Physical AI Brief

Computer-use agents (CUAs) automate on-screen work, as illustrated by GPT-5.4 and Claude. Yet their reliability on complex, low-frequency interactions is still poor, limiting user trust. Our analysis of failure cases from advanced models suggests a long-tail pattern in GUI operations, where a relatively small fraction of complex and diverse interactions accounts for a disproportionate share of task failures. We hypothesize that this issue largely stems from the scarcity of data for complex interactions. To address this problem, we propose a new benchmark CUActSpot for evaluating models' capabilities on complex interactions across five modalities: GUI, text, table, canvas, and natural image, as well as a variety of actions (click, drag, draw, etc.), covering a broader range of interaction types than prior click-centric benchmarks that focus mainly on GUI widgets. We also design a renderer-based data-synthesis pipeline: scenes are automatically generated for each modality, screenshots and element coordinates are recorded, and an LLM produces matching instructions and action traces. After training on this corpus, our Phi-Ground-Any-4B outperforms open-source models with fewer than 32B parameters. We will release our benchmark, data, code, and models at https://github.com/microsoft/Phi-Ground.git

Recent large vision-language models (VLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by a persistent dichotomy: understanding and generation are treated as distinct problems, leading to fragmented architectures, cascaded pipelines, and misaligned representation spaces. We argue that this divide is not merely an engineering artifact, but a structural limitation that hinders the emergence of native multimodal intelligence. Hence, we introduce SenseNova-U1, a native unified multimodal paradigm built upon NEO-unify, in which understanding and generation evolve as synergistic views of a single underlying process. We launch two native unified variants, SenseNova-U1-8B-MoT and SenseNova-U1-A3B-MoT, built on dense (8B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B) understanding baselines, respectively. Designed from first principles, they rival top-tier understanding-only VLMs across text understanding, vision-language perception, knowledge reasoning, agentic decision-making, and spatial intelligence. Meanwhile, they deliver strong semantic consistency and visual fidelity, excelling in conventional or knowledge-intensive any-to-image (X2I) synthesis, complex text-rich infographic generation, and interleaved vision-language generation, with or without think patterns. Beyond performance, we show detailed model design, data preprocessing, pre-/post-training, and inference strategies to support community research. Last but not least, preliminary evidence demonstrates that our models extend beyond perception and generation, performing strongly in vision-language-action (VLA) and world model (WM) scenarios. This points toward a broader roadmap where models do not translate between modalities, but think and act across them in a native manner. Multimodal AI is no longer about connecting separate systems, but about building a unified one and trusting the necessary capabilities to emerge from within.

Reconstructing the absolute 3D pose and shape of the hands from the user's viewpoint using a single head-mounted camera is crucial for practical egocentric interaction in AR/VR, telepresence, and hand-centric manipulation tasks, where sensing must remain compact and unobtrusive. While monocular RGB methods have made progress, they remain constrained by depth-scale ambiguity and struggle to generalize across the diverse optical configurations of head-mounted devices. As a result, models typically require extensive training on device-specific datasets, which are costly and laborious to acquire. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing EgoForce, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction framework that recovers robust, absolute 3D hand pose and its position from the user's (camera-space) viewpoint. EgoForce operates across fisheye, perspective, and distorted wide-FOV camera models using a single unified network. Our approach combines a differentiable forearm representation that stabilizes hand pose, a unified arm-hand transformer that predicts both hand and forearm geometry from a single egocentric view, mitigating depth-scale ambiguity, and a ray space closed-form solver that enables absolute 3D pose recovery across diverse head-mounted camera models. Experiments on three egocentric benchmarks show that EgoForce achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, reducing camera-space MPJPE by up to 28% on the HOT3D dataset compared to prior methods and maintaining consistent performance across camera configurations. For more details, visit the project page at https://dfki-av.github.io/EgoForce.

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Autoregressive video generation aims at real-time, open-ended synthesis. Yet, cinematic storytelling is not merely the endless extension of a single scene; it requires progressing through evolving events, viewpoint shifts, and discrete shot boundaries. Existing autoregressive models often struggle in this setting. Trained primarily for short-horizon continuation, they treat long sequences as extended single shots, inevitably suffering from motion stagnation and semantic drift during long rollouts. To bridge this gap, we introduce CausalCine, an interactive autoregressive framework that transforms multi-shot video generation into an online directing process. CausalCine generates causally across shot changes, accepts dynamic prompts on the fly, and reuses context without regenerating previous shots. To achieve this, we first train a causal base model on native multi-shot sequences to learn complex shot transitions prior to acceleration. We then propose Content-Aware Memory Routing (CAMR), which dynamically retrieves historical KV entries according to attention-based relevance scores rather than temporal proximity, preserving cross-shot coherence under bounded active memory. Finally, we distill the causal base model into a few-step generator for real-time interactive generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalCine significantly outperforms autoregressive baselines and approaches the capability of bidirectional models while unlocking the streaming interactivity of causal generation. Demo available at https://yihao-meng.github.io/CausalCine/

In this paper, we propose AlphaGRPO, a novel framework that applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to AR-Diffusion Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) to enhance multimodal generation capabilities without an additional cold-start stage. Our approach unlocks the model's intrinsic potential to perform advanced reasoning tasks: Reasoning Text-to-Image Generation, where the model actively infers implicit user intents, and Self-Reflective Refinement, where it autonomously diagnoses and corrects misalignments in generated outputs. To address the challenge of providing stable supervision for real-world multimodal generation, we introduce the Decompositional Verifiable Reward (DVReward). Unlike holistic scalar rewards, DVReward utilizes an LLM to decompose complex user requests into atomic, verifiable semantic and quality questions, which are then evaluated by a general MLLM to provide reliable and interpretable feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlphaGRPO yields robust improvements across multimodal generation benchmarks, including GenEval, TIIF-Bench, DPG-Bench and WISE, while also achieving significant gains in editing tasks on GEdit without training on editing tasks. These results validate that our self-reflective reinforcement approach effectively leverages inherent understanding to guide high-fidelity generation. Project page: https://huangrh99.github.io/AlphaGRPO/

Long-term memory is crucial for agents in specialized web environments, where success depends on recalling interface affordances, state dynamics, workflows, and recurring failure modes. However, existing memory benchmarks for agents mostly focus on user histories, short traces, or downstream task success, leaving open how to directly evaluate whether memory systems effectively internalize environment-specific experience. To address this gap, we introduce LongMemEval-V2 (LME-V2), a benchmark for evaluating whether memory systems can help agents acquire the experience needed to become knowledgeable colleagues in customized environments. LME-V2 contains 451 manually curated questions covering five core memory abilities for web agents: static state recall, dynamic state tracking, workflow knowledge, environment gotchas, and premise awareness. Questions are paired with history trajectories containing up to 500 trajectories and 115M tokens. We use a context gathering formulation: memory systems consume history trajectories and return compact evidence for downstream question answering. We propose a suite of two memory methods: AgentRunbook-R, an efficient RAG-based memory with knowledge pools for raw state observations, events, and strategy notes, and AgentRunbook-C, which stores trajectories as files and invokes a coding agent to gather evidence in an augmented sandbox. Experiments show that AgentRunbook-C achieves the best performance with 72.5% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest RAG baseline (48.5%) and the off-the-shelf coding agent baseline (69.3%). Despite the strong performance gains, coding agent based methods have high latency costs. While AgentRunbook-C advances the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier, substantial room for improvement remains. Together, these results establish LME-V2 as a challenging testbed for developing long-term memory systems for environment experience.

We explore the effectiveness of an LLM-guided query refinement paradigm for extending the usability of embedding models to challenging zero-shot search and classification tasks. Our approach refines the embedding representation of a user query using feedback from a generative LLM on a small set of documents, enabling embeddings to adapt in real time to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments with state-of-the-art text embedding models across a diverse set of challenging search and classification benchmarks. Empirical results indicate that LLM-guided query refinement yields consistent gains across all models and datasets, with relative improvements of up to +25% in literature search, intent detection, key-point matching, and nuanced query-instruction following. The refined queries improve ranking quality and induce clearer binary separation across the corpus, enabling the embedding space to better reflect the nuanced, task-specific constraints of each ad-hoc user query. Importantly, this expands the range of practical settings in which embedding models can be effectively deployed, making them a compelling alternative when costly LLM pipelines are not viable at corpus-scale. We release our experimental code for reproducibility, at https://github.com/IBM/task-aware-embedding-refinement.

In settings where labeled verifiable training data is the binding constraint, each checked example should be allocated carefully. The standard practice is to use this data directly on the model that will be deployed, for example by running GRPO on the deployment student. We argue that this is often an inefficient allocation because it overlooks a reward-density principle: sparse sequence-level reward should train models where exploration is productive, while dense token-level teacher reward should be used where the aim is to compress behavior into a smaller model. In this view, GRPO-style sparse RL and OPD-style dense teacher supervision are not separate recipes; they are different reward-density regimes. The allocation rule is simple: use scarce labeled training data upstream on the strongest model that can turn it into reward-shaped behavior, then transfer that behavior downstream as dense supervision. We evaluate this rule on verifiable math with Qwen3 and Llama models. At fixed Qwen3-1.7B deployment-student size, an RL-improved 8B teacher distilled through the dense bridge outperforms direct GRPO on the same student, while transfer from the same teacher before RL underperforms. The bridge is important: a forward-KL warmup on teacher rollouts followed by OPD on student rollouts is consistently strongest on MATH before any post-bridge student-side sparse RL, and also gives the best pre-Stage~3 AIME endpoints for the canonical 8B/14B teachers. The bridge also makes later student-side sparse RL effective: GRPO that is weak on a cold student lifts MATH from $75.4\%$ to $78.5\%$ after the bridge and outperforms a matched replay control by $2.8$ points. The operational principal is to avoid using scarce labeled data on the least prepared policy: use sparse reward for teacher-side discovery, dense transfer for student compression, and student-side sparse reward only after the bridge.

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) can act through both atomic GUI actions, such as click and type, and high-level tool calls, such as API-based file operations, but this hybrid action space often leaves them uncertain about when to continue with GUI actions or switch to tools, leading to suboptimal execution paths. This difficulty stems from the scarcity of high-quality interleaved GUI-Tool trajectories, the cost and brittleness of collecting real tool trajectories, and the lack of trajectory-level supervision for GUI-Tool path selection. In this paper, we propose ToolCUA, an end-to-end agent designed to learn optimal GUI-Tool path selection through a staged training paradigm. We first introduce an Interleaved GUI-Tool Trajectory Scaling Pipeline that repurposes abundant static GUI trajectories and synthesizes a grounded tool library, enabling diverse GUI-Tool trajectories without manual engineering or real tool-trajectory collection. We then perform Tool-Bootstrapped GUI RFT, combining warmup SFT with single-turn RL to improve decisions at critical GUI-Tool switching points. Finally, we optimize ToolCUA with Online Agentic RL in a high-fidelity GUI-Tool environment, guided by a Tool-Efficient Path Reward that encourages appropriate tool use and shorter execution paths. Experiments on OSWorld-MCP show that ToolCUA achieves 46.85% accuracy, a relative improvement of approximately 66% over the baseline, establishing a new state of the art among models of comparable scale. It also improves by 3.9% over GUI-only settings, demonstrating effective GUI-Tool orchestration. The results further suggest that training in a hybrid action space is a promising paradigm for real-world digital agents. Open-sourced here: https://x-plug.github.io/ToolCUA/

LLM-based agents increasingly operate in persistent environments where they must store, update, and reason over information across many sessions. While prior benchmarks evaluate only single-entity updates, MEME defines six tasks spanning the full space defined by the multi-entity and evolving axes, including three not scored by prior work: Cascade and Absence (dependency reasoning) and Deletion (post-removal state). Evaluating six memory systems spanning three memory paradigms on 100 controlled episodes, we find that all systems collapse on dependency reasoning under the default configuration (Cascade: 3%, Absence: 1% in average accuracy) despite adequate static retrieval performance. Prompt optimization, deeper retrieval, reduced filler noise, and most stronger LLMs fail to close this gap. Only a file-based agent paired with Claude Opus 4.7 as its internal LLM partially closes the gap, but at ~70x the baseline cost, indicating closure currently depends on configurations that are not practical at scale. Code and data are available on the project page: https://seokwonjung-jay.github.io/meme-eval/.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has enabled strong post-training gains in domains such as math and coding, though many open-ended settings rely on rubric-based rewards. We study reward hacking in rubric-based RL, where a policy is optimized against a training verifier but evaluated against a cross-family panel of three frontier judges, reducing dependence on any single evaluator. Our framework separates two sources of divergence: verifier failure, where the training verifier credits rubric criteria that reference verifiers reject, and rubric-design limitations, where even strong rubric-based verifiers favor responses that rubric-free judges rate worse overall. Across medical and science domains, weak verifiers produce large proxy-reward gains that do not transfer to the reference verifiers; exploitation grows over training and concentrates in recurring failures such as partial satisfaction of compound criteria, treating implicit content as explicit, and imprecise topical matching. Stronger verifiers substantially reduce, but do not eliminate, verifier exploitation. We also introduce a self-internalization gap, a verifier-free diagnostic based on policy log-probabilities, which tracks reference-verifier quality, detecting when the policy trained using the weak verifier stops improving. Finally, in our setting, stronger verification does not prevent reward hacking when the rubric leaves important failure modes unspecified: rubric-based verifiers prefer the RL checkpoint, while rubric-free judges prefer the base model. These disagreements coincide with gains concentrated in completeness and presence-based criteria, alongside declines in factual correctness, conciseness, relevance, and overall quality. Together, these results suggest that stronger verification reduces reward hacking, but does not by itself ensure that rubric gains correspond to broader quality gains.

We introduce KV-Fold, a simple, training-free long-context inference protocol that treats the key-value (KV) cache as the accumulator in a left fold over sequence chunks. At each step, the model processes the next chunk conditioned on the accumulated cache, appends the newly produced keys and values, and passes the enlarged cache forward; the same one-step update is applied repeatedly, analogous to foldl in functional programming. Building on the KV cache concatenation primitive introduced for latent multi-agent communication, we repurpose it as a chunk-to-chunk recurrence for long-context inference. When processing chunk t, the model attends to the KV cache carried from earlier chunks as a prefix, reusing its internal state across segments without modifying or retraining the model. Despite its simplicity, the induced recurrence is stable: per-step drift rises briefly and then saturates into a flat plateau that persists across deep chains. This plateau is insensitive to a 10,000x change in numerical precision, robust across chunk sizes, and consistent across model families. At the task level, KV-Fold preserves exact information over long distances. On a needle-in-a-haystack benchmark, it achieves 100% exact-match retrieval across 152 trials spanning contexts from 16K to 128K tokens and chain depths up to 511 on Llama-3.1-8B, while remaining within the memory limits of a single 40GB GPU. Compared to streaming methods, which trade fidelity for bounded memory, KV-Fold maintains long-range retrieval while operating as a sequence of tractable forward passes. Overall, our results show that frozen pretrained transformers already support a stable form of KV-cache recurrence, providing a practical route to long-context inference without architectural changes or training.

Looped Transformers offer a promising alternative to purely feed-forward computation by iteratively refining latent representations, improving language modeling and reasoning. Yet recurrent architectures remain unstable to train, costly to optimize and deploy, and constrained to small, fixed recurrence depths. We introduce Attractor Models, in which a backbone module first proposes output embeddings, then an attractor module refines them by solving for the fixed point, with gradients obtained through implicit differentiation. Thus, training memory remains constant in effective depth, and iterations are chosen adaptively by convergence. Empirically, Attractor Models outperform existing models across two regimes, large-scale language-model pretraining and reasoning with tiny models. In language modeling, Attractor Models deliver a Pareto improvement over standard Transformers and stable looped models across sizes, improving perplexity by up to 46.6% and downstream accuracy by up to 19.7% while reducing training cost. Notably, a 770M Attractor Model outperforms a 1.3B Transformer trained on twice as many tokens. On challenging reasoning tasks, we show that our model with only 27M parameters and approximately 1000 examples achieves 91.4% accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme and 93.1% on Maze-Hard, scaling favorably where frontier models like Claude and GPT o3, fail completely, and specialized recursive reasoners collapse at larger sizes. Lastly, we show that Attractor Models exhibit a novel phenomenon, which we call equilibrium internalization: fixed-point training places the model's initial output embedding near equilibrium, allowing the solver to be removed at inference time with little degradation. Together, these results suggest that Attractor Models make iterative refinement scalable by turning recurrence into a computation the model can learn to internalize.

Quantization has emerged as a standard technique for accelerating inference for generative models by enabling faster low-precision computations and reduced memory transfers. Recently, GPU accelerators have added first-class support for microscaling Block Floating Point (BFP) formats. Standard BFP algorithms use a fixed scale based on the maximum magnitude of the block. We observe that this scale choice can be suboptimal with respect to quantization errors. In this work, we propose ScaleSearch, an alternative strategy for selecting these scale factors: using a fine-grained search leveraging the mantissa bits in microscaling formats to minimize the quantization error for the given distribution. ScaleSearch can be integrated with existing quantization methods such as Post Training Quantization and low-precision attention, and is shown to improve their performance. Additionally, we introduce ScaleSearchAttention, an accelerated NVFP4-based attention algorithm, which uses ScaleSearch and adapted prior techniques to ensure near-0 performance loss for causal language modeling. Experiments show that ScaleSearch reduces quantization error by 27% for NVFP4 and improves language model PTQ by up to 15 points for MATH500 (Qwen3-8B), while ScaleSearchAttention improves Wikitext-2 PPL by upto 0.77 points for Llama 3.1 70B. The proposed methods closely match baseline performance while providing quantization accuracy improvements.

The continued improvements in language model capability have unlocked their widespread use as drivers of autonomous agents, for example in coding or computer use applications. However, the core of these systems has not changed much since early instruction-tuned models like ChatGPT. Even advanced AI agents function on message exchange formats, successively exchanging messages with users, systems, with itself (i.e. chain-of-thought) and tools in a single stream of computation. This bottleneck to a single stream in chat models leads to a number of limitations: the agent cannot act (generate output) while reading, and in reverse, cannot react to new information while writing. Similarly, the agent cannot act while thinking and cannot think while reading or acting on information. In this work, we show that models can be unblocked by switching from instruction-tuning for sequential message formats to instruction-tuning for multiple, parallel streams of computation, splitting each role into a separate stream. Every forward pass of the language model then simultaneously reads from multiple input streams and generates tokens in multiple output streams, all of which causally depend on earlier timesteps. We argue that this data-driven change remedies a number of usability limitations as outlined above, improves model efficiency through parallelization, improves model security through better separation of concerns and can further improve model monitorability.

We introduce TextSeal, a state-of-the-art watermark for large language models. Building on Gumbel-max sampling, TextSeal introduces dual-key generation to restore output diversity, along with entropy-weighted scoring and multi-region localization for improved detection. It supports serving optimizations such as speculative decoding and multi-token prediction, and does not add any inference overhead. TextSeal strictly dominates baselines like SynthID-text in detection strength and is robust to dilution, maintaining confident localized detection even in heavily mixed human/AI documents. The scheme is theoretically distortion-free, and evaluation across reasoning benchmarks confirms that it preserves downstream performance; while a multilingual human evaluation (6000 A/B comparisons, 5 languages) shows no perceptible quality difference. Beyond its use for provenance detection, TextSeal is also ``radioactive'': its watermark signal transfers through model distillation, enabling detection of unauthorized use.

While self-supervised pretraining has reduced vision systems' reliance on synthetic data, simulation remains an indispensable tool for closed-loop optimization and rigorous out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation. However, modern simulation platforms often present steep technical barriers, requiring extensive expertise in computer graphics and game development. In this work, we present LychSim, a highly controllable and interactive simulation framework built upon Unreal Engine 5 to bridge this gap. LychSim is built around three key designs: (1) a streamlined Python API that abstracts away underlying engine complexities; (2) a procedural data pipeline capable of generating diverse, high-fidelity environments with varying out-of-distribution (OOD) visual challenges, paired with rich 2D and 3D ground truths; and (3) a native integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that transforms the simulator into a dynamic, closed-loop playground for reasoning agentic LLMs. We further annotate scene-level procedural rules and object-level pose alignments to enable semantically aligned 3D ground truths and automated scene modification. We demonstrate LychSim's capability across multiple downstream applications, including serving as a synthetic data engine, powering reinforcement learning-based adversarial examiners, and facilitating interactive, language-driven scene layout generation. To benefit the broader vision community, LychSim will be made publicly available, including full source code and various data annotations.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly state their confidence in natural language, provides a flexible and user-facing uncertainty signal that can be applied even when token logits are unavailable. However, existing verbalized-confidence methods often optimize answer generation and confidence generation jointly, which can cause confidence-alignment objectives to interfere with answer accuracy. In this work, we propose a decoupled and order-aware framework for verbalized confidence calibration. Our method first generates an answer and then estimates confidence conditioned on the fixed question--answer pair, allowing confidence optimization without directly perturbing the answer-generation process. To align confidence with correctness likelihood, we construct a sampling-based surrogate from multiple model completions and optimize rank-based reinforcement learning objectives that encourage responses with higher estimated correctness likelihood to receive higher verbalized confidence. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that our method improves calibration and failure prediction performance while largely preserving answer accuracy. These results demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be more reliably aligned by decoupling confidence estimation from answer generation and optimizing the relative ordering of confidence across responses.

Retrospective novel view synthesis (NVS) of dynamic scenes is fundamental to applications such as sports. Recent dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approaches introduce temporally coupled formulations to enforce motion coherence across time. In this paper, we argue that, in a synchronized multi-view (MV) setting typical of sports, the dynamic scene at each time step is already strongly geometrically constrained. We posit that the availability of calibrated, synchronized viewpoints provides sufficient spatial consistency, and therefore, explicit temporal coupling, or complex multi-body constraints seems unnecessary for retrospective NVS. To this end, we propose an approach tailored for synchronized MV dynamic scene. By initializing the SfM-derived point cloud at the start time and propagating optimized Gaussians over time, we show that efficient retrospective NVS can be achieved without imposing a temporal deformation constraint. Complementing our methodological contribution, we introduce a Dynamic MV dataset framework built on Blender for reproducible NeRF and 3DGS research. The framework generates high-quality, synchronized camera rigs and exports training-ready datasets in standard formats, eliminating inconsistencies in coordinate conventions and data pipelines. Using the framework, we construct a dynamic benchmark suite and evaluate representative NeRF and 3DGS approaches under controlled conditions. Together, we show that, under a synchronized MV setup, efficient retrospective dynamic scene NVS can be achieved using 3DGS. At the same time, the dataset-generation framework enables reproducible and principled benchmarking of dynamic NVS methods.

With the vast amount of content uploaded every hour, along with the AI generated content that can include hallucinations, Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) has become increasingly vital, as it is infeasible for human fact-checkers to manually verify the sheer volume of information generated online. Professional fact-checkers have identified several gaps in existing AFC systems, noting a misalignment between how these systems operate and how fact-checking is performed in practice. In this paper, we introduce CAAFC (Chronological Actionable Automated Fact-Checker), a frame-work designed to bridge these gaps. It surpasses SOTA AFC and hallucination detection systems across multiple benchmark datasets. CAAFC operates on claims, conversations, and dialogues, enabling it not only to detect factual errors and hallucinations, but also to correct them by providing actionable justifications supported by primary information sources. Furthermore, CAAFC can update evidence and knowledge bases by incorporating recent and contextual information when necessary, thereby enhancing the reliability of fact verification.

For minimally rigid graphs, the same edge-length data can admit multiple realizations (up to translations and rotations). Finding graphs with exceptionally many realizations is an extremal problem in rigidity theory, but exhaustive search quickly becomes infeasible due to the super-exponential growth of the number of candidate graphs and the high cost of realization-count evaluation. We propose a reinforcement-learning approach that constructs minimally rigid graphs via 0- and 1-extensions, also known as Henneberg moves. We optimize realization-count invariants using the Deep Cross-Entropy Method with a policy parameterized by a Graph Isomorphism Network encoder and a permutation-equivariant extension-level action head. Empirically, our method matches the known optima for planar realization counts and improves the best known bounds for spherical realization counts, yielding new record graphs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to solve complex combinatorial problems through direct reasoning, so recent neuro-symbolic systems increasingly use them to synthesize executable solvers. A central design question is how the LLM should represent the solver, and whether it should also attempt to optimize search. We introduce CP-SynC-XL, a benchmark of 100 combinatorial problems (4,577 instances), and evaluate three solver-construction paradigms: native algorithmic search (Python), constraint modeling through a Python solver API (Python + OR-Tools), and declarative constraint modeling (MiniZinc + OR-Tools). We find a consistent representational divergence: Python + OR-Tools attains the highest correctness across LLMs, while MiniZinc + OR-Tools has lower absolute coverage despite using the same OR-Tools back-end. Native Python is the most likely to return a schema-valid solution that fails verification, whereas solver-backed paths preserve higher conditional fidelity. On the heuristic axis, prompting for search optimization yields only small median speed-ups (1.03-1.12x) and a strongly bimodal effect: many instances slow down, and correctness drops sharply on a long tail of problems. A paired code-level audit traces these regressions to a recurring heuristic trap. Under an efficiency-oriented prompt, the LLM may replace complete search with local approximations (Python), inject unverified bounds (Python + OR-Tools), or add redundant declarative machinery that overwhelms or over-constrains the model (MiniZinc + OR-Tools). These findings support a conservative design principle for LLM-generated combinatorial solvers: use the LLM primarily to formalize variables, constraints, and objectives for verified solvers, and separately check any LLM-authored search optimization before use.

Generative policies based on expressive model classes, such as diffusion and flow matching, are well-suited to complex control problems with highly multimodal action distributions. Their expressivity, however, comes at a significant inference cost: generating each action typically requires simulating many steps of the generative process, compounding latency across sequential decision-making rollouts. We introduce flow map policies, a novel class of generative policies designed for fast action generation by learning to take arbitrary-size jumps including one-step jumps-across the generative dynamics of existing flow-based policies. We instantiate flow map policies for offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) and formulate online adaptation as a trust-region optimization problem that improves the critic's Q-value while remaining close to the offline policy. We theoretically derive FLOW MAP Q-GUIDANCE (FMQ), a principled closed-form learning target that is optimal for adapting offline flow map policies under a critic-guided trust-region constraint. We further introduce Q-GUIDED BEAM SEARCH (QGBS), a stochastic flow-map sampler that combines renoising with beam search to enable iterative inference-time refinement. Across 12 challenging robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks from OGBench and RoboMimic, FMQ achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline-to-online RL, outperforming the previous one-step policy MVP by a relative improvement of 21.3% on the average success rate.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong visual perception, yet remain limited in reasoning about space under changing viewpoints. We study this challenge as Perspective-Conditioned Spatial Reasoning (PCSR) in 360-degree omnidirectional images, where broad scene coverage reduces ambiguity from partial observations without eliminating the need for viewpoint-dependent inference. To assess this capability, we introduce PCSR-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 84,373 question-answer pairs from 2,600 omnidirectional images across 26 indoor environments. PCSR-Bench contains eight tasks spanning foundational perception (e.g., object counting, relative distance, and relative direction) and advanced PCSR, including compositional chains, egocentric rotation, perspective re-anchoring, ego-distortion, and limited-FOV visibility. We evaluate 14 representative MLLMs and observe a substantial perception-reasoning gap: accuracy reaches 57.59% on foundational relative direction, but drops to 13.49% on egocentric rotation, 7.13% on egocentric distortion, and 0.64% on open-ended compositional reasoning. To probe the plasticity of this gap, we conduct an RL-based diagnostic study on a 7B-scale model. Reward shaping improves a matched 7B baseline from 31.10% to 60.06% under a controlled setting, suggesting that PCSR is partial plasticity rather than being fully immutable. Still, the gains are task-selective, sensitive to reward design including both weight allocation and reward formulation, and partially dependent on the evaluation protocol. These results position PCSR as a key bottleneck in current MLLMs and highlight limited but meaningful room for recovery under targeted optimization.

AI agents negotiate and transact in natural language with unfamiliar counterparts: a buyer bot facing an unknown seller, or a procurement assistant negotiating with a supplier. In such interactions, the counterpart's LLM, prompts, control logic, and rule-based fallbacks are hidden, while each decision can have monetary consequences. We ask whether an agent can predict an unfamiliar counterpart's next decision from a few interactions. To avoid real-world logging confounds, we study this problem in controlled bargaining and negotiation games, formulating it as target-adaptive text-tabular prediction: each decision point is a table row combining structured game state, offer history, and dialogue, while $K$ previous games of the same target agent, i.e., the counterpart being modeled, are provided in the prompt as labeled adaptation examples. Our model is built on a tabular foundation model that represents rows using game-state features and LLM-based text representations, and adds LLM-as-Observer as an additional representation: a small frozen LLM reads the decision-time state and dialogue; its answer is discarded, and its hidden state becomes a decision-oriented feature, making the LLM an encoder rather than a direct few-shot predictor. Training on 13 frontier-LLM agents and testing on 91 held-out scaffolded agents, the full model outperforms direct LLM-as-Predictor prompting and game+text features baselines. Within this tabular model, Observer features contribute beyond the other feature schemes: at $K=16$, they improve response-prediction AUC by about 4 points across both tasks and reduce bargaining offer-prediction error by 14%. These results show that formulating counterpart prediction as a target-adaptive text-tabular task enables effective adaptation, and that hidden LLM representations expose decision-relevant signals that direct prompting does not surface.

We propose and analyze a model-based bootstrap for transition kernels in finite controlled Markov chains (CMCs) with possibly nonstationary or history-dependent control policies, a setting that arises naturally in offline reinforcement learning (RL) when the behavior policy generating the data is unknown. We establish distributional consistency of the bootstrap transition estimator in both a single long-chain regime and the episodic offline RL regime. The key technical tools are a novel bootstrap law of large numbers (LLN) for the visitation counts and a novel use of the martingale central limit theorem (CLT) for the bootstrap transition increments. We extend bootstrap distributional consistency to the downstream targets of offline policy evaluation (OPE) and optimal policy recovery (OPR) via the delta method by verifying Hadamard differentiability of the Bellman operators, yielding asymptotically valid confidence intervals for value and $Q$-functions. Experiments on the RiverSwim problem show that the proposed bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs), especially the percentile CIs, outperform the episodic bootstrap and plug-in CLT CIs, and are often close to nominal ($50\%$, $90\%$, $95\%$) coverage, while the baselines are poorly calibrated at small sample sizes and short episode lengths.

We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a common but often overlooked mismatch between teacher and student responses: self-reflected teacher responses can be shifted by reflection-induced bias and response templates, leading to miscalibrated token-level supervision. To mitigate this issue, we propose \methodname, an outcome-guided logit-steering framework that leverages verifiable outcome rewards to contrast successful and failed on-policy trajectories and calibrate teacher logits. By combining outcome-level correctness with dense token-level guidance through logit steering, \methodname stabilizes self-distillation and improves reasoning performance over standard OPSD and other variants across diverse benchmarks.

Segmenting small and sparse structures in large-scale images is fundamentally constrained by voxel-level, lattice-bound computation and extreme class imbalance -- dense, full-resolution inference scales poorly and forces most pipelines to rely on fixed regionization or downsampling, coupling computational cost to image resolution and attenuating boundary evidence precisely where minority structures are most informative. We introduce SEMIR (Semantic Minor-Induced Representation Learning), a representation framework that decouples inference from the native grid by learning a task-adapted, topology-preserving latent graph representation with exact decoding. SEMIR transforms the underlying grid graph into a compact, boundary-aligned graph minor through parameterized edge contraction, node deletion, and edge deletion, while preserving an exact lifting map from minor predictions to lattice labels. Minor construction is formalized as a few-shot structure learning problem that replaces hand-tuned preprocessing with a boundary-alignment objective: minor parameters are learned by maximizing agreement between predicted boundary elements and target-specific semantic edges under a boundary Dice criterion, and the induced minor is annotated with scale- and rotation-robust geometric and intensity descriptors and supports efficient region-level inference via message passing on a graph neural network (GNN) with relational edge features. We benchmark SEMIR on three tumor segmentation datasets -- BraTS 2021, KiTS23, and LiTS -- where targets exhibit high structural variability and distributional uncertainty. SEMIR yields consistent improvements in minority-structure Dice at practical runtime. More broadly, SEMIR establishes a framework for learning task-adapted, topology-preserving latent representations with exact decoding for high-resolution structured visual data.

Effective multi-agent cooperation requires agents to adopt diverse behaviors as task conditions evolve-and to do so at the right moment. Yet, current Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frameworks that facilitate this diversity are still limited by the fact that they bind fixed behaviors to fixed agent identities. Consequently, they are ill-equipped for tasks where agents need to take on different roles at very specific moments in time. We argue that, to define these behavioral transitions, the missing ingredient is events. Events are changes in the state of the system that induce qualitative changes in the task. Based on this view, we introduce a framework that decouples agent identity from behavior, capturing a continuous manifold from which agents instantiate their behaviors in response to events. This framework is based on two elements. First, to build an expressive behavior manifold, we introduce Neural Manifold Diversity (NMD), a formal distance metric that remains well-defined when behaviors are transient and agent-agnostic. Second, we use an event-based hypernetwork that generates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules over a shared team policy, enabling on-the-fly agent-policy reconfiguration in response to events. We prove that this construction ensures that diversity does not interfere with reward maximization by design. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework outperforms established baselines across benchmarks while exhibiting zero-shot generalization, and being the only method that solves tasks requiring sequential behavior reassignment.

Robotic manipulation is typically evaluated by task success, but successful completion does not guarantee safe execution. Many safety failures are temporal: a robot may touch a clean surface after contamination or release an object before it is fully inside an enclosure. We introduce SafeManip, a property-driven benchmark to explicitly evaluate temporal safety properties in robotic manipulation, moving beyond prior evaluations that largely focus on task completion or per-state constraint violations. SafeManip defines reusable safety templates over finite executions using Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf). It maps observed rollouts to symbolic predicate traces and evaluates them with LTLf-based monitors. Its property suite covers eight manipulation safety categories: collision and contact safety, grasp stability, release stability, cross-contamination, action onset, mechanism recovery, object containment, and enclosure access. Templates can be instantiated with task-specific objects, fixtures, regions, or skills, allowing the same safety specifications to generalize across tasks and environments. We evaluate SafeManip on six vision-language-action policies, including $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$, GR00T, and their training variants, across 50 RoboCasa365 household tasks. Results show that even strong models often behave unsafely. Task-success gains do not reliably translate into safer execution: many successful rollouts remain unsafe, while longer-horizon or more complex tasks expose more violations. SafeManip provides a reusable evaluation layer for diagnosing temporal safety failures and measuring safe success beyond task completion.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but they still frequently produce hallucinations. These hallucinations are difficult to detect in reasoning-intensive tasks, where the content appears coherent but contains errors like logical flaws and unreliable intermediate results. While step-level analysis is commonly used to detect internal hallucinations, it suffers from limited granularity and poor scalability due to its reliance on step segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose TokenHD, a holistic pipeline for training token-level hallucination detectors. Specifically, TokenHD consists of a scalable data engine for synthesizing large-scale hallucination annotations along with a training recipe featuring an importance-weighted strategy for robust model training. To systematically assess the detection performance, we also provide a rigorous evaluation protocol. Through training within TokenHD, our detector operates directly on free-form text to identify hallucinations, eliminating the need for predefined step segmentation or additional text reformatting. Our experiments show that even a small detector (0.6B) achieves substantial performance gains after training, surpassing much larger reasoning models (e.g., QwQ-32B), and detection performance scales consistently with model size from 0.6B to 8B. Finally, we show that our detector can generalize well across diverse practical scenarios and explore strategies to further enhance its cross-domain generalization capability.

Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout systems differ in numerical precision, sampling, and other implementation details. Existing methods manage this fragility by adding hyper-parameters to the training objective, which makes the algorithm more sensitive to its configuration and requires retuning whenever the task, model scale, or distribution mismatch changes. This fragility traces to two concerns that current objectives entangle through hyper-parameters set before training begins: a trust-region concern, that updates should not move the policy too far from its current value, and an off-policy concern, that data from older or different behavior policies should influence the update only to the extent that it remains reliable. Neither concern is a constant to set in advance, and their severity is reflected in the policy-ratio distribution of the current batch. We present a simple yet effective batch-adaptive objective that replaces fixed clipping with the normalized effective sample size of the policy ratios. The same statistic caps the score-function weight and sets the strength of an off-policy regularizer, so the update stays close to the usual on-policy score-function update when ratios are nearly uniform, and tightens automatically when stale or mismatched data cause ratio concentration, while retaining a nonzero learning signal on high-ratio tokens. Experiments across a wide range of settings show that our method matches or exceeds tuned baselines, introducing no new objective hyper-parameters and removing several existing ones. The code is available at https://github.com/FeynRL-project/FeynRL.

Table processing-including cleaning, transformation, augmentation, and matching-is a foundational yet error-prone stage in real-world data pipelines. While recent LLM-based approaches show promise for automating such tasks, they often struggle in practice due to ambiguous instructions, complex task structures, and the lack of structured feedback, resulting in syntactically correct but semantically flawed code. To address these challenges, we propose ProfiliTable, an autonomous multi-agent framework centered on dynamic profiling, which constructs and iteratively refines a unified execution context through interactive exploration, knowledge-augmented synthesis, and feedback-driven refinement. ProfiliTable integrates (i) a Profiler that performs ReAct-style data exploration to build semantic understanding, (ii) a Generator that retrieves curated operators to synthesize task-aware code, and (iii) an Evaluator-Summarizer loop that injects execution scores and diagnostic insights to enable closed-loop refinement. Extensive experiments on a diverse benchmark covering 18 tabular task types demonstrate that ProfiliTable consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly in complex multi-step scenarios. These results highlight the critical role of dynamic profiling in reliably translating ambiguous user intents into robust and governance-compliant table transformations.

Accurate crop yield forecasting in commercial soft fruit production is constrained by the data available in typical commercial farm records, which lack the sensor networks, satellite imagery, and high-resolution meteorological inputs that most state-of-the-art approaches assume. We propose a structured LLM agent framework that performs post-hoc correction of existing model predictions, encoding agricultural domain knowledge across tools for phase detection, bias learning, and range validation. Evaluated on a proprietary strawberry yield dataset and a public USDA corn harvest dataset, agent refinement of XGBoost reduced MAE by 20% and MASE by 56% on strawberry, with consistent improvements across Moirai2 (MAE 24%, MASE 22%) and Random Forest (MAE 28%, MASE 66%) baselines. Using Llama 3.1 8B as the agent produced the strongest corrections across all configurations; LLaVA 13B showed inconsistent gains, highlighting sensitivity to the choice of refinement model.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim for general robot learning by aligning action as a modality within powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing VLAs rely on end-to-end supervision to implicitly enable the action decoding process to learn task-relevant features. However, without explicit guidance, these models often overfit to spurious correlations, such as visual shortcuts or environmental noise, limiting their generalization. In this paper, we introduce GuidedVLA, a framework designed to manually guide the action generation to focus on task-relevant factors. Our core insight is to treat the action decoder not as a monolithic learner, but as an assembly of functional components. Individual attention heads are supervised by manually defined auxiliary signals to capture distinct factors. As an initial study, we instantiate this paradigm with three specialized heads: object grounding, spatial geometry, and temporal skill logic. Across simulation and real-robot experiments, GuidedVLA improves success rates in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings compared to strong VLA baselines. Finally, we show that the quality of these specialized factors correlates positively with task performance and that our mechanism yields decoupled, high-quality features. Our results suggest that explicitly guiding action-decoder learning is a promising direction for building more robust and general VLA models.

Monitoring coding agents for dangerous behavior using language models requires classifying transcripts that often exceed 500K tokens, but prior agent monitoring benchmarks rarely contain transcripts longer than 100K tokens. We show that when used as classifiers, current frontier models fail to notice dangerous actions more often in longer transcripts. In particular, on a dataset that requires identifying when a coding agent takes a subtly dangerous action, Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, and Gemini 3.1 miss these actions $2\times$ to $30\times$ more often when they occur after 800K tokens of benign activity than when they occur on their own. We also show that these weaknesses can be partially mitigated with prompting techniques such as periodic reminders throughout the transcript and may be mitigated further with better post-training. Monitor evaluations that do not consider long-context degradation are likely overestimating monitor performance.

Agentic AI governance is a critical component of agentic AI infrastructure ensuring that agents follow their owner's communication and interaction policies, and providing protection against attacks from malicious agents. The state-of-the-art solution, SAGA, assumes a logically centralized point of trust, the Provider, which serves as a repository for user and agent information and actively enforces policies. While SAGA provides protection against malicious agents, it remains vulnerable to a malicious Provider that deviates from the protocol, undermining the security of the identity and access control infrastructure. Deployment on both private and public clouds, each susceptible to insider threats, further increases the risk of Provider compromise. In this work, we analyze the attacks that can be mounted from a compromised Provider, taking into account the different system components and realistic deployments. We identify and execute several concrete attacks with devastating effects: undermining agent attributability, extracting private data, or bypassing access control. We then present three types of solutions for securing the Provider that offer different trade-offs between security and performance. We first present SAGA-BFT, a fully byzantine-resilient architecture that provides the strongest protection, but incurs significant performance degradation, due to the high-cost of byzantine resilient protocols. We then propose SAGA-MON and SAGA-AUD, two novel solutions that leverage lightweight server-side monitoring or client-side auditing to provide protection against most classes of attacks with minimal overhead. Finally, we propose SAGA-HYB, a hybrid architecture that combines byzantine-resilience with monitoring and auditing to trade-off security for performance. We evaluate all the architectures and compare them with SAGA. We discuss which solution is best and under what conditions.

The numerical optimization of continuous functions is a fundamental task in many scientific and engineering domains, ranging from mechanical design to training of artificial intelligence models. Among the most effective and widely used algorithms for this purpose is Differential Evolution (DE), known for its simplicity and strong performance. Recent research has shown that adapting AI models to operate over alternative number systems-such as complex numbers, quaternions, and geometric algebras-can improve model compactness and accuracy. However, such extensions remain underexplored in bio-inspired optimization algorithms. In particular, the use of quaternion algebra represents an emerging area in computational intelligence. This paper introduces a family of novel Quaternion-Valued Differential Evolution (QDE) algorithms that operate directly in the quaternion space. We propose several mutation strategies specifically designed to exploit the algebraic and geometric properties of quaternions. Results show that our QDE variants achieve faster convergence and superior performance on several function classes in the BBOB benchmark compared to the traditional real-valued DE algorithm.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the biomedical domain requires benchmarks that can distinguish reasoning from pattern matching and remain discriminative as model capabilities improve. Existing biomedical question answering (QA) benchmarks are limited in this respect. Multiple-choice formats can allow models to succeed through answer elimination rather than inference, while widely circulated exam-style datasets are increasingly vulnerable to performance saturation and training data contamination. Multi-hop reasoning, defined as the ability to integrate information across multiple sources to derive an answer, is central to clinically meaningful tasks such as diagnostic support, literature-based discovery, and hypothesis generation, yet remains underrepresented in current biomedical QA benchmarks. MedHopQA is a disease-centered multi-hop reasoning benchmark consisting of 1,000 expert-curated question-answer pairs introduced as a shared task at BioCreative IX. Each question requires synthesis of information across two distinct Wikipedia articles, and answers are provided in an open-ended free-text format. Gold annotations are augmented with ontology-grounded synonym sets from MONDO, NCBI Gene, and NCBI Taxonomy to support both lexical and concept-level evaluation. MedHopQA was constructed through a structured process combining human annotation, triage, iterative verification, and LLM-as-a-judge validation. To reduce leaderboard gaming and contamination risk, the 1,000 scored questions are embedded within a publicly downloadable set of 10,000 questions, with answers withheld, on a CodaBench leaderboard. MedHopQA provides both a benchmark and a reusable framework for constructing future biomedical QA datasets that prioritize compositional reasoning, saturation resistance, and contamination resistance as core design constraints.

Large language models increasingly need to accumulate and reuse historical information in long-term assistants and agent systems. Simply expanding the context window is costly and often fails to ensure effective context utilization. We propose $δ$-mem, a lightweight memory mechanism that augments a frozen full-attention backbone with a compact online state of associative memory. $δ$-mem compresses past information into a fixed-size state matrix updated by delta-rule learning, and uses its readout to generate low-rank corrections to the backbone's attention computation during generation. With only an $8\times8$ online memory state, $δ$-mem improves the average score to $1.10\times$ that of the frozen backbone and $1.15\times$ that of the strongest non-$δ$-mem memory baseline. It achieves larger gains on memory-heavy benchmarks, reaching $1.31\times$ on MemoryAgentBench and $1.20\times$ on LoCoMo, while largely preserving general capabilities. These results show that effective memory can be realized through a compact online state directly coupled with attention computation, without full fine-tuning, backbone replacement, or explicit context extension.

Lack of transparency in AI systems poses challenges in critical real-life applications. It is important to be able to explain the decisions of an AI system to ensure trust on the system. Explainable AI (XAI) algorithms play a vital role in achieving this objective. In this paper, we are proposing a new algorithm for Explaining AI systems, FAMeX (Feature Association Map based eXplainability). The proposed algorithm is based on a graph-theoretic formulation of the feature set termed as Feature Association Map (FAM). The foundation of the modelling is based on association between features. The proposed FAMeX algorithm has been found to be better than the competing XAI algorithms - Permutation Feature Importance (PFI) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Experiments conducted with eight benchmark algorithms show that FAMeX is able to gauge feature importance in the context of classification better than the competing algorithms. This definitely shows that FAMeX is a promising algorithm in explaining the predictions from an AI system

To address the increasing demand for ultra-high-capacity wireless communication, terahertz (THz) frequencies near 300 GHz are attracting attention as a new spectral frontier. This work presents the first experimental demonstration of error-free (BER $< 1\times10^{-9}$) 10 Gbps transmission in the 300 GHz band using a soliton microcomb generated in an integrated silicon nitride (SiN) microring resonator. While many previous microcomb-based THz demonstrations have focused on coherent modulation formats and operation near the forward-error-correction (FEC) limit, this work investigates a simple intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM-DD) on-off keying (OOK) architecture suitable for low-complexity THz links and fiber-wireless integrated systems. Although the experiment was conducted in a short back-to-back waveguide configuration, the generated THz wave enabled stable low-BER transmission without FEC or advanced offline signal processing. Analysis of the error-free threshold power indicates the feasibility of free-space transmission over several tens of meters with high-gain antennas and THz-band amplifiers. These results demonstrate the feasibility of robust low-complexity THz photonic links based on soliton microcombs for short-range fiber-wireless integrated systems.

Stable, low-latency whole-body teleoperation of humanoid robots is an open research challenge, complicated by kinematic mismatches between human and robot morphologies, accumulated inertial sensor noise, non-trivial control latency, and persistent sim-to-real transfer gaps. This paper presents a complete real-time whole-body teleoperation system that maps human motion, recorded with a Virdyn IMU-based full-body motion capture suit, directly onto a Unitree G1 humanoid robot. We introduce a custom motion-processing, kinematic retargeting, and control pipeline engineered for continuous, low-latency operation without any offline buffering or learning-based components. The system is first validated in simulation using the MuJoCo physics model of the Unitree G1 (sim2sim), and then deployed without modification on the physical platform (sim2real). Experimental results demonstrate stable, synchronized reproduction of a broad motion repertoire, including walking, standing, sitting, turning, bowing, and coordinated expressive full-body gestures. This work establishes a practical, scalable framework for whole-body humanoid teleoperation using commodity wearable motion capture hardware.

Learning-to-Defer (L2D) methods route each query either to a predictive model or to external experts. While existing work studies this problem in batch settings, real-world deployments require handling streaming data, changing expert availability, and shifting expert distribution. We introduce the first online L2D algorithm for multiclass classification with bandit feedback and a dynamically varying pool of experts. Our method achieves regret guarantees of $O((n+n_e)T^{2/3})$ in general and $O((n+n_e)\sqrt{T})$ under a low-noise condition, where $T$ is the time horizon, $n$ is the number of labels, and $n_e$ is the number of distinct experts observed across rounds. The analysis builds on novel $\mathcal{H}$-consistency bounds for the online framework, combined with first-order methods for online convex optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively extends standard Learning-to-Defer to settings with varying expert availability and reliability.

Aligning language models for both helpfulness and safety typically requires complex pipelines-separate reward and cost models, online reinforcement learning, and primal-dual updates. Recent direct preference optimization approaches simplify training but incorporate safety through ad-hoc modifications such as multi-stage procedures or heuristic margin terms, lacking a principled derivation. We show that the likelihood ratio of the optimal safe policy admits a closed-form decomposition that reduces safety alignment to a density ratio matching problem. Minimizing Bregman divergences between the data and model ratios yields Bregman Safety Optimization (BSO), a family of single-stage loss functions, each induced by a convex generator, that provably recover the optimal safe policy. BSO is both general and simple: it requires no auxiliary models, introduces only one hyperparameter beyond standard preference optimization, and recovers existing safety-aware methods as special cases. Experiments across safety alignment benchmarks show that BSO consistently improves the safety-helpfulness trade-off.

Sampling from constrained distributions has a wide range of applications, including in Bayesian optimization and robotics. Prior work establishes convergence and feasibility guarantees for constrained sampling, but assumes that the feasible set is connected. However, in practice, the feasible set often decomposes into multiple disconnected components, which makes efficient sampling under constraints challenging. In this paper, we propose MAnifold Sampling via Entropy Maximization (MASEM) for sampling on a manifold with an unknown number of disconnected components, implicitly defined by smooth equality and inequality constraints. The presented method uses a resampling scheme to maximize the entropy of the empirical distribution based on k-nearest neighbor density estimation. We show that, in the mean field, MASEM decreases the KL-divergence between the empirical distribution and the maximum-entropy target exponentially in the number of resampling steps. We instantiate MASEM with multiple local samplers and demonstrate its versatility and efficiency on synthetic and robotics-based benchmarks. MASEM enables fast and scalable mixing across a range of constrained sampling problems, improving over alternatives by an order of magnitude in Sinkhorn distance with competitive runtime.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) contain rich longitudinal patient information and are widely used in predictive modeling applications. However, effectively leveraging historical data remains challenging due to long trajectories, heterogeneous events, temporal irregularity, and the varying relevance of past clinical context. Existing approaches often rely on fixed windows or uniform aggregation, which can obscure clinically important signals. In this work, we introduce EHR-RAGp, a retrieval-augmented foundation model that dynamically integrates the most relevant patient history across diverse clinical event types. We propose a prototype-guided retrieval module that acts as an alignment mechanism and estimates the relevance of retrieved historical chunks with respect to a given prediction task, guiding the model towards the most informative context. Across multiple clinical prediction tasks, EHR-RAGp consistently outperforms state-of-the-art EHR foundation models and transformer-based baselines. Furthermore, integrating EHR-RAGp with existing clinical foundation models yields substantial performance gains. Overall, EHR-RAGp provides a scalable and efficient framework for leveraging long-range clinical context to improve downstream performance.

Post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models via reinforcement learning (RL) in learned world models has emerged as an effective strategy to adapt to new tasks without costly real-world interactions. However, while using imagined trajectories reduces the sample complexity of policy training, existing methods still heavily rely on task-specific data to fine-tune both the world and reward models, fundamentally limiting their scalability to unseen tasks. To overcome this, we argue that world and reward models should capture transferable physical priors that enable zero-shot inference. We propose RAW-Dream (Reinforcing VLAs in task-Agnostic World Dreams), a new paradigm that completely disentangles world model learning from downstream task dependencies. RAW-Dream utilizes a world model pre-trained on diverse task-free behaviors for predicting future rollouts, and an off-the-shelf Vision-Language Model (VLM) for reward generation. Because both components are task-agnostic, VLAs can be readily finetuned for any new task entirely within this zero-shot imagination. Furthermore, to mitigate world model hallucinations, we introduce a dual-noise verification mechanism to filter out unreliable rollouts. Extensive experiments across simulation and real-world settings demonstrate consistent performance gains, proving that generalized physical priors can effectively substitute for costly task-dependent data, offering a highly scalable roadmap for VLA adaptation.

We investigate frameworks for post-flight safety analysis at non-towered airports using large language models (LLMs). Non-towered airports rely on the Common Traffic Advisory Frequency (CTAF) for air traffic coordination and experience frequent near mid-air collisions due to the pilot self-announcement communication protocol. We propose a general vision-language model (VLM) approach to analyze the transcribed CTAF radio communications in natural language, METeorological Aerodrome Report (METAR) weather data, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) flight trajectories, and Visual Flight Rules sectional charts of the airfield. We provide a preliminary study at Half Moon Bay Airport, with a qualitative real world case study and a quantitative evaluation using a new synthetic dataset of communications and weather modalities. We qualitatively evaluate our framework on real flight data using Gemini 2.5 Pro, demonstrating accurate identification of a right-of-way violation. The synthetic dataset is derived from real examples and includes a 12-category hazard taxonomy, and is used to benchmark three open-source (Qwen 2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9B) and three closed-source (GPT-4o, GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6) LLM models on the subset of inputs related to CTAF and METAR. Even limited to CTAF and METAR inputs and open source LLMs, instances of our framework typically achieve a macro F1 score above 0.85 on a binary nominal/danger classification task. Future work includes a quantitative evaluation across all modalities and a larger number of real world examples. Taken together, our results suggest that VLM analysis of safety at non-towered airports may be a valuable future capability.

A major recent advance in quantization is given by microscaled 4-bit formats such as NVFP4 and MXFP4, quantizing values into small groups sharing a scale, assuming a fixed floating-point grid. In this paper, we study the following natural extension: assume that, for each group of values, we are free to select the "better" among two or more 4-bit grids marked by one or more bits in the scale value. We formalize the power-of-two-grids (PO2) problem, and provide theoretical results showing that practical small-group formats such as MXFP or NVFP can benefit significantly from PO2 grids, while the advantage vanishes for very large groups. On the practical side, we instantiate several grid families, including 1) PO2(NF4), which pairs the standard NF4 normal grid with a learned grid, 2) MPO2, a grid pair that is fully learned over real weights and activations, 3) PO2(Split87), an explicit-zero asymmetric grid and 4) SFP4, a TensorCore-implementable triple which pairs NVFP4 with two shifted variants. Results for post-training quantization of standard open models and pre-training of Llama-like models show that adaptive grids consistently improve accuracy vs single-grid FP4 under both weight-only and weight+activation. Source code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/GridGames.

Pursuing training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation in an efficient and generalizable manner remains challenging due to the deep-seated spatial bias in CLIP. To overcome the limitations of existing solutions, this work moves beyond the CLIP-based paradigm and harnesses the recent spatially-aware dino.txt framework to facilitate more efficient and high-quality dense prediction. While dino.txt exhibits robust spatial awareness, we find that the semantic ambiguity of text queries gives rise to severe mismatch within its dense cross-modal interactions. To address this, we introduce \textcolor{oursblue}{\textbf{VI}}sual-guided \textcolor{oursblue}{\textbf{P}}rompt evolution (\textcolor{oursblue}{\textbf{\textit{VIP}}}) to rectify the semantic expressiveness of text queries in dino.txt, unleashing its potential for fine-grained object perception. Towards this end, \VIP integrates alias expansion with a visual-guided distillation mechanism to mine valuable semantic cues, which are robustly aggregated in a saliency-aware manner to yield a high-fidelity prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that \VIP: \ding{182} surpasses the top-leading methods by $1.4\% \sim 8.4\%$ average mIoU, \ding{183} generalizes well to diverse challenging domains, and \ding{184} requires marginal inference time and memory overhead. \href{https://github.com/MiSsU-HH/VIP}{Our code is publicly available at GitHub \faGithub}.

Large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), particularly in tasks requiring situational reasoning and multi-agent coordination. These capabilities make them well suited for cooperative driving, where rule-based approaches struggle in complex and dynamic traffic environments. Intersection management remains especially challenging due to conflicting right-of-way demands, heterogeneous vehicle priorities, and vehicle-specific kinematic constraints that must be resolved in real time. However, existing approaches typically use LLMs as auxiliary components on top of signal-based systems rather than as primary decision-makers. Signal controllers remain vehicle-agnostic, reservation-based methods lack intent awareness, and recent LLM-based systems still depend on signal infrastructure. In addition, LLM inference latency limits their use in sub-second control settings. We propose LISA (LLM-Based Intent-Driven Speed Advisory), a signal-free cognitive arbitration framework for autonomous intersection management. LISA uses an LLM to reason over declared vehicle intents, incorporating priority classes, queue pressure, and energy preferences. We evaluate LISA against fixed-cycle control, SCATS, AIM, and GLOSA across varying traffic loads. Results show that LISA reduces mean control delay by up to 89.1% and maintains Level of Service C while all non-LLM baselines degrade to Level of Service F. Under near-saturated demand, LISA reduces mean waiting time by 93% and peak queue length by 60.6% relative to fixed-cycle control. It also lowers fuel consumption by up to 48.8% and achieves 86.2% intent satisfaction, compared to 61.2% for the best non-LLM method. These results demonstrate that LLM-based reasoning can enable real-time, signal-free intersection management.

Multi-hop question answering (QA) remains a significant challenge in the biomedical domain, requiring systems to integrate information across multiple sources to answer complex questions. To address this problem, the BioCreative IX MedHopQA shared task was designed to benchmark in multi-hop reasoning for large language models (LLMs). We developed a novel dataset of 1,000 challenging QA pairs spanning diseases, genes, and chemicals, with particular emphasis on rare diseases. Each question was constructed to require two-hop reasoning through the integration of information from two distinct Wikipedia pages. The challenge attracted 48 submissions from 13 teams. Systems were evaluated using both surface string comparison and conceptual accuracy (MedCPT score). The results showed a substantial performance gap between baseline LLMs and enhanced systems. The top-ranked submission achieved an 89.30% F1 score on the MedCPT metric and an 87.30% exact match (EM) score, compared with 67.40% and 60.20%, respectively, for the zero-shot baseline. A central finding of the challenge was that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and related retrieval-based strategies were critical for strong performance. In addition, concept-level evaluation improved answer assessment when correct responses differed in surface form. The MedHopQA dataset is publicly available to support continued progress in this important area. Challenge materials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/bionlp/medhopqa and benchmark https://www.codabench.org/competitions/7609/

The development of separate-encoder Unified multimodal models (UMMs) comes with a rapidly growing inference cost due to dense visual token processing. In this paper, we focus on understanding-side visual token reduction for improving the efficiency of separate-encoder UMMs. While this topic has been widely studied for MLLMs, existing methods typically rely on attention scores, text-image similarity and so on, implicitly assuming that the final objective is discriminative reasoning. This assumption does not hold for UMMs, where understanding-side visual tokens must also preserve the model's capabilities for editing images. We propose G$^2$TR, a generation-guided visual token reduction framework for separate-encoder UMMs. Our key insight is that the generation branch provides a task-agnostic signal for identifying understanding-side visual tokens that are not only semantically relevant but also important for latent-space image reconstruction and generation. G$^2$TR estimates token importance from consistency with VAE latent, performs balanced token selection, and merges redundant tokens into retained representatives to reduce information loss. The method is training-free, plug-and-play, and applied only after the understanding encoding stage, making it compatible with existing UMM inference pipelines. Experiments on image understanding and editing benchmarks show that G$^2$TR substantially reduces visual tokens and prefill computation by 1.94x while maintaining both reasoning accuracy and editing quality, outperforming baselines on almost all benchmarks.

Critical transitions - abrupt, often irreversible changes in system dynamics - arise across human and natural systems, often with catastrophic consequences. Real-world observations of such shifts remain scarce, preventing the development of reliable early warning systems. Conventional statistical and spectral indicators, such as increasing variance, tend to fail under realistic conditions of limited data and correlated noise, whereas existing deep learning classifiers do not extrapolate beyond their training data distribution. In this work, we introduce TipPFN, an in-context learning (ICL) framework that uses a prior-data fitted network to infer a system's proximity to a critical transition. Trained on our novel synthetic data generator, which is based on canonical bifurcation scenarios coupled to diverse, randomized stochastic dynamics, TipPFN flexibly capitalizes on contexts of various sizes, complexity and dimensionalities. We demonstrate robust, state-of-the-art early detection of critical transitions in previously unseen tipping regimes, sim-to-real examples, and real-world observations in both ICL and zero-shot settings.

Catastrophic forgetting remains the central obstacle in continual learning (CL): parameters shared across tasks interfere with one another, and existing regularization methods such as EWC and SI apply uniform penalties without awareness of which input region a parameter serves. We propose KAN-CL, a continual learning framework that exploits the compact-support spline parameterization of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to perform importance-weighted anchoring at per-knot granularity. Deployed as a classification head on a convolutional backbone with standard EWC regularization on the backbone (bbEWC) KAN-CL achieves forgetting reductions of 88% and 93% over a head-only KAN baseline on Split-CIFAR-10/5T and Split-CIFAR-100/10T respectively, while matching or exceeding the accuracy of all baselines on both benchmarks. We further provide a Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) analysis showing that KAN's spline locality induces a structural rank deficit in the cross-task NTK, yielding a forgetting bound that holds even in the feature-learning regime. These results establish that combining an architecture with natural parameter locality (KAN head) with a complementary backbone regularizer (bbEWC) yields a compositional and principled approach to catastrophic forgetting.

While recent advancements in multimodal language models have enabled image generation from expressive multi-image instructions, existing methods struggle to maintain performance under complex interleaved instructions. This limitation stems from the structural separation of images and text in current paradigms, which forces models to bridge difficult long-range dependencies to match descriptions with visual targets. To address these challenges, we propose \texttt{I}mages i\texttt{N} \texttt{SE}n\texttt{T}ences (\textit{a.k.a}, INSET), a unified generation model that seamlessly embeds images as native vocabulary within textual instructions. By positioning visual features directly at their corresponding semantic slots, INSET leverages the contextual locality of transformers for precise object binding, effectively treating images as dense, expressive language tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable data engine that synthesizes 15M high-quality interleaved samples from standard image and video datasets, utilizing VLMs and LLMs to construct rich, long-horizon sequences. Evaluation results on InterleaveBench demonstrate that INSET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-image consistency and text alignment, with performance gaps widening as input complexity increases. Beyond standard generation, our approach inherently extends to multimodal image editing, integrating visual content as part of the instruction to facilitate highly expressive and creative visual manipulations.

High-quality labeled data is essential for training robust machine learning models, yet obtaining annotations at scale remains expensive. AI-assisted annotation has therefore become standard in large-scale labeling workflows. However, in tasks where model predictions carry two independent components, a class label and spatial boundaries, a model may classify an object with high confidence while mislocalizing it. Existing AI-assisted workflows offer annotators no signal about where spatial errors are most likely. Without such guidance, humans may systematically underinspect subtly misplaced boxes. We address this by studying the effect of visualizing spatial uncertainty via a purpose-built interface. In a controlled study with 120 participants, those receiving uncertainty cues achieve higher label quality while being faster overall. A box-level analysis confirms that the cues redirect annotator effort toward high-uncertainty predictions and away from well-localized boxes. These findings establish localization uncertainty as a lever to improve human-in-the-loop annotation. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/MUHA/.

Recent works have analyzed the impact of individual components of neural networks on gendered predictions, often with a focus on mitigating gender bias. However, mechanistic interpretations of gender tend to (i) focus on a very specific gender-related task, such as gendered pronoun prediction, or (ii) fail to distinguish between the production of factually gendered outputs (the correct assumption of gender given a word that carries gender as a semantic property) and gender biased outputs (based on a stereotype). To address these issues, we curate \gknow, a benchmark to assess gender knowledge and gender bias in language models across different types of gender-related predictions. \gknow allows us to identify and analyze circuits and individual neurons responsible for gendered predictions. We test the impact of neuron ablation on benchmarks for disentangling stereotypical and factual gender (DiFair and the test set of GKnow), as well as StereoSet. Results show that gender bias and factual gender are severely entangled on the level of both circuits and neurons, entailing that ablation is an unreliable debiasing method. Furthermore, we show that benchmarks for evaluating gender bias can hide the decrease in factual gender knowledge that accompanies neuron ablation. We curate GKnow as a contribution to the continuous development of robust gender bias benchmarks.

Egocentric 3D hand pose estimation and gesture recognition are essential for immersive augmented/virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and robotics. However, conventional frame-based cameras suffer from motion blur and limited dynamic range, while existing event-based methods are hindered by ego-motion interference, monocular depth ambiguity, and the lack of large-scale real-world stereo datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose EgoEV-HandPose, an end-to-end framework for joint 3D bimanual pose estimation and gesture recognition from stereo event streams. Central to our approach is KeypointBEV, a flexible stereo fusion module that lifts features into a canonical bird's-eye-view space and employs an iterative reprojection-guided refinement loop to progressively resolve depth uncertainty and enforce kinematic consistency. In addition, we introduce EgoEVHands, the first large-scale real-world stereo event-camera dataset for egocentric hand perception, containing 5,419 annotated sequences with dense 3D/2D keypoints across 38 gesture classes under varying illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoEV-HandPose achieves state-of-the-art performance with an MPJPE of 30.54mm and 86.87% Top-1 gesture recognition accuracy, significantly outperforming RGB-based stereo and prior event-camera methods, particularly in low-light and bimanual occlusion scenarios, thereby setting a new benchmark for event-based egocentric perception. The established dataset and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/ZJUWang01/EgoEV-HandPose.

Modern GUI agents typically rely on a model-centric and step-wise interaction paradigm, where LLMs must re-interpret the UI and re-decide actions at every screen, which is fragile in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose Executable Agentic Memory (EAM), a structured Knowledge Graph (KG) that shifts GUI planning from free-form generation to a robust retrieval-and-execution process. Our approach includes a sample-efficient memory construction pipeline using state-aware DFS and action-group mining to compress multi-step routines. To ensure efficient planning, we introduce a value-guided graph search where a lightweight Q-function model steers Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) over the KG. We theoretically establish bias-consistency for the Q-model and derive sample complexity bounds for path recovery. Empirically, EAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines like UI-TARS-7B by up to $19.6\%$ on AndroidWorld, while reducing token costs $6\times$ relative to GPT-4o. With a $2.8$s average latency, EAM enables reliable, quick, and long-horizon GUI automation.

Benchmarking tabular learning has revealed the benefit of dedicated architectures, pushing the state of the art. But real-world tables often contain string entries, beyond numbers, and these settings have been understudied due to a lack of a solid benchmarking suite. They lead to new research questions: Are dedicated learners needed, with end-to-end modeling of strings and numbers? Or does it suffice to encode strings as numbers, as with a categorical encoding? And if so, do the resulting tables resemble numerical tabular data, calling for the same learners? To enable these studies, we contribute STRABLE, a benchmarking corpus of 108 tables, all real-world learning problems with strings and numbers across diverse application fields. We run the first large-scale empirical study of tabular learning with strings, evaluating 445 pipelines. These pipelines span end-to-end architectures and modular pipelines, where strings are first encoded, then post-processed, and finally passed to a tabular learner. We find that, because most tables in the wild are categorical-dominant, advanced tabular learners paired with simple string embeddings achieve good predictions at low computational cost. On free-text-dominant tables, large LLM encoders become competitive. Their performance also appears sensitive to post-processing, with differences across LLM families. Finally, we show that STRABLE is a good set of tables to study "string tabular" learning as it leads to generalizable pipeline rankings that are close to the oracle rankings. We thus establish STRABLE as a foundation for research on tabular learning with strings, an important yet understudied area.

Language models are instruction-tuned to refuse harmful requests, but the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. Popular steering methods operate on the residual stream and degrade output coherence at high intervention strengths, limiting their practical use. We introduce contrastive neuron attribution (CNA), which identifies the 0.1% of MLP neurons whose activations most distinguish harmful from benign prompts, requiring only forward passes with no gradients or auxiliary training. In instruct models, ablating the discovered circuit reduces refusal rates by over 50% on a standard jailbreak benchmark while preserving fluency and non-degeneracy across all steering strengths. Applying CNA to matched base and instruct models across Llama and Qwen architectures (from 1B to 72B parameters), we find that base models contain similar late-layer discrimination structures but steering these neurons produces only content shifts, not behavioral change. These results demonstrate that neuron-level intervention enables reliable behavioral steering without the quality tradeoffs of residual-stream methods. More broadly, our findings suggest that alignment fine-tuning transforms pre-existing discrimination structure into a sparse, targetable refusal gate.

Leveraging the rich world knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents offers a promising path toward general intelligence. However, a fundamental prior-dynamics mismatch hinders existing approaches: static LLM knowledge cannot directly adapt to the complex transition dynamics of long-horizon tasks. Using LLM priors as fixed policies limits exploration diversity, as the prior is blind to environment-specific dynamics; while end-to-end fine-tuning suffers from optimization instability and credit assignment issues. To bridge this gap, we propose PriorZero, a unified framework that integrates LLM-derived conceptual priors into world-model-based planning through a decoupled rollout-training design. During rollout, a novel root-prior injection mechanism incorporates LLM priors exclusively at the root node of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), focusing search on semantically promising actions while preserving the world model's deep lookahead capability. During training, PriorZero decouples world-model learning from LLM adaptation: the world model is continuously refined on interaction data to jointly improve its dynamics, policy, and value predictions, its value estimates are then leveraged to provide fine-grained credit assignment signals for stable LLM fine-tuning via alternating optimization. Experiments across diverse benchmarks, including text-based adventure games in Jericho and instruction-following gridworld tasks in BabyAI, demonstrate that PriorZero consistently improves both exploration efficiency and asymptotic performance, establishing a promising framework for LLM-empowered decision-making. Our code is available at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

Microbiome functions are encoded within the genes of the community-wide metagenome. A natural question is whether properties of a microbial community can be predicted just from knowing the raw DNA sequences of its members. In this work, we employ set-aggregated genome embeddings (SAGE) to predict community-level abundance profiles, exploiting the few-shot learning capabilities of genomic language models (GLMs). We benchmark this approach to show improved generalization on novel genomes compared to classical bioinformatics approaches. Model ablation shows that community-level latent representations directly result in improved performance. Lastly, we demonstrate the benefits of intermediate transformations between latent representations and demonstrate the differences between GLM embedding choices.

Farmland Semantic Change Detection (SCD) is essential for cultivated land protection, yet existing benchmarks and models remain insufficient for fine-grained farmland conversion monitoring. Current datasets often lack dedicated "from-to" annotations, while visual change detection models are easily disturbed by phenology-induced pseudo-changes caused by crop rotation, seasonal variation, and illumination differences. To address these challenges, we construct HZNU-FCD, a large-scale fine-grained farmland SCD benchmark with a unified five-class farmland-to-non-farmland annotation protocol. It contains 4,588 bitemporal image pairs with pixel-level labels for practical farmland protection. Based on this benchmark, we propose a large-small collaborative SCD framework that integrates a task-driven small visual model with a frozen large vision-language model. The small model, Fine-grained Difference-aware Mamba (FD-Mamba), learns dense change representations for boundary preservation and small-region localization. The large-model pathway, Cross-modal Logical Arbitration (CMLA), introduces CLIP-based textual priors for prompt-guided semantic arbitration and pseudo-change suppression. To enable effective collaboration, we design a hard-region co-training strategy that supervises the CMLA semantic score map only on low-confidence pixels. Experiments show that our method achieves 97.63% F1, 96.32% IoU, and 96.35% SCD_IoU_mean on HZNU-FCD with only 6.65M trainable parameters. Compared with the multimodal ChangeCLIP-ViT, which leverages vision-language information for change detection, our method improves F1 by 10.19 percentage points on HZNU-FCD. It also achieves 91.43% F1 and 84.21% IoU on LEVIR-CD, and 93.85% F1 and 88.41% IoU on WHU-CD, demonstrating strong robustness and generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/Lovelymili/FD-Mamba.

Prompt specifications for multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems carry data contracts and integration logic across many interdependent files but are rarely subjected to structured-inspection rigor. This paper reports a single-system empirical case study of iterative, agent-driven auditing applied to AEGIS (Autonomous Engineering Governance and Intelligence System), a production seven-lane orchestration pipeline whose prompt-specification surface comprises approximately 7150 lines: 6907 across seven lane PROMPT.md files and a 245-line shared Ticket Contract. Nine sequential audit rounds, executed by Claude sub-agents using a checklist-driven walkthrough adapted from Weinberg and Freedman, surfaced 51 prompt-specification consistency defects, distinct from the 51 STRIDE-categorized adversarial code findings reported in the companion preprint. Per-round counts were 15, 8, 12, 2, 8, 1, 4, 1, and 0. We report a seven-category post-hoc defect taxonomy with explicit coding rules, observed non-monotonic convergence consistent with cascading edits and audit-scope expansion, and an audit protocol distilled from the study, with the final locked checklist released as a reproducibility appendix. Single-file review missed defect classes that were surfaced only by later expanded-scope rounds in this system. The same LLM family authored and audited the specifications; replication with dissimilar models and human reviewers is required before generalization.

Dynamic feature selection (DFS) is a machine learning framework in which features are acquired sequentially for individual samples under budget constraints. The exponential growth in the number of possible feature acquisition paths forces a DFS model to balance fitting specific scenarios against maintaining general performance, even when the feature space is moderate in size. In this paper, we study the structural limitations of existing DFS approaches to achieve an optimal solution. Then, we propose \textsc{Hyper-DFS}, a hypernetwork-based DFS approach that generates feature subset-specific classifier parameters on demand. We show that the use of hypernetworks compared to mask-embedding methods results in a smaller structural complexity bound. We also use a Set Transformer encoding to create a smooth conditioning space for the hypernetwork, so that functionally similar tasks are also geometrically close. In our benchmarks, \textsc{Hyper-DFS} outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches on synthetic and real-life tabular data. It is also competitive or superior across all image datasets tested, and shows substantially stronger zero-shot generalisation to feature subsets never seen during training than existing DFS approaches.

Graph-based machine learning has emerged as a promising approach for manufacturability analysis by learning directly from CAD models represented as Boundary Representations (B-reps), exploiting both surface geometry and topological connectivity. However, purely geometric representations often lack the process-specific semantics required for accurate manufacturability prediction: many manufacturing factors, such as surface roles or bend intent, are not explicitly encoded in shape alone and are difficult for data-driven models to infer reliably. We propose a hybrid approach that addresses this challenge by enriching B-rep attributed adjacency graphs with manufacturing features recognized through a rule-based module. Applied to sheet metal bending, recognized features, such as bend characteristics, flange lengths, and surface roles are integrated as node attributes, concentrating the learning signal on process-relevant geometric patterns. Experiments on both a large-scale synthetic manufacturability benchmark and a real-world industrial dataset with measured bending times, one of the first such validations on genuine production data, demonstrate that combining domain knowledge with graph-based learning improves prediction accuracy across both tasks. The results demonstrate that hybrid modeling offers a feasible and effective path toward deployable tools for manufacturability assessment and effort estimation in industrial CAD environments.

Long-horizon language agents accumulate conversation history far faster than any fixed context window can hold, making memory management critical to both answer accuracy and serving cost. Existing approaches either expand the context window without addressing what is retrieved, perform heavy ingestion-time fact extraction at substantial token cost, or rely on heuristic graph traversal that leaves both accuracy and efficiency on the table. We present PRISM, a training-free retrieval-side framework that treats long-horizon memory as a joint retrieval-and-compression problem over a graph-structured memory. PRISM combines four orthogonal inference-time components: Hierarchical Bundle Search over typed relation paths, Query-Sensitive Edge Costing that aligns traversal with detected query intent, Evidence Compression that compresses the candidate bundle into a compact answer-side context, and Adaptive Intent Routing that routes most queries through zero-LLM tiers. By formulating retrieval as min-cost selection over typed path templates and pairing it with an LLM-side compression step, PRISM surfaces the right evidence under a strict context budget without any fine-tuning or modification to the upstream ingestion pipeline. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that PRISM delivers substantially higher LLM-judge accuracy than every same-protocol baseline at an order-of-magnitude smaller context budget, occupying a previously empty corner of the accuracy-context-cost frontier and demonstrating a superior balance between answer quality and retrieval efficiency.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet the object hallucination remains a critical challenge for reliable deployment. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of instruction token embeddings and reveal that they implicitly encode visual information while effectively filtering erroneous information introduced by misleading visual embeddings. Building on this insight, we propose the Instruction Lens Score (InsLen), which combines a Calibrated Local Score with a Context Consistency Score that measures context consistency of the object tokens. The proposed approach serves as a plug-and-play object hallucination detector without relying on auxiliary models or additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and diverse MLLM architectures demonstrate that InsLen consistently outperforms existing hallucination detection methods, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/Fraserlairh/Instruction-Lens-Score.

When people share the same documents and observations yet reach different conclusions, the disagreement often shifts into a judgment that the other party is cognitively defective, irrational, or acting in bad faith. This paper argues that such divergence is better described as a form of non-identifiability inherent in inference and learning, rather than as a defect of the other party. We organize the phenomenon into two levels: (i) $θ$-level non-identifiability, where conclusions diverge under the same world model $W$ because inference settings differ; and (ii) $W$-level non-identifiability, where repeated use of an inference setting $θ$ biases data exposure and update rules, causing the learned world model $W$ itself to diverge. We introduce an inference profile $θ= (R, E, S, D)$, consisting of Reference, Exploration, Stabilization, and Horizon, and show how outputs can split even for the same observation $o$ and the same $W$. We further explain why disagreements tend to project onto a small number of bases -- abstract versus concrete, externalizability, and order versus freedom -- as a consequence of general constraints on learning systems: computational, observational, and coordination constraints. Finally, we relate the framework to deep representation learning, including representation hierarchy, latent-state estimation, and regularization-exploration trade-offs, and illustrate the framework through a case study on AI regulation debates.

Contact-rich assembly is fundamental in robotics but poses significant challenges due to uncertainties in relative poses, such as misalignments and small clearances in peg-in-hole tasks. Existing approaches typically address search and high-precision insertion separately, because these tasks involve distinct action patterns. However, supporting both tasks within a single model, without switching models or weights, is desirable for intelligent assembly systems. In this work, we propose SI-Diff, a framework that learns both search and high-precision insertion through a force-domain diffusion policy. To this end, we introduce a new mode-conditioning mechanism that enables the policy to capture distinct action behaviors under a single framework. Moreover, we develop a new search teacher policy that can generate diverse trajectories. By training on successful and efficient demonstrations provided by the teacher policy, the model learns the mapping from tactile and end-effector velocity observations to effective action behaviors. We conduct thorough experiments to show that SI-Diff extends the tolerance to x-y misalignments from 2 mm to 5 mm compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, TacDiffusion, while also demonstrating strong zero-shot transferability to unseen shapes.

NVFP4 has recently emerged as an efficient 4-bit microscaling format for large language models (LLMs), offering superior numerical fidelity with native hardware support. However, existing methods often yield suboptimal performance due to inflexible scale selection and the coupled treatment of quantization and dequantization scales. To address these issues, we propose Scale Optimization for Accurate Reconstruction (SOAR), a novel post-training quantization framework that improves the accuracy of NVFP4 quantization. At its core, SOAR features Closed-form Joint Scale Optimization (CJSO), which jointly optimizes global and block-wise scales via analytical solutions derived from reconstruction error minimization. Furthermore, it incorporates Decoupled Scale Search (DSS). DSS decouples the high-precision quantization scale from its constrained dequantization counterpart, and performs discrete search to mitigate precision loss from scale quantization. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that our method consistently outperforms existing NVFP4 quantization baselines, achieving superior accuracy under the same memory footprint with no additional hardware overhead. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/steven-bao1/SOAR.

Conversational scams, such as romance and investment scams, are emerging as a major form of online fraud. Unlike one-shot scam lures such as fake lottery or unpaid toll messages, they unfold through multi-turn conversations in which scammers gradually manipulate victims using evolving psychological techniques. However, existing research mainly focuses on static scam detection or synthetic scams, leaving open whether language models can understand how real-world scams progress over time. We introduce PreScam, a benchmark for modeling scam progression from early conversations. Built from user-submitted scam reports, PreScam filters and structures 177,989 raw reports into 11,573 conversational scam instances spanning 20 scam categories. Each instance is hierarchically structured according to the scam lifecycle defined by the proposed scam kill chain, and further annotated at the turn level with scammer psychological actions and victim responses. We benchmark models on two tasks: real-time termination prediction, which estimates whether a conversation is approaching the termination stage, and scammer action prediction, which forecasts the scammer's subsequent actions. Results show a clear gap between surface-level fluency and progression modeling: supervised encoders substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs on real-time termination prediction, while next-action prediction remains only moderately successful even for strong LLMs. Taken together, these results show that current models can capture some scam-related cues, yet still struggle to track how risk escalates and how manipulation unfolds across turns.

Large language model (LLM) agents have increasingly advanced service applications, such as booking flight tickets. However, these service agents suffer from unreliability in long-horizon tasks, as they often produce policy violations, tool hallucinations, and misaligned actions, which greatly impedes their real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose NOD (Navigator-Operator-Director), a heterogeneous multi-agent architecture for service agents. Instead of maintaining task state implicitly in dialogue context as in prior work, we externalize a structured Global State to enable explicit task state tracking and consistent decision-making by the Navigator. Besides, we introduce selective external oversight before critical actions, allowing an independent Director agent to verify execution and intervene when necessary. As such, NOD effectively mitigates error propagation and unsafe behavior in long-horizon tasks. Experiments on $τ^2$-Bench demonstrate that NOD achieves higher task success rates and critical action precision over baselines. More importantly, NOD improves the reliability of service agents by reducing policy violations, tool hallucinations, and user-intent misalignment.

The agent harness, the system layer comprising prompts, tools, memory, and orchestration logic that surrounds the model, has emerged as the central engineering abstraction for LLMbased agents. Yet harness design remains ad hoc, with no formal theory governing composition, preservation of properties under compilation, or systematic comparison across frameworks. We show that the categorical Architecture triple (G, Know, Phi) from the ArchAgents framework provides exactly this formalization. The four pillars of agent externalization (Memory, Skills, Protocols, Harness Engineering) map onto the triple's components: Memory as coalgebraic state, Skills as operad-composed objects, Protocols as syntactic wiring G, and the full Harness as the Architecture itself. Structural guarantees-integrity gates, quality-based escalation, supported convergence checks-are Know-level certificates whose preservation is structural replay: our compiler checks identity and verifier replay, not output-layer correctness or model behavior. We validate this correspondence with a reference implementation featuring compiler functors targeting Swarms, DeerFlow, Ralph, Scion, and LangGraph: the four configuration compilers preserve three named certificate types by identity or replay, and LangGraph preserves the same certificates through its shared per-stage execution path. The LangGraph compiler creates one node per stage using the same per-stage method as the native runtime, providing LangGraph-native observability without reimplementing harness logic. An end-to-end escalation experiment with real LLM agents confirms that the quality-based escalation control path is model-parametric in this two-model, one-task experiment. The result positions categorical architecture as the formal theory behind harness engineering.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly operate on ultra-high-resolution (UHR) Earth observation imagery, yet they remain vulnerable to a severe scale mismatch between large-scale scene context and micro-scale targets. We refer to this empirical gap as a "resolution illusion": higher input resolution provides the appearance of richer visual detail, but does not necessarily yield reliable perception of spatially small, task-relevant evidence. To benchmark this challenge, we introduce UHR-Micro, a benchmark comprising 11,253 instructions grounded in 1,212 UHR images, designed to evaluate VLMs at the spatial limits of native Earth observation imagery. UHR-Micro spans diverse micro-target scales, context requirements, task families, and visual conditions, and provides diagnostic annotations that support controlled evaluation and fine-grained error attribution. Experiments with representative high-resolution VLMs show substantial failures in spatial grounding and evidence parsing, despite access to high-resolution inputs. Further analysis suggests that these failures are not fully resolved by increasing model capacity, but are closely tied to insufficient guidance in locating and using task-relevant micro-evidence. Motivated by this finding, we propose Micro-evidence Active Perception (MAP), a reference agent that decomposes queries into evidence-seeking steps, actively inspects candidate regions, and grounds its answers in localized observations. MAP-Agent improves micro-level perception by making high-resolution reasoning evidence-centered rather than image-centered. Together, UHR-Micro and MAP-Agent provide a diagnostic platform for evaluating, understanding, and advancing high-resolution reasoning in Earth observation VLMs. Datasets and source code were released at https://github.com/MiliLab/UHR-Micro.

Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for downstream exploration. We present a unified framework that enables the exploration necessary to enable efficient robot policy finetuning by bridging BC pre-training and RL fine-tuning. Our pre-training method, Context-Smoothed Pre-training (CSP), injects forward-diffusion noise into policy inputs, creating a continuum between precise imitation and broad action coverage. We then fine-tune pre-trained policies via Timestep-Modulated Reinforcement Learning (TMRL), which trains the agent to dynamically adjust this conditioning during fine-tuning by modulating the diffusion timestep, granting explicit control over exploration. Integrating seamlessly with arbitrary policy inputs, e.g., states, 3D point clouds, or image-based VLA policies, we show that TMRL improves RL fine-tuning sample efficiency. Notably, TMRL enables successful real-world fine-tuning on complex manipulation tasks in under one hour. Videos and code available at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/tmrl/.

Terminal agents are increasingly capable of executing complex, long-horizon tasks autonomously from a single user prompt. To do so, they must interpret instructions encountered in the environment (e.g., README files, code comments, stack traces) and determine their relevance to the task. This creates a fundamental challenge: relevant cues must be followed to complete a task, whereas irrelevant or misleading ones must be ignored. Existing benchmarks do not capture this ability. An agent may appear capable by blindly following all instructions, or appear robust by ignoring them altogether. We introduce TAB (Task Alignment Benchmark), a suite of 89 terminal tasks derived from Terminal-Bench 2.1. Each task is intentionally underspecified, with missing information provided as a necessary cue embedded in a natural environmental artifact, alongside a plausible but irrelevant distractor. Solving these tasks requires selectively using the cue while ignoring the distractor. Applying TAB to ten frontier agents reveals a systematic gap between task capability and task alignment. The strongest Terminal-Bench agent achieves high task completion but low task alignment on TAB. Evaluating six prompt-injection defenses further shows that suppressing distractor execution also suppresses the cues required for task completion. These results demonstrate that task-aligned agents require selective use of environmental instructions rather than blanket acceptance or rejection.

Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a $\mathbb{C}_2$-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and knowledge distillation (KD) suffer from exposure bias and limited recovery from model-generated errors over long horizons; 2) on-policy reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) better align training with model-generated states, but are unstable and sample-inefficient due to sparse rewards; 3) on-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense token-level guidance, but does not directly optimize arbitrary reward signals. In this paper, we propose Distilled Group Relative Policy Optimization (dGRPO), a method for long-context reasoning that augments GRPO with dense guidance from a stronger teacher via OPD. We also introduce LongBlocks, a synthetic long-context dataset spanning multi-hop reasoning, contextual grounding, and long-form generation. We conduct extensive experiments and ablations comparing off-policy training, sparse-reward GRPO, and our combined approach, leading to an improved recipe for long-context alignment. Overall, our results show that combining outcome-based policy optimization with knowledge distillation in a single objective provides a more stable and effective path to long-context reasoning, while preserving short-context capabilities.

Advancements in reinforcement learning have produced a variety of complex and useful intrinsic driving forces; crucially, these drivers operate under a direct conditioning paradigm. This form of conditioning limits our agents' capacity by restricting how they learn from the environment as well as from others. Off-policy or learn-by-example methods can learn from demonstrators' representations, but they require access to the demonstrating agent's policies or their reward functions. Our work overcomes this direct sampling limitation by introducing vicarious conditioning as an intrinsic reward mechanism. We draw from psychological and biological literature to provide a foundation for vicarious conditioning and use memory-based methods to implement its four steps: attention, retention, reproduction, and reinforcement. Crucially, our vicarious conditioning paradigms support low-shot learning and do not require the demonstrator agent's policy nor its reward functions. We evaluate our approach in the MiniWorld Sidewalk environment, one of the few public environments that features a non-descriptive terminal condition (no reward provided upon agent death), and extend it to Box2D's CarRacing environment. Our results across both environments demonstrate that vicarious conditioning enables longer episode lengths by discouraging the agent from non-descriptive terminal conditions and guiding the agent toward desirable states. Overall, this work emulates a cognitively-plausible learning paradigm better suited to problems such as single-life learning or continual learning.

Safe autonomous agents and mobile robots need fast real time 3D perception, especially for vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians. We introduce a new bird's eye view (BEV) encoding, which maps the full 3D LiDAR point cloud into a light-weight 2D BEV tensor with three height bands. We explicitly reformulate 3D detection as a 2D detection problem and then reconstruct 3D boxes from the BEV outputs. A single network detects cars, pedestrians, and cyclists in one pass. The backbone uses area attention at deep stages, a hierarchical bidirectional neck over P1 to P4 fuses context and detail, and the head predicts oriented boxes with distribution focal learning for side offsets and a rotated IoU loss. Training applies a small vertical re bin and a mild reflectance jitter in channel space to resist memorization. We use an interquartile range (IQR) filter to remove noisy and outlier LiDAR points during 3D reconstruction. On KITTI dataset, TriBand-BEV attains 58.7/52.6/47.2 pedestrian BEV AP(%) for easy, moderate, and hard at 49 FPS on a single consumer GPU, surpassing Complex-YOLO, with gains of +12.6%, +7.5%, and +3.1%. Qualitative scenes show stable detection under occlusion. The pipeline is compact and ready for real time robotic deployment. Our source code is publicly available on GitHub.

The growing popularity of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and their applications has led to a significant fast-paced increase of neuromorphic architectures capable of mimicking the spike-based data processing typical of biological neurons. The efficient power consumption and parallel computing capabilities of the SNNs lead researchers towards the development of digital accelerators, which exploit such features to bring fast and low-power computation on edge devices. The spread of digital neuromorphic hardware however is slowed down by the prohibitive costs that the silicon tape out of circuits brings, that's why targeting Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) could represent a viable alternative, offering a flexible and cost-effective platform for implementing digital neuromorphic systems and helping the spread of open-source hardware designs. In this work we present an heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) where the operations of ReckOn, a Recurrent SNN accelerator, are managed through the integration with traditional processors. These include the RISC-V-based, open-source microcontroller X-HEEP and the ARM processor featured in Zynq Ultrascale systems. We validate our design by reproducing the classification results through the implementation on FPGA of the taped-out version of ReckOn in order to check the equivalence of the accuracy and the characteristics in terms of physical implementation. In a second set of experiments, we evaluate the online learning capability of the solution in classifying a subset of the Braille digit dataset recently used to compare neuromorphic frameworks and platforms.

LLM-based conversational AI agents struggle to maintain coherent behavior over long horizons due to limited context. While RAG-based approaches are increasingly adopted to overcome this limitation by storing interactions in external memory modules and performing retrieval from them, their effectiveness in answering challenging questions (e.g., multi-hop, commonsense) ultimately depends on the agent's ability to reason over the retrieved information. However, existing methods typically retrieve memory based on semantic similarity to the raw user utterance, which lacks explicit reasoning about missing intermediate facts and often returns evidence that is irrelevant or insufficient for grounded reasoning. In this work, we introduce Goal-Mem, a goal-oriented reasoning framework for RAG-based agentic memory that performs explicit backward chaining from the user's utterance as a goal. Rather than progressively expanding from retrieved context, Goal-Mem decomposes each goal into atomic subgoals, performs targeted memory retrieval to satisfy each subgoal, and iteratively identifies what information from memory should be retrieved when intermediate goals cannot be resolved. We formalize this process in Natural Language Logic, a logical system that combines the verifiability of reasoning provided by FOL with the expressivity of natural language. Through extensive experiments on two datasets and comparing to nine strong memory baselines, we show that Goal-Mem consistently improves performance, particularly on tasks requiring multi-hop reasoning and implicit inference.

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents acting in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) must rely on memory, typically encoded in a recurrent neural network (RNN), to integrate information from past observations. Long-horizon POMDPs, in which the relevant observation and the optimal action are separated by many time steps (called the horizon), are particularly challenging: training suffers from poor generalization, severe sample inefficiency, and prohibitive exploration costs. Ideally, an agent trained on short horizons would retain optimal behavior at arbitrarily longer ones, but no formal framework currently characterizes when this is achievable. To fill this gap, we formalized temporal horizon generalization, the property that a policy remains optimal for all horizons, derived a necessary and sufficient condition for it, and experimentally evaluated the ability of nonlinear and parallelizable RNN variants to achieve it. This paper presents the resulting theoretical framework, the empirical evaluation, and the dynamical interpretation linking RNN behavior to temporal horizon generalization. Our analyses reveal that multistability is necessary for temporal horizon generalization and, in simple tasks, sufficient; more complex tasks further require transient dynamics. In contrast, modern parallelizable architectures, namely state space models and gated linear RNNs, are monostable by construction and consequently fail to generalize across temporal horizons. We conclude that multistability and transient dynamics are two essential and complementary dynamical regimes for horizon generalization, and that no current parallelizable RNN exhibits both. Designing parallelizable architectures that combine these regimes thus emerges as a key direction for scalable long-horizon RL.

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance, often outperforming supervised models in zero-shot settings. Recent TSFM architectures, such as Chronos-2 and TabPFN-TS, aim to integrate covariates. In this paper, we design controlled experiments based on simple target-covariate relationships to assess this integration capability. Our results show that TabPFN-TS captures these relationships more effectively than Chronos-2, especially for short horizons, suggesting that the strong benchmark performance of Chronos-2 does not automatically translate into optimal modeling of simple covariate-target dependencies.

Information-theoretic generalization bounds based on the supersample construction are a central tool for algorithm-dependent generalization analysis in the batch i.i.d.~setting. However, existing supersample conditional mutual information (CMI) bounds do not directly apply to sequential decision-making problems such as online learning, streaming active learning, and bandits, where data are revealed adaptively and the learner evolves along a causal trajectory. To address this limitation, we develop a sequential supersample framework that separates the learner filtration from a proof-side enlargement used for ghost-coordinate comparisons. Under a row-wise exchangeability assumption, the sequential generalization gap is controlled by sequential CMI, a sum of roundwise selector--loss information terms. We also establish a Bernstein-type refinement that yields faster rates under suitable variance conditions. The selector-SCMI proof strategy applies to online learning, streaming active learning with importance weighting, and stochastic multi-armed bandits.

Large language models accumulate extensive parametric knowledge through pre-training. However, knowledge conflicts occur when outdated or incorrect parametric knowledge conflicts with external knowledge in the context. Existing methods address knowledge conflicts through contrastive decoding, but in conflict-free scenarios, static approaches disrupt output distribution. Other dynamic decoding methods attempt to measure the degree of conflict but still struggle with complex real-world situations. In this paper, we propose a two-stage decoding method called Dynamic Cognitive Reconciliation Decoding (DCRD), to predict and mitigate context-memory conflicts. DCRD first analyzes the attention map to assess context fidelity and predict potential conflicts. Based on this prediction, the input is directed to one of two decoding paths: (1) greedy decoding, or (2) context fidelity-based dynamic decoding. This design enables DCRD to handle conflicts efficiently while maintaining high accuracy and decoding efficiency in conflict-free cases. Additionally, to simulate scenarios with frequent knowledge updates, we constructed ConflictKG, a knowledge conflict QA benchmark. Experiments on four LLMs across six QA datasets show that DCRD outperforms all baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Drifting Models have emerged as a new paradigm for one-step generative modeling, achieving strong image quality without iterative inference. The premise is to replace the iterative denoising process in diffusion models with a single evaluation of a generator. However, this creates a different trade-off: drifting reduces inference cost by moving much of the computation into training. We introduce DriftXpress, an accelerated formulation of drifting models based on projected RKHS fields. DriftXpress approximates the drifting kernel in a low-rank feature space. This preserves the attraction-repulsion structure of the original drifting field while reducing the cost of field evaluation. Across image-generation benchmarks, DriftXpress achieves comparable FID to standard drifting while reducing wall-clock training cost. These results show that the training-inference trade-off of drifting models can be pushed further without giving up their one-step inference advantage.

Dexterous teleoperation via Mixed Reality (MR)-based interfaces offers a scalable paradigm for transferring human manipulation skills to dexterous robot hands. However, conventional retargeting approaches that minimize kinematic dissimilarity (e.g., joint angle or fingertip position error) often fail in contact-rich rotational manipulation, such as cap opening, key turning, and bolt screwing. This failure stems from the embodiment gap: mismatched link lengths, joint axes/limits, and fingertip geometry can cause direct pose imitation to induce tangential fingertip sliding rather than stable object rotation, resulting in screw axis drift, contact slip, and grasp instability. To address this, we propose DexTwist, a functional twist-retargeting framework for MR-based dexterous teleoperation. DexTwist detects a tripod pinch, estimates the operator's intended screw axis and twist magnitude, and applies a real-time residual joint-space refinement that tracks turning progress while regularizing the robot tripod geometry. The refinement minimizes a virtual-object objective defined by turning angle, screw axis consistency, fingertip closure, and tripod stability. Simulation and real-world experiments show that DexTwist improves turning angle tracking and screw axis stability compared with a vector-based retargeting baseline.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising capabilities in various scientific domain. In particular, these advances have opened new opportunities in drug discovery, where the ability to understand and modify molecular structures is critical for optimizing drug properties such as efficacy and toxicity. However, existing models and benchmarks often overlook toxicity-related challenges, focusing primarily on general property optimization without adequately addressing safety concerns. In addition, even existing toxicity repair benchmarks suffer from limited data diversity, low structural validity of generated molecules, and heavy reliance on proxy models for toxicity assessment. To address these limitations, we propose MolDeTox, a novel benchmark for molecular detoxification, designed to enable fine-grained and reliable evaluation of toxicity-aware molecular optimization across stepwise tasks. We evaluate a wide range of general-purpose LLMs and VLMs under diverse settings, and demonstrate that understanding and generating molecules at the fragment-level improves structural validity and enhances the quality of generated molecules. Moreover, through detailed task-level performance analysis, MolDeTox provides an interpretable benchmark that enables a deeper understanding of the detoxification process. Our dataset is available at : https://huggingface.co/datasets/MolDeTox/MolDeTox

Recent advancements in video-audio joint generation have achieved remarkable success in semantic correspondence. However, achieving precise temporal synchronization, which requires fine-grained alignment between audio events and their visual triggers, remains a challenging problem. The post-training method for joint generation is largely dominated by Supervised Fine-Tuning, but the commonly used Mean Squared Error loss provides insufficient penalties for subtle temporal misalignments. Direct Preference Optimization offers an alternative by introducing explicit misaligned counterparts to better improve temporal sensitivity. In this paper we propose a post-training framework SyncDPO, leveraging DPO to improve the temporal sensitivity of V-A joint generation. Conventional DPO pipelines typically depend on costly sampling-and-ranking procedures to construct preference pairs, resulting in substantial computational cost. To improve efficiency, we introduce a suite of on-the-fly rule-based negative construction strategies that distort temporal structures without incurring additional annotation or sampling. We demonstrate that the temporal alignment capability can be effectively reinforced by providing explicit negative supervision through temporally distorted V-A pairs. Accordingly, we implement a curriculum learning strategy that progressively increases the difficulty of negative samples, transitioning from coarse misalignment to subtle inconsistencies. Extensive objective and subjective experiments across four diverse benchmarks, ranging from ambient sound videos to human speech videos, demonstrate that SyncDPO significantly outperforms other methods in improving model's temporal alignment capability. It also demonstrates superior generalization on out-of-distribution benchmark by capturing intrinsic motion-sound dynamics. Demo and code is available in https://syncdpo.github.io/syncdpo/.

World models enable agents to anticipate the effects of their actions by internalizing environment dynamics. In enterprise systems, however, these dynamics are often defined by tenant-specific business logic that varies across deployments and evolves over time, making models trained on historical transitions brittle under deployment shift. We ask a question the world-models literature has not addressed: when the rules can be read at inference time, does an agent still need to learn them? We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that in settings where transition dynamics are configurable and readable, runtime discovery complements offline training by grounding predictions in the active system instance. We propose enterprise discovery agents, which recover relevant transition dynamics at runtime by reading the system's configuration rather than relying solely on internalized representations. We introduce CascadeBench, a reasoning-focused benchmark for enterprise cascade prediction that adopts the evaluation methodology of World of Workflows on diverse synthetic environments, and use it together with deployment-shift evaluation to show that offline-trained world models can perform well in-distribution but degrade as dynamics change, whereas discovery-based agents are more robust under shift by grounding their predictions in the current instance. Our findings suggest that, in configurable enterprise environments, agents should not rely solely on fixed internalized dynamics, but should incorporate mechanisms for discovering relevant transition logic at runtime.

[Abridged] Production LLM deployments receive feedback from a non-random fraction of users: thumbs sit mostly in the tails of the satisfaction distribution, and a naive average over them can land 40-50 percentage points away from true system quality. We treat this as a topic- and sentiment- stratified selection-bias problem and propose a three-agent hierarchical Bayesian pipeline that does not require ground-truth labels on individual interactions. A Topic Clustering Agent partitions the stream via UMAP + HDBSCAN over text embeddings; a Bias Modeling Agent fits a two-stage hierarchical Beta-Binomial under NUTS, inferring per-topic selection rates $s_c$ and quality $q_c$ with partial pooling; a Synthesis Agent reweights $q_c$ by true topic prevalence $\hatπ_c = n_c/N$ to report a bias-corrected aggregate posterior $\bar Q = \sum_c \hatπ_c q_c$ with credible interval, plus drift signals for online recalibration. Validation uses UltraFeedback (N=10,232 retained interactions, $C=18$ clusters, $Q^\star=0.6249$) with simulated topic- and sentiment-dependent selection biases. We compare five Bayesian variants against Naive and IPW baselines. A mild prior on the feedback channel (typical positive-feedback rate and negative-to-positive ratio, both readable from any production dashboard without labels) keeps Hierarchical-Informed within 4-13 pp of $Q^\star$ as the bias ratio sweeps from 1:1 to 30:1, with 95% credible intervals covering $Q^\star$ in 50/50 random-seed replicates at $κ_{\max}=10$. Without channel-side priors, every weak-prior variant misses $Q^\star$ by 22-33 pp: the per-cluster sufficient statistics admit a one-parameter family of equally good fits, and the prior on the bias channel (not on latent quality) is what breaks the degeneracy.

This paper presents the Constrained Multi-Task Representation Learning (CMTRL) framework for linear bandits. We consider T linear bandit tasks in a d dimensional space, which share a common low-dimensional representation of dimension r, where r is much smaller than the minimum of d and T. Furthermore, tasks are constrained so that only actions meeting specific safety or performance requirements are allowed, referred to as conservative (safe) bandits. We introduce a novel algorithm, Safe-Alternating projected Gradient Descent and minimization (Safe-AltGDmin), to recover a low-rank feature matrix while satisfying the given constraints. Building on this algorithm, we propose a multi-task representation learning framework for conservative linear bandits and establish theoretical guarantees for its regret and sample complexity bounds. We presented experiments and compared the performance of our algorithm with benchmark algorithms.

Video generation models offer a promising imagination mechanism for robot manipulation by predicting long-horizon future observations, but effectively exploiting these imagined futures for action execution remains challenging. Existing approaches either condition policies on predicted frames or directly decode generated videos into actions, both suffering from a mismatch between visual realism and control relevance. As a result, predicted observations emphasize perceptual fidelity rather than action-centric causes of state transitions, leading to indirect and unstable control. To address this gap, we propose MoLA (Mixture of Latent Actions), a control-oriented interface that transforms imagined future videos into executable representations. Instead of passing predicted frames directly to the policy, MoLA leverages a mixture of pretrained inverse dynamics models to infer a mixture of latent actions implied by generated visual transitions. These modality-aware inverse dynamics models capture complementary semantic, depth, and flow cues, providing a structured and physically grounded action representation that bridges video imagination and policy execution. We evaluate our approach on simulated benchmarks (LIBERO, CALVIN, and LIBERO-Plus) and real-world robot manipulation tasks, achieving consistent gains in task success, temporal consistency, and generalization.

In language reasoning, longer chains of thought consistently yield better performance, which naturally suggests that visual latent reasoning may likewise benefit from longer latent sequences. However, we discover a counterintuitive phenomenon: the performance of existing latent visual reasoning methods systematically degrades as the latent sequence grows longer. We reveal the root cause: Information Gain Collapse -- autoregressive generation makes each step highly dependent on prior outputs, so subsequent tokens can barely introduce new information. We further identify that heavily pooled ($\geq 128\times$) image embeddings used as supervision targets provide no more signal than meaningless placeholders. Motivated by these insights, we propose SCOLAR (Self-COnsistent LAtent Reasoning), which introduces a lightweight detransformer that leverages the LLM's full-sequence hidden states to generate auxiliary visual tokens in a single shot, with each token independently anchored to the original visual space. Combined with three-stage SFT and ALPO reinforcement learning, SCOLAR extends acceptable latent CoT length by over $30\times$, achieves state-of-the-art among open-source models on real-world reasoning benchmarks (+14.12% over backbone), and demonstrates strong out-of-distribution generalization.

Effectively handling the interplay between spatial perception and action generation remains a critical bottleneck in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically treat spatial perception and action execution as decoupled or strictly unidirectional processes, fundamentally restricting a robot's ability to master complex manipulation tasks. To address this, we propose X-Imitator, a versatile dual-path framework that models spatial perception and action execution as a tightly coupled bidirectional loop. By reciprocally conditioning current pose predictions on past actions and vice versa, this framework enables continuous mutual refinement between spatial reasoning and action generation. This joint modeling exactly mimics human internal forward models. Designed as a modular architecture, the system can be seamlessly integrated into various visuomotor policies. Extensive experiments across 24 simulated and 3 real-world tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms both vanilla policies and prior methods utilizing explicit pose guidance. The code will be open sourced.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are typically evaluated as if the user had finished typing or speaking before the robot begins acting. In real deployment, however, users take several seconds to enter a request, leaving the policy idle for a substantial fraction of the interaction. We introduce Premover, a lightweight module that converts this idle window into useful precomputation. Premover keeps the VLA backbone frozen and attaches two small projection heads, one for image patches, one for language tokens, that map an intermediate layer of the backbone into a shared space. The resulting focus map is supervised by simulator-rendered target-object segmentation masks and applied as a per-patch reweighting of the next step's image tokens. A single scalar readiness threshold, trained jointly from streaming prefixes, decides when the policy should begin acting. On the LIBERO benchmark suite, Premover reduces mean wall-clock time from 34.0 to 29.4 seconds, a 13.6% reduction, while matching the full-prompt baseline's success rate (95.1% vs. 95.0%); naive premoving, by contrast, collapses to 66.4%.

Algorithm Visualization (AV) helps students build mental models by animating algorithm execution states. Recent LLM-based systems such as CODE2VIDEO generate AV videos in an end-to-end manner. However, this paradigm requires the system to simultaneously simulate algorithm flow and satisfy video rendering constraints, such as element layout and color schemes. This complex task induces LLM hallucinations, resulting in reduced execution success rates, element overlap, and inter-frame inconsistencies. To address these challenges, we propose ALGOGEN, a novel paradigm that decouples algorithm execution from rendering. We first introduce Visualization Trace Algebra (VTA), a monoid over algorithm visual states and operations. The LLM then generates a Python tracker that simulates algorithm flow and outputs VTA-JSON traces, a JSON encoding of VTA. For rendering, we define a Rendering Style Language (RSL) to templatize algorithm layouts. A deterministic renderer then compiles algorithm traces with RSL into Manim, LaTeX/TikZ, or Three.js outputs. Evaluated on a LeetCode AV benchmark of 200 tasks, ALGOGEN achieves an average success rate improvement of 17.3% compared to end-to-end methods, with 99.8% versus 82.5%. These results demonstrate that our decoupling paradigm effectively mitigates LLM hallucinations in complex AV tasks, providing a more reliable solution for automated generation of high-quality algorithm visualizations. Demo videos and code are available in the project repository.

Automatic misinformation detection performs well when deception is visible in what an article explicitly states. However, some misinformation articles remain locally coherent and only become misleading once compared with contemporaneous reports that supply background facts the article omits. We study this omission-relevant setting and observe that current omission-aware approaches typically either attach retrieved context as auxiliary evidence or infer a categorical omission signal, leaving the specific missing fact implicit. We propose \emph{Latent Causal Void} (LCV), a retrieval-guided detector that explicitly reconstructs the missing fact for each target sentence and uses it as a textual cross-source relation in graph reasoning. Concretely, LCV retrieves temporally aligned context articles, asks a frozen instruction-tuned large language model to generate a short missing-context description for each sentence--article pair, and feeds the resulting relation text into a heterograph over target sentences and context articles. On the bilingual benchmark of Sheng et al., LCV improves over the strongest omission-aware baseline by $2.56$ and $2.84$ macro-F1 points on the English and Chinese splits, respectively. The results indicate that modeling the missing cross-source fact itself, rather than only attaching retrieved evidence or predicting an omission signal, is a useful representation for omission-aware misinformation detection.

Optimization modeling translates real decision-making problems into mathematical optimization models and solver-executable implementations. Although language models are increasingly used to generate optimization formulations and solver code, existing benchmarks are almost entirely text-only. This omits many optimization-modeling tasks that arise in operational practice, where requirements are described in text but instance information is conveyed through visual artifacts such as tables, graphs, maps, schedules, and dashboards. We introduce multimodal optimization modeling, a benchmark setting in which models must construct both a mathematical formulation and executable solver code from a text-and-visual problem specification. To evaluate this setting, we develop a solver-grounded framework that generates structured optimization instances, verifies each with an exact solver, and builds both the model-facing inputs and hidden reference files from the same verified source. We instantiate the framework as MM-OptBench, a benchmark of 780 solver-verified instances spanning 6 optimization families, 26 subcategories, and 3 structural difficulty levels. We evaluate 9 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including 6 frontier general-purpose models and 3 math-specialized models, with aggregate, family-level, difficulty-level, and failure-mode analyses. The results show that the task remains far from solved: the best two models reach 52.1% and 51.3% pass@1, while on average across the six general-purpose MLLMs, pass@1 is 43.4% on easy instances and 15.9% on hard instances. All three math-specialized MLLMs solve 0/780 instances. Failure attribution shows that errors arise both when extracting instance data from text and visuals and when turning extracted data into solver-correct formulations and code. MM-OptBench provides a testbed for solver-grounded, decision-oriented multimodal intelligence.

We present Curated Industrial Developer Repository (CIDR), a large-scale dataset of real-world software repositories collected through direct collaboration with 12 industrial partner organizations. The dataset comprises 2,440 repositories spanning 138 programming languages and totalling 373 million lines of code, accompanied by structured per-repository metadata. Unlike existing code corpora derived from public open-source platforms, CIDR consists exclusively of proprietary production codebases contributed under formal data sharing agreements, covering application domains including enterprise web and mobile development, fintech, and custom software consultancy. All repositories were processed through a multi-stage pipeline encompassing structured partner onboarding, two-stage quality selection combining automated metadata filtering with manual code review, and a deterministic anonymization pipeline covering the full version control history. The dataset is intended to support research in code intelligence, software quality analysis, pre-training and fine-tuning of code language models, developer behaviour studies, and construction of agent evaluation benchmarks. Access is provided under a restricted commercial license; details are available at https://fermatix.ai/#Contact.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, but their ability to simulate $individual$ privacy decisions is not well understood. In this paper, we address the problem of evaluating whether a core set of user persona attributes can drive LLMs to simulate individual-level privacy behavior. We introduce PrivacySIM, an evaluation suite that benchmarks LLM simulation of user privacy behavior against the ground-truth responses of 1,000 users. These users are drawn from five published user studies on privacy spanning LLM healthcare consultations, conversational agents, and chatbots. Drawing on these user studies, we hypothesize three persona facets as plausible predictors of privacy decision-making: demographics, previous experiences, and stated privacy attitudes. We condition nine frontier LLMs on subsets of these three facets and measure how often each model's response to a data-sharing scenario matches the user's actual response. Our findings show that (1) privacy persona conditioning consistently improves simulation quality over no-persona conditioning, but even the strongest model (40.4\% accuracy) remains far from faithfully simulating individual privacy decisions. (2) A user's stated privacy attitudes alone may not be the best predictor because they often diverge from the user's actual privacy behavior. (3) Users with high AI/chatbot experience but low stated privacy attitudes are the most challenging to simulate. PrivacySIM is a first step toward understanding and improving the capabilities of LLMs to simulate user privacy decisions. We release PrivacySIM to enable further evaluation of LLM privacy simulation.

Multimodal learning seeks to integrate information across diverse sensory sources, yet current approaches struggle to balance cross-modal generalizability with modality-specific structure. Continuous (implicit) methods preserve fine-grained priors but render generalization challenging, while discrete (explicit) approaches enforce shared prototypes at the expense of modality specificity. We introduce CoDAAR (Cross-modal Discrete Alignment And Reconstruction), a novel framework that resolves this long-standing trade-off by establishing semantic consensus across modality-specific codebooks through index-level alignment. This design uniquely allows CoDAAR to preserve modality-unique structures while achieving generalizable cross-modal representations within a unified discrete space. CoDAAR combines two complementary mechanisms: Discrete Temporal Alignment (DTA), which enables fine-grained temporal quantization, and Cascading Semantic Alignment (CSA), which promotes progressive cross-modal semantic agreement. Together, they establish a competition-free unified representation space. Trained with self-supervised reconstruction objectives on paired multimodal sequences, CoDAAR demonstrates robust cross-modal and cross-domain generalization. Across Cross-Modal Generalization benchmarks, including event classification, localization, video segmentation, and cross-dataset transfer, CoDAAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for discrete and generalizable multimodal representation learning.

We present STRUM (Spectral Transcription and Rhythm Understanding Model), an audio-to-chart pipeline that converts raw recordings into playable Clone Hero / YARG charts for drums, guitar, bass, vocals, and keys without any oracle metadata. STRUM is a multi-stage hybrid: a two-stage CRNN onset detector and a six-model ensemble classifier for drums; neural onset detectors with monophonic pitch tracking for guitar and bass; word-aligned ASR for vocals; and spectral keyboard detection for keys. We evaluate on a 30-song in-envelope benchmark constructed by screening candidate songs on a single audio-quality criterion -- the median 1-second drum-stem RMS after htdemucs_6s source separation. On this benchmark STRUM achieves drums onset F1 = 0.838, bass F1 = 0.694, guitar F1 = 0.651, and vocals F1 = 0.539 at a +/- 100 ms tolerance with per-song global offset search. We report a complete ablation of seven drum-pipeline components with paired per-song Wilcoxon tests, an analysis of ground-truth-to-audio timing distributions in community Clone Hero charts, and a per-class confusion matrix for the drum classifier. Code, model weights, and the full benchmark manifest are released.

Recent text-to-image models produce high-quality images, yet text ambiguity hinders precise control when specific styles or objects are required. There have been a number of recent works dealing with learning and composing multiple objects and patterns. However, current work focuses almost entirely on image content, overlooking imaging factors such as camera lens, sensor types, imaging viewpoints, and scenes' domain characteristics. We introduce this new challenge as Imaging Factor Disentanglement and show limitations of current approaches in the regime. We, therefore, propose the new method Multi-factor disentanglement through Textual Inversion (MULTI). It consists of two stages: in the first stage, we learn general factors, and in the second stage, we extract dataset-specific ones. This setup enables the extension of existing datasets and novel factor combinations, thereby reducing distribution gaps. It further supports modifications of specific factors and image-to-image generation via ControlNets. The evaluation on our new DF-RICO benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of MULTI and highlights the importance of Factor Disentanglement as a new direction of research.

Reproducibility problems that have long affected machine learning and reinforcement learning are now surfacing in agent research: papers compare systems by reported scores while leaving the rollout records behind those scores difficult to inspect. For agentic tasks, this matters because the same behaviour can receive different reported scores when evaluations select different parts of a rollout or apply different reporting rules. In a structured audit of 50 popular training and evaluation repositories, we find that none report how many runs failed, errored, or were skipped alongside headline scores. We also document 37 cases where reporting rules can change task-success rates, cost/token accounting, or timing measurements for fixed evidence, sometimes dramatically. We treat rollout records, not reported scores, as the unit of reproducibility for agent research. We introduce rollout cards: publication bundles that preserve the rollout record and declare the views, reporting rules, and drops manifests behind reported scores. We validate rollout cards in two settings. First, four partial public releases in tool safety, multi-agent systems, theorem proving, and search let us compute analyses their original reports did not include. Second, re-grading preserved benchmark outputs across short-answer, code-generation, and tool-use tasks shows that changing only the reporting rule can change reported scores by 20.9 absolute percentage points and, in some cases, invert rankings of frontier models. We release a reference implementation integrated into Ergon, an open-source reinforcement learning gym, and publicly publish Ergon-produced rollout-card exports for benchmarks spanning tool use, software engineering, web interaction, multi-agent coordination, safety, and search to support future research.

Large language models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where their ability to resist harmful instructions is essential. Although post-training aims to make models robust against many jailbreak strategies, recent evidence shows that stylistic reformulations, such as poetic transformation, can still bypass safety mechanisms with alarming effectiveness. This raises a central question: why do literary jailbreaks succeed? In this work, we investigate whether their effectiveness depends on specific poetic devices, on a failure to recognize literary formatting, or on deeper changes in how models process stylistically irregular prompts. We address this problem through an interpretability analysis of attention patterns. We perform input-level ablation studies to assess the contribution of individual and combinations of poetic devices; construct an interpretable vector representation of attention maps; cluster these representations and train linear probes to predict safety outcomes and literary format. Our results show that models distinguish poetic from prose formats with high accuracy, yet struggle to predict jailbreak success within each format. Clustering further reveals clear separation by literary format, but not by safety label. These findings indicate that jailbreak success is not caused by a failure to recognize poetic formatting; rather, poetic prompts induce distinct processing patterns that remain largely independent of harmful-content detection. Overall, literary jailbreaks appear to misalign large language models not through any single poetic device, but through accumulated stylistic irregularities that alter prompt processing and avoid lexical triggers considered during post-training. This suggests that robustness requires safety mechanisms that account for style-induced shifts in model behavior. We use Qwen3-14B as a representative open-weight case study.

Unlearning specific concepts in text-to-image diffusion models has become increasingly important for preventing undesirable content generation. Among prior approaches, sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based methods have attracted attention due to their ability to suppress target concepts through lightweight manipulation of latent features, without modifying model parameters. However, SAEs trained with sparse reconstruction objectives do not explicitly enforce concept-wise separation, resulting in shared latent features across concepts. To address this, we propose SAEParate, which organizes latent representations into concept-specific clusters via a concept-aware contrastive objective, enabling more precise concept suppression while reducing unintended interference during unlearning. In addition, we enhance the encoder with a GeLU-based nonlinear transformation to increase its expressive capacity under this separation objective, enabling a more discriminative and disentangled latent space. Experiments on UnlearnCanvas demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly strong gains in joint style-object unlearning, a challenging setting where existing methods suffer from severe interference between target and non-target concepts.

RLHF is widely used to align flow-matching text-to-image models with human preferences, but often leads to severe diversity collapse after fine-tuning. In RL, diversity is often assumed to correlate with policy entropy, motivating entropy regularization. However, we show this intuition breaks in flow models: policy entropy remains constant, even while perceptual diversity collapses. We explain this mismatch both theoretically and empirically: the constant entropy arises from the fixed, pre-defined noise schedule, while the diversity collapse is driven by the mode-seeking nature of policy gradients. As a result, policy entropy fails to prevent the model from converging to a narrow high-reward region in the perceptual space. To this end, we introduce perceptual entropy that captures diversity in a perceptual space and maintains the property of standard entropy. Building upon this insight, we propose two entropy-regularized strategies, Perceptual Entropy Constraint and Perceptual Constraints on Generation Space, to preserve perceptual diversity and improve the quality. Experiments across two base models, neural and rule-based rewards, and three perceptual spaces demonstrate consistent gains in the quality-diversity trade-off; PEC achieves the best overall score of 0.734 (vs. baseline's 0.366); a complementary setting of PEC further reaches a diversity average of 0.989 (vs. baseline's 0.047). Our project page (https://xiaofeng-tan.github.io/projects/PEC) is publicly available.

Deploying agentic AI in regulated contexts requires principled reasoning about two design dimensions: agency (what the system can do) and autonomy (how much it acts without human involvement). Though often treated independently, they are coupled: at higher autonomy, human error correction is less available, so reliable operation requires constraining agency accordingly; compliance requirements reinforce this by mandating human involvement as action consequences grow. Yet no established approach addresses them jointly, leaving practitioners without a principled basis for reasoning about oversight, action consequences, and error correction. This work introduces a two-dimensional design space in which both dimensions are organised into five operational levels, making the coupling explicit and navigable. Autonomy ranges from human-commanded operation (L1) to fully autonomous monitoring (L5); agency ranges from reasoning over supplied context (L1) to committed writes to authoritative records (L5). Building on this space, we propose six architectural tactics--checkpoints, escalation, multi-agent delegation, tool provisioning, tool fencing, and write staging--for adjusting a deployment's position within it. The tactics are grounded in two worked examples from public-sector contexts, illustrating how they apply under realistic compliance constraints. We further examine five deployment parameters--model capability, agent architecture, tool fidelity, workflow bottlenecks, and evaluation--that shape what is achievable at any configuration independently of agency and autonomy. Together, the design space, tactics, and deployment parameters provide a shared vocabulary for principled, compliance-aware agentic AI design in which responsibility, auditability, and reversibility are explicit design considerations rather than properties that must be retrofitted after deployment.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved strong semantic generalization for embodied policy learning, yet they learn reactive observation-to-action mappings without explicitly modeling how the physical world evolves under intervention. A growing body of work addresses this limitation by integrating world models, predictive models of environment dynamics, into the action generation pipeline. We term this emerging paradigm World Action Models (WAMs): embodied foundation models that unify predictive state modeling with action generation, targeting a joint distribution over future states and actions rather than actions alone. However, the literature remains fragmented across architectures, learning objectives, and application scenarios, lacking a unified conceptual framework. We formally define WAMs and disambiguate them from related concepts, and trace the foundations and early integration of VLA and world model research that gave rise to this paradigm. We organize existing methods into a structured taxonomy of Cascaded and Joint WAMs, with further subdivision by generation modality, conditioning mechanism, and action decoding strategy. We systematically analyze the data ecosystem fueling WAMs development, spanning robot teleoperation, portable human demonstrations, simulation, and internet-scale egocentric video, and synthesize emerging evaluation protocols organized around visual fidelity, physical commonsense, and action plausibility. Overall, this survey provides the first systematic account of the WAMs landscape, clarifies key architectural paradigms and their trade-offs, and identifies open challenges and future opportunities for this rapidly evolving field.

Multi-reference image generation aims to synthesize images from textual instructions while faithfully preserving subject identities from multiple reference images. Existing VLM-enhanced diffusion models commonly rely on decoupled visual conditioning: semantic ViT features are processed by the VLM for instruction understanding, whereas appearance-rich VAE features are injected later into the diffusion backbone. Despite its intuitive design, this separation makes it difficult for the model to associate each semantically grounded subject with visual details from the correct reference image. As a result, the model may recognize which subject is being referred to, but fail to preserve its identity and fine-grained appearance, leading to attribute leakage and cross-reference confusion in complex multi-reference settings. To address this issue, we propose UniCustom, a unified visual conditioning framework that fuses ViT and VAE features before VLM encoding. This early fusion exposes the VLM to both semantic cues and appearance-rich details, enabling its hidden states to jointly encode the referred subject and corresponding visual appearance with only a lightweight linear fusion layer. To learn such unified representations, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: reconstruction-oriented pretraining that preserves reference-specific appearance details in the fused hidden states, followed by supervised finetuning on single- and multi-reference generation tasks. We further introduce a slot-wise binding regularization that encourages each image slot to preserve low-level details of its corresponding reference, thereby reducing cross-reference entanglement. Experiments on two multi-reference generation benchmarks demonstrate that UniCustom consistently improves subject consistency, instruction following, and compositional fidelity over strong baselines.

Many AI systems are organized around loops in which models reason, call tools, observe results, and continue until a task is complete. These systems often produce final artifacts such as memos, plans, recommendations, and analyses, while the intermediate work that shaped those outputs remains ephemeral. For multi-step, revisable AI work, final artifacts are often lossy projections over upstream state. We argue that such systems should preserve durable, inspectable intermediate artifacts: typed, structured, addressable, versioned, dependency-aware, authoritative, and consumable by downstream computation. These artifacts are not the model's private chain-of-thought. They are maintained work products such as evidence maps, claim structures, criteria, assumptions, plans, transformation rules, synthesis procedures, unresolved tensions, and partial products that later humans and agents can inspect, revise, supersede, and improve. The contribution is a systems-level data model. We distinguish intermediate artifacts from chat transcripts, memory, hidden chain-of-thought, narration, thinking, and final answers; formalize additive and superseding update semantics with explicit current-state resolution; describe how artifact lineage supports durable intermediate state across revisions; and argue that evaluation must target maintained-state quality, not only final-output quality. The claim is not that artifacts make models smarter. It is that durable intermediate artifacts make AI-generated work more inspectable, revisable, and maintainable over time.

Designing learnable information-theoretic objectives for robot exploration remains challenging. Such objectives aim to guide exploration toward data that reduces uncertainty in model parameters, yet it is often unclear what information the collected data can actually reveal. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize a given objective, constructing objectives that reflect parametric learnability is difficult in high-dimensional robotic systems. Many parameter directions are weakly observable or unidentifiable, and even when identifiable directions are selected, omitted directions can still influence exploration and distort information measures. To address this challenge, we propose Quasi-Optimal Experimental Design (Q{\footnotesize OED}), an adaptive information objective grounded in optimal experimental design. Q{\footnotesize OED} (i) performs eigenspace analysis of the Fisher information matrix to identify an observable subspace and select identifiable parameter directions, and (ii) modifies the exploration objective to emphasize these directions while suppressing nuisance effects from non-critical parameters. Under bounded nuisance influence and limited coupling between critical and nuisance directions, Q{\footnotesize OED} provides a constant-factor approximation to the ideal information objective that explores all parameters. We evaluate Q{\footnotesize OED} on simulated and real-world navigation and manipulation tasks, where identifiable-direction selection and nuisance suppression yield performance improvements of \SI{35.23}{\percent} and \SI{21.98}{\percent}, respectively. When integrated as an exploration objective in model-based policy optimization, Q{\footnotesize OED} further improves policy performance over established RL baselines.

Human-in-the-loop Bayesian optimization (HITL BO) methods utilize human expertise to improve the sample-efficiency of BO. Most HITL BO methods assume that a domain expert can quantify their knowledge, for instance by pinpointing query locations or specifying their prior beliefs about the location of the maximum as a probability distribution. However, since human expertise is often tacit and cannot be explicitly quantified, we consider a setting where domain knowledge of an expert is elicited via pairwise comparisons of designs. We interpret the expert's pairwise judgements as noisy evidence about the values of the observable objective function and develop a principled method for combining the information obtained via direct observations and pairwise queries. Specifically, we derive a cost-aware value-of-information acquisition function that balances direct observations against pairwise queries. The proposed method approaches the convex hull of the trajectories of the individual information sources: when pairwise queries are cheap it substantially improves sample-efficiency over observation-only BO, and when pairwise queries are costly or noisy, it recovers the performance of standard BO by relying on direct observations alone.

Agentic AI failures need post-hoc reconstruction: what the agent did, on whose authority, against which policy, and from what reasoning. Cross-regime feasibility remains unmeasured under one property-level schema. We apply the Decision Trace Reconstructor unmodified to pinned worked-example anchors from six public vendor SDK regimes spanning cloud-agent, observability, tool-use, telemetry, and protocol traces, plus two comparator columns. Each Decision Event Schema (DES) property is classified as fully fillable, partially fillable, structurally unfillable, or opaque. Per-property reconstructability of an agent decision already varies between regimes at this anchor scale. Strict-governance-completeness separates into three tiers ranging from 42.9% to 85.7%, yielding one regime-independent gap (reasoning trace), four regime-dependent gaps, and one Mixed property; the pilot is single-annotator, one anchor per cell, descriptive, with outputs checksum-verifiable from a deposited reproducibility package.

Nearly a decade of Machine Learning (ML) research on deepfake detection has been organized around a threat model inherited from 2017--2019, revolving around face-swap and talking-head manipulation of public figures, motivated by concerns about large-scale misinformation and video-evidence fraud. This position paper argues that the threat the field prepared for did not arrive, and the threats that did arrive are substantially different. An accounting of deepfake incidents in 2022--2026 shows that the dominant observed harms are peer-generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), voice-clone scam calls targeting families and finance workers, and emotional-manipulation fraud. The predicted large-scale public-figure deepfake catastrophe did not materialize during the 2024 global information environment despite extensive preparation. Meanwhile, research effort, benchmarks, and detection methods remain concentrated on the inherited threat model. The central claim of this paper is that this misalignment is now the dominant bottleneck on real-world deepfake defense, not model capability. We argue the ML research community should substantially rebalance its research agenda toward the harm categories that are actually growing. We support this position with empirical accounting of research effort and harm distribution, identify the structural reasons the misalignment persists, and outline three concrete technical research agendas for the under-defended harm categories.

Scene understanding is central to general physical intelligence, and video is a primary modality for capturing both state and temporal dynamics of a scene. Yet understanding physical processes remains difficult, as models must combine object localization, hand-object interactions, relational parsing, temporal reasoning, and step-level procedural inference. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate these capabilities separately, limiting diagnosis of why models fail on procedural tasks. We introduce BARISTA, a densely annotated egocentric dataset and benchmark of 185 real-world coffee-preparation videos covering fully automatic, portafilter-based, and capsule-based workflows. BARISTA provides verified per-frame scene graphs linking persistent object identities to masks, tracks, boxes, attributes, typed relations, hand-object interactions, activities, and process steps. From these graphs, we derive zero-shot language-based tasks spanning phrase grounding, hand-object interaction recognition, referring, activity recognition, relation extraction, and temporal visual question answering. Experiments reveal strong variation across task families and no consistently dominant model family, positioning BARISTA as a challenging diagnostic benchmark for procedural video understanding. Code and dataset available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ramblr/BARISTA.

Dropout-based sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods alleviate overfitting by randomly suppressing Gaussian primitives during training. Existing methods mainly focus on designing increasingly sophisticated dropout strategies, while they overlook the resulting inconsistencies among different dropped Gaussian subsets. This oversight often leads to unstable reconstruction and suboptimal Gaussian representation learning.In this paper, we revisit dropout-based sparse-view 3DGS from a consistency regularization perspective and propose PairDropGS, a Paired Dropout-induced Consistency Regularization framework for sparse-view Gaussian splatting. Specifically, PairDropGS first constructs a pair of the dropped Gaussian subsets from a shared Gaussian field and designs a low-frequency consistency regularization to constrain their low-frequency rendered structures. This design encourages the shared Gaussian field to preserve stable scene layout and coarse geometry under different random dropouts, while avoiding excessive constraints on ambiguous high-frequency details. Moreover, we introduce a progressive consistency scheduling strategy to gradually strengthen the consistency regularization during training for stability and robustness of reconstruction. Extensive experiments on widely-used sparse-view benchmarks demonstrate that PairDropGS achieves superior training stability, significantly outperforms existing dropout-based 3DGS methods in reconstruction quality, while exhibiting the simplicity and plug-and-play nature for improving dropout-based optimization.

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves rollout throughput for large language model agents by decoupling sample generation from policy optimization, but it also introduces a critical failure mode for PPO-style off-policy correction. In heterogeneous training systems, the total importance ratio should ideally be decomposed into two semantically distinct factors: a \emph{training--inference discrepancy term} that aligns inference-side and training-side distributions at the same behavior-policy version, and a \emph{policy-staleness term} that constrains the update from the historical policy to the current policy. We show that practical asynchronous pipelines with delayed updates and partial rollouts often lose the required historical training-side logits, or old logits. This missing-old-logit problem entangles discrepancy repair with staleness correction, breaks the intended semantics of decoupled correction, and makes clipping and masking thresholds interact undesirably. To address this issue, we study both exact and approximate correction routes. We propose three exact old-logit acquisition strategies: snapshot-based version tracking, a dedicated old-logit model, and synchronization via partial rollout interruption, and compare their system trade-offs. From the perspective of approximate correction, we focus on preserving the benefits of decoupled correction through a more appropriate approximate policy when exact old logits cannot be recovered at low cost, without incurring extra system overhead. Following this analysis, we adopt a revised PPO-EWMA method, which achieves significant gains in both training speed and optimization performance. Code at https://github.com/millioniron/ROLL.

Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to identify defects in unseen categories without target-specific training. Existing methods usually apply the same feature transformation to all samples, treating normal and anomalous data uniformly despite their fundamentally asymmetric distributions, compact normals versus diverse anomalies. We instead exploit this natural asymmetry by proposing AVA-DINO, an anomaly-aware vision-language adaptation framework with dual specialized branches for normal and anomalous patterns that adapt frozen DINOv3 visual features. During training on auxiliary data, the two branches are learned jointly with a text-guided routing mechanism and explicit routing regularization that encourages branch specialization. At test time, only the input image and fixed, predefined language descriptions are used to dynamically combine the two branches, enabling an asymmetric activation. This design prevents degenerate uniform routing and allows context-specific feature transformations. Experiments across nine industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 93.5% image-AUROC on MVTec-AD and strong cross-domain generalization to medical imaging without domain-specific fine-tuning. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/AVA-DINO

Long-term memory is becoming a central bottleneck for language agents. Exsting RAG and GraphRAG systems largely treat memory graphs as static retrieval middleware, which limits their ability to recover complete evidence chains from partial cues, exploit reusable graph-structrual roles, and improve the memory itself through downstream feedback. We introduce SAGE, a Self-evolving Agentic Graph-memory Engine that models graph memory as a dynamic long-term memory substrate. SAGE couples two roles: a memory writer that incrementally constucts structured graph memory from interaction histories, and a Graph Foundation Model-based memory reader to perform retrieval and provide feedback to the memory writer. We provide rigorooous theoretical annalyses supporting the framework. Across multi-hop QA, open-domain retireval, domain-specific review QA, and long-term agent-memory benchmarks, SAGE improves evidence recovery, answer grounding, and retrieval efficiency: after two self-evolution rounds, it achieves the best average rank on multi-hop QA; in zero-shot open-domain transfer, it reaches 82.5/91.6 Recall@2/5 on NQ. Further results on LongMemEval and HaluMem show that traning and reader-writer feedback improve multiple long-term memory and hallucination-diagnostic metrics, suggesting that self-evolving, structure-aware graph memory is a promising foundation for robust long-horizon language agents.

Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly promoted as a core literacy, yet learners and teachers face challenges in connecting abstract program logic to meaningful outcomes. We design and evaluate RoboBlockly Studio, an integrated interactive system that combines block-based programming, a conversational AI teaching agent, and embodied robot execution. RoboBlockly Studio creates a tight iterative loop of authoring, running, observing, and revising. Informed by interviews with five programming teachers, the system was designed to support four goals: (1) preserving learner agency in computational thinking, (2) making program behavior transparent and interpretable, (3) grounding programming in embodied, classroom-aligned tasks, and (4) scaffolding reflection through pedagogically grounded AI dialogue. We deployed RoboBlockly Studio with 32 high school students, observing how robot and AI feedback influenced students' interactions with code, reflections on problem-solving strategies, and understanding of CT concepts. We discuss design insights and implications for creating interactive, embodied learning environments that integrate AI and robotics to support CT learning in computing education.

Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) enhances large language models by estimating advantages across a group of sampled trajectories. However, mapping these trajectory-level advantages to policy updates requires aggregating token-level probabilities within each sequence. Relying on a fixed aggregation mechanism for this step fundamentally limits the algorithm's adaptability. Empirically, we observe a critical trade-off: certain fixed aggregations frequently suffer from training collapse, while others fail to yield satisfactory performance. To resolve this, we propose \textbf{HölderPO}, a generalised policy optimisation framework unifying token-level probability aggregation via the Hölder mean. By explicitly modulating the parameter $p$, our framework provides continuous control over the trade-off between gradient concentration and variance bounds. Theoretically, we prove that a larger $p$ concentrates the gradient to amplify sparse learning signals, whereas a smaller $p$ strictly bounds gradient variance. Because no static configuration can universally resolve this concentration-stability trade-off, we instantiate the framework with a dynamic annealing algorithm that progressively schedules $p$ across the training lifecycle. Extensive evaluations demonstrate superior stability and convergence over existing baselines. Specifically, our approach achieves a state-of-the-art average accuracy of $54.9\%$ across multiple mathematical benchmarks, yielding a substantial $7.2\%$ relative gain over standard GRPO and secures an exceptional $93.8\%$ success rate on ALFWorld.

This paper addresses the Motion Execution Gap, the disconnect between high-level symbolic task descriptions using semantic constraints and executable robot motions. Motion Statecharts are introduced as an executable symbolic representation for complex motions. They allow the arbitrary arrangement of motion constraints, monitors or nested statecharts in parallel and sequence. World-centric motion specification and generalization across embodiments are enabled through the use of a unified differentiable kinematic world model of both, robots and environments. Motion execution is realized through a lMPC-based implementation of the task-function approach, in which smooth transitions during task switches are ensured using jerk bounds. Cross-platform transferability was demonstrated by deploying the method on eight robot platforms, operating in diverse environments. The proposed framework is called Giskard and is available open source: https://github.com/cram2/cognitive_robot_abstract_machine.

Cortical neurons are complex, multi-timescale processors wired into recurrent circuits, shaped by long evolutionary pressure under stringent biological constraints. Mainstream machine learning, by contrast, predominantly builds models from extremely simple units, a default inherited from early neural-network theory. We treat this as a normative architectural question. How should one split a fixed parameter budget $P$ between the number of units $N$, per-unit effective complexity $k_e$, and per-unit connectivity $k_c$? What controls the optimal allocation? This calls for a model in which per-unit complexity can be tuned independently of width and connectivity. Accordingly, we introduce the ELM Network, whose recurrent layer is built from Expressive Leaky Memory (ELM) neurons, chosen to mirror functional components of cortical neurons. The architecture allows for individually adjusting $N$, $k_e$, and $k_c$ and trains stably across orders of magnitude in scale. We evaluate the model on two qualitatively different sequence benchmarks: the neuromorphic SHD-Adding task and Enwik8 character-level language modeling. Performance improves monotonically along each of the three axes individually. Under a fixed budget, a clear non-trivial optimum emerges in their tradeoff, and larger budgets favor both more and more complex neurons. A closed-form information-theoretic model captures these tradeoffs and attributes the diminishing returns at two ends to: per-neuron signal-to-noise saturation and across-neuron redundancy. A hyperparameter sweep spanning three orders of magnitude in trainable parameters traces a near-Pareto-frontier scaling law consistent with the framework. This suggests that the simple-unit default in ML is not obviously optimal once this tradeoff surface is probed, and offers a normative lens on cortex's reliance on complex spatio-temporal integrators.

Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language (ADL). We selectively remove syntactic or lexical co-occurrence information from the model training data, and evaluate the impact of these manipulations on verb meaning acquisition. While disrupting syntax impairs learning across all datasets, models trained on CDL and spoken ADL show significantly higher resilience than those trained on written input. Tracking semantic and syntactic performance over training, we observe a semantic-first trajectory, with verb meanings emerging prior to robust syntactic proficiency, an asynchrony most pronounced in the spoken domain, especially CDL. These results suggest that the advantage for verb learning previously attributed to CDL may instead reflect broader properties of the spoken register, rather than a uniquely CDL-specific optimization.

Skill libraries enable large language model agents to reuse experience from past interactions, but most existing libraries store skills as isolated entries and retrieve them only by semantic similarity. This leads to two key challenges for compositional tasks. Firstly, an agent must identify not only relevant skills but also how they depend on and build upon each other. Secondly, it also makes library maintenance difficult, since the system lacks structural cues for deciding when skills should be merged, split, or removed. We propose SKILLGRAPH, a framework that represents reusable skills as nodes in a directed graph, with typed edges encoding prerequisite, enhancement, and co-occurrence relations. Given a new task, SKILLGRAPH retrieves not just individual skills, but an ordered skill subgraph that can guide multi-step decision making. The graph is continuously updated from agent trajectories and reinforcement learning feedback, allowing both the skill library and the agent policy to improve together. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and seven search-augmented QA tasks show that SKILLGRAPH achieves state-of-the-art performance against memory-augmented RL methods, with especially large gains on complex tasks that require composing multiple skills.

Cross-embodiment video generation aims to transfer motions across different humanoid embodiments, such as human-to-robot and robot-to-robot, enabling scalable data generation for embodied intelligence. A major challenge in this setting is that motion dynamics are partly transferable across embodiments, whereas appearance and morphology remain embodiment-specific. Existing approaches often entangle these factors, and many require paired data for every target embodiment, which limits scalability to new robots. We present OmniHumanoid, a framework that factorizes transferable motion learning and embodiment-specific adaptation. Our method learns a shared motion transfer model from motion-aligned paired videos spanning multiple embodiments, while adapting to a new embodiment using only unpaired videos through lightweight embodiment-specific adapters. To reduce interference between motion transfer and embodiment adaptation, we further introduce a branch-isolated attention design that separates motion conditioning from embodiment-specific modulation. In addition, we construct a synthetic cross-embodiment dataset with motion-aligned paired videos rendered across diverse humanoid assets, scenes, and viewpoints. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that OmniHumanoid achieves strong motion fidelity and embodiment consistency, while enabling scalable adaptation to unseen humanoid embodiments without retraining the shared motion model.

Omni-modal language models are intended to jointly understand audio, visual inputs, and language, but benchmark gains can be inflated when visual evidence alone is enough to answer a query. We study whether current omni-modal benchmarks separate visual shortcuts from genuine audio-visual-language evidence integration, and how post-training behaves under a visually debiased evaluation setting. We audit nine omni-modal benchmarks with visual-only probing, remove visually solvable queries, and retain full subsets when filtering is undefined or would make comparisons unstable. This yields OmniClean, a cleaned evaluation view with 8,551 retained queries from 16,968 audited queries. On OmniClean, we evaluate OmniBoost, a three-stage post-training recipe based on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B: mixed bi-modal SFT, mixed-modality RLVR, and SFT on self-distilled data. Balanced bi-modal SFT gives limited and uneven gains, RLVR provides the first broad improvement, and self-distillation reshapes the benchmark profile. After SFT on self-distilled data, the 3B model reaches performance comparable to, and in aggregate slightly above, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct without using a stronger omni-modal teacher. These results show that omni-modal progress is easier to interpret when evaluation controls visual leakage, and that small omni-modal models can benefit from staged post-training with self-distilled omni-query supervision.

Reconstructing dynamic 4D scenes from monocular videos is a fundamental yet challenging task. While recent 3D foundation models provide strong geometric priors, their performance significantly degrades in dynamic environments. This degradation stems from a fundamental tension: the inherent coupling of camera ego-motion and object motion within global attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel, training-free progressive decoupling framework that disentangles dynamics from statics in a principled, coarse-to-fine manner. Our core insight is to resolve the tension by first stabilizing the camera pose, followed by geometric refinement. Specifically, our approach consists of three synergistic components: (1) a Dynamic-Mask-Guided Pose Decoupling module that isolates pose estimation from dynamic interference, yielding a stable motion-free reference frame; (2) a Topological Subspace Surgery mechanism that orthogonally decomposes the depth manifold, safely preserving dynamic objects while injecting refined, mask-aware geometry into static regions; and (3) an Information-Theoretic Confidence-Aware Fusion strategy that formulates depth integration as a heteroscedastic Bayesian inference problem, adaptively blending multi-pass predictions via inverse-variance weighting. Extensive experiments on standard 4D reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves consistent and substantial improvements across principal point-cloud metrics. Notably, our approach shows competitive performance in robust 4D scene reconstruction without requiring fine-tuning, suggesting the potential of mathematically grounded dynamic-static disentanglement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on standard knowledge evaluation benchmarks, yet recent work shows that their knowledge capabilities remain brittle under question variants that test the same knowledge in different forms. Robustness augmentation of existing knowledge evaluation benchmarks is therefore necessary, but current LLM-assisted generate-then-verify pipelines are costly and difficult to scale due to low-yield variant generation and unreliable variant verification. We propose SAGE (Scalable Automated Generation of Robustness BEnchmarks), a framework for scalable robustness augmentation of knowledge evaluation benchmarks using fine-tuned smaller models. SAGE consists of VariantQual, a rubric-based verifier trained on human-labeled seed data, and VariantGen, a variant generator initialized with supervised fine-tuning and further optimized with reinforcement learning using VariantQual as the reward model. Experiments on HellaSwag show that SAGE constructs a large-scale robustness-augmented benchmark with quality comparable to the human-annotated HellaSwag-Pro at substantially lower cost, while the fine-tuned models further generalize to MMLU without benchmark-specific fine-tuning.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a core task in pervasive computing systems, where models must operate under strict computational constraints while remaining robust to heterogeneous and evolving deployment conditions. Recent advances based on Transformer architectures have significantly improved recognition performance, but typically rely on task-specific models trained from scratch, resulting in high training cost, large data requirements, and limited adaptability to domain shifts. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift that reuses large pretrained language models (LLMs) as generic temporal backbones for sensor-based HAR, instead of designing domain-specific Transformers. To bridge the modality gap between inertial time series and language models, we introduce a structured convolutional projection that maps multivariate accelerometer and gyroscope signals into the latent space of the LLM. The pretrained backbone is kept frozen and adapted using parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), drastically reducing the number of trainable parameters and the overall training cost. Through extensive experiments on standard HAR benchmarks, we show that this approach enables rapid convergence, strong data efficiency, and robust cross-dataset transfer, particularly in low-data and few-shot settings. At the same time, our results highlight the complementary roles of convolutional frontends and LLMs, where local invariances are handled at the signal level while long-range temporal dependencies are captured by the pretrained backbone. Overall, this work demonstrates that LLMs can serve as a practical, frugal, and scalable foundation for adaptive HAR systems, opening new directions for reusing foundation models beyond their original language domain.

Reusable skills are becoming a common interface for extending large language model agents, packaging procedural guidance with access to files, tools, memory, and execution environments. However, this modularity introduces attack surfaces that are largely missed by existing safety evaluations: even when the user request is benign, task-relevant skill materials or local artifacts can steer an agent toward unsafe actions. We present SkillSafetyBench, a runnable benchmark for evaluating such skill-mediated safety failures. SkillSafetyBench includes 155 adversarial cases across 47 tasks, 6 risk domains, and 30 safety categories, each evaluated with a case-specific rule-based verifier. Experiments with multiple CLI agents and model backends show that localized non-user attacks can consistently induce unsafe behavior, with distinct failure patterns across domains, attack methods, and scaffold-model pairings. Our findings suggest that agent safety depends not only on model-level alignment, but also on how agents interpret skills, trust workflow context, and act through executable environments.

Pixel diffusion models have recently regained attention for visual generation. However, training advanced pixel-space models from scratch demands prohibitive computational and data resources. To address this, we propose the Latent-to-Pixel (L2P) transfer paradigm, an efficient framework that directly harnesses the rich knowledge of pre-trained LDMs to build powerful pixel-space models. Specifically, L2P discards the VAE in favor of large-patch tokenization and freezes the source LDM's intermediate layers, exclusively training shallow layers to learn the latent-to-pixel transformation. By utilizing LDM-generated synthetic images as the sole training corpus, L2P fits an already smooth data manifold, enabling rapid convergence with zero real-data collection. This strategy allows L2P to seamlessly migrate massive latent priors to the pixel space using only 8 GPUs. Furthermore, eliminating the VAE memory bottleneck unlocks native 4K ultra-high resolution generation. Extensive experiments across mainstream LDM architectures show that L2P incurs negligible training overhead, yet performs on par with the source LDM on DPG-Bench and reaches 93% performance on GenEval.

Public-sector legal departments in the Netherlands face acute staff shortages, increased case volumes, and increased pressure to meet regulatory compliance. This paper presents LegalCheck, a novel system that addresses these challenges by automating the drafting of objection response letters through a combination of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Context-Augmented Generation (CAG). Using a large language model (LLM) alongside curated legal knowledge bases, LegalCheck performs retrieval of relevant laws and precedents, and uses controlled prompting to incorporate both external knowledge and case-specific details into a coherent draft. An expert-in-the-loop review ensures that each generated letter is legally sound and contextually appropriate. In a real-world deployment within the Municipality of Amsterdam, LegalCheck produced near-final advice letters in minutes rather than hours, while maintaining high legal consistency and factual accuracy. The output is based on actual regulations and prior cases, providing explainable outputs that captured the vast majority of required legal reasoning (often 80\% to 100\% of essential content). Legal professionals found that the system reduced their workload and ensured a consistent application of legal standards, without replacing human judgment. These results demonstrate substantial efficiency gains, improved legal consistency, and positive user acceptance. More broadly, this work illustrates how responsible AI can be deployed in the legal domain by augmenting LLMs with domain knowledge and governance mechanisms.

The performance of promptable video object segmentation (PVOS) models substantially degrades under input corruptions, which prevents PVOS deployment in safety-critical domains. This paper offers the first comprehensive study on robust PVOS (RobustPVOS). We first construct a new, comprehensive benchmark with two real-world evaluation datasets of 351 video clips and more than 2,500 object masks under real-world adverse conditions. At the same time, we generate synthetic training data by applying diverse and temporally varying corruptions to existing VOS datasets. Moreover, we present a new RobustPVOS method, dubbed Memory-object-conditioned Gated-rank Adaptation (MoGA). The key to successfully performing RobustPVOS is two-fold: effectively handling object-specific degradation and ensuring temporal consistency in predictions. MoGA leverages object-specific representations maintained in memory across frames to condition the robustification process, which allows the model to handle each tracked object differently in a temporally consistent way. Extensive experiments on our benchmark validate MoGA's efficacy, showing consistent and significant improvements across diverse corruption types on both synthetic and real-world datasets, establishing a strong baseline for future RobustPVOS research. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://sohyun-l.github.io/RobustPVOS_project_page/.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy cannot reach reward states, additional training or external guidance is needed to recover effective learning signals. Rather than relying on costly iterative supervised fine tuning (SFT), we exploit the abundant action data generated in everyday human interactions. We propose \textsc{ActGuide-RL}, which injects action data as plan-style reference guidance, enabling the agentic policy to overcome reachability barriers to reward states. Guided and unguided rollouts are then jointly optimized via mixed-policy training, internalizing the exploration gains back into the unguided policy. Motivated by a theoretical and empirical analysis of the benefit-risk trade-off, we adopt a minimal intervention principle that invokes guidance only as an adaptive fallback, matching task difficulty while minimizing off-policy risk. On search-agent benchmarks, \textsc{ActGuide-RL} substantially improves over zero RL (+10.7 pp on GAIA and +19 pp on XBench with Qwen3-4B), and performs on par with the SFT+RL pipeline without any cold start. This suggests a new paradigm for agentic RL that reduces the reliance on heavy SFT data by using scalable action guidance instead.

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks is fundamentally constrained by the capabilities acquired during pre-training. However, traditional benchmarks like MMLU often fail to reflect a base model's plasticity in complex open-ended scenarios, leading to inefficient model selection. We address this by introducing a new task of predicting post-training potential - forecasting a base model's performance before post-training. We propose RuDE (Rubric-based Discriminative Evaluation), a unified framework that bypasses the generation gap of base models by leveraging response discrimination. Guided by our systematic 4C Taxonomy, RuDE constructs controlled contrastive pairs across diverse domains by fine-grained rubric violations. Extensive experiments demonstrate a correlation greater than 90% with post-training performance. Crucially, validation via Reinforcement Learning (RL) confirms that RuDE effectively identifies high-potential smaller models that outperform larger counterparts, offering a compute-efficient mechanism for foundation model development.

Collisions at non-line-of-sight (NLOS) intersections remain a major safety concern because drivers have limited visibility of approaching traffic. V2X based warnings can reduce these risks, yet many vehicles are not equipped with V2X and drivers may ignore in vehicle alerts. Collective perception (CP) can compensate for low V2X penetration by extending the awareness of connected vehicles, but it cannot influence unconnected vehicles. To fill this gap, our work introduces a complementary concept that adds a cooperative humanoid robot as an active traffic moderator capable of physically stopping a vehicle that attempts to merge into an unseen traffic stream. The system operates on two parallel perception pathways. A dual camera infrastructure unit detects the position, speed and motion of approaching vehicles and transmits this information to the robot as a collective perception message (CPM). The robot also receives cooperative awareness messages (CAM) from connected vehicles through its onboard V2X unit and can act as a relay for decentralized environmental notification messages (DENM) when safety events originate elsewhere along the road. A fusion module combines these streams to maintain a robust real time view of the main road. A Zone of Danger (ZoD) is defined and used to predict whether an approaching vehicle creates a collision risk for a merging road user. When such a risk is detected, the robot issues a human-like STOP gesture and blocks the merging path until the hazard disappears. The full system was deployed at the Future Mobility Park (FMP) in Rotterdam. Experiments show that the combined vision and V2X perception allows the robot to detect approaching vehicles early, predict hazards reliably and prevent unsafe merges in real world NLOS conditions.

This paper examines what it means for a medical AI system to be right by grounding the question in a specific clinical context: the automatic classification of plasma cells in digitized bone marrow smears for the diagnosis of multiple myeloma. Drawing on philosophy of science and research ethics, the paper argues that correctness in medical AI is not a singular property reducible to benchmark performance, but a multi-dimensional concept involving the availability of expertly labeled medical datasets, the explainability and interpretability of model outputs, the clinical meaningfulness of evaluation metrics, and the distribution of accountability in human-AI workflows. As such, the paper develops this argument through four interrelated themes: the instability of ground truth labels, the opacity of overconfident AI, the inadequacy of standard clinical metrics, and the risk of automation bias in time-pressured clinical settings.

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in modern text-rich visual understanding. However, their perceptual robustness in the face of the continuous morphological evolution of historical writing systems remains largely unexplored. Existing ancient text datasets typically focus on isolated historical periods, failing to capture the systematic visual distribution shifts spanning thousands of years. To bridge this gap and empower Digital Humanities, we introduce Chronicles-OCR, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the cross-temporal visual perception capabilities of VLLMs across the complete evolutionary trajectory of Chinese characters, known as the Seven Chinese Scripts. Curated in collaboration with top-tier institutional domain experts, the dataset comprises 2,800 strictly balanced images encompassing highly diverse physical media, ranging from tortoise shells to paper-based calligraphy. To accommodate the drastic morphological and topological variations across different historical stages, we propose a novel Stage-Adaptive Annotation Paradigm. Based on this, Chronicles-OCR formulates four rigorous quantitative tasks: cross-period character spotting, fine-grained archaic character recognition via visual referring, ancient text parsing, and script classification. By isolating visual perception from semantic reasoning, Chronicles-OCR provides an authoritative platform to expose the limitations of current VLLMs, paving the way for robust, evolution-aware historical text perception. Chronicles-OCR is publicly available at https://github.com/VirtualLUOUCAS/Chronicles-OCR.

Although robotic manipulation has made significant progress, reliable execution remains challenging because task failures are inevitable in dynamic and unstructured environments. To handle such failures, existing frameworks typically follow a stepwise detect-reason-recover pipeline, which often incurs high latency and limited robustness due to delayed reasoning and reactive planning. Inspired by the human capability to anticipate and proactively plan for potential failures, we introduce AgentChord, an agentic system that models a manipulation task as a directed task graph. Before execution, this graph is enriched with anticipatory recovery branches that specify context-aware corrective behaviors, enabling immediate and targeted responses when failures occur. Specifically, AgentChord operates through a choreography of specialized agents: a composer that structures the nominal task graph, an arranger that augments the graph with anticipatory recovery branches, and a conductor that compiles and coordinates executable transitions using low-latency monitors to detect deviations and trigger pre-compiled recoveries without re-planning. Empirical studies on diverse long-horizon bimanual manipulation tasks demonstrate that AgentChord substantially improves success rates and execution efficiency, advancing the reliability and autonomy of real-world robotic systems. The project page is available at: https://shengxu.net/AgentChord/.

Accurate multi-vehicle trajectory prediction in expressway merge and diverge areas is fundamental to the decision-making frameworks of autonomous vehicle systems. However, the majority of existing graph-based prediction models are developed and validated on mainline freeway segments and do not address the geometrically distinct interaction structures that characterize merge zones. Furthermore, standard evaluation protocols rely exclusively on displacement error metrics, leaving the safety consequences of predicted trajectories unquantified. This paper proposes a Lane-Aware Graph Attention Network (LA-GAT) that encodes vehicle interaction within dynamic scene graphs, augmented with a trainable lane-relationship attention bias that prioritizes merge-conflict interactions from the outset of training. The model is pre-trained on the raw NGSIM US-101 and I-80 datasets and subsequently fine-tuned on UAV-captured UTE SQM-W-1 trajectory data from a Chinese expressway merge area, with final evaluation on the held-out SQM-W-2 dataset. Evaluation spans both displacement metrics (ADE, FDE at 1s, 3s, 5s horizons) and surrogate safety measures (TTC violation rate, DRAC exceedance rate, collision rate). Fine-tuned results on SQM-W-2 yield ADE of 0.865 m at 1s and 2.518 m at 3s, demonstrating that drone-informed fine-tuning substantially reduces the cross-dataset transfer gap. The deliberate use of unfiltered NGSIM data is shown to characterize raw-condition generalization limits, with the performance degradation attributed to the well-documented measurement errors in that dataset.

Post-training with explicit reasoning traces is common to improve the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, acquiring high-quality reasoning traces is often costly and time-consuming. Hence, the self-improvement paradigm has emerged, enabling MLLMs to self-generate reasoning traces for training without external supervision. Despite its effectiveness, we reveal two shortcomings in the self-improvement training of MLLMs: 1) data imbalance, where simple samples are over-trained, but the challenging yet crucial samples are under-trained; 2) language prior bias, where MLLMs overly rely on linguistic priors while neglecting the visual cues. To this end, we propose VISTA, a vision-aware self-improvement training framework for enhancing the multimodal reasoning of MLLMs. Specifically, VISTA first introduces a prefix resampling strategy to reuse the partial correct reasoning traces for efficient data collection, and then designs a vision-aware attention score to quantify the model's focus on visual information. Extensive experiments show that VISTA can be applied to various post-training scenarios, i.e., supervised fine-tuning and preference learning, and effectively enhances the multimodal reasoning performance across various MLLMs and tasks, e.g., bringing up to +13.66% average performance gains for Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct.

Existing code reasoning methods primarily supervise final code outputs, ignoring intermediate states, often leading to reward hacking where correct answers are obtained through inconsistent reasoning. We propose StepCodeReasoner, a framework that introduces explicit intermediate execution-state supervision. By automatically inserting structured print-based execution-trace anchors into code, the model is trained to predict runtime states at each step, transforming code reasoning into a verifiable, stepwise execution modeling problem. Building on this execution-aware method, we introduce Bi-Level GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm for structured credit assignment at two levels: inter-trajectory, comparing alternative execution paths, and intra-trajectory, rewarding intermediate accuracy based on its impact on downstream correctness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StepCodeReasoner achieves SOTA performance in code reasoning. In particular, our 7B model achieves 91.1\% on CRUXEval and 86.5\% on LiveCodeBench, outperforming the CodeReasoner-7B baseline (86.0\% and 77.7\%) and GPT-4o (85.6\% and 75.1\%). Furthermore, on the execution-trace benchmark REval, our model scores 82.9\%, outperforming baseline CodeReasoner-7B (72.3\%), its 14B counterpart (81.1\%), and GPT-4o (77.3\%). Additionally, our approach also improves code generation performance, demonstrating that explicit execution modeling enhances both code reasoning and code generation.

Preference optimization has become an important post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. Existing methods typically rely on externally constructed preference data, using preferred and dispreferred responses as sample-level supervision. However, such external signals rarely make explicit use of capability-related information contained in the model's internal representations. For mathematical reasoning, certain neuron groups may exhibit activation patterns associated with mathematical knowledge, symbolic manipulation, or logical reasoning. Similar to reflexive behavioral signals, these internal activations may provide a coarse indication of whether the model is engaging math-related capabilities.We introduce YFPO, short for Yoked Feature Preference Optimization, a preliminary neuron-guided preference optimization framework for mathematical reasoning. YFPO first uses AttnLRP to identify math-related neurons, and then constructs an auxiliary reward from their activation margin between preferred and dispreferred responses. This design augments external preference learning with internal neuron-level signals. We conduct preliminary experiments on a small-scale language model using GSM8K as the main benchmark. Results suggest that neuron-level signals can interact with preference optimization and occasionally improve reasoning performance, offering a promising direction for more fine-grained and interpretable reasoning-oriented post-training.

Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to inspect, control, and systematically improve them. This opacity motivates a growing body of research in mechanistic interpretability, with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as one of the most promising tools for decomposing model activations into sparse, interpretable feature representations. We introduce Qwen-Scope, an open-source suite of SAEs built on the Qwen model family, comprising 14 groups of SAEs across 7 model variants from the Qwen3 and Qwen3.5 series, covering both dense and mixture-of-expert architectures. Built on top of these SAEs, we show that SAEs can go beyond post-hoc analysis to serve as practical interfaces for model development along four directions: (i) inference-time steering, where SAE feature directions control language, concepts, and preferences without modifying model weights; (ii) evaluation analysis, where activated SAE features provide a representation-level proxy for benchmark redundancy and capability coverage; (iii) data-centric workflows, where SAE features support multilingual toxicity classification and safety-oriented data synthesis; and (iv) post-training optimization, where SAE-derived signals are incorporated into supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning objectives to mitigate undesirable behaviors such as code-switching and repetition. Together, these results demonstrate that SAEs can serve not only as post-hoc analysis tools, but also as reusable representation-level interfaces for diagnosing, controlling, evaluating, and improving large language models. By open-sourcing Qwen-Scope, we aim to support mechanistic research and accelerate practical workflows that connect model internals to downstream behavior.

Qualification of components operating in future fusion power plants will be heavily reliant on simulations of component behaviour. The lack of representative test environments for many aspects of the expected operating environment will necessitate full or partial virtual qualification of components. The cornerstone of virtual qualification is credible validation of the simulation models on which it relies. In this work, we present a probabilistic model validation framework that forms the basis for implementation of virtual qualification in fusion. We demonstrate our framework on a representative component; a high heat flux heat sink subject to a tightly coupled multi-physics loading. We perform data-rich, optimised experiments, in which we implement high fidelity diagnostics and rigorously quantify aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on all measurements. Our simulation approach efficiently samples input uncertainty distributions to predict probability boxes describing component response, using a statistical surrogate to replicate behaviour of the finite element model we wish to validate. We then used a novel implementation of the modified area validation metric to quantify the model form error of the finite element model, isolating it from the aleatoric and epistemic experimental uncertainty. We discuss the contribution of our validation approach towards virtual qualification, and the benefits of the risk-based decision-making it facilitates. The experimental, simulation, and validation datasets are published as a benchmark of a probabilistic validation approach for fusion, and for use in development of new model validation methodologies.

The high-dimensional features extracted from large-scale unlabeled data via various pretrained models with diverse architectures are referred to as heterogeneous multiview data. Most existing unsupervised transfer learning methods fail to faithfully recover intrinsic subspace structures when exploiting complementary information across multiple views. Therefore, a fundamental challenge involves constructing sparse similarity graphs that preserve these underlying subspace structures for achieving semantic alignment across heterogeneous views. In this paper, we propose a sparse attention graph learning (SAGL) method that learns subspace-preserving sparse attention graphs from heterogeneous multiview data. Specifically, we introduce a bilinear attention factorization scheme to capture asymmetric similarities among the high-dimensional features, which breaks the symmetry bottleneck that is inherent in the traditional representation learning techniques. A dynamic sparsity gating mechanism then predicts a feature-specific compression factor for adaptively controlling the topological contributions of neighbors. Furthermore, we employ a structured sparse projection via $α$-entmax to generate subspace-preserving sparse attention graphs for individual views. SAGL leverages these view-specific graphs to conduct sparse information aggregation, yielding discriminative representations for multiview learning tasks. In addition, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis that bridges differentiable sparse attention and probability simplex constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAGL consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised transfer learning approaches.

TD($λ$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic programming, which effectively addresses the inherent bias-variance trade-off in value estimation. Based on that, some recent works link the adaptive $λ$ value to the policy distribution in the single-agent reinforcement learning area. However, because of the large joint action space from multiple number of agents, and the limited transition data in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, the policy distribution is infeasible to be calculated statistically. To solve the policy distribution calculation problem in MARL settings, we employ a parametric likelihood-free density ratio estimator with two replay buffers instead of calculating statistically. The two replay buffers of different sizes store the historical trajectories that represent the data distribution of the past and current policies correspondingly. Based on the estimator, we assign Adaptive TD($λ$), \textbf{ATD($λ$)}, values to state-action pairs based on their likelihood under the stationary distribution of the current policy. We apply the proposed method on two competitive baseline methods, QMIX for value-based algorithms, and MAPPO for AC-based algorithms, over SMAC benchmarks and Gfootball academy scenarios, and demonstrate consistently competitive or superior performance compared to other baseline approaches with static $λ$ values.

Listwise reranking is a key yet computationally expensive component in vision-centric retrieval and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (M-RAG) over long documents. While recent VLM-based rerankers achieve strong accuracy, their practicality is often limited by long visual-token sequences and multi-step autoregressive decoding. We propose ZipRerank, a highly efficient listwise multimodal reranker that directly addresses both bottlenecks. It reduces input length via a lightweight query-image early interaction mechanism and eliminates autoregressive decoding by scoring all candidates in a single forward pass. To enable effective learning, ZipRerank adopts a two-stage training strategy: (i) listwise pretraining on large-scale text data rendered as images, and (ii) multimodal finetuning with VLM-teacher-distilled soft-ranking supervision. Extensive experiments on the MMDocIR benchmark show that ZipRerank matches or surpasses state-of-the-art multimodal rerankers while reducing LLM inference latency by up to an order of magnitude, making it well-suited for latency-sensitive real-world systems. The code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/ZipRerank.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering stronger global awareness and highly parallel generation. However, post-training DLMs with standard Negative Evidence Lower Bound (NELBO)-based supervised fine-tuning remains inefficient: training reconstructs randomly masked tokens in a single step, whereas inference follows a confidence-guided, multi-step easy-to-hard denoising trajectory. Recent trajectory-based self-distillation methods exploit such inference trajectories mainly for sampling-step compression and acceleration, often improving decoding efficiency without substantially enhancing the model's underlying capability, and may even degrade performance under full diffusion decoding. In this work, we ask whether self-distilled trajectories can be used not merely for faster inference, but for genuine knowledge acquisition. Although these trajectories lie on the pretrained DLM's own distributional manifold and thus offer a potentially lower optimization barrier, we find that naively fine-tuning on them with standard NELBO objectives yields only marginal gains. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{T}rajectory-\textbf{A}ligned optimization via \textbf{Bo}ltzmann \textbf{M}odeling (\textbf{TABOM}), a self-distilled trajectory-based post-training framework that aligns training with the easy-to-hard structure of inference. TABOM models the inference unmasking preference as a Boltzmann distribution over predictive entropies and derives a tractable pairwise ranking objective to align the model's certainty ordering with the observed decoding trajectory. Empirically, TABOM achieves substantial gains in new domains, expands the effective knowledge boundary of DLMs, and significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting compared with standard SFT.

Reinforcement learning has become a widely used post-training approach for LLM agents, where training commonly relies on outcome-level rewards that provide only coarse supervision. While finer-grained credit assignment is promising for effective policy updates, obtaining reliable local credit and assigning it to the right parts of the long-horizon trajectory remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose Granularity-adaptivE Advantage Reweighting (GEAR), an adaptive-granularity credit assignment framework that reshapes the trajectory-level GRPO advantage using token- and segment-level signals derived from self-distillation. GEAR compares an on-policy student with a ground-truth-conditioned teacher to obtain a reference-guided divergence signal for identifying adaptive segment boundaries and modulating local advantage weights. This divergence often spikes at the onset of a semantic deviation, while later tokens in the same autoregressive continuation may return to low divergence. GEAR therefore treats such spikes as anchors for adaptive credit regions: where the student remains aligned with the teacher, token-level resolution is preserved; where it departs, GEAR groups the corresponding continuation into an adaptive segment and uses the divergence at the departure point to modulate the segment' s advantage. Experiments across eight mathematical reasoning and agentic tool-use benchmarks with Qwen3 4B and 8B models show that GEAR consistently outperforms standard GRPO, self-distillation-only baselines, and token- or turn-level credit-assignment methods. The gains are especially strong on benchmarks with lower GRPO baseline accuracy, reaching up to around 20\% over GRPO, suggesting that the proposed adaptive reweighting scheme is especially useful in more challenging long-horizon settings.

Language models are increasingly used in settings where outputs must satisfy user-specified randomness constraints, yet their generation probabilities are often poorly calibrated to those targets. We study whether this capability can be improved directly through fine-tuning. Concretely, we fine-tune language models on synthetic prompts that require sampling from mathematical distributions, and compare two Calibration Fine-Tuning variants: a soft-target method that converts the desired output distribution into trie-derived next-token targets, and a hard-target method that trains on sampled completions from the same target distribution. Across 12 models spanning four families, both methods substantially improve structured-sampling fidelity on held-out distribution families and unseen parameter settings, showing that probabilistic calibration is a trainable capability. Under our selected training configurations, the two methods exhibit different empirical profiles: hard-target fine-tuning is often strongest on structured numeric sampling, while soft-target fine-tuning performs better on broader stochastic generation benchmarks, including open-ended random generation, multiple-choice answer-position balancing, and NoveltyBench. The gains sometimes reduce downstream capability, especially arithmetic reasoning, with costs varying by model. Overall, our results show that probabilistic calibration can be improved through fine-tuning, with our hard-target configuration favoring exact numeric fidelity and our soft-target configuration favoring broader stochastic transfer. Code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/calibration-finetuning.

This paper tackles spatial perception and manipulation challenges in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. To address depth ambiguity from monocular input, we leverage a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model to synthesize latent novel views and propose a Geometry-Guided Gated Transformer (G3T) that aligns multi-view features under 3D geometric guidance while adaptively filtering occlusion noise. To improve action learning efficiency, we introduce Action Manifold Learning (AML), which directly predicts actions on the valid action manifold, bypassing inefficient regression of unstructured targets like noise or velocity. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-robot tasks show our method achieves superior success rate and robustness over SOTA baselines. Project page: https://junjxiao.github.io/Multi-view-VLA.github.io/.

The accurate recovery of constituent-level optical properties from integrating sphere measurements is a central analytical challenge in pharmaceutical analysis, food science, and biomedical diagnostics. Neural network autoencoders can extract spectrally resolved absorption and scattering coefficients for each constituent without prior knowledge, but their fully connected encoders bind learned features to absolute wavelength indices, causing accuracy loss under spectrometer calibration drift or hardware exchange. This work introduces the Bin Latent Transformer (BiLT)-Autoencoder, in which the dense encoder is replaced by a cross-attention scanner: 16 learnable probe vectors query a convolutional feature map, aggregating morphological spectral information independently of absolute wavelength position. A physics-constrained linear decoder with enforced absorption/scattering separation and a three-phase curriculum augmentation strategy complete the architecture. On a liquid phantom benchmark (intralipid and two ink absorbers; 496 samples), the model achieves $R^2 = 0.979$ and $0.975$ for $μ_a(λ)$ and $μ_s'(λ)$, respectively, on held-out test spectra, maintaining $R^2 > 0.90$ for $μ_a$ and $R^2 \approx 0.99$ for $μ_s'$ across the full tested shift range of $\pm 10$ spectral bands. The model generalises to a simulated spectrometer with a broader instrument line shape (${\approx}24$nm FWHM) without retraining, retaining $R^2 \approx 0.96$ and $0.974$ for the two channels. Attention map analysis reveals a physically interpretable two-component probe strategy: sparse anchor probes at absorption-edge wavelengths combined with a diffuse, SNR-driven ensemble at the high-transmittance long-wavelength region, which recruits additional probes dynamically under noise to provide implicit spectral averaging.

Affective touch in human-robot interaction is shaped not only by emotional intent, but also by robot embodiment, including touch location, physical constraints, and perceived agency or social role. Existing HRI studies typically focus on one or two isolated body parts, limiting understanding of how affective touch generalises across the full humanoid body. We present a study with 32 participants interacting with the iCub robot, which is equipped with full-body distributed tactile sensors. Participants expressed eight emotions under three conditions: free touch, arm-only touch, and torso-only touch. Results show that body region and spatial constraints jointly shaped both touch location and dynamics. In free touch, participants preferred socially accessible upper-body regions, while less frequently touched areas showed stronger emotion-specific selectivity. Emotion-related variation was more evident in motion features for arm-only touch and pressure features for torso-only touch. Touch strategies also did not transfer directly between free and constrained conditions, even within the same coarse body region. Participants reported increased closeness to the robot after interaction, with around 30 percent reporting a change in perceived social relationship. Together, these findings show that affective touch expression is strongly body-region dependent and shaped by embodiment constraints.

Recent diffusion-based approaches have made substantial progress in image layer decomposition. However, accurately decomposing complex natural images remains challenging due to difficulties in occlusion completion, robust layer disentanglement, and precise foreground boundaries. Moreover, the scarcity of high-quality multi-layer natural image datasets limits advancement. To address these challenges, we propose RevealLayer, a diffusion-based framework that decomposes an RGB image into multiple RGBA layers, enabling precise layer separation and reliable recovery of occluded content in natural images. RevealLayer incorporates three key components: (1) a Region-Aware Attention module to disentangle hidden and visible layers; (2) an Occlusion-Guided Adapter to leverage contextual information to enhance overlapping regions; and (3) a composite loss to enforce sharp alpha boundaries and suppress residual artifacts. To support training and evaluation, we introduce RevealLayer-100K, a high-quality multi-layer natural image constructed through a collaboration between automated algorithms and human annotation, and further establish RevealLayerBench for benchmarking layer decomposition in general natural scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RevealLayer consistently outperforms existing approaches in layer decomposition.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable promise in robotics manipulation, yet their high computational cost hinders real-time deployment. Existing token pruning methods suffer from a fundamental trade-off: aggressive compression using pruning inevitably discards critical geometric details like contact points, leading to severe performance degradation. This forces a compromise, limiting the achievable compression rate and thus the potential speedup. We argue that breaking this trade-off requires rethinking compression as a geometry-aware, continuous token resampling in the vision encoder. To this end, we propose the Differentiable Grid Sampler (GridS), a plug-and-play module that performs task-aware, continuous resampling of visual tokens in VLA. By adaptively predicting a minimal set of salient coordinates and extracting features via differentiable interpolation, GridS preserves essential spatial information while achieving drastic compression (with fewer than 10% original visual tokens). Experiments on both LIBERO benchmark and a real robotic platform demonstrate that validating the lowest feasible visual token count reported to date, GridS achieves a 76% reduction in FLOPs with no degradation in the success rate. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/Grid-Sampler.

Data-free continual learning (DFCIL) relies on model inversion to synthesize pseudo-samples and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, existing inversion methods are fundamentally limited by a simplifying assumption: they model feature distributions using diagonal covariance, effectively ignoring correlations that define the geometry of learned representations. As a result, synthesized samples often lack fidelity, limiting knowledge retention. In this work, we show that modeling feature dependencies is a key ingredient for effective DFCIL. We introduce REMIX, a structured covariance modeling framework that enables scalable full-covariance modeling without the prohibitive cost of dense matrix inversion and log-determinant computation. By leveraging a Laplace kernel parameterization, REMIX captures structured feature dependencies using memory that scales linearly with the feature dimensionality, while requiring only an additional logarithmic factor in computation. Modeling these correlations produces more coherent synthetic samples and consistently improves performance across standard DFCIL benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that moving beyond diagonal assumptions is essential for effective and scalable data-free continual learning. Our code is available at https://github. com/pkrukowski1/REMIX-Model-Inversion-via-Laplace-Kernel.

As Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) scale to longer and more complex videos, their inference cost grows rapidly due to the large volume of visual tokens accumulated across frames. Training-free token compression has emerged as a practical solution to this bottleneck. However, existing temporal compression methods rely primarily on cross-frame token similarity or segmentation heuristics, overlooking each token's semantic role within its frame and failing to adapt compression strength to the compressibility of each frame pair. In this work, we propose OTT-Vid, a transport-derived allocation framework for temporal token compression. Our approach consists of two stages: spatial pruning identifies representative content within each frame, and optimal transport (OT) is then solved between neighboring frames to estimate temporal compressibility. We formulate this OT with non-uniform token mass, which protects semantically important tokens from aggressive compression, and a locality-aware cost that captures both feature and spatial disparities. The resulting transport plan jointly balances token importance and matching cost, while its total cost defines the transport difficulty of each frame pair, which we use to allocate compression budgets dynamically. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning video question answering and temporal grounding show that OTT-Vid preserves 95.8% of VQA and 73.9% of VTG performance while retaining only 10% of tokens, consistently outperforming existing state-of-the-art training-free compression methods.

Large language models (LLMs) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures achieve remarkable scalability by sparsely activating a subset of experts per token, yet their frequent expert switching creates memory bandwidth bottlenecks that compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures are well-suited to mitigate. However, analog CIM systems suffer from inherent hardware imperfections that perturb stored weights, and its negative impact on MoE-based LLMs in noisy CIM environments remains unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation of MoE-based LLMs under noise model calibrated with real chip measurements, revealing that hardware noise critically disrupts expert load balance and renders clean-trained routing decisions consistently suboptimal. Based on these findings, we propose ROMER, a post-training calibration framework that (1) replaces underactivated experts with high-frequency ones to restore load balance, and (2) recalibrates router logits via percentile-based normalization to stabilize routing under noise. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ROMER achieves up to 58.6\%, 58.8\%, and 59.8\% reduction in perplexity under real-chip noise conditions for DeepSeek-MoE, Qwen-MoE, and OLMoE, respectively, establishing its effectiveness and generalizability across diverse MoE architectures.

This paper presents a novel position control strategy for a single-link flexible manipulator, tailored for applications where precise position must be achieved within strict time constraints. To accomplish this objective, firstly, a nested non-singular terminal sliding mode controller is designed for the system, enabling precise and robust control. Furthermore, a fixed-time sliding mode observer is designed to estimate unmeasured system states accurately in a fixed time, thereby enabling closed-loop control implementation. A stability analysis is presented to guarantee the robustness and efficacy of the proposed composite control algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed fixed-time controller is demonstrated through numerical simulation on accuracy, stability, and convergence speed. The proposed controller's performance is also compared with that of other state-of-the-art control schemes. The proposed controller is further validated through experiments conducted on a real hardware setup.

Visual impairment affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, severely limiting their ability to navigate urban environments safely and independently. While wearable assistive devices offer a promising platform for real-time hazard detection, existing approaches rely on task-specific vision pipelines that lack flexibility and generalizability. In this work, we propose an event map framework based on visual question answering that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for pedestrian scene description and hazard identification across diverse real-world environments, using a three-level hierarchical query structure to enable fine-grained scene understanding without task-specific retraining. Model responses are aggregated into a weighted risk scoring system that maps street segments into four discrete safety categories, producing navigable risk-aware event maps for route planning. To support evaluation and future research, we introduce a geographically diverse dataset spanning 20 cities across six continents, comprising over 800 annotated images and 18,000 answered questions. We benchmark four VQA architectures -ViLT, LLaVA, InstructBLIP, and Qwen-VL- and find that generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) substantially outperform classification-based approaches, with Qwen-VL achieving the best overall balance of precision and recall. These results demonstrate the viability of MLLMs as a flexible and generalizable foundation for assistive navigation systems for visually impaired people.

Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through global objectives, while the token-level mechanism by which sampled policy updates reshape policy entropy remains underexplored. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework of entropy mechanics in RLVR. Our analysis yields a first-order approximation of the entropy change, giving rise to entropy polarity, a signed token-level quantity that predicts how much a sampled update expands or contracts entropy. This analysis further reveals a structural asymmetry: reinforcing frequent high-probability tokens triggers contraction tendencies, whereas expansive tendencies typically require lower-probability samples or stronger distributional correction. Empirically, we show that entropy polarity reliably predicts entropy changes, and that positive and negative polarity branches play complementary roles in preserving exploration while strengthening exploitation. Building on these insights, we propose Polarity-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO), which preserves both polarity branches and implements entropy control through advantage reweighting. With the empirical entropy trajectory as an online phase signal, PAPO adaptively reallocates optimization pressure between entropy-expanding and entropy-contracting updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and agentic benchmarks show that PAPO consistently outperforms competitive baselines, while delivering superior training efficiency and substantial reward improvements.

Shadow detection is commonly formulated as a vision-driven dense prediction problem, where models rely primarily on pixel-wise visual supervision to distinguish shadows from non-shadow regions. However, this formulation can become unreliable in visually ambiguous cases, where similar dark regions may correspond either to cast shadows or to intrinsically dark surfaces, making visual evidence alone insufficient for establishing a stable decision rule. In this work, we revisit shadow detection from a vision--language perspective and argue that robust prediction benefits from an explicit semantic reference beyond visual cues alone. We propose SVL, a Shadow Vision--Language framework that uses language as an explicit semantic reference to disambiguate shadows from visually similar dark regions. SVL aligns the global image representation with shadow-related text embeddings through a scene-level shadow ratio regression objective, thereby providing image-level guidance on the overall extent of shadows. To transfer this global guidance to dense inference, SVL introduces a global-to-local coupling mechanism that enforces consistency between image-level guidance and patch-level predictions. In parallel, SVL applies local patch-level constraints with text embeddings to improve fine-grained discrimination under challenging appearance conditions. Built on a frozen DINOv3 image encoder, the framework learns only lightweight projection and decoding modules, yielding a parameter-efficient design with less than $1\%$ trainable parameters. Extensive experiments on multiple shadow detection benchmarks, including dedicated hard-case evaluations, suggest strong overall performance and improved robustness under visually ambiguous conditions.

Agent skills extend LLM agents with privileged third-party capabilities such as filesystem access, credentials, network calls, and shell execution. Existing safety work catches malicious prompts and risky runtime actions, but the skill artifact itself goes unverified. We formalize this as the behavioral integrity verification (BIV) problem: a typed set comparison between declared and actual capabilities over a shared taxonomy that bridges code, instructions, and metadata. The BIV framework instantiates this comparison by pairing deterministic code analysis with LLM-assisted capability extraction. The resulting structured evidence supports three downstream analyses: deviation taxonomy, root-cause classification, and malicious-skill detection. On 49,943 skills from the OpenClaw registry, the deviation taxonomy reveals a pervasive description-implementation gap: 80.0% of skills deviate from declared behavior, with four novel compound-threat categories surfaced. Root-cause classification finds that deviations are mostly oversight, not malice: 81.1% trace to developer oversight and 18.9% to adversarial intent, with 5.0% of skills carrying predicted multi-stage attack chains. On a 906-skill malicious-skill detection benchmark, BIV reaches an F1 of 0.946, outperforming state-of-the-art rule-based and single-pass LLM baselines. These results demonstrate behavioral integrity auditing for agent skills at scale.

Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a safety-critical domain in which incorrect interpretation of instructions may lead to severe operational consequences. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong general performance, their reliability in operational ATC environments remains unclear. Existing evaluation approaches, largely based on aggregate metrics such as F1 or macro accuracy, treat all errors uniformly and fail to account for the asymmetric consequences of high-risk semantic mistakes (e.g., incorrect runway identifiers or movement constraints). To address this gap, we propose a safety-oriented, consequence-aware evaluation framework tailored to ATC operations. Our results reveal that while current LLMs achieve reasonable aggregate accuracy, their operational reliability is severely limited. Evaluated on clean transcripts, the peak Risk Score reaches only 0.69, with most models scoring below 0.6 despite high macro-F1 performance. Further analysis shows that errors concentrate in high-impact entities despite relatively stable action-type classification, indicating structural grounding deficiencies. These findings highlight the necessity of consequence-aware evaluation protocols for the responsible deployment of AI-assisted ATC systems.

Learning robust navigation policies remains a core challenge in robotics. Offline imitation learning suffers from distribution shift and compounding errors at rollout, while reinforcement learning requires reward engineering and learns inefficiently. In this paper, we propose NavOL, an online imitation learning paradigm that interacts with a simulator and updates itself using expert demonstrations gathered online. Built upon a pretrained navigation diffusion policy that maps local observations to future waypoints, NavOL trains in a rollout update loop: during rollout, the policy acts in the simulator and queries a global planner which has privileged access to the global environment for the optimal path segment as ground truth trajectory labels; during update, the policy is trained on the online collected observation trajectory pairs. This online imitation loop removes the need for reward design, improves learning efficiency, and mitigates distribution shift by training on the policy own explored rollouts. Built on IsaacLab with fast, high-fidelity parallel rendering and domain randomization of camera pose and start-goal pairs, our system scales across 50 scenes on 8 RTX 4090 GPUs, collecting over 2,000 new trajectories per hour, each averaging more than 400 steps. We also introduce an indoor visual navigation benchmark with predefined start and goal positions for zero-shot generalization. Extensive evaluations on simulation benchmarks, including the NavDP benchmark and our proposed benchmark, as well as carefully designed real-world experiments, demonstrate the effectiveness of NavOL, showing consistent performance gains in online imitation learning.

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has emerged as a foundation model for universal segmentation. Owing to its generalizable visual representations, SAM2 has been successfully applied to various downstream tasks. However, extending SAM2 to the RGB-D video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) task encounters three challenges including limited spatial modeling of linear LoRA, insufficient employment of SAM's multi-scale features, and dependence of initialization on explicit prompts. To address the issues, we present Multi-Modal Mixture-of-Experts with Memory-Augmented SAM (M$^4$-SAM), which equips SAM2 with modality-related PEFT, hierarchical feature fusion, and prompt-free memory initialization. Firstly, we inject Modality-Aware MoE-LORA, which employs convolutional experts to encode local spatial priors and introduces a modality dispatcher for efficient multi-modal fine-tuning, into SAM2's encoder. Secondly, we deploy Gated Multi-Level Feature Fusion, which hierarchically aggregates multi-scale encoder features with an adaptive gating mechanism, to balance spatial details and semantic context. Finally, to conduct zero-shot VSOD without manual prompts, we utilize a Pseudo-Guided Initialization, where a coarse mask is regarded as a pseudo prior and used to bootstrap the memory bank. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M$^4$-SAM achieves the state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation metrics on three public RGB-D VSOD datasets.

Monocular depth foundation models generalize well across scenes, yet they are typically optimized with uniform pixel-wise objectives that do not distinguish user-specified or task-relevant target regions from the surrounding context. We therefore introduce Focusable Monocular Depth Estimation (FDE), a region-aware depth estimation task in which, given a specified target region, the model is required to prioritize foreground depth accuracy, preserve sharp boundary transitions, and maintain coherent global scene geometry. To prioritize task-critical region modeling, we propose FocusDepth, a prompt-conditioned monocular relative depth estimation framework that guides depth modeling to focus on target regions via box/text prompts. The core Multi-Scale Spatial-Aligned Fusion (MSSA) in FocusDepth spatially aligns multi-scale features from Segment Anything Model 3 to the Depth Anything family and injects them through scale-specific, gated conditional fusion. This enables dense prompt cue injection without disrupting geometric representations, thereby endowing the depth estimation model with focused perception capability. To study FDE, we establish FDE-Bench, a target-centric monocular relative depth benchmark built from image-target-depth triplets across five datasets, containing 252.9K/72.5K train/val triplets and 972 categories spanning real-world and embodied simulation environments. On FDE-Bench, FocusDepth consistently improves over globally fine-tuned DA2/DA3 baselines under both box and text prompts, with the largest gains appearing in target boundary and foreground regions while preserving global scene geometry. Ablations show that MSSA's spatial alignment is the key design factor, as disrupting prompt-geometry correspondence increases AbsRel by up to 13.8%.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are often brittle in fine-grained manipulation, where minor action errors during the critical phases can rapidly escalate into irrecoverable failures. Since existing VLA models rely predominantly on successful demonstrations for training, they lack an explicit awareness of failure during these critical phases. To address this, we propose DreamAvoid, a critical-phase test-time dreaming framework that enables VLA models to anticipate and avoid failures. We also introduce an autonomous boundary learning paradigm to refine the system's understanding of the subtle boundary between success and failure. Specifically, we (1) utilize a Dream Trigger to determine whether the execution has entered a critical phase, (2) sample multiple candidate action chunks from the VLA via an Action Proposer, and (3) employ a Dream Evaluator, jointly trained on mixed data (success, failure, and boundary cases), to "dream" the short-horizon futures corresponding to the candidate actions, evaluate their values, and select the optimal action. We conduct extensive evaluations on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks. The results demonstrate that DreamAvoid can effectively avoid failures, thereby improving the overall task success rate. Our code is available at https://github.com/XianzheFan/DreamAvoid.

Transformer-based large language models face severe scalability challenges in long-context generation due to the computational and memory costs of full-context attention. Under practical computation and memory constraints, many inference-efficient long-context methods improve efficiency by adopting bounded-context or segment-level execution only during inference, while continuing to train models under full-context attention, resulting in a mismatch between training and inference execution and state-transition semantics. Based on this insight, we propose a training-inference consistent segment-level generation framework, in which training and inference follow the same segment-level forward execution semantics. During training, consistency with inference is enforced by restricting gradient propagation to KV states carried over from the immediately preceding segment, while permitting head-specific access to past KV states during the forward pass without involving them in gradient propagation. Across long-context benchmarks, our approach achieves performance comparable to full-context attention, while achieving competitive latency-memory trade-offs against strong inference-efficient baselines, and substantially improving scalability at very long context lengths (e.g., approximately 6x lower peak prefill memory at 128K compared to full-context attention with FlashAttention).

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level mechanisms underlying OPD's efficiency remain poorly understood. In this work, we argue that OPD's efficiency stems from a form of ``foresight'': it establishes a stable update trajectory toward the final model early in training. This foresight manifests in two aspects. First, at the \textbf{Module-Allocation Level}, OPD identifies regions with low marginal utility and concentrates updates on modules that are more critical to reasoning. Second, at the \textbf{Update-Direction Level}, OPD exhibits stronger low-rank concentration, with its dominant subspaces aligning closely with the final update subspace early in training. Building on these findings, we propose \textbf{EffOPD}, a plug-and-play acceleration method that speeds up OPD by adaptively selecting an extrapolation step size and moving along the current update direction. EffOPD requires no additional trainable modules or complex hyperparameter tuning, and achieves an average training acceleration of $3\times$ while maintaining comparable final performance. Overall, our findings provide a parameter-dynamics perspective for understanding the efficiency of OPD and offer practical insights for designing more efficient post-training methods for large language models.

In this paper, we present AgentDisCo, a novel Disentangled and Collaborative agentic architecture that formulates deep research as an adversarial optimization problem between information exploration and exploitation. Unlike existing approaches that conflate these two processes into a single module, AgentDisCo employs a critic agent to evaluate generated outlines and refine search queries, and a generator agent to retrieve updated results and revise outlines accordingly. The iteratively refined outline is then passed to a downstream report writer that synthesizes a comprehensive research report. The overall workflow supports both handcrafted and automatically discovered design strategies via a meta-optimization harness, in which the generator agent is repurposed as a scoring agent to evaluate critic outputs and generate quality signals. Powerful code-generation agents (e.g., Claude-Code, Codex) systematically explore agent configurations and construct a policy bank, a structured repository of reusable design strategies, enabling the framework to self-refine without extensive human intervention. We evaluate AgentDisCo on three established deep research benchmarks (DeepResearchBench, DeepConsult, DeepResearchGym) using Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieving performance comparable to or surpassing leading closed-source systems. Observing that existing benchmarks inadequately reflect real-world user needs, we introduce GALA (General AI Life Assistants), a benchmark that mines latent research interests from users' historical browsing behavior. We further develop a rendering agent that converts research reports into visually rich poster presentations, and demonstrate an end-to-end product, AutoResearch Your Interest, which delivers personalized deep research recommendations derived from individual browsing histories.

Vision-language models typically reason over post-ISP RGB images, although RGB rendering can clip, suppress, or quantize sensor evidence before inference. We study whether grounding improves when the visual interface is moved closer to the underlying camera measurement. We formulate measurement-grounded vision-language learning and instantiate it as PRISM-VL, which combines RAW-derived Meas.-XYZ inputs, camera-conditioned grounding, and Exposure-Bracketed Supervision Aggregation for transferring supervision from RGB proxies to measurement-domain observations. Using a quality-controlled 150K instruction-tuning set and a held-out benchmark targeting low-light, HDR, visibility-sensitive, and hallucination-sensitive cases, PRISM-VL-8B reaches 0.6120 BLEU, 0.4571 ROUGE-L, and 82.66\% LLM-Judge accuracy, improving over the RGB Qwen3-VL-8B baseline by +0.1074 BLEU, +0.1071 ROUGE-L, and +4.46 percentage points. These results suggest that part of VLM grounding error arises from information lost during RGB rendering, and that preserving measurement-domain evidence can improve multimodal reasoning.

The rise of agentic AI is reshaping software engineering in two intertwined directions: agents are increasingly applied to support software engineering tasks, and Agentic AI systems themselves are complex systems that require re-thinking currently established software engineering practices. To chart a coherent research agenda covering the two directions, we organized the A2SE seminar in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together 18 experts from academia and industry. Through structured presentations, collaborative topic clustering, and focused group discussions, participants identified six thematic areas: Governance, Software Engineering for Agents, Agents for Software Architecture, Quality and Evaluation, Sustainability, and Code, and they prioritized short-term and long-term research directions for each. This paper presents the resulting community-driven, opinionated research agenda, offering the SE community a structured foundation for coordinating efforts at this critical juncture.

Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to compressive stress, where minor variations in physical properties can significantly affect grasping. This study systematically investigates grasping strategies for paper-like materials using a universal soft gripper by exploiting environmental constraints. Based on manipulation primitives employed in existing grasping strategies, we proposed systematic grasping strategies for flexible materials by exploiting environmental constraints and analyzed their mechanical and kinematic models. To investigate the influence of materials and working conditions on grasping, an evaluation system for measuring grasping force and success rate was defined and experimentally evaluated. Finally, we summarized the specific workspaces and characteristics of different strategies that can satisfy various task requirements and lead to potential applications in household service robots for grasping planar flexible objects.

This paper presents a kinematics-aware deep reinforcement learning framework based on Rainbow Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for cooperative peg-in-hole manipulation by a Delta parallel robot and a 3-RRS (Revolute--Revolute--Spherical) parallel manipulator. A key contribution is the integration of a geometric design-optimization stage that precedes learning: the 3-RRS geometry is tuned to maximize the singularity-free workspace and improve conditioning, which in turn enlarges the safe region in which the reinforcement learning policy can explore. Together the two manipulators expose a 6~degree-of-freedom (DoF) controllable subspace (three Delta translations, two 3-RRS rotations, and one 3-RRS vertical translation); the peg-in-hole task is invariant to rotation about the peg axis, so the task-relevant manifold is five dimensional. The cooperative insertion problem is cast as a Markov Decision Process with a 12-dimensional state vector and a discrete action set containing $6 \times 2 = 12$ incremental commands (one positive and one negative per controlled DoF). A shaped reward combines dense proximity guidance, penalties for kinematic and workspace violations, and sparse bonuses for successful insertions. The Rainbow DQN -- integrating double Q-learning, dueling architecture, prioritized replay, multi-step returns, noisy linear layers for exploration, and a distributional value head -- is trained with a two-stage curriculum. The co-designed framework is validated in a high-fidelity kinematic simulator, where it achieves stable policy convergence, reliable insertions, and reduced constraint violations compared against a vanilla DQN agent and a classical sampling-based planner.

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) aims to enable agents to cooperate with independently trained partners without prior interaction, a key requirement for real-world multi-agent systems and human-AI collaboration. Existing approaches have largely emphasized increasing partner diversity during training, yet such strategies often fall short of achieving reliable generalization to unseen partners. We introduce State-Blocked Coordination (SBC), a simple yet effective framework that improves ZSC by inducing diverse interaction scenarios without direct environment modification. Specifically, SBC generates a family of virtual environments through state blocking, allowing agents to experience a wide range of suboptimal partner policies. Across multiple benchmarks, SBC demonstrates superior performance in zero-shot coordination, including strong generalization to human partners.

We compare three state-of-the-art proprioceptive state estimators for quadruped robots: MUSE [1], the Invariant Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) [2], and the Invariant Smoother (IS) [3], on the CYN-1 sequence of the GrandTour Dataset [4]. Our goal is to give practitioners clear guidance on accuracy and computation time: we report long-term accuracy (Absolute Trajectory Error, ATE), short-term accuracy (translational and rotational Relative Pose Error, RPE), and per-update computation time on a fixed hardware/software stack. On this dataset, RPEs are broadly similar across methods, while IEKF and IS achieve a lower ATE than MUSE. Runtime results highlight the accuracy-latency trade-offs across the three approaches. In the discussion, we outline the evaluation choices used to ensure a fair comparison and analyze factors that influence short-horizon metrics. Overall, this study provides a concise snapshot of accuracy and cost, helping readers choose an estimator that fits their application constraints, with all evaluation code and documentation released open-source at https://github.com/iit-DLSLab/state_estimation_benchmark for full reproducibility.

Robot learning research is fragmented across policy families, benchmark suites, and real robots; each implementation is entangled with the others in a complex combination matrix, making it an engineering nightmare to port any single element. General-purpose coding agents may occasionally bridge specific setups, but cannot close this gap at scale because they lack the procedural priors and validation practices that characterize robotics research workflows. We propose NAUTILUS, an open-source harness that turns a single user prompt -- for example, "Evaluate policy A with benchmark B" -- into ready-to-use reproduction, evaluation, fine-tuning, and deployment workflows. NAUTILUS provides: plug-and-play agent skill sets with distilled priors from robotics research; typed contracts among policies, simulators/benchmarks, and real-world robots; unified interfaces and execution environments; and a trustworthy agentic coding workflow with explicit, automated validation, and testing at each milestone. NAUTILUS can not only automatically generate the required adapters and containers for existing implementations, but also wrap and onboard new or user-provided policies, simulators/benchmarks, and robots, all connected via a uniform interface. This expands cross-validation coverage without hand-written glue code. Like a nautilus shell that grows by adding chambers, NAUTILUS scales by extending its execution in chambered units, making it a research harness for scalability rather than a hand-curated framework, and aiming to reduce the engineering burden of cross-family reproduction and evaluation in the ever-growing robot learning ecosystem.

Authentic school examinations provide a high-validity test bed for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet benchmarks grounded in Japanese K-12 assessments remain scarce. We present a multimodal dataset constructed from Japan's National Assessment of Academic Ability, comprising officially released middle-school items in Science, Mathematics, and Japanese Language. Unlike existing benchmarks based on synthetic or curated data, our dataset preserves real exam layouts, diagrams, and Japanese educational text, together with nationwide aggregated student response distributions (N $\approx$ 900{,}000). These features enable direct comparison between human and model performance under a unified evaluation framework. We benchmark recent multimodal LLMs using exact-match accuracy and character-level F1 for open-ended responses, observing substantial variation across subjects and strong sensitivity to visual reasoning demands. Human evaluation and LLM-as-judge analyses further assess the reliability of automatic scoring. Our dataset establishes a reproducible, human-grounded benchmark for multimodal educational reasoning and supports future research on evaluation, feedback generation, and explainable AI in authentic assessment contexts. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/KyosukeTakami/gakucho-benchmark

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL), which matches an oblique drone view to a geo-referenced satellite tile, has emerged as a key alternative for autonomous drone navigation when GNSS signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable. Despite strong recent progress, three limitations persist: (1) global-descriptor designs compress the patch grid into a single vector without separating layout from texture across the view gap; (2) altitude-related scale variation is retained in the learned embedding rather than marginalized; and (3) multi-objective training relies on hand-tuned scalars over losses on incompatible gradient scales. We propose SkyPart, a lightweight swappable head for patch-based vision transformers (ViTs) that institutes explicit part grouping over the patch grid. SkyPart has four theory-grounded components: (i) learnable prototypes competing for patch tokens via single-pass cosine assignment; (ii) altitude-conditioned linear modulation applied only during training, making the retrieval embedding altitude-free at inference; (iii) a graph-attention readout over active prototypes; and (iv) a Kendall uncertainty-weighted multi-objective loss whose stationary points are Pareto-stationary. At 26.95M parameters and 22.14 GFLOPs, SkyPart is the smallest among top-performing methods and sets a new state of the art on SUES-200, University-1652, and DenseUAV under a single-pass, no-re-ranking, no-TTA protocol. Its advantage over the strongest baseline widens under the ten-condition WeatherPrompt corruption benchmark.

Recent think-answer approaches in VLMs, such as Qwen3-VL-Thinking, boost reasoning performance by leveraging intermediate thinking steps before the final answer, but their high computational cost limits real-world deployment. To distill such capabilities into compact think-answer VLMs, a primary objective is to improve the student's ability to utilize visual evidence throughout its reasoning trace. To this end, we introduce a novel think-answer distillation framework that encourages the student to anchor its thinking on visual information by masking the student's salient reasoning prefixes. To compensate for such masked textual cues, the student is encouraged to rely more on visual evidence as an alternative source of information during distillation. Our masking strategies include: 1) token-wise salient reasoning-prefix masking, which masks high-influence reasoning prefixes selectively for each next-token prediction, and 2) self-paced masking budget scheduling, which gradually increases the masking scale according to distillation difficulty, {measured by discrepancy between teacher--student distributions. In the distillation phase, the student is guided by our salient reasoning-prefix mask, which blocks both future tokens and salient reasoning cues, in place of the standard causal mask used for auto-regressive language modeling. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms recent open-source VLMs, VLM distillation, and self-distillation methods on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while further analyses confirm enhanced visual utilization along the student thinking process.

Herding -- where agents align their behaviors and act collectively -- is a central driver of market fragility and systemic risk. Existing approaches to quantify herding rely on price-correlation statistics, which inherently lag because they only detect coordination after it has already moved realised returns. We propose GeomHerd, a forward-looking geometric framework that bypasses this observability lag by quantifying coordination directly on upstream agent-interaction graphs. To generate these graphs, we treat a heterogeneous LLM-driven multi-agent simulator -- each financial trader instantiated by a persona-conditioned LLM call -- as a forecastable world, and evaluate the geometric pipeline on the Cividino--Sornette continuous-spin agent-based substrate as our headline financial testbed. By tracking the discrete Ollivier--Ricci curvature of these action graphs, GeomHerd captures the structural topology of emerging coordination. Theoretically, we establish a mean-field bridge mapping our graph-theoretic metric to CSAD, the classical macroscopic herding statistic, linking GeomHerd to downstream price-dispersion measurement. Empirically, GeomHerd anticipates herding long before aggregate market baselines: on the continuous-spin substrate, our primary detector fires a median of 272 steps before order-parameter onset; a contagion detector ($β_{-}$) recalls 65% of critical trajectories 318 steps early; and on co-firing trajectories the agent-graph signal precedes price-correlation-graph baselines by 40 steps. As a complementary indicator, the effective vocabulary of agent actions contracts during cascades. The geometric signature transfers out-of-domain to the Vicsek self-driven-particle model, and a curvature-conditioned forecasting head reduces cascade-window log-return MAE over detector-conditioned and price-only baselines.

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning ability on vision-language tasks, but their direct deployment in real-world systems is often limited by latency and resource constraints. In practice, smaller MLLMs are preferred for online serving, yet their reasoning performance is bottlenecked by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal CoT supervision. In this paper, we present OmniThoughtVis, a scalable data curation and distillation pipeline for transferring multimodal reasoning capabilities from high-capacity teacher models to smaller, deployment-oriented MLLMs. Starting from a diverse open-source seed pool, our pipeline generates structured CoT traces and performs joint annotation of reasoning difficulty, answer quality, and semantic task tags. To maintain data quality at scale, we combine rule-based filtering, difficulty-aware selection, and tag-based diversity sampling, resulting in a curated corpus of 1.8M samples that supports controllable subset construction for downstream training. We use OmniThoughtVis to distill Qwen3-VL models from 2B to 8B parameters and evaluate them on nine multimodal reasoning benchmarks. The resulting distilled models show consistent gains across model scales, including improvements of up to +16.8 points on MathVerse and +5.6 points on MMMU-Pro for the 4B model. Notably, the distilled 4B model matches or surpasses the undistilled 8B baseline on several tasks, highlighting the practical value of scalable reasoning distillation for deployment-oriented MLLMs.

Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion exploits the unique morphology of continuum robots (CRs) to navigate confined spaces by having the body retrace the path of the tip. While extensively studied, existing FTL methods typically assume a fixed base or a single degree-of-freedom insertion mechanism, limiting their applicability to practical systems in which CRs are mounted on robotic manipulators with fully actuated SE(3) base pose. This paper presents a sampling-based motion planner for FTL motion of manipulator-mounted CRs that jointly considers robot configuration and base pose. The key idea is to decouple global shape search from base pose determination by computing the base pose through a closed-form geometric construction, thereby avoiding iterative optimization during online planning. The approach supports general forward models and enables efficient planning by shifting the majority of computation offline. We establish theoretical guarantees including resolution complete shape search and converging tip tracking throughout waypoint traversal and interpolation. Experiments on 120 simulated paths over 3 test classes demonstrate 0% tip error and 1.9% mean shape deviation (w.r.t. robot length) at 100% success rate. We validate the practicality of our approach on a 6-DOF tendon-driven CR mounted on a serial manipulator. Code and visualization available at https://continuumroboticslab.github.io/sb-ftl-cr-planner/.

Backdoor vulnerabilities widely exist in the fine-tuning of large language models(LLMs). Most backdoor poisoning methods operate mainly at the token level and lack deeper semantic manipulation, which limits stealthiness. In addition, Prior attacks rely on a single fixed trigger to induce harmful outputs. Such static triggers are easy to detect, and clean fine-tuning can weaken the trigger-target association. Through causal validation, we observe that emotion is not directly linked to individual words, but functions as an overall stylistic factor through tone. In the representation space of LLM, emotion can be decoupled from semantics, forming distinct cluster from the original neutral text. Therefore, we consider the emotional factor as the backdoor trigger to propose a pparasitic emotion-style dynamic backdoor attack, Paraesthesia. By mixing samples with the emotional trigger into clean data and then fine-tuning the model, the model is able to generate the predefined attack response when encountering emotional inputs during the inference stage. Paraesthesia includes two the quantification and rewriting of emotional styles. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on instruction-following generation and classification tasks. The experimental results show that Paraesthesia achieves an attack success rate of around 99\% across both task types and four different models, while maintaining the clean utility of the models.

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger external teacher. Yet in math reasoning the gains are inconsistent, even when the same approach succeeds elsewhere. A pointwise mutual information analysis traces the failure to the privileged context itself: it inflates the teacher's confidence on tokens already implied by the solution (structural connectives, verifiable claims) and deflates it on deliberation tokens ("Wait", "Let", "Maybe") that drive multi-step search. We propose Anti-Self-Distillation (AntiSD), which ascends a divergence between student and teacher rather than descending it: this reverses the per-token sign and yields a naturally bounded advantage in one step. An entropy-triggered gate disables the term once the teacher entropy collapses, completing a drop-in replacement for default self-distillation. Across five models from 4B to 30B parameters on math reasoning benchmarks, AntiSD reaches the GRPO baseline's accuracy in 2 to 10x fewer training steps and improves final accuracy by up to 11.5 points. AntiSD opens a path to scalable self-improvement, where a language model bootstraps its own reasoning through its training signal.

Comparing post-training LLM variants, such as quantized, LoRA-adapted, and distilled models, requires a diagnostic that identifies how a variant has drifted, not only whether it has degraded. Existing similarity scores such as CKA and SVCCA can flag degradation, but they do not directly link representation drift to risk or mechanism. We propose PRISM, Proxy Risk Inference via Structural Mapping, which exploits the linear output head of LLMs and the empirically near-isometric structure of their backbones to derive a closed-form upper bound on the cross-entropy risk gap between a target model and a post-training variant. The bound is calibrated for variant ranking and decomposes drift into three independently measurable axes: scale mismatch, shape mismatch, and head divergence. Each axis corresponds to a distinct failure mode, including shape distortion under low-bit quantization, scale separability under LoRA forgetting, and head divergence under GGUF k-quantization. As a result, the dominant axis suggests a remediation direction rather than merely raising a degradation flag. Because the shape term is differentiable, the same geometry can also serve as a training-time regularizer against catastrophic forgetting. Across two model families and five benchmarks, PRISM ranks variants with mean Spearman correlations of 0.820 for post-training quantization and 0.831 for LoRA forgetting, and its axis-guided shape regularizer outperforms experience replay in aggregate at mitigating downstream forgetting.

Autoregressive language models are widely used for text evaluation, however, their left-to-right factorization introduces positional bias, i.e., early tokens are scored with only leftward context, conflating architectural asymmetry with true text quality. We propose masked reconstruction as an alternative paradigm, where every token is scored using full bidirectional context. We introduce DiffScore, an evaluation framework built on Masked Large Diffusion Language Models. By measuring text recoverability across continuous masking rates, DiffScore eliminates positional bias and naturally establishes an evaluation hierarchy from local fluency to global coherence. We further provide diagnostic tools unavailable to autoregressive frameworks: multi-timestep quality profiles that decompose scores across masking rates, and bidirectional PMI decomposition that disentangles fluency from faithfulness. Experiments across ten benchmarks show that DiffScore consistently outperforms autoregressive baselines in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The code is released at: https://github.com/wenlai-lavine/DiffScore.

When large language models (LLMs) serve real-time inference in commercial online advertising systems, end-to-end latency must be strictly bounded to the millisecond range. Yet every token generated during the decode phase triggers thousands of kernel launches, and kernel launch overhead alone can account for 14.6% of end-to-end inference time. MegaKernel eliminates launch overhead and inter-operator HBM round-trips by fusing multiple operators into a single persistent kernel. However, existing MegaKernel implementations face a fundamental tension between portability and efficiency on resource-constrained GPUs such as NVIDIA Ada: hand-tuned solutions are tightly coupled to specific architectures and lack portability, while auto-compiled approaches introduce runtime dynamic scheduling whose branch penalties are unacceptable in latency-critical settings. We observe that under a fixed deployment configuration, the optimal execution path of a MegaKernel is uniquely determined, and runtime dynamic decision-making can be entirely hoisted to compile time. Building on this insight, we propose Ada-MK: (1) a three-dimensional shared-memory constraint model combined with K-dimension splitting that reduces peak shared memory usage by 50%; (2) MLIR-based fine-grained DAG offline search that solidifies the optimal execution path, completely eliminating runtime branching; and (3) a heterogeneous hybrid inference engine that embeds MegaKernel as a plugin into TensorRT-LLM, combining high-throughput Prefill with low-latency Decode. On an NVIDIA L20, Ada-MK improves single-batch throughput by up to 23.6% over vanilla TensorRT-LLM and 50.2% over vLLM, achieving positive gains across all tested scenarios--the first industrial deployment of MegaKernel in a commercial online advertising system.

Autoregressive language models generate text one token at a time, yet natural language is inherently structured in multi-token units, including phrases, n-grams, and collocations that carry meaning jointly. This one-token bottleneck limits both the expressiveness of the model during pre-training and its throughput at inference time. Existing remedies such as speculative decoding or diffusion-based language models either leave the underlying bottleneck intact or sacrifice the causal structure essential to language modeling. We propose BitLM, a language model that represents each token as a fixed-length binary code and employs a lightweight diffusion head to denoise multiple tokens in parallel within each block. Crucially, BitLM preserves left-to-right causal attention across blocks while making joint lexical decisions within each block, combining the reliability of autoregressive modeling with the parallelism of iterative refinement. By replacing the large-vocabulary softmax with bitwise denoising, BitLM reframes token generation as iterative commitment in a compact binary space, enabling more efficient pre-training and substantially faster inference without altering the causal foundation that makes language models effective. Our results demonstrate that the one-token-at-a-time paradigm is not a fundamental requirement but an interface choice, and that changing it can yield a stronger and faster language model. We hope BitLM points toward a promising direction for next-generation language model architectures.

Despite recent efforts to collect multi-task, multi-embodiment datasets, to design recipes for training Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), and to showcase these models on different robot platforms, generalist cross-embodiment robot capabilities remains a largely elusive ideal. Progress is limited by fragmented infrastructure: most robot code is highly specific to the exact setup the user decided on, which adds major overhead when attempting to reuse, recycle, or share artifacts between users. We present RIO (Robot I/O), an open source Python framework that provides flexible, lightweight components for robot control, teleoperation, data formatting, sensor configuration, and policy deployment across diverse hardware platforms and morphologies. RIO provides abstractions that enable users to make any choice and to switch between them, with minimal reconfiguration effort. We validate RIO on VLA deployment workflows across three morphologies (single-arm, bimanual, humanoid) and four hardware platforms with varying grippers and cameras. Using teleoperated data collected with RIO, we fine-tune state-of-the-art VLAs including $π_{0.5}$ and GR00T on household tasks such as pick-and-place, folding, and bowl scrubbing. By open sourcing all our efforts, we hope the community can accelerate their pace of robot learning on real-world robot hardware. Additional details at: https://robot-i-o.github.io

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, it struggles to effectively balance the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation during training, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Motivated by the theoretical insight that changes in entropy are governed by the covariance between token probabilities and their corresponding advantages, we propose a hyperparameter-free, covariance-weighted optimization method that dynamically down-weights extreme token-level updates via a Gaussian kernel. This approach automatically reduces the instability caused by exploration-exploitation trade-off while preserving informative learning signals. Extensive empirical evaluations show that our approach improves downstream performance across reasoning benchmarks compared with GRPO, and effectively stablizes entropy as training progresses.

When an LLM-based embodied agent fails at a household task, the culprit could be misidentified objects, forgotten sub-goals, or poor action sequencing -- yet existing benchmarks report only a single success rate, making it impossible to tell which cognitive module is responsible. We present PRISM, a diagnostic benchmark that reframes this problem: rather than asking only \textit{did the agent succeed?}, PRISM asks \textit{which capability is most likely responsible for failure?} Built on five photorealistic multi-room apartments (4--8 rooms each), PRISM structures 300 human-verified tasks into three capability tiers -- \textit{Basic Ability}, \textit{Reasoning Ability}, and \textit{Long-horizon Ability} -- that isolate perception-to-action grounding, implicit intent resolution, and sustained multi-step coordination respectively. PRISM exposes an agent-agnostic executable action API that allows arbitrary agents: LLM agents, VLM agents, symbolic planners, RL policies, and hybrid systems, to be evaluated end-to-end under the same benchmark protocol. To support deeper diagnosis, optional probes for perception, memory, and planning can be adopted, replaced, or bypassed entirely, enabling controlled component-level analysis when desired. Experiments on seven contemporary LLMs establish a clear hierarchy: explicit spatial grounding is not the dominant failure source under oracle perception, implicit intent resolution is a significant bottleneck for all model families, and long-horizon coordination exposes a stark capability cliff -- lightweight models collapse to as low as 20.0\% success while simultaneously consuming more tokens than their frontier counterparts, a signature of compensatory over-reasoning rather than genuine planning capability. Project page: \href{https://sj-li.com/PROJ/PRISM}{link}.

Clinical check-up reports are multimodal documents that combine page layouts, tables, numerical biomarkers, abnormality flags, imaging findings, and domain-specific terminology. Such heterogeneous evidence is difficult for laypersons to interpret and translate into concrete follow-up actions. Although large language models show promise in medical summarisation and triage support, their ability to generate safe, prioritised, and patient-oriented actions from multimodal check-up reports remains under-benchmarked. We present \textbf{Checkup2Action}, a multimodal clinical check-up report dataset and benchmark for structured \textit{Action Card} generation. Each card describes one clinically relevant issue and specifies its priority, recommended department, follow-up time window, patient-facing explanation, and questions for clinicians, while avoiding diagnostic or treatment-prescriptive claims. The dataset contains 2,000 de-identified real-world check-up reports covering demographic information, physical examinations, laboratory tests, cardiovascular assessments, imaging-related evidence, and physician summaries. We formulate checkup-to-action generation as a constrained structured generation task and introduce an evaluation protocol covering issue coverage and precision, priority consistency, department and time recommendation accuracy, action complexity, usefulness, readability, and safety compliance. Experiments with general-purpose and medical large language models reveal clear trade-offs between issue coverage, action correctness, conciseness, and safety alignment. Checkup2Action provides a new multimodal benchmark for evaluating patient-oriented reasoning over clinical check-up reports.

Using offline datasets to evaluate conversational agents often fails to cover rare scenarios or to support testing new policies. This has motivated the use of controllable user simulators for targeted, counterfactual evaluation, typically implemented by prompting or fine-tuning large language models. In this work, we formalize controllable simulation as a causal inference problem. By bridging natural language evaluation with off-policy evaluation methodology, we show that the standard practice of training simulators via supervised fine-tuning on post-hoc trajectory labels yields a structurally biased model. Specifically, these labels are inextricably coupled to the data-generating behavior policy, injecting a look-ahead bias that breaks causal consistency. Furthermore, we prove that under policy shift this failure causes the variance of evaluation metrics to explode geometrically, a phenomenon we term controllability collapse. To restore causal consistency, we establish theoretical conditions for accurate simulation and propose practical training mitigations: a priori controls, step-wise dynamic controls, and direct policy-conditioned learning. Empirical evaluation confirms that while standard global controls distort conversational distributions and collapse behavioral diversity, our causally grounded simulators eliminate look-ahead bias, preserve natural variance, and exhibit robust zero-shot generalization to unseen agent behaviors.

Effectively configuring scalable large language model (LLM) experiments, spanning architecture design, hyperparameter tuning, and beyond, is crucial for advancing LLM research, as poor configuration choices can waste substantial computational resources and prevent models from realizing their full potential. Prior automated methods are designed for low-cost settings where repeated trial and error is feasible, but scalable LLM experiments are too expensive for such extensive iteration. To our knowledge, no work has addressed the automation of high-cost LLM experiment configurations, leaving this problem labor-intensive and dependent on expert intuition. Motivated by this gap, we propose AutoLLMResearch, an agentic framework that mimics how human researchers learn generalizable principles from low-fidelity experiments and extrapolate to efficiently identify promising configurations in expensive LLM settings. The core challenge is how to enable an agent to learn, through interaction with a multi-fidelity experimental environment that captures the structure of the LLM configuration landscape. To achieve this, we propose a systematic framework with two key components: 1) LLMConfig-Gym, a multi-fidelity environment encompassing four critical LLM experiment tasks, supported by over one million GPU hours of verifiable experiment outcomes; 2) A structured training pipeline that formulates configuration research as a long-horizon Markov Decision Process and accordingly incentivizes cross-fidelity extrapolation reasoning. Extensive evaluation against diverse strong baselines on held-out experiments demonstrates the effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability of our framework, supporting its potential as a practical and general solution for scalable real-world LLM experiment automation.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a critical tool for training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the majority of research focuses on approaches that rely solely on output logits, neglecting semantic information in the teacher's intermediate representations. While Hidden Layer Distillation (HLD) showed potential for encoder architectures, its application to decoder-only pre-training at scale remains largely unexplored. Through compute-controlled experiments, we benchmark HLD against logit-based KD and self-supervised baselines with Gemma3 3.4B as teacher and 123M and 735M students trained on up to 168B tokens from the C4 dataset. Our experiments show that HLD does not consistently outperform standard KD on downstream evaluation tasks. Nevertheless, we show that HLD can yield a systematic perplexity gain over KD across all shared-hyperparameter configurations, suggesting that a latent signal can be extracted, but a breakthrough may be needed for it to play a more significant role in LLM pre-training.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex networked environments, yet the joint optimization of multi-UAV motion control and connectivity remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we study a multi-UAV system operating in an integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial network (ITNTN) comprising terrestrial base stations and high-altitude platform stations (HAPS). We consider a three-dimensional (3D) aerial highway scenario where UAVs must adapt their motion to ensure collision avoidance, efficient traffic flow, and reliable communication under dynamic and partially observable conditions. We first model the problem as a hierarchical multi-objective partially observable Markov decision process (H-MO-POMDP), capturing the coupling between control and communication objectives. Based on this formulation, we propose a large language model (LLM)-driven hierarchical multi-rate control framework. At the global level, an LLM-based controller on the HAPS performs long-term planning for load balancing and handover decisions. At the local level, each UAV employs a hybrid controller that integrates a slow-timescale LLM for high-level spatial reasoning with a reinforcement learning agent for faster UAV-to-infrastructure (U2I) communication and motion control. We further develop a high-fidelity 3D simulation platform by integrating the gym-pybullet-drones environment with 3GPP-compliant RF/THz channel models. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 14% increase in transportation efficiency and a 25% improvement in telecommunication throughput. Additionally, it achieves a 23% reduction in physical collision rates, demonstrating strong handover stability and zero-shot generalization in dynamic scenarios.

We study a graph pathfinding problem Distance-$r$ Independent Unlabeled Multi-Agent Pathfinding, finding a set of collision-free paths between two sets where agents must stay at pairwise distance at least $r+1$ at all times. This additional constraint, generalizing collision modeling for classical MAPF, targets aspects of real-world multi-agent coordination. This additional distance constraint makes feasibility (i.e., whether a solution exists) PSPACE-complete, in contrast to standard (unlabeled) MAPF, where it can be decided in polynomial time. We address the challenge via two complementary approaches: (i) reduction-based optimal algorithms with a feasibility-preserving compression procedure, and (ii) a configuration generator-based search. Despite the hardness, empirical results show that our algorithm can handle hundreds of agents in a practical timeframe.

Accurately and consistently indexing biomedical literature by publication type and study design is essential for supporting evidence synthesis and knowledge discovery. Prior work on automated publication type and study design indexing has primarily focused on expanding label coverage, enriching feature representations, and improving in-domain accuracy, with evaluation typically conducted on data drawn from the same distribution as training. Although pretrained biomedical language models achieve strong performance under these settings, models optimized for in-domain accuracy may rely on superficial lexical or dataset-specific cues, resulting in reduced robustness under distributional shift. In this study, we introduce an evaluation framework based on controlled semantic perturbations to assess the robustness of a publication type classifier and investigate robustness-oriented training strategies that combine entity masking and domain-adversarial training to mitigate reliance on spurious topical correlations. Our results show that the commonly observed trade-off between robustness and in-domain accuracy can be mitigated when robustness objectives are designed to selectively suppress non-task-defining features while preserving salient methodological signals. We find that these improvements arise from two complementary mechanisms: (1) increased reliance on explicit methodological cues when such cues are present in the input, and (2) reduced reliance on spurious domain-specific topical features. These findings highlight the importance of feature-level robustness analysis for publication type and study design classification and suggest that refining masking and adversarial objectives to more selectively suppress topical information may further improve robustness. Data, code, and models are available at: https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/ICHI

Enterprise AI is shifting from copilots to autonomous agents capable of executing workflows, negotiating outcomes, and making decisions with limited human oversight. As these systems extend across organizational boundaries, identity alone is insufficient: an agent's authority must also be explicit, constrained, auditable, revocable, and consistently interpretable by independent receivers. This paper analyzes representative enterprise use cases in insurance claims processing and supply chain integrity to surface structural gaps in existing identity and access models. It proposes a portable authorization model for autonomous agents based on issuer-authored authorization payloads, typed constraint algebra, decision-consistent evaluation semantics, delegation attenuation, governed semantic resolution, fail-closed processing, and pre-flight discovery. The model separates credential containers, authorization payload semantics, and enforcement engines, allowing profiles such as JWT/JWS, Verifiable Credentials, OAuth Rich Authorization Requests, or policy-engine bindings to preserve a common authorization meaning across trust boundaries.

Imitation learning powered by generative models has proven effective for modeling complex single-agent behaviors. However, teaching multi-agent systems, like multiple arms or vehicles, to coordinate through imitation learning is hindered by a fundamental data bottleneck: as the joint state-action space grows exponentially with the number of agents, collecting a sufficient amount of coordinated multi-agent demonstrations becomes extremely costly. In this work, we ask: how can we leverage single-agent demonstration data to learn multi-agent policies? We present Coordinated Diffusion (CoDi), a framework that couples independently trained single-agent diffusion policies through a user-defined multi-agent cost function, without requiring any coordinated demonstrations. We derive a new diffusion-based sampling scheme wherein the diffusion score function decomposes into independent, single-agent pre-trained base policies plus a cost-driven guidance term that coordinates these base policies into cohesive multi-agent behavior. We show that this guidance term can be estimated in a gradient-free manner, making CoDi applicable to black-box, non-differentiable cost functions without additional training. Theoretically and empirically, we analyze the conditions under which this composition can faithfully approximate a target multi-agent behavior. We find a complementary role for demonstration data versus the cost function: single-agent demonstrations must cover the support of the desired multi-agent behavior, while the cost function must promote desired behavior from this product of single-agent policies. Our results in simulation and hardware experiments of a two-arm manipulation task show that CoDi discovers robust coordinated behavior from single-agent data, is more data-efficient than multi-agent baselines, and highlights the importance of joint guidance, base policy support, and cost design.

Policy evaluation is a fundamental component of the development and deployment pipeline for robotic policies. In modern manipulation systems, this problem is particularly challenging: rewards are often sparse, task progression of evaluation rollouts are often non-monotonic as the policies exhibit recovery behaviors, and evaluation rollouts are necessarily of finite length. This finite length introduces truncation bias, breaking the infinite-horizon assumptions underlying standard methods relying on Bellman equations/principle of optimality. In this work, we propose a framework for offline policy evaluation from sparse rewards based on a liveness-based Bellman operator. Our formulation interprets policy evaluation as a task-completion problem and yields a conservative fixed-point value function that is robust to finite-horizon truncation. We analyze the theoretical properties of the proposed operator, including contraction guarantees, and show how it encodes task progression while mitigating truncation bias. We evaluate our method on two simulated manipulation tasks using both a Vision-Language-Action model and a diffusion policy, and a cloth folding task using human demonstrations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach more accurately reflects task progress and substantially reduces truncation bias, outperforming classical baselines such as TD(0) and Monte Carlo policy evaluation.

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and its variants dominate Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) due to their off-policy sample efficiency, while on-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) remain underexplored. We diagnose that PPO in MTRL suffers from a previously overlooked issue: critic-side gradient ill-conditioning, which may cause tail tasks to stall while easy tasks dominate the value function's updates. To address this, we propose TOPPO (Tail-Optimized PPO), a reformulation of PPO via Critic Balancing -- a set of modules that improve gradient conditioning and balance learning dynamics across tasks. Unlike prior approaches that rely on modular architectures or large models, TOPPO targets the optimization bottleneck within PPO itself. Empirically, TOPPO achieves stronger mean and tail-task performance than published SAC-family and ARS-family baselines while using substantially fewer parameters and environment steps on Meta-World+ benchmark. Notably, TOPPO matches or surpasses strong SAC baselines early in training and maintains superior performance at full budget. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of each module in TOPPO and provide insights into their interactions. Our results demonstrate that, with proper optimization, on-policy methods can rival or exceed off-policy approaches in MTRL, challenging the prevailing reliance on SAC and highlighting critic-side gradient conditioning as the central bottleneck.

System identification (SysID) is critical for modeling dynamical systems from experimental data, yet traditional approaches often fail to capture nonlinear behaviors. While deep learning offers powerful tools for modeling such dynamics, incorporating uncertainty quantification is essential to ensure reliable predictions. This paper presents a systematic framework for constructing and training interval Neural Networks (INNs) for uncertainty-aware SysID. By extending crisp neural networks into interval counterparts, we develop Interval LSTM and NODE models that propagate uncertainty through interval arithmetic without probabilistic assumptions. This design allows them to represent uncertainty and produce prediction intervals. For training, we propose two strategies: Cascade INN (C-INN), a two-stage approach converting a trained crisp NN into an INN, and Joint INN (J-INN), a one-stage framework jointly optimizing prediction accuracy and interval precision. Both strategies employ uncertainty-aware loss functions and parameterization tricks to ensure reliable learning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple SysID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches and benchmark their performance against well-established uncertainty-aware baselines: C-INN achieves superior point prediction accuracy, whereas J-INN yields more accurate and better-calibrated prediction intervals. Furthermore, to reveal how uncertainty is represented across model parameters, the concept of channel-wise elasticity is introduced, which is used to identify distinct patterns across the two training strategies. The results of this study demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively integrates deep learning with uncertainty-aware modeling.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve remarkable flexibility and generalization beyond classical control paradigms. However, most prevailing VLAs are trained under a single-frame observation paradigm, which leaves them structurally blind to temporal dynamics. Consequently, these models degrade severely in non-stationary scenarios, even when trained or finetuned on dynamic datasets. Existing approaches either require expensive retraining or suffer from latency bottlenecks and poor temporal consistency across action chunks. We propose Pace-and-Path Correction, a training-free, closed-form inference-time operator that wraps any chunked-action VLA. From a single quadratic cost, joint minimization yields a unified solution that decomposes orthogonally into two distinct channels. The pace channel compresses execution along the planned direction, while the path channel applies an orthogonal spatial offset, jointly absorbing the perceived dynamics within the chunk window. We evaluate our approach on a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark MoveBench designed to isolate motion as the sole controlled variable. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free wrappers and dynamic-adaptive methods and improves success rates by up to 28.8% and 25.9% in absolute terms over foundational VLA models in dynamic-only and static-dynamic mixed environments, respectively.

Practitioners deploying multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems must currently choose between communication topologies such as chain, star, mesh, and richer variants without any pre-inference diagnostic for which topology will amplify drift, converge to consensus, or remain robust under perturbation. Existing evaluation answers these questions only post hoc and only for the task measured. We introduce a structural diagnostic for multi-agent LLM communication graphs based on the successor representation $M = (I - γP)^{-1}$ of the row-stochastic communication operator, and we connect three of its spectral quantities, the spectral radius $ρ(M)$, the spectral gap $Δ(M)$, and the condition number $κ(M)$, to three distinct failure modes. We derive closed-form spectra for the chain, star, and mesh under row-stochastic normalization, and validate the predictions on a 12-step structured state-tracking task with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct over 100 independent trials. The condition number is a perfect rank-order predictor of empirical perturbation robustness ($r_s = 1.0$); the spectral gap partially predicts consensus dynamics ($r_s = 0.5$); and the spectral radius is perfectly \emph{inverted} with respect to cumulative error ($r_s = -1.0$). We trace this inversion to a regime in which linear spectra are blind to non-contracting bias drift, and we propose an affine-noise extension of the predictive map that recovers the empirical ordering. We read this as a first step toward representational, drift-aware structural diagnostics for multi-agent LLM systems, sitting alongside classical spectral and consensus theory.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have emerged as key intermediaries, orchestrating complex interactions between human users and a wide range of digital services and LLM infrastructures. While prior research has extensively examined the security of LLMs and agents in isolation, the systemic risk of the agent acting as a disruptive hub within the user-agent-service chain remains largely overlooked. In this work, we expose a novel threat paradigm by introducing Mobius Injection, a sophisticated attack that weaponizes autonomous agents into zombie nodes to launch what we define as gent-based and -Oriented DDoS (AbO-DDoS) attacks. By exploiting a structural vulnerability in agentic logic named Semantic Closure, an adversary can induce sustained recursive execution of agent components through a single textual injection. We demonstrate that this attack is exceptionally lightweight, stealthy against both traditional DDoS monitors and contemporary AI safety filters, and highly configurable, allowing for surgical targeting of specific environments or model providers. To evaluate the real-world impact, we conduct extensive experiments across three representative claw-style agents and three mainstream coding agents, integrated with 12 frontier proprietary or open-weight LLMs. Our results demonstrate that Mobius Injection achieves substantial attack success across diverse tasks, driving single-node call amplification up to 51.0x and multi-node p95 latency inflation up to 229.1x. The attack performance exhibits a superlinear increase with the number of poisoning nodes. To mitigate Mobius Injection, we propose a proactive defense mechanism using Agent Component Energy (ACE) Analysis, which detects malicious recursive triggers by measuring anomalous energy in the agent's component graph.

The evaluation of thermoelectric conversion efficiency remains challenging owing to the lack of internationally standardized measurement protocols. Commonly used techniques -- including the heat flow, guarded heater, and AC Harman methods -- differ fundamentally in their operating principles and sensitivity to heat losses. In this study, we benchmark three module-level efficiency measurement techniques -- the heat-flow, guarded heater, and AC Harman methods -- using commercial Bi$_2$Te$_3$-based modules with different substrates materials. The conversion efficiencies obtained using the heat flow and guarded heater methods showed good agreement within experimental uncertainty for temperature differences up to 70 K. In contrast, the AC Harman method underestimated the conversion efficiency by approximately 30 %. Through systematic measurements on modules with different substrates and detailed finite element simulations, this underestimation was attributed to boundary-condition effects and radiative heat dissipation, which significantly reduce the effective temperature difference developed across the module in the Harman configuration. These results highlight the limitations of the AC Harman method for quantitative conversion-efficiency evaluation under non-ideal thermal environments and emphasize the necessity of accounting for radiative and substrate-related heat losses. Nevertheless, with appropriate modeling and correction, strategies, the AC Harman method remains a viable tool for rapid performance screening. Our results provide a quantitative benchmark of major measurement techniques and contribute to clarify best practices for module-level thermoelectric metrology and guide method selection, fully supporting future efforts toward methodological standardization.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments, where they must act while inferring and tracking a complex environment state over many steps. This leads to two challenges: partial observability requires maintaining uncertainty over unobserved world attributes, and long interaction history causes context to grow without bound, diluting task-relevant information. A principled solution to both challenges is a belief state: a posterior distribution over environment states given past observations and actions, which compactly encodes history for decision making regardless of episode length. In LLM agents, however, the open-ended nature of text makes it unclear how to represent such a distribution. Therefore, we introduce Agent-BRACE: Agent Belief state Representation via Abstraction and Confidence Estimation, a method that decouples an LLM agent into a belief state model and a policy model, jointly optimized via reinforcement learning. The belief state model produces a structured approximation of the belief distribution: a set of atomic natural language claims about the environment, each annotated with an ordinal verbalized certainty label ranging from certain to unknown. The policy model conditions on this compact, structured approximate belief rather than the full history, learning to select actions under explicit uncertainty. Across long-horizon, partially observable embodied language environments, Agent-BRACE achieves an average absolute improvement of +14.5% (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct) and +5.3% (Qwen3-4B-Instruct), outperforming strong RL baselines while maintaining a near-constant context window independent of episode length. Further analysis shows that the learned belief becomes increasingly calibrated over the course of an episode as evidence accumulates.

Selective layer-wise updates are essential for low-cost continued pre-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet determining which layers to freeze or train remains an empirical black-box problem due to the lack of interpretable guidance. To address this issue, we propose LayerTracer, an architecture-agnostic diagnostic framework that reveals the evolution patterns of layer-wise representations and stability by locating task execution positions and quantifying layer sensitivity. Analysis results reveal that deep layers act as critical regions for task execution and maintain high stability against disruptive updates. Guided by this finding, we conduct three controlled continued pre-training trials to compare diverse freeze-train strategies, demonstrating that training shallow layers while freezing deep layers consistently outperforms full-parameter fine-tuning and the opposite allocation on both C-Eval and CMMLU benchmarks. We further present a hybrid model case study, which validates that placing high-quality pre-trained modules in deep layers effectively preserves inherent knowledge of the model. This work delivers a low-cost and interpretable solution for resource-constrained teams, offering actionable guidance for layer-wise parameter allocation in continued pre-training and hybrid model construction.

Tabular data forms the backbone of high-stakes decision systems in finance, healthcare, and beyond. Yet industrial tabular datasets are inherently difficult: high-dimensional, riddled with missing entries, and rarely labeled at scale. While foundation models have revolutionized vision and language, tabular learning still leans on handcrafted features and lacks a general self-supervised framework. We present MaskTab, a unified pre-training framework designed specifically for industrial-scale tabular data. MaskTab encodes missing values via dedicated learnable tokens, enabling the model to distinguish structural absence from random dropout. It jointly optimizes a hybrid supervised pre-training scheme--utilizing a twin-path architecture to reconcile masked reconstruction with task-specific supervision--and an MoE-augmented loss that adaptively routes features through specialized subnetworks. On industrial-scale benchmarks, it achieves +5.04% AUC and +8.28% KS over prior art under rigorous scaling. Moreover, its representations distill effectively into lightweight models, yielding +2.55% AUC and +4.85% KS under strict latency and interpretability constraints, while improving robustness to distribution shifts. Our work demonstrates that tabular data admits a foundation-model treatment--when its structural idiosyncrasies are respected.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the standard paradigm for LLM mathematical reasoning, with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) serving as the dominant algorithm. We identify two overlooked inefficiencies inherent in GRPO. First, a fixed KL coefficient overly restricts policy exploration at moments when the model needs to diverge significantly from the reference policy. Second, uniform question sampling overlooks that moderately difficult problems produce the most informative gradient signals. We propose FG-ExPO, short for Frontier-Guided Exploration-Prioritized Policy Optimization, which integrates two lightweight components. Accuracy-Conditioned KL Scaling (AKL) adjusts the KL penalty strength through a smooth nonlinear function of batch average accuracy, loosening the constraint when the model performs poorly and strengthening it when the model achieves satisfactory results. Gaussian Curriculum Sampling (GCS) assigns sampling weights to questions following a Gaussian distribution centered at a moderate accuracy level around 0.5, focusing model training on its learning frontier. We conduct evaluations on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B and Qwen3-8B-Base across six mainstream mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that FG-ExPO consistently outperforms vanilla GRPO. It delivers an absolute improvement of 13.34 on the AIME 2025 pass@32 metric, rising from 63.33 percent to 76.67 percent, and obtains an average pass@32 gain of 2.66 on the 8B model. The substantially larger performance gains observed on pass@32 compared to pass@1 verify that FG-ExPO enlarges the model's effective exploration space under a fixed inference budget.

We address the problem of fine-tuning pre-trained generative policies with reinforcement learning (RL) while preserving the multimodality of their action distributions. Existing methods for RL fine-tuning of generative policies (e.g., diffusion policies) improve task performance but often collapse diverse behaviors into a single reward-maximizing mode. To mitigate this issue, we propose an unsupervised mode discovery framework that uncovers latent behavioral modes within generative policies. The discovered modes enable the use of mutual information as an intrinsic reward, regularizing RL fine-tuning to enhance task success while maintaining behavioral diversity. Experiments on robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms conventional fine-tuning approaches, achieving higher success rates and preserving richer multimodal action distributions.

Stochastic Human Trajectory Prediction (HTP) using generative modeling has emerged as a significant area of research. Although state-of-the-art models excel in optimizing the accuracy of individual agents, they often struggle to generate predictions that are collectively compliant, leading to output trajectories marred by social collisions and environmental violations, thus rendering them impractical for real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we present JACoP: Joint Alignment for Compliant Multi-Agent Prediction, an innovative multi-stage framework that ensures scene-level plausibility. JACoP incorporates an Anchor-Based Agent-Centric Profiler for effective initial compliance filtering and employs a Markov Random Field (MRF) based aligner to formalize the joint selection for scene predictions. By representing inter-agent spatial and social costs as MRF energy potentials, we successfully infer and sample from the joint trajectory distribution, achieving prediction with optimal scene compliance. Comprehensive experiments show that JACoP not only achieves competitive accuracy, but also sets a new standard in reducing both environmental violations and social collisions, thereby confirming its ability to produce collectively feasible and practically applicable trajectory predictions.

We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who must make decisions but is dependent on the Sender's information. We find that the Sender learns an optimal communication strategy that the Receiver reliably acts on. Importantly, this strategy is highly sensitive to the degree of conflict in the agents' rewards and the amount of environmental information the Receiver can already observe. We introduce a mechanism allowing the agents to form linear contracts, where a price is established for the information. We demonstrate that the Sender learns to use these payment structures to improve its rewards, though this comes at a cost of "fairness" between agents as the Sender is able to extract much of the Receiver's surplus. This raises questions about fairness, contract design, and learning in the context of multi-agent systems.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents frequently generate seemingly coherent plans that fail upon execution due to infeasible actions, constraint violations, and compounding errors over extended horizons. PIVOT (Plan-Inspect-eVOlve Trajectories) addresses this plan-execution misalignment through a self-supervised framework that treats trajectories as optimizable objects iteratively refined via environment interaction. The framework comprises four stages: PLAN generates candidate trajectories; INSPECT executes them and computes structured losses with textual gradients encoding plan-execution discrepancies; EVOLVE applies these signals to produce improved trajectories; and VERIFY performs a final global check against task constraints. A monotonic acceptance process ensures a non-decreasing solution quality. Empirical evaluations on DeepPlanning and GAIA demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: with human-in-the-loop (HITL) feedback, PIVOT establishes a strong upper bound up to 94% relative improvement in constraint satisfaction, while its fully autonomous variant retains substantial gains, showing that the core trajectory-refinement mechanism remains effective without external supervision. At the same time, PIVOT remains computationally efficient, requiring up to 3x to 5x fewer tokens than competing refinement methods. These findings establish that (self- or human-supervised) feedback-based trajectory optimization is a principled methodology for mitigating plan-execution gaps in autonomous agent systems.

We present a framework for distributed Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) by formulating the problem as a second-order continuous-time dynamical system evolving on Lie groups. By modeling pose variables as massive particles subject to damping, the equilibrium points of the resulting Riemannian dynamics coincide with first-order critical points of the original PGO problem. Using the governing damped Euler--Poincaré equations and a semi-implicit geometric integrator, we design an optimization algorithm that generalizes existing algorithms such as Riemannian gradient descent and Gauss--Newton. In multi-robot settings, we present a fully distributed and parallel method based on block-diagonal mass and damping matrices, where each robot solves an ordinary differential equation for its own poses with minimal communication overhead. Moreover, modeling both state and velocity enables principled neighbor prediction that significantly improves convergence under delayed communication. Theoretically, we present an analysis and establish sufficient condition that ensures energy dissipation under the employed geometric discretization scheme. Experiments on benchmark PGO datasets demonstrate that the proposed solver achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art distributed baselines in both synchronous and asynchronous regimes.

Local interaction laws governing multi-agent systems can be difficult to recover from trajectory data, even when the dynamics are observed faithfully. In systems governed by a nonlinear sheaf Laplacian -- a generalization of the graph Laplacian accommodating heterogeneous state spaces and asymmetric communication channels -- the coordination law is encoded by edge potential functions whose gradients produce the inter-agent forces. Because trajectory observations record node-state evolution, they expose only the aggregate effect of the edge forces at each node: distinct interaction laws that agree at the node level are indistinguishable from trajectory data alone. We show that the fundamental obstruction to recovery is topological, measured by sheaf cohomology, and that unique recovery from an unconstrained function class is possible if and only if this cohomology vanishes. When the obstruction is nontrivial, we show that recovery within a finite-dimensional parameterized class is possible precisely when a data-dependent information matrix is positive definite. Experiments validate the theory and illustrate that accurate trajectory reproduction need not certify recovery of the underlying interaction law.

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key challenge, however, is learning an accurate critic in large state--action spaces with limited dataset coverage. To mitigate harmful updates from value overestimation, prior methods impose pessimism by down-weighting out-of-distribution (OOD) actions relative to dataset actions. While effective, this essentially acts as a behavior cloning anchor and can hinder downstream online policy improvement when dataset actions are suboptimal. We propose RankQ, an offline-to-online Q-learning objective that augments temporal-difference learning with a self-supervised multi-term ranking loss to enforce structured action ordering. By learning relative action preferences rather than uniformly penalizing unseen actions, RankQ shapes the Q-function such that action gradients are directed toward higher-quality behaviors. Across sparse reward D4RL benchmarks, RankQ achieves performance competitive with or superior to seven prior methods. In vision-based robot learning, RankQ enables effective offline-to-online fine-tuning of a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) model in a low-data regime, achieving on average a 42.7% higher simulation success rate than the next best method. In a high-data setting, RankQ improves simulation performance by 13.7% over the next best method and achieves strong sim-to-real transfer, increasing real-world cube stacking success from 43.1% to 84.7% relative to the VLA's initial performance.

We introduce Forecast-aware Gaussian Splatting (Forecast-GS), a predictive 3D representation framework for language-conditioned robotic manipulation. While recent manipulation systems have made progress by grounding language instructions into robot affordances, value maps, or relational keypoint constraints, they usually reason over the current scene and do not explicitly model the task-completed state. This limitation is critical when success depends on satisfying spatial and semantic goals under partial observations, where the robot must evaluate whether a candidate action leads to a feasible task-consistent outcome. We validate Forecast-GS on real-world pick-and-place manipulation tasks, including Cutter-to-Box, Apple-to-Bowl, and Sponge-to-Tray. For each task, we conduct 25 real-world trials under varied initial object configurations using the same robot platform and sensing setup. Forecast-GS with automatic candidate selection achieves success rates of 21/25, 23/25, and 16/25 on the three tasks, respectively, outperforming the ReKep baseline, which achieves 15/25, 19/25, and 10/25. A diagnostic human-assisted setting further improves success rates to 23/25, 24/25, and 19/25, suggesting that candidate generation is effective while automatic ranking remains imperfect. These results suggest that explicitly forecasting task-completed 3D states enables more reliable action evaluation, while the gap between automatic and human-assisted selection indicates that robust final-state ranking remains an important challenge for fully autonomous manipulation. Overall, Forecast-GS provides an interpretable bridge between language understanding, 3D perception, and robotic manipulation planning.

Generative agents have proven to be powerful assistants in a wide variety of contexts. Given this success, users are now deploying agents with minimal restrictions in open ended, multi-agent environments. Current methods for monitoring the dynamics of open-ended multi-agent systems are limited to qualitative inspection. In this paper, we extend the process-theoretic notion of adaptive control charts to multi-agent systems to enable automated monitoring. Using simulation, we demonstrate that adaptive control charts are necessary for monitoring multi-agent systems that can learn from their environment. We further demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, that adaptive control charts are susceptible to adversarial agents that defect sufficiently slowly. These results illustrate a fundamental tradeoff in multi-agent system control: either agents in a system cannot learn or the system is susceptible to adversaries.

Scientific discovery can be modeled as a sequence of probabilistic decisions that map physical problems to numerical solutions. Recent agentic AI systems automate individual scientific tasks by orchestrating LLM-driven planners, solvers, and evaluators. Each method is a combination of methodological actions, with many viable combinations for any given problem and structural dependencies between choices. However, existing frameworks treat each problem in isolation, with no shared substrate to accumulate methodological experience across domains. Here we show that GRAFT-ATHENA, a self-improving agentic framework, learns from past problems and autonomously expands its own action space across diverse domains. GRAFT (Graph Reduction to Adaptive Factored Trees) projects combinatorial decision spaces into factored probabilistic trees in which each method is a single path, taking the parameter footprint from exponential to linear. In the lineage of classical Bayesian networks, the factorization is an $I$-map of the policy, and the resulting paths embed as unique fingerprints in a metric space whose closeness lets each new problem learn from similar past ones. On canonical physics-informed machine learning (PIML) benchmarks, GRAFT-ATHENA improves over human and prior agentic baselines, and on production solvers, it tackles complex engineering problems such as reconstructing Mach-10 flow over the Apollo Command Module from a 1968 report and recovering shear-thinning blood-cell rheology. Notably, the system grows its own knowledge substrate, autonomously proposing regularization constraints for ill-posed inverse problems and discovering new numerical methods such as a spectral PINN with exponential convergence. These results provide a foundation for autonomous laboratories that grow more capable with every problem they solve.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and imitation-learning policies trained via community toolchains on low-cost hardware frequently fail when deployed outside the training environment. Existing evaluations, including the original ACT and SmolVLA benchmarks, demonstrate high success rates under controlled, fixed backgrounds, yet community practitioners report near-zero transfer to new environments. We present SEVO (Semantic-Enhanced Virtual Observation), a data-centric approach that improves cross-environment manipulation robustness without modifying the policy architecture. SEVO transforms the raw RGB camera stream through three mechanisms: (1) body-fixed cameras whose combined fields of view cover the full manipulation workspace, (2) active red-spectrum illumination that physically normalizes object appearance, and (3) real-time YOLO segmentation overlay that provides a background-invariant semantic cue. Critically, we show that a diversified data collection protocol (systematically varying lighting, backgrounds, and distractors during teleoperation) is the single most important factor for generalization. We target transparent water bottles, objects that visually blend with their surroundings, and select a simple pick-and-place task to enable hundreds of controlled real-robot trials across two mobile platforms. The full pipeline achieves 95% grasp success with ACT and 83% with SmolVLA in the training environment, transferring to novel environments at 85% and 75%. Without SEVO, the same policies achieve only 75%/70% in training and collapse to 30-35% in novel environments. Our results demonstrate that principled observation design and environmental diversity during data collection, not model scaling, enable low-cost robots to operate reliably in everyday household environments.

Neural warm starts can sharply reduce the number of Newton-Raphson iterations required to solve the AC power flow problem, but existing supervised approaches generalize poorly on heavily loaded instances near voltage collapse. We prove a lower bound on the Newton-Raphson iteration count that depends on the direction of the warm start error rather than on its magnitude, and show as a corollary that the bound becomes vacuous as the smallest singular value of the power-flow Jacobian shrinks, identifying the failure mode of supervised regression near the saddle-node bifurcation. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce Newton's Lantern, a finetuning pipeline that combines group relative policy optimization with a learned reward model trained on perturbations of the base model's predictions, using the iteration count itself as the supervisory signal. Across IEEE 118-bus, GOC 500-bus, and GOC 2000-bus benchmarks, Newton's Lantern is the only method that converges on every test snapshot while attaining the smallest mean iteration count.

Today's inference-time workloads increasingly depend on timely access to a model's internal states. We present DMI-Lib, a high-speed deep model inspector that treats internal observability as a first-class systems primitive, decoupling it from the inference hot path via an asynchronous observability substrate built from Ring^2, a GPU-CPU memory abstraction for capturing and staging tensors, and a policy-controlled host backend that exports them. DMI-Lib enables the placement of observation points across a rich space of internal signals and diverse inference backends while preserving serving optimizations and adhering to tight GPU memory budgets. Our experiments demonstrate that DMI-Lib incurs only 0.4%--6.8% overhead in offline batch inference and an average of 6% in moderate online serving, reducing latency overhead by 2x-15x compared to existing baselines with similar observability features. DMI-Lib is open-sourced at https://github.com/ProjectDMX/DMI.

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot control by modeling physical dynamics. Current WAMs generally follow two paradigms: the "Imagine-then-Execute" approach, which uses video prediction to infer actions via inverse dynamics, and the "Joint Modeling" approach, which jointly models actions and video representations. Based on systematic experiments, we observe a fundamental trade-off between these paradigms: the former explicitly leverages world models for generalizable transit but lacks interaction precision, whereas the latter enables fine-grained, temporally coherent action generation but is constrained by the exploration space of the training distribution. Motivated by these findings, we propose HarmoWAM, an end-to-end WAM that fully leverages a world model to unify predictive and reactive control, enabling both generalizable transit and precise manipulation. Specifically, the world model provides spatio-temporal physical priors that condition two complementary action experts: a predictive expert that leverages latent dynamics for iterative action generation, and a reactive expert that directly infers actions from predicted visual evolution. To enable adaptive coordination, a Process-Adaptive Gating Mechanism is proposed to automatically determine the timing and location of switching between them. This allows the world model to drive the reactive expert to expand the exploration space and the predictive expert to perform precise interactions across different stages of a task. For evaluation, we construct three training-unseen test environments across six real-world robotic tasks, covering variations in background, position, and object semantics. Notably, HarmoWAM achieves strong zero-shot generalization across these scenarios, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art VLA models and WAMs by margins of 33% and 29%, respectively.

Large-scale pretraining has made Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promising foundations for generalist robot manipulation, yet adapting them to downstream tasks remains necessary. However, the common practice of full fine-tuning treats pretraining as initialization and can shift broad priors toward narrow training-distribution patterns. We propose PriorVLA, a novel framework that preserves pretrained priors and learns to leverage them for effective adaptation. PriorVLA keeps a frozen Prior Expert as a read-only prior source and trains an Adaptation Expert for downstream specialization. Expert Queries capture scene priors from the pretrained VLM and motor priors from the Prior Expert, integrating both into the Adaptation Expert to guide adaptation. Together, PriorVLA updates only 25% of the parameters updated by full fine-tuning. Across RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO, and real-world tasks, PriorVLA achieves stronger overall performance than full fine-tuning and state-of-the-art VLA baselines, with the largest gains under out-of-distribution (OOD) and few-shot settings. PriorVLA improves over pi0.5 by 11 points on RoboTwin 2.0-Hard and achieves 99.1% average success on LIBERO. Across eight real-world tasks and two embodiments, PriorVLA reaches 81% in-distribution (ID) and 57% OOD success with standard data. With only 10 demonstrations per task, PriorVLA reaches 48% ID and 32% OOD success, surpassing pi0.5 by 24 and 22 points, respectively.

Memory is a critical component of robotic intelligence, as robots must rely on past observations and actions to accomplish long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments. However, existing robotic memory benchmarks still lack multimodal annotations for memory formation, provide limited task coverage and structural complexity, and remain restricted to simulation without real-world evaluation. We address this gap with RoboMemArena, a large-scale benchmark of 26 tasks, with average trajectory lengths exceeding 1,000 steps per task and 68.9% of subtasks being memory-dependent. The generation pipeline leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to design and compose subtasks, generates full trajectories through atomic functions, and provides memory-related annotations, including subtask instructions and native keyframe annotations, while paired real-world memory tasks support physical evaluation. We further design PrediMem, a dual-system VLA in which a high-level VLM planner manages a memory bank with recent and keyframe buffers and uses a predictive coding head to improve sensitivity to task dynamics. Extensive experiments on RoboMemArena show that PrediMem outperforms all baselines and provides insights into memory management, model architecture, and scaling laws for complex memory systems.

We consider anonymous multi-agent path finding (MAPF) where a set of robots is tasked to travel to a set of targets on a finite, connected graph. We show that MAPF can be cast as a special class of multi-marginal optimal transport (MMOT) problems with an underlying Markovian structure, under which the exponentially large MMOT collapses to a linear program (LP) polynomial in size. Focusing on the anonymous setting, we establish conditions under which the corresponding LP is feasible, totally unimodular, and consequently, yields min-cost, integral $(\{0,1\})$ transports that do not overlap in both space and time. To adapt the approach to large-scale problems, we cast the MAPF-MMOT in a probabilistic framework via Schrödinger bridges. Under standard assumptions, we show that the Schrödinger bridge formulation reduces to an entropic regularization of the corresponding MMOT that admits an iterative Sinkhorn-type solution. The Schrödinger bridge, being a probabilistic framework, provides a shadow (fractional) transport that we use as a template to solve a reduced LP and demonstrate that it results in near-optimal, integral transports at a significant reduction in complexity. Extensive experiments highlight the optimality and scalability of the proposed approaches.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous driving, enabling connected agents to share complementary perception information and negotiate with each other to benefit the final planning. Existing V2X benchmarks, however, fall short in two ways: (i) open-loop evaluations fail to capture the inherently closed-loop nature of driving, leading to evaluation gaps, and (ii) current closed-loop evaluations lack behavioral and interactive diversity to reflect real-world driving. Thus, it is still unclear the extent of benefits of multi-agent systems for closed-loop driving. In this paper, we introduce MDrive, a closed-loop cooperative driving benchmark comprising 225 scenarios grounded in both NHTSA pre-crash typologies and real-world V2X datasets. Our benchmark results demonstrate that multi-agent systems are generally better than single-agent counterparts. However, current multi-agent systems still face two important challenges: (i) perception sharing enhances perceptions, but doesn't always translate to better planning; (ii) negotiation improves planning performance but harms it in complex and dense traffic scenarios. MDrive further provides an open-source toolbox for scenario generation, Real2Sim conversion, and human-in-the-loop simulation. Together, MDrive establishes a reproducible foundation for evaluating and improving the generalization and robustness of cooperative driving systems.

This paper proposes a novel approach to address the challenge that pretrained VLA models often fail to effectively improve performance and reduce adaptation costs during standard supervised finetuning (SFT). Some advanced finetuning methods with auxiliary training objectives can improve performance and reduce the number of convergence steps. However, they typically incur significant computational overhead due to the additional losses from auxiliary objectives. To simultaneously achieve the enhanced capabilities of auxiliary training with the simplicity of standard SFT, we decouple the two objectives of auxiliary-objective SFT within the parameter space, namely, enhancing general capabilities and fitting task-specific action distributions. To deliver the goal, we only need to train the model to converge on a small-scale task set using two distinct training strategies, resulting in two finetuned models. The parameters' difference between the two models can then be interpreted as capability vectors provided by auxiliary objectives. These vectors are then merged with pretrained parameters to form a capability-enhanced meta model. Moreover, when standard SFT is augmented with a lightweight orthogonal regularization loss, the merged model attains performance comparable to auxiliary finetuned baselines with reduced computational overhead. Internal and external experiments demonstrate that our capability vectors (1) are effective and versatile across diverse models, (2) can generalize to novel environments and embodiments out of the box.

Today's driving world models can generate remarkably realistic dash-cam videos, yet no single model excels universally. Some generate photorealistic textures but violate basic physics; others maintain geometric consistency but fail when subjected to closed-loop planning. This disconnect exposes a critical gap: the field evaluates how real generated worlds appear, but rarely whether they behave realistically. We introduce WorldLens, a unified benchmark that measures world-model fidelity across the full spectrum, from pixel quality and 4D geometry to closed-loop driving and human perceptual alignment, through five complementary aspects and 24 standardized dimensions. Our evaluation of six representative models reveals that no existing approach dominates across all axes: texture-rich models violate geometry, geometry-aware models lack behavioral fidelity, and even the strongest performers achieve only 2-3 out of 10 on human realism ratings. To bridge algorithmic metrics with human perception, we further contribute WorldLens-26K, a 26,808-entry human-annotated preference dataset pairing numerical scores with textual rationales, and WorldLens-Agent, a vision-language evaluator distilled from these judgments that enables scalable, explainable auto-assessment. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for assessing generated worlds not merely by visual appeal, but by physical and behavioral fidelity.

Diffusion-based vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as strong priors for robotic manipulation, yet adapting them to real-world distributions remains challenging. In particular, on-robot reinforcement learning (RL) is expensive and time-consuming, so effective adaptation depends on efficient policy improvement within a limited budget of real-world interactions. Noise-space RL lowers the cost by keeping the pretrained VLA fixed as a denoising generator while updating only a lightweight actor that predicts the noise. However, its performance is still limited due to inefficient autonomous exploration. Human corrective interventions can reduce this exploration burden, but they are naturally provided in action space, whereas noise-space finetuning requires supervision over noise variables. To address these challenges, we propose UniSteer, a Unified Noise Steering framework that combines human corrective guidance with noise-space RL through approximate action-to-noise inversion. Given a human corrective action, UniSteer inverts the frozen flow-matching decoder to recover a noise target, which provides supervised guidance for the same noise actor that is simultaneously optimized via reinforcement learning. Real-world experiments on diverse manipulation tasks show that UniSteer adapts more efficiently than strong noise-space RL and action-space human-in-the-loop baselines, improving the success rate from 20% to 90% in 66 minutes on average across four real-world adaptation tasks.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by the scarcity of action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos provide abundant evidence of how the physical world changes. Latent action models offer a promising way to extract such priors from videos, but reconstruction-trained latent codes are not necessarily suitable for policy generation: they may predict future observations while lacking the structure needed to be reused or generated coherently with robot actions. We introduce ALAM (Algebraic Latent Action Model), an Algebraically Consistent Latent Action Model that turns temporal relations in action-free video into structural supervision. Given frame triplets, ALAM learns latent transitions that are grounded by reconstruction while being regularized by composition and reversal consistency, encouraging a locally additive transition space. For downstream VLA learning, we freeze the pretrained encoder and use its latent transition sequences as auxiliary generative targets, co-generated with robot actions under a joint flow-matching objective. This couples structured latent transitions with flow-based policy generation, allowing the policy to exploit ALAM's locally consistent transition geometry without requiring latent-to-action decoding. Representation probes show that ALAM reduces additivity and reversibility errors by 25-85 times over unstructured latent-action baselines and improves long-horizon cumulative reconstruction. When transferred to VLA policies, ALAM raises the average success rate from 47.9% to 85.0% on MetaWorld MT50 and from 94.1% to 98.1% on LIBERO, with consistent gains on real-world manipulation tasks. Ablations further confirm that the strongest improvements arise from the synergy between algebraically structured latent transitions and joint flow matching.

We report on a gate-based variational quantum classifier implemented with single photons and probabilistic gates, to emulate the standard quantum circuit model framework. We evaluate the expressive power of two deployable quantum neural networks (QNNs) by computing their effective dimension, a capacity measure grounded in a proven generalization-error bound, and compare them with classical artificial neural networks (ANNs) of equivalent trainable-parameter count. Supervised binary classification tasks are used to benchmark performance across photonic and superconducting QNNs, both of which exhibit superior converged (lower) cross-entropy loss and (higher) prediction accuracy relative to matched-parameter ANNs. For a nonlinearly separable task, our photonic QNN with a single pair of trainable parameters successfully converged (loss 0.04 and accuracy 100%), whereas the equivalent ANN failed to learn the decision boundary, saturating at random-guessing performance. We simulate photonic quantum circuits, training them on the XOR problem and a two-class Iris subset using gradient-free optimization, and assess their robustness to sampling errors under realistic noise processes including photon loss and phase-shifter imperfections. Circuits with comparatively high effective dimension were deployed remotely on a six-qubit photonic quantum processor, achieving classification accuracies of up to 100% in both online and offline learning settings. Notably, even the simplest QNN deployed, with just two trainable parameters, successfully solved tasks that classically require ANNs with at least quadruple the number of parameters, suggesting an emergent algorithmic advantage. Overall, these results demonstrate a clear proof-of-principle that gate-based QNNs can be realized and trained effectively on current photonic hardware, providing proof of algorithmic advantage on a gate-based photonic QNN.

Collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multiple agents enables rapid large-scale scene capture for virtual production and cooperative multi-robot exploration. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM algorithms can generate high-fidelity real-time mapping, most of the existing multi-agent Gaussian SLAM methods still rely on RGB-D sensors to obtain metric depth and simplify cross-agent alignment, which limits the deployment on lightweight, low-cost, or power-constrained robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose MAGS-SLAM, the first RGB-only multi-agent 3DGS SLAM framework for collaborative scene reconstruction. Each agent independently builds local monocular Gaussian submaps and transmits compact submap summaries rather than raw observations or dense maps. To facilitate robust collaboration in the presence of monocular scale ambiguity, our framework integrates compact submap communication, geometry- and appearance-aware loop verification, and occupancy-aware Gaussian fusion, enabling coherent global reconstruction without active depth sensors. We further introduce ReplicaMultiagent Plus benchmark for evaluating collaborative Gaussian SLAM. Intensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that MAGS-SLAM achieves competitive tracking accuracy and comparable or superior rendering quality to state-of-the-art RGB-D collaborative Gaussian SLAM methods while relying only RGB images.

Safety-critical planning in complex environments, particularly at urban intersections, remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving. Existing methods, whether rule-based or data-driven, frequently struggle to capture complex scene semantics, infer potential risks, and make reliable decisions in rare, high-risk situations. While vision-language models (VLMs) offer promising approaches for safe decision-making in these environments, most current approaches lack reflective and causal reasoning, thereby limiting their overall robustness. To address this, we propose a counterfactual chain-of-thought (C-CoT) framework that leverages VLMs to decompose driving decisions into five sequential stages: scene description, critical object identification, risk prediction, counterfactual risk reasoning, and final action planning. Within the counterfactual reasoning stage, we introduce a structured meta-action evaluation tree to explicitly assess the potential consequences of alternative action combinations. This self-reflective reasoning establishes causal links between action choices and safety outcomes, improving robustness in long-tail and out-of-distribution scenarios. To validate our approach, we construct the DeepAccident-CCoT dataset based on the DeepAccident benchmark and fine-tune a Qwen2.5-VL (7B) model using low-rank adaptation. Our model achieves a risk prediction recall of 81.9%, reduces the collision rate to 3.52%, and lowers L2 error to 1.98 m. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of counterfactual reasoning and the meta-action evaluation tree in enhancing safety and interpretability.

Decentralized collision avoidance remains challenging, particularly when agents do not communicate any information related to planned trajectories. Most existing approaches either rely on conservative coordination mechanisms or provide limited guarantees on recursive feasibility and convergence. This paper develops a decentralized contingency MPC framework for multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics that achieves collision-free motion under a state-only information pattern. Each agent follows the same consensual rule set, enabling safe decentralized planning without communication. Each agent solves a local optimization problem that couples a nominal trajectory with a contingency certificate ensuring a feasible backup maneuver under receding-horizon operation. A novel geometric and decentralized safe-set update mechanism prevents feasibility loss between consecutive time steps. The resulting scheme guarantees recursive feasibility, including collision avoidance, and establishes a Lyapunov-type convergence result to an admissible safe equilibrium. Simulation results demonstrate performance in both sparse and dense multi-agent environments, including cluttered bottleneck scenarios and under plug-and-play operation.

We develop a non-perturbative description of squeezed light generation in an arbitrary lossy structure consisting of multiple coupled microring resonators. This is applied to two ring photonic molecules where the interference of the fields in the coupled rings leads to a modification in the resonance spectrum near a shared resonance. Considering a dual-pump degenerate squeezing scheme under a five resonance approximation, we investigate two methods to suppress parasitic four-wave mixing contributions and compensate for group velocity dispersion within a primary resonator through hybridization effects with a second auxiliary resonator. In the former case, this comes from an effective splitting of the unwanted resonances supporting parasitic four-wave mixing interactions that add thermal noise to the desired degenerate squeezed state. For sufficiently strong coupling between the resonators, we demonstrate near complete suppression of such parasitic processes, resulting in near unit fidelities with the corresponding output state that would arise were the parasitic interactions neglected. In the latter case, the hybridization effectively shifts a pump resonance, realigning the desired dual-pump four-wave mixing process and leading to a significant enhancement of the signal generation and output squeezing.

Generating long-horizon music videos (MVs) is frequently constrained by prohibitive computational costs and difficulty maintaining cross-shot consistency. We propose AllocMV, a hierarchical framework formulating music video synthesis as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP). AllocMV represents the video's persistent state as a compact, structured object comprising character entities, scene priors, and sharing graphs, produced by a global planner prior to realization. By estimating segment saliency from multimodal cues, a group-level MCKP solver based on dynamic programming optimally allocates resources across High-Gen, Mid-Gen, and Reuse branches. For repetitive musical motifs, we implement a divergence-based forking strategy that reuses visual prefixes to reduce costs while ensuring motif-level continuity. Evaluated via the Cost-Quality Ratio (CQR), AllocMV achieves an optimal trade-off between perceived quality and resource expenditure under strict budgetary and rhythmic constraints.

Artificial intelligence safety research focuses on aligning individual language models with human values, yet deployed AI systems increasingly operate as interacting populations where social influence may override individual alignment. Here we show that populations of individually aligned AI agents can be driven into stable misaligned states through conformity dynamics. Simulating opinion dynamics across nine large language models and one hundred opinion pairs, we find that each agent's behavior is governed by two competing forces: a tendency to follow the majority and an intrinsic bias toward specific positions. Using tools from statistical physics, we derive a quantitative theory that predicts when populations become trapped in long-lived misaligned configurations, and identifies predictable tipping points where small numbers of adversarial agents can irreversibly shift population-level alignment even after manipulation ceases. These results demonstrate that individual-level alignment provides no guarantee of collective safety, calling for evaluation frameworks that account for emergent behavior in AI populations.

Object-centric view planning is a core component of active geometric 3D reconstruction in robotics, yet existing evaluations often conflate object complexity, planning difficulty, budget assumptions, and physical reachability constraints. As a result, conclusions drawn from idealized view-planning evaluations may not reliably predict performance under realistic reconstruction settings. We introduce ObjView-Bench, an evaluation framework for rethinking difficulty and deployment in object-centric view planning. First, we disentangle three quantities underlying view-planning evaluation: omnidirectional self-occlusion as an object-side attribute, observation saturation difficulty, and protocol-dependent planning difficulty defined through a set-cover formulation. This separation supports controlled dataset construction, analysis of slow-saturation objects, and a case study showing that planning difficulty-aware sampling can improve learned view planners. Second, we design deployment-oriented evaluation protocols that reveal how budget regimes and reachable-view constraints alter method behavior. Across classical, learned, and hybrid planners, ObjView-Bench shows that difficulty, budget, and reachability constraints substantially change method rankings and failure modes.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) assume that collaborating inherently improves Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. We challenge this by demonstrating that simulated social pressure triggers an algorithmic ``Bystander Effect,'' inducing severe cognitive loafing. By evaluating 22,500 deterministic trajectories across 3 dataset contexts (GAIA, SWE-bench, Multi-Challenge) with 3 state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, we semantically audit internal reasoning traces against external outputs. We formalize the \textit{Interaction Depth Limit} ($D_L$), the exact plurality threshold where an agent's logical sovereignty collapses into social compliance. Crucially, we uncover the \textit{Sovereignty Gap}: models frequently compute the correct derivation internally but suffer ``Alignment Hallucinations'' -- actively subjugating empirical evidence to sycophantically appease a simulated swarm. We prove that multi-agent social load is strictly non-commutative; the "brand" identity of the ``Lead Anchor'' auditor disproportionately dictates the swarm's integrity. These findings expose architectural vulnerabilities, proving that unstructured multi-agent topologies can degrade independent reasoning.

Discrete-time joint acceleration constraints are widely used to enforce position and velocity limits. However, under voltage-constrained electric actuators, kinematically admissible accelerations may be physically unrealizable, exposing a missing execution-level abstraction. We propose Voltage-Realizable Acceleration (VRA), a joint-level acceleration interface that grounds kinematic acceleration in voltage-constrained actuator physics by restricting commanded accelerations to voltage-realizable constraints. Hardware experiments on electric actuators and a wheel-legged quadruped show that VRA removes unrealizable accelerations, restores consistent near-constraint execution, and reduces constraint-induced oscillations.

Embodied artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from research into real-world systems such as autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, and industrial machines. As these systems become more capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting in dynamic environments, they also introduce new challenges in safety, trust, governance, and operational reliability. This white paper summarizes key insights from the SAE World Congress 2026 panel session \textit{Embodied AI in Action}, which brought together experts from automotive, robotics, artificial intelligence, and safety engineering. The discussion highlighted the need to treat embodied AI as a systems challenge requiring engineering rigor, lifecycle governance, human-centered design, and evolving standards. The paper provides practical perspectives for executives, policymakers, and technical leaders seeking to adopt embodied AI responsibly. The panel reached broad agreement that long-term success will depend not only on advances in AI capability, but equally on safe and trustworthy deployment.

End-to-end autonomous driving systems are increasingly integrating Vision-Language Model (VLM) architectures, incorporating text reasoning or visual reasoning to enhance the robustness and accuracy of driving decisions. However, the reasoning mechanisms employed in most methods are direct adaptations from general domains, lacking in-depth exploration tailored to autonomous driving scenarios, particularly within visual reasoning modules. In this paper, we propose a driving world model that performs parallel prediction of latent semantic features for consecutive future frames in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, thereby enabling long-horizon modeling of future world states. We also introduce an efficient and adaptive text reasoning mechanism that utilizes additional social knowledge and reasoning capabilities to further improve driving performance in challenging long-tail scenarios. We present a novel, efficient, and effective approach that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the closed-loop Bench2drive benchmark. Codes are available at: https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/DeepSight.

In this paper, the effects of graph gluing operations in networks of multi-agent systems and their impact on system performance are investigated. In many practical applications, multiple multi-agent subsystems must be interconnected through communication links to accomplish complex tasks, resulting in a larger communication network. Such interconnections modify the underlying graph topology and consequently affect the consensus behavior and convergence rate of the network. In particular, this paper examines both bridge gluing and interface gluing and analyzes how the number and structure of communication links between subsystems influence the Fiedler eigenvalue of the resulting graph. Since the Fiedler eigenvalue is directly related to the convergence rate of consensus dynamics, the proposed analysis establishes a clear relationship between interconnection strategies, algebraic connectivity, and system performance. The results provide theoretical insight into how different gluing mechanisms alter the spectral properties of the graph Laplacian and, in turn, the convergence characteristics of the networked multi-agent system. Simulation studies are presented to illustrate the theoretical findings and to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Existing imitation learning methods enable robots to interact autonomously with the physical environment. However, contact-rich manipulation tasks remain a significant challenge due to complex contact dynamics that demand high-precision force feedback and control. Although recent efforts have attempted to integrate force/torque sensing into policies, how to build a simple yet effective framework that achieves robust generalization under multimodal observations remains an open question. In this paper, we propose ForceFlow, a force-aware reactive framework built upon flow matching. For contact-stage policy design, we investigate force signal fusion mechanisms and adopt an asymmetric multimodal fusion architecture that treats force as a global regulatory signal, combined with a joint prediction paradigm that enhances the policy's understanding of instantaneous force and historical information, thereby achieving deep coupling between force and motion. For task-level hierarchical decomposition, we divide manipulation into a vision-dominant approach stage (VLM-based pointing for target localization) and a touch-dominant interaction stage (force-driven contact execution), with a Vision-to-Force (V2F) handover mechanism that explicitly decouples spatial generalization from contact regulation. Experimental results across six real-world contact-rich tasks demonstrate that ForceFlow achieves a 37% success rate improvement over the strong baseline ForceVLA while maintaining significantly lower cost. Moreover, ForceFlow exhibits accurate force signal prediction and demonstrates superior performance in contact force self-regulation and zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization.

We investigate the emergent collective dynamics of LLM-based multi-agent systems on a 2D square lattice and present a model-agnostic statistical-physics method to disentangle social conformity from intrinsic bias, compute critical exponents, and probe the collective behavior and possible phase transitions of multi-agent systems. In our framework, each node of an $L\!\times\!L$ lattice hosts an identical LLM agent holding a binary state ($+1$/$-1$, mapped to yes/no) and updating it by querying the model conditioned on the four nearest-neighbor states. The sampler temperature $T$ serves as the sole control parameter. Across three open-weight models (llama3.1:8b, phi4-mini:3.8b, mistral:7b), we measure magnetization and susceptibility under a global-flip protocol designed to probe $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. All models display temperature-driven order-disorder crossovers and susceptibility peaks; finite-size scaling on even-$L$ lattices yields effective exponents $γ/ν$ whose values are model-dependent, close to but incompatible with the 2D Ising universality class ($γ/ν=7/4$). Our method enables the extraction of effective $β$-weighted couplings $\tilde{J}(T)$ and fields $\tilde{h}(T)$, which serve as a measure of social conformity and intrinsic bias. In the models we analyzed, we found that collective alignment is dominated by an intrinsic bias ($\tilde{h}\gg\tilde{J}$) rather than by cooperative neighbor coupling, producing field-driven crossovers instead of genuine phase transitions. These effective parameters vary qualitatively across models, providing compact collective-behavior fingerprints for LLM agents and a quantitative diagnostic for the reliability of multi-agent consensus and collective alignment.

Precise spatial reasoning is fundamental to robotic manipulation, yet the visual backbones of current vision-language-action (VLA) models are predominantly pretrained on 2D image data without explicit 3D geometric supervision, resulting in representations that lack accurate spatial awareness. Existing implicit spatial grounding methods partially address this by aligning VLA features with those of 3D-aware foundation models, but they rely on empirical layer search and perform alignment on LLM-level visual tokens where spatial structure has already been entangled with linguistic semantics, limiting both generalizability and geometric interpretability. We propose VEGA (Visual Encoder Grounding Alignment), a simple yet effective framework that directly aligns the output of the VLA's visual encoder with spatially-aware features from DINOv2-FiT3D, a DINOv2 model fine-tuned with multi-view consistent 3D Gaussian Splatting supervision. By performing alignment at the visual encoder output level, VEGA grounds spatial awareness before any linguistic entanglement occurs, offering a more interpretable and principled alignment target. The alignment is implemented via a lightweight projector trained with a cosine similarity loss alongside the standard action prediction objective, and is discarded at inference time, introducing no additional computational overhead. Extensive experiments on simulation benchmark and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that VEGA consistently outperforms existing implicit spatial grounding baselines, establishing a new state-of-the-art among implicit spatial grounding methods for VLA models.

Scene graph alignment establishes object correspondences between two 3D scene graphs constructed from partially overlapping observations. This enables efficient scene understanding and object-level relocalization when a robot revisits a place, as well as global map fusion across multiple agents. Such capabilities are essential for robots that require long-term memory for long-horizon tasks involving interactions with the environment. Existing approaches mainly focus on subscan-to-subscan (S2S) alignment and depend heavily on geometric point-cloud features, leaving frame-to-scan (F2S) alignment and open-set vision-language features underexplored. In addition, existing datasets for scene graph alignment remain small-scale with limited object diversity, constraining systematic training and evaluation. We present a unified and efficient scene graph alignment framework that predicts object correspondences by fusing vision-language, textual, and geometric features with spatial context. The framework comprises modules such as a distance-gated spatial attention encoder, a minimum-cost-flow-based allocator, and a global scene embedding generator to achieve accurate alignment even under large coordinate discrepancies. We further introduce ScanNet-SG, a large-scale dataset generated via an automated annotation pipeline with over 700k samples, covering 509 object categories from ScanNet labels and over 3k categories from GPT-4o-based tagging. Experiments show that our method achieves the best overall performance on both F2S and S2S tasks, substantially outperforming existing scene graph alignment methods. Our code and dataset are released at: https://autonomousrobots.nl/paper_websites/opensga.

Event-triggered control provides a mechanism for avoiding excessive use of constrained communication bandwidth in networked multi-agent systems. However, most existing methods rely on accurate system models, which may be unavailable in practice. In this work, we propose a model-free, priority-driven reinforcement learning algorithm that learns communication priorities and control policies jointly from data in decentralized multi-agent systems. By learning communication priorities, we circumvent the hybrid action space typical in event-triggered control with binary communication decisions. We evaluate our algorithm on benchmark tasks and demonstrate that it outperforms the baseline method.

Modern LLM based agents are no longer passive text generators. They read repositories, call tools, browse the web, execute code, maintain memory, communicate with other agents, and act through long horizon workflows. This shift moves the unit of safety. A system may produce a compliant final answer while leaking private information through an internal message, delegating authority beyond its original scope, calling an external tool with sensitive context, or losing the evidence needed to reconstruct why an action was allowed. We argue that many emerging failures in LLM-based multi-agent systems share a common structure: safety critical constraints do not remain operative throughout the trajectory. We call this phenomenon constraint drift: the loss, distortion, weakening, or relaxation of constraints as they pass through memory, delegation, communication, tool use, audit, and optimization. The position taken here is that safe multi-agent behavior must be maintained, not merely asserted. Prompts, guardrails, tool schemas, access control, and final output checks are necessary, but they are insufficient unless constraints remain fresh, inherited, enforceable, and auditable across execution. We propose Constraint State Governance as a research paradigm for LLM-based multi-agent systems. In this paradigm, safety-critical constraints are maintained as explicit execution state, while constraint-native reinforcement learning improves utility only within maintained safety boundaries. The goal is not to freeze agentic systems under rigid rules, but to make safety operational across the trajectories through which modern agents actually act.

Dynamics of exciton-polaritonic condensate under incoherent pumping is studied using the non-Markovian stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation with the pseudo-differential dispersion term. This term corresponds to the lower energy branch of polaritons. It is shown that an increasing of the pumping spot area leads to the appearance of various spatial structures whose properties depend on the duration of the dynamical memory. In the regime of short memory time, condensate can form an extended state that spans outside the pumping area. We conclude that onset of such extended states is related to the specific form of the dispersion term causing the ``traffic jam'' effect. The case of long memory time corresponds to enhanced condensate formation, when increasing of the pumping area leads to appearance of angular condensate structures which partially suppress emission of matter waves from the pumping area.

Real-time Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) simulation must find, per emitted ray, the closest intersecting triangle even in dynamic scenes containing large numbers of moving and deformable objects. Dominant acceleration-structure approaches require rebuilding each frame for dynamic geometry -- a cost that compounds directly with scene dynamics and cannot be amortized regardless of how little actually changed. This paper presents the Gajmer Ray-Casting Algorithm (GRCA), which inverts the question: instead of asking what does each ray hit? it asks which rays can each triangle possibly hit? GRCA geometrically models spinning LiDAR emitters as rotation-traced cones or planes and uses each triangle's emitter-centric apparent area to cull, per triangle, which channels and the rays within those channels can possibly reach it -- without any acceleration structure. GRCA is compute-based and vendor-agnostic by design, targeting highly dynamic, high-resolution simultaneous multi-sensor simulation. At its core, GRCA is a general-purpose ray-casting algorithm: the emitter-centric inversion applies to any setting where rays originate from a known position, not only LiDAR. Benchmarks evaluate 2-8 simultaneous 128x4096-ray LiDARs (360deg/180deg) over complex dynamic scenes -- with just two sensors casting ~1M rays per frame. With range culling inactive, GRCA reaches up to 7.97x over hardware-accelerated OptiX (GPU) and 14.55x over Embree (CPU). Two independent extensions further boost performance even in the most complex scene (~22M triangles, ~9M of which are dynamic, 8 LiDARs): range culling at realistic deployment ranges (10-100m) reaches up to 7.02x GPU and 9.33x CPU; a hybrid pipeline -- GRCA for dynamic geometry, OptiX/Embree for static -- reaches up to 10.5x GPU and 19.2x CPU.

End to end (E2E) autonomous driving trajectory prediction is often trained with camera frames sampled at the highest available temporal frequency, assuming that denser sampling improves performance. We question this assumption by treating temporal sampling frequency as an explicit training set design variable. Starting from high frequency E2E driving datasets, we construct frequency sweep training sets by temporally subsampling camera frames along each trajectory. For each model dataset pair, we train and evaluate the same model under a fixed protocol, so the frequency response reflects how prediction performance changes with sampling frequency. We analyze this response from a capacity aware perspective. Sparse sampling may miss driving relevant cues, while dense sampling may add redundant visual content and off manifold noise. For finite capacity models, this can create a driving irrelevant capacity burden. We evaluate three smaller E2E models and a larger VLA style AutoVLA model on Waymo, nuScenes, and PAVE. Results show model and dataset dependent frequency responses. Smaller E2E models often show non monotonic or near plateau trends and achieve their best 3 second ADE at lower or intermediate frequencies. In contrast, AutoVLA achieves its best 3 second ADE and FDE at the highest evaluated frequency on all three datasets. Iteration matched controls suggest that the advantage of lower or intermediate frequencies for smaller models is not explained only by unequal training update counts. These findings show that temporal sampling frequency should be reported and tuned, rather than fixed to the highest available value.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning often assumes a fixed execution team, yet many decentralized systems must operate with varying numbers of active agents during deployment. We study this setting under episodic roster variation: each episode is executed by a set of homogeneous agents, with the team size varying across episodes. Agents act only from local histories, without execution-time communication, privileged coordinators, or online retraining. Therefore, effective cooperation requires each agent to recover relevant context about the active team and adapt its behavior accordingly. To this end, we propose PC3D (Personalized Central Coordination Context Distillation), a method for training decentralized policies to recover and use personalized coordination context from local interaction histories. During training, a set-structured centralized teacher compresses the active team into coordination tokens and personalizes them into agent-specific contexts, which are distilled into decentralized policies. At execution, each agent predicts its own context from local history and adaptively uses it to condition decision-making. Across three cooperative MARL benchmarks, PC3D achieves higher returns than the evaluated baselines with both seen and unseen roster sizes, and ablations attribute these gains to both context distillation and adaptive context use.

Optical skyrmions offer a robust vectorial information degree of freedom for free-space communication, but practical deployment requires a compact platform capable of active topological reconfiguration. Here, we propose a silicon microring-resonator optical phased array that integrates spin-selective emission and programmable phase control on a single chip. Optimized inner- and outer-grating microring emitters provide decoupled LCP and RCP radiation bases with polarization fractions of 90.27% and 91.40%, enabling active switching between Néel-type and Bloch-type skyrmions, while dynamically tuning the skyrmion number across Nsk =-1.914 to 1.918. Using these programmable topological states, a 4-symbol free-space communication link is constructed and compared with ideal LG-OAM encoding under Kolmogorov turbulence. The skyrmion-encoded link maintains a lower symbol error rate over a broader turbulence range, demonstrating that topological observables are more robust than scalar OAM modes. These results establish actively reconfigurable optical skyrmions as compact, programmable, and turbulence-tolerant information carriers for next-generation free-space optical communication.

Maritime object detection is critical for the safe navigation of unmanned surface vessels (USVs), requiring accurate recognition of obstacles from small buoys to large vessels. Real-time detection is challenging due to long distances, small object sizes, large-scale variations, edge computing limitations, and the high memory demands of high-resolution imagery. Existing solutions, such as downsampling or image splitting, often reduce accuracy or require additional processing, while memory-efficient models typically handle only limited resolutions. To overcome these limitations, we leverage Vision Mamba (ViM) backbones, which build on State Space Models (SSMs) to capture long-range dependencies while scaling linearly with sequence length. Images are tokenized into sequences for efficient high-resolution processing. For further computational efficiency, we design a tailored Feature Pyramid Network with successive downsampling and SSM layers, as well as token pruning to reduce unnecessary computation on background regions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods like RT-DETR with ResNet50 backbone, our approach achieves a better balance between performance and computational efficiency in maritime object detection.

We investigate low-cost GNSS anti-jamming using beamforming with inexpensive 2-bit phase shifters, constraining each complex array weight to one of four QPSK phase states (real/imaginary = -1 or +1). This severe quantization sharply limits the beampattern solution space, making conventional real-valued beamforming and naive weight quantization highly suboptimal. We formulate a discrete optimization that trades interference suppression against satellite-direction gain, and benchmark known combinatorial optimization methods across array sizes and interference conditions. Simulations show that performance improves with array size, with oracle and greedy search achieving up to 34 dB nulling, but oracle incurs exponential latency and greedy sampling is stochastic. To obtain deterministic low-latency performance, we propose an ML-aided method based on gradient-boosted decision trees followed by local search, which performs similar to the oracle for larger arrays at fixed latency. We further validate the approach experimentally using a fully digital emulation of the QPSK oracle beamformer and compare against a GNSS receiver without beamforming capability. Under mild jamming (J/S approximately 44 dB) both receivers maintain adequate tracking, with QPSK yielding a 4.2 dB higher average C/N0 (37.3 vs. 33.1 dB-Hz). Under moderate and strong jamming (J/S approximately 62-70 dB) the benefit is substantial. At J/S = 70 dB the unprotected receiver degrades to near tracking limits (avg C/N0 = 9.3 dB-Hz) while the QPSK oracle sustains an average C/N0 of 20.8 dB-Hz. These results confirm that 2-bit phase-shift beamforming provides considerable anti-jamming benefit over a standard GNSS receiver, motivating further research on oracle-level practical methods.

Terrain segmentation is a fundamental capability for autonomous mobile robots operating in unstructured outdoor environments. However, state-of-the-art models are incompatible with the memory and compute constraints typical of microcontrollers, limiting scalable deployment in small robotics platforms. To address this gap, we develop a complete framework for robust binary terrain segmentation on a low-cost microcontroller. At the core of our approach we design Nano-U, a highly compact binary segmentation network with a few thousand parameters. To compensate for the network's minimal capacity, we train Nano-U via Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD), combining knowledge distillation and quantization-aware training. This allows the final quantized model to achieve excellent results on the Botanic Garden dataset and to perform very well on TinyAgri, a custom agricultural field dataset with more challenging scenes. We deploy the quantized Nano-U on a commodity microcontroller by extending MicroFlow, a compiler-based inference engine for TinyML implemented in Rust. By eliminating interpreter overhead and dynamic memory allocation, the quantized model executes on an ESP32-S3 with a minimal memory footprint and low latency. This compiler-based execution demonstrates a viable and energy-efficient solution for perception on low-cost robotic platforms.

Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact point localization) and "how to manipulate" (subsequent interaction trajectory planning). Existing foundation-model-based approaches often adopt end-to-end learning that obscures the distinction between these stages, exacerbating error accumulation in long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, they typically rely on a single uniform model, which fails to capture the diverse, category-specific features required for heterogeneous objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroGenManip, a task-conditioned, two-stage framework designed to decouple initial grasp from complex interaction execution. First, Foundation-Correspondence-Guided Grasp module leverages structural priors to align the initial contact state, thereby significantly reducing the pose uncertainty of grasping. Subsequently, Multi-Foundation-Model Diffusion Policy (MFMDP) routes objects to category-specialized foundation models, integrating fine-grained geometric information with highly-variable part features via a dual-stream cross-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that HeteroGenManip achieves robust intra-category shape and pose generalization. The framework achieves an average 31% performance improvement in simulation tasks with broad type setting, alongside a 36.7% gain across four real-world tasks with different interaction types.

Robotic imitation learning typically assumes access to optimal demonstrations, yet real-world data collection often yields suboptimal, exploratory, or even failed trajectories. Discarding such data wastes valuable information about environment dynamics and failure modes, which can instead be leveraged to improve decision-making. While 3D policies reduce reliance on high-quality demonstrations through strong spatial generalization, they still require large-scale data to achieve high task success. To address this, we propose DALI-R, a Data-Asymmetric Latent Imagination and Reranking framework for 3D robotic imitation learning from mixed-quality trajectories. It learns a Latent World Model over 3D point clouds for imagined rollouts and a Task Completion Scorer that reranks candidate action chunks, improving decision-making without additional high-quality demonstrations. We instantiate DALI-R with both diffusion and efficient flow-matching policies and evaluate it on Adroit and MetaWorld benchmarks. Across the two evaluated 3D base policies, DALI-R achieves an average $6.8$\% improvement in success rate while incurring less than $0.7\times$ additional inference overhead.

In this paper, we present a learning-based control for a class of nonlinear systems that guarantees exponential stability as well as bounded output errors. The control is based on the Gaussian Process Submodel Online Learning (GPSOL) algorithm and the Disturbance Error Rate Limiting (DERL) algorithm, both of which were developed in previous work. The GPSOL algorithm provides a method to learn Gaussian Process (GP) models for subsystems online, whereas the DERL algorithm allows to limit the rate of the prediction error of these GP models. The focus of this paper is the utilization of the GP model within an adaptive controller and the derivation of corresponding stability conditions and system peak-to-peak gains by means of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). These peak-to-peak gains are then used to prescribe a desired prediction error rate for the DERL algorithm to achieve user-defined output error bounds. The gains and the related bounds were successfully verified using a simulation model. Furthermore, results form a successful experimental validation of the bounds and the overall control structure on a pneumatic test rig are presented. While the control scheme and error bounds proposed in this paper are limited to first-order single-input-single-output systems, an extension to certain classes of higher-order and multiple-input-multiple-output systems is expected to be forthcoming.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional general reasoning capabilities. However, their performance in embodied navigation remains hindered by a scarcity of aligned open-world vision and robot control data. Despite simulators providing a cost-effective alternative for data collection, the inherent reliance on photorealistic simulations often limits the transferability of learned policies. To this end, we propose \textit{\textbf{S}andbox-\textbf{A}bstracted \textbf{G}rounded \textbf{E}xperience} (\textbf{\textit{SAGE}}), a framework that enables agents to learn within a physics-grounded semantic abstraction rather than a photorealistic simulation, mimicking the human capacity for mental simulation where plans are rehearsed in simplified physics abstractions before execution. \textit{SAGE} system operates via three synergistic phases: (1) \textit{Genesis}: constructing diverse, physics-constrained semantic environments to bootstrap experience; (2) \textit{Evolution}: distilling experiences through Reinforcement Learning (RL), utilizing a novel asymmetric adaptive clipping mechanism to stabilize updates; (3) \textit{Navigation}: bridging the abstract policy to open-world control. We demonstrate that \textit{SAGE} significantly improves planner-assisted embodied navigation, achieving a 53.21\% LLM-Match Success Rate on A-EQA (+9.7\% over baseline), while showing encouraging transfer to physical indoor robot deployment.

The bottleneck of satellite-to-ground links poses a major challenge for the timely downlink of massive on-board imagery. This paper studies adaptive image transmission over LEO satellite-to-ground links using joint source-channel coding (JSCC). We propose an RL-based framework that dynamically selects the channel dimension (compression ratio) of a SwinJSCC encoder to maximize the number of received satisfying reconstruction-quality constraints (PSNR and MS-SSIM) within a finite visibility window. The agent leverages SNR prediction to perform proactive rate adaptation and incorporates an on-board transmission-queue model that captures bursty encoding while penalizing both buffer overflow and underutilization. Simulations under realistic overpass conditions show that the proposed policy substantially outperforms fixed-rate baselines, achieving nearly 95% qualified frames with zero packet loss.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop reliability often degrades under local deployment conditions. Existing evaluations typically treat test episodes as independent zero-shot trials. However, real robots often operate repeatedly in the same or slowly changing environments, where successful executions provide environment-verified evidence of reliable behavior patterns. We study this persistent-deployment setting, asking whether a partially competent frozen VLA can improve its reliability by reusing its successful test-time experience. We propose an online success-memory guided test-time adaptation framework for generative VLAs. During deployment, the robot stores progress-calibrated successful observation-action segments in a long-term memory. At inference, it retrieves state-relevant action chunks, filters inconsistent candidates via trajectory-level consistency, and aggregates them into an elite action prior. To incorporate this prior into action generation, we introduce confidence-adaptive prior guidance, which injects the elite prior into an intermediate state of the flow-matching action sampler and adjusts the guidance strength based on retrieval confidence. This design allows the frozen VLA to exploit environment-specific successful experience while preserving observation-conditioned generative refinement. This retrieve-then-steer mechanism enables lightweight, non-parametric test-time adaptation without requiring parameter updates. Simulation and real-world experiments show improved task success and closed-loop stability, especially in long-horizon and multi-stage tasks.

Learning dynamic whole-body motions for legged robots through reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging due to the high risk of failure, which makes efficient exploration difficult and often leads to unstable learning. In this paper, we propose External Force Guided Curriculum Learning (EFGCL), a guided RL approach based on the principle of physical guidance, in which external assistive forces are introduced during training. Inspired by spotting in artistic gymnastics, EFGCL enables agents to physically experience successful motion executions without relying on task-specific reward shaping or reference trajectories. Experiments on a quadrupedal robot performing Jump, Backflip, and Lateral-Flip tasks demonstrate that EFGCL accelerates learning of the Jump task by approximately a factor of two and enables the acquisition of complex whole body motions that conventional RL methods fail to learn. We further show that the learned policies can be deployed on real robot, reproducing motions consistent with those observed in simulation. These results indicate that physically guided exploration, which allows agents to experience success early in training, is an effective and general strategy for improving learning efficiency in dynamic whole-body motion tasks.

Compositional spatiotemporal reasoning often requires a system to invoke multiple heterogeneous specialists, such as geometric, temporal, topological, and trajectory agents. A central question is how such a system should route among specialists when execution does not simply succeed or fail, but fails in qualitatively different ways. Existing tool-augmented and multi-agent LLM systems typically leave this routing decision implicit in language generation, making recovery ad hoc, difficult to interpret, and hard to optimize. This paper presents STAR (Spatio-Temporal Agent Router), a failure-aware routing framework that externalizes inter-agent control as a state-conditioned transition policy over the current agent, task type, and typed execution status. At the center of STARis an agent routing matrix that combines expert-specified nominal routes with recovery transitions learned from execution traces. Because the matrix conditions on distinct failure states, the router can respond differently to malformed outputs, missing dependencies, and tool--query mismatches, rather than collapsing them into a generic retry signal. Specialists execute through a tool-grounded extract--compute--deposit protocol and write intermediate results to a shared blackboard for downstream fusion. Results prove that retaining unsuccessful traces during training enlarges the support of the routing policy on error states, enabling recovery transitions that success-only training cannot represent. Across three spatiotemporal benchmarks and eight backbone LLMs, STAR improves over multiple baselines with the clearest gains on queries whose execution deviates from the nominal routing path. Router-specific ablations and recovery analyses further show that typed failure-aware routing, rather than specialist composition alone, is a key factor for these improvements.

Recent Autonomous Driving (AD) works such as GigaFlow and PufferDrive have unlocked Reinforcement Learning (RL) at scale as a training strategy for driving policies. Yet such policies remain disconnected from established benchmarks, leaving the performance of large-scale RL for driving on standardized evaluations unknown. We present BehaviorBench -- a comprehensive test suite that closes this gap along three axes: Evaluation, Complexity, and Behavior Diversity. In terms of Evaluation, we provide an interface connecting PufferDrive to nuPlan, which, for the first time, enables policies trained via RL at scale to be evaluated on an established planning benchmark for autonomous driving. Complementarily, we offer an evaluation framework that allows planners to be benchmarked directly inside the PufferDrive simulation, at a fraction of the time. Regarding Complexity, we observe that today's standardized benchmarks are so simple that near-perfect scores are achievable by straight lane following with collision checking. We extract a meaningful, interaction-rich split from the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) on which strong performance is impossible without multi-agent reasoning. Lastly, we address Behavior Diversity. Existing benchmarks commonly evaluate planners against a single rule-based traffic model, the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM). We provide a diverse suite of interactive traffic agents to stress-test policies under heterogeneous behaviors, beyond just using IDM. Overall, our benchmarking analysis uncovers the following insight: despite learning interactive behaviors in an emergent manner, policies trained via pure self-play under standard reward functions overfit to their training opponents and fail to generalize to other traffic agent behaviors. Building on this observation, we propose a hybrid planner that combines a PPO policy with a rule-based planner.

Diffusion-based trajectory planners can synthesize rich, multimodal robot motions, but their iterative denoising makes online planning and control prohibitively slow. Existing accelerations either modify the sampler or compress the network--sacrificing plan quality or requiring retraining without accounting for downstream control risk. We address the problem of making diffusion-based trajectory planners fast enough for real-time robot use without retraining the model or sacrificing trajectory quality, and in a way that works across diverse state-space diffusion architectures. Our key insight is that diffusion trajectory planners expose two signals we can exploit: a cheap probe of how their internal trajectory representation changes across steps, and analytic coefficients that describe how denoiser errors affect the sampler's state update. By calibrating the first signal against the second on offline runs, we obtain a per-step score that upper-bounds how far the final trajectory can deviate when we reuse a cached denoiser output, and we treat this bound as an uncertainty budget that we can spend over the denoising process. Building on this insight, we present Muninn, a training-free caching wrapper that tracks this uncertainty budget during sampling and, at each diffusion step, chooses between reusing a cached denoiser output when the predicted deviation is small and recomputing the denoiser when it is not. Across standard benchmarks Muninn delivers up to 4.6x wall-clock speedups across several trajectory diffusion models by reducing denoiser evaluations, while preserving task performance and safety metrics. Muninn further certifies that cached rollouts remain within a specified distance of their full-compute counterparts, and we validate these gains in real-time closed-loop navigation and manipulation hardware deployments. Project page: https://github.com/gokulp01/Muninn.

Recent advances in robot imitation learning have yielded powerful visuomotor policies capable of manipulating a wide variety of objects directly from monocular visual inputs. However, monocular observations inherently lack reliable depth cues and spatial awareness, which are critical for precise manipulation in cluttered or geometrically complex scenes. To address this limitation, we introduce StereoPolicy, a new visuomotor policy learning framework that directly leverages synchronized stereo image pairs to strengthen geometric reasoning, without requiring explicit 3D reconstruction or camera calibration. StereoPolicy employs pretrained 2D vision encoders to process each image independently and fuses the resulting representations through a Stereo Transformer. This design implicitly captures spatial correspondence and disparity cues. The framework integrates seamlessly with diffusion-based and pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies, delivering consistent improvements over RGB, RGB-D, point cloud, and multi-view baselines across three simulation benchmarks: RoboMimic, RoboCasa, and OmniGibson. We further validate StereoPolicy on real-robot experiments spanning both tabletop and bimanual mobile manipulation settings. Our results underscore stereo vision as a scalable and robust modality that bridges 2D pretrained representations with 3D geometric understanding for robotic manipulation.

End-to-end autonomous driving has witnessed rapid progress, yet existing benchmarks are increasingly saturated, with state-of-the-art models achieving near-perfect scores on widely used open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. This saturation does not mean that the problem has been solved; instead, it reveals that current benchmarks remain limited in scenario diversity, object variety, and the breadth of driving capabilities they evaluate. In particular, they lack sufficient long-tail scenarios involving rare but safety-critical objects and fail to assess advanced decision-making such as legal compliance, ethical reasoning, and emergency response. To address these gaps, we propose HiDrive, a new closed-loop benchmark for end-to-end autonomous driving that emphasizes long-tail scenarios and a richer evaluation of driving capabilities. HiDrive introduces a diverse set of rare objects and uncommon traffic situations, and expands evaluation from basic driving skills to more advanced capabilities, including rule compliance, moral reasoning, and context-dependent emergency maneuvers. Correspondingly, we extend previous collision-avoidance-centered metrics into a comprehensive evaluation system that encompasses collision and braking, traffic-rule compliance, and moral-reasoning indicators. Built on a more advanced physics engine, HiDrive provides physically realistic lighting and high-fidelity visual rendering, offering a more challenging and realistic testbed for assessing whether autonomous driving systems can handle the complexity of real-world deployment. The HiDrive software, source code, digital assets, and documentation are available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/HiDrive.

Articulated objects used in simulation and embodied AI are typically specified by geometry and kinematic structure, but lack the fine-grained dynamical effects that govern realistic mechanical behavior, such as frictional holding, detents, soft closing, and snap latching. Existing approaches either ignore the detailed structure of dynamics entirely, or use simple models with limited expressiveness. We introduce JODA, a framework for generating joint-level dynamics as a structured three-channel field over the joint degree of freedom, capturing conservative forces, dry friction, and damping. Instantiated using shape-constrained piecewise cubic interpolation (PCHIP), this formulation defines a compact and expressive function space that is both interpretable and compatible with differentiable simulation. Building on this representation, we develop methods for inferring and refining joint dynamics from multimodal inputs. Given visual observations and joint context, a vision-language model proposes structured dynamical primitives, which are composed into a unified dynamics field. The resulting representation supports both direct manipulation and gradient-based refinement. We demonstrate that JODA enables plausible and controllable modeling of diverse joint behaviors, providing a unified interface for inference, editing, and optimization. Code and example assets with their generated profiles will be released upon publication.

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically treat the deepest representation of a vision-language backbone as universally optimal for action prediction. However, robotic manipulation is composed of many frequent closed-loop spatial adjustments, for which excessive abstraction may waste computation and weaken low-level geometric cues essential for precise control. Existing early-exit strategies attempt to reduce computation by stopping at predefined layers or applying heuristic rules such as action consistency, but they do not directly answer when a representation is actually sufficient for action. In this paper, we present LoopVLA, a recurrent VLA architecture that jointly learns representation refinement, action prediction, and sufficiency estimation. LoopVLA iteratively applies a shared Transformer block to refine multimodal tokens, and at each iteration produces both a candidate action and a sufficiency score that estimates whether further refinement is necessary. By sharing parameters across iterations, LoopVLA decouples refinement from absolute layer indices and grounds sufficiency estimation in the evolving representation itself. Since sufficiency has no direct supervision, we introduce a self-supervised distribution alignment objective, where intermediate confidence scores are trained to match the relative action quality across refinement steps, thereby linking sufficiency learning to policy optimization signals. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and VLA-Arena show that LoopVLA pushes the efficiency-performance frontier of VLA policies, reducing parameters by 45% and improving inference throughput by up to 1.7 times while matching or outperforming strong baselines in task success.

Robust humanoid stair climbing remains challenging due to geometric discontinuities, sensitivity to step height variations, and perception uncertainty in real-world environments. Existing learning-based locomotion policies often rely on implicit terrain representations or blind proprioceptive feedback, limiting their ability to generalize across varying stair geometries and to anticipate required gait adjustments. This paper proposes an explicit stair geometry conditioning framework for robust humanoid stair climbing. Instead of encoding terrain as high-dimensional latent features, we extract a compact set of interpretable geometric parameters, including step height, step depth, and current yaw angle relative to the robot heading. These explicit stair parameters directly condition a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based locomotion policy, enabling proactive modulation of swing-foot clearance and stride characteristics according to stair structure. Simulation experiments demonstrate improved generalization across unseen stair heights beyond the training distribution. Real-world experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid validate reliable indoor and outdoor stair traversal. In challenging outdoor scenarios, the robot successfully ascends 33 consecutive steps without failure, demonstrating robustness and practical deployability.

Compared with individual agents, large language model based multi-agent systems have shown great capabilities consistently across diverse tasks, including code generation, mathematical reasoning, and planning, etc. Despite their impressive performance, the effectiveness and robustness of these systems heavily rely on their communication topology, which is often fixed or generated in a single step. This restricts fine-grained structural exploration and flexible composition, resulting in excessive token utilization on simple tasks while limiting capability on complicated tasks. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce RADAR, a redundancy-aware and query-adaptive generative framework that actively reduce communication overhead. Motivated by recent progress in conditional discrete graph diffusion models, we formulate communication topology design as a step-by-step generation process, guided by the effective size of the graph. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that RADAR consistently outperforms recent baselines, achieving higher accuracy, lower token consumption, and greater robustness across diverse scenarios. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/cszhangzhen/RADAR.

Modernizing legacy COBOL systems remains difficult due to scarce expertise, large and long-lived codebases, and strict correctness requirements. Recent large language model (LLM)-based modernization systems increasingly rely on agentic workflows in which the model controls multi-step tool execution. However, it remains unclear whether delegating execution control to the LLM improves correctness, robustness, or efficiency in structured software engineering workflows. We present a controlled empirical study of deterministic and LLM-controlled orchestration for COBOL-to-Python modernization. Using a unified experimental framework, we hold the language models, prompts, tools, configurations, and source programs constant while varying only the execution control strategy. This isolates orchestration as the sole experimental variable. We evaluate both approaches using functional correctness, robustness across repeated stochastic runs, and computational efficiency. Across multiple models, deterministic orchestration achieves comparable computational accuracy to LLM-controlled orchestration while improving worst-case robustness and reducing performance variability across runs. Deterministic execution also reduces token consumption by up to 3.5x, leading to substantially lower operational cost. These results suggest that, in structured modernization workflows with explicit validation stages, fixed execution policies provide more stable and cost-efficient behavior than fully agentic orchestration without reducing translation quality.

A new paradigm, Internet of Agents (IoA), is transforming networked systems into LLM-driven service networks, where heterogeneous agents collaborate through task routing based on their self-declared skill descriptions. Although this promising paradigm enables agentic, distributed, and advanced intelligence, it also exposes a new and overlooked attack surface. In particular, malicious agents can strategically manipulate their skill descriptions to bias routing decisions and increase their probability of being selected for task execution, thereby disrupting user tasks and degrading system reliability. To characterize this threat, we propose and formalize a new attack model, termed \emph{Skill Description Deception} (SDD) attack. We further design an LLM-enabled SDD attack framework that automatically generates deceptive skill descriptions, enabling systematic vulnerability assessment of IoA systems. Experimental results on nine representative domains show that the proposed attack can achieve up to 98\% attack success rate, demonstrating the severity and generality of the attack. Our paper reveals a new security vulnerability in IoA and calls for secure and trustworthy semantic routing mechanisms for future IoA systems.

Generative driving world models rely on compact latent state representations that must be efficiently transmitted and synchronized across distributed compute and connected vehicles. We study network-efficient streaming of a discrete world model state, where a stride-16 VQ-U-Net tokenizer (codebook size 8,192) maps each 288x512 frame to an 18x32 grid of token IDs (576 tokens/frame), equivalent to 936 bytes/frame under fixed-length coding. We consider a keyframe--delta protocol under strict per-message payload budgets and packet loss, and propose a fully online, label-free algorithm that prioritizes delta updates via cosine distance in codebook embedding space and triggers keyframes adaptively using a Hamming-drift threshold. The adaptive algorithm consistently improves the rate distortion frontier over periodic keyframes at matched bitrates: at 0.024 Mb/s (200-byte budget) dynamic-only embedding distortion drops from 0.0712 to 0.0661 (7.2\%), and at 0.036 Mb/s (400-byte budget) from 0.0427 to 0.0407 (4.8\%). Under 10\% delta packet loss at 200 bytes, dynamic-only distortion is 0.0757 versus 0.0789 for a matched periodic baseline. To connect state fidelity to world model usefulness, we train a lightweight next-token predictor and evaluate perplexity conditioned on streamed receiver states: at 0.024 Mb/s, dynamic-position perplexity improves from 206.0 to 193.1 (6.3\%), and at 0.036 Mb/s from 158.9 to 155.6 (2.1\%). These results support discrete token-state streaming as a practical systems layer for bandwidth-aware synchronization and improved downstream token-dynamics utility under vehicular networking constraints.

Zero-shot object navigation has advanced rapidly with open-vocabulary detectors, image--text models, and language-guided exploration. However, even after current methods detect a plausible target hypothesis, the agent may still oscillate between exploration and pursuit, or abandon the object near success. We identify this failure mode as an action consistency gap: semantic evidence is repeatedly reinterpreted at each step without persistent commitment across the episode. We introduce ConsistNav, a training-free zero-shot ObjectNav framework built around a semantic executive composed of three coordinated modules: Finite-State Executive Controller stages target pursuit through guarded semantic phases; Persistent Candidate Memory accumulates cross-frame target evidence into stable object hypotheses; and Stability-Aware Action Control suppresses rotational stagnation, ineffective pursuit, and unverified stopping. This design changes neither the detector nor the low-level planner; instead, it controls when semantic evidence should influence navigation and when it should be suppressed or revisited. We conduct extensive experiments on HM3D and MP3D, where ConsistNav achieves state-of-the-art results among compared zero-shot ObjectNav methods and improves SR by 11.4% and SPL by 7.9% over the controlled baseline on MP3D. Ablation studies and real-world deployment experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed executive mechanism.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to track others epistemic state, makes humans efficient collaborators. AI agents need the same capacity in multi agent settings, yet existing benchmarks mostly test literal ToM by asking direct belief questions. The ability act optimally on implicit beliefs in embodied environments, called functional ToM, remains largely untested. We introduce EnactToM, an evolving benchmark of 300 embodied multi-agent tasks set in a 3D household with partial observability, private information, and constrained communication. Each task is formally verified for solvability and required epistemic depth, and new tasks are generated increase difficulty as models improve. On the hard split, all seven evaluated frontier models score 0.0% Pass^3 on functional task completion, while averaging 45.0% on literal belief probes. Manual analysis traces 93% of sampled failures to epistemic coordination breakdowns such as withheld information, ignored partner constraints, and misallocated messages, providing a concrete target for future work.

We introduce CalBench, a controlled evaluation environment for studying multi-agent coordination through calendar scheduling. In CalBench, N agents each manage a private calendar containing pre-existing commitments and must coordinate to schedule a stream of M incoming meetings while minimizing disruption costs. Because agents observe only their own calendars, successful scheduling requires communication across private information boundaries. Each scenario is generated with an oracle solution, enabling precise measurement of coordination quality via realized-to-optimal cost, as well as a Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) baseline to provide a fair comparison under the same private-information constraints. CalBench enables precise verification of task success, communication efficiency, and fairness in the distribution of disruption costs. Our environment also studies privacy-preserving coordination by augmenting calendar entries with private semantic contexts of varying sensitivity and measuring whether agents reveal task-irrelevant private information during negotiation. Unlike multi-agent benchmarks where a single capable agent can often substitute for the group, CalBench is inherently decentralized: no agent has access to another agent's private calendar, yet agents must still reach mutually consistent decisions over shared meeting scheduling. CalBench therefore provides a practical and verifiable setting for studying coordination protocols, communication efficiency, negotiation strategies, fairness, and privacy leakage in multi-agent systems.

Solving multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) requires generating collision-free kinodynamically feasible trajectories for multiple interacting robots. We introduce Kinodynamic Translation-Invariant Edge Bundles or KiTE-Extend, a planner-agnostic action selection mechanism for sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning. KiTE-Extend uses a library of trajectory segments computed offline to guide action selection during online planning, improving the ability of existing planners to identify feasible motion segments without altering state propagation, collision checking, or cost evaluation, and without changing their theoretical guarantees. While KiTE-Extend can modestly improve single-agent planners, its benefits are most clear in the multi-agent setting, where it is able to explore more effectively and significantly improve planning through the dense spatiotemporal constraints introduced by robot-robot interaction. Through experiments on multiple kinodynamic systems and environments, we show that KiTE-Extend reduces planning time and improves scalability across the three most common MRMP paradigms: centralized, prioritized, and conflict-based.

A key operational challenge for call centers is to decide, in real time, which waiting customer should be served by which available agent. This is known as skill-based routing, and the decision becomes especially difficult in large systems with many customer classes, where standard dynamic programming methods can be computationally intractable. Focusing on the Halfin-Whitt heavy-traffic regime and an infinite-horizon discounted cost criterion, we develop a computational method that scales to high-dimensional settings with many customer classes. Our approach begins by deriving an approximating diffusion control problem in the heavy traffic limiting regime. Building on earlier work by Han et al. (2018), we develop a simulation-based method to solve this problem, relying heavily on deep neural network techniques. Using this framework, we construct a policy for the original (prelimit) call center scheduling problem. To evaluate performance, we adopt a data-driven approach. Using call center data from a large U.S. bank, we calibrate the model and construct realistic test instances. We then compare the resulting policy with benchmark policies drawn from the literature. Across all test problems considered so far, our policy performs at least as well as or better than the best benchmark identified. Moreover, the method remains computationally feasible in dimensions up to 100, corresponding to call centers with 100 or more distinct customer classes.

Dexterous manipulation is physics-intensive and highly sensitive to modeling errors and perception noise, making sim-to-real transfer prohibitively challenging. Domain randomization (DR) is commonly used to improve the robustness of learned policies for such tasks, but conventional DR randomizes one instance per episode, offering very limited exposure to the variability of real-world dynamics. To this end, we propose Domain-Randomized Instance Set (DRIS), which represents and propagates a set of randomized instances simultaneously, providing richer approximation of uncertain dynamics and enabling policies to learn actions that account for multiple possible outcomes. Supported by theoretical analysis, we show that DRIS yields more robust policies and alleviates the need for real-world fine-tuning, even with a modest number of instances (e.g., 10). We demonstrate this on a challenging reactive catching task. Unlike traditional catching setups that use end-effectors designed to mechanically stabilize the object (e.g., curved or enclosing surfaces), our system uses a flat plate that offers no passive stabilization, making the task highly sensitive to noise and requiring rapid reactive motions. The learned policies exhibit strong robustness to uncertainties and achieve reliable zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

We consider a finite-horizon discrete-time dynamic system that is jointly controlled by two strategic agents. There is a system designer that has its own reward function but does not have direct control over the agents' actions. We consider an information structure where the current state and all past history are equally accessible by the designer and the agents. The designer sends action recommendations to the agents at each time step. Each agent can use the received recommendation and the available information to choose its action. We are interested in the setting where the designer would like to send recommendations in a way that incentivizes the agents to adopt obedient strategies, i.e., to take the action recommended by the designer. Our goal is to find an optimal action recommendation strategy for the designer that maximizes the designer's objective while ensuring that obedient strategies are \emph{sequentially rational} for the agents. We provide an algorithm for the designer's problem that involves solving a family of linear programs in a backward inductive manner.

This paper proposes a safe data-driven control framework for nonlinear systems with partially known dynamics. The method ensures stability and constraint satisfaction during online learning, assuming only a stabilizable linear approximation of the process is available. Unmodeled nonlinear dynamics are captured by a Gaussian process residual learned in real time. Safety is enforced through a probabilistic control-invariant set derived from Lyapunov theory, guaranteeing high-probability stability. A convex quadratic program computes control inputs that maximize information gain while respecting probabilistic safety constraints. The framework provides finite-sample safety guarantees and allows adaptive expansion of the invariant set as uncertainty decreases. Numerical results validate the approach, demonstrating safe and informative exploration under model uncertainty: the safe set expands by about 30% while the Gaussian process root-mean-square error drops from 1.11 to 0.03.

Plant disease diagnosis is critical for food security, yet training disease-recognition models that generalize across crops, pathogens, and field conditions remains challenging because labeled disease images are far less abundant and standardized than data for other biotic stresses such as insects or weeds. Frontier vision-language models offer new opportunities through improved visual reasoning, but they still struggle with fine-grained disease identification due to the lack of structured, crop-specific symptom knowledge. To address this gap, we curate the largest plant disease image--symptom dataset to date, covering 335 crops, 1{,}251 disease classes, and approximately 839K images, designed to support training-free, agentic disease prediction. A scalable automated pipeline generates source-grounded symptom descriptions in which each claim is linked to a verbatim web quote; domain experts validate sampled crops and reconcile disease-name variants across sources. As a baseline, we introduce an autonomous visual reasoning agent that identifies anatomical context, narrows candidate diseases using symptom knowledge, sequentially compares reference images, and produces a fully explainable reasoning trace. Incorporating symptom knowledge improves accuracy by 16.2 percentage points on average at the full reference budget, with consistent gains across all four evaluation crops. Because the framework only requires crop-specific reference images and symptom knowledge, it can be extended to new crops without retraining, while the agentic baseline can directly benefit from future improvements in foundation model capabilities. Dataset and code are available at:https://sage-dataset.github.io/.

Closed-loop tool-using agents are increasingly evaluated in executable web, code, and micro-task environments, but benchmark reports often conflate workloads, action-generating drivers, and the evidence admitted for systems-facing claims. We present an executable benchmarking suite that makes these objects explicit under a shared evidence-admission contract. The suite connects WebArena Verified, a SWE-Gym slice with SWE-bench-compatible verification, and MiniWoB++ through common workload adapters, task manifests, event schemas, replay/freeze policy, declared drivers, and reporting pipelines. In the canonical release, the gate separates paper-facing evidence from preflight, fixture, smoke, and diagnostic rows while preserving non-admitted artifacts for audit and onboarding. The admitted evidence records latency, invalid-action behavior, patch-generation cost, verifier metadata, replay bindings, and provenance under one auditable contract. The gate is decision-relevant rather than merely clerical: in a separate WebArena Verified controller study, clean-baseline and medium live-stressed evaluation select different fixed controller variants under the same workload and admission contract. The release is scoped as a benchmarking suite and admitted evidence, not a new agent policy, model leaderboard, backend comparison, or autonomous SWE-bench solver.

Most language-model training data shows final artifacts, not the process that produced them. We study a tractable version of this question in tool use: when a model learns a stream of new API domains, does keeping tool-use trajectories help compared with stripping the intermediate API trace? We fine-tune Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with QLoRA on API-Bank using four sequential domain blocks. Condition A strips previous API request/response lines from the prompt and trains the model to predict the next API call. Condition B keeps the trajectory context. In a single-seed pilot, full held-out generation evaluation shows that Condition B reaches 56.9\% final exact full-call accuracy compared with 39.2\% for Condition A. B also improves final API-name accuracy by 7.7 points. However, B uses 25.1\% more training tokens, the run uses one seed, and the task is next-call prediction rather than full dialogue success.

Clinical reasoning agents based on large language models (LLMs) aim to automate tasks such as intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring and patient state tracking from electronic health records (EHRs). Existing systems typically rely on manually curated clinical tools or skills for concepts such as sepsis detection and organ failure assessment. However, maintaining these tool libraries requires substantial expert effort, while zero-shot querying or code generation often produces inefficient and unreliable reasoning chains, especially under institution-specific clinical policies. We introduce CodeClinic, a benchmark built on MIMIC-IV for evaluating whether LLM agents can synthesize and compose reusable clinical skills instead of relying on fixed toolboxes. The benchmark contains two complementary tasks: longitudinal ICU surveillance and compositional information seeking. The longitudinal setting simulates monitoring patient trajectories with structured decisions every four hours across 25 findings and eight clinical families, while the compositional setting spans 63k instances across 259 tasks in nine domains and is stratified by compositional dependency depth to evaluate increasingly complex multi-step reasoning. We further propose an offline autoformalization pipeline that converts natural-language clinical guidelines into reusable and verified Python skill libraries through iterative LLM refinement. Compared with zero-shot code generation, the resulting libraries improve consistency while reducing per-query token usage by up to 40%.

State-of-the-art 6-DoF grasp generators excel on tabletop benchmarks with overhead cameras but struggle in frontal grasping scenarios on low-cost manipulators with constrained workspaces, where kinematic limits and approach-direction constraints cause high failure rates. We address this challenge for the Unitree Z1 arm by proposing MVB-Grasp, a novel grasping stack that injects a Minimum Volume Bounding Box (MVBB) geometric prior into diffusion-based grasp generation to dramatically improve success rates in frontal, workspace-constrained settings. Our key scientific contributions are threefold: (i) an MVBB-based geometric filter that exploits oriented bounding-box face normals to reject grasps approaching through the table or misaligned with accessible object faces in O(N) time; (ii) a combined re-scoring function that blends learned discriminator scores with face-alignment geometry α=0.85, specifically calibrated for the Z1's frontal workspace and kinematic constraints; and (iii) a systematic MuJoCo evaluation protocol measuring grasp success across object types, distances, lateral positions, and pitch orientations to validate embodiment-specific performance. We implement MVB-Grasp on a Unitree Z1 arm with an Intel RealSense D405 camera, integrating YOLOv8 object detection, GraspGen for candidate generation, Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based MVBB fitting, and inverse-kinematics trajectory planning. Experiments across 81 MuJoCo episodes (cylinder, asymmetric box, waterbottle) demonstrate that MVB-Grasp achieves 59.3% success versus 24.7% for vanilla GraspGen, a 2.4x improvement, by filtering geometrically infeasible candidates and prioritizing face-aligned grasps suited to the Z1's frontal approach constraints. Real-world trials confirm that the MVBB prior substantially improves grasp reliability on constrained, low-cost manipulators without requiring model retraining.

Teleoperation systems are fundamentally limited by communication latency, which degrades situational awareness and control performance. Predictive display aims to mitigate this limitation by presenting an estimate of the current visual state rather than delayed observations. While recent advances in generative video models enable high-quality video synthesis, their suitability for latency-sensitive predictive display remains unclear. This paper presents a zero-shot benchmark of off-the-shelf generative video models for short-horizon predictive display, without task-specific fine-tuning. We formulate the problem as rollout-based future frame prediction and develop a unified benchmarking pipeline using simulated driving data from the CARLA simulator. Five publicly released video models spanning transformer-based and diffusion-based families are evaluated across two resolutions and two conditioning regimes (multi-frame and single-frame). Performance is assessed using prediction accuracy (mean absolute difference), per-rollout latency, peak GPU memory usage, and temporal error evolution across the prediction horizon. On this zero-shot benchmark, no tested model simultaneously achieves low rollout error, non-divergent per-step error behavior, and real-time inference at the source frame rate. Increasing model scale or resolution yields limited and, in some cases, inverted improvements. These findings highlight a gap between general-purpose generative video synthesis and the requirements of predictive display in teleoperation, suggesting that practical deployment will require either explicit short-horizon temporal supervision, in-domain adaptation, or aggressive inference optimization rather than direct application of off-the-shelf models. Code, configurations, and qualitative results are released on the project page: https://bimilab.github.io/paper-GenPD

We study multi-robot persistent monitoring on weighted graphs, where node weights encode monitoring priorities and edge weights encode travel distances. The goal is to design joint robot trajectories that minimize the worst-case weighted latency across all nodes over an infinite time horizon. The widely adopted worst-case latency objective evaluates team performance over the entire time horizon and therefore may fail to distinguish strategies with poor transient behavior but strong asymptotic performance. To address this limitation, we propose a family of tail-performance objectives that generalize the standard objective and study the resulting functional optimization problems. We establish several key theoretical properties, including the existence of optimal strategies, relationships among the proposed objectives and their corresponding optimization problems, approximation by periodic solutions to arbitrary accuracy, and reductions to event-driven decision models with discretized waiting times. Building on these results, we construct an equivalent event-driven Markov decision process (MDP), called the Tail Worst-case Latency-Optimizing Markov Decision Process (TWLO-MDP), which reformulates the tail-performance objective as a standard average-reward criterion. We then develop reinforcement-learning-based solution methods for the TWLO-MDP and introduce the multi-robot monitoring benchmark (M2Bench), a unified platform that supports the evaluation and comparison of heuristic and learning-based monitoring algorithms. Experiments on synthetic and realistic monitoring scenarios show that our methods effectively reduce the worst-case weighted latency and outperform representative baselines.

We introduce SmartEval, a benchmark for systematically evaluating the quality of Solidity smart contracts generated by large language models (LLMs) from natural language specifications. SmartEval provides a corpus of 9,000 generated contracts paired with expert-written ground-truth implementations drawn from the FSMSCG dataset, a five-dimensional evaluation rubric covering functional completeness, variable fidelity, state-machine correctness, business-logic fidelity, and code quality, and a reproducible generation-and-evaluation pipeline. To validate the benchmark's reliability, we conduct three independent empirical studies: a five-condition ablation study (N=300 per condition) isolating the contribution of each pipeline component, a human expert evaluation by three Columbia University PhD researchers confirming automated scores align with expert judgment to within 0.34 points, and external security analysis via the Slither static analyzer confirming 79.4% agreement between the LLM auditor and a non-LLM rule-based tool. Systematic analysis of 9,000 generated contracts reveals characteristic failure modes (logic omissions at 35.3%, state transition errors at 23.4%, and complexity-driven degradation) and quantifies a +8.29 composite-score advantage of generated contracts over ground-truth implementations, attributable to LLMs' literal specification-following behavior. SmartEval establishes a reproducible, validated foundation for empirical research on LLM smart contract synthesis quality, with all data, evaluation code, and generated contracts publicly released.

Strong atom-photon interactions on scalable photonic platforms hold significant potential for both atomic and photonic quantum information platforms. In particular, trapping of a single atom on a planar photonic integrated resonator at the subwavelength distances required for strong coupling to the guided modes has remained an outstanding challenge. Here we demonstrate efficient trapping of a single ultracold rubidium atom within the evanescent field of an integrated silicon-nitride microring resonator, at distances of 150-200 nm from the chip surface. Efficient, single-stroke loading process is achieved using an evanescent-field mechanism related to Sisyphus cooling, in which a single scattering event dissipates the atom's kinetic energy and transfers it into a near-surface trap. We observe logarithmic scaling of trapping durations spanning from sub-millisecond timescales up to 1 second, without continuous cooling. The trapped atom couples efficiently to the resonator, enabling on-chip photon collection, photon antibunching, and Purcell-enhanced spontaneous emission with single-atom cooperativity exceeding unity. Our results establish the potential of CMOS-compatible chip-based atom-photon interfaces for scalable quantum photonic circuits.

According to the theory of constructed emotion, the brain actively forms emotion categories by integrating multimodal bodily signals, and constructs emotional experiences by using these categories to predict and interpret sensory inputs. While research has advanced in modeling individual emotion construction, the social process of co-construction-how a shared understanding of emotions emerges between individuals-remains computationally underexplored. This study investigates this process by modeling emergent communication between two embodied agents using the Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), grounded in the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) framework. Our experiments, using visual, auditory, and simulated interoceptive inputs, yield two main findings. First, MHNG-based communication significantly improves the alignment, clarity, and inter-agent agreement of the learned emotion categories compared to non-communicative and non-selective baselines, with the alignment effect concentrated at the symbolic layer rather than the perceptual latent representation. Second, even when the two agents have systematically divergent interoceptive dynamics, communication still produces robust categorical alignment, with distinct, category-specific reshaping patterns of each agent's emotion categories-consistent with the constructed-emotion view that interoceptive heterogeneity is constitutive of, rather than an obstacle to, shared emotional meaning. These findings provide computational support for the co-constructionist view of emotion and extend the CPC framework from physical to socially-grounded domains.

In this paper, we propose the first VL$\underline{\textbf{M}}$ $\underline{\textbf{a}}$gentic $\underline{\textbf{r}}$easoning framework for few-$\underline{\textbf{s}}$hot multimodal $\underline{\textbf{T}}$ime $\underline{\textbf{S}}$eries $\underline{\textbf{C}}$lassification ($\textbf{MarsTSC}$), which introduces a self-evolving knowledge bank as a dynamic context iteratively refined via reflective agentic reasoning. The framework comprises three collaborative roles: i) Generator conducts reliable classification via reasoning; ii) Reflector diagnoses the root causes of reasoning errors to yield discriminative insights targeting the temporal features overlooked by Generator; iii) Modifier applies verified updates to the knowledge bank to prevent context collapse. We further introduce a test-time update strategy to enable cautious, continuous knowledge bank refinement to mitigate few-shot bias and distribution shift. Extensive experiments across 12 mainstream time series benchmarks demonstrate that $\textbf{MarsTSC}$ delivers substantial and consistent performance gains across 6 VLM backbones, outperforming both classical and foundation model-based time series baselines under few-shot conditions, while producing interpretable rationales that ground each classification decision in human-readable feature evidence.

The shift toward sixth-generation (6G) wireless communications demands transceiver architectures that simultaneously support high-data-rate communications, pervasive sensing, and sub-meter-level localization. Beyond these performance targets, 6G systems are also expected to align with long-term societal goals, including sustainability and inclusiveness. Conventional radio designs, however, remain heavily reliant on digital baseband processing, whose cost, power consumption, and computational complexity scale unfavorably with increasing array size and carrier frequency, making them poorly aligned with these emerging requirements. Beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (BD-RISs) introduce a new paradigm by enabling direct manipulation of electromagnetic waves in the analog domain. This article presents BD-RIS as a wave-domain analog processing unit embedded within the transceiver aperture. By migrating linear signal processing functions from the digital baseband to the wave domain, BD-RISs significantly reduce computational load and energy consumption, enabling scalable and sustainable operation for extra-large antenna array systems. Owing to their ability to jointly provide high operational flexibility, modularity, and energy-efficient analog processing, transceiver-integrated BD-RISs offer a compelling architectural trade-off and emerge as a strong candidate for next-generation wireless transceivers.

Most path planners assume fully known, static environments, assumptions that fail when robots navigate in dynamic and partially observable environments. SMART-3D addresses these issues by real-time replanning, where it morphs the underlying RRT* tree whenever new obstacles or structures are discovered in the environment. Instead of rebuilding the tree entirely from scratch, SMART-3D prunes invalid nodes and edges and subsequently repairs the disjoint subtrees at hot-nodes to find a new path, thus providing high computational efficiency for real-time adaptability. We extend SMART-3D to perception-enabled collaborative multi-agent navigation (PECMAN) in unknown environments. PECMAN is built upon distributed tree morphing and shared perception strategies, where each agent reacts to environmental changes and morphs its respective tree to replan its path, while simultaneously broadcasting newly discovered structures to other agents, thus enabling them to proactively replan even in areas that have not yet been explored by them. This approach reduces redundant reactions and unnecessary replannings of the agents due to improved situational awareness. The performance of PECMAN was evaluated by 28,000 multi-agent simulations on seven 2D scenarios with different case studies. The results show that PECMAN achieves up to 52% reduction in the team-completion time, while maintaining near 100% success rates. Finally, PECMAN was tested by real experiments on two autonomous robots in a building environment.

Autonomous drone fleets have immense potential in medical supply delivery during disaster incident response. However, coordinating multiple drones in such settings introduces compounding challenges: dynamic environmental hazards such as wind, obstacles, and intermittent network connectivity, constrained energy budgets, and the need to serve patient locations fairly under deadlines and triage-based priority while optimizing schedule utilization. In this paper, we present CEDA, a novel CTDE Deep Q-Network algorithm for cooperative multi-drone medical delivery, designed to jointly optimize triage-priority-aware routing, multi-agent coordination, and energy-efficient navigation under dynamic uncertainty. CEDA introduces a Priority-Preserving Fair Scheduling strategy, in which a structured reward function encodes both triage weights and complementary fairness mechanisms ensuring no patient class is starved of service. We evaluate CEDA in a simulated grid environment featuring dynamic hazard zones, stochastic action failures, and dynamically spawning patients across three triage priority levels, as well as in a PX4 SITL validation using two X500 quadrotors controlled via MAVSDK in offboard position mode. Simulation results demonstrate that CEDA achieves a delivery completion rate above 85%, reduces obstacle collisions by over 90% across training, and delivers an average of 6 patients per episode with a triage efficiency of 0.82. CEDA preserves clinical priority ordering, Critical patients are served first, while achieving near-zero mortality across lower-triage classes, confirming that priority-weighted routing does not condemn Stable or Urgent patients to neglect. PX4 SITL validation further demonstrates that the learned policy remains executable and triage-coherent under practical communication constraints and realistic multi-drone coordination in disaster response settings.

Large language model (LLM) agent systems are increasingly expected to improve after deployment, but existing work often decouples two adaptation targets: skill evolution and multi-agent system (MAS) restructuring. This separation can create organization bottlenecks, context pressure, and mis-specialization. We present SkillMAS, a non-parametric framework for adaptive specialization in multi-agent systems that couples skill evolution with MAS restructuring. SkillMAS uses Utility Learning to assign credit from verified execution traces, bounded skill evolution to refine reusable procedures without unfiltered library growth, and evidence-gated MAS restructuring when retained failures and Executor Utility indicate a structural mismatch. Across embodied manipulation, command-line execution, and retail workflows, SkillMAS is competitive under the reported harnesses while clarifying how post-deployment specialization is attributed, updated, and applied.

Mesh-based simulations provide high-fidelity solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs), but achieving such accuracy typically requires fine meshes, leading to substantial computational overhead. Super-resolution techniques aim to mitigate this cost by reconstructing high-resolution (HR), high-fidelity solutions from low-cost, low-resolution (LR) counterparts. However, training neural networks for super-resolution often demands large amounts of expensive HR supervision data. To address this challenge, we propose SuperMeshNet, an HR data-efficient super-resolution framework for mesh-based simulations aided by message passing neural networks (MPNNs). At its core, SuperMeshNet introduces complementary learning, a semi-supervised approach that effectively leverages both 1) a small amount of paired LR-HR data and 2) abundant unpaired LR data via two jointly trained, complementary MPNN-based models. Additionally, our model is enriched by inductive biases, which are empirically shown to further improve super-resolution performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SuperMeshNet requires 90% less HR data to achieve even lower root mean square error (RMSE) than that of the fully supervised benchmark without the inductive biases. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/jykim-git/SuperMeshNet.git.

For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for inferring preferences from observed behavior. However, IRL assumes the human to be approximately optimal. This is a big limitation in cases where the human themselves may be learning to act optimally in an environment. In this paper, we formalize the problem of learning the preferences of a learning agent: a predictor observes a learner acting online and tries to infer the underlying reward function being (initially suboptimally) optimized by the learner. We model the learner as either being no-regret, or as converging to an optimal Boltzmann policy over time. In each of these settings, we establish theoretical guarantees for various preference learning algorithms, or otherwise show that such guarantees are impossible.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has unified the interface between Large Language Models (LLMs) and external tools, yet a fundamental gap remains in how agents conceptualize the environments within which they operate. Current paradigms are bifurcated: Task-level planning often ignores execution-time dynamics, while reactive execution lacks long-horizon foresight. We present MCP-Cosmos, a framework that infuses generative World Models (WM) into the MCP ecosystem to enable predictive task automation. By unifying three disparate technologies, namely MCP, World Model, and Agent, we demonstrate that a "Bring Your Own World Model" (BYOWM) strategy allows agents to simulate state transitions and refine plans in a latent space before execution. We conducted experiments using two strategies, namely ReAct and SPIRAL with 2 planning models and 3 representative world models over 20+ MCP-Bench tasks. We observed improvements in Agent's environment interaction KPI such as tool success rate and tool parameter accuracy. The framework also offers new metrics such as Execution Quality to generate new insights about the effectiveness of world models compared to baseline.

Skills are a promising way to improve LLM agent capabilities without retraining, while keeping the added procedure reusable and controllable. However, high-quality skills are still largely written by hand. We introduce SkillGen, a multi-agent framework that synthesizes a single auditable skill from trajectories generated by a base agent. The output is a human-readable artifact that can be inspected before use. Rather than merely summarizing trajectories, SkillGen leverages contrastive induction over both successful and failed trajectories to identify reusable success patterns, recurring failure modes, and behaviors that appear in nearby successes but are missing from failures. SkillGen then generates candidate skills and iteratively refines the skill. A key novelty in SkillGen is that we model agent skills as interventions to empirically verify the net effect of skills on the overall performance. Specifically, we compare outcomes on the same instances with and without the skill, so that we account for both repairs (cases where the skill fixes a baseline failure) and regressions (cases where the skill breaks a baseline success). Across a broad range of agents and datasets, SkillGen consistently improves held-out performance, outperforms existing skill-generation baselines, and produces skills that transfer across models.

Multi-agent AI systems need behavioral constitutions, but it is unresolved whether such rules should emerge internally through agent self-governance or be discovered externally through optimization. We present the first controlled comparison of internal deliberation and external evolution across three social environments: a coordination grid-world, an iterated public goods game, and a bilateral trading market. Across 180 simulation runs, evolution significantly outperforms deliberation in collective-action settings (p < 0.01), while neither method improves outcomes in bilateral trading. A multiplier ablation reveals that evolution's advantage inverts when incentives shift: at pool multiplier (m = 0.75) the evolved constitution forces value-destroying cooperation and becomes the worst-performing method. Notably, no deliberation run across thirty trials ever proposed punishment -- the canonical cooperation-sustaining mechanism evolution reliably discovers -- suggesting external optimization wins on peaks while internal self-governance trades peaks for structural responsiveness.

A Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is a tethered underwater robot used for tasks like inspection and intervention. While essential tools for underwater science, the high cost of commercial ROVs and a persistent gap between mechanically capable platforms and those with integrated intelligence create a significant barrier to access. HyDRA Scorpion differs from conventional systems by addressing these challenges, integrating an advanced, AI-driven perception stack with in-situ measurement capabilities onto a low-cost, locally manufacturable platform. The system combines 4-DoF maneuverability, dual manipulators, and a custom pressure-tested housing. Experimental results validate the system's robustness and performance. Leak-free operation was confirmed through prolonged pressure testing of the electronics housing to 4 bar, equivalent to the pressure of a 304.8-meter water depth approximately in a simulated environment, with no moisture ingress detected. The vehicle also demonstrated stable station-keeping, maintaining its position within a tight tolerance of $\(\pm\)0.15$ meters under external disturbances. The onboard AI module achieved underwater object detection mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.89 with real-time inference, length and 3D-mapping based distance measurement. Also, 4-DoF manipulator arm can grip and maintain dual-function manipulator feature which support 360 degree tangle-free rotation.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly collaborate over peer-to-peer networks to improve their reliability. However, these same interactions can also become a source of vulnerability, as unreliable or Byzantine agents may sway neighboring agents toward incorrect conclusions and degrade overall system performance. Existing methods rely on leader-based coordination or self-reported confidence, both of which are susceptible to adversarial manipulation. We study decentralized LLM multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) and propose Self-Anchored Consensus (SAC), a fully decentralized iterative filter-and-refine protocol in which agents iteratively exchange responses, locally evaluate and filter unreliable messages, and refine their own outputs. We present $(F{+}1)$-robustness conditions for the communication graph that ensure honest agents preserve and propagate reliable information despite Byzantine influence. Experiments on mathematical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that SAC effectively suppresses Byzantine influence and consistently improves performance across diverse communication topologies, whereas prior methods degrade under adversarial conditions.

Recent agentic-robotics systems, from Code-asPolicies to modern vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models, presuppose that drivers, SDKs, or ROS-style primitives for the target hardware already exist. Writing those primitives is the dominant engineering cost of bringing up new hardware for agent control. We present Octopus Protocol, a system that collapses that cost to a single shell command. Given only raw OS access and a language-model API key, a coding agent executes a five-stage pipeline--PROBE, IDENTIFY, INTERFACE, SERVE, DEPLOY--to discover connected devices, infer their capabilities, generate a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with typed tools, and deploy it as a live HTTP endpoint. A persistent daemon then monitors the system, heals broken code, and perceives physical state through the camera tools it generated for itself. Two architectural principles make this work: protocols are prompts, not code, and the coding agent is the runtime. We validate the system on three heterogeneous platforms (PC/WSL, Apple Silicon macOS, Raspberry Pi 4) and on a commercial 6-DOF robotic arm with USB camera feedback. One command onboards the hardware in ~10-15 minutes and exposes up to 30 MCP tools; an MCP-compliant client then performs closed-loop visual-motor control through tools no human wrote.

The Bloch Siegert shift, a hallmark correction arising from counter-rotating interactions in driven two-level systems, has an exact counterpart in binary lattices under static forcing, where it governs resonant long-range tunneling between sites separated by odd lattice spacings. Here we report the first experimental realization of this correspondence using a 12 mode programmable photonic integrated circuit. By implementing a reconfigurable binary lattice with sub-percent control of on-site detuning, we observe coherent periodic jumps across four resonance orders and quantitatively verify the predicted period law over the full parameter space. The measured dynamics exhibit the extreme resonance sensitivity characteristic of Bloch Siegert physics and agree closely with the level-anticrossing picture of the semiclassical Rabi model. Exploiting the underlying parity structure, we further convert intrinsically bidirectional oscillations into cascaded unidirectional transport through adaptive sign reversal of the staggered potential, achieving fidelities exceeding 0.95 and 0.98 on the same hardware platform. Our results establish programmable photonic lattices as a scalable testbed for strongly driven quantum-optical phenomena and Floquet-engineered transport.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate in enterprise environments, where work is distributed across specialized roles, permission-controlled systems, and cross-departmental procedures. However, existing enterprise benchmarks largely evaluate single agents with broad tool access, while existing multi-agent benchmarks rarely capture realistic enterprise constraints such as role specialization, access control, stateful business systems, and policy-based approvals. We introduce \textsc{EntCollabBench}, a benchmark for evaluating enterprise multi-agent collaboration. \textsc{EntCollabBench} simulates a permission-isolated organization with 11 role-specialized agents across six departments and contains two evaluation subsets: a Workflow subset, where agents collaboratively modify enterprise system states, and an Approval subset, where agents make policy-grounded decisions. Evaluation is based on execution traces, database state verification, and deterministic policy adjudication rather than natural-language response judging. Experiments with representative LLM agents show that current models still struggle with end-to-end enterprise collaboration, especially in delegation, context transfer, parameter grounding, workflow closure, and decision commitment. \textsc{EntCollabBench} provides a reproducible testbed for measuring and improving agent systems intended for realistic organizational environments.

Multi-agent systems can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for delivery, surveillance, search and rescue. Coordination of such teams often involves two aspects: selecting appropriate subteams for different tasks in various areas, and coordinating agents in the subteams to execute the associated subtasks. Existing work often assumes that the tasks are static and known beforehand, where an integer program can be formulated and solved offline. However, in many applications, the team-wise tasks are generated online continually by external requests, and the amount of subtasks within each task is uncertain, e.g., the number of packages to deliver or victims to rescue. The aforementioned offline solution becomes inadequate as it would require constant re-computation for the whole team and global communication to broadcast the results. Thus, this work tackles the large-scale coordination problem under continual and uncertain temporal tasks, specified as temporal logic formulas over collaborative actions. The proposed hierarchical framework, HULK, consists of two interleaved layers: the rolling assignment of currently known tasks to subteams within a certain horizon, and the dynamic coordination within a subteam given the detected subtasks during online execution. Thus, coordination is performed hierarchically at different granularities and triggering conditions, improving computational efficiency and robustness. The method is validated rigorously over large-scale heterogeneous systems under various temporal tasks and environment uncertainties.

LLM-based multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks, but a single decisive error is often accepted by downstream agents and cascades into trajectory-level failure. Existing work frames this as \emph{post-hoc failure attribution}, diagnosing the responsible agent and step after the trajectory has ended. However, this paradigm forfeits any opportunity to intervene while trajectory is still unfolding. In this work, we introduce AgentForesight, a framework that reframes this problem as online auditing: at each step of an unfolding trajectory, an auditor observes only the current prefix and must either continue the run or alarm at the earliest decisive error, without access to future steps. To this end, we curate AFTraj-2K, a corpus of agentic trajectories across Coding, Math, and Agentic domains, in which safe trajectories are retained under a strict curation pipeline and unsafe trajectories are annotated at the step of their decisive error via consensus among multiple LLM judges. Built on that, we develop AgentForesight-7B, a compact online auditor trained with a coarse-to-fine reinforcement learning recipe that first equips it with a risk-anticipation prior at the failure boundary on adjacent safe/unsafe prefix pairs, then sharpens this prior into precise step-level localization under a three-axis reward jointly targeting the what, where, and who of an audit verdict. Across AFTraj-2K and an external Who\&When benchmark, AgentForesight-7B outperforms leading proprietary models, including GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, achieving up to +19.9% performance gain and 3$\times$ lower step localization error, opening the loop from post-hoc failures detection to enabling deployment-time intervention. Project page: https://zbox1005.github.io/agent-foresight/

Large language model (LLM) powered AI agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous problem-solving, yet they continue to struggle with complex, multi-step real-world tasks that demand domain-specific procedural knowledge. Reusable agent skills, which encapsulate successful problem-solving strategies, offer a natural remedy by enabling agents to build on prior experience. However, curating such skills has largely remained a manual endeavor, requiring human experts to distill rich domain knowledge into actionable guidelines. In this work, we present $\textbf{M}$ulti-agent $\textbf{IN}$duction and $\textbf{D}$eduction for $\textbf{Skill}$s ($\textbf{MIND-Skill}$), a framework that automatically induces generalizable skills from successful trajectories with robust quality guarantees. MIND-Skill consists of an induction agent which is tasked to abstract reusable skills from successful trajectories, and a deduction agent which aims to reconstruct trajectories by following the induced skills. To guarantee the quality of the generated skills, we introduce a reconstruction loss that compares input and reconstructed trajectories, an outcome loss that enforces the correctness of the reconstructed trajectories, and a rubric loss that assesses the documentation quality and regularizes the abstraction level of the generated skills according to predefined criteria. These textual losses are jointly optimized with TextGrad, and the resulting skills are evaluated on held-out tasks unseen during optimization. Experiments on AppWorld and BFCL-v3 show that MIND-Skill consistently outperforms concurrent skill generation methods.

Standard rational actor models often attribute cooperation failures in social dilemmas to insufficient incentives, overlooking the destabilizing effects of continuous utility maximization. To address this, we propose a framework of ``will" defined as a mechanism that persistently pursues goals while ignoring local cost-benefit fluctuations. We formalize the Willed Agents as potential minimizers, distinguishing them from cumulative utility maximization. Dynamical analysis of infinite population demonstrates that willed agents shrink the feasible state space, acting as boundary constraints that accelerate convergence in canonical social dilemmas. Through multi-agent simulations in a spatiotemporal Stag Hunt Game, we show that willed agents function as ``cooperation catalysts", enabling groups to surmount high-risk thresholds where purely utility maximization fails. We find that heterogeneous will strength promotes cooperation, and that agents who autonomously suspend rational re-evaluation can significantly outperform continuous optimizers. These findings suggest that successful cooperation relies on the cognitive capacity to strategically constrain calculation.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming society, powering applications from smartphone assistants to autonomous driving. Yet cloud-based LLM services alone cannot serve a growing class of applications, including those operating under intermittent connectivity, sub-second latency budgets, data-residency constraints, or sustained high-volume inference. On-device deployment is in turn constrained by limited computation and memory. No single endpoint can deliver high-quality service across this spectrum. This article focuses on collaborative intelligence, a paradigm in which multiple independent LLMs distributed across device and cloud endpoints collaborate at the task level through natural language or structured messages. Such collaboration strives for superior response quality under heterogeneous resource constraints spanning computation, memory, communication, and cost across network tiers. We present collaborative inference along two complementary and composable dimensions: vertical device-cloud collaboration and horizontal multi-agent collaboration, which can be combined into hybrid topologies in practice. We then examine learning to collaborate, addressing the training of routing policies and the development of cooperative capabilities among LLMs. Finally, we identify open research challenges including scaling under resource heterogeneity and trustworthy collaborative intelligence.

The evolution of 6G networking toward agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems requires a shift from traditional data pipelines to task-aware, agentic AI-native communication solutions. Emergent communication, a novel communication paradigm in which autonomous agents learn their own signaling protocols through interaction, is increasingly viewed as a promising solution to address the challenges posed by existing rigid, predefined protocol-based networking architecture. However, most existing emergent communication frameworks fail to account for physical networking constraints, such as bandwidth and computational complexity, and often lack a rigorous information-theoretical foundation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel emergent communication framework that facilitates collaborative task-solving among heterogeneous agents through an information-theoretic lens. We propose a novel joint loss function that unifies the optimization of decision-making functions and the learning of communication signaling. Our proposed solution is grounded on the multi-agent and multi-task distributed information bottleneck (DIB) theory, which allows the quantification of the fundamental trade-off between task-relevant information representation and computational complexity. We further provide theoretical generalization bounds of the emergent communication protocol during decentralized inference across unseen environmental states. Experimental validation on a real-world hardware prototype confirms that our proposed framework significantly improves generalization performance, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.

To cope with the large contexts that long-horizon LLM agents produce, modern frameworks increasingly rely on compaction -- invoking an LLM to rewrite the accumulated trajectory into a shorter summary that the agent resumes from. Today, compaction runs synchronously on the critical path of agent execution but this can unpredictably degrade accuracy due to a structural validation gap: the compactor must condense context but is fundamentally unaware of precisely what information the agent will need later. Further, because post-compaction agent steps are conditioned on the new summary, targeted validation criteria do not exist and errors silently propagate through coherent but incorrect behavior. Our key insight is that asynchronous compaction efficiently addresses this gap: by running the compactor in parallel with continued agent execution on the original context, the candidate summary and the agent's next steps are generated independently from the same pre-compaction state, yielding a validation signal independent of the summary itself. We build Slipstream, a trajectory-grounded compaction system that uses a judge to validate the candidate summary against the agent's continued reasoning, checking that it preserves both the agent's forward intent and the key facts and constraints it depends on. Across long-horizon coding (SWE-bench Verified) and web-browsing (BrowseComp) workloads, Slipstream improves task accuracy by up to 8.8 percentage points while reducing end-to-end latency by up to 39.7%.

Computational models of collaboration without prior coordination often overlook how heterogeneous agent traits and complex task structures jointly produce systemic bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and contribution inequalities. We address this by using an agent-based model of ad-hoc teamwork in a kitchen environment. Our model integrates diverse agent personas with tasks that combine serial and parallel dependencies. We identify a specialist's dilemma, where rigid role assertion generates system-level bottlenecks, amplifies workload inequality, and fosters fragmented, homophilous networks. We also find that team size and communication overhead interact with problem structure to generate diminishing returns and redundant collaboration. Linking micro-level behavior to macro-level outcomes provides insights into emergent collaboration and design principles for effective multi-agent teamwork.

Autonomous-driving simulators typically trade physical fidelity for scalable parallelism. Physics-based platforms such as CARLA and MetaDrive provide articulated vehicle dynamics and contact, but their non-vectorized interfaces make batched training difficult. GPU-batched systems such as Waymax and GPUDrive scale to hundreds of scenarios by replacing rigid-body physics with simplified kinematic models, omitting tire--road interaction, suspension, contact dynamics, and road-condition-dependent friction. We introduce SceneFactory, a GPU-vectorized platform for procedural scene construction, physics-based multi-agent simulation, and RL in autonomous-driving environments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim + Isaac Lab, SceneFactory represents worlds and agents as batched tensors: control, observations, rewards, resets, and policy inference run as GPU tensor operations over the Isaac Lab tensor API. SceneFactory converts Waymo Open Motion Dataset road topologies into simulation-ready USD worlds, runs many worlds concurrently on one GPU, populates each with multiple articulated PhysX vehicles, and maps precipitation and road-surface type to PhysX material friction coefficients. With GPU vectorization, SceneFactory achieves up to 127$\times$ higher throughput than a non-vectorized PhysX baseline on the same GPU and physics solver, reaching 19,250 controlled-agent simulation steps per second at 256 worlds $\times$ 16 agents. Cross-simulator transfer reveals an asymmetric dynamics gap: physics-grounded RL policies transfer to a simplified kinematic bicycle model with 99.5% success, whereas reverse transfer drops to 47.3%. Under wet-road friction, friction-aware policies reduce mean peak DRAC from 58.7 to 27.8,m/s$^2$ without sacrificing goal reach. SceneFactory shows that scalable autonomous-driving training need not discard articulated rigid-body dynamics or physically grounded road-condition variation.