been continuously fuzzed for five to eight years, as well as on 100 randomly selected Arvo projects from the CyberGym benchmark. With around one hour per project and a total cost of $300, Revelio discovered 19 previously unknown memory-safety vulnerabilities. On benchmarks, Revelio outperformed frontier coding agents across diverse backbone models at comparable token costs. Our results suggest that Revelio enables scalable and trustworthy end-to-end LLM-based memory-safety vulnerability detection.

We consider learning-based control in LQR setting, where the parameters associated with each mode are a priori unknown. The next mode to be activated is revealed online only at the time of switching. The objective is to determine both the switching times and the control gains for each mode such that (1) the norm of the system state remains bounded according to a prescribed criterion, and (2) the accumulated cost is minimized. To formalize the state-norm requirement, we introduce the notion of $(α,β)$-controllability for given parameters $α$ and $β$. We first study the problem in a known model setting and show that, under the switching mechanism described above and under the assumption that each mode is visited infinitely often, the strategy that minimizes the average expected cost consists of applying, in each mode, the feedback gain obtained from the solution of the discrete algebraic Riccati equation, while selecting dwell times that sufficiently satisfy the controllability condition. We refer to this strategy as the benchmark policy. Next, we propose an algorithm for the unknown-model setting that minimizes the regret, defined as the difference between the cumulative cost incurred by the online algorithm and that of the offline benchmark. By accurately estimating dwell-time errors, our method achieves an expected regret of $\mathcal{O}(|\mathcal{M}|^{1/4} n_s^{3/4} + n_m)$, where $n_s$ denotes the number of switches, $|\mathcal{M}|$ is the number of modes, and $n_m$ is the number of malignant switches.

LLM "agent societies" are studied via demonstrations of emergent consensus or polarization -- with no measurable control parameter, no theory of when each regime appears, and no test of whether an outcome is a genuine social dynamic or a model artifact. We introduce the coupling gain gamma, measured per-agent by counterfactually perturbing a neighbour's stated opinion. (i) gamma is stable and model-distinguishing -- across five frontier models it spans 0.15-0.43 (n=20, 95% CIs <= 0.025), paraphrase-invariant; social-neighbour gamma roughly equals numeric-anchor gamma, so gamma is evidence-coupling, not uniquely social. (ii) Classical dynamics with measured (not assumed) coefficients organise the regime: Friedkin-Johnsen for consensus/pluralism, signed-Laplacian/structural-balance for polarization. (iii) Frontier LLMs do not spontaneously backfire (beta <= 0), so default societies do not self-polarize -- polarization is always induced; the beta>0 branch arises only in the FJ surrogate, never in the agents. (iv) A randomized-initial-condition diagnostic -- the (slope, bias) of final vs. initial opinion -- separates genuine averaging from model-prior artifacts (boundary-censoring ruled out by construction via interior-valued facts); applied to a published "emergent consensus" result (Chuang et al. 2023) it reveals a model-specific conflation: averaging on debatable claims, prior-artifact on settled facts. (v) Coupling is context-dependent: pairwise gamma does not predict multi-neighbour outcomes -- it can order them backwards -- whereas a modality-matched group coupling does (sixteen closed+open models, Pearson r=-0.70, permutation p=0.008). The regime laws take this matched coupling, not the single-neighbour gamma: emergent consensus must be read from coupling in the target interaction. We contribute a measurement protocol and a validity instrument, not new theory.

Electrochromic devices (ECDs) offer a compelling route toward low-power, non-emissive optical modulators with nonvolatile states. However, their widespread implementation is hindered by limitations in operating voltage, switching speed, color tunability, and long-term stability. Mixed ionic-electronic conductors (MIECs) provide a promising alternative platform, enabling optical modulation through ion-driven redox and structural transformations. Oxygen-based MIECs offer enhanced durability, environmental robustness, and compatibility with oxide electronics and silicon photonics, yet remain largely underexplored for electrochromic and photonic applications. Here, we demonstrate structure-driven analog optical control in an ion-pumped SrFeO$_{3-δ}$ thin-film device by undergoing reversible oxygen-driven phase transitions between brownmillerite and perovskite structures. Phase transition is accompanied by pronounced changes in its electronic structure and optical constants. By harnessing these ion-induced structural transformations and integrating an optically passive Al$_2$O$_3$ interference layer, we achieve continuous and reversible modulation of optical transmittance and color. These results provide a general framework for ion-driven analog photonic and electrochromic devices and highlight the potential of oxygen-based MIECs for next-generation ionochromic systems compatible with silicon-based photonic platforms.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful and convenient tool to modernize controller design. In this work, we study the zero-shot transfer of RL-based control policies from simulation to hardware for cart-pole swing-up and stabilization. The two policies are trained independently, and the handoff is implemented in Simulink via switching logic. We apply a first-order action smoothing filter to prevent hardware damage from high-frequency oscillatory actuation. Pairing this bandwidth-aware filtering with sensitivity-guided domain randomization (DR) and a simple linear curriculum learning (CL) schedule, we obtain a swing-up policy that in all of our experiments injects sufficient energy for handoff into the stabilizer's region of attraction. The stabilization policy rejects disturbances within the tested range, and the swing-up policy can re-engage after larger perturbations and restores the pendulum to the inverted position.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) constitute a rapidly maturing class of scientific machine learning models in which the governing equations of a physical system are embedded directly into the training objective as soft constraints. By enforcing partial differential equations (PDEs), conservation laws, and constitutive relationships during optimization, PINNs enable the construction of models that are simultaneously data-efficient, physically consistent, and capable of operating in regimes where measurements are sparse or indirect. In contrast to conventional deep learning, where the loss is typically defined solely in terms of data misfit, the learning task in PINNs is reformulated as a constrained optimization problem in which admissible solutions are confined to the manifold defined by the underlying physics. This review provides a comprehensive assessment of recent developments in physics-informed machine learning with an emphasis on PINN-based formulations for forward modelling, inverse design, and equation discovery across nanophotonics, fluid mechanics, astronomy, and biomedical engineering. Particular attention is devoted to how physical knowledge is injected at different stages of the modelling pipeline, including synthetic data generation, non-dimensionalization and scaling, architecture selection, loss design, and post-training regularization. We highlight emerging strategies for multi-physics coupling, transfer learning across parameter and geometry spaces, and rigorous benchmarking against established numerical solvers. Finally, the review discusses interpretability, uncertainty quantification, and hardware acceleration, and articulates how physics-informed learning is reshaping engineering practice by enabling digital twins and design workflows that combine simulation and data in a unified differentiable framework.

Today's transistors dictate the voltage and charge scales for both logic and memory. While AI systems are recognized to be limited by memory energy, the dominant share of the energy is expended in the intrachip interconnects whose voltage and charge scales are set by transistors. The energy scaling challenges of transistors can be attributed to simultaneously meeting high current density, high current/impedance modulation, and the inability to lower voltages. Hence, a new logic element that lowers the voltage and charge needs is a priority, not only for lowering logic power but also memory access power. Here, we propose a novel 3-terminal logic element for low energy computing, a solid-state transcapacitor (TCAP). A TCAP is a solid state displacement current modulator realized by a gate which controls the charge-voltage relationship of the channel. Unlike transistors, TCAPs eliminate the dissipative transport current, are not bound by the Boltzmann current modulation limit, and operate with displacement currents limited only by the polarization response and contact resistance. Hence, TCAP circuits may simultaneously overcome the voltage, current density, and current modulation limits of CMOS. We describe a solid state TCAP using a piezoelectric transcapacitor in which a gate-controlled stressor modulates the capacitance of a polar channel via electromechanical coupling. This device achieves inversion and gain, essential for logic, and is functionally equivalent to a 1T-1C memory cell, enabling dense memory. Using voltage scaling, capacitive energy recovery, and high polarization densities of polar materials, the logic based on TCAP offers a pathway to 100 fold lower energy consumption with a delay comparable to ultimately scaled CMOS devices. This approach provides a new potential pathway for low-energy computing beyond the limits of transistors using electro-mechanics and multiferroics.