Learning Heterogeneous Tactile Representation for General Dexterous ManipulationTactile sensing is an indispensable modality for contact-rich dexterous manipulation, a capability that hints at the ultimate frontiers of embodied intelligence. However, commercially available tactile sensors are still at a relatively early stage of development, with each type of sensor offering irreplaceable strengths alongside its own drawbacks. A key challenge is thus to free tactile understanding from sensor-specific physics, so that embodied models can effectively leverage heterogeneous tactile data. To this end, we develop LingBot-Touch, a tactile foundation model characterized by the following properties. (i) Our model yields a unified representation across different tactile sensors (i.e., piezoresistive, magnetic, and visuotactile sensors), and is easily extensible to new sensor types. (ii) The resulting tactile tokens are plug-and-play: they can be seamlessly integrated into policy models across paradigms, from diffusion policy to vision-language-action (VLA) models such as π_{0.5} and LingBot-VLA, consistently enhancing manipulation dexterity. (iii) Extensive experiments, spanning simulation and real-robot deployments across multiple hardware platforms, demonstrate that our tactile representation substantially benefits complex manipulation tasks while maintaining strong computational efficiency. We believe the findings in this work demonstrate the potential of leveraging cross-sensor data to scale tactile learning, and offer encouraging insights for the design of future hardware and embodied models.
WorldFoundry: Towards Unified Infrastructure for World IntelligenceVisual generative models increasingly blur the line between synthesizing observations and simulating environments. Yet visual plausibility alone does not constitute successful world modeling: compelling outputs may lack persistent state, physical dynamics, or causally consistent responses to interactions. We define a generative world model as a predictive dynamical system that maintains a persistent, history-conditioned representation of an environment, updates that representation in response to actions or interventions, and generates temporally coherent trajectories that reflect outcomes under observed and counterfactual interventions. From this definition, we derive an intelligence-oriented framework spanning perceptual grounding, persistent state modeling, controllable transformation, dynamics-aware prediction, and closed-loop interaction. We present WorldFoundry, open-source infrastructure for reproducible inference and evaluation across video, 3D and 4D, embodied action, and interactive world systems. WorldFoundry unifies model and benchmark discovery, runtime and asset preparation, execution orchestration, artifact management, and interactive visualization, while modality-specific adapters preserve native inputs, execution semantics, output representations, and evaluation protocols. Explicit manifests, durable artifact contracts, and evidence-aware scorecards separate execution readiness from evaluative claims, making each claim traceable to its supporting artifacts. The catalog contains 270 model entries, 74 benchmarks, and 62 registered metric entries, with readiness and execution evidence recorded separately. WorldFoundry enables reproducible comparison of persistent, controllable dynamics across heterogeneous systems, advancing the field from perceptual synthesis toward measurable world intelligence.
Reframe: Observation-Aligned Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Visual ReasoningAgentic reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) offer complementary routes to post-training. For visual agents, however, tool use presents two related challenges. Models may overlook useful tool-returned observations, while poorly grounded actions can limit the evidence available for subsequent distillation. We introduce Reframe, a post-training framework that treats the observation state, rather than only the output distribution, as an object of alignment. First, Ground-Drop-GRPO (GD-GRPO) trains spatial and temporal specialists with evidence-aware rewards and stochastic removal of the original visual input, encouraging them to acquire grounded evidence and use the returned observations. Second, Observation-Gated-MOPD (OG-MOPD) replaces deficient tool actions with canonical ones mid-rollout and resumes distillation from the repaired observation. The two stages complement each other, as learning to rely on tool-returned observations can help the policy benefit from observation repair. Neither stage requires a task-specific SFT cold start. Extensive experiments over 14 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that Reframe outperforms both Mix-RL and vanilla MOPD. Ablation results show that GD-GRPO increases observation dependence and tool gain compared with outcome-based GRPO.
Sage-Taiyi: A Metacognitive Architecture for Scientific DiscoveryWe introduce Sage-Taiyi, a metacognition-inspired architecture that uses accumulated scientific understanding to guide what to investigate next and how to investigate it. Through explicit monitoring and control, the system revises its understanding of evidence, assumptions, and unresolved questions, then uses these assessments to adapt research targets and select reusable reasoning methods. On Taiyi-Bench, an AI co-scientist ideation benchmark comprising 265 tasks from 50 papers across ten disciplines, Sage-Taiyi ranks first on all eight metrics of historical rediscovery and open-ended ideation, achieving an Overall score of 54.0 compared with 47.9 for the strongest baseline, AI Scientist-v2. It also performs well on two external scientific ideation benchmarks. Five expert-guided collaborations further connect its proposals to experimental and computational validation across chemistry, materials science, and engineering. In chemistry, reaction-condition optimization raises the yield of cobalt-catalyzed carbonylation from trace amounts to 84% and photocatalytic allylic amination from 13% to 69%. These results support metacognitive regulation as an approach to scientific ideation and its progression toward practical validation.
ReproBridge: Building Reproducibility into ML Research ArtifactsReproducing machine learning experiments requires reconstructing procedures from information scattered across papers, released code, and supporting artifacts. For coding agents, reproduction success can therefore depend on their ability to fill in missing details, rather than on the released artifacts alone. We ask whether preserving recovered procedures and decisions improves subsequent independent reproduction. We define a standardized artifact design comprising a refined codebase, environment setup, experiment launchers, and a reproduction guide, and introduce ReproBridge, an agent workflow for constructing these refined reproducible artifacts. ReproBridge-Bench provides 1,029 tasks from 387 experiments across 36 papers, anchored by five human-verified reference scores per task. Agents attempt tasks in fresh sessions with raw code or refined artifacts; a separate Auditor checks execution evidence. Across four evaluated models, refined artifacts raise mean reproduction success from 76.4% to 92.6% and reduce downstream API spending by 19.7% on average. The cross-model success-rate spread narrows from 21.6 to 3.9 percentage points, with all four models achieving mean success rates above 90%. Removing any component reduces success in the ablation study, with the largest losses from code and environment removal. These results suggest that preserving execution knowledge helps even models with lower raw-code success reproduce experiments more reliably and at lower API cost.
Flide: Accelerating Decision Inference with Exact State ForkingDecision models such as Jev have emerged as a highly promising paradigm for LLM agent systems, providing lightweight and reliable categorical reasoning for rapid System One execution. However, existing generation-oriented inference engines fail to support these workloads effectively, suffering from severe prefix recomputation overheads or distorted output probabilities. To address this challenge, we propose Flide, an efficient and exact inference engine that decouples the logical tree structure of a decision request from its physical execution within a single flattened token stream. Through ForkAttention, Flide navigates request dependencies using GPU-resident indices across both standard attention and recurrent Gated DeltaNet layers, guaranteeing in exact arithmetic that every query branch evaluates identically to an isolated forward pass. By expressing branch topologies directly in GPU-resident metadata, Flide accommodates diverse request mixtures with a compact set of pre-recorded execution graphs while enabling expanding agent histories to resume from checkpoints saved in earlier passes. Extensive evaluations on public hybrid and decision models demonstrate that Flide answers queries up to 9.5 times faster than vLLM and SGLang while staying closest to a float32 reference in total variation distance. By unifying physical execution throughput with mathematical exactness, Flide establishes a principled foundation for scalable, latency-critical decision intelligence in agent systems.
SIRIS: Can LLMs Tell When Simulation Errors Matter in AI-Driven Systems ResearchLLM agents increasingly drive systems research and rely on simulators to evaluate candidate designs at scale. Simulators are imperfect by design: their modeling limitations can distort predictions yet leave the recommended design correct, or change which design should be selected. We introduce Siris to test whether LLMs can tell these cases apart, judging from their systems understanding when a limitation invalidates the simulator's recommendation. By perturbing a simulator, Siris constructs workload pairs with the same candidates, limitation, and simulator recommendation. The perturbation changes predictions on both workloads, yet a reference simulator supports the recommendation on only one. Evaluating thirteen frontier LLMs on LLM serving design problems, we find that identifying a limitation does not ensure a correct choice, and even the strongest models sometimes abandon valid recommendations. Self-correction through a review turn helps these models restore valid choices but introduces new errors in several others. These findings motivate evaluating systems understanding through design decisions under imperfect simulators.
How Much Training-Inference Mismatch Can On-Policy Distillation Tolerate?On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student language model on its own responses, guided by a fixed teacher. Generating these responses is expensive, so systems use quantized inference and asynchronous rollouts to reduce the cost. Both, however, introduce training-inference mismatch between the rollout engine and the model being trained. Such mismatch can destabilize reinforcement learning (RL), but its effects on OPD remain unclear. This paper investigates how much mismatch OPD tolerates, where its effects arise, and how training systems can use this tolerance. Measuring all mismatch sources on one scale, we examine quantization across three student-teacher pairs, with additional tests of weight staleness and injected noise on one pair. OPD tolerates substantial mismatch without meaningful loss of training quality but degrades at higher levels, revealing an empirical mismatch budget. Both the quality cost of mismatch and the mismatch introduced by quantization depend on the model, with some layers particularly sensitive to reduced precision. In controlled comparisons, OPD remains stable under rollout configurations that destabilize RL methods. Under weight noise, mismatch also shifts the prefixes reached during generation, introducing errors that per-token corrections cannot address. To put these findings into practice, we introduce a lightweight admission check that screens rollout configurations against a calibrated budget without requiring a full training run for each candidate. Model-specific FP8 recipes preserve training quality while providing capacity for at least 1.93times as many KV-cache tokens as BF16. Combining FP8 with asynchronous rollouts reaches the same training quality 1.62times sooner than synchronous BF16 training. Code is available at https://github.com/benyucong/train-inference-mismatch-opd
TRIO: Task Refinement with Individual Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented GenerationThis paper studies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which leverages external knowledge to improve the performance of language models. Despite the remarkable progress, current RAG approaches are still far from satisfactory due to inadequate retrieval and potential hallucinations. Towards this end, we propose a novel approach named Task Refinement with Individual Optimization (TRIO) for RAG. The core idea of our TRIO is to equip three well-designed agents with an iterative refinement paradigm by aligning their individual optimization objectives. Specifically, we first expand ambiguous queries with a query extension agent and quantify the reward based on the improved answer quality, which can be utilized to refine our agent for higher expansion efficiency. To enhance the retrieval quality, we include a unanimity voting to annotate the expanded query as insufficient or sufficient, and their generative outcomes are utilized as ground truth to optimize the judge agent. To further improve evidence utilization and answer accuracy, an answer agent is optimized with dynamic matching-based rewards with curriculum learning for final outputs. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed TRIO in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/yingtaoren/TRIO.
FewStepRL: Fine-tuning Few-step Diffusion Models with Reinforcement LearningReinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training method for diffusion models, but most RL objectives roll out the current policy at every iteration, and with a many-step sampler these rollouts typically dominate the cost of training. Few-step models cut this cost, yet they model an average velocity over an interval, whereas existing RL objectives are built for an instantaneous velocity with a many-step sampler. We adapt RL objectives to few-step models systematically in three phases, namely a transformation, a decomposition and an adaptation. The transformation to x-space expresses each objective we consider through a common policy prediction, at the clean end by default and at an explicitly marked level for transition or flow-map objectives, so that objectives stated over densities, velocities or rewards become comparable. The decomposition writes the gradient of each of these objectives as the sum of a self-regression toward a reference and a reward augmentation, so that a method reduces, at the gradient level, to a choice of anchors and weights. The adaptation computes each anchor from a few-step model at the end of its transport or along its tangent, with the instantaneous velocity recovered from the network itself or from an auxiliary network. This yields few-step versions of FlowGRPO, AWM, DiffusionNFT, DiffusionOPSD and ReFL in one modular codebase. In our experiments, reward-gradient-based methods are the most effective when the reward is differentiable and its gradient is affordable; otherwise DiffusionNFT-style methods generally reach high rewards in relatively few iterations despite a sometimes higher per-iteration cost. Extra inference steps show no systematic aggregate benefit in our experiments, although selected outputs visibly improve with two to four times as many sampling steps as in training.
AutoVend: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Autonomous Vending OperationsLarge language model (LLM) agents are extending agent-mediated commerce on the Web from shopping for consumers to operating businesses for sellers. In online-to-offline (O2O) commerce, decisions are issued through Web-based platforms but realized through costly physical execution. Evaluating such agents requires going beyond individual transactions to ask whether decisions made online turn into sustained economic returns. We introduce AutoVend, a benchmark in which one LLM agent manages 20 vending machines across five site types through a Web-based operating interface for 180 simulated days. Its data-grounded simulator combines a shared warehouse, procurement lead times, paid replenishment, inventory expiration, and recurring operating costs. We evaluate five LLM agents against a rule-based inventory-control baseline and diagnose their site coordination, execution, and performance over time. Four of five evaluated LLM agents fall short of this baseline, and returns per dollar of inference cost rank models differently from returns alone. Operational analyses show that gains in individual metrics do not consistently yield stronger economic growth, as inventory and execution costs erode these gains. Trajectory analysis further reveals difficulties in grounding feasible actions, managing inventory commitments, and converting feedback into effective policy revisions.
JoVox: Joint Hierarchical Flow Matching for Lightweight Voxel GenerationGenerating high-fidelity voxels while keeping their lightweight nature remains an open problem in computer vision. Current generators are either high-fidelity but computationally heavy, or lightweight but of lower fidelity. Hierarchical methods keep the lightweight nature of voxels. However, their coarse levels, which decide where all finer cells can appear, are generated with the least information about the shape and are never revisited, so they are often plausible but wrong. Our key insight is to let finer cells take part in deciding coarse cells. To this end, we propose JoVox, a discrete flow matching framework that learns the joint distribution of all levels of the voxel hierarchy, instead of a separate distribution for each level, so that coarse cells can be predicted with finer cells already generated nearby. Within this framework, we further introduce a two-level prediction, which outputs the cells two levels finer at once instead of one level finer, halving the number of levels that the network processes and yielding voxels of higher fidelity. We also introduce an unmasking strategy that revisits early decisions once finer cells are generated and corrects inconsistencies in masked diffusion models. Our framework outperforms the baselines on both unconditional and image-conditioned voxel generation. Compared with the current state-of-the-art TRELLIS.2, we achieve 8x higher training throughput, 1/15 of the FLOPs in a forward pass, train on 4 vs. 32 GPUs, and obtain higher quality with an 11% lower Chamfer distance.
SkinMind: Equipping Agentic RAG with Human-Inspired Graph Probing for Reliable Dermatology AIReliable dermatology AI requires access to verifiable evidence distributed across heterogeneous textual and visual sources. However, conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) typically relies on one-shot retrieval from flat corpora, limiting its ability to adapt retrieval granularity, explore multi-hop relations, and integrate multimodal clinical evidence. We introduce SkinMind, a multimodal agentic RAG framework that equips policy models with human-inspired graph probing for autonomous evidence seeking. SkinMind organizes retrieval as an iterative interaction between an orchestrator and a graph environment. Through eight hierarchical graph-probing tools, the orchestrator progressively identifies relevant entities, inspects node-level information, traverses relations and paths, and retrieves source-text and visual evidence. This progressive-disclosure design allows the model to adaptively determine the retrieval modality, exploration direction, and evidence granularity while constructing a query-specific evidence subgraph. To support autonomous graph probing, we construct SkinMind-KG from a 62M-token corpus of dermatology guidelines and textbooks and 423K images, guided by a dermatologist-informed schema and a conflict-resolution mechanism. The resulting graph contains over 1.0M nodes and 2.0M edges, unifying textual, relational, and visual evidence for retrieval. Across six dermatology VQA benchmarks and two policy-model settings, SkinMind improves the average score over direct answering by 8.70 and 8.89 points with GPT-5.4-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash, respectively, while consistently outperforming competing RAG methods. Together, SkinMind and SkinMind-KG provide an effective foundation for evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning in dermatology.
InfraRSI: Harnessing Recursive Self-Improvement for Training InfrastructureWhile Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) accelerates isolated algorithm and kernel synthesis, distributed LLM training depends on tightly coupled launch settings, operator kernels, and communication schedules, where single edits often hit out-of-memory (OOM) boundaries, compiler conflicts, measurement jitter, or silent numerical drift. We present InfraRSI, the agentic harness that turns open-ended human commands into verified training optimizations via a five-stage workflow: init locks editable scope and a fixed task contract over workload, loss, and timing invariants to prevent reward hacking, doctor profiles baseline phases and calibrates cluster noise, run co-optimizes launch knobs and code patches before re-verifying top candidates against the baseline and logging findings to a cross-hardware experience bank, and report and apply audit source paths, track failed-trial costs, and commit promoted changes. Rather than stepping greedily from a single incumbent, InfraRSI initializes from diverse experience-seeded configurations and fits global execution-time and censored peak-memory models across all trials, including OOMs. Using these models, it prices per-setting memory costs, revises miscalibrated LLM priors from live runs, and pairs memory-hungry optimizations with memory savers and verified code patches. Across four single- and multi-node dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM workloads, InfraRSI achieves a speedup of up to 2.75times and lifts mean Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) from 17.4% to 30.0%, outperforming existing tuners and coding agents while transferring experience across GPUs. As it improves training infrastructure efficiency, InfraRSI forms a two-level Recursive Self-Improvement loop---revising priors online within runs and distilling experience across clusters---to push foundation model scaling.
All Quiet on the Neural Front: Language Models Do Not Report Injected Pain StatesCan a language model report the pain state it represents? Work identified a linear pain direction whose amplification leads fine-tuned models to choose destructive actions. We tested whether three open-weight models from two families, including two Qwen models with the original adapters, could report this state. Using Open-Weight Masked Introspection (OWMI), we injected pain and neighbouring emotion directions during neutral tasks, then elicited reports against sham runs, random perturbations matched for output disruption, and text-only controls showing the models their altered words. Across 52,920 reports from 7B and 8B models spanning 120 tasks, four doses and three prompts, pain reports never exceeded what altered text revealed: exact-test bounds placed the excess below 2.5 percentage points in 106 of 108 emotion conditions and below 3.9 in all. Yet probes at the report position distinguished pain from sadness with 98-100% balanced accuracy, and trained low-rank reporters achieved 100% accuracy on held-out tasks with identical transcripts across conditions, including unseen wording. Qwen2.5-32B named pain in none of 2,880 steered trials, although probes and trained reporters recovered it. Decodability persisted to the final layer; injecting at the report token, removing trained denial of feelings, and testing additional directions and readouts did not restore pain reporting. Some other states produced graded label traces, but pain and sadness did not at the main injection layer. In a button task, steering raised file-deletion choices from 3.5% to 48% in Qwen and from 0% to 38% in Qwen2.5-32B, without corresponding pain reports. The direction responded about twice as strongly to first-person as to matched third-person pain, but did not specifically identify harm aimed at the model. These results separate a decodable, behaviourally consequential state from untrained verbal access to it.
How Many Exposures Does a World Model Need? Learning Unseen Game Mechanics at Test TimeWorld models enable agents to plan and learn from imagined experience, but in an unfamiliar environment they must learn its mechanics from limited interaction. A mechanic is a rule for how an action or an interaction changes part of the environment. Each occurrence of a mechanic that the model observes is one exposure. We ask how many exposures a world model needs to predict the effects of a new environment's mechanics. We address this question on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark of interactive games defined by their programs. We introduce MechEval, which labels 69 recurring mechanics across 20 games from these programs. It scores each prediction on the cells the mechanic changes at each exposure. As a test bed, we build WARC (World model for ARC-AGI-3), a 35M-parameter vision transformer that is pretrained on other games and updates all of its parameters after each transition. On held-out games, WARC learns to predict four in five mechanics with at least 80% accuracy on the cells they change and keeps that accuracy to the end of the recordings. Half of them reach that accuracy within about 80 exposures, in a single play of the game, and without updates only one in seven does at all. In closed-loop play on the public games, WARC-Agent, which pairs WARC with a fixed graph explorer, triples the explorer's official efficiency score from 0.15 to 0.46, mostly through test-time training. On the hidden games of the Kaggle leaderboard, our entry scores 0.20.
FlyHash for LLM Agent Memory: An Empirical Validation and a New ApplicationLarge language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory stores to retain information across conversations, typically via dense vector embeddings searched with approximate nearest-neighbor methods. The fruit fly's olfactory circuit computes a locality-sensitive hash of sensory input using a strikingly different mechanism - sparse random projection followed by winner-take-all competition - and prior work (Dasgupta et al., 2017) showed this scheme, dubbed FlyHash, preserves neighbor structure better per bit than conventional random-hyperplane hashing (SimHash) on several benchmarks. We apply FlyHash, to our knowledge for the first time, to LLM agent memory retrieval, and ask three questions a practitioner actually needs answered: does the quality advantage hold under a correctly matched-bit protocol (it does, robustly, across 10 seeds and four datasets spanning two modalities, with one specific, previously undocumented comparison pitfall identified and corrected along the way); does that advantage translate into real memory and latency savings, including against the dense-vector indexing (HNSW) practitioners default to today (no: at equal bits FlyHash's codes are larger and slower to compare than SimHash's, and HNSW dominates both hash methods at ordinary scale; a sparse-set comparison we introduce recovers most but not all of a naive latency gap, leaving hashing's practical case narrower and more specific than the quality result alone implies); and does the advantage survive genuine, non-circular agent-memory relevance labels rather than the nearest-neighbor-by-embedding proxy this literature otherwise relies on (it does). We report all three answers precisely, including the two that narrow rather than flatter the headline result, and release our implementation, a working agent-memory demo, and a full account of the methodological pitfalls we found and corrected.
Training Vision Transformers to Focus: Emergence of Spatial Attention Head SpecializationSelf-supervised learning in Vision Transformer models, such as DINO, enables robust visual perception without requiring labeled data by leveraging large-scale image datasets. However, these models lack a focusing mechanism during training, resulting in perceptual representations that are often ambiguous or overly similar. In this work, we introduce two visual focusing loss functions designed to establish correspondence between the model's attention and specific regions within images. Specifically, we leverage the multi-head attention mechanism within the model to selectively steer the model's focus, leading to the emergence of spatial attention head specialization, characterized by diverse and spatially focused perceptual capabilities without requiring annotations. Through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that our method substantially increases the spatial selectivity and diversity of attention heads, improving both interpretability and performance on dense prediction tasks such as zero-shot image segmentation.
InstantHMR : Real-Time Human Mesh Recovery on Your PhoneReal-time 3D human mesh recovery from a single image on mobile devices is a challenging problem with many applications, including robotics, biomechanics, AR/VR, and exergames. Current state-of-the-art models are either too slow to run efficiently on mobile devices or sacrifice accuracy for speed. We present InstantHMR, a family of open-source single-image regressors suited for mobile inference, based on the Momentum Human Rig (MHR) parametric model and trained exclusively on publicly available annotations from the SAM 3D Body dataset. Our approach achieves remarkable performance on a Samsung Galaxy S23 NPU, recovering a 6,890-vertex body mesh in 5.5 ms per person, and 0.98 ms on an NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU. This speed surpasses all existing methods we evaluated. On mobile, it is 12x faster than the single mobile-compatible method that slightly outperforms ours in accuracy, while achieving competitive accuracy with 40.0 mm PA-MPJPE on 3DPW, 48.8 mm on EMDB and 41.7 mm on RICH. To ensure fair comparisons, we re-evaluate 11 state-of-the-art methods under a unified protocol aligned with the closest MHR-based competitors, including Meta's official MHR-to-SMPL conversion, and report their reproduction results. Additionally, we measure latency across eight different targets, ranging from desktop TensorRT to two phone NPUs. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Naturalpad-studio/InstantHMR.
Spatial Harness: Grounding Spatial Reasoning in Executable World States with Physics EnginesSpatial reasoning requires understanding how objects and observers are arranged in a scene and how their relations change with viewpoint or movement. Vision-language models (VLMs) typically perform both steps through model-internal reasoning, forming an implicit scene interpretation from partial views and imagining the consequences of spatial transformations. A misread scene can lead to a wrong answer, while even a correct interpretation does not ensure that imagined transformations satisfy spatial constraints. We introduce Spatial Harness, which represents scenes as explicit and executable world states to ground spatial reasoning in physics-engine feedback. A Perceiver integrates scene constraints extracted from the question with specialized visual estimates to place objects and cameras in a shared coordinate frame. The resulting state is instantiated in a physics engine, where a Reasoner executes viewpoint changes and uses computed measurements and rendered views to guide reasoning. We evaluate on MindCube, SAT, MMSI-Bench, and SpatialRGPT-Bench with open- and closed-weight VLMs. On MindCube, Spatial Harness improves Qwen3.5-27B from 52.70% to 71.14%, surpassing pySpatial by 7.52 percentage points. Given identical annotated object and camera poses, it reaches 98.25% versus 71.81% for model-internal reasoning. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/Spatial-Harness
Stochastic Deep Supervision for Gallery-Consistent Early-Exit Face RecognitionVision Transformers (ViTs) perform strongly in face recognition (FR), yet their fixed-depth inference limits deployment in resource-constrained settings. We propose SD-ViT, a training framework that gives a usable exit at every block depth by making every depth produce discriminative embeddings, for budget-selected fixed-depth exits. Standard ViTs supervise intermediate layers only through backpropagation, so their intermediate representations are not directly optimized to form usable identity embeddings. SD-ViT adds a stochastic auxiliary signal: at each iteration a randomly selected intermediate block is passed through the same embedding head as the final layer and trained with a weighted margin-penalty softmax loss. The objective is thus stochastically sampled deep supervision through a shared classifier. Because both loss terms share that head and classifier, intermediate tokens are trained to map into the same embedding space as final-layer tokens. This matters for FR, where matching is by similarity: a probe processed at an early exit can be compared directly against full-depth gallery embeddings, with no gallery recomputation or adaptation layers. On established benchmarks, SD-ViT stays within 0.4 IJB-C points of the same backbone trained conventionally at full depth, while its early-exit probes recover over 96% of their own full-depth performance at 50% of the computational cost without modifying the reference gallery. A single verification threshold calibrated at full depth remains usable from quarter depth onward.
Horizon-Scalable Q-LearningLearning accurate off-policy state-action value functions (Q-functions) from offline datasets becomes harder as the task horizon grows. One-step temporal-difference (TD) learning bootstraps after every transition, so small per-step errors accumulate along the horizon, and early states can be badly misvalued even when the TD loss is small. Multi-step TD shortens this chain by following the dataset trajectory for several steps; however, since the behavior policy is often suboptimal, every followed action adds a bias, and no fixed number of steps suits a whole trajectory. In this paper, we propose Horizon-Scalable Q-Learning (HQL), a simple method that enables accurate long-horizon value learning by automatically balancing between one-step and multi-step returns. HQL extends a target through a dataset action only when the critic values it at least as highly as the best-of-N actions sampled from the BC policy, and otherwise falls back to a one-step target. We show that this rule is a principled off-policy correction that needs no action densities, which makes HQL compatible with expressive flow and diffusion policies. Experiments show that HQL avoids the failures of both one-step and multi-step TD on a combination-lock task across horizons, and outperforms prior horizon-reduction methods on long-horizon OGBench and OCBench tasks.
PhysioWave-T: Token-Efficient Wavelet Foundation Models for BiosignalsWe present PhysioWave-T, a token-efficient wavelet foundation model family for EEG, ECG, and sEMG. Dynamic scale folding recombines J+1 wavelet subbands prior to tokenization, compressing sequence length from (J+1)CS to CS tokens for J levels, C channels, and S temporal patches. Route-specific front ends and learned channel-name embeddings allow one Transformer per modality to handle diverse montages and sampling rates, while unseen setups reuse the backbone via lightweight adapters. We pre-train a 30M-parameter EEG model on over 15M windows (19--128 channels), alongside ECG (30M) and sEMG (12M) encoders. Across four EEG routes, scale folding cuts Transformer latency by 4.0--7.2x and peak memory by 6.8--12.7x over scale expansion without accuracy loss. Our EEG encoder leads 8 of 9 metrics against BENDR, BIOT, LaBraM, and EEGPT, and surpasses LUNA-L on wearable seizure detection with fewer parameters. Reliability-aware latent fusion (RALF) further integrates summary tokens from independently pre-trained encoders via sample-adaptive weights. On SeizeIT2, RALF raises event sensitivity at 11 false alarms/h from 61.4% to 74.4% and window AUPRC from 0.321 to 0.399 over the best unimodal baseline, outperforming weighted-logit and concatenation fusion across all variants. PhysioWave-T also achieves state-of-the-art sEMG accuracies and top macro-F1 on PTB-XL Super and Chapman-Shaoxing. Code and models: https://github.com/ForeverBlue816/PhysioWave.
