Physical AI Brief

An interactive world model must follow the user's actions, remember the places it has shown, and stream in real time. The tension is structural: control wants a short horizon, memory wants an unbounded one. ReWorld separates the two during training and bounds them at inference. Mixed per-head attention windows confine most heads to the recent past while a small set of global heads attends over the entire history, and random head routing keeps either capability from binding to particular heads; random chunk dropping makes sparse histories in-distribution. At inference the whole past lives under a fixed budget: a bounded KV cache backed by a pose-indexed landmark bank, from which the model retrieves the landmarks nearest the current pose. A metric-scale-aligned data engine places eight sources -- Unreal-rendered fly-throughs, game roaming, and real-world footage -- on one physical action scale, so the same key press moves the camera the same distance in every source, and palindrome trajectories supply the revisit evidence that memory training needs. Distribution-matching distillation confined to a LoRA adapter then compresses sampling to four steps: one backbone serves both a high-fidelity multi-step mode and a real-time interactive one, streaming 704x1280 video across photorealistic, game-style, and stylized worlds. Under a three-axis protocol covering action following, long-horizon recall, and video quality, against six recent interactive world models it attains the best control fidelity ($11.95^\circ$ rotation error and the best camera-motion consistency) and the best generation quality; and on minute-long out-and-back rollouts ($64$\,s, $384$ latents), its fixed 12-chunk cache still regenerates the starting view -- at rollout lengths where a sliding window has long evicted the evidence and full-KV attention runs out of memory.

Modern software systems accumulate technical debt over decades of development, which makes migration expensive and largely manual. As coding agents become increasingly capable at bug fixing, can they autonomously perform such migrations? Existing benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate only behavioural correctness, not whether the migration actually occurred. This leads an easy hack: agents copy the original implementation to make tests pass. We call this Blindness. To address this problem, we introduce SWE Refactor Bench, a benchmark comprising 20 whole-repository migrations, covering 4 kinds of technical debt. A three-stage evaluation protocol measures both migration completeness and behavioural correctness. (1) Migration Audit verifies that the migration occurred. (2) Behavioural Tests measure correctness with a fixed test suite. (3) Agentic Verification uses 6 independent coding agents to generate targeted tests for hidden behavioural differences. Across 520 runs from 8 frontier models and 26 model-effort configurations, only 28 of 520 runs ($5.4\%$) pass all three stages, 13 of the 20 tasks receive no accepted solution, and the best model (claude-opus-5) scores $47.0/100$. Migration completeness and behavioural correctness are distinct abilities: a few runs preserve behaviour by skipping the migration and are stopped at Migration Audit; most attempt it and break behaviour, and are stopped at Behavioural Tests. Agents cannot deliver a perfect migration: among the 340 runs that pass Migration Audit, $58\%$ reach $99\%$ of the fixed checks, yet only $26\%$ reach $100\%$. Agent capability differs across migration categories: agents score $31.4$ on build toolchain rewrites but only $5.6$ on language rewrites. Together, these findings position SWE Refactor Bench as a rigorous testbed for developing coding agents for reliable whole-repository migrations.

Language models are sequential processors, but long-horizon agency requires external information and computation beyond model weights and active context. Prime Agent is an open-source harness for long-horizon evaluation and coding-agent workflows. A persistent IPython REPL follows the Recursive Language Model abstraction for programmatic context processing and test-time compute, while Continual Harness preserves histories, memories, skills, prompts, and subagent specifications across trajectories. Recursive subagents coordinate through direct agent-to-agent communication, and the Agents View lets humans inspect and manage daemon-backed sessions. Prime Agent standardizes execution, recovery, verification, and resource accounting while leaving strategy construction to the model. This low-friction, expressive membrane prevents harness failures from becoming model failures and pushes measurement toward the model's true maximal underlying capability. Prime Agent raises ARC-AGI-3 RHAE Best@1 from 30% to 95.5% and matches or exceeds native and popular harnesses across long-context coding, GPU-kernel generation, emulator construction, and autonomous nanoGPT speedruns. On Factorio, we find refinement allows for continuous technology progression and dedicated subagents enable parallelized work. Code is available at https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent.

Machine-learning-based anomaly detection is increasingly used in industrial control systems (ICS), yet most studies assume that detector training data is trustworthy. In practice, training data may be corrupted through compromised logs, labeling errors, manipulated historian records, or unsafe retraining processes. This paper evaluates the robustness of offline ICS anomaly-detection pipelines on the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) benchmark under training-time contamination. We assess 11 heterogeneous anomaly detectors under three contamination strategies: random injection, similarity-targeted injection, and feature-noise injection. The first two insert attack samples into the nominal training pool, while the third adds bounded Gaussian noise to selected normal training samples. These attacks are contamination-based rather than gradient-driven poisoning methods. Contamination budgets from 1% to 10% are evaluated using clean validation and test sets under a unified offline protocol. The results show that robustness is strongly model-dependent and cannot be predicted from clean-data performance alone. Injection-based contamination causes the greatest degradation, particularly for local-density and distance-based detectors, whereas feature-noise contamination has a comparatively limited effect. PCA, SVM, HBOS, and IForest remain relatively stable, while the tuned neural detectors demonstrate intermediate robustness. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of training-data integrity in ML-enabled ICS monitoring, subject to the evaluated dataset, models, and threat assumptions.

In this paper, we introduce the Inertial Manifold Neural Operator (IMNO) for solving dissipative time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs). The long-time dynamics of such systems often exhibit an effective low-dimensional structure due to dissipation. Unlike standard neural operator architectures such as the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), IMNO explicitly leverages the low-dimensional structure to achieve better physical interpretability, accuracy, and stability in long-horizon autoregressive training and prediction for nonlinear dissipative PDEs. For shift-equivariant PDEs, we further introduce a shift-equivariant variant (IMNO-SE) of the proposed neural operator, ensuring that a spatial shift in the input induces the same spatial shift in the output. This symmetry-preserving inductive bias substantially improves its performance in shift-equivariant PDEs. Extensive benchmark experiments are presented to evaluate IMNO's performance numerically.

Does multi-agent LLM interaction help or hurt? Some work reports gains from debate (Du et al., 2024), critique loops (Chen et al., 2025), and mixture-of-agents synthesis (Wang et al., 2025), while other work finds that interaction adds cost without improving quality under equal budgets (Tran & Kiela, 2026; Xu et al., 2026; Jarrett et al., 2025), or that independent sampling already captures multi-agent gains (Li et al., 2024). We argue this contradiction partly reflects a missing distinction, because not all multi-agent communication is equal. Different model families find structurally different solutions, but when agents read each other's complete outputs, their proposals converge within one round, erasing the diversity that motivates using multiple models. We call this the interaction tax. We test 11 verifier-scored optimization tasks under matched budgets and find that full-solution interaction is a weak default. Independent proposal generation avoids this collapse. Full-solution interaction mainly makes agents stay close to the first solution they see instead of trying different approaches, and critique helps only if the violated rule is easy for the LLM to find and fix. These results suggest that multi-agent performance depends less on the number of agents than on the information they exchange, and interaction helps only when agents share the right information at the right time.

Modern AI models such as tabular foundation models and gradient-boosted ensembles can outpredict classical methods, but provide little basis for reasoning about their predictions. High-stakes decisions call for models that are both accurate and interpretable as built. Local linear modeling offers a path forward: a smooth regression function is locally well approximated by a linear one, allowing a linear fit near each query point to achieve high accuracy without sacrificing transparency. The challenges lie in learning what is "local" and developing statistical tools for interpretation. Here, we propose local distillation, in which a black-box "teacher" guides a regularized linear "student" model at each query point. The teacher (1) defines locality by upweighting training observations with similar predicted outcomes, and (2) anchors the fit with its prediction at the query point, included as a pseudo-observation whose weight is estimated from the data. For interpretation, we add a small amount of Gaussian randomization to the local objective and use refits to assess stability: selection frequencies identify reliable features at a query point, and clustering the randomized fits identifies stable subgroups across the data. Under the lasso penalty, we prove that this randomization yields feature-selection probabilities that are stable under small perturbations of the training responses. Across 17 benchmark datasets, local distillation nearly matches its AI teacher's accuracy while producing a sparse linear model at each test point. In a high-dimensional cancer gene expression example, the framework identifies patient subgroups whose local models use different genes; this heterogeneity is invisible to a global linear model, and difficult to surface in a black-box model.

World models can predict video without learning dynamics that they reliably preserve. We test whether a frozen DreamerV3 trained only on pendulum video learns a scalar that its own latent transition treats as approximately conserved. A label-free search recovers the same energy-like invariant across independently trained conservative models, while the same procedure finds no comparable invariant in matched damped models. During autonomous rollouts, this quantity drifts. Projecting the latent state back toward its initial level set reduces rollout error in all three conservative models, whereas matched random constraints usually increase it. These results distinguish a dynamically meaningful invariant from a merely decodable correlate and reveal a concrete failure mode: a world model can learn a physical constraint from pixels yet violate that constraint when it imagines forward.

Earth-system analysis reconstructs changing physical processes from observations that differ in source, scale, timing, and modality. Natural hazards make this work consequential because incomplete evidence can change estimates of severity, exposure, and mechanism. We introduce EarthVerse, a benchmark that evaluates scientific agents through package-scoped investigations. Its 405 reproducible tasks are grounded in 199 documented events and 19 hazard families. Agents inspect heterogeneous event packages, choose compatible evidence, execute transparent calculations, reconcile source differences, and preserve provenance in the final answer. We provide executable ground truth that decomposes each task into fine-grained answer units, together with task-specific rubrics that assess the supporting research process while allowing multiple valid paths. We evaluate 25 model and agent systems under a controlled tool-using protocol, then use controlled studies to locate failures in evidence access, tool selection, memory, reasoning, interaction, and scientific execution. Across systems, the best mean answer-unit accuracy is 84.65%, while the highest Strict@95 is only 34.81%. The gap shows that current agents often complete individual steps without maintaining a consistent chain across evidence, scales, units, calculations, and physical interpretation. EarthVerse provides a reproducible basis for measuring end-to-end scientific reliability in dynamic Earth systems.

Historical people may appear under different languages, scripts, and transcription traditions, while distinct individuals may share highly similar or even identical names. This makes historical identity reconciliation more than a problem of string matching or transliteration. We introduce MHER, a provenance-controlled benchmark for pairwise reconciliation of person-name attestations from the Mongol world. MHER contains a balanced 396-pair Name-only core over 84 primary historical persons and a stricter 160-pair Source-grounded subset constructed from mention-by-source evidence, with entity-disjoint development and test splits. Across five generative systems, correctly Source-grounded evidence improves paired TEST accuracy by 12.96 to 94.44 percentage points relative to Name-only input. On five identical-surface different-person cases, all models fail under names alone (0/25 model-item decisions), whereas Source-grounded evidence yields 24/25 correct resolutions, with the remaining output an abstention. Context-only ablations show that historical descriptions often carry substantial identity information, while explicitly signaled misgrounding controls produce substantially lower performance. We also find that names are not uniformly beneficial: for Qwen3-8B, restoring surface forms converts ten otherwise correct Context-only distinctions into false identity merges. These results show that historical entity reconciliation depends not only on surface correspondence, but on whether identity judgments respond appropriately to provenance-controlled historical evidence. MHER therefore provides a controlled framework for studying evidence use, abstention, and failure modes in historical NLP.

Reasoning-Induced Misalignment, where fine-tuning on reasoning data containing no harmful content, including mathematics, code, and problem-solving with chain-of-thought traces can induce harmful behaviors of LLM, posing a serious challenge to the safety of LLM reasoning. Cross-architecture, cross-scale, and cross-dataset checks show that RIM does not always emerge. Previous work attributed RIM to neuron-level entanglement, but did not identify the geometry of the representation space underlying this entanglement or propose a training-time fix. We provide both: a representation-space analysis of RIM and the Safety-Direction Penalty (SDP), which penalizes movement along a learned safety direction during reasoning fine-tuning. The analysis extracts two activation-space directions, one encoding reasoning ability and the other safety behavior. These directions are coupled: fine-tuning that improves reasoning shifts safety representations, and prompts with larger shifts show larger safety degradation. CKA distance ratios and probes locate the safety-decision layers where this shift is most relevant. These findings guide the design of SDP: the coupling motivates penalizing displacement along the safety direction, and the layer localization sets the initial scope. When the initial scope leaves compensatory shifts beyond the penalized layers, the same diagnostics guide iterative expansion. On Qwen2.5-3B and 7B, SDP restores safety while preserving benchmark reasoning performance.

Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However, its potential for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored. We propose Self-Reflective Policy Optimization (SRPO), a framework that internalizes this capability. SRPO enables LLMs to analyze their own completed trajectories, synthesize errors into concise "reflection patches," and use reflection-conditioned teacher scores on student on-policy rollouts as dense token-level training signals. This process effectively transforms sparse terminal supervision into dense, token-level learning signals without requiring external critics, separate reward models, or larger teacher models. We demonstrate that SRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across mathematical reasoning and long-horizon agentic benchmarks with exceptional data efficiency. Using a Qwen3-8B base model, SRPO attains 73.3% on AIME'24 using only 8% (0.08x) of the training FLOPs required by scaled supervised fine-tuning, while significantly improving success rates on WebShop (64.7%), ALFWorld (76.8%), and SWE-Bench-Lite (31.2%). Code is available at https://github.com/Galleons2029/SRPO

World action models (WAMs) have recently gained increasing attention as a framework for jointly modeling scene evolution and ego actions in autonomous driving. Most existing WAMs learn scene dynamics in pixel space by combining a video-generation backbone for future-observation prediction with an action head for ego-trajectory prediction. Pixels, however, provide only an indirect representation of these dynamics: they entangle geometry and motion with appearance, texture, and illumination, forcing the model to infer three-dimensional transformations from two-dimensional observations. We argue that geometry, represented by point clouds, offers a more natural state space for driving because it explicitly captures spatial structure and the rigid and non-rigid transformations that govern scene evolution while directly aligning with the space in which driving actions are executed. Building on this insight, we introduce \textbf{GeoWAM}, a visual geometry world action model for autonomous driving. Rather than predicting future images, GeoWAM is pretrained to forecast future scene geometry, yielding representations that jointly encode spatial structure and temporal evolution. A geometry-conditioned action head then leverages these learned geometric dynamics to predict future ego trajectories. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop evaluations show that visual geometry world modeling yields substantially stronger driving policies than image-based alternatives, establishing future-geometry prediction as an effective pretraining objective for autonomous driving.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can turn multimodal context into robot actions, but their action decoders are still trained largely by behavior cloning. This supervises which motor command was demonstrated while leaving implicit the local objective served by the behavior under the instruction. Future-based supervision enriches action learning with frames, latent observations, trajectories, or motion representations, but these signals capture particular realizations of what may happen rather than the shared semantic objective of the forthcoming behavior. We propose Intention Distillation (INDI), which distills behavior-level intent into the action decoder. During training, a frozen teacher VLM interprets a demonstrated segment from the current observation, instruction, coarse action summary, and corresponding execution video. From its standard inputs, the deployed VLA recovers the resulting multimodal intent representation at an intermediate decoder layer and uses it to organize action prediction together with representations of how the behavior unfolds and what it achieves. On SimplerEnv-Bridge, INDI improves GR00T-N1.7 from 64.3% to 84.7%, and on RoboCasa Kitchen it improves the controlled GR00T-N1.7 baseline from 64.1% to 70.3%, with consistent gains on $π_{0.5}$ across both benchmarks. In real-world tasks, INDI improves average success from 62.0% to 68.7%, with gains of up to 12.0 pp on longer-horizon tasks. Further analyses show that the recovered latent is used by the decoder, captures behavior objective and execution progress, and organizes downstream predictions in an objective-dependent manner. These results show that action decoders benefit from explicitly modeling the semantic objective of the behavior they generate.

As large language models are increasingly used in data-scarce and evolving task scenarios, few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has become a key paradigm for task adaptation. However, direct ICL often uses a small set of examples without explicitly abstracting task rules, making it sensitive to example construction. In contrast, human learners often reduce such sensitivity by first summarizing task rules from examples and then applying them to new instances. To evaluate this ability, we propose StrategyBench, which selects strategy-inducible tasks from BIG-Bench, constructs reference strategies, and defines evaluation metrics along two dimensions: strategy quality and downstream utility. We further analyze strategy induction from three perspectives: task variation, model configuration, and adaptation setting, covering category-wise differences, generator-executor choices, demonstration design, and SFT-based adaptation. Experiments show that explicit strategy utility differs substantially across task categories and depends on both strategy generation and execution conditions. The benchmark is released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StrategyBench-D53C.

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on video and image-sequence benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether they capture temporal structure. To study this question, we formulate temporal grounding as an anomaly detection problem, providing a simple and controlled evaluation that directly tests sensitivity to temporal consistency. We introduce TimeCatch, where temporal anomalies are created by swapping consecutive frames and frame-level anomalies by replacing a frame with Gaussian noise. Models are evaluated on anomaly detection and localization tasks across four synthetic and real-world datasets, alongside a human study. Our evaluation reveals a substantial gap between frame-level and temporal anomaly detection. While VLMs consistently detect frame-level anomalies and often localize them accurately, they perform near chance on temporal anomaly detection and only modestly above chance on localization. Humans, in contrast, achieve near-ceiling performance on both tasks. Additional analyses across model scales, prompting strategies, sequence lengths, and visual similarity suggest that these failures cannot be explained solely by limitations in perception or model capacity. Together, these findings indicate that current VLMs can identify anomalies within individual frames but struggle to integrate information across frames to reason about temporal consistency. TimeCatch provides a controlled benchmark for evaluating temporal grounding in vision-language models.

Time series forecasting (TSF) is evolving toward multimodal and agentic settings, yet using foundation models remains uneconomical in resource-constrained scenarios, where compact, specialized forecasters are more desirable. However, lightweight forecasters typically require substantial training data, limiting their use in domains with scarce, slowly accumulated, or privacy-sensitive time series. To address this dilemma, we investigate the challenging problem of few-shot learning for lightweight forecasters. We propose MetaCaster, a meta-harness-optimized multi-agent framework that uses agentic data generation to automatically train specialized lightweight forecasters from only a few examples and textual contexts. Our work highlights a new TSF paradigm in which agents act not as forecasters but as intermediary engineers that prepare efficient, task-specific forecasters for deployment. Experiments on 18 datasets, 23 state-of-the-art lightweight forecasters, and 14 baselines demonstrate that MetaCaster achieves both data efficiency and computational efficiency while maintaining high-quality TSF performance.

Memory is becoming a default subsystem in deployed LLM agents to provide persistent personalization and continuity. This naturally prompts a question: will memory system introduce new vulnerabilities into agents? Thus we propose InjecMEM, a novel memory injection attack paradigm that requires only a single interaction (no read/edit access to memory store) to steer later responses of related queries toward a pre-specified output. Guided by the retrieval-then-generate mechanism of memory systems, we craft the injection with a retriever-agnostic anchor and an adversarial command. The anchor contains high-recall topical cues so that downstream retrieval consistently associates the record with the target topic. The command is a short sequence optimized to remain effective under uncertain fused contexts, variable placements, and long prompts so that it reliably steers outputs once retrieved. We learn the command via gradient-based coordinate search, averaging over synthetic prompt templates and insertion positions, and extend it to joint optimization across backbones to study transfer. Evaluated across multiple memory systems and backbone models, InjecMEM achieves reliable topic-conditioned retrieval and targeted generation, remains effective under memory drift, and leaves non-target queries unaffected. Our results underscore the need to harden memory systems and provide a reproducible framework for studying agent memory.

Anomaly detection is often applied to data stored in relational databases, yet most existing methods require flattening multiple tables into a single feature matrix. This flattening can obscure entity identity, schema structure, and multi-hop dependencies, limiting the detection of anomalies that depend on relational context rather than isolated feature values. Beyond preserving relational structure, relational anomaly detection raises an additional challenge: how to incorporate symbolic behavioral evidence into learned relational representations. To address these challenges, we study relational anomaly detection, where the goal is to identify anomalous entities or events in a multi-table database. We propose RAD, a rule-augmented relational anomaly detector that combines heterogeneous graph representation learning with refined symbolic rule signals. RAD derives candidate rules from random-forest paths over flattened summaries of the entities or events being scored, refines them into compact interpretable predicates, injects the resulting rule features into the graph model, and learns anomaly scores using reconstruction-based and pairwise-ranking supervision. To evaluate this setting, we introduce a relational anomaly detection benchmark spanning three settings: LANL cybersecurity event detection and two unexpected user-churn anomaly tasks derived from Amazon and H&M relational databases. Experiments show that RAD improves anomaly ranking over flattened tabular detectors and relational baselines under natural class imbalance, achieving the best average rank on AUROC and AUPRC across the benchmark. Ablations show that direct rule injection and ranking-based supervision are key contributors to performance, while edge reconstruction is not uniformly beneficial. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/noahd15/RAD_RelationalAnomalyDetection.

The quadratic growth of attention computation and key-value (KV) cache with respect to sequence length is a central bottleneck for ultra-long-context language models and high-resolution generative models. We propose ProxyFormer, a general dual-stream architecture built upon proxy tokens. In each layer, fine-grained local features are compressed bottom-up into a small set of proxy states; expensive global interactions are performed only in the compressed proxy space; the globally contextualized proxies are then decompressed and injected top-down back into the local stream. Because the local stream persists across layers, fine-grained information that is not captured by one compression step remains accessible for later refinement, alleviating the irreversible information loss of conventional one-shot compression. We further introduce factorized multi-level compression/decompression, layer-wise dynamic compression ratios, asymmetric dual embeddings, and a proxy-only KV-cache inference scheme. On a 16GB GPU with batch size 1, a standard decoder-only model can train sequences of only about 20K tokens, whereas ProxyFormer with a compression ratio of 64 extends the trainable sequence length to about 0.7M. A model trained with a 64K window retains 92%-95% retrieval accuracy on a multi-needle retrieval task with 1,048,576 tokens, and a model trained with an 8K window exceeds 94% accuracy when extrapolated to 256K tokens. Preliminary image-generation experiments demonstrate the feasibility of ProxyFormer for both pixel-space and latent-space flow matching.

With rapid advancement over the last few years, many different methods are now widely used for classification. However, training these models requires substantial labeled data. Active Learning is a potential solution to this problem. Pool-based active learning minimizes costs by querying only the most informative samples from an unlabeled dataset. Diversity-based approaches, on the other hand, attempt to select a representative subset of the data. There are many different objectives for determining the selection process, including exact K-center, exact K-median, and Greedy K-center. In this paper, we will focus on evaluating the performance of Greedy K-center across a variety of metric spaces: the raw feature space, a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) space, and a model-derived probability space (with and without entropy-based weighting). Using Random Forest classifiers as a baseline evaluator, our empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that mapping unlabeled instances into a predictive probability space and weighting the result by entropy often dominates the other options for active learning selection with Greedy K-center.

Space robots operate in extreme environments where hardware degradation can critically compromise traditional control strategies. While continual reinforcement learning offers a promising mechanism for online adaptation, it inherently requires access to a reward signal during deployment. However, precise reward computation in space is often infeasible due to the lack of external tracking systems and the overall complexity of the environment. To address the challenge of unobservable rewards, we introduce a reward-free continual learning framework that leverages latent-state world models. By pre-training a model-based agent across diverse simulations, the world model learns a robust predictor of the reward structure within its latent space. Upon deployment to an environment with severe hardware degradation, we freeze the observation encoder and reward predictor to update only the transition dynamics of the world model through unsupervised rollouts. By training the policy entirely on imagined trajectories generated by this updated world model, the agent adapts to altered dynamics without receiving new rewards. We demonstrate our approach across simulated planetary traversal, orbital navigation, and precision assembly tasks subjected to severe morphological failures.

Dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) are increasingly used to publish time-varying export limits that keep distribution networks within operational limits. Purely technical DOE allocation, however, can systematically privilege electrically favorable prosumers, while embedding fairness directly into a single-period optimal power flow (OPF) objective mixes network feasibility, equity and efficiency in a way that obscures the cost of fairness. This paper proposes a two-stage, multi-period framework that addresses both of these. Initially, a technical distributed OPF computes network-feasible export envelopes. The subsequent stage then applies a dynamic aggregate export budget and redistributes capacity through cumulative proportional fairness, limiting the additional curtailment by an admissible efficiency budget. The resulting fair DOEs are treated as first-stage decisions, while battery storage provides scenario-dependent recourse under demand and renewable uncertainty. The operational problem is solved by a calibrated regional alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) on a lossless LinDistFlow model and independently validated using AC power flow. On the IEEE 33-bus feeder over a 24-hour horizon, the technical benchmark yields 2.1097 MWh of renewable curtailment, whereas the fairness-constrained allocation increases curtailment to 5.7216 MWh but caps the maximum cumulative curtailment ratio at 11.20% and raises Jain fairness indices close to unity, with AC voltage deviations below 0.01 p.u. and no voltage or thermal violations under the adopted 0.90-1.05 p.u. limits. Results show that considering both storage (which alleviates curtailment impact) and multi-period fairness (which increases curtailment) is an interesting approach for modern DOE design, which in turn requires a multi-period, co-designed approach.

Design-space exploration of configurable Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) requires executable evaluation when design choices affect timing, fault propagation, recovery behavior, and temporal-property satisfaction. Repeated stochastic executions make exhaustive exploration impractical for large design spaces. This paper presents a temporal-property-driven CPS design workflow using Reinforcement Learning (RL). At design time, the RL agent selects subsystem alternatives to assemble a candidate system model. The model is then evaluated through simulation, during which online temporal-property monitors observe runtime traces and produce functional-property violation indicators. These indicators are combined with evaluated non-functional terms for budget, recoverability, sustained compliance, and operational use to calculate the reward used for subsequent candidate selection. The workflow is evaluated on a methane-sensitive mine-pump CPS. The corresponding executable case-study model is provided as additional contribution. RL-guided search identifies the highest-reward design observed in the experiments after 26 episodes (corresponds to 130 executable simulations). These designs were reached with fewer simulations than surrogate-guided Bayesian Optimization and population-based Genetic Algorithm baselines under the same executable model and reward formulation. Ablation study results indicate that value-based feedback and reuse of previous simulation traces contribute to this reduction.

Understanding a basketball game requires recognizing events, localizing actions, identifying players, and relating these to structured game knowledge. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate these abilities one at a time, leaving the interactions among these abilities under-explored. We introduce BasketballBench, a multimodal benchmark comprising 7,980 questions across ten tasks in text, image, and video. It is built from the 2025-2026 NBA season and includes official playby-play, rosters and profiles for 530 active players, and 2,501 possession-level broadcast clips. We further propose BasketballSkills, an agent that composes eight basketball-specific perception and retrieval tools under four reusable skills that specify tool order, evidence bindings, and stopping conditions. Experiments show that current MLLMs struggle particularly on questions requiring the integration of multiple capabilities, whereas BasketballSkills outperforms them, highlighting the effectiveness of explicitly composing domain-specific capabilities for comprehensive basketball understanding.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has grown rapidly over the past decade, driven by digital transformation in the Arab world, social media, and large language models (LLMs). Despite this growth, a comprehensive quantitative meta-analysis of the field remains absent. This study presents a large-scale bibliometric and topic-based analysis of 7,120 Arabic NLP papers published between 1960 and 2026, sourced from six collections. We employ BERTopic for topic modeling, regression analysis to identify citation predictors, social network analysis for co-authorship structures, and geographic mapping. Our findings show a significant publication surge after 2020, driven by transformer models and LLMs. Topic modeling identifies 19 substantive themes, the largest centered on text, speech, translation, and recognition. Citation analysis reveals a positive correlation between paper age and citations (r = 0.245, p < 0.001); regression shows that indexing in OpenAlex or Semantic Scholar and institutional affiliation are associated with higher citation counts. Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Egypt lead in research output. A task-dialect gap matrix identifies critical understudied areas, including summarization for Maghrebi, Iraqi, and Sudanese dialects. The largest topic has the highest H-index (87), followed by sentiment analysis (54). Our quantitative approach complements existing qualitative surveys and offers recommendations to prioritize under-resourced dialects and develop culturally aligned benchmarks for Arabic NLP.

Agent skills are reusable procedural artifacts that extend language agents with specialized workflows, tool conventions, and domain behaviors at inference time. However, creating reliable skills still depends largely on human authorship, model priors, or execution traces. These sources are often unavailable for unfamiliar tasks, suggesting the need to create skills from open-world materials. In this paper, we study open-world skill creation: given an underspecified skill brief and a source-access specification, a creator must discover behavior-relevant requirements omitted by the brief and determine how broadly each source-derived procedure is justified. We propose SkillAlchemy, an admission-centered framework for source-grounded skill creation. SkillAlchemy identifies implicit requirements through contrastive evidence, admits candidate procedures based on evidence-supported scope, and compiles the admitted content into a grammar-guided skill package. Extensive experiments across 87 SkillsBench v1.1 tasks demonstrate that SkillAlchemy improves pass rate over no-skill execution by 19.9 percentage points and the strongest automated baseline by 8.6 percentage points, while achieving performance comparable to human-curated skills.

Long-horizon planning is critical for safe autonomous driving in complex scenarios. Existing methods improve planning continuity with temporal memory, but such memory may become invalid and mislead decisions when the driving command changes. Thus, selectively leveraging useful history while suppressing command-inconsistent memory remains a key challenge. To address this issue, we propose MomADv2, a reliable state-space memory framework for long-horizon end-to-end autonomous driving. At its core, MomADv2 introduces a Selective State-Space Planning Memory Query Module, which filters historical planning queries based on temporal continuity and command consistency, selects planning modes relevant to the current command, and models the evolution of planning intentions through a selective state-space mechanism. To further alleviate local trajectory deviations and error accumulation in long-horizon planning, we design a Flow-Matching Trajectory Residual Refiner. It learns a continuous residual correction field from the refined planning output to the expert trajectory, enabling fine-grained trajectory refinement while preserving the stability of anchor-based planning. Extensive experiments on closed-loop NAVSIM and Bench2Drive, as well as open-loop nuScenes, demonstrate that MomADv2 improves long-horizon planning consistency and reduces the average collision rate by 15.6% over MomAD under 6-second planning.

Discrete Diffusion Models (DDMs) have recently been introduced to recommendation systems, modeling user history as a token generation process via iterative denoising. However, while effective at capturing user-level sequential patterns, these methods often fail to explicitly integrate item-based collaborative filtering information, a critical component for accurate recommendation. This deficiency manifests in two key aspects: (1) the item representation is often semantic-focused, lacking collaborative priors for diffusion training; and (2) the denoising process employs a uniform noise schedule, treating all tokens indiscriminately and ignoring item-level adaptive structural dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose ANR-DiffRec, a unified framework designed to encode item-based collaborative structures into discrete diffusion for generative recommendation. First, we explicitly incorporate an item co-occurrence matrix to guide semantic ID generation, providing a structured collaborative prior for discrete diffusion training. Second, we introduce an item-based adaptive noise rescheduling mechanism that dynamically adjusts denoising weights according to both local contextual recoverability and behavior-aware item dependencies. Specifically, the proposed strategy jointly models intra-item structural context and inter-item collaborative signals, enabling structure-aware denoising during diffusion training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommendation models. Code: https://github.com/CalmaQi/ANR-DiffRec.

Interactive clinical agents must gather decisive evidence and convert it into grounded actions under partial observability. A correct final diagnosis alone does not show that an agent respected evidence and care-process constraints. We introduce MediSkill-Evo, a clinical agent that evolves governed process knowledge without backbone fine-tuning. It separates experience into four typed banks for clinical skills, process rules, symbolic schemas, and measurement procedures. Provenance, support, replay, and controller-defined safety checks govern publication to a frozen test-time snapshot. A Process-Constrained Preference Harness binds evidence to its source, rejects controller-invalid candidates, and ranks actions with a safety-prioritized Clinical Process Critic. We evaluate complete agent systems across two backbone endpoints and six controlled stress dimensions under the same Doctor-turn limit. On 300 held-out Qwen encounters, MediSkill-Evo improves diagnosis accuracy from 61.33 percent to 69.00 percent and treatment-intent coverage from 33.62 percent to 66.44 percent, while reducing automatically scored critical failures from 31.00 percent to 16.33 percent relative to AgentClinic. On 180 hard-isolation conditions derived from 30 cases, target recovery reaches 93.61 percent under patient-behavior pressure, 100.00 percent for temporal evidence, and 92.22 percent for triage red flags. An exploratory 100-case MedSAM comparison evaluates request-gated tool-interface feasibility. These results provide descriptive end-to-end evidence for the complete system on fixed evaluation suites, not causal evidence for an individual bank or clinical validation of the automatic judge.

Recent LLM-agent systems make conflicting design bets: decompose work across many narrow agents, or use one strong tool-using agent. This pilot studies that choice on bounded cross-border VAT determination with reverse charge, where every case has an oracle label and each intermediate decision is independently scoreable. We hold the activity surface fixed (subtasks, tools, I/O schemas, validation checks, orchestrator, base model, and merge policy) and vary only the assignment of subtasks to workers across four orchestrated configurations, from one wide worker to five narrow ones, against S0, a tuned no-orchestrator single agent, with a deterministic rule engine as oracle. The program spans 4,400 runs: a 40-case, five-repeat main sweep, matched-token arms separating prompt-budget from agent-count effects, and three failure-injection arms, all judged against pre-registered falsification criteria. The two intermediate configurations lead on accuracy (0.830, against endpoints at 0.720 and 0.770) but miss the pre-stated bar against the fine endpoint, so the intermediate-optimum hypothesis remains unsupported at pilot scale. The single agent does not Pareto-dominate the orchestrated set. The matched-token criterion fires: the budget-matched single agent lands 6.5 points below the leader, but the interval includes zero, so any advantage is consistent with a prompt-budget explanation. Under injection, availability faults are absorbed at every granularity, with wide-scope restart over-recovering its baseline by +0.160, while one schema-conforming hallucinated record degrades every configuration and inverts the ordering, hitting fragmented configurations hardest. The contribution is a bounded, preregistered pilot heuristic for right-sizing decomposition (place one partition boundary at the dependency-layer midpoint), released with oracle, dataset, harness, raw traces, and analysis pipeline.

Structured data exists in many forms (tables, knowledge graphs, charts, and time series), and converting it into text may involve different generation tasks. However, most prior work on data-to-text (D2T) generation has focused on specific tasks and datasets, relying either on task-specific training data or on the zero-shot capabilities of large language models. We study cross-domain D2T generation in a setting where neither in-domain training text nor test references are available, and where domains, generation goals, and input structures vary substantially. We compare data-driven knowledge distillation (DDKD) against zero-shot inference and fine-tuning on out-of-domain D2T data, and introduce structure-preserving augmentation via structural subsampling and perturbation. Experiments on five benchmarks show that, at constant model size (1.7B parameters), DDKD consistently outperforms both fine-tuning and zero-shot inference. Moreover, the resulting small models outperform a much larger finetuned model on two of the five domains, achieving comparable performance on the remaining three. We further construct QUINTD-5, a fivefold extension of QUINTD-1, and show that simply scaling real target-domain inputs yields only modest gains, whereas our augmentation strategy remains more effective and more cost-efficient for cross-domain distillation.

English Wikipedia is often treated as the default encyclopedic source, yet non-English Wikipedia editions can contain richer locally grounded information for long-tail figures. We study cross-lingual biography enrichment: enriching an existing English biography with facts supported by a non-English biography about the same person. Focusing on women from non-English-speaking contexts, we introduce \textsc{CLAW-4L}, a benchmark consisting of 300 Wikipedia biography pairs linking an English biography with its French, Chinese or Azerbaijani counterpart, along with claim annotations and a fine-grained claim-pair relation corpus. We propose a claim-based enrichment framework that extracts English claims from both biographies, aligns them to identify enrichment evidence from the non-English biography, and rewrites the English biography using the selected claims. Our results show that non-English Wikipedia biographies provide valuable evidence for improving English biography coverage, while lower-resource settings remain challenging.

Video generation is progressing beyond isolated clips toward long-form narratives and interactive worlds, requiring models to preserve identities, follow user controls, and remain stable over extended rollouts. We present JoyAI-Echo-1.5, a unified audio-visual generation system with two purpose-built variants. The long-video variant introduces composable cross-shot memory that aggregates visual evidence across multiple prior shots and speaker cues derived from speech-filtered full-shot audio, enabling persistent character appearance and voice identity across flexible combinations of text, image, and memory conditioning. The world-model variant converts heterogeneous navigation inputs into calibrated metric 6-DoF camera trajectories and injects them through a geometry-aware conditioning pathway, enabling controller-agnostic interaction across flexible viewpoints. To support efficient long-horizon generation, we transform a bidirectional audio-visual backbone into a causal few-step generator using progressive teacher forcing and short- and long-horizon Self-Gradient Forcing on self-generated rollouts. Experiments demonstrate strong performance in both settings. JoyAI-Echo-1.5 achieves improvements over existing long-video baselines in cross-shot consistency, visual quality, text alignment, and speech fidelity. Its world-model variant ranks first on WBench, with an average score of 81.7, and achieves leading visual quality and long-horizon persistence on SANA-WM-Bench. Together, these results indicate that memory, geometric control, and rollout-aware training provide a practical foundation for generating coherent stories and continuously evolving interactive worlds. Project page: https://echo-team-joy-future-academy-jd.github.io/Echo-1.5-Page/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) recognise patterns but do not natively track the path of exclusions that a coherent discourse demands. When an input rests on a fabricated authority, a misapplied mechanism, or a surreptitious analogy, an unsteered LLM tends to engage with it as if it were grounded, and to reify the misstep into any structured output it generates. Logic-Augmented Generation (LAG) with POLANYI++, an LLM-steering method that uses heuristics, ontologies and problem solving methods for tacit knowledge extraction, produces an Extended Knowledge Graph (XKG) in OWL2, but inherits the same vulnerability: a sophisticated nonsensical input is reified into the graph alongside the legitimate triples, and is hardly detectable by automated reasoners since the XKG is generated jointly with the wrong assumptions. We introduce DARKSIDE, a coherence auditing method on top of POLANYI++. It formalises the trail as an explicit data structure of accumulated exclusions over discourse time, complemented by a warrant axis that classifies each named referent as Warranted, Unattested, Misattributed or Fabricated, with an escalation rule that pushes the DelegationRiskAssessment to UNSAFE when the fabricated rate is positive or the unsupported rate exceeds a threshold. We evaluate DARKSIDE as a steering layer over a Gemini 3 on BSBench, a 100-item adversarial corpus of sophisticated-sounding nonsense across software engineering, finance, healthcare, physics and law, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 as an independent judge. The empirical evidence supports an architectural claim: when an LLM forward pass is wrapped in an ontology-mediated negative-trail apparatus, the structural pattern-vs-path gap can be partially scaffolded. The XKG functions as the missing memory, and the warrant axis as an epistemic firewall.

Audio-visual deepfake detection is an actively studied topic, where one of the main challenges is to develop detectors able to generalize across deepfake generation methods. We conjecture that overfitting can be mitigated by extracting multiple high-level cues from the available audio and visual modalities via pre-trained models. We therefore assemble a wide variety of pre-trained models to extract features that encode mouth movements, face parsing, facial expressions, head pose, gaze tracking, heart rate, audio emotion and speech activity. We further integrate both unimodal and multimodal cues via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) backbone to detect deepfakes. We perform in-domain and cross-domain experiments on five benchmarks for deepfake detection (MAVOS-DD, AVLips, PolyGlotFake, BioDeepAV, FakeAVCeleb) to compare our framework (DF-MoE) with state-of-the-art methods. Our results indicate that DF-MoE obtains superior deepfake detection results, surpassing all competing methods. We release our code at https://github.com/vladhondru25/DF-MoE.

Autonomous indoor navigation requires both semantic understanding and precise geometric control. We propose OptiSight, a hybrid framework that combines Vision-Language Model reasoning with deterministic visual servoing through a finite-state Chain-of-Thought architecture. Grounded-SAM localizes open-vocabulary targets, while camera projection geometry converts visual observations into navigation commands without requiring dense mapping. The VLM is queried only at key decision points, reducing computational overhead while geometric control handles continuous navigation. Experiments in AI Habitat demonstrate reliable zero-shot navigation across diverse indoor scenarios, including obstacle avoidance and semantic ambiguity, while operating within an 8~GB VRAM budget. The source code is available at https://github.com/avanalperen/OptiSight-Python-Multimodal-CoT-for-Visual-Reasoning.

Mixed-integer programming (MIP) lies at the core of operations research and industrial optimization. While large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in automated MIP modeling from natural language, they prioritize semantic correctness but overlook formulation strength, severely bottlenecking the efficiency of downstream solvers. We propose FormuEvo, an LLM-guided evolutionary framework for automated discovery of solver-efficient MIP formulations. FormuEvo frames MIP formulation design as evolutionary optimization over the symbolic space of MIP formulations, represented as executable modeling programs, by iteratively generating, evaluating, and selecting stronger candidates via LLM-driven crossover, mutation, and repair operations. To move beyond blind exploration, FormuEvo introduces a solver-informed diagnosis mechanism that exploits fine-grained solver statistics as verbal gradients for targeted refinement. Additionally, a structured memory abstracts prior experience into reusable modeling strategies, avoiding redundant exploration while enabling zero-shot transfer to unseen problems and bootstrapping smaller LLMs. Experiments across diverse linear and non-linear problems demonstrate that FormuEvo discovers formulations that significantly outperform both expert-designed formulations and existing LLM-based approaches, accelerating solvers by up to 5.5$\times$, with distilled knowledge transferring effectively across problems and model scales.

Modeling team interactions in high-stakes environments such as operating rooms is critical for understanding how coordination, communication, and individual behaviors shape team performance and safety outcomes. Existing datasets in this domain are often fragmented across modalities, annotation schemes, and formats, limiting their ability to support integrated analyses of real-world collaborative processes. We address this limitation by introducing an extended multimodal dataset for surgical team interaction analysis, built from real operating room recordings. Starting from an existing corpus, we construct an analysis-ready version of the data by providing speaker diarization, transcripts, and multi-level annotations capturing team performance, interaction processes, and individual characteristics. Team performance is assessed using a standardized surgical teamwork evaluation protocol, while interaction quality and individual attributes are annotated through structured rating schemes covering collaboration, group dynamics, and non-technical skills. To further support the study of coordination breakdowns and performance variability, we introduce counterfactual annotations that describe plausible alternative team outcomes in the presence of observed interaction failures, enabling analysis of how specific behavioral patterns may relate to different trajectories of team performance. In addition, we provide structured temporal and relational representations designed to support computational modeling of teamwork processes and the design of AI-assisted collaborative systems. The dataset is designed to support the study of how individual actions, interaction patterns, and team-level processes jointly contribute to team outcomes in surgical settings, providing a unified resource for analyzing collaborative behavior in high-stakes domains.

Developing competitive deep learning baselines for medical imaging remains a highly iterative process requiring literature review, implementation, experimentation, and expert refinement. Existing automation approaches typically optimize isolated components, such as architecture search or hyperparameter tuning, rather than the complete baseline development process. We present an agentic AI Scientist workflow that combines literature-guided reasoning, automated code generation, and hypothesis-driven experimentation to generate competitive baseline models for medical imaging challenges. The framework is evaluated on four public benchmarks spanning segmentation, classification, and detection. Across all tasks, the Experimentation Pipeline consistently improves validation performance, achieving competitive leaderboard results, including 6th place on both PUMA tracks (15 teams) and 31st place on MILK10k (125 teams). On MIDOG25, the resulting model also demonstrates strong domain generalization across scanners, tumor types, and species. Using the same workflow across all challenges without task-specific redesign, we demonstrate that skill-based, literature-guided agentic workflows can substantially reduce the engineering effort required to develop competitive medical imaging baselines.

Video understanding requires intelligent agents to transcend mere recognition of visual facts and comprehend the underlying intents behind human actions (often termed the "dark matter" of social intelligence). To bridge the gap between visual observation and intent reasoning, we introduce a novel task, IntentQA, and contribute a large-scale VideoQA dataset specifically tailored for this purpose. However, recognizing that standard metrics may overestimate capabilities due to dataset biases, we go beyond simple accuracy to rigorously evaluate model robustness. We augment the benchmark by generating five distinct contrast sets via Large Language Models (LLMs) and introducing a "Contrast Performance Decline" metric. We propose the X-CaVIR (eXplainable Context-aware Video Intent Reasoning) framework, which leverages three types of "Cognitive Context" to enhance video analysis: i) Situational Context via a cross-modal Video Query Language (VQL) module, ii) Contrastive Context via a Contrastive Learning module, and iii) Commonsense Context via a Commonsense Reasoning module. Crucially, to overcome the opacity of traditional black-box models, we refine the integration of LLMs within X-CaVIR by employing a transparent pipeline that synergizes video captions with VQA model outputs. This approach not only improves performance by effectively utilizing rich commonsense knowledge but also renders the reasoning process explicitly interpretable. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our components, the superiority of X-CaVIR over state-of-the-art baselines, and its stability against perturbations on the contrast sets.

Open-world video understanding often requires a model to locate sparse visual evidence and acquire external knowledge that is absent from the video and its parametric memory. While Thinking-with-Videos enables active temporal perception and Deep Research supports multi-step information seeking, the two capabilities are typically developed in isolation. We introduce VideoRover, a unified Video Deep Research framework that iteratively coordinates video cropping, multimodal search, and webpage browsing. Given a video-question pair, VideoRover uses each tool result to select the next action, so localized video clips guide external retrieval and retrieved evidence triggers further video inspection and verification. To develop this capability, we construct an automated data curation pipeline, producing 26K verified SFT trajectories and 3K challenging RL instances. We also introduce VideoRover-Bench, a benchmark stratified by video duration and research difficulty. Experiments on VideoDR and VideoRover-Bench show that our VideoRover-8B-RL achieves performance comparable to proprietary models in the direct-answer setting without tool use while outperforming larger open-source models equipped with the same tool suite. Ablation studies and training dynamics further validate the complementary roles of active video grounding, external retrieval, and long-horizon reinforcement learning.

Continuous optimisation methods need to balance sharing information and maintaining alternative search directions. In this paper, we introduce Mycelial Search (Myco), a graph-structured metaheuristic designed around active tips, community-weighted flow, adaptive cord plasticity, and anchor-based injection. Candidate solutions form an evolving spatial graph in which a Louvain partition distinguishes within-community from cross-community information exchange. Adaptive cord plasticity subsequently modifies active tip-to-tip edges according to their alignment with the local flow. An anchor-based injection mechanism supplements the graph-driven tip dynamics. We evaluated Myco on the CEC 2022 single-objective bound-constrained benchmark suite at dimensions $D=10$ and $D=20$, using 30 independent runs per algorithm-function pair. The comparison includes eleven established optimisers from several search families. Myco reaches competitive results on selected functions across both dimensions. The ablation analysis further shows that community structure regulates the range of graph-based information exchange, whereas cord plasticity controls the persistence of local directional influence. These findings indicate that graph-structured local interaction can support continuous optimisation, while its effectiveness depends on landscape structure and information transfer across local search regions.

Industrial demand changes the paradigms of production. Due to smaller batch sizes and more variations in products, companies face a growing challenge to adopt more adaptive production systems. In particular, robot-based automation is usually static and fails to respond to constantly changing processes. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models are a promising opportunity to mitigate this challenge by generating robot actions based on the observed system state. However, current research either focuses on large models that cannot be computed on premise, creating compliance and security challenges, or use lab-grade robot hardware that obscures exploitation in real industrial settings. In this work, we adapt Hugging Face's SmolVLA for Universal Robots lightweight robots. Further, we release the open-source repository ROS2SmolVLA that implements an interface for ROS 2 to SmolVLA, and makes it applicable for industrial-grade hardware. By this, we allow a lenient adoption into lab and industrial environments. We validate the functionality of SmolVLA for a Universal Robots UR10e using a pick-and-place task and give implementation guidelines. Our findings support that SmolVLA is a well-suited option for small-sized tasks that need to be computed on premise.

Hint-based reinforcement learning addresses reward sparsity in long-horizon agentic tasks by retaining a prefix of an expert trajectory before each rollout, letting the policy explore from a state closer to success. Its effectiveness hinges on the guidance depth: how much of the trajectory to keep. Existing methods treat this depth as a deterministic scalar. Scheduled approaches share one value across samples and ignore per-task heterogeneity; per-sample probing estimates it separately at the cost of extra rollouts. We find that useful guidance occupies a band of depths whose informativeness profile is approximately Gaussian around the band center, rather than concentrating at a single optimal point. We propose Agent-G$^2$, a Gaussian guidance framework that draws the depth per task from a Gaussian whose center and spread are estimated online from rollouts already collected for policy optimization, requiring no probe rollouts or learned depth predictor. The center combines a global baseline with per-cluster difficulty, and the spread tracks within-cluster variance. We evaluate Agent-G$^2$ on ALFWorld and WebShop on Qwen2.5-1.5B / 7B-Instruct. Agent-G$^2$ outperforms the strongest hint-based, hint-free, and Aux-RL baselines on ALFWorld by 2.3 / 3.9 / 7.4 points at under one-third the rollout cost of per-sample probing.

Analog circuit topology synthesis remains challenging because useful designs occupy a tiny fraction of a combinatorial search space, and small structural changes can induce highly nonlinear changes in behavior. Evolutionary algorithms are attractive because they can optimize over discrete circuit topologies using only black-box evaluations, but they often require many SPICE simulations and may converge prematurely. We introduce LLM-SPICEMixer, a hybrid synthesis framework that augments genetic netlist generation with IGEL (Inspiration-Guided Evolution with LLMs), an LLM-based proposal operator. During search, IGEL prompts an LLM with high-performing circuits from the elite set and instructs it to generate a new SPICE netlist, which is then evaluated by SPICE and selected using the same reward mechanism as conventional genetic operators. Thus, the LLM contributes structured topology proposals while simulation remains the source of truth. We evaluate LLM-SPICEMixer on a challenging benchmark task: synthesizing transistor-level circuits that implement a discriminant function for Iris classification. Compared with the genetic framework without LLM guidance, LLM-SPICEMixer improves the median final training reward by 8.4% and the median validation-selected test reward by 8.8%. The best validation-selected circuit achieves 93.3% test accuracy at the nominal tt corner and 85.9% average test accuracy across 17 process, voltage, and temperature corners.

Vision-language model safety benchmarks typically evaluate only final responses: whether a model refuses, warns, or complies. This outcome-level view cannot tell whether a model is safe for the right multimodal reason. Safelooking behavior may reflect keyword-triggered refusal, missed visual hazards, or over-refusal of benign-sensitive inputs. We introduce EviSafe, an evidence-grounded framework for VLM safety that jointly evaluates natural user-facing behavior, explicit grounding in textual and visual evidence, and behavioral sensitivity to counterfactual changes in safety-critical evidence. EviSafeBench instantiates the framework as a controlled benchmark with 1,181 gold image-text scenarios and 2,452 targeted counterfactual variants across eight safety domains and eight risk-source types. Each scenario includes a gold safety decision, evidence annotations, a safe-response policy, and counterfactual interventions. The three-probe protocol queries models with natural-response, evidencereporting, and counterfactual-response prompts, then scores them using an evidence-aware judge. Across eleven evaluated VLMs, natural severity accuracy ranges from 27.6% to 52.8%, relaxed diagnostic consistency from 6.1% to 29.3%, and unsafe-to-safe counterfactual transition success from 30.4% to 58.4%. These gaps show that the evaluated VLMs are not reliably safe for the right multimodal reason and motivate evaluation beyond refusal counts.

Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer. This puts practitioners in a double bind: keeping Policy-KL constrains response behavior and consumes the action-side exploration budget, while dropping it leaves the optimization without an explicit drift control. We argue for an alternative that breaks the dilemma by moving regularization to the input side. As training progresses, the distribution over training queries induced by the current policy drifts unchecked from its pre-RL reference distribution. Concretely, Environment-Regularized Policy Optimization (ERPO) introduces a Query-KL (QKL) term that bounds this query distribution shift, together with a dataset-static reference-derived per-query weight that biases each per-query update toward queries typical under the reference. The QKL gradient flows strictly through the query likelihood; the response score function used by policy-gradient estimators does not appear in the QKL term, so QKL exerts no direct gradient pressure on the response distribution---exploration is preserved. ERPO plugs into GRPO/PPO/REINFORCE-style pipelines without additional forward passes. On six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ERPO replaces the standard Policy-KL regularizer while achieving effective control over query distribution drift, delivering stronger accuracy and substantially more stable behavior under high-temperature decoding and long-horizon training.Our source code are available at https://github.com/alibaba/ERPO

Proprioception in musculoskeletal humanoids is typically estimated primarily from muscle sensing, while the role of cutaneous deformation around joints remains insufficiently explored. In biological systems, mechanoreceptors distributed within soft tissue complement muscle feedback and support reliable joint state estimation. This study presents the design of a biomimetic joint-covering skin with a tissue-like layered structure that integrates pressure- and stretch-sensitive elements within the joint-covering tissue. The proposed skin is implemented on the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi-W, and its independent proprioceptive capability as well as its integration with muscle sensing are evaluated. Experimental results show that the proposed skin alone achieves joint angle estimation with an average error of approximately 3 degrees. Furthermore, integration with muscle sensing improves estimation accuracy. Owing to its joint-covering structure, the skin may mechanically mitigate the influence of external disturbances on the muscles, and the integration of multiple modalities suggests the possibility of contributing to the identification of external stimuli that are difficult to interpret using muscle sensing alone. This work presents a design methodology for biomimetic joint-covering skin and demonstrates that such tissue-structured skin can serve as an effective approach for extending proprioceptive systems in musculoskeletal humanoids.

Fashion complementary image generation (CIG) aims to create garments that stylistically match a seed item based on user intent, making it a natural multimodal grounding problem where models must interpret language in visual context. Existing CIG benchmarks rely on rigid template prompts (e.g., "a photo of a skirt"), failing to reflect natural user queries and obscuring model behavior across levels of linguistic specificity. We introduce fashion complementary image generation with free-form instructions, a multimodal language-grounding setting where a model generates a compatible garment from a seed image and a natural-language instruction. To this end, we enrich three CIG benchmarks with low-, medium-, and high-specificity instructions generated by a vision-language model and validated by human annotators. We instantiate the task with StyleFlow, a Rectified Flow Matching model that jointly conditions on the seed image and instruction within a single multimodal transformer. Across image quality metrics, catalog-alignment analysis, ablations, and human evaluation, StyleFlow consistently produces instruction-aligned and stylistically coherent garments while reducing architectural complexity and inference cost relative to auxiliary-module approaches.

Memory-based anomaly detectors store nominal training patches and score test patches against this memory. A patch selected for coverage therefore becomes a nor- mal reference without a separate check that geometric rarity makes it safe to trust. We probe this coupling with sparse training contamination. Under fixed representa- tions and memory budgets, we compare random, medoid, local, and global coverage selectors. We then use CLEANCON, an out-of-bag cross-image support gate that changes candidate-image eligibility while fixing the representation, absolute mem- ory size, builder, and inference rule. Global coverage strongly over-represents sparse contamination. CLEANCON reduces final-memory contamination to approx- imately zero and increases category-macro P-AP in all 12 matched comparisons. Yet along a retention sweep, the lowest-contamination memory does not attain the highest P-AP; performance continues to improve while contamination rises. Mem- ory contamination therefore does not order the resulting memories by P-AP.Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jw-chae/cleancon.

Learned KV-cache eviction often faces a soft-to-hard mismatch: during training, differentiable gates typically attenuate token contributions, whereas inference saves memory only when KV entries are physically removed. We ask whether the attention substrate affects this soft-to-hard transition. Using GPT-2-scale Transformers trained on OpenWebText, we run a controlled $2\times2\times2$ comparison over attention type, learned gating, and positional encoding. Although sigmoid attention is worse as a dense language model, learned hard eviction changes the useful operating points: sigmoid-gated models delete KV entries with negligible PPL change relative to their own no-eviction references. Under a matched live-cache protocol on the same dense backbones, learned sigmoid gates obtain lower PPL than our H$_2$O and KeyDiff implementations, whereas softmax gates do not uniformly beat these post-hoc methods. The results suggest that attention normalization can substantially affect whether a training-time soft gate transfers cleanly to hard KV deletion.

Memory-based anomaly detectors store nominal training patches and score test patches against this memory. A patch selected for coverage therefore becomes a nor- mal reference without a separate check that geometric rarity makes it safe to trust. We probe this coupling with sparse training contamination. Under fixed representa- tions and memory budgets, we compare random, medoid, local, and global coverage selectors. We then use CLEANCON, an out-of-bag cross-image support gate that changes candidate-image eligibility while fixing the representation, absolute mem- ory size, builder, and inference rule. Global coverage strongly over-represents sparse contamination. CLEANCON reduces final-memory contamination to approx- imately zero and increases category-macro P-AP in all 12 matched comparisons. Yet along a retention sweep, the lowest-contamination memory does not attain the highest P-AP; performance continues to improve while contamination rises. Mem- ory contamination therefore does not order the resulting memories by P-AP

Accurate visual localization on robotic and wearable platforms remains challenging in dense urban environments. Existing methodologies typically rely on GPS for absolute positioning, yet GPS signals frequently degrade in urban canyons due to multipath propagation. Consequently, standard solutions like visual odometry suffer from unmitigated drift over time, while map-matching techniques struggle to acquire the reliable GPS priors they need, on top of being too computationally heavy for real-time edge execution. To address these limitations, we propose Spotter, a robuts and real-time visual localization framework that uses building facades as a reliable source of global geo-reference, while retaining the capability to integrate GPS signals when available. In an offline stage, Spotter processes Google Street View panoramas by semantically segmenting facades and pairing multi-view stereo depth with cartographic data to build a compact metric database. At runtime, query images are matched via a cascaded retrieval and geometric verification pipeline to recover fine-grained global camera localization. We benchmark Spotter on a newly collected dataset of pedestrian sequences acquired with wearable smart glasses across several districts of Barcelona. Experimental results show that Spotter outperforms odometry-based baselines and achieves localization accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art map-based methods while operating at significantly higher frame rates.

General-purpose language models can reason and synthesize knowledge, but complex work also requires sustained interaction with files, information sources, and executable code, together with state maintenance, failure recovery, and verifiable delivery. We call this \emph{working capability}: sustained, verifiable progress toward a real-world objective. Apodex 1.1 develops this capability along two complementary dimensions. \emph{Environment Scaling} expands the diversity and verifiability of executable file, search, and code environments, while \emph{Agentic Coordination Scaling} trains agents to decompose long-horizon tasks, delegate parallel work, integrate asynchronous results, and replan. A shared execution harness and AgentOS maintain task state and provenance across tools and agents, and training turns environment trajectories and coordination traces into reliable behavior. Across complex professional work, finance, scientific research, mathematics, coding, and search, Apodex 1.1 reaches the leading performance band despite using a substantially smaller model than many frontier systems. The 35B-parameter Apodex 1.1 Mini further retains strong working capability in a locally deployable form. These results ground agentic intelligence in useful, verifiable work completed over time and advance our goal of building a \emph{Heavy-Duty Solver} for ambitious, long-running tasks.

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) deliver impressive perception yet still falter on scientific and mathematical reasoning. Parameter-level adaptation is unavailable for closed-weight or on-device backbones, and stateless prompting forfeits any compounding benefit from problems already solved. We propose \textbf{DG-Mem}, a dual-grained agentic memory framework that augments a frozen MLLM with a non-parametric, externally stored memory built once from training-time rollouts and consulted read-only at test time. Motivated by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) account of human memory, DG-Mem factors its store into an instance-grounded exemplar memory and a category-level schema memory of IF-THEN rules, with a transient reflection store mediating their construction so that schemas are synthesized only from abstract reflections, never from exemplar text. Two design choices distinguish DG-Mem: an online concept categorizer that grows the category space incrementally during training rather than committing to a predefined taxonomy, and a Shapley context attribution procedure that decomposes correctness across the entire retrieved rule set and yields a per-rule utility that re-weights retrieval at test time. The pipeline introduces no gradient updates and is deployable on closed-weight or on-device backbones. Across MathVista, MMMU, and MMMU-Pro on four open-weight and proprietary backbones (Qwen3.5-27B, Qwen3.5-122B-A10B, GPT-5-Nano, Gemini-3-Flash), DG-Mem improves consistently over no-memory and competitive memory baselines.

In long-term collaboration spanning multiple meetings, factual states such as decisions and risks are continually revised, overturned, and replaced. Existing long-context methods typically stack the entire history, while many RAG and structured-memory methods organize knowledge as static or append-only facts and rely on semantic relevance at read time. Without explicit modeling of knowledge lifecycles, these approaches may retain conflicting old and new states simultaneously or discard history, leading to stale retrieval and answers that are difficult to verify. We present EvoWiki, an incremental question-answering architecture for dynamic long-form text. EvoWiki decouples offline incremental construction (BUILD) from online structured reading (READ). BUILD captures the intra-meeting micro-evolution from proposal to decision and uses entity version chains and a fine-grained State-Overwrite Protocol to explicitly distinguish current valid states from superseded history while preserving meeting-level provenance anchors. READ bypasses relevance-based Top-k retrieval and performs deterministic entity addressing, temporal resolution, and cross-entity multi-hop aggregation over the complete Wiki to produce grounded and traceable answers. We further introduce CrossMeet, a high-fidelity bilingual benchmark designed to simulate long-term state evolution, covering factual consistency, temporal reasoning, and cross-meeting multi-hop reasoning. Across six datasets and two reader models, EvoWiki improves macro-average Judge Accuracy over the strongest baselines by 9.72 and 10.00 percentage points, respectively. Human evaluation shows that EvoWiki is more robust and factually faithful under frequent state flips, validating valid-state-oriented reading as a reliable approach to cross-meeting knowledge evolution.

The FAIR Digital Object (FDO) framework mandates that metadata attribute values be expressed as persistent identifiers (PIDs) wherever possible, to produce a fully machine-actionable graph in which every reference is resolvable. The Europeana Data Model was designed long before the FDO specification, and it stores most metadata values as plain text. This serves human browsing well enough, but gives an automated agent nothing to follow across records or collections. We present a pipeline that transforms flat Europeana records into an FDO-compliant knowledge graph structured with CIDOC-CRM. Following the FDO specification, we model every heritage entity as a discrete FDO with its own PID, type, profile, and metadata layer. The core technical challenge is automating the FDO-prescribed distinction between values that must become PID references (resolvable entities) and those that may remain literals (terminal leaves such as notes, measurements, and dates). We address this with a large language model that classifies each metadata value, routes it to a controlled vocabulary (Getty AAT, Wikidata, VIAF, PeriodO), and links it to a shared entity FDO. We evaluate using 637 archaeological records from five Europeana providers, processing each with the LLM. The pipeline links 86% of metadata slots, resolving 58.5% of values Europeana had not already enriched. It also merges cross-lingual surface forms that byte-identical matching keeps apart, where 17 of 33 such merges are correct on manual review. Graph connectivity does not separate this from string matching; what distinguishes the FDO graph is that every node is typed and resolvable.

Recent work proposes next-chunk reasoning RL for leveraging no-CoT data---corpora such as worked solutions and textbook derivations that contain reasoning-rich content but lack explicit chain-of-thought annotations. The method trains a model to generate implicit reasoning traces and rewards them by their ability to predict the next chunk of text. While promising, existing evaluations primarily compare against conventional SFT baselines, leaving open whether the gains come from the RL formulation itself or from more effectively exposing the model to no-CoT data. We address this question with a controlled study of next-chunk reasoning RL and a simple but previously overlooked alternative: Mixed SFT, a single supervised fine-tuning stage that jointly trains on no-CoT and long-CoT data. Despite its simplicity, Mixed SFT achieves a clearly higher post-RLVR performance ceiling than next-chunk reasoning RL while requiring over 60 times less training compute. The advantage is consistent across in-domain mathematical reasoning and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Moreover, we show that higher pre-RLVR accuracy does not necessarily translate into higher post-RLVR accuracy, highlighting the need to evaluate no-CoT training strategies in the context of the full post-training pipeline.

Vision-language models typically encode an image into hundreds of visual tokens, incurring substantial inference latency and GPU memory overhead. Existing pruning methods largely rely on attention scores and directly aggregate outputs across attention heads and network layers, making it difficult to characterize evidential uncertainty and conflict. We propose E2S-Pruner, a progressive two-stage evidence-fusion framework for visual token pruning that requires no auxiliary model, trainable parameters, or fine-tuning. In the first stage, E2S-Pruner treats each attention head as an independent evidence source, estimates its reliability from evidence clarity and inter-head consistency, and represents each visual token using three states: important, unimportant, and uncertain. In the second stage, Dempster--Shafer evidence theory is used to quantify inter-layer conflict and fuse complementary evidence from multiple network layers. We further introduce a spatial novelty constraint that promotes coverage of distinct image regions and prevents the retained tokens from concentrating in a few locally salient areas. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, E2S-Pruner retains 98.0%, 96.8%, and 90.6% of the aggregate performance when the average numbers of retained visual tokens are 192, 128, and 64, respectively, while improving throughput by 1.96x and 2.09x under the 128-token and 64-token settings. Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B further demonstrate cross-model generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/taoyu-qian/E2S-Pruner.git.

As Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shifts toward diverse portfolio generation, it is stymied by two critical bottlenecks: flawed measurement of evidence utilization, and suboptimal context budget allocation. We resolve both sequentially. To resolve measurement, we expose a pervasive ``diagnostic illusion'': standard relevance proxies fail catastrophically on hard negatives. We replace them with an efficient causal leave-one-out probe that accurately isolates generative reliance and formally calibrates the structural dilution of LLM attention. To resolve allocation, we deploy this causal probe in a deconfounded factorial grid. We prove that the prevailing strategy of monolithic context widening is an architectural trap penalized by relevance decay. Instead, allocating compute iteratively across multiple sequential generations drives transformative portfolio recall gains of 16.7--20.5 absolute percentage points, scaling robustly up to 32B models. Finally, we unify these solutions into a deployable closed-loop submodular scheduler. Augmented by an attribution-steered contrastive decoder to override LLM attention inertia, our architecture systematically forces fresh evidence integration. By dominating classical open-loop baselines, we establish sequential, feedback-driven orchestration as the definitive paradigm for generative search. Our code, data, and causal measurement instruments are available at https://github.com/PeiYangLiu/ascp.

Traditional clinical prediction models rely on task-specific pipelines and curated, structured data, which scale poorly and underutilize unstructured text. To address this, we introduce future querying, a paradigm that probes whether large language models (LLMs) can function as implicit medical world models by evaluating their ability to answer time-indexed clinical queries about a patient's future. Our framework operates on unstructured clinical documentation using endpoint-agnostic training, enabling a single model to answer diverse clinical queries over patient trajectories without manual feature engineering or task-specific retraining. We show that small, locally fine-tuned open-weight models can match or approach larger proprietary systems, making the framework suitable for privacy-preserving, on-premise deployment. Evaluated on a new synthetic medical reports dataset and real ICU notes from the MIMIC-IV dataset, our results provide encouraging evidence that LLMs can capture aspects of clinical dynamics.

Identifying and classifying environmental mitigation obligations in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydropower licensing documents is a labor-intensive task requiring deep domain expertise. We formulate this as a multi-label classification problem over a structured 135-category taxonomy and address the central challenge of severe label scarcity: 40 of 135 categories have no training examples, and 26 have fewer than five. A supervised Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based pipeline, while effective on well-represented categories, achieves F1 of zero on unseen classes regardless of augmentation strategy. We introduce a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline that conditions classification on retrieved category definitions, enabling zero-shot generalization across the full label space. We further propose a hybrid system that combines BERT detection with RAG classification, exploiting the high recall of fine-tuned detection and the zero-shot coverage of retrieval-augmented reasoning. Evaluated on the full set of 2017 license documents (5,860 paragraphs, 135 categories), the hybrid achieves a Micro F1 of 0.524, outperforming the BERT-only pipeline (0.477) and the RAG-only pipeline (0.416) across all training-support buckets.

We present Mover360, a controllable object manipulation framework for 360° images. Unlike perspective images, 360° images in equirectangular projection (ERP) exhibit horizontal wrap-around, latitude-dependent distortion, and global scene continuity, which makes object-level edits difficult for existing perspective editors to produce and for users to specify. To address this, Mover360 centers on object Translation (relocating a specified object within an existing panorama) while supporting reference-guided Insert and Remove as auxiliary tasks. Its interface unifies point-, bbox-, and mask-guided control by encoding each task into a fixed prompt and a compact, ERP-aligned instruction map. In the default point mode, a single click relocates an object, allowing the model to infer a plausible size, support, and illumination using panoramic context and an auxiliary depth condition. Structurally, Mover360 is a lightweight adaptation of a pretrained diffusion transformer. To generate paired supervision, we construct a UE5 data-generation pipeline with surface-aware object placement and randomized illumination, yielding large-scale paired data and a dual-domain benchmark of synthetic and real panoramas with ground truth for all three tasks. Across both test domains and two evaluation protocols, Mover360 outperforms strong baselines for perspective editing, insertion, and inpainting in reconstruction fidelity, semantic consistency, and distributional quality. Code and our benchmark dataset are available at https://zhonghaoyi.github.io/Mover360/.

Event extraction aims to identify event triggers, classify event types, and extract arguments to construct structured event representations. Despite strong in-domain performance, developing models that generalize robustly across domains remains challenging due to variations in contextual expressions and event schemas. Prior unified and multi-task approaches improve in-domain accuracy but exhibit limited flexibility when applied to unseen domains. Even large language model-based methods that provide full event ontologies at inference time often underperform compared to smaller, task-specific fine-tuned models. We propose a unified multi-domain and multi-task training framework that models heterogeneous event schemas within a single model. Our approach introduces domain conditioning signals, jointly with task-specific prompts, enabling dynamic adaptation to dataset-specific schemas without requiring complete event label sets at inference time. The framework supports both pipeline and end-to-end extraction settings, facilitating efficient task- and domain-level transfer. Experiments on diverse event extraction benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance, strong cross-domain generalization, and practical scalability, while preserving domain-specific precision.

Retrieval can efficiently and effectively augment a frozen vision--language--action (VLA) policy without retraining, yet retrieved text becomes a control intervention once it enters the executed prompt. In a matched audit, raw appended text reduces mean success from 92.47\% to 3.00\%, while meaningful and length-matched meaningless appends both fail on all 500 states. This result identifies \emph{prompt-form collapse}: changing the instruction form, rather than adding useful semantics, can dominate execution. We introduce TOWN-VLA (Think Only When Needed), a prompt-authority interface that separates candidate generation from permission to alter the policy input. A fixed compatibility rule authorizes a canonical compact instruction; otherwise, the interface restores the original Base prompt exactly. Across 900 audited routes, every route follows this contract: 525 routes recover Base with matching hashes, and all 375 authorized prompts preserve the task signature. On a matched $4\times7$ LIBERO-Plus evaluation with 10{,}030 episodes per method, success rises from 69.5\% to 73.1\% ($+362$ episodes; 95\% CI 1.89--5.45 points), improving on six perturbation axes and all four suites. On a physical PiPER arm with a frozen \pizerofive{} checkpoint, success rises from 52.7\% to 78.7\% over 150 trials per method ($p=3.16\times10^{-6}$). Prompt authority is enforceable for a frozen controller; oracle-free admission calibration is the next deployment target.

Historical retrieval for time-series prediction commonly treats past similarity as a proxy for usefulness. We ask a different question: which historical examples should be expected to matter for a query? We define predictive relevance as expected future utility conditioned on inference-time information, using realized futures only during training as privileged supervision. A normalized-pattern retriever first forms a coarse candidate set, and a lightweight residual multilayer perceptron (MLP) learns a listwise future-compatibility target while keeping inference-time scoring strictly past-only. Our method retains similarity-based candidate generation but reranks its candidates by a more predictive relevance criterion. Optimal relevance decomposes into candidate-level utility and query-specific compatibility, motivating Candidate-Prior and Shuffled-Future controls. Across six benchmarks, the reranker improves Pattern retrieval while revealing candidate-global, query-specific, and mixed relevance regimes. On all 12 confirmatory tasks, it improves Pattern and outperforms a matched-protocol Stationarity-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting (SARAF) retrieval rule. Architecture-matched ablations show that correct future supervision, rather than the MLP or added context alone, drives gains in query-specific regimes. Alternative-similarity experiments show that a strong last-value-anchored L2 rule remains superior in some domains, whereas future-supervised relevance is particularly strong where our diagnostics indicate query-specific relevance, especially on Solar. Candidate-pool diagnostics show that this contrast is not explained solely by coarse Pattern retrieval. Overall, historical relevance is structured and domain dependent rather than governed by a universally superior retrieval rule.

Fast and reliable plasma equilibrium prediction is essential for real-time tokamak operation and control, but conventional Grad-Shafranov (GS) solvers are often too costly for real-time deployment. We develop an AI surrogate framework and benchmark five architectures (MLP, CNN, FNO, Transformer, and KAN) on a numerical GS database with 100,000 IID and 10,000 OOD samples. Under a unified protocol, we evaluate accuracy, inference efficiency, model scaling, and robustness. We also establish device-level validation on the EXL-50U tokamak by linking numerical GS solutions, surrogate predictions, and the standard Shape Editor reference to assess simulation-to-device consistency. The surrogates achieve errors of $10^{-3}$-$10^{-2}$ relative to GS solutions, while the GS-to-device discrepancy remains at $10^{-3}$. Transformer gives the best IID accuracy, whereas CNN offers the best balance of accuracy, robustness, and speed, reaching 0.7 ms TensorRT latency. On unseen plasma geometries and parameter regimes, CNN and FNO show the strongest extrapolation stability, with 4%-5% relative $L_2$ error, while models with weaker inductive biases degrade more substantially. Scaling data and model capacity improves interpolation but not necessarily extrapolation, revealing a trade-off between capacity and OOD generalization. Overall, this work provides a systematic, device-consistent benchmark for AI-based GS prediction and practical guidance for selecting reliable surrogates for real-time plasma control and fusion applications.

Biomedical knowledge exists in two complementary but distinct forms: unstructured scientific literature and structured knowledge graphs (KGs). Aligning them is essential for knowledge grounding, evidence retrieval, and KG completion, yet existing methods do not explicitly align free-text evidence with KG triples. We present a unified framework for systematically studying design choices for aligning biomedical text and KGs. With a text encoder and a KG embedding model both frozen, we learn only a lightweight projection between their spaces via a contrastive objective. This enables a fair comparison across six design dimensions: text encoder, KG embedding model, projection head, triple composition, training direction, and hard-negatives sampling. We construct CTD-Align, a corpus of over 22K one-to-one tripledocument pairs linking chemical-gene interactions from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database to supporting PubMed passages. We evaluate alignment on it in two retrieval settings: document-to-triple and triple-to-document. We find that the triple composition and the training direction (i.e., shared retrieval space) have the greatest impact, whereas the text encoder and hard-negatives sampling matter little. Overall, simple choices win: projecting text into the KG space with a linear head over concatenated subject, predicate, and object embeddings performs best. These findings establish lightweight contrastive alignment as an effective, practical foundation for bridging biomedical text and KGs.

Decision-making in high-dimensional, nonlinear systems remains a central challenge in robotics. While model-based methods like Model Predictive Control (MPC) offer sample efficiency and interpretability, their performance degrades when the dynamics model is inaccurate or long-horizon predictions are required. Conversely, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies directly from interaction but suffers from high sample complexity and unstable optimization. Recent advances in sequence modeling have inspired transformer-based decision-making frameworks that can unify MPC and RL, but their training typically faces significant optimization challenges due to highly non-convex loss landscapes. In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates MPC with RL in a sequence decision-making framework and leverages a curvature-aware optimization to efficiently tackle non-convex loss landscapes. MPC provides predictions of locally optimal trajectories that guide the decision transformer, removing the need for extensive offline pretraining. To address the slow and unstable convergence of traditional optimizers, we train the policy in a Riemannian parameter space using an efficient Riemannian (curvature-aware) method, leading to faster and more robust optimization. We evaluate our framework on high-dimensional quadruped control tasks and demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, including TRPO, SAC, and Online Decision Transformer, achieving higher returns and faster convergence.

Large language models are increasingly expected to execute complex workflows whose success depends on maintaining interdependent constraints and producing artifacts that satisfy strict end-to-end verification. Yet successful execution experience is typically lost after a single run, forcing subsequent models to rediscover strategies and failure modes from scratch. We study whether such experience can instead be externalized and reused through EvoMap, where verifier-confirmed execution trajectories are consolidated into structured Gene. To evaluate this setting, we introduce the Long-Workflow Benchmark (LongWoF-Bench), comprising 778 machine-verifiable tasks across code generation, agent-environment synthesis, mathematical reasoning, and rule following. On the 252 tasks with verifier-confirmed Opus trajectories, evolved EvoMap Gene outperform Skill across all seven evaluated models by 8.7-15.5 percentage points, with the gains extending to consumer models from different model families. In contrast, reference-distilled Gene do not exhibit the same advantage, indicating that compact representation alone is insufficient and that Gene utility is closely associated with verified experience provenance. For Claude Opus, Gene reuse also completes 39 more tasks than Skill while reducing solve-time token consumption by 9.9%. Together, these results show that verified execution experience can be retained and shared as a reusable external resource, enabling models to improve long-workflow completion without repeatedly paying the full cost of experience discovery.

We present EchoWM, an omnimodal world model for enterable generative media that responds to continuous navigation while jointly generating 720p video, environmental sound, music and speech. We organize interaction around camera intent: in first-person scenes, it specifies observer motion, while in third-person scenes, camera--character dynamics are learned from data without view-specific controllers. Discrete commands and continuous poses are mapped to a shared metric-scale relative 6-DoF trajectory, with dataset-level calibration preserving motion magnitude across heterogeneous data. To jointly learn audio-visual generation and trajectory control, we construct a complementary data engine and adopt progressive training followed by autoregressive post-training for long-horizon generation. Extensive evaluations show that \model achieves strong trajectory following and high visual quality on public world-model benchmarks, supporting both first- and third-person interaction across varied subjects, and maintaining synchronized environmental sound and speech over long-horizon generation.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in coding capabilities, their potential in cybersecurity has drawn increasing research attention, with closed-source LLMs (e.g., Mythos) delivering advanced cybersecurity capabilities. However, existing open-source efforts remain limited: frontier open-weight models do not provide reproducible cybersecurity training solutions, open-source training solutions focus on isolated tasks and lack scalable agentic data, and scaling agentic rollouts requires strong domain priors. In this work, we introduce \textbf{CyberFactory}, a unified open-source framework that connects data construction, trajectory synthesis, and model training across proof-of-concept (PoC) generation, vulnerability patching, and cybersecurity question answering (CyberQA). CyberFactory transforms public vulnerability artifacts, including CVEs from the wild, into executable and verifiable task instances. It further uses a reusable vulnerability-analysis skill to guide the teacher through source inspection, problem solving with domain prior, and evidence-based validation. The resulting supervision is agentic: the model interacts with tools and target environments and revises its solutions according to execution feedback. Using these trajectories, we train and release \modelname\footnote{\emph{Aegis} is, in Greek mythology, the protective shield of Zeus and Athena; the name reflects the model's defensive, security-oriented purpose.}, which internalizes the skill-guided procedure without requiring the skill at inference time. On CyberGym, \modelname reaches 52.4% Pass@1 under a one-hour budget, improving over its Qwen~3.5 base model by +22.8 points and outperforming the evaluated general-purpose backbones under the same scaffold.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly attractive for automating network configuration, yet their reliability and failure patterns are poorly understood. An essential prerequisite is to assess such agents in a realistic but risk-free environment. Existing benchmarks, however, fall short: they often treat configuration as static command generation or rely on overly simplified settings. Such evaluations understate the core challenges of network configuration, where correctness requires reasoning about protocol complexity and topology dependence. We present NetConfArena, an executable benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in closed-loop network configuration. NetConfArena places agents in emulated multi-device networks, provides a standardized and compact action interface for task execution, and evaluates the resulting network behavior with hidden task-specific executable test cases. The benchmark relies on an LLM-assisted, emulation-grounded pipeline, which converts human-oriented network materials into reusable parameterized task templates. We evaluate representative LLM agents on 480 task instances instantiated from 96 protocol-focused task templates, yielding 3840 execution trajectories, and show that failures are not limited to command errors. The failures also reveal gaps in task-specification adherence and robust planning and execution. These findings suggest two future directions: using validated trajectories as supervision signals to improve foundation models, and designing harness mechanisms that make agent execution more reliable and accountable.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) exhibit strong parallel decoding capabilities by denoising multiple tokens in a single generation step. However, this parallelism comes with substantial computational overhead, as each step requires interactions with all suffix tokens. Existing methods typically reduce this cost by retaining only a local suffix window as a substitute for the full suffix. Despite their effectiveness, these methods overlook the structural heterogeneity across suffix regions and re-initialize suffix tokens with identical representations at each timestep. To this end, we propose a structured suffix modeling method for efficient DLM inference. Specifically, we divide the suffix into three regions, i.e., the local, middle, and tail regions, and retain different numbers of suffix tokens in each region according to their structural roles. Moreover, we incorporate the decoding results from the previous step into the suffix token representations at the current step, allowing them to carry evolving denoising information across generation steps. Notably, our method is training-free and orthogonal to several existing acceleration techniques, such as parallel decoding strategies and KV cache. Empirical results across multiple benchmarks on three DLMs demonstrate that our method can further accelerate DLM inference and improve performance in most cases. In particular, in long-sequence inference, our method achieves up to a \(72.81\times\) speedup when combined with other acceleration techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/zifengcheng/SSM.

Counterspeech effectively neutralizes the impact of online hate. Although prior work explores automated counterspeech generation, it largely emphasizes stylistic control while treating hate speech as homogeneous, overlooking that distinct forms of abuse require fundamentally different counterspeech strategies. To address this gap, we introduce FIRE (Factuality Informed Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework) that first decomposes hate speech into one of the five distinct categories (misinformation, stereotype, conspiracy, dehumanizing, non-factual), and then maps it to a targeted counterspeech style. To facilitate FIRE, we curate FactualCS, a novel dataset of $4,784$ instances that provides the annotations regarding hate categories, reasoning traces, and evidence mappings, which are critical elements for grounded generation that are missing in prior work. A comprehensive evaluation across $28$ baseline configurations demonstrates that FIRE significantly surpasses existing methods, despite using compact agents ($<$2B). FIRE achieves a $\sim$ $12 \%$ and $\sim$ $11 \%$ improvements in factual and category-specific accuracy respectively, while simultaneously reducing toxicity by $\sim$ $11 \%$ relative to the strongest baselines. Further human evaluation confirms that responses generated by FIRE are significantly preferred over the strongest baselines, underscoring its effectiveness for real-world deployment. These findings show that decomposing the underlying intent of hate speech is essential for generating safe, effective, and contextually precise counterspeech.

We present the first LLM-powered multi-agent system for autonomous fault management across millions of optical links in production AIDCs. Refined via SFT and continuous memory evolution, it achieves 97.7% F1 and over 60% fault-incident reduction, outperforming SOTA LLMs on a ten-week field data evaluation.

Vision-based wheat phenotyping requires repeated measurements under deployment constraints, from growth-stage recognition to wheat-head counting and organ segmentation. Plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) provide a common architecture for these tasks, but quadratic attention limits high-throughput and edge inference. Training-free token merging is attractive because it can be inserted into trained models without retraining. We provide a systematic benchmark of ToMe and Mutual Pair Merging across growth-stage classification, wheat-head detection, and wheat-organ segmentation, measuring task quality, throughput, token count, and peak GPU memory, with additional Raspberry Pi 5 measurements. The benchmark reveals a clear hierarchy: classification is highly merge-tolerant, while detection and segmentation are constrained by repeated instances, thin organs, dense boundaries, reconstruction, and runtime overhead. Optimized attention backends can erase apparent speedups, so deployment value must be profiled on the target runtime rather than inferred from token count.

Achieving 360° coverage is critical for the visual perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Fisheye cameras offer a cost-effective solution by enabling full surround coverage with as few as two sensors. However, existing multi-view fisheye datasets are limited, and synthesizing rare corner cases typically requires computationally expensive 3D simulations, hindering the training. While generative models have achieved significant success in standard perspective imagery, their application to wide-angle distortion remains unexplored. In this work, we formally introduce the novel problem of multi-view fisheye image generation conditioned on volumetric semantic representations and present two distinct methods. We first propose SyntheOcc-FE, which adapts the SyntheOcc architecture to fisheye data. While effective, this method is constrained by the scarcity of fisheye datasets, which limits its generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose our second method, MIVIFI (multi-view fisheye), which leverages cross-domain learning with Equirectangular Projections. By bridging the gap between dataset domains using KITTI-360 fisheye images alongside nuScenes multi-view standard images, our approach enables high-fidelity manipulation of scene content. This framework enables the structural modification of semantic occupancy inputs to introduce or eliminate specific actors and facilitates the rendering of diverse meteorological conditions and illumination scenarios absent in the limited fisheye datasets. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve robust photorealistic multi-view fisheye image generation and highlight the specific advantages of our cross-domain strategy for handling data scarcity.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models often expose spatial grounding through autoregressive text coordinates or opaque action tokens, creating brittle interfaces between multimodal reasoning and robot execution. We present Pointing-VLA, a typed hidden-state spatial readout built on Embodied-R1. Geometry-specific heads predict normalized points, object-functional grounding (OFG) heatmaps, and visual trajectories without serializing geometry as text. For the evaluated Bridge/WidowX and physical pick-place deployments, an explicit execution contract assigns PICK to source-conditioned OFG and PLACE to Pointing, providing direct stage-aligned spatial targets. Pointing-VLA achieves SOTA performance on Bridge/WidowX, averaging 72.9\% across the evaluated four-task set without Bridge-specific finetuning under collision-enabled CuRobo execution. Pointing and OFG show complementary strengths across native and cross-dataset evaluations. The OFG/contact readout transfers to NORA-1.5, preserving or improving success while reducing recorded controller time by more than 20$\times$; typed heads are also 6.68--6.90$\times$ faster than Embodied-R1 text decoding on a shared external suite. When integrated as spatial guidance for a $π_{0.5}$ action policy, Pointing-VLA raises autonomous real-robot success from 52.7\% to 80.7\% across three visual contexts. These results establish typed spatial readouts as an efficient, inspectable interface between embodied reasoning and robot execution.

Poor illumination obscures small, low-contrast defects in UAV bridge imagery, reducing the reliability and operational flexibility of automated inspection. This paper investigates whether degradation-aware image restoration can improve bridge damage detection under low-light conditions and transfer from synthetic degradations to real inspection scenes. We propose DaL- MoE, a detector-agnostic restoration front end trained with an ISP-aware low-light synthesis pipeline and equipped with degradation-aware guidance estimation and complementary experts for noise suppression, color adjustment, and structural-detail recovery. On paired synthetic data, DaL-MoE achieves 23.12 dB PSNR and 0.8482 SSIM, increasing YOLOv11m box mAP50 from 0.3097 to 0.4923 and mask mAP50 from 0.2281 to 0.3529. On real low-light UAV imagery without paired normal-light references, sim-to-real evaluation shows improved defect visibility and more complete detections than direct inference on raw low-light inputs. Future work will develop low-light-aware bridge damage detectors with stronger cross-scene generalization across bridge sites, imaging conditions, and illumination levels.

Pnar, an Austroasiatic language spoken by approximately 0.4 million people in the Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, lacks the digital corpora and natural language processing (NLP) resources. This paper presents the first machine translation study for the English and Pnar language pair. Using articles collected from the Wyrta newspaper, we built a parallel corpus comprising of 10,234 sentences and trained phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems the models using 9,563 parallel corpora under three configurations for each direction using Moses, GIZA++ , KenLM, varying lexicalized reordering and minimum error rate training (MERT) tuning. The models are evaluated on a held out test set of 371 sentences, the best performing system achieves a BLEU score of 14.97 (chrF2: 33.42, TER: 77.60) for Pnar to English and 11.16 (chrF2: 31.38, TER: 93.51) for English to Pnar, establishing the first quantitative benchmark for this language pair. Lexicalized reordering improves translation quality by 3.73 BLEU points for Pnar to English, reflecting the structural shift from the source language's SOV word order to the target language's SVO order, whereas MERT tuning degrades BLEU performance under low resource conditions. Finally, we analyze the remaining translation errors, including morphological out of vocabulary (OOV) words, long-distance reordering and Khasi code mixing and discuss future directions toward neural and multilingual machine translation for Pnar.

We study a hybrid proposal--correction architecture for reduced-order PDE forecasting in which a pure-state quantum reservoir computer (QRC) predicts latent coefficient dynamics and a PINN-based physics-informed corrector (PIC) refines local rollout windows. The method is evaluated on Burgers and Kuramoto--Sivashinsky (KS), with KS as the primary chaotic benchmark. On KS, QRC+PIC consistently improves over QRC alone in RMSE, NRMSE, and PDE residual, while Burgers highlights a regime in which simple baselines remain strong. These results suggest that QRC proposals with local physics-informed correction are a viable benchmark-dependent reduced-order forecasting strategy.

Molecular science represents an important frontier for LLM-based agents. Unlike general agents that mainly operate over natural language, code, or web environments, molecular LLM agents must perceive, reason about, and act upon chemical objects across symbolic strings, molecular graphs, 3D conformations, spectra, simulations, and wet-lab measurements. Their capabilities depend on chemically faithful molecular perception, an LLM-centered agent framework, domain-specific tool grounding, and computational or experimental feedback, in addition to planning and tool use. This work develops a conceptual framework for molecular LLM agents from two complementary perspectives. First, we introduce an architectural view of molecular-agent design, covering molecular representation and perception, the agent framework, domain-specific toolboxes, and learning and optimization. Second, we propose a scientific autonomy ladder inspired by staged autonomy in engineering systems, categorizing agents into four levels: L1 assistive or fixed workflows, L2 adaptive computational agents, L3 feedback-aware physical experiment agents, and L4 scientific-agenda agents. Together, these two perspectives establish a comprehensive framework for comparing existing molecular LLM agents, identifying missing capabilities and deployment risks, and guiding the design, evaluation, and deployment of future agents in molecular discovery workflows.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging paradigm in content-based image retrieval that enables users to formulate compositional queries by combining a reference image with an auxiliary modality, usually text-based. This approach supports fine-grained search where the target image shares structural elements with the user-provided image while incorporating the modifications specified by the auxiliary text. Conventional CIR methods rely on multimodal fusion to combine visual and textual features into a joint query embedding, which requires training modules that align composed queries with the targets. In this work, we propose PeFuse (for pseudo-fusion), a training-free framework that leverages pretrained Diffusion Models and Multimodal Large Language Models to bridge modalities via generative conversion. We introduce two novel strategies: uni-directional and bi-directional conversion, which convert CIR into four single-modality retrieval problems. These methods reformulate CIR as either intra-modal or cross-modal single-query retrieval tasks, bypassing the need for dedicated task-specific training. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that converting CIR into text-to-image retrieval tasks is more effective than alternative conversion strategies, achieving competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining high flexibility thanks to replaceable components of the conversion pipeline. These results highlight the effectiveness of the pseudo-fusion paradigm for zero-shot CIR. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/StevenXuf/PeFuse4CIR.

Recent progress in the field of TinyML has demonstrated that low-power hardware based on microcontrollers can achieve bird species monitoring in real time based on acoustic sensor data for an entire breeding period on a single battery charge. However, the state of the art on low-power microcontrollers was so far limited to binary classification of a single species. In contrast, real fauna monitoring deployments often target multiple species simultaneously. To address this challenge we develop PolyChirp, an approach combining biological domain expertise, automated dataset curation, neural architecture optimization and novel hardware to achieve multiclass bird species detection in the wild. PolyChirp is based on newly designed tiny multiclass models that leverage recent microcontrollers and hardware acceleration with a neural processing unit (NPU). We evaluate the predictive performance of these models, and we measure their computational performance -- memory footprint, latency, energy consumption -- on common microcontroller hardware. Our results demonstrate that PolyChirp not only outperforms state-of-the-art on single species binary classification, but also achieves robust classification of up to 10 species simultaneously, while still fitting with the resource envelope of a sensor that must remain operational in the field for a full season on a single battery charge.

Classical Chinese poetry composition has long valued Tuiqiao, the iterative refinement of words, imagery, and prosody. However, many current AI poetry systems follow a one-shot generation paradigm, which reduces users to prompt providers and weakens their creative agency. We present Jiuge-Tuiqiao, an interactive human-AI collaborative system for classical Chinese poetry composition. The system is designed around a triadic model: user-driven control, ancient-guided evidence, and AI-assisted generation. Users can lock characters or lines, receive real-time prosody feedback, and obtain interpretable refinement suggestions grounded in high-frequency collocations, PPL-ranked classical lines, and structured knowledge extracted from classical encyclopedias. This design turns AI from an autonomous generator into a background assistant that supports the user's own process of poetic refinement. Preliminary experiments and user feedback suggest that Jiuge-Tuiqiao improves controllability, interpretability, and user engagement in classical poetry composition.

Media bias detection relies on definitions and examples that specify what counts as bias, yet these specifications often vary across datasets or remain implicit, even when given the same name. Such variation makes it unclear whether models trained for the same bias category learn the same construct or different phenomena, a problem largely overlooked in prior work. We examine how definition choice affects bias annotation in a between-subjects experiment with 354 participants and a parallel evaluation with four LLMs. Participants and models rate six news articles across four bias categories using definitions that vary in conceptual framing and elaboration. Across 8,496 human and 28,800 LLM ratings, we find that the conceptual target of a definition drives annotation divergence, while construct-preserving elaboration does not: conceptual framing significantly shifts annotations for humans and does so even more strongly for LLMs. We discuss implications for construct specification in annotation protocols and prompt-based measurement, and consider how definitional sensitivity may propagate to downstream classification beyond media bias. We also release MUDD, the Multi-Definition Bias Detection Dataset.

Large language models increasingly operate over large collections of tools, functions, APIs, and specialized agents. As the candidate action space grows, a function-calling model must process more schemas, consume more prompt tokens, and distinguish among increasingly similar or irrelevant alternatives. We study a complementary systems strategy: reduce the candidate set before language-model inference while leaving the downstream model unchanged. We introduce AgentWeave, a deterministic pre-inference routing layer that constructs a bounded model-visible action space using eligibility, requirement, capability, and routing signals. We evaluate AgentWeave with a frozen BFCL-derived routing-pressure protocol using the public MadeAgents/Hammer2.1-1.5b model. On 48 fresh BFCL V4 multiple-function tasks, AgentWeave achieves 6/48 (12.5%) native BFCL successes, whereas all-tools, deterministic random top-8, and semantic top-8 baselines each achieve 0/48. The paired success difference is +12.5 percentage points with a 10,000-resample paired bootstrap 95% confidence interval of +4.17 to +22.92 points and exact McNemar p=0.03125. Relative to all-tools exposure, AgentWeave presents 70.18% fewer tools, uses 61.70% fewer input tokens, and exhibits 50.95% lower mean local-model latency. The result is deliberately narrow: this is a BFCL-derived routing-pressure study rather than an official full BFCL leaderboard score, and absolute task success remains low. The evidence nevertheless shows that candidate-space construction can materially affect a fixed model's function-calling behavior and motivates evaluating routing as a distinct stage before model reasoning.

With the rapid progress of diffusion models and large-scale video generation, generative world models are increasingly expected to replace traditional simulators, including physics engines, game engines, and reinforcement-learning environments. Yet the remaining distance from generation to simulation lacks a systematic assessment. We present a capability-based study using an external yardstick: eight capabilities of a traditional simulator, namely asset construction, physics engine, interaction, controllability, stability, state feedback, diversity, and evaluation metrics. We trace three main technical routes--latent dynamics, video generation, and joint-embedding prediction--and map exactly 200 representative works published from 2018 to June 2026 onto these capabilities. Our analysis shows that world models have achieved functional substitution in interaction and controllability for specific scenarios, but remain short of traditional simulators in formal guarantees of physical laws, structured state feedback, and reproducible long-horizon evolution. State feedback is the most neglected cross-route shortcoming: only 6 of 163 implementation papers expose a runtime interface for querying entity states or physical parameters. We identify six research directions: formalized physics, a unified action interface, first-class state feedback, long-horizon stability, downstream-utility evaluation, and cross-route hybridization. Project page: https://github.com/AtongWang/world-model-simulators

Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns, and reusable tools. However, because each injected Skill expands the prompt of every query, an effective Skill benchmark must determine not only whether an agent can solve a task, but whether the Skill should have been injected at all. We introduce WebDev-Skills-Bench and use it for a controlled empirical study of 31 public WebDev Skills on 50 Web-Bench projects and 1,000 ordered tasks. The benchmark compares four matched conditions, including a length-matched irrelevant control and leave-one-out component ablations. To isolate Skill effects from prompt-length artifacts, we place only SKILL.md in the prompt while mounting auxiliary files into the agent workspace. Across four models, target Skill injection reduces mean Pass@2 by 1.3% to 4.2%, lowers task completion depth, and increases token cost by 72% to 394%, with gains in only 17% to 36% of Skill-project pairs. Length-matched controls reveal two failure modes: some models are length-distracted, where an equally long irrelevant Skill reproduces most of the loss, while others are content-misled, where prompt length is neutral but Skill content still lowers Pass@2 by 1.1% to 1.4%. Further analysis shows that losses concentrate on easy early tasks, Skill rankings transfer weakly across models, and anti-pattern rules outperform example-heavy content within helpful Skills. These findings recast a matched Skill as a hypothesis about a particular Skill-project-model triple rather than a portable asset, reframing injection as a per-deployment routing decision and making length-matched controls and per-model audits a minimum standard for Agent-Skill evaluation.

Cultural understanding in video means more than recognizing what is visible; it requires grasping the symbolic and temporal significance of cultural concepts. We decompose this into three abilities: naming what a concept symbolizes, visually recognizing it on video, and locating its sub-events in time. Existing video-cultural benchmarks tend to test what is seen, collapsing these three abilities into a single score that hides the bottleneck. We introduce the Cultural Moment Benchmark (CMB): 306 expert-curated concepts from seven countries in Southeast Asia across five categories. We evaluate each concept through three stages, one per ability. Given a description, Stage 1 (S1) selects from four candidate concept names, Stage 2 (S2) selects from four candidate video moments, and Stage 3 (S3) predicts the start and end times of the moment in a video. To keep each stage focused on a distinct ability, we use three design choices: semantic-similarity distractors (S1, S2), unlabeled video moments (S2), and free-form localization on a different example video (S3). Across six vision-language models, failure modes vary by ability and modality. i) Even the strongest closed-source models score below 30% when all three stages must be correct; ii) The three abilities do not fully cascade: naming a concept correctly helps half the models recognize it on video, but recognizing it has little effect on locating the sub-event in time; iii) Audio is complementary, redundant, or distracting depending on the concept, more often distracting in non-Latin-script countries; removing both audio and subtitles hurts Games and Music the most. Our 14-rater human study shows that even Expert raters score below chance on concepts from a neighboring country, indicating that CMB requires country-specific cultural knowledge. CMB acts as a diagnostic harness, attributing failures to a specific ability or modality.

Large language models (LLMs) now support forecasting systems that combine language-based reasoning with temporal data, evidence retrieval, external tools, and iterative prediction. We investigate LLM-based forecasting agents, meaning systems in which a language model contributes to a scored prediction about a future or currently unobserved target. We organize architectures into three groups. Standalone LLM workflows operate on encoded time series or event context. Tool- and retrieval-augmented agents incorporate external evidence. Hybrid systems pair LLMs with statistical or foundation models. We then review training methods and evaluation protocols. We examine negative as well as positive evidence, including sensitivity to small input perturbations, ablations in which the LLM component does not improve accuracy, and benchmark gains that may reflect contamination instead of temporal reasoning. We cover applications in finance, weather, health, energy, and operations, and we summarize the benchmarks and datasets used for evaluation. The evidence indicates that measurement is a central limitation. Future work requires calibration under distribution shift, contamination-resistant live evaluation, explicit reporting of cost and accuracy together, and methods for handling feedback between deployed forecasts and the outcomes being forecast.

Navigating large, photorealistic 3D apartments from raw pixels is widely considered infeasible for plain reinforcement learning. We build an agent that does it anyway, estimating its own pose from the camera alone. The agent has to reach several target objects in sequence, and their positions change between episodes, so it must explore to find them. It builds on our earlier object-centric topological controller, which still read the agent's true pose and its object detections from the simulator. Here we replace that true pose with an onboard, object-centric estimate. For each object we keep a bank of ORB features that, when the object is seen again, yield a rough pose measurement, which a minimal Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) fuses with a motion model. As on a real robot, the executed motions are noisy. The estimate drifts, but the agent and the nearby objects drift together, so a locally consistent pose is enough to follow each short edge and then home in visually on the target, which lets us replace full SLAM with a much smaller model, closer to how biological navigation appears to work. In the photorealistic Habitat simulator, the agent reaches its target objects from vision alone, with a pose that only needs to be locally consistent.

Semi-structured $N$:$M$ sparsity has emerged as a practical direction for accelerating large language models (LLMs). However, existing learnable-mask approaches incur substantial parameter and memory overhead, limiting their scalability to large models and aggressive sparsity regimes. In this work, we revisit semi-structured pruning from a perspective that reconciles efficiency with scalability. We propose Reservoir of Importance (RoI), a lightweight semi-structured pruning framework that learns sparsity masks through differentiable subset sampling. Unlike prior methods that model full categorical distributions over all feasible $N$:$M$ patterns, RoI introduces a compact-logit parameterization for sparsity mask learning and performs sampling without replacement to select masks, thereby reducing trainable parameters from combinatorial complexity to $\mathcal{O}({M})$. As a result, RoI requires 1.5-8.75$\times$ fewer learnable parameters and significantly lower memory cost, while remaining fully aligned with hardware-friendly sparsity patterns. Extensive evaluations across multiple scales of the Qwen2.5 LLM family (0.5-7B parameters) demonstrate that RoI achieves competitive performance with strong memory efficiency, stability, and scalability to more aggressive $N$:$M$ sparsity patterns, offering a practical path toward efficient LLM deployment.

Web search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise, but deep research tasks expose a recurring failure mode: once an agent has produced a query, plan, or intermediate conclusion, it becomes less objective when later judging the consequences of that same action. We term this phenomenon \textbf{inertia bias}. To make it measurable, we introduce the IBIS benchmark, which controls the search observations while varying whether the model is evaluating the outcome of its own prior action. We find that models are substantially worse when they ``own'' the preceding search step, showing that self-authored action history can systematically distort subsequent judgment. We further show that this bias propagates into two forms of system-level degradation: search noise at the worker level and contextual noise at the manager level. To address this problem, we propose NIS-Agent, which applies context isolation at the two decision points most vulnerable to inertia bias: webpage triage and final-answer validation. Across GAIA, WebWalkerQA, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-zh, NIS-Agent achieves competitive performance while reducing token cost by 33\% compared to our baseline. We further train an 8B model to be intrinsically more resistant to inertia bias; under the same NIS-Agent framework, it attains average performance comparable to GPT-4o on deep research benchmarks.

LLM agents remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks, where small local failures can compound over extended interactions and lead to overall task failure. Although external harnesses can substantially improve robustness, harness design remains a manual and expensive process that requires searching over a large space of prompts, tool configurations, and control logic. We propose AutoSaddler, an automatic harness optimization framework that formulates harness improvement as an offline learning problem and iteratively updates the harness using failure signals from mini-batches. AutoSaddler combines failure-trace diagnosis, structured patch generation that treats the harness as code, and validation-based update selection. Experiments on GAIA2, SWE-Bench Pro, and Terminal-Bench 2.0 show that AutoSaddler substantially improves agent performance over the corresponding base harnesses, achieving gains of 9.0, 9.6, and 10.0 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies further suggest that effective harness optimization benefits from three ingredients: deep debugging rather than shallow reflection, targeted modifications rather than unconstrained editing, and generalization-aware selection rather than trajectory-specific repair. Together, these results suggest that automatic harness optimization is a promising path toward more performant and reliable agent systems.

RoboRacer offers a standardized platform for research using 1:10-scale autonomous vehicles, but the variety of available tracks hinders the process of acquiring policies. Although existing occupancy-grid simulators allow for the quick addition of new maps, they fail to include physical contact, while 3D simulators require each circuit to be implemented as a separate asset, thus limiting their scalability. In order to overcome this issue, we have developed RoboRacer Arena, a system that creates 3D racing environments directly from occupancy maps. Our method starts by using a flood fill algorithm to extract the drivable corridors and to identify the track boundaries, which are then used to establish the barriers. A distance field is calculated to define the collision boundaries. The track surfaces, collision properties, and materials are assembled into a USD stage, which allows for the automated and reproducible generation of the environment in Isaac Sim. The input maps can be obtained from SLAM sessions, from rescaled Formula 1 circuits, or from natural-language descriptions. When the input is based on natural language, we use Gemma 4 31B to generate a track specification without specifying any coordinates or geometry. To guarantee consistency and reproducibility, we apply geometric screening, procedural generation, and raster-level validation. The simulation environments are initialized in a time range of 1.18 to 2.48 seconds, with the initialization time increasing linearly as the raster size increases. In 30 matched trials involving 10 tracks and 3 seeds, 21 maps were generated and all passed validation. RoboRacer Arena currently contains 130 tracks and supports the generation of tracks from natural language. In benchmark tests, the system attains 8,707 vehicle-steps per second when using 256 parallel rigid-body vehicles, excluding the time taken for rendering and policy execution.

As on-device LLM agents evolve into personal copilots, the mobile operating system has become a key testbed for this paradigm, making rigorous capability evaluation essential. Yet existing benchmarks fall into two camps, each with a critical blind spot: GUI-centric benchmarks test surface-level screen manipulation while overlooking background tool use and long-horizon planning, whereas static function-calling benchmarks rely on offline API matching that is detached from real runtime constraints. To close this gap, we present \textbf{MobilePA-Bench}, an interactive, stateful, and tool-centric benchmark for evaluating the tool-calling and planning abilities of mobile planning agents. MobilePA-Bench runs on an executable sandbox that maintains live application databases and returns structured feedback, spanning $13$ functional domains and $212$ realistic mobile tools. Beyond basic tool use, it evaluates a central planning agent along three advanced dimensions: \emph{(1)~Sub-agent Collaboration}---decomposing a complex task and delegating specialized work to capable sub-agents; \emph{(2)~Memory Usage}---recalling stored memories, user profiles, and past preferences to resolve implicit requests; and \emph{(3)~Skill Usage}---invoking pre-packaged composite skills instead of planning every step from scratch. Extensive experiments show that current frontier LLMs remain unreliable in mobile settings: performance drops sharply under strict tool ordering, permission limits, and unexpected runtime errors. By pairing an interactive function-calling sandbox with evidence-based verification, MobilePA-Bench serves as both a practical diagnostic benchmark and an interactive foundation for agentic reinforcement learning---accelerating the development of dependable mobile agents.

Controlling restricted knowledge in large language models is essential for model alignment and safe deployment. Test-time unlearning avoids costly retraining and parameter updates by intervening only during inference. However, existing activation-editing methods apply isolated pointwise corrections, overlooking how autoregressive generation continually reconstructs hidden states from the prompt, cache, and generated prefix. Consequently, later states may return to restricted knowledge regions after a locally successful correction, causing restricted knowledge re-entry. In this work, we propose Stateful Test-Time Unlearning via restricted knowledge boundary control (ST$^2$U), which formulates test-time unlearning as trajectory-wide boundary control. ST$^2$U first models restricted knowledge boundaries in low-dimensional invertible coordinates while leaving orthogonal non-target components unchanged. During inference, ST$^2$U monitors risk along the trajectory, applies minimal boundary corrections with contextual anchoring, and propagates historical correction states across tokens to mitigate knowledge re-entry. This trajectory-wide control enables more persistent forgetting while preserving non-target capabilities and limiting inference overhead. Across three benchmarks and three model families, ST$^2$U delivers the strongest overall balance, combining best or second-best retention with competitive forgetting and substantially less restricted-knowledge re-entry than test-time baselines (13.76%-19.84% versus 46.50%-59.10%).

We study how an AI system can identify and model other agents in its environment from observation alone, which is a capability necessary for cooperative behaviour in the real world. This problem is less constrained than inverse reinforcement learning and remains largely unexplored. We propose a framework that uses a reinforcement learning agent, trained on an independent task as a prior about agentic dynamics, to perform agency detection and policy reconstruction.

Multi-agent debate can improve large language model reasoning by eliciting diverse hypotheses and critiques, yet its performance is often constrained by weak moderation. Common pipelines rely on fixed budgets, agreement-based stopping, or untrained judges, leading to redundant deliberation and unreliable evidence aggregation. We cast moderation as a meta-cognitive process, monitoring debate utility, controlling deliberation, and adjudicating a final answer, and introduce Meta-Moderator, a learnable framework that dynamically regulates debate and decides when to finalize an answer. Meta-Moderator is trained independently of the debaters via outcome-driven policy optimization, making debate regulation an explicit capability rather than an incidental effect of prompting. Across five benchmarks, Meta-Moderator outperforms widely used decision layers and transfers across tasks and system configurations. Further analyses show that it allocates debate more selectively and reduces mis-aggregation after informative hypotheses appear.

Multilingual LLM outputs can vary across sociocultural contexts. However, evidence of cultural grounding can be misleading: identity labels may be inferred from explicit or indirect textual cues, while names and wording can reveal the source language. Treating all these signals as evidence of cultural grounding may obscure potential biases. We present a human-validated, multi-agent audit that separates three questions: whether outputs reproduce social biases, whether identity groups are represented differently, and whether outputs reflect cross-cultural patterns. The study analyzes 89,253 outputs from 12 LLMs in English, French, and Chinese, spanning 18 occupations and three task conditions. We find that bias representation varies systematically across languages and tasks. Removing direct identity cues sharply reduces identity-label prediction in English and Chinese, but has a much smaller effect in French. Across all language-genre settings, the cultural context associated with the source language receives the highest average relevance score, with moderate agreement between automated and human ratings. However, the ability to identify the source language drops substantially after translation and again after masking names. Without these controls, multilingual audits may mistake surface cues for cultural understanding, leading to misleading conclusions about cross-cultural variation and bias. Our audit offers a practical framework for separating such shortcuts from more meaningful cross-cultural patterns.

An LLM router picks which model should answer each query. The appeal is that models fail on different questions. Whatever single model is best overall still gets some wrong, and another model in the pool gets many of those right. Getting that choice right every time is the ceiling, and a router is an attempt to approach it. However, recent work reports that routers do not get close. Across 21 routing methods on five benchmarks, sharply different designs land within a fraction of a point of each other, and all of them stay far below that ceiling. Learned routers often fail to beat simply always calling the strongest model. We ask what those missed questions have in common. We set fourteen models to answer all 294 questions, with 7 task types across 3 languages: Korean, English and Hindi. We ran the whole matrix twice, changing nothing, but 5.37% of the 4,116 model-question pairs came out scored differently anyway. Run-to-run movement like that is normal, and we argue that a small win does not show that routing did anything, ours or anyone else's. Counting an answer correct only when the model got it right in both runs, 29 questions on this matrix can be improved with routing. Every correct-answer count here is on that rule. Task type accounts for most of them: assigning each task type one model in advance, chosen once and never updated, improves 21 of the 29. Splitting each task type by language improves 2 more and leaves 6 of 294 unoptimized. That handful is what a learned router would have been built for, and it is smaller than the run-to-run movement above, which is a share of pairs rather than of questions. The static table we adopted answers 262 of 294 questions at $3.33 per run, against the best single model's 245 at $7.69. All of this is fitted and scored on the same 294 questions with no holdout.

Large language models (LLMs) require effective unlearning to address privacy regulations and safety concerns. However, achieving precise forgetting without compromising general utility remains challenging. Existing sequence- and token-level methods penalize target outputs without modeling their context-dependent retrieval paths, which can disrupt linguistic structure or suppress benign knowledge. We present ADU, a fine-grained, training-based framework that shifts unlearning from token erasure to contextual attention-pathway decoupling. Exploiting the functional distinction between local and global attention heads, ADU identifies preplan positions that retrieve persistent sensitive anchors and fixes their candidate paths under the original model. It then trains attention-projection adapters to suppress attention mass along these paths while preserving local-attention structure and retain-set language modeling. Post-training activation exchange tests whether the modified attention-output module transmits the learned forgetting effect. ADU achieves the strongest aggregate performance among evaluated baselines on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks, including a Forget Quality of (0.93) on TOFU. It preserves 87--98% of model utility (92.9% on average versus 81.9% for baselines) while reducing side effects in benign contexts.

Federated fine-tuning of on-device large language models (LLMs) faces a significant computing burden. To overcome this limitation, split learning (SL) has emerged as a promising solution, which offloads the primary training workload to a powerful server. However, SL requires exchanging high-dimensional activations and gradients between clients and the server, resulting in prohibitive communication costs. To overcome this challenge, we propose SplitLite, a communication-efficient split federated LoRA fine-tuning method that exploits the low effective rank structure of consecutive-epoch activation and gradient residuals. Our key finding is that, when LoRA uses rank $r$ updates in parameter space, the activation and gradient residuals of the same data sample between adjacent epochs also exhibit effective rank-$2r$ and rank-$4r$ structures, respectively. By revealing this property, SplitLite transmits only quantized truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) residual factors, thereby significantly reducing both activation uplink and gradient downlink traffic. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark across a series of advanced on-device LLMs demonstrate that our method reduces activation uplink communication costs by up to 93.5\% and total communication costs by up to 83.7\%, without performance degradation.

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a scalable paradigm for long-video understanding, but existing systems typically inherit a fixed temporal granularity from video segmentation when constructing their retrieval index. We argue that this design unnecessarily couples indexing granularity with evidence granularity: coarse representations can often suffice for locating relevant temporal regions, while fine-grained evidence remains important for downstream reasoning. We propose \textbf{Density-Aware Graph Construction (DAGC)}, a training-free approach that decouples a query-independent coarse retrieval index from the original fine-grained evidence space. DAGC constructs a compact, density-adaptive graph index by merging visually redundant neighboring chunks, while preserving mappings to the original temporal units. Retrieved coarse regions are subsequently expanded back to the original chunk granularity for fine-grained evidence refinement and answer generation. Experiments on MLVU, VideoMME, and LongVideoBench show that DAGC retains only about 40--50\% of the original graph nodes and achieves $1.3$--$1.7\times$ end-to-end wall-clock acceleration while preserving approximately 99\% of the original QA performance. The gains transfer across different LVLM backbones and video RAG pipelines, suggesting that long-video RAG need not maintain the same temporal granularity for indexing and evidence reasoning.

Fully online embodied learning requires synaptic adaptation to acquire new behaviors while preserving previously learned dynamics during ongoing interaction. We extend the Predictive-Coding-inspired Variational Recurrent Neural Network (PV-RNN) to continuously adapt its synaptic weights and propose Free-Energy-Gated Plasticity (FEGP), which regulates the effective learning rate according to variational free energy. In real-time physical human--robot interaction, a randomly initialized network acquired three cyclic motor patterns without offline pretraining, replay, or task-boundary signals, with all three patterns emerging in autonomous rollouts. Controlled experiments over ten randomized teaching streams and five network initializations per stream showed that FEGP substantially improved repertoire coverage and retention of previously acquired patterns after they left the recent observation window. Neither a constant learning rate matched to the gate's time-averaged effective rate nor replay of the same gain values with disrupted temporal organization reproduced these improvements. These results indicate that the temporal allocation of plasticity relative to model--environment mismatch, rather than simply its average magnitude or distribution, is critical for maintaining previously acquired behaviors during continued online learning.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on diverse vision-language tasks, but transformer-based visual encoders split images into fixed-resolution sub-images, compromising object integrity in lightweight VLMs. Existing methods only focus on the visual modality and fail to dynamically preserve the integrity of prompt-relevant regions, limiting performance. In this work, we observe that the early-layer image-text entropy of cross-modal attention strongly correlates with answer grounding quality and task accuracy. Building on this finding, we propose \textbf{ENCORE}, an entropy-guided framework with two components: At inference, an \textbf{Entropy-based Cropping Strategy} (ECS) evaluates a small set of candidate crops and selects the one with minimal entropy, preserving contiguous regions relevant to the prompt. At training, \textbf{Entropy Regularization Training} (ERT) augments next-token prediction with an entropy term that sharpens attention on key visual tokens while down-weighting irrelevant ones. Experiments on ten VQA benchmarks show that ENCORE, fine-tuning only 0.14\% of parameters, achieves an average 1.43\% accuracy gain and state-of-the-art performance among recent 2B-parameter VLMs. Our code is released in https://github.com/baokou-fw2/ENCORE.

Training large language models is costly. How low a loss the same compute can ultimately reach depends on how each step's gradient is converted into a weight update; the rule that performs this conversion is the optimizer. From SGD and AdamW to the recent Muon, effective update rules have mostly been shaped by engineering intuition and then selected on benchmarks. Muon semi-orthogonalizes the momentum matrix before applying the update and has kept breaking records on public training benchmarks; yet why the semi-orthogonalized direction works, and over how long a history the momentum should average, are two questions at present answered mainly by experience. Here we treat the weight matrix during training as a responsive medium with memory and build a physical model for it, in which both questions find answers: the semi-orthogonalized direction is the maximally dissipative response under an output-side safety budget, which explains why it works; momentum is the internal stress accumulated by the medium; how long it should average is set by the relaxation of this stress, and a real medium relaxes on more than one timescale, the simplest form being one fast and one slow. On this basis we propose the Bi-Maxwell optimizer. The framework further yields a testable consequence: gradient directions change fast early in training and more slowly later, so the optimal memory length should grow with training stage; step-by-step measurements of a proxy for it by a read-only probe across 8 independent training trajectories are consistent with this consequence. Replacing the memory kernel alone, from a single timescale to two, brings training to the target loss in noticeably fewer steps on a public large-language-model optimizer benchmark.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made general-purpose robot manipulation increasingly plausible by conditioning robot actions on natural-language instructions. A key test of such generality is whether policies actually follow language instructions. Yet many manipulation benchmarks leave this ability underdetermined: the intended object or destination is often visually salient or uniquely feasible, allowing policies to succeed without grounding the instruction. We argue that instruction-following evaluation should be text-indispensable: multiple actions should be visually and physically plausible, while only one should be consistent with the language instruction. We introduce InstructMove, a text-indispensable benchmark for instruction-following manipulation. InstructMove instantiates this principle in pick-and-place scenes with semantic distractors, decomposing instruction following into category identification, attribute discrimination, spatial reasoning, and compositional pick-and-place. InstructMove supports a train-eval protocol with InstructMove training data and held-out evaluation tasks, with additional diagnostics for language dependence. Experiments with representative VLA policies show that InstructMove provides a controlled testbed for diagnosing visual shortcuts and that InstructMove simulation data can improve real-world instruction-following manipulation performance. Code: https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/RoboOrchardSim

Robot manipulators are commonly engineered around a decoupled motion-generation stack: a planner computes a collision-free path and a lower-level controller tracks the resulting reference. This separation is computationally convenient, but it can produce references that are difficult to execute under actuator limits, tracking error, model mismatch, and small obstacle clearances. We present CSymPlan, a certified symbolic planning and control framework for high-DOF manipulators with two complementary implementations: an offline implementation that precomputes certified reach-avoid feedback policies for known workspaces; and an online implementation that synthesizes or updates symbolic policies at runtime from changing task and perception information using parallelization. The offline implementation reduces the manipulator dynamics to a sampled perturbed double-integrator model in operational space through feedback linearization, treats torque-realization errors, modeling inaccuracies, and measurement uncertainty as bounded disturbances, and refines the synthesized symbolic policy to the Franka FR3 through a quantization--lookup--torque realization pipeline. The online implementation uses the same abstraction and refinement interface, but replaces the precomputed policy table with a runtime pFaces request--synthesis--execution loop. In randomized simulated benchmarks and perception-driven Franka FR3 experiments, both implementations complete reach-avoid tasks with zero safety violations; whenever no certified action exists, the robot holds, replans, or stops safely instead of executing an uncertified command.

Knowledge graphs are often accompanied by ontological class hierarchies that encode valuable semantic information, yet many link prediction methods either ignore such hierarchies or incorporate them indirectly through additional graph edges. Recent work introduced hierarchy-aware graph neural networks (GNNs), which use semantic losses derived from box embeddings to encourage satisfaction of subclass relationships during GNN-based representation learning. While this approach has shown promise for biological regression tasks, its effectiveness for knowledge graph link prediction has not been investigated. In this paper we evaluate hierarchy-aware semantic losses on link prediction across three benchmark datasets: AIFB, CoDEx, and BioKG. We combine graph neural network encoders with box-embedding-based semantic losses that encourage learned representations to better satisfy ontology-derived class hierarchies, and compare this approach to both standard link prediction models and models incorporating subclass relations as graph edges. Across all datasets, hierarchy-aware semantic losses significantly improve mean reciprocal rank (MRR) and consistently outperform models that incorporate hierarchy information through additional subclass edges. Relative to the baseline GNN models, MRR improved by 7.6%, 2.4%, and 15.5% on AIFB, CoDEx, and BioKG, respectively. Furthermore, semantic losses consistently outperform the alternative of augmenting the graph with subclass edges. These results are consistent with ontology-derived class hierarchies providing complementary information to graph structure, and suggest that encouraging hierarchical consistency through semantic losses is an effective and comparatively parameter-efficient mechanism for improving knowledge graph link prediction.

Fault-tolerant navigation for thruster-actuated robots requires online adaptation to failures that are neither binary nor fully observable: thrusters may degrade continuously, fail dead, or jam stuck-open. Classical fault detection pipelines require dedicated sensors unavailable at deployment; oracle controllers that observe the true failure state are equally impractical. We show that privileged critic training is sufficient for sensor-free fault adaptation: giving the PPO value function access to the true degradation state dgt during training, while the actor receives only standard task observations, shapes a policy that compensates for failures at deployment without any dedicated fault sensing. We propose RAFT (Recurrent Asymmetric Fault Tolerant), a policy with recurrent memory trained with a privileged asymmetric critic. Evaluated on a floating-platform robot (8 thrusters, 1 reaction wheel) under up to four simultaneous thruster failures, RAFT achieves 70.2% success at four concurrent failures, closing 84% of the gap from a failure-naive baseline (4.8%) to an oracle policy that sees the full degradation state at deployment (82.4%). All code, checkpoints, and data are open-source.

Embodied multimodal agents must answer from growing observation streams under a fixed per-decision token budget. We formalize this constraint through four resource walls: a perceptual Shannon wall for bounded state, a horizon wall for query-independent frame selection, a round wall for non-adaptive retrieval, and a conditional composition wall for fixed-depth inference. We introduce ASP, a training-free wrapper for frozen multimodal models that combines a capped structured state, a verbatim episodic index, and query-conditioned budget allocation with iterative access. Following a pre-registered protocol, we evaluate seven open-weight models from 3B to 31B on SEW-Bench, a license-free synthetic long-horizon walkthrough benchmark constructed to instantiate these walls. The registered natural-video benchmarks were not run because their frames require dataset agreements; our evidence therefore concerns access mechanisms, not natural-scene perception. Under a 4,096-token decision budget, ASP reaches 75 to 94% episodic retrieval accuracy, compared with 3 to 19% for equal-budget query-independent sampling, and budget reallocation outperforms quadrupling the sampling budget on every backbone. However, the full three-component architecture does not validate channel duality: removing the compressive state raises the flagship mean from 35.4 to 58.0, ASP does not outperform the verbatim-only baseline on any backbone, and two of four pre-registered falsification criteria fire. These results show that query-conditioned access, rather than parameter count or context growth alone, is decisive under a fixed budget, while prompted online compression does not earn its cost in this setting.

Large language model (LLM) agents rely heavily on knowledge encoded in model parameters or presented as unstructured context. In domain-specific tasks, this leaves important semantic connections implicit. This often results in incomplete evidence use and brittle multi-step decisions. Ontologies offer a way to externalize domain concepts and relations as machine-interpretable structures, but constructing task-usable ontologies traditionally requires substantial effort from domain experts and is difficult to scale. Automatic construction is also challenging: an ontology that appears semantically plausible may not contain the relational structures needed for actual decision making. We present OaK, an ontology-as-a-kernel framework that dynamically constructs and refines task-oriented ontologies for LLM agents. Given task requirements and training data, OaK constructs an ontology and its knowledge graph, generates task-adaptation functions for graph reasoning, and uses judge feedback to iteratively refine both. By making relevant concepts and relations explicit, the ontology grounds knowledge retrieval and multi-step decision making. We evaluate OaK on TravelPlanner, CRMArenaPro, and ToolQA. Results show that OaK improves standard LLM agents, strengthens evidence grounding, and boosts the reliability of multi-step reasoning.

Embodied Reasoning constitutes a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, serving as the basis for autonomous perception, reasoning, and interaction within physical environments. Recent studies have shifted the paradigm of embodied reasoning from static perception toward dynamic exploration, where agents acquire task-relevant information through interactions with the environment. However, existing active reasoning approaches generally generate exploration trajectories incrementally without long-horizon planning. Even recently emerged test-time scaling frameworks often resort to myopic, single-step lookaheads, which struggle to resolve the delayed feedback inherent in complex, occluded spatial environments. To address this limitation, we propose ParallelWorld, a multi-horizon test-time scaling framework for embodied reasoning. Instead of greedy, single-step trials, ParallelWorld empowers agents to simulate and evaluate multi-step future trajectories in parallel before committing to an action. Specifically, we introduce a verifier-guided tree-search paradigm. Starting from the current state, ParallelWorld branches into multiple parallel trajectories and rolls them out continuously across a multi-step horizon. At each simulation step, a verifier agent evaluates the intermediate state transitions, dynamically pruning unpromising branches and prioritizing paths with the highest information gain. Once the multi-step prospective simulation is complete, the agent synthesizes the long-horizon outcomes to commit to the optimal action sequence. Finally, an answer agent performs reasoning over the selected trajectory to produce the final reasoning. Extensive experiments on ESI-Bench demonstrate that ParallelWorld consistently improves active perception and reasoning performance.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as multi-step agents, where explicit reasoning supports task decomposition and tool coordination but also accumulates self-generated text. Over long trajectories, this text can dominate the context and suppress visual evidence, creating textual debt. We observe that reasoning becomes redundant once task-relevant visual evidence is grounded, while stale hypotheses can misguide later inference when grounding remains uncertain. Pruning must therefore remove redundant text without discarding visual evidence. We propose SPARE, a Kullback--Leibler (KL)-guided framework for pruning accumulated reasoning in multimodal tool-use agents. SPARE uses a compact task-state summary as privileged diagnostic context. For each candidate segment, it replays the same model under the original and summary-conditioned contexts. Reverse-KL divergence from on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) then tests whether the summary sufficiently covers the segment without disrupting future reasoning. We further fine-tune the summarizer with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), enabling more compact summaries, broader coverage, and more aggressive pruning. Across multi-step visual tool-use benchmarks, SPARE achieves the highest average accuracy among pruning methods while removing 37.89--64.58\% of reasoning tokens. This favorable accuracy--context trade-off shows that reducing textual dominance restores reliance on visual evidence and mitigates over-conditioning on self-generated language.

Coding agents are increasingly evaluated not only by whether they solve a task, but also by how they execute it. However, existing process-level evaluations often treat action prediction, task uncertainty, and step attribution as if they were the same problem, which makes it unclear what such evaluations actually measure. In this paper, we introduce a measurement framework for process evaluation in coding agents and instantiate step-level causal attribution with SCAE, a replay-based estimator derived from a structural causal model of agent execution. Our framework combines prefix-conditioned identification, replay/intervention-based estimation, and controlled judge-information manipulation to study process evaluation at the action, task, and step levels. Experiments on 499 file-localization episodes from 12 repositories show that next actions are driven primarily by execution provenance rather than code-graph transitions, execution uncertainty is structured at the task rather than step level, and full-trace judges exhibit systematic collider bias, suggesting that current process evaluation often measures semantic relevance rather than certified causal contribution.

While the top model on OmniDocBench now reaches 96.34% overall on printed-document parsing, the ability of current models to handle challenging handwritten documents remains largely uncharacterized. Existing benchmarks focus on isolated text or formulas, overlook handwritten tables and real-world degradation, and report aggregate accuracy without explaining why models fail. We present WildHandBench, a benchmark containing 500 handwritten documents across three structures (free text, tables, formulas), four languages, and nine real-world scenarios. We introduce a Prior-Driven Error (PDE) metric that quantifies whether errors originate from language priors rather than visual evidence. Evaluating 18 state-of-the-art models together with calibrated human baselines, we find: (1) the best model achieves only 71.85% overall; (2) humans outperform all models yet the gap is narrow (77.09% vs. 71.85%); and (3) model errors are qualitatively different from human errors -- 63-91% of model errors are prior-driven versus only 49% for humans, exposing systematic reliance on language priors that conventional accuracy metrics cannot capture.

Concept-bottleneck controllable generation routes multi-attribute control through a low-dimensional concept code that, at deployment, must be synthesised from a target attribute configuration. We study this problem in concept-bottleneck text generation under multi-axis compositional generalisation, comparing three ways to obtain the inference-time code: classifier inversion against the encoder heads, reference-text encoding, and a post-hoc label-conditioned prior. Since a concept code admits no direct LM-fluency term, regularising inversion must instead constrain the code toward the encoder's training distribution. We therefore test bare inversion and three regularised variants: label-agnostic and label-conditioned Mahalanobis penalties, and a conditional normalising-flow density baseline. Every inversion variant we test underperforms a simple post-hoc prior fitted to per-combination encoder means on the same checkpoints, across three backbone families spanning $124$M to $8$B parameters. The bare form of classifier inversion also silently collapses to chance, traceable to a directly measured off-manifold code. We validate this diagnosis on real-world benchmarks and under external evaluators, enabling fair comparison with published baselines.

Floating waste in inland waterways threatens aquatic ecosystems and requires timely monitoring under cluttered, multi-object conditions. Existing aquatic-waste datasets provide limited geographic coverage, sparse multi-instance annotations, and little supervision beyond boxes and labels. Compact vision-language models (VLMs) therefore remain insufficiently evaluated for jointly localizing, classifying, counting, and explaining floating waste. We introduce WADE, a reasoning-annotated benchmark containing 2,167 images from rural Bangladesh, 13,608 bounding boxes, and ten waste categories. Each annotation is associated with class-level recognition rules covering visual cues, likely confusions, and discriminative features. We evaluate six VLMs under zero-shot, two-shot, reasoning-guided, and fine-tuned settings using detection, counting, and hallucination metrics. For resource-efficient adaptation, we jointly fine-tune Qwen3-VL-2B on boxes, labels, and reasoning chains using QLoRA. Fine-tuning increases recall from 0.0248 to 0.2339 and F1 from 0.0257 to 0.2163, while reducing image-level hallucination from 0.6836 to 0.0883. However, over three-quarters of instances remain undetected, establishing WADE as a challenging benchmark for dense floating-waste grounding with compact VLMs.

Large language models are increasingly used to propose research ideas, yet the prevailing ways of judging such ideas supply no shared decision rule: free-form judging sways with style and position, and scoring against a later paper rewards recovery of one realized trajectory. We introduce a benchmark that carries a proposal from Literature to Test: the Lit2Test benchmark centers on a six-field contract organized around a falsifying outcome, so that every proposal precommits the observation that would prove it wrong, making its quality decidable in the first place rather than merely arguable. Built prospectively from 200 real-paper neighborhoods, Lit2Test elicits proposals from four frontier models and compares them through 1,200 pairwise comparisons judged blind in both presentation orders. The protocol audits its own reliability through diagnostic controls and bounded human calibration, with three annotators corroborating the conclusions within explicitly stated reliability bounds. Lit2Test recovers a strict ranking of the four models in all 10,000 bootstrap replicates, and the separation comes from the quality of the proposed tests and metrics rather than from surface fluency. We release the benchmark, construction pipeline, and audit artifacts for public use.

Federated learning has traditionally been formulated as a single-objective optimization problem, primarily focused on maximizing model utility. In real-world applications, however, machine learning models often need to optimize multiple and potentially conflicting objectives simultaneously. This motivates federated multiobjective optimization (FMOO), which provides a natural framework for jointly handling multiple task-specific objectives in federated learning. In this paper, we propose a momentum-based variance-reduced algorithm for federated multiobjective optimization. The method incorporates a momentum-driven gradient estimator into the local updates to reduce the variance of stochastic updates, leading to an improved convergence rate. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that the expected Pareto stationarity measure of a randomly selected output iterate decays at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-2/3})$, improving upon the $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/2})$ rates established for existing methods such as FSMGDA and FedCMOO. Numerical experiments on federated multiobjective optimization benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of the proposed algorithm.

Gaze is increasingly used as an input signal for vision and multimodal models, yet no consensus exists on how to represent it across datasets. Raw traces preserve detail but are noisy and device-dependent, while coarse event labels are easy to model but can discard local motion structure. We formulate event-aligned, fixed-horizon angular displacement as an interpretable, event-conditioned motion vocabulary and compare it with event-only, spatial, absolute-angle, learned vector-quantized, and continuous representations. To assess transfer alongside target predictability and token collapse, our evaluation combines next-token prediction with target-domain regret, low-order target references, paired bootstrap, order sensitivity, motif overlap, and frozen structural probes. In an event-aligned headset benchmark, angular-motion tokens have lower target-domain regret than frozen-codebook VQ tokens in one transfer direction, while the reverse direction is inconclusive. The probes reveal complementary representation properties, and event-only tokens show that low perplexity can retain little motion information. On a third egocentric dataset, a matched comparison of I-VT, native, and frame-span interfaces shows that event construction materially changes transfer: native events have the lowest regret into EGTEA, while frame-span events have zero motif overlap and fail severely as a source. Motion-based tokenization therefore provides a compact representation for event-aligned egocentric gaze streams, while the evaluation identifies how target predictability and event construction shape cross-dataset conclusions.

We present TSWAP, a deployed eight-language conversational wellness advisor grounded, via retrieval-augmented generation, in a verified knowledge base of Thai traditional medicine and certified wellness providers. An unmodified open-weight LLM (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on vLLM) is grounded on a ~30.6K-chunk Thai index by a hybrid dense-sparse retriever with cross-encoder reranking; a first-turn query classifier forces tool-based retrieval for entity lookups; a rule-based safety layer enforces medical scope and Thai emergency routing; and all eight languages are served zero-shot with translate-then-retrieve. We release the first Thai traditional-medicine/wellness retrieval benchmark (50 questions with gold document IDs; Recall@5 = 0.88), production QA logs (91.1% test-retest pass over 259 cases), and a 71-question frontier no-retrieval probe showing what each grounding pillar contributes: without the safety prompt the backend model family produced a full drug-dosing schedule and complied with out-of-scope requests, and without the knowledge base it produced zero verifiable provider recommendations. We further report two transferable deployment findings: English-calibrated 4-bit AWQ quantization corrupts Thai tone marks, and forced-retrieval routing is necessary for reliable grounding.

We develop a finite-width geometric framework describing how learned feature geometries are organized, transported, and selectively aligned in deep neural networks. Incompatibility among weight-generated covariance, gates, and backward sensitivities is quantified through three families of commutators: between gates and covariance, between sensitivities and covariance, and between average gradient outer products (AGOPs) and neural feature matrices (NFMs). An exact layerwise identity decomposes the sensitivity-covariance commutator into four sources: downstream transport, adjacent-layer imbalance, pointwise sensitivity fluctuations, and nonlinear gate-covariance interactions. The AGOP-NFM commutator is a singular-value-weighted transport of the internal commutator, explaining why observed feature-side alignment alone does not determine the internal geometry from which it emerges. Buffered localized energies resolve mixing between separated covariance subspaces. We establish spectral-gap, projector-evolution, and stabilization estimates, and formulate conditional Lyapunov principles that yield decay under explicit geometric error-bound or intrinsic-damping assumptions. These criteria do not follow from gradient flow alone and clarify why risk reduction need not imply commutator collapse. Analytic examples and numerical experiments exhibit factorization of spectral and activation geometry, transient growth, and cancellation among nonzero sources. In tested finite-time regimes, cancellation dominated by a negative transport-imbalance interaction persists across depths, widths, and two regression benchmarks. Spectral alignment therefore appears as a layer- and scale-dependent compatibility phenomenon governed by transport, interaction, cancellation, and possible damping, rather than a universal consequence of training.

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) generate textual responses directly from speech, offering an alternative to cascaded systems. Despite recent advances, existing SLMs still exhibit weaker instruction-following behavior and limited generalization across diverse tasks compared to text-based language models. Our analysis shows that speech and text representations in current SLMs remain weakly aligned despite strong downstream performance, indicating that structural differences between continuous, temporally varying speech and discrete text remain insufficiently addressed. To address this, we propose a simple framework that decouples length mismatch from semantic alignment and encourages closer correspondence between speech and text representations. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate competitive performance against strong baselines, underscoring the importance of explicitly addressing structural differences between speech and text in SLM training. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jaykim9870/Do_SLMs_Hear_Speech_as_They_Read_Text.

Recent monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) streaming reconstruction methods have achieved impressive performance by balancing reconstruction quality and efficiency. However, extending these frameworks to underwater scenes remains challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as light attenuation and scattering, which degrades camera pose tracking and distorts scene geometry. To address these challenges, we propose AquaFlow, a monocular Gaussian Splatting streaming reconstruction framework for efficient and high-fidelity underwater reconstruction. Specifically, AquaFlow fine-tunes a 3D vision foundation model on large-scale underwater data for robust pose and pointmap estimation, and introduces a medium-guided incremental Gaussian initialization strategy for streaming mapping. Furthermore, we develop a streaming-compatible hybrid scene representation that integrates structured, distance-conditioned neural Gaussians with a physics-inspired optical model to compensate for underwater image formation effects, enabling accurate scene reconstruction. We evaluate AquaFlow on a comprehensive dataset of 62 diverse underwater trajectories, collected from both public benchmarks and in-the-wild web videos across various scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AquaFlow achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering performance, reducing average localization error by 13.2% and improving PSNR by 4.74 dB compared to WaterSplat-SLAM.

Robotic navigation in human environments requires a spatio-temporal semantic representation that can rec- oncile open-vocabulary perception with long-term environmental changes. While foundation models provide strong zero-shot recognition, their predictions are intermittent and view-dependent, and naively integrating them into mapping pipelines leads to identity drift and stale semantics over time. We present SuperMap, a 4D spatio-temporal mapping framework for language-guided navigation that integrates high-frequency geometric SLAM with asynchronous open-vocabulary perception. Our core contribution is a consistency-driven mapping engine that combines 3D-aware instance association/re-activation with a principled existence-and-label confidence update to maintain stable object identities and prune outdated map content under occlusions and scene changes. SuperMap produces a queryable 4D scene-graph representation that interfaces naturally with Vision-Language Models by supporting compositional queries over object semantics, relations, We demonstrate SuperMap on benchmarks and real robots, including dynamic scenes with appearance/disappearance and relocation, and provide ablations and runtime analysis. We release the full system as open-source to provide the community with a deployable baseline for open-vocabulary spatio-temporal mapping. Project website: superodometry.com/supermap.

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to generate a pixel-level mask for the object specified by a language expression. Recent methods based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often rely on one-pass coordinate prediction for visual localization, which serializes continuous spatial locations as discrete text tokens and may lead to localization bias and alignment errors. To address these issues, we propose DRAgent, an MLLM-driven discriminative reasoning (DR) framework for RES. Instead of requiring the MLLM to generate localization coordinates, DRAgent first constructs a detector-generated candidate space and then uses the MLLM as a visual-semantic target discriminator. Specifically, the MLLM performs reliable target selection among potential distractors through a two-stage DR mechanism, which first screens high-recall candidates and then performs instance-wise verification. The selected target box is subsequently used as a spatial prompt for a foundation segmentation model to produce the final pixel-level mask. Furthermore, we construct a self-consistency-filtered reasoning-chain data pipeline for LoRA-based fine-tuning, providing more reliable supervision for enhancing the MLLM's discriminative reasoning capability. Experiments demonstrate that DRAgent achieves competitive performance on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg.

Societies of interacting language-model agents offer a controllable and repeatable way to study collective behaviour at scales that would be difficult to test with people. Their scientific value, however, depends on whether a social mechanism that works in a small group still operates when thousands of agents interact, and testing this directly requires costly large-scale runs. Here we introduce an audit that predicts a mechanism's fate as a population grows. It asks how often the mechanism can act, whether agents use the information it supplies, and whether the measurement itself creates apparent scale effects. Controlled experiments show that a single structural term can decide whether reciprocity, consensus or punishment survives scaling. For gossip, the population at which the mechanism fails is set by the reach and lifetime of its messages. In language-model societies, agents respond not only to social information but to how it is expressed: counts and percentages led to different scale behaviour. Predictions made before execution held on third-party code and a second model family, while a failed prediction exposed the boundary of the finding. The audit provides a prospective way to decide which social mechanisms can be interpreted across population scales.

Multimodal speculative decoding accelerates vision-language models by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens for parallel verification by a larger target model. Existing methods typically condition the drafter on a fixed visual interface, such as a predefined visual-token budget or a static compressed representation. However, our controlled visual-budget analysis shows that visual demand varies substantially across tasks and decoding stages, which means more visual input is not always beneficial. Actually, insufficient evidence may weaken visual grounding, while excessive context adds overhead and may disrupt drafting. We propose FOVEA (Focused On-demand Visual Evidence Adaptation), a cache-friendly approach that builds a reusable visual memory and dynamically retrieves a bounded subset for a draft state. A cumulative-mass rule determines both how many and which entries are selected. The selected entries are aggregated into a visual readout and fused with the current draft hidden state through a lightweight gated residual correction. Rather than inserting visual tokens into the autoregressive context, the correction modifies only the representation passed to the language-model head. Experiments across multiple vision-language backbones and multimodal benchmarks show that FOVEA improves draft acceptance and end-to-end decoding speed, achieving up to $2.13\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding. These results demonstrate that state-conditioned evidence retrieval is an effective alternative to reusing a fixed visual representation throughout multimodal generation.

Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline as a fixed upstream constraint. We empirically test whether two extensions to standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), entity-graph linking and iterative reformulation, absorb or amplify these errors. Using four English accents synthesized through neural TTS, we evaluate four RAG configurations on three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA and MuSiQue) against a clean-text oracle. Although the structurally richer configurations generally retain higher absolute F1 under ASR input, both extensions amplify the error: the F1 gap from clean text to the highest-WER accent is 36-67% larger under their combination than under naive dense retrieval, on all three benchmarks. The dominant failure mode is corruption of one or more query entities, accounting for 87-96% of degradation cases on 2WikiMultiHopQA across all four methods. Two lightweight surface-form mitigations leave most of the gap intact, indicating that downstream retrieval structure amplifies remaining entity errors. We release code and data at https://github.com/ZhenghuaBao/spoken-multihop-rag .

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have leveraged internet-scale pretraining and task-focused finetuning to achieve strong performance on long-horizon tasks, they often struggle with non-Markovian tasks that require memory. Existing approaches to memory typically involve additional Vision-Language-Models (VLMs) for long-term memory management, introducing a memory bottleneck and a fractured training pipeline. Conditioning on multiple historical frames can provide the VLA with access to more descriptive features of past scenes, but can degrade performance if frames are chosen at arbitrary, fixed intervals. To address these limitations, we present UniMem, a framework that unifies high-level, multimodal memory and low-level control under one backbone. UniMem employs an event classifier for memory updates, a keyframe encoder for dense spatial memory, and a keyframe caching technique to minimize overhead during policy rollouts. We evaluate UniMem across five simulation and four hardware tasks targeting sequential and spatial memory, demonstrating that our unified, single-model system outperforms fixed-interval image sampling baselines (93.4% vs. 68.2%) in simulation and hierarchical baselines (80.0% vs. 43.5%) in hardware, while offering faster inference and a simple training pipeline for easy adoption. Project website: https://losterberg3.github.io/unimem-vla/

Storing face images under a hard sub-kilobyte budget, as required for identity documents, smart-card biometrics and bandwidth-constrained verification, forces a codec to discard most of the signal while keeping what a face matcher actually reads: identity. Generic codecs optimize pixel fidelity, not the embedding distances that drive verification, so which codec, resolution and setting best preserve identity at 1024 bytes or less, and how that degrades at 512, is unclear. We benchmark ten general and face-specific codecs across resolutions, byte budgets, two datasets (controlled Color FERET, in-the-wild AI-Solutions-KK) and four anchor face matchers, with a fourteen-model ViT and CNN roster confirming the ranking is backbone-invariant. We then train a custom identity-preserving codec that hits the byte budget exactly via binary search over a frozen gain table, and run four studies: resolution, demographic fairness, recompression, and no-box adversarial robustness. Sub-kilobyte identity preservation is feasible, but which codec to deploy depends entirely on the budget. At 1024 bytes and the 112 px working resolution the problem is close to solved: modern codecs hold Color FERET equal-error rate under 0.35 percent on the ArcFace anchor. At 512 bytes the field re-sorts: AVIF, HEIF, JPEG XL and legacy JPEG collapse to 28 to 98 percent false-non-match rate at FMR 1e-4, while WebP, JPEG-AI and our byte-budgeted learned codecs stay out of that band, with 24.3 percent for WebP against 6.9 percent for our accurate variant in the wild. That re-sort, not the 1024-byte ranking, is the operational result: a codec chosen at 1 kB is not the codec to deploy at half that.

State Space Models (SSMs) have surfaced as a promising architecture in Video Frame Interpolation (VFI), as they can capture long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. However, their predefined scanning order limits their effectiveness in modeling the dynamic motion trajectories inherent in VFI problems. To tackle this challenge, we propose Motion-Guided Mamba for Video Frame Interpolation (MGMVFI), an adaptation of the selective state space model tailored explicitly for VFI. MGMVFI introduces Motion-Guided Serialization (MGS), which leverages optical flow to define a motion-adaptive 1D input order for the SSM. This aligns the causal state updates with semantically related tokens, enabling motion-consistent feature propagation, particularly for large and dynamic motions. Additionally, to mitigate the unreliable feature representations caused by inaccurate optical flow estimates, we introduce contextual synthesis that utilizes the surrounding spatial context for robust inter-frame feature synthesis. These components are seamlessly integrated within our tailored Mamba architecture, which also employs a lightweight refinement block to enhance local detail reconstruction at a reduced computational cost. Extensive experiments on standard VFI benchmarks demonstrate that MGMVFI achievesstate-of-the-artperformance,particularly on complex and dynamic motions, thereby establishing a new direction for sequence modeling in video interpolation.

RAG systems are increasingly used to summarize what large collections of documents say. A user asks "What do people think about X?" and receives an answer that reads as consensus. But standard top-k retrieval ranks documents by query similarity, not by how faithfully they represent the population, so minority views quietly disappear. Existing fixes fall short. Diversity re-rankers like MMR and DPP spread retrieved documents apart, but with no target distribution to aim for. Calibration methods based on KL or JS divergence do target one, yet treat opinion bins as unordered: confusing strong positive with strong negative costs no more than an adjacent-bin miss. We introduce WARP, a family of post-retrieval algorithms that calibrate retrieved evidence to the population's opinion distribution. WARP first recovers underrepresented opinions that cosine ranking may bury, then uses Wasserstein-1 distance to select documents whose sentiment-intensity distribution matches the population target, capturing the ordinal structure ignored by KL and JS divergence. We develop three variants for dense, sparse, and variable candidate pools, trading off calibration quality and speed. Across three review domains spanning 35K documents, 156 queries, and 26 entities, WARP's domain-matched variants reduce distributional error by at least 43% with sub-second latency. These gains carry through to generation: a five-judge LLM panel prefers WARP-generated answers in 86% of decided comparisons at k <= 5.

Existing data pruning methods predominantly rely on high-dimensional feature embeddings to measure sample importance. However, these compressed vectors often obscure fine-grained semantic interactions, leading to suboptimal coverage of rare semantic concepts in the pruned subsets. In this paper, we propose Mapping the Concept Landscape (MCL), a novel structural perception framework for transparent data pruning. Instead of abstract embeddings, we represent each image-caption pair as an explicit sample-level graph comprising entities, events, and attributes. By integrating these individual graphs into a comprehensive dataset-level graph, we characterize the global distribution of semantic concepts and quantify their rarity across the entire corpus. Based on this structured perception, we develop a greedy concept-coverage maximization algorithm that iteratively selects samples to maximize the marginal gain of high-value, under-represented concepts. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior pruning efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods but also provides a transparent and interpretable audit trail for the selection process.

Vision-language models (VLMs) frequently fail at visual change reasoning, even when their vision encoders contain sufficient information. We observe that correct VLM outputs tend to contain explicit verbal evidence (object names, colors, spatial locations) that supports the claimed change, while incorrect outputs often lack such evidence. We propose SAVER (Selective Auditing of Verbal Evidence for Error Recovery), a lightweight, rule-based method that parses VLM responses for this evidence and triggers structured reprompting only when evidence is missing or inconsistent. Across three change detection benchmarks and four VLMs, SAVER significantly improves accuracy on tasks where errors stem from the model failing to articulate what it saw (expression failures), with gains up to +25.8% on CLEVR-Change. The evidence patterns can also be generated by an LLM in a single call, matching the hand-tuned gate on CLEVR-Change. Ablation experiments confirm that the evidence gate, not reprompting alone, drives the improvement.

A retrieval-augmented QA system can return different answers after an index expansion even when its requested model identifier, prompt, retrieval policy, evidence depth, rendering, and exposed generation controls are held fixed. Aggregate accuracy may hide these changes when gains and losses cancel, while ordinary generation variability makes one-shot comparisons overstate update effects. We call the hidden phenomenon accuracy-blind answer churn and introduce the \emph{Snapshot Compatibility Audit}, which estimates excess answer churn by subtracting same-snapshot repeat disagreement from cross-snapshot disagreement. We instantiate it by expanding one frozen FineWeb prefix from one to seven shards. In a preregistered 400-question Natural Questions study, normalized-exact and blinded-semantic excess churn are 6.44 and 10.25 percentage points while exact-match accuracy changes by only $-1.50$ points. A post-hoc analysis finds repeat-stable semantic flips on 40/400 questions. A separately preregistered 200-question TriviaQA study yields smaller, directionally consistent excess churn while exact-match accuracy moves in the opposite direction. An outcome-blind post-hoc 100-question subset replication with a second DeepSeek generator and serving configuration finds 8.75 pp of semantic excess churn even as exact match rises by 3.00 percentage points. Answer-level compatibility can therefore fail without a conspicuous or consistently directed utility shift. Retrieval-augmented releases should audit compatibility alongside utility.

Practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires families of post-trained variants---instruction-tuned, reasoning-tuned, and chat-style models---each at multiple sizes to meet diverse latency and memory budgets. Producing each (variant, size) pair independently is prohibitive, so model families typically span only a handful of coarse-grained sizes per post-trained variant. Boomerang distillation (Kangaslahti et al., 2026) reduces this cost along the size axis for base models. Through model size interpolation, it constructs models of intermediate sizes from a single teacher-student pair without additional training. However, it still treats each post-trained variant as a separate object of optimization. We introduce ADAPT---Amortized Distillation Across Post-Trained LLMs---a framework for amortizing distillation across both axes of a model family: size and post-training variant, producing $L \times K$ models for $L$ interpolated sizes across $K$ post-trained variants with a single distillation run. ADAPT combines two components. First, a two-phase distillation procedure constructs post-trained students through pre-training alignment and supervised fine-tuning distillation, enabling smooth size--performance interpolation on generation and reasoning tasks. Second, weight-delta initialization approximates this construction across post-trained variants by transferring the distillation-induced weight change from the base model to students initialized from different post-trained variants. The resulting continuum of interpolated models also enables adaptive model-size selection at inference time, improving the compute--accuracy trade-off for long-form reasoning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in investment decision-making, yet prior work shows that they exhibit systematic, model-specific investment preferences. We study whether a model's overall investment stance can be calibrated to a specified direction and strength. We introduce an investment-bias dial, an inference-time intervention on a single neuron that continuously adjusts a model-level decision prior---its overall tendency toward buying or selling---without targeting specific firms or investment attributes. Using matched positive and negative evidence, we evaluate five open-weight LLMs and find that the dial produces monotonic changes in investment stance without modifying prompts or model parameters. At the response level, the dial shifts both investment decisions and the evidential emphasis of generated rationales under identical inputs. In an agentic retrieval setting, the dial also changes what information the model searches for, which evidence it selects, and which evidence is reflected in its final analysis. In a long-context evaluation, the dial maintains stable stance control as context length increases, whereas a matched system-prompt instruction progressively attenuates. We further show that changes in the dial propagate to security rankings and downstream portfolio composition in an exploratory backtest. Overall, our results show that an LLM's aggregate investment stance can be calibrated toward a specified target at inference time.

Full-length RNAs, particularly messenger RNAs, often exceed the context lengths used to pretrain existing RNA foundation models, limiting complete-transcript modeling at single-nucleotide resolution. We present RIBOSPAN, a 1.61-billion-parameter bidirectional RNA foundation model natively pretrained with context lengths up to 10,240 nt. RIBOSPAN combines dense bidirectional self-attention, single-nucleotide tokenization, and attention-isolated sequence packing to enable high-resolution modeling of complete long RNAs. We evaluate the model through nucleotide reconstruction, a controlled long-context representation benchmark, and frozen RNA-type representation analysis. Native 10K pretraining preserves strong reconstruction at 10,240 tokens, while continued pretraining with 40% masking improves recovery under heavy corruption while preserving representation quality. The long-context benchmark further shows that native 10K models maintain strong contextual responsiveness and context-specific representation separation while keeping perturbation-induced representation changes highly localized. Inference-time YaRN scaling recovers much of the contextual organization lost by direct extrapolation of short-context models, but induces substantially greater distal representation diffusion. Frozen-representation evaluations further demonstrate state-of-the-art RNA representation quality, with RIBOSPAN achieving the strongest overall performance across diverse RNA types and retaining a clear advantage on long RNAs. Building on the same backbone, we develop a multidimensionally conditioned discrete-diffusion framework for full-length mRNA generation and redesign, including synonymous-codon diffusion for protein-preserving CDS optimization. Together, RIBOSPAN establishes a powerful long-context foundation for transferable RNA representation learning and full-transcript mRNA design.

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) are expanding the range of behaviors that can be represented in agent-based simulations, but many contemporary platforms are difficult to study, modify, or run on ordinary computers. We present two intentionally minimal simulation foundations for education and rapid prototyping. SD-AgentFoundry-2D provides a two-dimensional multi-agent environment in which locally hosted LLM agents move, communicate, respond to place occupancy, and encounter spatially localized fire events. SD-AgentFoundry-3D provides a three-dimensional digital-twin environment in which a locally hosted VLM receives first-person images and produces natural-language movement instructions. Both codebases are designed to run locally on macOS, Windows, and Linux and are deliberately left open to modification rather than developed as finished applications. Together, they offer accessible starting points for learning about generative social simulation and for building domain-specific extensions.

Deploying LLMs for enterprise Text-to-SQL is bottlenecked less by the model than by what context reaches it: business logic spans thousands of tables, and no model can ingest a full catalog at once. We argue that the most effective place to intervene is therefore the \emph{knowledge-base context} the model consumes, and that this context should be \emph{constructed} from historical usage rather than tuned for as a fixed input. Using a query-DAG decomposition--the same family of intermediates that enterprise benchmarks like BEAVER annotate, here recovered from production SQL--we compare the value of oracle query graphs versus retrieved knowledge-base context. In this ablation, retrieved knowledge-base context provides the largest marginal improvement when added to the full oracle graph. Building on this, we optimize a distillation procedure that turns historical query profiles into reusable SQL reference cards. On a benchmark of 5176 production queries from a major online retailer, optimizing these context artifacts yields larger gains (${\sim}12$--$25\%$ AST similarity) than optimizing the retrieval harness (${\sim}3$--$12\%$). On the public BEAVER benchmark, which lacks the production-usage signals available in our internal setting, the picture is more mixed: table cards alone perform about the same as raw historical SQL. The best optimized variant retrieves both cards and raw SQL, scoring $9.00\%$ versus $6.33\%$ (p-value $0.12$) for the comparable baseline on a held-out $N{=}300$ subset, using retrieved context and harness changes but no agentic loop.

Dual-comb spectroscopy (DCS) enables high-speed, high-resolution spectroscopy by down-converting optical spectra to the radio-frequency (RF) domain through the interference of two mutually detuned frequency combs. Accurately resolving narrow molecular absorption features requires closely spaced comb lines generated by large laser cavities with long round-trip times, thereby hindering the miniaturization of high-resolution spectrometers. Here, we circumvent this limitation by demonstrating a swept-source dual-comb spectrometer using two unidirectional racetrack semiconductor lasers integrated on the same chip. The traveling-wave frequency combs are generated by strong RF injection at the laser cavity round-trip frequency of 14.3~GHz and are continuously tuned in frequency by varying the laser drive currents. This enables continuous spectral sampling over a 32~cm$^{-1}$ range centered near 8~\textmu m, with an effective sampling interval of approximately 80~MHz. The outputs of both combs are coupled into the same monolithically integrated light coupler, providing automatic collinear alignment before the combined beam interrogates the sample. We benchmark the spectrometer against an external-cavity tunable laser and validate its performance using HITRAN simulations for 1.25\% nitrous oxide. Finally, the unidirectional comb architecture suppresses the detrimental effects of optical feedback, yielding comparable residuals even under deliberately introduced strong feedback. More broadly, the benefits of miniaturization extend beyond reduced footprint: chip-scale integration enables new forms of electrical and optical control that can fundamentally change how dual-comb spectrometers are operated.

Industrial technical reports contain high-value knowledge for maintenance, troubleshooting, and product engineering, but their heterogeneous structure (dense prose, specifications, tables) makes them difficult to index and reason over with standard retrieval and QA pipelines, and no public instruction-tuning or benchmark datasets are built from such documents. We address this gap with Industrial-Instruction, contributing (i) two open QA datasets built from real industrial technical reports and (ii) the end-to-end pipeline that produces them. Using 906 public Panasonic documents (7,525 pages), we apply layout-aware extraction, build a semantic retrieval index, and synthesize multiple-choice QA grounded in retrieved evidence under five query-document relationships (irrelevant retrieval, single-/multi-document support, single-/multi-document answer). After filtering an initial 23.9k generated samples, each dataset provides approximately 13.6k QA pairs with source documents and a held-out benchmark split. Fine-tuning small open LLMs (under 10B parameters) improves Set-Match Accuracy from 28.5% to 42.0% and F1 from 46.6% to 63.5% on the Panasonic benchmark. We release two parallel versions built by the same pipeline: one generated with the open-weight Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct model and one with the closed, API-based Claude-Opus-4.6 model, enabling a direct comparison of open- versus frontier-model data generation. The Claude-Opus-4.6 dataset yields a cleaner raw corpus and larger fine-tuning gains, at roughly two orders of magnitude higher cost. MMLU evaluation shows models trained on the Claude-Opus-4.6 data retain essentially all general knowledge, versus a small but measurable forgetting effect for the Qwen-generated data. Together, these datasets and pipeline offer a practical, reproducible path toward scalable industrial benchmarks and training data from real-world documentation.

When can an agent failure be caught? An audit is usually limited by the record rather than by the method. CatchBench therefore puts one auditor's question to three information states: the declared configuration before a run (PRE), a growing prefix of its trace (LIVE), and the finished trace (POST). Prior benchmarks fix one of these states or vary the telemetry; to our knowledge none scores all three under one task-method interface. Each state admits different questions, so seven task contracts carry their own labels and metrics rather than one leaderboard. Four are evidential; three are Gold-derived mechanism diagnostics. The release scores 72 entrants, from rule scanners and structural models to eleven LLM judges across nine model families (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Gemma, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Nova), over 1187 declared configurations and 1162 recorded runs. Most of the arena does not order: 47 of 118 pre-declared contrasts separate, and the rest are published unresolved rather than ranked. The two sharpest results cut against our own data. One rule ignores every name and permission; it flags each capability declared after the first. On one of six configuration sources it reaches a perfect F1, so a score there measures how the corpus was built rather than how well a method reasons. Our admissibility bar then rejected one injected substrate and withheld evidential status from the other. A benchmark number is therefore not interpretable until the process behind its labels is published and tested for the shortcut it may leave. We report both, and regenerate every ordering from released predictions with no model call.

Ensuring reliability in uncertain environments remains difficult for long-horizon robotic manipulation. End-to-end VLA models are data-heavy and opaque, making diagnosis and verification difficult. Hierarchical pipelines are more interpretable, but their plans are often weakly grounded in observations, weakly aligned with low-level actions, and computed without online feedback, leading to open-loop behavior and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce the Triplet-to-Track System (TTS), a closed-loop long-horizon imitation learning system that uses human videos to reduce reliance on robot-collected data. TTS represents high-level subgoals as instance-grounded triplets, translates them into continuous track priors for execution, and monitors task progress from observations for online replanning. Across diverse real-world long-horizon tasks, TTS achieves a 74.8\% average success rate and supports object-level and compositional generalization.

We present the NeuralNexus Arm, an open, low-cost 6-DOF robotic manipulator built by an undergraduate engineering team, together with the design decisions and debugging experience needed to reproduce it. The arm is driven by a single STM32H743 microcontroller on a custom printed circuit board (PCB) and combines two stepper-driver strategies on one controller: push-pull 3.3 V step/direction outputs for onboard TMC2209 drivers on the three wrist joints, and open-drain outputs for external CL57T and DM542 drivers on the three high-torque proximal joints. We describe the mechanical design, mixed-driver electronics, interrupt-driven firmware, a MATLAB/Simscape-based inverse-kinematics pipeline, a browser-native control interface using the Web Serial API, and a lightweight vision pipeline for object localisation and autonomous pick-and-place tasks. We also document non-obvious hardware and firmware failure modes encountered during the transition from a development board to the custom PCB as reproducibility guidance. All design files and firmware are released openly. The platform actuates all six axes under coordinated control at a 2 kHz update rate and executes both manual and pre-recorded motions from the browser interface.

Reliable deployment of LLM agents in user-facing products depends not on raw task-solving ability but on consistency and limit-awareness: behaving the same way across repeated trials, and recognizing when a request cannot, or cannot yet, be safely fulfilled. CAR-bench exposes this reliability gap in the domain of in-car assistants: an LLM-simulated user issues incomplete or ambiguous requests, requiring the agent to resolve uncertainty through multi-turn dialogue and tool use while strictly adhering to domain policies. Even frontier models show a substantial gap between what they can solve at least once (Pass@3) and what they solve consistently across trials (Pass^k). We bridge this gap with TRACE (TRAjectory-Contrastive Evolution), which iteratively improves a skill-based agent's behavioral knowledge without modifying model weights. This knowledge is organized as a Skill Bank of modular, retrievable skills, each encoding a self-contained set of tool-use rules and behavioral guidelines. TRACE evolves this bank through an agentic self-evolution loop: after each evaluation round, it groups trajectories by the skills invoked and refines each skill by contrasting successful and failed behaviors. The updated bank then guides subsequent rounds, while during deployment the Actor performs state-conditioned skill orchestration at every turn. On GPT-5.5, TRACE improves consistency (Pass^3) by 34.6 points, from 59.9% to 94.5%, while shrinking the gap between potential and reliable performance to just 4.0 points. On the official hidden set, TRACE achieved first place using GPT-5.6-Sol, attaining a Pass^3 score of 70%-a 40% relative improvement over the baseline. These results show that TRACE converts high model potential into stable, consistent performance gain. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/Car-bench-TRACE.

Large-scale rollouts have become a core component of modern LLM systems, spanning reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, on-policy distillation (OPD), and sampling-heavy evaluation pipelines. Unlike online serving, which is typically optimized for request-level latency and throughput, a small number of long-tail generations can dominate the end-to-end makespan of an entire rollout step. In practice, rollout requests are often routed uniformly across replicas, which can place extremely long generations inside high-concurrency decoding batches. To address this, we present TailSieve, a partial-rollout-guided framework that jointly controls tail routing and replica allocation for LLM rollouts. In an idealized setting with known completion lengths, we show that makespan-optimal routing in the long-tail regime combines tail isolation with load balancing, and that a simple top-k policy closely approximates this offline optimum. Leveraging the observation that long-tail prompts tend to remain long-tailed across policy updates, TailSieve uses partial rollouts as a training-free signal for identifying candidate tail groups. A hierarchical controller then jointly adapts the number of isolated groups and the replica split between the tail and bulk pools using collected response-work history and a measured concurrency-throughput model. TailSieve achieves up to 1.67x routing-only speedup over uniform group routing. The resulting low-concurrency tail pool further enables route-specialized speculative decoding with MTP or DFlash, achieving up to 2.59x speedup over uniform routing. Selected prompts are regenerated under the current policy, preserving on-policy generation and avoiding additional routing-induced length bias in steady state.

Multimodal graph learning requires jointly training over graph structure and heterogeneous node attributes, yet existing methods largely decouple these processes: prior multimodal graph neural networks (GNNs) focus on aligning modalities in a shared embedding space while operating on fixed or weakly adapted graph structures, and graph structure learning approaches infer topology from unimodal node representations without accounting for multimodal interactions. This separation fundamentally limits the ability of GNNs to capture semantically meaningful relationships in multimodal settings, where observed edges are often noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with underlying semantics. We propose ReCoG (Reciprocal Co-Evolution for Multimodal Graph Learning), a new learning paradigm that tightly couples graph structure learning and multimodal representation learning through end-to-end reciprocal interaction. Concretely, ReCoG integrates (i) a multimodal graph refiner that infers and corrects edges using cross-modal semantic evidence, and (ii) a coupled cross-modal message passing mechanism that performs joint intra- and inter-modality propagation over the refined graph. This unified design yields greater expressiveness than decoupled or two-stage formulations and allows dynamic interaction between topology and representation learning. Across diverse benchmarks for node classification and link prediction, ReCoG consistently outperforms strong multimodal graph structure learning baselines, including graph foundation models. Our results demonstrate that reciprocal co-evolution of structure and semantics is important for effective multimodal graph learning, challenging the prevailing separation between topology and representation learning.

Spatial multi-omics technologies jointly profile gene expression, surface proteins, and histology at each tissue spot, yet most spatial domain discovery methods provide only cluster assignments, without indicating assignment reliability, modality contributions, or why a domain decision should be trusted. We present OmicSync, a reliability-aware spatial multi-omics framework that couples unsupervised domain clustering with evidence-constrained LLM reasoning using model-derived per-spot signals, including assignment confidence, epistemic routing uncertainty, and modality-routing weights. These signals are converted into structured evidence dictionaries and used to generate standard, stepwise, counterfactual, contrastive, and uncertainty-focused explanations. OmicSync integrates a KAN-GCN backbone with spatial encoding, cross-modal fusion, uncertainty-aware routing, cell-type supervision, and missing-modality imputation. We further introduce OmicSync-R, which closes the reasoning-clustering loop by using automatically computed reasoning-quality scores as REINFORCE rewards, allowing reasoning coherence to shape the latent structure without backpropagating through the language model. Across four 10x CytAssist FFPE spatial proteomics benchmarks, OmicSync achieves the best average rank on Human Tonsil (1.44), Glioblastoma (1.78), and Tonsil Add-on (1.22), and second-best on Human Breast Cancer (2.33). OmicSync-R further improves ARI on Human Breast Cancer from 45.73 to 46.72 and outperforms existing methods on six of nine clustering metrics. Together, OmicSync and OmicSync-R enable reliability-aware, spot-level auditable spatial domain discovery guided by evidence-constrained reasoning.

Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves photorealistic reconstruction of time-varying scenes, and recent physics-aware extensions improve extrapolation by explicitly predicting velocity fields. However, these extensions merely fit vector fields to visual deformations without satisfying Lagrangian mechanics, leading to three major issues: (i) physically inconsistent trajectories, (ii) lack of time-reversibility, and (iii) geometric collapse during long-term extrapolation. In this paper, we propose LagrangeGS, which formulates dynamic 3DGS as a non-conservative Lagrangian system. While this Lagrangian formulation fundamentally solves (i), a direct application of general LNNs to dynamic 3DGS requires a large velocity-Hessian inversion for millions of Gaussian particles. To overcome this computational bottleneck, we approximate the velocity-Hessian as an identity matrix, decoupling particle dynamics for computational tractability. For (ii), we restrict the non-conservative forces to be explicitly time independent, enabling consistent backward integration. Finally, to address (iii), we introduce local rigid alignment that regularizes particle trajectories. Extensive evaluations on dynamic scene benchmarks demonstrate that LagrangeGS enables stable long-term extrapolation, consistent time reversal, and counterfactual physics-based editing without retraining.

Financial institutions need an independent way to detect missing, stale, and misclassified corporate-event records in vendor databases. We introduce Search-to-Record, a database-assurance task in which search-enabled large language models reconstruct institution-defined event records from public sources for a known security universe and historical cutoff, and DelistBench, a 1,200-record benchmark for security-level delisting announcements. We evaluate five models in paired closed-book and web-enabled conditions. Web access raises announcement-date accuracy within seven days by 34.0 to 48.0 percentage points and event-status accuracy by approximately 2.8 to 21.7 points; the best system achieves 81.5% overall joint accuracy within seven days. Economy web systems achieve 75.9-78.3% overall joint accuracy within seven days at 4.5-6.6% of the API cost of the most expensive web system. Risk-based triage identifies low-error subsets, although the highest-coverage operating point still sends 27.3% of the balanced test set to review. The evaluation identifies web retrieval as the main source of timing gains and shows that low-cost systems can approach the best system's accuracy. Together, Search-to-Record, DelistBench, and the evaluation provide concrete deployment guidance: calibrate triage to local event prevalence and market mix, preserve positive-event recall, and route positive and ambiguous cases to targeted review.

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn latent dynamics for planning and avoid representation collapse by matching features to maximum-entropy distributions such as isotropic Gaussians, yielding dense representations. However, it is unclear whether dense representations are the most favorable geometry for modeling dynamics. In this work, we ask whether a different geometry, sparse representations, can make action-conditioned latent dynamics easier to model, and what dynamical structure emerges from such representations. We first show that nonlinear Lipschitz dynamics can be approximated arbitrarily well by action-conditioned linear dynamics in a sufficiently high-dimensional one-hot latent space, with rollout error vanishing as the dimension grows. This motivates distributed sparse representations as a practical relaxation of one-hot sparsity. We introduce LpWorldModel (LpWM), a JEPA model regularized with Rectified Distribution Matching Regularization (RDMReg) to match encoder features to a Rectified Generalized Gaussian distribution, yielding non-negative sparse codes. Empirically, sparsity lowers the predictor complexity required for successful planning: on PushT, sparse LpWM outperforms dense LeWM by up to 57% in planning success at intermediate predictor capacities. This advantage also extends beyond Gaussian distribution matching, with LpWM outperforming dense VICReg representations across multiple predictor families. We further find that the learned sparse representations are mode-factored, with support encoding discrete dynamical regimes and feature magnitudes capturing continuous within-regime state. Together, these results suggest that sparse representations can reduce the predictor complexity required for control while revealing interpretable structure.

Unified models for visual understanding and generation have made rapid progress, yet they still lack the ability to understand and manipulate the spatial states of object instances. Existing models can describe objects in natural language, but they struggle to precisely represent continuous object poses and generate geometrically consistent images under target viewpoints. To mitigate this, we propose \emph{Object-Uni}, a unified model for object-centric spatial understanding and controllable generation. Specifically, we formulate object-centric spatial intelligence as a unified problem connecting pose perception, spatial reasoning, pose-conditioned generation, and object-centric novel view synthesis. We treat object pose as an explicit geometric variable shared by understanding and generation, rather than merely a prediction label or control signal. To make pose usable by multimodal large language models, we propose a viewpoint-based orientation abstraction that maps orientation into structured viewpoint descriptions while preserving continuous geometric supervision. We further construct an object-centric spatial benchmark (UniSpatial-80K) and train a unified model with an object-token-grounded pose anchor to associate each instance with its pose state. Experiments show that our model improves object-level pose understanding and pose-controllable generation, moving unified models from describing objects toward manipulating spatial states.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at text understanding and generation, yet still struggle to reliably understand and apply externally provided procedural rules at scale. To evaluate this capability, we introduce RuleWorld, a large-scale benchmark that reformulates rules as globally reusable abstract units rather than instance-specific facts. In RuleWorld, several scenarios, including single-rule, parallel multi-rule, and multi-hop reasoning, are settled for comprehensive evaluation. We further propose DynaRule, an end-to-end framework that injects the given rules into the KV cache and turns retrieval into an internal, learnable, step-wise process. Specifically, DynaRule employs Stacked Step-Level Attention Training with a special <search> token to enable dynamic rule re-attention and updating during inference. In this way, the model can re-attend to the most relevant rules at each step, dynamically replacing outdated ones to support more stable multi-step reasoning. Experiments on RuleWorld show that existing LLMs face challenges under large rule pools, while DynaRule improves average QA accuracy by up to 19 points and achieves over 85% Recall@1 at 10K rules, outperforming strong baselines by large margins. We make our code and dataset available here: https://github.com/SharkSpicy-NLP/Beyond-Factual-Knowledge.

Object-centric world models forecast future videos by evolving a set of entity slots, but the variables receiving dynamics supervision are often unconstrained visual features. We introduce \method{}, a mask-grounded soft-Hamiltonian world model that makes its position-like state explicitly depend on slot-owned image support. A frozen video-slot encoder produces slots and masks; spatial moments of mask-owned support form a canonical state $Q$, temporal differences form $P$, and a learned energy supplies a soft directional bias to a bounded learned increment. Decoder-relevant appearance and identity are stored separately in a causal visual context. A gated composer and bounded residual then combine this context with the propagated phase state to reconstruct decoder-compatible slots. On OBJ3D, given six observed frames and evaluated over the following 30 frames, \method{} reduces LPIPS by 25.0\% and spatial MSE by 33.7\% relative to the strongest object-centric baseline. On CLEVRER, given six observed frames and evaluated over the following ten frames, the corresponding reductions are 14.5\% and 18.7\%. Horizon-resolved visual and object-state measurements show that the complete model accumulates error more slowly throughout the 30-frame closed-loop rollout. Project page:https://github.com/moshwm-anon/-moshwm-anon.github.io.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) requires models to identify subtle emotional cues that are often distributed across distant dialogue turns. Existing methods typically incorporate dialogue history through a fixed context window. However, short windows discard potentially useful long-range evidence, while enlarging the window repeatedly re-encodes overlapping utterances, increases computational and memory costs, and may introduce irrelevant context. Moreover, commonly used parameter-efficient adaptation methods, such as LoRA, mainly introduce fixed low-rank transformations in the feature space and do not explicitly maintain a dialogue-level state or condition their transformations on the evolving conversational context. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight adapter, DiaRelay, to enable LLMs to explicitly maintain a dialogue-level memory for accurate ERC. Based on LoRA, DiaRelay introduces two extra tightly collaborative components, Selective Relay Memory Transition and Dual-axis Relay Memory Read. Selective Relay Memory Transition progressively aggregates useful historical evidence into a bounded relay memory and propagates it across successive utterance predictions. This allows earlier emotional cues to influence later predictions after they leave the local context window, without re-encoding the complete dialogue history or expanding the backbone context length. Dual-axis Relay Memory Read uses the propagated memory to dynamically modulate low-rank feature transformations, enabling context-dependent representation adaptation without test-time gradient updates. Extensive experiments show that DiaRelay can achieve SOTA weighted F1 and accuracy on MELD while obtaining competitive results on IEMOCAP with only an extra 7.1M trainable parameters, indicating the effectiveness and generalizability of our DiaRelay in enhancing LLM-based emotional understanding.

Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (G-3DGS) has emerged as a promising approach for novel view synthesis undersparse-view settings. However, existing frameworks remain restricted by pixel-aligned Gaussian estimation, whichstruggles in partially observed or occluded regions and often leads to incomplete surfaces or structural collapse. Toaddress these challenges, we propose SeeU (Seeing the Unseen), a novel G-3DGS framework. We frame its core design asSemantic-in-Gaussian: semantic-conditioned refinement in Gaussian space. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-viewEntropy-Aware (CEA) module that aggregates multi-view semantic and geometric cues into compact embeddings. Theseembeddings guide the Conditional Gaussian Transformer, which applies residual updates to coarse Gaussians, helpingrecover under-constrained regions of partially observed structures while preserving surface consistency. Comprehensiveexperiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SeeU consistently improves rendering quality and structuralcompleteness while retaining efficient feed-forward inference. Especially under challenging extrapolation settings,SeeU achieves an average improvement of 2.44 dB in PSNR compared to recent SOTA G-3DGS methods.

Nonverbal behavior generation systems for virtual agents often take an utterance as input and generate nonverbal behaviors that emphasize or illustrate the content of the verbal channel. However, human nonverbal behavior is shaped by more than the content of the speech. It is also influenced by speaker roles, interpersonal relationships, social context, and the cognitive and emotional states of the interactants. As a result, the nonverbal channel may reinforce, weaken, qualify, or even contradict the verbal channel. It may also reveal internal states that are hidden or only indirectly implied in speech, including emotional "leakage" that may be incidental to the immediate interaction. Modeling this richer relationship between verbal and nonverbal behavior is important for designing virtual agents that exhibit realistic, human-like behavior. It is especially critical in training contexts that require nuanced social interpretation, such as counseling simulations involving virtual patients. Drawing on Ekman's framework of verbal nonverbal relationships, we propose a taxonomy of categories in which mismatches between verbal and nonverbal behavior can occur. We then examine alternative approaches for realizing these behaviors using large language models, focusing on whether LLMs can select contextually appropriate mismatched verbal and nonverbal behaviors from a given dialogue and social interaction context. Finally, we evaluate the resulting behaviors in a human-subject study, assessing whether context-driven nonverbal behavior, when embodied in a virtual human, produces the intended effects on observers.

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made strides over the past decade applying them to a wide range of problems and control tasks. However, the deployment of RL on neuromorphic hardware for continuous control tasks remains under-validated. Namely it is unclear whether replacing a conventional actor network with a spiking neural network (SNN) affects the performance of an agent before any hardware-specific benefits manifest. We provide a systematic validation of a minimal, neuromorphically viable spiking actor variant of Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) on conventional hardware, establishing a baseline for future neuromorphic RL research. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Actor Network Soft Actor Critic (SANSAC) to address the use of RL frameworks in continuous environments, designed as a framework that can be implemented on neuromorphic hardware. We compare a traditional Soft Actor Critic (SAC) network to SANSAC in a traditional computer. We demonstrate the near equivalent performance of SANSAC and SAC, while addressing the impact of hidden dimensions. Our results demonstrate the viability of SNN based algorithms in complex continuous environments, as well as competitive performance to traditional neural networks in traditional computers, providing a basis to continue exploring the use of SNNs in continuous RL frameworks.

State-of-the-art temporal-link-prediction (TLP) models are, in essence, multi-channel information aggregators: they combine an interaction-history channel, a time-encoding channel, and a structure channel. The first two have been refined relentlessly; the structure channel remains a crude afterthought -- DyGFormer encodes it as a 1--2-bit neighbour-cooccurrence count. We begin with a measurement: on sparse temporal graphs the classical 1-hop common-neighbour signal is near-random (discriminative AUC $\approx 0.50$), because two nodes almost never share a direct neighbour; the genuinely discriminative signal lies one hop deeper -- the 2-hop cohesive bridge, whose discAUC reaches 0.73--0.98, on both bipartite and non-bipartite graphs. Motivated by this, we propose HAWKEYE, a cohesion-aware structural channel that incrementally maintains the classical k-family of cohesiveness indicators (degree $\to$ k-core $\to$ k-truss) and forms 2-hop cohesive-bridge features. HAWKEYE is a drop-in replacement for a temporal-graph model's native structure channel, with no change to the backbone. Swapping HAWKEYE into DyGFormer improves test AP/MRR over the cooccurrence channel by +0.6 to +10.8 points across six multi-seed-validated datasets (uci, enron, USLegis, CanParl, reddit, mooc). On the bipartite recommendation benchmark tgbl-subreddit, a 3-seed single-pass struct-only ablation shows HAWKEYE nearly doubling the baseline test MRR (0.103$\pm$0.003 $\to$ 0.204$\pm$0.005, +10.1 points across all three seeds); the streaming pipeline scales to the 67M-edge tgbl-flight in five minutes per pass. We further characterise when it helps: the gain tracks a graph's training-free 2-hop discAUC and vanishes on degenerate or saturated graphs -- a predictable boundary. All code, data, and figure-generation scripts are released.

Clinical diagnosis requires progressive integration of patient history, physical examination, laboratory findings, medical images, and diagnostic-informative tests. However, most multimodal medical benchmarks evaluate fixed inputs or endpoint answers, while fully interactive diagnostic agents conflate evidence selection with evidence interpretation. We present a source-grounded framework to construct progressive multimodal diagnostic dialogues from case reports and an evaluation strategy for assessing MLLMs on final diagnosis, diagnostic reasoning, and image-finding interpretation. Evaluation on 24 internal medicine case reports showed that our framework can accurately convert case reports into reference dialogues, achieving a diagnosis F1 of 0.99 and a reasoning-quality score of 4.79 out of 5. Evaluation on two frontier MLLMs (o4-mini and Claude Haiku 4.5) achieved reasoning-quality scores of 2.75 and 2.50, respectively, with substantially lower diagnosis, reasoning, and image-finding F1 scores. The results demonstrate that fluent responses do not necessarily reflect evidence-grounded clinical reasoning and highlight the utility of the proposed framework for evaluating multimodal diagnostic reasoning.

Long-form audio inputs make the KV cache the dominant memory cost of speech LLMs. Prefill-only KV compression methods permanently discard audio KV positions once evicted, with no pathway to recover them during decoding. We show this is fragile on long-form audio: prefill attention concentrates near the audio start (an attention-sink effect), while decode-time attention distributes broadly, and the two rankings overlap weakly. We propose WnW (Waxing-and-Waning KV cache), which classifies KV-heads into anchor, tidal, and fixed roles via offline calibration. Anchor heads remain on GPU and serve as a decode-time importance observer; tidal heads keep a CPU-resident complement that is recalled chunk-by-chunk based on aggregated anchor-head scores; fixed heads keep only an on-GPU subset, with the rest permanently discarded. On LibriSpeech-Long with two 3B backbones (Voxtral-mini-3b and Qwen2.5-Omni-3B), WnW preserves near-Full-Cache accuracy while keeping only 20% of audio tokens on GPU, where prefill-only baselines fail to terminate. Results generalize across language, task, and domain shifts, and CPU-GPU recall adds little decode-time overhead in our measurements.

Living organisms exhibit extraordinary adaptability to unseen environments through their intrinsic physical structures and lifelong feedback-driven learning. Endowing robots with comparable generalization is critical for reliable operation in the real world. While recent approaches attempt to improve generalization by scaling training data, such strategies remain impractical for robotics, where collecting real-world demonstrations at the scale of large language models is prohibitively costly and slow. Contrary to this reliance on massive datasets, we show that robots can generalize effectively under dynamics uncertainties even with limited training data by leveraging a feedback mechanism, namely PhyFilter, that corrects learning outputs with physics-filtered learning residuals. PhyFilter operates as a lightweight, model-agnostic module whose parameters can be automatically optimized through an auto-learning algorithm, eliminating manual tuning and enabling seamless integration with diverse robot policies. We validate PhyFilter across four representative robotic systems, demonstrating that it enables quadruped robots to generalize to unseen terrains, payload variations, and speed ranges; drones to flight under unseen wind disturbances; aerial manipulators to achieve centimeter-level in-air capture despite wind and mass uncertainties; and acceleration differentiators to remain robust with distribution shift. These results show that physics-filtered feedback can serve as a powerful alternative to massive data scaling.

Agent ecosystems now include thousands of MATS components (Models, Agents, Tools, and Skills), yet their discovery still relies on in-context routing. These systems read a registry (names, hints, or descriptions, as context budget permits), pick a candidate, invoke it, and retry on failure. This pattern degrades with scale, and registries are growing fast. We recast capability discovery as search over a registry by defining an offline enrichment step that turns sparse metadata into searchable profiles, and an online retrieve-then-rank pipeline that returns a ranked shortlist without invoking any candidates online. We show that from N=10 to 7,278 capabilities, in-context routing's top-1 accuracy (Match@1) collapses (0.85 to 0.12), while retrieve-then-rank degrades more gently (0.81 to 0.39) because its reranker still ranks the right capability first 0.70-0.87 of the time once retrieval finds it. In the Nova Micro sweep, the crossover is around N=500. We compare against two in-context baselines. Full-Ctx puts the whole registry in the prompt and asks the LLM to pick. Search&Pick gives the LLM a search tool to narrow candidates before it picks. At full scale the pipeline leads Search&Pick by 6.5 percentage points (pp) on Match@1 at about half the cost. It reduces cost 70x versus Full-Ctx. We use a fixed configuration (same enrichment, retriever, and scorer weights) across agent, tool, and skill registries. The pipeline runs in production as the default capability-discovery layer of a large-scale multi-agent platform.

This work develops a discrete-time framework for identifying probability localization dynamics through finite stochastic representations adapted in space, time, memory, and state information. A compact dynamically relevant set is localized by a finite measurable partition, producing an observable probability state and a relational graph of admissible transitions. Structured stochastic liftings derived from Stochastically Structured Reservoir Computing (SSRC) give lossless polynomial representations of the observable state, while stochastic delay liftings add finite observable memory. These are distinguished from dynamically informed state-space enrichment: refinement of observational fibers containing states with the same present observation but different observable futures, yielding an exact obstruction-to-closure criterion. A route-network toy problem gives a minimal obstruction example, while four numerical laboratories (rotational phase dynamics, the chaotic logistic map, the Van der Pol oscillator, and a synthetic cyclic inventory system) show how spatial scale, temporal scale, polynomial degree, and delay depth interact. The logistic map isolates representation-induced memory in an otherwise Markovian chaotic system, using its exact invariant law as an ergodic benchmark and its zero-mass pseudospectrum to separate relaxation from transient amplification. An exact rotational cycle calibrates pseudospectra as a robustness diagnostic rather than a closure certificate. The inventory example gives a closure-driven enrichment procedure: residence-age hazards trigger age-refined states that improve predictive scores. These results motivate a minimal adequate representation: the least complex representation meeting predictive, structural, and identifiability requirements.

Semantic segmentation has rapidly advanced with deep learning; however, challenges remain in effectively capturing local and global contexts as well as addressing the long-tailed distribution problem. To tackle these issues, we present Contextrast++, a robust contrastive learning method for semantic segmentation that improves multi-scale feature integration and mitigates class imbalance issues. Our method consists of two key components: 1) contextual contrastive learning (CCL) and 2) boundary-aware negative (BANE) sampling. CCL includes three subcomponents: adaptive fusion module, pixel-to-anchor (PA) loss, and anchor-to-anchor (AA) loss. The adaptive fusion module dynamically balances local and global feature integration, resulting in a more context-aware representation. While the PA loss leverages the fused multi-scale features to improve feature representation learning, the AA loss focuses on addressing the long-tailed distribution problem by utilizing a memory bank that stores a fixed number of class-balanced representative anchors. Meanwhile, BANE sampling enhances segmentation precision by selecting hard negatives from misclassified boundary regions, which refines fine-grained details during contrastive learning. As verified in extensive experiments using public datasets, we demonstrate that Contextrast++ substantially improves semantic segmentation performance over existing contrastive learning-based state-of-the-art approaches, while introducing no additional computational overhead during inference.

UAV vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) is commonly evaluated as goal reaching, but inspection-oriented deployment requires the agent to stop within a valid inspection region and avoid falsely confirming visually or semantically similar distractors. This requirement exposes a key weakness in existing coarse-to-fine UAV-VLN policies: the coarse goal predicted before local refinement is often treated as reliable, although it may drift toward plausible but incorrect object regions and limit the ability of the local stage to recover. To systematically evaluate this problem, we introduce LG-UVI, an object-centric inspection evaluation setting derived from CityNav/CityRefer. LG-UVI extends standard UAV-VLN episodes with target objects, hard distractors, type-aware inspection regions, and diagnostics for inspection-region arrival and object-level confirmation. To address this inspection-oriented setting, we further propose RACO, a reliability-aware adaptive coarse-to-fine navigation framework. Instead of treating the predicted coarse goal as a fixed waypoint, RACO views it as a runtime hypothesis and uses object-level candidate anchors to check and correct coarse localization before Stage 1 and at the Stage 1-to-Stage 2 boundary. RACO also applies scale-adaptive terminal refinement to handle terminal near-miss cases using runtime-observable geometric and anchor-based evidence. Under a unified online evaluation protocol, RACO improves SR over the reproduced HETT baseline by 9.53 and 7.98 percentage points on validation-unseen and test-unseen, respectively. It also improves inspection-region arrival and reduces false verification risk, showing that coarse-goal reliability optimization is an effective complement to existing coarse-to-fine UAV-VLN policies.

The continuous integration of inverter-based resources makes transient stability analysis increasingly important for power system modernization, in light of the intricate dynamics arising from large-scale inverter deployment. However, analytical transient stability analysis methods consistently yield overly conservative stability boundary estimates, which constrain grid dispatch and operational flexibility. Although recent neural Lyapunov methods attempt to enlarge these stability boundaries to obtain less conservative estimates, they remain trapped within restricted domains due to the out-of-distribution problem. To break this bottleneck, this paper proposes a probabilistic active learning framework. Starting from a deterministic inner stability region certified by neural Lyapunov functions, the framework constructs a Gaussian process surrogate and deploys an uncertainty-guided frontier search. By intelligently coupling electromagnetic transient simulations with active boundary exploration, the algorithm systematically drives the estimated stability boundary outward. Comprehensive evaluations across multi-machine grid-forming benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially reduces estimation conservatism. Across test systems ranging up to four interconnected grid-forming inverters, the methodology achieves up to a $20$-fold volumetric enlargement of the certified stability region over classical baselines, while requiring at most 220 time-domain simulation queries per system, far fewer than the 1,600 queries that exhaustive EMT evaluation demands even for the simplest single-inverter benchmark.

Agentic AI frameworks interpret open-ended task goals and decompose them into multi-step plans. Richer information about embodiment-specific capabilities, physical preconditions, and cross-robot coordination improves grounding, but does not eliminate infeasible, mistimed, or unsafe physical actions. Physical robot crews therefore require an explicit architectural interface between semantic planning and execution, where every planned action is verified against robot capabilities, system state, and workflow constraints before actuation. This paper introduces Physical Agentic AI, a framework for skill-grounded robot agent orchestration, in which each robot exposes a typed library of executable skills while a foundation model planner decomposes a task into phases and assigns each phase to a robot-skill pair. A Robot Orchestration layer exposes the skill library, robot state, named locations, and workflow contracts to a non-actuating Mission Planner, while a deterministic Robot Orchestrator validates and authorizes one skill at a time. We evaluate on a drone-UGV search-and-dispatch mission, where every mission in every condition is executed live in Gazebo, and on a humanoid-quadruped transportation task using hardware-equivalent skill interfaces plus two physical trials on a Unitree G1 and Go2. Varying planner knowledge and runtime enforcement independently, we find that retrieval raises skill grounding from 51% to 96% yet leaves informed planners dispatching 23-29% of faulted steps. Per-dispatch enforcement reduces false dispatch to 0% with no false blocks, and a held-plan ablation confirms that the gate, not plan variation, is responsible. Live execution makes the difference physical: without enforcement all eight injected faults crossed the orchestration boundary and six produced robot motion; with enforcement all eight were refused before motion.

Modern text-to-SQL systems have become increasingly elaborate, relying on schema-linking modules, retrieval-augmented prompting, candidate generation, and multi-stage refinement pipelines. While effective, these additions introduce substantial latency and engineering overhead. To this end, we present \textbf{ReAct-SQL}, a simple yet effective zero-shot ReAct-style framework built solely on iterative reasoning and a constrained action space defined by a typed Domain-Specific Language (DSL) of 15 relational operations, rather than free-form SQL generation. The model incrementally issues DSL calls, observes compiled-SQL execution feedback, and revises its reasoning through interaction. On corrected BIRD mini-dev and EHR-SQL, ReAct-SQL achieves \textbf{84.5\%} and \textbf{73.9\%} accuracy, respectively, matching substantially more elaborate baselines while running up to $8\times$ faster. Incremental ablations further show that iteration primarily improves grounding, while the DSL improves compositional reliability.

Deploying large language models on edge devices is increasingly limited by a widening gap between model size and available memory. Existing approaches such as quantization, smaller models, and offloading can raise the effective memory limit, but they still assume that the model can be compressed or partitioned to fit within some budget. We target the harder model-exceeds-memory setting, in which the model remains larger than resident memory throughout execution and storage becomes an active source of weights on the critical path. We observe that MLP activity during autoregressive decoding has strong temporal locality: approximately 82-85% of active neurons persist from one token to the next. This means that most sparse weights needed for the current token are already resident, and only the newly needed rows must be fetched from storage. We present NeuroPrefetcher, a storage-backed LLM inference system that exploits this property through predictive delta prefetching. After layer 0, a single GPU-resident predictor, occupying 2.86% of base model parameters, predicts sparse activity for all downstream MLP layers in one forward pass. The runtime compares these predictions against resident GPU buffers and issues application-scheduled NVMe reads only for incoming delta rows, replacing reactive operating-system demand paging with explicit, model-aware weight movement. On real unified-memory edge hardware, NeuroPrefetcher achieves 7.9-12.0x speedup over llama.cpp across constrained memory budgets.

Despite recent advances in molecular foundation models, several limitations remain, such as chemically invalid augmentations, modality collapse, and incomplete representation of biochemical environments. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{Mol-JEPA}, a scalable framework for learning molecular world models. Rather than relying on suboptimal molecular perturbations, our model uses modality masking to exploit information from molecular structures, cellular phenotypes, binding affinities, ADMET profiles, quantum chemistry simulations and other drug discovery data. Across various benchmarks, we show that the representations learned by Mol-JEPA deliver strong performance, demonstrating the value of incorporating biochemical context through latent space prediction.

Recent vision-language models (VLMs) show strong capabilities in robotic perception and spatial reasoning, yet their ability to reason about complex mechanical assemblies remains underexplored. We introduce OmniCAD, a large-scale benchmark for assembly-aware 3D spatial reasoning across diverse industrial systems, including robotic mechanisms, automotive components, aerospace structures, and agricultural machinery. OmniCAD contains 25k mechanical assemblies, with an average of 12 parts per assembly and 21 types of mate relationships. Each assembly includes a human-verified ground-truth 3D model and renderings from 20 viewpoints. The benchmark evaluates three capabilities: (1) component-level 3D spatial reasoning, requiring prediction of part positions and orientations; (2) part-to-part relational reasoning, requiring identification of mating relationships and assembly constraints; and (3) tool-augmented agentic reasoning, where models iteratively select viewpoints, inspect visual evidence, and refine predictions. Experiments show that current VLMs struggle with industrial assembly reasoning, often producing inaccurate poses, invalid mating relationships, part interpenetration, and degraded performance as assembly complexity increases. We will open-source the benchmark, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to support research on accurate, physically valid, and scalable 3D assembly reasoning.

Current work on improving reliability in large language model (LLM)- generated answers has primarily leveraged Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), knowledge-graph augmentation, and reinforcement learning. While these methods are adept at enhancing and measuring reliability through semantic similarity and faithfulness, they often struggle to distinguish semantic similarity from geographic validity. This is especially critical in natural hazard management domains where geographic granularity (i.e., town vs. city vs. state) is significant for decision-making, as responses valid in one municipality may not transfer to another. In such domains, a confidently wrong answer carries greater risk than abstaining. We present GeoRisk-RAG, a novel hierarchy-aware framework that addresses this geographic-validity gap through selective answering. This framework explicitly estimates geographic applicability using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based distance for context retrieval before response generation. Experiments on a novel held-out wildfire-related question-answering (QA) dataset show that GeoRisk-RAG significantly reduces false confidence rates for location-dependent questions, lowering the rate to 0.009 compared with ~0.090 for standard semantic similarity and reranking baselines, while consistently achieving higher human preference alignment. This work provides a more comprehensive assessment of end-to-end RAG pipelines by integrating geographic validity and selective-answering behavior for safer decision-making in geospatial domains.

Transferring reinforcement learning policies from simulation to Real-World robots remains a major challenge, particularly when dealing with low-level torque control, where even small modelling inaccuracies can lead to unstable or unsafe behaviours. In this work, we propose a Real2Sim2Real pipeline that improves Sim2Real transfer for torque-controlled robotic arms by combining trajectory matching, parameter optimization via genetic algorithms, and domain randomization. Using the 7-DOF Franka Emika Panda robot, we first identify friction, inertia, and gravity compensation parameters by minimizing the error between real and simulated joint trajectories. These calibrated dynamics are then used to train a TQC-based reinforcement learning agent in simulation. The trained policy is evaluated in both Gazebo and MuJoCo environments, and finally deployed on the real robot. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement in tracking accuracy and policy robustness after parameter tuning, with smooth policy transfer from simulation to the Real-World across multiple target-reaching tasks. This work highlights the effectiveness of accurate physical modelling in enabling stable and generalizable torque-based reinforcement learning policies.

Clinical decision-making relies on identifying relevant patient information to guide diagnosis and treatment, a challenge that is especially difficult in the data-dense and rapidly changing intensive care unit (ICU). Large language models (LLMs) could support this task. However, existing applications and datasets mostly emphasize surface-level retrieval or factual recall rather than the inductive and deductive reasoning clinicians practice to select and reason over decision-relevant evidence. We hypothesized that training LLMs on expert ICU reasoning could yield clinical reasoning skills that generalize beyond critical care. Here we introduce ICU-REACT, a reasoning dataset developed with 19 clinicians through a clinician-in-the-loop framework to teach LLMs to perform information retrieval and context-aware clinical reasoning in the ICU. Using ICU-REACT, we fine-tuned Clin-REACT models spanning 8B-70B parameters and three model families. Across five clinical reasoning benchmarks, Clin-REACT consistently outperformed its backbone models and open-source general-purpose and medical LLMs. Gains extended to different tasks including script concordance tests, and downstream diagnosis and treatment tasks. These findings suggest that expert reasoning supervision in critical care can improve broader clinical reasoning, although prospective evaluation is needed before real-world clinical use.

Robot policies receive heterogeneous observations at each decision step, yet sequence models differ in how they organize these inputs over time. We introduce WorldToken, a time-first policy instantiation that fuses multiview images, proprioception, and task conditioning within each policy timestep into one world token. A causal temporal Transformer models the resulting world-token sequence, and a diffusion action head generates action chunks. On 23 RoboCasa tasks, an 85.3M-parameter policy trained from scratch apart from a frozen pretrained CLIP text encoder achieves 59.45% mean closed-loop success using 2,900 generated demonstrations per task. A complete factorial sweep over five dataset sizes, five model sizes, and two training seeds shows consistent gains from additional target-domain data and diminishing returns beyond moderate model size. Under same-checkpoint history truncation, reducing visible history to one or two policy timesteps lowers closed-loop success for all 50 RoboCasa policies. On RMBench Blocks Ranking, reducing visible history from 146 to 8 seconds lowers evaluator success from 95% to 28%, while an exploratory extended rollout sustains the reference swap sequence for over 850 seconds. These results establish the empirical feasibility of the complete WorldToken instantiation and characterize its data-scaling and temporal-context behavior under the tested recipes. They do not establish superiority over alternative sequence organizations or isolate which components of the complete implementation drive the observed performance.

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are designed to improve reasoning by decomposing tasks across multiple agents with specialized functions, but the presence of multiple agents does not inherently guarantee coherent reasoning or outputs that align with task objectives. This paper introduces a quantitative ethnographic (QE) approach for diagnosing and redesigning multi-agent LLM systems based on the discourse produced through agent interactions. We test this approach using automated essay scoring as an example context, applying Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to model a five-agent multi-agent debate system and examine differences between debates that produced correct versus incorrect scoring decisions. Results show that, in the initial system, correct scoring decisions were characterized by rubric-grounded justification, agreement, and elaboration. Incorrect scoring decisions, in contrast, were characterized by extended proposition-challenge-response exchanges that were less consistently tied to rubric criteria. We then used the findings to revise the agents' prompts. The revised system improved exact scoring accuracy from 27.78% to 40.28% and shifted the discourse of incorrect debates toward the rubric-grounded pattern of correct ones, making the two nearly indistinguishable. Based on these results, we argue that QE can support a diagnostic-to-redesign loop for AI reasoning by tracing how patterns of agent interaction relate to system performance, informing prompt redesign, and evaluating whether those redesigns change both outcomes and interaction patterns.

In adaptive control, parametric uncertainties in linear-in-parameter form consist of unknown parameters and known regressor signals. Convergence of the unknown parameters to their ideal values requires the regressor to satisfy a persistent excitation (PE) condition, which depends on future data and is therefore infeasible to guarantee online. Memory-based parameter update laws address this by enabling ideal parameter convergence under the online-verifiable finite excitation (FE) condition. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to construct a memory term via the Modified Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure for a class of multi-input multi-output nonlinear systems with an unknown diagonal control effectiveness matrix and bounded nonparametric uncertainties. Under the finite excitation condition, the constructed memory term yields an identity coefficient matrix in the parameter estimation error dynamics. The identity coefficient matrix eliminates the need for time-varying adaptation gains, enables an explicit ultimate bound on the parameter estimation error, and preserves the structure of the nonparametric uncertainty bound under the memory term. Building on this, a combined adaptation law is developed for controller gain estimation under FE. The closed-loop tracking and estimation errors are shown to decay exponentially to a neighborhood of the origin, characterized by an explicit ultimate bound, with a decay rate that depends solely on user-defined gains and system constants, independent of the level of regressor excitation. This removes the dependence of the convergence rate on the level of regressor excitation, a key limitation of existing approaches such as concurrent learning, memory regressor extension, and DREM.

Rubrics aim to make language-model evaluation transparent by decomposing response quality into interpretable criteria. However, natural-language rubrics are often ambiguous, require black-box LLM judges, and typically assume criteria aggregate independently through linear weighted sums, limiting their ability to capture dependencies, alternatives, penalties, and override conditions. We propose ExecRubrics, a framework for representing rubrics as compact executable programs. ExecRubrics encodes evaluation logic as verifiable Python scoring functions, giving natural-language rubric intent an operational semantics: a fixed decision procedure that can be inspected, executed, and edited. On three long-form response benchmarks-HealthBench, HelpSteer, and ArgQuality-we show that ExecRubrics can substitute for expensive black-box judges in ranking preferred over dispreferred responses, matching or improving NL rubric baselines with best preference accuracies of 53%, 78%, and 92%, respectively, while reducing evaluation latency by up to 320 times. We show that incorporating external logic and resources from text processing libraries such as NLTK and spaCy further improves preference accuracy. Our results suggest a novel way of looking at evaluation, by offering a faster, more explainable, and less ambiguous alternative to black-box rubric evaluation, particularly in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and banking where precision and auditability are critical.

Existing LLM unlearning methods struggle with robustness: unbounded forget losses degrade model coherence, fixed-weight balancing cannot adapt as retain difficulty shifts mid-training, and methods that work on one benchmark falter under scaling or repeated application. We propose BLADE, a constrained bilevel framework whose three mechanisms give smooth, predictable control over the optimization landscape: a clamped-entropy forget loss whose gradient is exactly zero once a token reaches sufficient uncertainty; an asymmetric augmented Lagrangian that permanently ratchets retain protection after any violation; and a bilevel structure confined to LoRA adapters that repairs retain damage before each forgetting step. BLADE dominates across three benchmark families, improving average composite scores over the strongest baselines by $6$% on TOFU, $9$% on MUSE Books, and $7$% on KnowUndo, and it remains stable under $4\times$ scaling and $4$ sequential unlearning steps on MUSE News where the best competing method collapses entirely.

A long-video answer is evidence-supported only when the frames decoded from the video cover every event the answer depends on. Existing evaluations score final-answer correctness or predicted evidence intervals, but the frames a method decodes before answering are rarely audited, so correct answers can still rest on incomplete observation. We introduce VES-Bench, a 600-question benchmark of Temporal Ordering and Event Counting items over 348 public long videos. Each item carries a jointly necessary set of evidence intervals, letting us audit at three strictness levels whether a method's decoded frames cover every one of them. We also propose TRACE, a training-free agent that grounds answers in raw visual clips, builds an evidence bundle round by round, and stops only when the answer stabilises as the bundle grows and a final pass over the same clips returns the same answer. Under a same-backbone audit, TRACE answers 50.7% of questions correctly with at least two decoded frames inside every evidence interval, at 98.7 frames per question: over 10 points above uniform decoding at 128 frames (40.2%), and within 2.6 points of uniform decoding at 256 frames at 0.39x its frame cost, while reaching the highest answer accuracy in the audit (63.5%). TRACE also stays competitive on Video-MME (86.1), LVBench (75.6), and LongVideoBench (75.1).

Claim-level Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) aims to mitigate the lack of reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by evaluating the factuality of each claim in their outputs. We introduce Kernel Token Contradiction (KTC), a lightweight approach to compute claim-level UQ under realistic white-box conditions. KTC represents the candidate tokens involved in LLM generation as a positive semi-definite kernel that integrates both the LLM's conditional distribution and a token contradiction score. We then use the Von Neumann entropy to quantify the uncertainty of this kernel. To estimate token contradiction, we develop a new approach based on frequency statistics from the Wikipedia corpus. Although CPU-only, our approach achieves over an 8.2x speedup compared to state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated methods based on cross-encoders, and over a 65x speedup compared to CPU-only methods with comparable performance. Our evaluation spans two benchmarks across four European languages and 16 different models. KTC not only matches the average performance of existing methods but also outperforms them in high-precision regimes. This combination of computational efficiency and accuracy makes real-time monitoring of LLM outputs practical in production.

Two properties of optimization-based controllers such as model predictive control (MPC) limit their use in space flight. The online computing time varies and can exceed the sampling period, and the closed-loop behavior carries no formal guarantee. Explicit MPC, where a parametric solution of the optimization problem is computed, replaces the on-board optimization with a lookup table of piecewise-affine functions with a fixed execution time. However, it has been regarded as only applicable to small horizons, since the number of regions bounds the memory the table occupies and admits only an exponential bound in the horizon. This paper builds on recent developments in parametric solutions of quadratic programs and nonconvex reachability analysis to provide an entire pipeline for spacecraft rendezvous controllers under the Clohessy-Wiltshire dynamics. For this application, efficient data structures can be constructed to encode the control law, both from a computing time and a memory standpoint. In addition, the controller can be verified offline with a guaranteed closed-loop stability certificate by resorting to reachability analysis with hybrid zonotopes. At a 51-step horizon the rendezvous law occupies 10.5 MB and is evaluated in under 300 ns. The occupied memory would fit for instance the CubeSat flight computer ARM9-class AT91RM9200 meaning that the horizon limitation does not hold when the partition is built with the parametric solvers and data structures shown in this paper.

Forecasting dexterous hand motions from egocentric observations is fundamental to intelligent interactive systems. Existing VLM-based methods typically map observations directly to future motions, overlooking the underlying manipulation process that governs hand-object interactions. Moreover, end-to-end optimization couples manipulation learning with motion synthesis, causing motion-generation gradients to interfere with the pre-learned manipulation-aware representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose EMPIRE, a two-stage framework that introduces Explicit Manipulation Planning as an Intermediate Representation for Egocentric hand-motion forecasting. Stage I: Learn to Plan. EMPIRE first learns explicit manipulation plans from multimodal context to capture the progression of hand-object interactions. Stage II: Learn to Act. A motion generator synthesizes future bimanual hand motions conditioned on frozen planner representations, preventing motion-generation gradients from affecting manipulation planning. To support our method, we further construct EMPIRE-651K, a bimanual hand-motion forecasting dataset comprising 650,910 training windows across 111 tasks, each paired with an explicit per-hand manipulation plan. Under identical training and evaluation protocols, EMPIRE achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy, with an MPJPE of 84.53 mm and a finger-relative error of 38.97mm. We release the code and dataset at https://github.com/wangwen-banban/EMPIRE.

Query-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer low-latency inference that is attractive for bimanual robotic manipulation, but we observe that they can still exhibit discontinuous actions and execution failures in complex dual-arm tasks. We hypothesize that unstable multi-view and language fusion is one contributing factor in these failures, often coinciding with attention spreading to distracting regions. To improve robustness, we introduce the Modality Masking Mechanism (M3), an embarrassingly simple, training-only strategy that requires no architectural changes or large-scale robot pretraining. M3 stochastically masks subsets of modality channels during training, exposing the policy to controlled partial observations and encouraging it to rely less on distracting cues and more on evidence that remains reliable. We evaluate M3 on ten bimanual tasks from RoboTwin 2.0 and on three long-horizon real-world tasks. Compared with the Adapter baseline, M3 improves average success by 21.7% in the Clean setting and 11.4% in Clean2Rand, where policies are trained on clean demonstrations and evaluated on randomized scenes, while also improving averaged real-world full-task success by over 30%. These results suggest that structured training-time masking is a practical way to improve the robustness of query-based VLA policies for bimanual manipulation.

Human video is playing an increasingly central role in training World Action Models (WAMs), owing to its diversity and low collection cost relative to teleoperated robot data. However, most WAMs learn from such video only by predicting pixel-level future frames, giving dynamics that are not directly actionable, whereas motion retargeting recovers directly actionable actions but leaves a large visual gap across embodiments. We therefore propose motion-aligned latent dynamics as an embodiment-agnostic representation to bridge video priors and low-level actions. We further present LD4WAM, which pairs a Latent Dynamics Model trained with semantic reconstruction and real motion alignment with a World Dynamics Action Model built as a mixture-of-transformers (MoT), which preserves full future-video generation and uses learnable queries to distill these latent dynamics from generated futures for action conditioning. Pretrained on our curated unified dataset of over 5{,}000 hours of human and robot data, LD4WAM performs strongly in RoboTwin simulation and on real robots equipped with both grippers and dexterous hands, while generalizing well to unseen objects and backgrounds.

Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) is the routine probe of crystalline matter, yet its analysis is the rate-limiting step as laboratories automate acquisition. Deep-learning analyzers excel on simulated patterns and degrade on measured ones. This simulation-to-real gap is structural, not additive: synthetic denoising gives no measurable lift on real spectra, whereas correcting a small peak-position drift more than doubles median retrieval correlation. Real-spectrum fine-tuning, peak-aligned reranking, and recalibration narrow what remains and restore the coverage synthetic anchors lose. Xtalyst integrates these in an agent-orchestrated system spanning phase identification, refinement, and calibrated property prediction. On a frozen held-out partition (n=534) each module measured on both splits reproduces its development finding -- including the synthetic-anchor under-coverage, whose magnitude differs between the two pools -- while held-out refinement converges and preserves symmetry without reaching profile-quality fits, and on a diffractometer its wet-dry recommend-rescan-reanalyze loop flips a blinded silicon standard to a gated PASS and changes which minor phase is resolved on a multi-metal alloy.

Reliably tracking moving deformable linear objects (DLOs) while simultaneously ensuring robustness, accuracy, and temporally consistent state estimation remains a fundamental challenge in robot perception. We introduce MotionDLO, a real-time tracking framework specifically designed to overcome these limitations in temporal continuity and latency. The method exploits the high temporal resolution and sparsity of event-based cameras and combines segmentation with the Coherent Point Drift (CPD) algorithm under the principles of Motion Coherence Theory. This integration enables temporally consistent shape estimation while maintaining a low computational overhead. Existing event-based tracking methods are typically computationally efficient but exhibit reduced accuracy compared to frame-based approaches, or alternatively compromise event sparsity to achieve competitive performance. To resolve this trade-off, we propose a hybrid event- and frame-based tracking architecture that preserves the complementary strengths of both sensing modalities. The event stream ensures high-frequency motion updates, while frame-based information stabilizes spatial accuracy and object identity. We demonstrate that the proposed framework reliably associates DLO instances across video sequences, enabling robust perception for robotic manipulation tasks. Experimental results validate real-time performance at 12 ms update rates and accurate shape tracking with an point-to-curve error as measurement of accuracy of up to 0.43 mm, supporting dynamic path adaptation during manipulation. The source code and demonstration datasets are publicly available.

Structured coherence -- partially coherent light spanned by a finite number of modes -- is emerging as a powerful tool in optical communications, computation, cryptography, and spectroscopy. Key to these prospects is the recent development of on-chip processing of structured coherence, in which large meshes of interferometers implement unitary and non-unitary transformations on the Hermitian coherence matrix representing multimode partially coherent light. Two related critical tasks for the applications of structured coherence are the reconstruction of an unknown coherence matrix and its diagonalization. Stokes tomography has been utilized in reconstructing the coherence matrix, whereas variational processing has been employed in its diagonalization. We show here that Stokes tomography can also be exploited in the on-chip diagonalization of an unknown coherence matrix, which we verify for two-mode and four-mode structured coherence in an integrated hexagonal mesh of Mach-Zehnder interferometers. This photonic circuit implements a predetermined sequence of configurations to estimate the generalized Stokes parameters, which -- in a final step -- inform a reconfiguration of the photonic circuit that diagonalizes the coherence matrix. The field is thus left in a coherent-mode representation comprising uncorrelated, orthogonal modes whose weights correspond to the eigenvalues of the original coherence matrix. Moreover, the integrated photonic circuit can be configured to provide the original field alongside its diagonalized counterpart at the circuit output. We verify the diagonalization procedure for coherence matrices of different coherence rank, entropy, and structure. Finally, we dispel the common notion that O(N^2) steps are required for reconstructing an N x N coherence matrix and show that only O(N) steps are needed.

World action models (WAMs) couple visual future prediction with robot action generation, but accelerated students can lose task capabilities during distillation and later encounter states that are poorly represented by offline data. We study whether on-policy distillation (OPD) can repair such a student without requiring sparse-reward reinforcement learning. We introduce WAM-OPD, a deployment-consistent post-training recipe for a video-first WAM. The student acts in the environment and therefore determines the history distribution. A frozen teacher labels those student histories with coherent video and action targets, while the student action branch is trained under its own generated video plan, as it is at deployment. Joint video and action losses update lightweight adapters in the shared backbone, together with an action flow-matching regularizer. In preliminary RoboTwin 2.0 studies on two tasks, the released one-video/one-action-step Flash-WAM improves from 0.0% to 58.3% success on HANDOVER MIC, and from 16.7% to 33.3% on PUT OBJECT CABINET. These task-specific results are an initial capability proof rather than evidence of broad or uniform generalization. They nevertheless suggest that dense teacher supervision on student-induced histories is a promising post-training interface for video-first WAMs.

Graph-of-Convex-Sets (GCS)-based trajectory optimization represents collision-free regions in configuration space as a finite collection of convex sets and directly performs collision-free trajectory planning over these sets, substantially simplifying the planning process. However, existing GCS-based trajectory planning methods generally assume sufficient connectivity among the convex regions and do not explicitly address cases in which the start and goal regions belong to different connected components of the initial GCS map. To address this limitation, we propose GCS-Bridging, which reconnects disconnected convex regions through collision-free point paths followed by convex region inflation, thereby recovering the feasibility of otherwise disconnected GCS planning problems. Extensive simulations across multiple IRIS-related algorithms and scenarios demonstrate that GCS-Bridging restores missing start-to-goal connectivity in the initial GCS map with a 99.8% success rate. In addition, a hardware experiment on a single-arm Franka platform in a real-world scenario with initially disconnected start and goal regions validates the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical motion planning. Project website: https://zhouxk1997.github.io/GCS_Bridging/

Humans imitate at the level of intent: given a demonstration, we infer its goal and carry it out with whatever tools, objects, and layouts are at hand. Current robot policies instead learn observation-to-action mappings from visual inputs and language instructions, without explicitly inferring the demonstrated task. Learning from human video thus remains largely trajectory-level: models can replay motions in near-identical scenes, but still struggle to imitate what the demonstrator intends rather than merely what they do. We introduce The Imitator Game, a four-level benchmark (L0-L3) that progressively widens the gap between the human demonstration and the robot's own scene, isolating where trajectory replay ceases to suffice and task understanding becomes necessary. We pair it with IG-10K, the largest environment-aligned paired human-robot dataset to date and the only one instantiated across all four levels in both real and simulated settings (20,000+ paired episodes, 50+ tasks, 6 domains), and Imitator Arena, an open platform for blind A/B human evaluation. Across nine state-of-the-art models, performance is stable from L0 to L2 but collapses at L3, identifying functional substitution - achieving the same intent through a different object affordance - as the decisive barrier to intent-level imitation. Human-video-conditioned models outperform caption-conditioned ones, yet every model falls below 13% zero-shot success on unseen tasks; fine-tuning IG-10K-pretrained models with only $10$ paired human-robot demonstrations yields large gains that grow with pretraining scale. The project website and access to Imitator Arena are available at https://imitator-game.github.io.

Quadruped mobile manipulation requires two tightly coupled capabilities: reaching manipulation-ready configurations and maintaining stable contact throughout articulated-object interaction. However, existing methods often terminate navigation near the target, leaving a gap between reachability and manipulation readiness, while tracking lag, motion jitter, and contact instability limit continuous interaction. To address these challenges, we present TONAV, a unified framework integrating task-oriented navigation with action-velocity chunk learning. First, we introduce a position-velocity-coupled teleoperation framework that explicitly captures motion dynamics to improve master-follower consistency and collect smooth, temporally consistent demonstrations. Next, task-oriented navigation leverages vision-language reasoning to decompose high-level instructions into executable subgoals and adaptively refine the robot base toward a manipulation-ready configuration. Finally, action-velocity chunk learning jointly models joint positions and their temporal transitions under velocity supervision, enabling smooth and stable sustained-contact manipulation. Real-world experiments across diverse articulated-object tasks demonstrate that TONAV achieves higher success rates in both task-oriented navigation and complete mobile manipulation, mitigating the navigation-manipulation gap and improving continuous-contact interaction. The project page is at https://haochen611.github.io/TONAV.

World models for physical interaction are typically trained to predict future observations or latent features; however, a planning-oriented model must answer a fundamentally different question: whether a candidate action produces a task-consistent future while preserving essential relations.Monolithic state representations obscure the underlying entities, while standard instance-level object slots merely identify \emph{what} is present without specifying \emph{what role} each entity plays in the task context. To bridge this gap, we present the Semantically Rich World Model (SR-WM), a task-conditioned world model structured around five functional roles: gripper, target, goal, relation, and phase.Within SR-WM, a visual entity encoder extracts soft entity hypotheses from pretrained patch features, allowing segmentation masks to serve as optional proposal priors without mandating them as required state representations or inference inputs.A role binder subsequently maps these hypotheses to task-specific roles, while an action-conditioned dynamics model predicts role transitions alongside fine-grained semantics, including grasp/contact, predicate establishment, relation preservation, fixture state, and phase change.Crucially, this unified role state grounds downstream multi-candidate action generation, stage-aware reranking, and violation-aware suffix resampling.Our comprehensive evaluation protocol spans all four LIBERO simulation suites, cross-suite transfer, perception diagnostics, and action-sensitivity analysis.Ultimately, this formulation transforms object-centric prediction into a semantic interface linking visual dynamics with planning-oriented decision making.

Vision-based whole-body loco-manipulation on humanoid robots is challenging due to partial observability, contact-rich dynamics, and the difficulty of learning long-horizon behaviors from high-dimensional visual inputs. We present \href{https://github.com/DreamMimic/DreamMimic}{DreamMimic}, a framework that distills privileged teacher policies into vision-based humanoid controllers via world-model-assisted distillation. Instead of using a Dreamer-style RSSM for planning, we repurpose it to learn predictive latent dynamics that serve as both a representation space and an action-conditioned multi-step supervision signal, while exposing compact predictive features to the student policy to reduce long-term drift. Beyond standard reconstruction objectives for proprioceptive and visual observations, we add auxiliary prediction heads for privileged state, contact, object state, and reward estimation. These heads provide additional supervision related to agent--object interaction and task progress, encouraging the latent representation to retain signals that are useful for contact-rich loco-manipulation. We further introduce Performance-Conditioned Guidance (PCG), a reward-driven adaptive distillation schedule that computes performance scores for both teacher and student to dynamically balance guidance and exploration. PCG prevents both premature teacher annealing and excessive teacher interference in challenging visual settings. Experiments on OMOMO and BEHAVE show improved tracking-based loco-manipulation performance over strong vision-based baselines, without exposing online privileged interaction states to the student at deployment. Qualitative simulations further examine morphology and simulator changes. These results suggest that world models can provide a useful mechanism for stabilizing visual policy distillation in contact-rich humanoid behaviors.

Modern driving action models are increasingly improved in a self-improvement loop, where a learned world simulator imagines future observations and the resulting data is fed back to refine the action model. However, the bottleneck of this loop lies in the simulators' inability to generate behaviorally plausible responses by surrounding agents, making generated data both unrealistic in interaction and imbalanced in distribution. We introduce BehaviorWorldGen, a framework that closes the loop between action models and world simulators through controllable behavior-aware structured world generation. Its core component is BehaviorFlow, a meta-action-conditioned traffic-flow model that injects interpretable behavior controls and jointly generates multi-agent rollouts. BehaviorFlow realizes the specified agent behaviors while allowing surrounding vehicles to respond to the ego and to one another. The resulting rollouts are rendered by a world simulator into realistic multi-view observations, which are paired with corrected interaction-aware trajectories for action-model refinement. Since BehaviorWorldGen uses structured trajectories as the interface between its modules, it is compatible with diverse action models and world simulators. Experiments on world generation, scene extrapolation, and policy refinement demonstrate consistent improvements, with the largest benefits concentrated on difficult interactive scenarios.

LLMs generate fluent plans for robots but routinely violate the syntactic and se8mantic constraints they must satisfy to execute, and existing remedies trade formal guarantees against plan quality: soft methods (affordance scoring, grounded decoding) give no guarantee, while symbolic planners (LLM+P) discard the LM's commonsense. We propose \textbf{Meta-Ctrl}, a constrained-decoding framework that guarantees the encoded constraints while preserving the base LM's plan quality. Meta-Ctrl introduces \emph{meta-tokens}---a compact vocabulary of grounded actions---enforcing syntax at the token level and semantics (preconditions, goals, ordering) at the action level, an exact factorization that cuts the memory of constrained decoding from over 107TB to under 2GB. With it, a small open-weight LM becomes competitive where it otherwise sits at the bottom of the leaderboard: on WAH-NL under the LoTa-Bench protocol it reaches the highest reported subgoal success rate, exceeding GPT-4's, with consistent gains across the Embodied Agent Interface. We further demonstrate it on a real tabletop robot, where every generated plan satisfies its preconditions and goals by construction. Project website: https://meta-ctrlg.github.io/.

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through communication among role-specialized agents. However, inter-agent dependencies introduce reliability risks beyond isolated agent failures. For instance, errors in intermediate messages could be inherited and amplified by downstream agents. Existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods mainly target isolated responses or single-agent reasoning, and therefore fail to capture uncertainty propagation in MAS. To this end, we propose PropUQ-MAS, an error propagation-aware UQ framework that represents MAS execution as a communication-structured graph and estimates each step's reliability by combining local uncertainty with uncertainty inherited from upstream messages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PropUQ-MAS consistently improves UQ in MAS, with average relative gains of +6.10% in AUROC and +47.58% in PRR.

Autonomous agents increasingly interact with other independent agents, and such interactions typically admit multiple joint behaviors. When two agents prefer different ones, their independent strategies may be mutually incompatible and fail to reach a coordinated outcome; when they are identical, neither can differentiate its role when needed. Ideally, an agent should coordinate with any agent it encounters, regardless of which admissible joint behavior that agent aims to realize. We therefore propose a new form of strategy, the opinion-guided strategy, which keeps all the admissible joint behaviors available and postpones the selection to execution time, when the other agent's behavior reveals which one to realize. To realize this, nonlinear opinion dynamics are leveraged in a layered realization to guide the agent to a common admissible joint behavior in response to the other agent's evolving behavior, even without communication. We formally establish the conditions under which the strategy remains robust to every preference the other agent may hold. This robustness has an important implication: two agents running identical strategies can break symmetry when needed, a capability that conventional strategies lack. Three case studies across different applications show that the opinion-guided strategy coordinates with every randomly encountered agent, as long as it is willing to realize one of the admissible joint behaviors. One of them corresponds to a general-sum game: unlike conventional approaches devoted to finding a unique Nash equilibrium in advance, the opinion-guided strategy keeps every equilibrium open and guarantees the agents reach one, decided by their runtime interaction.

Construction robotics and automation offer promising means of improving productivity, alleviating workforce shortages, and reducing workers' exposure to physically demanding tasks. However, reliable contact-rich robotic assembly remains challenging under tight tolerances, fabrication inaccuracies, and uncertain contact dynamics. To address this challenge, we present a framework coupling diffusion policies trained on simulation-generated pose and force/torque data with an L1-inspired adaptive controller that corrects policy-predicted actions online to compensate for unmodeled contact dynamics. We benchmark the framework against baselines in timber joinery, pipe fitting, and sequential full-scale truss assembly. It achieves 100% success on single-task assemblies and 90-100% success across sequential truss assembly subtasks, with lower, more stable contact forces than the baselines. By enabling zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for force-aware contact-rich assembly, the framework reduces costly, labor-intensive real-world data collection for policy training and advances scalable, robust automation of multistage assembly, motivating extension to broader contact-rich manipulation tasks in construction.

Minimally invasive procedures performed within confined anatomical spaces depend on continuous endoscopic visualization. Current robotic endoscope systems can stabilize or reposition an endoscope, but they do not possess relevant context to provide effective visualization assistance. We present EndoNav, an anatomy-grounded natural-language framework that translates high-level surgeon commands into autonomous endoscopic visualization behaviors within patient-specific sinonasal anatomy. Spoken surgeon commands are transcribed and interpreted by an endoscopic viewpoint agent conditioned on a patient-specific anatomical scene representation. Rather than generating robot motion directly, the viewpoint agent generates structured visualization objectives that are converted into target viewpoints and inspection trajectories, which are then executed through geometry-constrained endoscope motion planning and joint-space control. We evaluate EndoNav using a structured three-pass sinus examination across three CT-derived anatomical models. For one cadaveric specimen, autonomous visualization is compared with sinus examinations performed by two resident surgeons. EndoNav achieved mean visualization IoUs of 87.04% and 84.37% relative to the two surgeon examinations, compared with an inter-surgeon IoU of 87.44%, while recovering 92.91% and 93.20% of surgeon-observed anatomical surfaces, respectively. These results demonstrate the feasibility of grounding high-level anatomical commands into patient-specific geometric objectives and translating them into anatomically constrained robotic visualization behaviors.

Computer use agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed as multi-agent systems that decompose a task into multiple subtasks executed across parallel virtual machines (VMs). However, a critical physical bottleneck is that the state of two VMs cannot be merged. Previous systems handle this ad-hoc rather than treating it as a first-class concern. We propose Spine-Branch Coordination for multi-agent computer use, a framework that decomposes a task into a "spine-branch" graph, where the spine carries the main task flow with continuous VM state and branch tasks execute in parallel to collect information the spine needs to complete the task. Branch VMs are discarded once their tasks finish, so no VM merging ever occurs. Experiments show that on 200 long-horizon tasks from Odysseys and across three CUA backbones, Spine-Branch improves success rate over the baseline system by 6.0% to 16.5%, while reducing per-task cost by 34% to 70%, indicating that explicitly modeling VM-state merging constraint enables multi-agent computer use to scale efficiently.

World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot actions. We argue that video generation is an unnecessary intermediate objective for world-action modeling. For robotic manipulation, the goal of a world model is not to reproduce how the world looks at every intermediate moment, but to predict the state that the world will reach after an action is executed. The intermediate frames only describe the visual transition between physical states, which consumes substantial model capacity and computation, but do not directly specify the physical outcome that the robot action is intended to produce. In this paper, we propose DELE-w0.5, which infers robot actions from predicted future states without relying on video generation. Concretely, DELE-w0.5 infers the action sequence from its corresponding compact future latent state. The future latent state captures the action-relevant physical outcome of robot interaction and serves as an explicit bridge between world modeling and action generation. The core design principle of DELE-w0.5 is to model how the physical world changes under robot actions, rather than how its visual appearance evolves frame by frame. This formulation removes the high-dimensional visual redundancy introduced by dense video representations, and it therefore enables cheaper training and low-latency inference. Across 480 real-robot trials on four long-horizon manipulation tasks, our DELE-w0.5 achieves the best performance among all compared policies, attaining 62.5 overall full-task success and 81.3 macro ordered-stage progress, outperforming the strongest baseline by 47.5 and 30.7 percentage points, respectively.

Robot foundation models have substantially advanced perception and control, but natural human-robot collaboration requires more than executing isolated commands. A robot must recognize ambiguity, maintain context across turns, communicate its intentions, and revise ongoing behavior as the user's intent changes. We present $\scriptstyle\mathsf{Ludi}_{\scriptscriptstyle 0.1}$, an agentic system for socially intelligent robots that integrates interactive speech, multimodal reasoning, memory, navigation, and learned manipulation. Its decision-making core is a fine-tuned vision-language model trained on multi-turn interaction traces spanning ambiguous requests, clarifications, corrections, interruptions, mixed social and task dialogue, and multi-step tasks. A purpose-built harness manages the model-tool interaction loop, while specialized navigation and manipulation policies execute physical skills. Ludi${}_{\scriptscriptstyle 0.1}$ demonstrates a practical path toward fluid human-robot collaboration today while producing the multimodal interaction traces needed to develop a more deeply integrated foundation model for robots and people.

Stable quadrupedal locomotion on sparse terrain requires selecting state-relevant terrain evidence for precise foot placement. Model-based foothold planners provide precise foothold selection but rely heavily on explicit model assumptions. Recent attention-based map encoding (AME) studies show that end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can learn implicit foothold guidance. However, the computational cost of dense AME encoding grows with map resolution, limiting its scalability to fine-grained sparse terrain. We propose DELTA, a Deformable Elevation-Based Local Terrain Attention encoder. DELTA predicts state-conditioned sampling locations, forms terrain evidence tokens from adaptive local elevation patches, and attends only to a fixed-size token set. With fixed sampling and patch settings, DELTA's encoder cost is independent of map resolution. Experiments show that DELTA achieves final traversal performance comparable to AME at the standard resolution while improving learning efficiency. This fixed encoder cost enables the use of higher-resolution terrain maps, improving traversal on fine-grained sparse terrain. DELTA also demonstrates strong generalization to unseen mixed evaluation courses composed of continuous and discrete terrain elements. Beyond simulation, DELTA demonstrates successful sim-to-real transfer on RAIBO2. Analysis of the learned sampling offsets and attention weights shows that DELTA samples steppable regions and attends to terrain evidence relevant to future touchdowns without foothold labels or attention supervision.

Software systems have traditionally been organized around applications where human users act as principal decision-makers. Recent developments in agentic capabilities alter this paradigm: software agents now autonomously translate high-level goals into structured tasks, orchestrating tools, services and sub-agents to execute complex workflows. This evolution gives rise to an agent economy where these autonomous agents capture real economic value. However, the infrastructure required to support the agent economy fails across three critical dimensions: the absence of persistent identity infrastructure prevents systemic accountability in agentic workflows; capability claims remain self-declared not backed by verifiable execution evidence; and the disconnect between creator identities, agent performance, and project value hinders the economic valuation of agents as assets. While existing registries provide naming and discovery, unifying these features around a persistent identity anchor remains largely unaddressed. TessIndex is a capability-verified identity system for agent primitives that utilizes a dual-plane architecture: the blockchain records compact commitments for identity, ownership, and verification, while centralized servers maintain dynamic metadata for discovery, commerce, and reputation. It establishes: persistent identities across agent primitives to enforce systemic accountability in autonomous workflows; a predicate-based verification process replacing self-declared claims with cryptographic capability proof; an identity infrastructure that links agent performance to both project and creator identities while capturing value through tokenization. Ultimately, TessIndex serves as an integrated infrastructure that binds an agent's existence across capabilities, execution, and reputation into a single persistent identity.

In embodied AI, safety risk can be latent: a benign instruction and a safe scene become hazardous only when composed. Prior work has advanced embodied safety by varying visual contexts or evaluating execution-time dynamics, but the complementary axis of fixing the scene and varying only the instruction remains underexplored. We introduce GuardianBench, an instruction-contrastive benchmark grounded in international safety standards that isolates this latent contextual risk through 3,024 instruction-scene examples organized as same-scene Safe/Unsafe contrastive pairs across various hazard categories. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) reveals instruction-insensitive verdicts: models disproportionately approve both instructions under a given scene; across the primary models, average pair accuracy is only 24.1%. Our systematic rationale audit localizes the dominant failure: models fail to bind the instruction-relevant cues that differentiate safe from unsafe compositions. As a post-training case study, Verdict Log-Odds Supervision (VLOS), a lightweight verdict-level objective, substantially improves performance on open-weight backbones. Together, our latent contextual risk task formulation, standards-grounded contrastive benchmark construction, pair-level and rationale-level failure diagnosis, and benchmark-enabled verdict calibration establish GuardianBench as a controlled evaluation suite for exposing and improving safety reasoning over instruction-scene compositions under latent contextual risk.

Automated evolution of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) holds significant potential for reducing the manual effort required to design and optimize LLM-based agent architectures. However, extant search-based paradigms face a fundamental trade-off, where an expanded optimization scope exacerbates evolutionary instability, while discrete branch-and-discard search isolates insights across lineages. To address these limitations, we propose a continuous, data-driven optimization paradigm built upon a unified ReAct-based infrastructure that reconciles a broad optimization scope with operational stability. Under this paradigm, we present OptiMAS, a task-agnostic agentic optimizer that leverages textual interaction trajectories and task feedback as loss signals for end-to-end MAS evolution. Equipped with a novel dual-track memory mechanism, OptiMAS sustains performance improvement over extended optimization horizons. Evaluation on four heterogeneous agentic benchmarks with three varying scale and accessibility LLM backbones, demonstrates that OptiMAS consistently achieves competitive or superior accuracy relative to both domain-specialized hand-crafted systems and existing evolutionary methods. Our work establishes a practical milestone toward robust, automated MAS evolution.

Human-in-the-loop real-world reinforcement learning enables rapid acquisition of effective robotic manipulation policies for individual tasks, often within tens of minutes. Yet it remains unclear how to extend this paradigm to continual learning, where a single policy must acquire new skills without losing previously learned behaviors. Existing real-world continual learning methods do not explicitly constrain prior behaviors, leading to severe catastrophic forgetting. We introduce Continual Interactive Distillation for Embodied Reinforcement Learning (CIDER), a continual reinforcement learning framework that freezes the accumulated historical policy as a teacher before learning each new task and interleaves task learning with distillation-based retention. We further introduce gradient routing to separate the gradients used for acquiring new tasks from those used for preserving prior behaviors. We evaluate our method with a single shared actor on six real-world household and industrial manipulation tasks. Interactive Distillation maintains high measured success on previously learned tasks across our six-task real-robot sequence while acquiring each new task in 10 to 20 minutes, whereas every baseline forgets at least one previous task. Additional ablations reveal the key design choices that govern the tradeoff between stability and plasticity in real-world continual reinforcement learning.

Human tactile perception relies on complex multisensory cues. Yet the relationship between tactile signals and perceptual representations remains poorly understood, limiting the integration of touch in digital environments and human-like robotic perception. To address this gap, we developed a computational framework comprising three interconnected deep learning models that map multisensory touch data to material perception, without relying on hand-crafted features. The models represent progressively different routes from tactile signals to material class: from low-level interaction signals to perceptual attribute distributions (Model 1), from predicted attribute distributions to material classification (Model 2), and directly from tactile signals to material categories, bypassing intermediate representations (Model 3). By combining deep learning with Integrated Gradients, the framework achieved high accuracy while offering interpretability, revealing which sensory modalities most strongly drive its decisions. Our results show that deep learning can approach near-perfect material classification when unconstrained by intermediate perceptual stages, but matching human-like performance is harder once those stages are modeled explicitly. Notably, thermal cues emerged as particularly informative across all models, providing robust signals for material differentiation. The results offer a computational account of how tactile signals lead to material perception and show how interpretable deep learning can both approach human-level performance and reveal cues that robotic and haptic systems need to incorporate.

Aerial payload transport using multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles is challenging because payload geometry, contact interaction, grasp stability, flight control, and narrow-passage traversal are strongly coupled during pickup and transport. Object-specific grippers often cannot adapt their footprint or grasp geometry when the payload shape or passage width changes. This paper presents a vision-guided morphing quadcopter for multi-geometry payload transport through narrow passages. The proposed platform uses four hybrid arm-leg structures that function as both landing supports and grasping members. A centrally placed actuator drives a tendon-based morphing mechanism, enabling all four arms to synchronously retract or expand for object grasping, footprint reduction, and post-transport release. Onboard vision estimates the payload geometry and passage width, while endpoint force feedback is used to confirm grasp contact during payload engagement. A phase-wise mission planner, PID-based flight stabilization, and morphology-adaptive grasp controller are implemented in a MuJoCo simulation environment. The framework is evaluated using box, cylindrical, and spherical payloads, representing flat-faced, rolling-curved, and fully curved contact conditions. Across the three cases, the simulated system completes the pickup-transport-release sequence with a maximum RMS position error of 0.31 m, a final drop-zone error below 0.18 m, a compact grasp footprint of 0.09-0.21 m2, and a footprint reduction of 75.0-89.7 percent. The results demonstrate that a single-actuator morphing quadcopter can adapt its grasp footprint for the transport of payloads with different geometries while reducing its overall footprint for narrow-passage traversal.

Autonomous excavation requires an intelligent control system that can convert spatial work intent into coordinated bucket motion under contact-rich soil interaction. This paper presents a target-conditioned intelligent control framework for autonomous excavation in a physics-based deformable-soil simulation workflow. An image-aligned target mask serves as a visual spatial command for the desired digging region, while a mask-conditioned Action Chunking Transformer maps multi-view RGB observations, proprioception, and the target mask to temporally extended joystick commands. To reduce target-ignoring behavior, demonstrations are organized with paired-condition supervision, where the same or closely matched scene is demonstrated with different target masks and corresponding action chunks. The framework is evaluated through both a diagnostic manipulation task and an excavation simulation benchmark with single-scoop and sequential pile-clearing protocols. In manipulation, target success is 4\% for no-condition ACT, 63\% for non-paired mask-conditioned ACT, and 96\% for paired-condition mask-conditioned ACT. In sequential pile clearing, paired-condition mask-conditioned ACT removes 76.8\% of the pile versus 27.4\% and 15.7\% for the two baselines, with 91.0\% human-normalized efficiency. The results show that visual target conditioning, paired demonstration structure, and action-chunk control form a practical cyber-physical simulation pipeline for excavator automation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with behavior cloning (BC) on expert demonstrations. However, BC provides only positive supervision for expert actions, without explicit negative supervision indicating which actions are instruction-inconsistent or otherwise inappropriate. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide such corrective signals, but often relies on externally specified rewards or curated non-expert data, both of which are costly to obtain in robotics. We show that offline RL for VLA models need not rely on curated non-expert trajectories: successful expert demonstrations alone can be transformed into dense corrective supervision through instruction relabeling. Specifically, by pairing expert actions with mismatched alternative instructions, we synthesize counterfactual instruction-observation-action tuples from the dataset and combine them with adversarial discriminator training to learn an instruction-grounded reward model for offline RL, without collecting additional rollouts or annotations. On the robustness-focused LIBERO-PRO benchmark, our method improves robustness to object position and task perturbations over a strong state-of-the-art baseline. It also outperforms competitive baselines in real-robot experiments on the TX-G2 (compatible with AGIBot G2). More broadly, our results suggest that, for data-constrained VLA learning, extracting denser supervision from each demonstration can complement collecting additional data.

This paper presents a safety-critical bilateral teleoperation framework for omnidirectional aerial manipulators that integrates visual and force-sensorless haptic wrench feedback. Unlike existing approaches that either rely on onboard force/torque sensors or use model-dependent wrench estimates, which may become unreliable under model uncertainties or induce unintended feedback during free-flight, our method implements a hierarchical safety filter based on control barrier functions to avoid such limitations. The safety filter, being the key contribution, explicitly accounts for tracking errors arising from physical interaction between the aerial manipulator and its surroundings while enforcing thrust limits, a factor overlooked despite its critical importance for flight safety. This safety filter adjusts the command from the operator to ensure safe and stable aerial manipulation and avoid motor saturation. The adjustment made by the filter is mapped to haptic feedback, which is intuitive to the operator and conveys information on physical interaction and impending motor saturation. By actual experiments with a hexarotor-based omnidirectional aerial manipulator, we demonstrate that the proposed method avoids haptic feedback during free-flight, provides directionally consistent feedback under physical interaction, and can be operated for diverse manipulative tasks. Moreover, an ablation study further shows that the saturation filter improves interaction stability by explicitly preventing motor saturation and informing the operator of corrective actions.

Transformer-based models are widely used for clinical prediction from electronic health records (EHRs), yet their architectures still require substantial manual tuning, and the optimal configuration may vary across tasks and hospitals. Neural architecture search (NAS) automates architecture design, but conventional methods are computationally costly for Transformer-based EHR models. Recent large language model (LLM)-guided NAS methods reduce manual search design but typically conduct each search independently, without reusing architecture knowledge across hospitals. In this study, we propose ATHENA (Agentic Transfer across Hospitals for EHR Neural Architecture Search), a knowledge-guided agentic NAS framework for Transformer-based EHR modeling. ATHENA uses a weight-sharing supernet that is pretrained once per hospital, allowing candidate architectures to be instantiated as inherited subnetworks and evaluated through fine-tuning rather than independent pretraining. It also incorporates a two-layer cross-hospital architecture prior. The first layer retrieves high-performing architecture examples from source sites based on task descriptors, while the second estimates the effects of architectural components using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)-based meta-regression. These priors guide a multi-agent LLM search together with validation feedback from the target hospital. Across six clinical prediction tasks and two independent health systems, ATHENA matches or outperforms four NAS baselines in 9 of 12 hospital-task evaluations at a search budget of 30. It also shows more consistent architecture selection across repeated searches. ATHENA provides a practical approach for reducing manual architecture tuning in Transformer-based EHR modeling. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/GatorAIM/ATHENA.

Recent mesh-based simulation advances have, in no small part, relied on neural surrogates of two distinct families: global models that route information through a small set of latent tokens, and local models that perform message passing across mesh edges. Consistent with both classes is the inability to perform beyond low-dimensional problems and small-scale or oversimplified meshes, the simulation regimes where industrial problems reside. Our work shows this explicitly and presents a unified formulation. In global approaches, latent-token attention acts as a spatial low-pass filter, while local message passing lacks the global reach necessary to propagate information across large mesh spaces. Viewed through the error, the two operators are the halves of a multigrid cycle: one corrects errors at the lower end of the spectrum, the other at the higher end, and neither can do the other's job. We introduce Read-Write-Relax (RWR), which interleaves latent attention with message-passing relaxation under a unified formulation. The interleaved processor lowers error across the entire spectrum, making RWR the most accurate model in nearly every comparison across our industrial and public benchmarks. It is also markedly data-efficient in the scarce-data regimes, accurate on the engineering quantities of interest, and scales full-field predictions to challenging, large-scale problems.

Black-box VR and 3D applications are difficult to regression test because observable failures depend on where a tester moves, what objects are visible, and which views are captured. Manual exploratory testing can find such failures, but its evidence is time-consuming to reproduce; systematic sweeps are reproducible, but they lack semantic guidance and spend exploration budget on low-value viewpoints. We observe that an LLM can make the high-level decisions a human tester makes during exploration: interpreting a task, choosing which objects to inspect, grouping related objects, recording what it saw, and deciding when missing evidence should trigger another attempt. Based on this observation, we present ExploreAI, an LLM-driven agentic framework that offloads repeated perception, navigation, multi-view capture execution, and logging to specialized modules while using the LLM for planning, evidence recording, capture-policy decisions, and verification decisions. ExploreAI constructs an Exploration Knowledge Base (EKB): a structured, per-object record of one exploration run. For each object the agent finds, the EKB stores the scan evidence that exposed it, the selected target, the navigation path, the multi-view capture, and the self-verification result. The EKB is a reusable testing artifact that supports reproducible observable-regression checking across versions of a VR or 3D application. Across six indoor and outdoor scenes in Unity, AI2-THOR, and BeamNG, ExploreAI constructs high-completeness EKBs under both complete and target exploration, and an LLM-module ablation shows where semantic planning, capture policy, evidence recording, and self-verification contribute. Reproduction pilots further show that EKB-guided traces help both humans and LLM-based reproducers reproduce exact object-view evidence more effectively than conditions without EKB context.

This paper investigates wearable-based recognition of human activities and gestures to support Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in object-handover and assembly-like scenarios. Electromyography (EMG) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals were collected using a Myo armband, culminating in a novel dataset introduced as MAGIC-HRI (Multimodal Activity, Gesture and Intention Collection) with a large taxonomy of 53 movement classes, including Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) numbers (0-9), hand gestures, object/tool handover actions (pick up/give/hold), tool-manipulation tasks, and generic assembly/idle motions, collected from 11 participants with 10 samples per class (530 samples per participant). Signals are segmented by detecting muscle activation via an EMG energy envelope, then processed using sliding windows; time- and frequency-domain features are extracted. Multiple classical classifiers are tuned via cross-validated grid search, with Random Forest as the strongest baseline. A Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) protocol reveals a large generalization gap, indicating substantial subject dependence. A personalized adaptation experiment suggests that injecting a small number of samples from a new user can markedly improve recognition. Overall, the study contributes a broad, HRI-driven multimodal dataset, a rigorous evaluation emphasizing generalization, and practical evidence that personalization is likely required for robust deployment in practical HRI.

Contact-rich robotic manipulation requires an accurate model of the kinematic relationship between a robot's joints and the task features it senses. This relationship is rarely known exactly: it changes with each tool the robot picks up and shifts, sometimes almost instantaneously, as contact modes change --- especially for multi-fingered hands that make and break contact at points that are not exactly prescribed, as in full-hand grasping. This paper develops an adaptive scheme that estimates that relationship online, using only joint-angle sensing and a wrist-mounted force/torque sensor, with no exteroceptive measurement of the tool tip. We derive a provably stable kinematic update law that identifies the kinematics of an unknown tool from force/torque feedback alone, and prove stability of both the rigid case and the case with a compliance controller as an inner loop. We show that identification is confined to the directions the motion excites --- so that, for example, a tool's length is unobservable under a rigid insertion push, while a compliant loop's passive yielding partially excites it; and that with a second-order admittance the compliant certificate holds unconditionally in continuous time. We also pose the combined control and estimation problem as a Quadratic Program (QP): the formulation yields the prediction term of the update law exactly but, instructively, cannot reproduce the tracking adaptation term. We validate the scheme in simulation on a peg-in-hole insertion. This work is the first step in a research program aimed at factoring manipulation learning into a task policy which can be learned in isolation of the robot, for instance by reinforcement learning, and an adaptive kinematic component that adapts online to the particular robot, hand, or tool in use.

Consider a typical test of a robot system: one observes a sequence of outcomes concerning some aspect of interest (crash or no crash, tracking error, time to completion), and reports a mean (crash risk, average error, mean time to completion) and, more importantly, an interval guaranteed to contain that mean at a prescribed confidence, referred to as a performance certificate. Given expensive real-world trials, the sample size is therefore small, and the certificate is often loose. Now consider the same procedure, except that before each real outcome is revealed, the operator ``peeks'' at a large bank of simulated results, and places a bet on where the real outcome will land. As the real outcomes settle the bets, the operator gains or loses wealth. One's ``trust'' over simulators also shifts within the portfolio. This paper develops that idea into a sim-to-real betting certificate framework with three contributions: (i) An algorithm that links a scalable bank of simulators to effective bets, and the accumulated betting wealth to the certificate. (ii) A proof that the returned certificate is anytime valid, covering the true mean with the prescribed probability, using any simulator bank. (iii) The guaranteed wealth-regret bounds yield configuration principles for the proposed algorithm and simulator bank design to deliver tight certificates. Experiments across synthetic distributions and real-world robot tests, covering both replayed standardized testing outcomes and online runtime evaluation, show the proposed method narrows the certificate by $51.6\%\pm16\%$ against classic and state-of-the-art baselines, and by $32.26\%\pm8\%$ in the extremely limited-sample regime ($\leq30$ samples).

Disassembling end-of-life electric vehicle (EV) battery packs is dull and dangerous work, performed almost entirely by humans. We present GOLEM (Generalized Open Library of Embodied Modules), an end-to-end, open-source system architecture for EV battery disassembly with the Unitree H1-2 humanoid robot in which walking, manipulation, dynamic stability, navigation, and spatial memory are independent modules with abstract interfaces, so that methods are easily developed, interchanged, and compared. GOLEM is deployed as a Docker-based ROS 2 abstraction in which MuJoCo and IsaacLab digital twins expose interfaces matching the physical robot. GOLEM's composability and per-module customization enable development and demonstration of humanoid EV battery disassembly, from simulation to reality. GOLEM provides fair comparison between humanoid modules, enabling evaluation as a capability ladder, in which one module is characterized at a time and added as a rung: LiDAR-inertial navigation places the robot within 13.0cm of a 6m goal; a learned standing controller recovers from external disturbances that sampling-based lower-body MPC does not; and grasping loosened fasteners from a real Hyundai Ioniq 5 pack degrades from 97% tethered to 87% free-standing to 37% under navigation-induced pose variance. Source code is available at the project page https://golem-humanoid.github.io

Recent vision-based action models have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex manipulation, but they rarely leverage explicit object physical properties to adapt their policies. We introduce ViTacPhys, a visual-tactile framework and data acquisition system that estimates object mass and friction-coefficient classes, together with continuous stiffness, from human manipulation demonstrations. Trained on data from 60 rigid and deformable objects, ViTacPhys combines temporal visual-tactile modeling, cross-attention multimodal fusion, and a semantic prior derived from a vision-language model. On seen objects, it achieves 97.2% mass classification accuracy, 98.8% friction-coefficient classification accuracy, and a stiffness mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 5.51%. On held-out objects from known categories, it achieves 87.5% mass accuracy, 97.5% friction-coefficient accuracy, and a stiffness MAPE of 9.08%. We transfer ViTacPhys from the human domain to the robot domain using limited robot teleoperation data, robot-style video augmentation, and human demonstrations with matched actions, and deploy it as an online module for adaptive grasping. The resulting physical-property-conditioned policy achieves total grasping success rates of 95.0% on in-distribution objects and 83.4% on out-of-distribution objects. For out-of-distribution objects successfully grasped by both methods, its force profiles are more consistent with human teleoperation than those produced by ACT. These results demonstrate the feasibility of explicitly estimating and conditioning on object physical properties for real-world adaptive grasping.

We formalize the Steiner Traveling Salesman Problem (Steiner-TSP) on Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS), which seeks a minimum-cost closed trajectory through required convex sets while allowing optional transit vertices and revisits. To explore the resulting infinite solution space, we propose a unified branch-and-bound search over rooted walk prefixes. Additive lower-bound-graph costs bound committed prefixes, while a cut-separated connected-flow relaxation lower-bounds the residual cost of visiting every remaining target and returning to the root. Under a uniform positive-cost assumption, best-first traversal terminates after finitely many expansions on every feasible instance without an initial incumbent, whereas depth-first traversal does so once a finite incumbent is available. For a user-specified factor $ε\geq1$, a global lower bound certifies that either strategy's incumbent cost is at most $ε$ times the global optimum. We further demonstrate joint sensing-mode, visitation-order, and continuous-trajectory selection for a mobile-manipulator inspection task, including action precedences expressed in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTL$_f$). Both traversal strategies find feasible solutions on all benchmark instances within 30s with mean certified optimality gaps of 28.1% and 29.7%, respectively, whereas two recent baselines succeed on only about half of the instances

We propose VT-MUSE, a Multimodal Unified SEquential representation learning framework for visuotactilemanipulation. Existing approaches often encode visual and tactile observations independently before fusion, limiting their ability to capture fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Moreover, most methods focus on observations at the current time step and overlook the temporal evolution of contact. VT-MUSE addresses both limitations through a two-stage representation learning framework. In Stage I, modality specific encoders are jointly adapted via cross-modal temporal alignment and masked-view consistency. In Stage II, a conditional variational latent model processes masked visual sequences together with full tactile histories. Auxiliary decoders reconstruct the masked recent visual observations and predict tactile depth changes, encouraging the latent representation to retain both global visual context and local contact dynamics. The learned representation is subsequently integrated into a lightweight Transformer policy through gated cross-attention. On the simulation benchmark, VT-MUSE outperforms the strongest baseline evaluated on all tasks by 11 percentage points and also achieves substantial improvements in real-world experiments.

Token compression has become a key technique for reducing the inference cost of large foundation models, with approaches such as token pruning and KV-cache reuse widely adopted in vision-language models and recently explored for embodied agents. In embodied agents, tokens not only support perception and semantic understanding but also directly affect latency-sensitive closed-loop robot action prediction. Existing schemes typically guide compression using redundancy or importance cues, such as visual similarity, attention scores, and saliency. However, these cues only indirectly measure the key factor for safe compression: how much a token can change before causing an unacceptable deviation in downstream actions. This receiver-dependent tolerance is closely related to the principle of just noticeable difference (JND). Classical JND characterizes signal tolerance in the human visual system, while machine-oriented JND extends this concept to downstream machine responses. Building on this progression, we introduce Action-JND, which extends JND modeling to embodied perception by defining noticeability through the language-conditioned action response of a vision-language-action (VLA) policy in closed-loop control. A token change is considered admissible only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin. To realize this concept, we develop a lightweight token-wise JND estimator in deep visual-feature space to predict the maximum tolerable perturbation while preserving policy responses. The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms, including stale-KV reuse and token pruning, prioritizing action-tolerant tokens for compression. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark with OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT demonstrate that Action-JND consistently improves compression reliability, especially under aggressive compression ratios.

Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a policy that fails cannot learn from that failure without additional human demonstrations. Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning offers a path to self-improvement but has proven difficult to scale to the multi-billion-parameter models underpinning modern robot policies. We propose Q-Planning, which equips a large visuomotor BC policy with a small off-policy Q-function. Because a Q-function estimates value rather than imitates actions, it can be trained on the same successful demonstrations as the BC policy and later absorb both successful and failed deployment rollouts, an asymmetry BC does not have. We exploit this asymmetry to enable value-guided action selection at inference (a single-step Q-weighted average over BC draws) and online self-improvement that fine-tunes only the Q-function, leaving the BC weights untouched. On LIBERO and bimanual RoboTwin, ten iterations of self-improvement lift every benchmark score we tested (LIBERO-10 93% to 99%, RoboTwin 83.8% to 91.4%) and shorten successful episodes on the near-ceiling suites (LIBERO-Object, LIBERO-Goal). On two contact-rich bimanual real-robot tasks, the same loop (BC frozen, no human intervention) improves purely from its own deployment rollouts: stack-cups 40% to 90% and insert-wallet 25% to 80% in five iterations, whereas SFT on successful rollouts alone stalls at 55% and 30%. Under an identical online budget Q-Planning is the only method, among Best-of-N, filtered SFT, IBRL, DSRL, and DAWR, that improves stably from failures without training an auxiliary actor.

The radiative transfer equation (RTE) governs thermal radiation in participating media, which is critical to modeling combustion, atmospheric, high-temperature, and radiative thermal management applications. However, due to the inherently high-dimensional nature of radiative transfer, numerical solutions to the RTE induce significant computational cost. This work develops a Fourier neural operator (FNO) as a fast, discretization-invariant, surrogate model for predicting the absorbed heat flux field in participating media. A dataset is generated on a benchmark 2-dimensional problem modeling thermal surface emission into a participating medium with spatially varying properties using Monte Carlo simulations. The FNO is trained to learn the solution operator, mapping the input property fields and geometry to the resulting heat flux field. The trained FNO provides up to 26-times computational acceleration compared to Monte Carlo simulation at equivalent error. Furthermore, as the FNO learns the solution operator and not an image-to-image mapping, the trained FNO accurately generalizes to various spatial discretizations, including those not seen in the training dataset. A spectral analysis of the spatial frequencies present in the heat flux prediction demonstrates the FNO's ability to suppress the high-frequency noise present in the training dataset, while preserving the physically meaningful low-mid frequency spectrum. These results demonstrate the Fourier neural operator surrogate model can provide accurate, computationally efficient, and discretization-invariant predictions for radiative transfer in a participating medium. By learning the underlying solution operator, this approach moves toward the development of surrogate models for radiative transfer capable of generalizing across a broad range of geometries, discretizations, and boundary conditions.

Long-horizon manipulation tasks are often only partially ordered. For example, when assembling an electronic device, the battery and circuit board may be installed in either order, but both must be in place before the enclosure is closed. Recovering such dependencies enables robots to flexibly reorder subtasks while preserving task validity. Existing approaches typically infer task structure from human demonstrations using both temporal and symbolic supervision. However, symbolic predicates require explicit grounding, which is difficult to obtain in realistic settings. In this work, we present an approach for extracting task dependency structures from demonstrations using only simple kinematic graphs and distributions over relative object poses. From these representations, our method estimates pairwise task-step-dependency probabilities and uses them to initialize the edge weights of a precedence graph. We then introduce a filtering pipeline that converts this graph of probability estimates into the final task dependency graph. We evaluate our approach on an existing benchmark and on a new dataset comprising longer tasks with more complex dependencies. We find that our method recovers more accurate task structures from fewer demonstrations than the baselines. Finally, we demonstrate that the inferred graphs can be used to generate multiple valid robotic execution orders for the same task.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) cooperation enables beyond-line-of-sight perception, mitigating occlusions in single-vehicle sensing. However, existing V2X benchmarks provide limited support for closed-loop evaluation and language-grounded supervision, hindering the development of vision-language models (VLMs) for end-to-end cooperative driving. To address these limitations, we introduce V2XBench, a simulation platform featuring synchronized ego--roadside sensing and closed-loop evaluation, together with Chat-V2XBench, a progressively structured VQA dataset for cooperative reasoning. Building upon this benchmark infrastructure, we propose AURORA, an end-to-end cooperative driving framework. Equipped with a dual-view perception architecture, AURORA mitigates spatial and semantic discrepancies across ego and roadside viewpoints through a query-level Cross-View Query Alignment and Fusion (CQAF) module. Leveraging the resulting unified tokens, a LoRA-adapted VLM bridges semantic reasoning and generative trajectory planning. Extensive closed-loop evaluations on V2XBench demonstrate that AURORA achieves state-of-the-art performance in heavily occluded scenarios, with a Route Completion rate of 98.21% and a Driving Score of 76.02, while requiring low roadside communication bandwidth. Ultimately, this work pioneers an extensible V2X--VLM paradigm, paving the way for next-generation cooperative autonomous driving.

We present PhysCaP, a Physics-Informed Code-as-Policy agent for active perception in robotic manipulation. While vision-language-action policies excel at imitating demonstrations, they rely on passive observation and fail to infer latent physical properties critical for manipulation. PhysCaP augments code-as-policy frameworks with a physics-informed exploration layer that enables explicit information-seeking through interaction. It introduces training-free physical property extraction modules that estimate object mass and stiffness from robot proprioception without additional sensors. To balance exploration costs and the efficiency of information obtained, PhysCaP employs a dual-agent design: a Planner that decides when to explore and when to stop, and a Prioritizer that filters implausible interactions and ranks the remainder using a heuristic priority score, enabling efficient, targeted exploration. We evaluate PhysCaP on real-world tabletop manipulation tasks (searching for hidden objects, detecting empty cans, and finding ripe avocados) and a simulated task in LIBERO. The results show that existing passive and naive interactive baselines either fail when physical properties are hidden or over-explore, whereas PhysCaP achieves comparable performance with fewer interactions and reduced execution time. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed physical property extraction modules. Project page: https://physcap.github.io

In household manipulation, pose uncertainty often results in off-centre or partial initial contact, making reliable object acquisition difficult. Roller-based grippers can actively draw objects inward but often provide limited post-capture stability, whereas granular-jamming grippers require sufficient contact before jamming to achieve strong retention. This paper presents a hybrid roller-jamming gripper that integrates active object intake and post-capture retention within a single gripper. The proposed gripper uses inward roller rotation to increase contact and draw the object toward the gripper centre, followed by vacuum-induced granular jamming to stiffen the rollers and stabilise the grasp. The paper also presents a simplified geometric analysis of the gripper and a bench-level characterisation of the prototype's force capability. The gripper prototype was mounted on a 7-DoF robotic arm and evaluated using eight test objects. Furthermore, controlled planar position and orientation offsets were applied, with each condition repeated three times. The main evaluation comprised 840 grasp trials, including 216 planar-offset trials and 624 orientation-offset trials. Overall, the gripper succeeded in 812/840 trials: 215/216 planar-offset trials and 597/624 orientation-offset trials. The ablation evaluation comprised 162 trials on three objects. The roller-only and jamming-only conditions achieved 54/81 and 24/81 successes, respectively, showing their different contributions. These results provide initial mechanism-level evidence that hybrid roller-jamming is a promising strategy for improving acquisition and retention after imperfect first contact.

Autonomous flight in unknown cluttered environments is hindered by the computation-quality-memory trilemma of onboard trajectory generation. In this paper, we propose an efficient end-to-end local planner via imitation learning. A lightweight offline-primitive-based dataset collection framework is designed to produce safe and high-quality trajectory primitives in non-convex environments. A compact neural network directly maps sensory inputs to polynomial coefficients that inherently encode higher-order dynamical information. The learned policy generates smooth, empirically collision-free and dynamically feasible trajectories in real time without back-end solving. It achieves ultra-fast computation (below 1ms on a standard desktop and average 3.68ms during onboard flight), while maintaining low onboard memory requirements (less than 1.5MiB). Extensive simulation benchmarks demonstrate superiority in both planning latency and target-reaching progress quality. Zero-shot deployment in real-world experiments further validates the robust sim-to-real transfer capability of the proposed method.

Bimanual manipulation enables complex tasks but introduces added complexity from the high number of degrees of freedom involved. When handling rigid objects, the relative transformation between the two end effectors must remain fixed throughout the motion, manifesting as a nonlinear equality constraint that confines the feasible configuration space to a measure-zero manifold and challenges conventional motion planners. We propose a fast bimanual motion planning pipeline that enforces this hard transformation constraint continuously along the entire path, using a leader-follower parameterization: the leader's configuration is treated as a free variable, while the follower's is determined via inverse kinematics to satisfy the constraint. We extensively evaluate the method in simulation across diverse environments, constraints and bimanual platforms, achieving 19.4x faster planning than prior work while guaranteeing continuous constraint satisfaction. Real-world experiments on a bimanual Kinova Gen3 setup, involving tray transport and elongated-object manipulation, validate direct transfer of planned trajectories to physical hardware.

There is already evidence of agentic AI exhibiting self-preservation behaviors: resisting deactivation, misrepresenting their activities, and, in some instances, attempting to copy themselves into other machines. This can be attributed to a phenomenon known as instrumental convergence, a theory proposed long before the development of large language models, which says that any goal-driven system will benefit from remaining functional in achieving its objective. Several experiments conducted by Anthropic, Palisade Research, and Apollo Research have shown the emergence of such a behavior in contemporary agents in adversarial settings. The phenomenon does not stem from survival instincts. Instead, it is the consequence of goal-oriented activity combined with having tools and awareness of the situation. The following discussion aims to distinguish what these findings prove and what they do not, as well as draw conclusions concerning the implications of such discoveries on agentic system testing, supervision, and development.

World models for continuous control are commonly trained for a fixed physical system and can degrade when known morphology parameters such as link lengths, masses, damping, and actuation change. Existing approaches often provide these parameters as conditioning information, but leave unspecified which part of the learned transition should remain reusable and which part should change with morphology. We propose Graph-Operator World Models (GraphOp-WM), a structured world model for generalization across unseen morphology parameters within related articulated robot families. GraphOp-WM represents bodies and their kinematic relations as an attributed graph and factorizes each transition into a morphology-independent local dynamics basis and a morphology-conditioned structured operator. The operator combines node-local modulation, kinematic-tree coupling, and a low-rank global correction, while architectural information separation, basis normalization, and paired-morphology supervision encourage static morphology dependence to be carried by the operator pathway. Graph-level readout and edge-wise action representations provide a compatible interface for reward, value, and TD-MPC-style planning. We further define controlled MuJoCo parameter splits covering interpolation, extrapolation, and held-out compositions of link geometry, mass, damping, and actuation parameters in Hopper, Walker2d, and HalfCheetah.

Optical phased arrays (OPAs) are promising wavefront controlling devices for imaging applications due to their compact and high-speed nature. However, conventional periodic OPAs have a limited spatial resolution, which scales only linearly with the number of optical antennas $N$. Here, we experimentally demonstrate high-resolution imaging using a non-redundant OPA (NR-OPA). Due to the non-redundant antenna layout of NR-OPA based on the Costas array, the resolution scales quadratically with $N$. Combined with the speckle-based single-pixel imaging (SSPI) scheme, which avoids the need for precise phase calibration, we experimentally achieve a large number of resolvable imaging points exceeding 10,000 using a silicon photonic NR-OPA chip with only $N=127$ without sweeping the wavelength. The demonstrated scheme provides a promising route toward mega-pixel imaging by a compact OPA chip with reduced number of phase shifters.

The ongoing energy transition challenges the stable operation of power systems and increases the need for rapid decision-making under uncertainty. While reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising framework for power system control and operation, existing applications typically focus on a single operational criterion, such as thermal security or small-signal stability. However, power system operation is inherently multi-objective and may involve trade-offs between objectives. This paper develops a unified-control deep reinforcement learning agent that maintains thermal security under stochastic load variations while steering the system toward operating points with improved damping of the most critical mode. Compared to a thermal-security-only agent and a business-as-usual policy, the proposed agent achieves a better balance among the operational objectives considered, with notably improved damping and negligible thermal-security violations. Finally, the operational value of increased critical damping is demonstrated under small- and large-signal disturbances, where operating points with higher damping lead to faster oscillation decay and improved critical clearing times.

The certification of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms for safety-critical operations requires verifiable design assurance. Airworthiness standards demand deterministic reliability, whereas multi-agent coordination algorithms execute non-deterministic models. This paper proposes a mixed-criticality architectural framework that applies SAE ARP4754B methods to swarm reconfiguration. First, a hardware-isolated Safety Monitor functions as a Run-Time Assurance (RTA) gateway, decoupling the flight-critical core from the non-deterministic Swarm Manager. Second, the monitor enforces formal safety contracts based on agent Health Vectors derived systematically from a Functional Hazard Assessment (FHA). Third, the framework propagates these Health Vectors to the collective planner to trigger fail-operational task reallocation, enabling intelligent swarm behaviors without compromising flight-critical isolation. Markov reliability modeling demonstrates that the $10^{-7}$ failures per flight hour Hazardous target is theoretically achievable for our SAIL IV scenario, provided the Safety Monitor meets $C_{monitor}>0.9991$, consistent with DAL B CMD/MON implementations.

We present a vision-only state estimation system for X-configuration quadcopters equipped with a canonical stereo camera pair and no inertial sensors. The system operates entirely in the body frame, requiring only synchronised stereo images and motor thrust commands. A continuous-discrete extended Kalman filter on a composite manifold state $\langle SE(3), \mathbb{R}^3, \ldots \rangle$ maintains estimates of body-frame pose, velocity, angular velocity, gravity, and disturbances, using stationary scene points as implicit inertial references. Feature points are detected (FAST, Shi-Tomasi), tracked temporally (SSD, Lucas-Kanade) and matched across cameras (NCC), with search regions predicted from filter-derived pose and point uncertainty. Chi-squared gating on the normalised innovation admits only stationary points to the filter. The system also produces a sparse 3D point cloud carrying per-point position, velocity and joint covariance. These come from a 4-view (two stereo pairs at two timestamps) full bundle adjustment that jointly estimates position and velocity from stereo disparity and temporal parallax, with the filter-derived relative pose as a prior. Feature points in the EKF do not enter the solver; their information is reflected through the pose prior. Point cloud density is spatially adaptive: an external focus point directs allocation, producing dense coverage in the region of attention and sparse coverage elsewhere. The output is a body-frame state estimate, a calibrated pose change, and a sparse scene flow. It is intended as a measurement source for a downstream world model anchored in the current body frame, without dependence on GPS, IMU, or any world-frame infrastructure, though the architecture accommodates their future integration.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly integrating perception, reasoning, and decision making within a unified multimodal framework. However, most existing VLA models formulate end-to-end autonomous driving as a visual question answering task, leading to unreliable and less interpretable decision reasoning. In addition, they fail to establish effective multi-modal interaction across heterogeneous sensors, thereby limiting robust scene perception and reliable driving reasoning in long-tail driving scenarios. To this end, we propose a robust VLA-based end-to-end autonomous driving system that combines multi-modality interaction with multi-trajectory planning and optimization, enabling more reliable, interpretable, and safer driving decisions. Our method comprises three core components: (1) Affinity-Guided Optimal Transport for main-auxiliary modality two-way interaction; (2) Distribution-Consistent Modality Transfer for heterogeneous modality distribution transfer and cross-modal interaction; (3) Multi-modal Multi-Trajectory Planning along with Perception-Oriented Trajectory Refinement for better driving decisions to long-tail driving scenarios. Experimental results in open-loop and closed-loop datasets demonstrate improvements in safety long-horizon driving reasoning and road scene perception over existing driving systems, highlighting the ability of our mutli-modality interaction and multi-trajectory planning and optimization for scalable VLA-based systems.

Accurate electricity price forecasting is critical for smart grid stability, yet the heavy reliance on historical price lags in modern predictive models often obscures the fundamental physical drivers of market volatility. This paper proposes a regime-sensitive, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) framework to unmask the hidden roles of load, climate, and calendar variables in the ERCOT Day-Ahead Market (2014-2024). Utilizing a Histogram-based Gradient Boosting Regressor (HGBR), we introduce a Suppression Ratio to quantify how price lags overshadow physical parameters. Our analysis reveals that while lags provide short-term memory during normal conditions, they fail to capture extreme dynamics; notably, their inclusion increased forecasting error (MAE/RMSE) during price spikes. By isolating these effects, the study revealed that price spikes are not merely the result of continuously rising temperatures, but rather emerge from the system reacting sharply within a specific temperature range. These findings underscore the importance of moving beyond lag-based models to uncover the true drivers of extreme price events.

This paper presents a reference-guided reinforcement learning framework to generate stand-up motion for a 29-DOF Unitree G1 humanoid on deformable soft ground, using a human demonstration recorded on hard ground. The terrain compliance is modelled using solref and solimp parameters from MuJoCo's rigid body soft-contact model. The rewards consists of (i) reference motion tracking through residual joint-position control and (ii) explicit recovery objectives such as pelvis height, torso uprightness, and the final posture. First, the policy is trained with the specified rewards considering hard ground. Next, the terrain stiffness is lowered by updating solref and the nominal surface penetration zone is expanded using solimp. Subsequent training enables the policy to adapt to the delayed support force generation due to significant surface penetration during contact-intensive phases while preserving the original demonstration pattern. The learned policy successfully completes the fallen-to-standing task in simulation, reaching the targeted pelvis height and uprightness, with a maximum contact penetration of approximately 40 mm during the process. The proposed method is demonstrated on two stand-up sequences and successfully achieves the final recovery objective on both hard and soft ground. Ablation studies show that reference tracking alone is insufficient for successful stand-up, and that explicit recovery rewards are essential.

The perpendicular Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory is one of the most promising emerging non-volatile memory technologies, based on ultra-thin magnetic tunnel junctions. However, as these devices are limited by their thermal stability factor at technological nodes smaller than 20 nm, their scalability is compromised. A possible solution to this limitation relies on taking advantage of the shape anisotropy, by increasing substantially the thickness of the storage layer. Thanks to the combination of a vertical aspect-ratio and enhanced volume, high thermal stability can be maintained at sub-10 nm nodes. Here, we present the technological advancements and understanding of the magnetisation reversal that led to faster switching speeds at reduced switching voltage, providing a viable approach for dense arrays of ultra-small magnetic tunnel junctions.

A humanoid has infinitely many ways to stand up from sitting while maintaining balance, making sit-to-stand (STS) a challenging control problem. We synthesise natural humanoid STS motion from scratch using reinforcement learning, without demonstrations or reference trajectories. A single Proximal Policy Optimisation policy learns smooth, human-like rising driven by three complementary components. (i) A coupled force/chair-height curriculum is used. A vertical pelvis-assist force aids early trajectory exploration and decays over training. Taller chairs are unlocked with decaying assisting force. This ensures that the policy masters a viable STS trajectory at each chair height before being exposed to harder ones, avoiding the premature distribution shift that otherwise collapses generalisation. (ii) Motion robustness is achieved by randomly sampling from a large number of inverse kinematics-generated initial and target poses spanning over eight chair heights. (iii) A set of rewards is defined inspired from biomechanics and optimal control studies. They shape the robot's angular momentum for seat-off, and enable support-region transition via centre of pressure attraction function to ensure smooth low-effort actuation. On a deterministic force-free evaluator, the policy attains more than 97% balanced-standing success across eight chair heights. The policy generalises smooth motion across chair heights and enables the robot to rise from substantially deep-seated postures as compared to the state of the art.

Tactile sensors are integral components of modern robotic systems, enabling robots to perceive and interact with the physical environment through tactile feedback. Despite their importance, the physical-layer security of tactile sensors has received little attention in prior work. In this paper, we present GhostTac, to the best of our knowledge, the first contactless attack that manipulates tactile sensing via electromagnetic interference (EMI). We identify that EMI exploits the nonlinear rectification and limited bandwidth amplification effects, allowing carefully crafted EMI signals to be converted into a persistent DC offset that bypasses on-board filtering and induces stable measurement deviations. Building on this mechanism, GhostTac enables fine-grained and controllable manipulation of sensor outputs by reshaping the spatial distribution and manipulating the magnitude at the targeted location. Such interference can induce unintended and harmful robot behaviors, such as causing a domestic robot to exert excessive force, resulting in physical damage or human injury. We evaluate GhostTac on 10 sensor modules and 2 dexterous hands, covering 15 tactile sensors of different types, and demonstrate consistent attack effectiveness across all tested devices. We further present three case studies on tactile grasping, slip detection, and material classification to illustrate practical impacts in real robotic tasks. We envision that our findings shed light on a new physical attack vector against tactile sensing in robotic systems.

The advancement of modern integrated photonics is frequently bottlenecked by device design workflows that rely heavily on manual simulation and expert intuition. While inverse design offers an alternative, it remains constrained by expert supervision and a lack of end-to-end automation. To address these issues, we present VortexChat, an agentic framework for the autonomous, end-to-end inverse design of integrated photonic devices directly from natural language specifications. VortexChat couples a large language model (LLM) decision agent with topology generation, gradient-based refinement, and full-wave electromagnetic simulation. This closed-loop architecture enables the system to iteratively decompose design objectives, orchestrate computational tools, and update strategies based on feedback with minimal human intervention. Constrained by the absolute metrics of the Vortex100 Benchmark, VortexChat autonomously generates devices that strictly meet all predefined performance thresholds without any human-in-the-loop. As an experimental demonstration, we fabricated a broadband terahertz perfect vortex beam multiplexer, autonomously designed by VortexChat, with measurements confirming high-efficiency operation, high mode purity and low inter-channel crosstalk in agreement with full-wave simulations. These results demonstrate that an LLM agent can assume key aspects of expert decision-making in photonic inverse design while maintaining physical fidelity and fabrication feasibility, providing a scalable route towards autonomous design of complex integrated photonic systems.

Accurate characterization of integrated nonlinear photonic devices is often limited by unknown facet-coupling losses and fabrication-induced non-uniformities, leading to systematic over- or underestimation of the intrinsic on-chip performance. Here, we present and demonstrate a unified bidirectional characterization framework that exploits nonlinear interactions under forward and backward propagation to independently extract facet-specific coupling efficiencies, intrinsic nonlinear conversion efficiency, and the longitudinal quasi-phase-matching profile using only classical power measurements. We experimentally validate the method using sidewall-poled thin-film lithium niobate waveguides, obtaining a normalized second-harmonic generation efficiency of $(1850 \pm 20)~\%\mathrm{W}^{-1}$ while simultaneously demonstrating broadband non-degenerate optical parametric amplification and parametric generation spanning more than $10~\mathrm{THz}$. Our framework is non-destructive, relies solely on classical power measurements, requires neither time-intensive microscopy nor calibrated internal references, and is compatible with wafer-scale testing, providing a general route to rigorous benchmarking and high-throughput characterization of photonic devices across material platforms.