arXiv Papers

In the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), achieving flexibility in human-accompanying within real-world environments holds great potential for various applications but also poses significant challenges. Traditional methods typically restrict robots to fixed positions relative to humans, such as tracking from behind, in front, or side-by-side, which limits robot adaptability in dynamic workspaces. This study introduces a novel human-companioning strategy that uses Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to enable mobile robots to dynamically adjust their tracking positions according to varying conditions. An interaction space is defined to capture the relationship between the human and the robot while considering the environment, which serves as the basis for state spaces in DRL to assist the robot in adapting to environmental changes. A human-robot companion controller is developed by integrating Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control with Control Barrier Functions (CBF), ensuring that the robot accurately follows the target's movement in both position and orientation while avoiding obstacles and enhancing social acceptance and safety. The proposed approach is evaluated in real-world scenarios, both indoors and outdoors, and compared with other studies. The results show that the proposed method improves the success rate and tracking accuracy by at least 24% and 47%, respectively, while enhancing human comfort. Experiments demonstrate the robot's ability to flexibly accompany a person walking at speeds of up to 1.7 m/s, dynamically adjusting its strategy without being confined to a fixed position. Additionally, the robot respects the human's intimate space to ensure safety, comfort, and effective obstacle avoidance.

Cosserat rod models for soft robots usually construct sectional stiffness by summing material properties over a common cross-section. This assumption becomes inaccurate for trimmed helicoid arms, where load-bearing helix domains are separated and connected only through sparse fused crossings. This paper formulates a separated-section constitutive law that evaluates each helix domain in its local frame and pulls its constitutive response back to the backbone, yielding an effective backbone stiffness. Sparse-fusion mechanics captures the additional compliance caused by relative motion between neighboring domains and determines channel-wise reduction profiles $\eta_c(s/L)$ for bending, torsion, and extension. The resulting effective sectional stiffness is strongly anisotropic: bending and extension are reduced by about one order of magnitude, whereas torsion remains close to the effective backbone stiffness. The resulting sectional law is embedded in a geometrically exact dynamic Cosserat model with GVS discretization and routed-tendon actuation. Across 103 measured configurations, the three datasets give pooled normalized position errors of \SI{7.7}{\percent}, \SI{6.7}{\percent}, and \SI{7.8}{\percent}, while each full-arm solve requires approximately \SI{0.3}{s} on one CPU core (Intel Xeon, Cascade Lake, \SI{2.8}{GHz}), enabling rapid model-based planning, state and load estimation, and morphology--control co-design for architected soft robots.

Sidescan sonar is a common sensor for both manned and autonomous marine exploration and mapping, yet very few methods build upon or exploit the geometric projection model of the sensor. As sidescan sonar is limited to a 1D range measurement, many approximations are frequently used, including the long-standing assumption of a flat seafloor. Rather than make similar approximations, this paper focuses on a multi-view geometry based approach and formalizes a two-view geometric constraint and proves that a shared feature is constrained to a locus within the intersection of a sphere and a plane. In addition, we characterize what governs the size of the ambiguity locus through Monte Carlo simulation that is grounded in real aperture and mounting geometry for both a surface vessel and an underwater vehicle. We translate additional simulations of relative trajectories for both vehicle platforms into concrete survey-planning guidance. Our results show that locus length is strongly governed by elevation misalignment, and peaks at a moderate oblique crossing angle of approximately 20 degrees, with minimal locus lengths obtained at near parallel and anti-parallel passes.

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to perform collaborative tasks with users effectively. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task and infer the state of the human and their intent for the robot to choose the best course of action. Due to the sparseness of the data in this domain, the policy for such multimodal systems is often crafted by hand; as the complexity of interactions grows, this process is not scalable. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to automatically generate the multimodal policy of the robot. Our system focuses on a realistic scenario where a robot assists a user in locating objects within a home environment, managing multimodal signals, including language and physical actions, to select the best action. In contrast to traditional dialog systems, our agent is trained with a simulator that uses human data and can deal with multiple modalities. We use a simple high-level reward function that needs no fine-tuning and enforce some preconditions to speed up the training process. A human study evaluating the system in a real-world setting demonstrates promising results, indicating high usability and effective task completion. This RL-based approach offers a scalable and interpretable alternative for designing interaction managers in multimodal human-robot collaborations.

Coordinated bimanual manipulation is challenging because the motion of either arm can alter the shared 3D scene and thereby affect the other arm. Yet most diffusion policies generate actions without explicitly modeling these future geometric consequences, while predictive variants typically use future state only as auxiliary supervision or fixed conditioning. We address this limitation by proposing JAMB, a diffusion policy that jointly denoises bimanual actions and future 3D point tracks. By allowing action and track hypotheses to evolve together within a shared Transformer, each can inform and refine the other throughout denoising. We further ground multimodal representations in a shared spatiotemporal coordinate system to facilitate geometry-aware interaction during joint denoising. We evaluate JAMB on diverse bimanual manipulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 and on a real-world robot, comparing it with action-only policies and alternative future-prediction approaches spanning different state representations and learning objectives. Across 16 simulation tasks, JAMB achieves an average success rate of 83.4%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 23.9 percentage points. On three real-world tasks, it outperforms the action-only and auxiliary geometry prediction methods by 50.0 and 21.2 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these performance gains, JAMB shows stronger generalization to cluttered scenes and out-of-distribution backgrounds than the evaluated baselines. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint action-motion modeling framework for coordinated bimanual manipulation. Our project website is available at https://jam-bimanual.github.io/

Neural inertial odometry increasingly uses networks as learned measurements inside filtering pipelines. Such measurements should transform consistently under arbitrary IMU mounting conventions: their mean must transform as a vector, and their covariance must transform congruently as a second-order tensor. We present GINIO, a geometric SO(3)-equivariant interface for neural inertial odometry under arbitrary rotations of the IMU measurement frame. Given calibrated IMU windows, our framework predicts a motion measurement and uncertainty obeying these tensorial laws. To support efficient sensor-frame learning, we introduce Last-Frame Alignment (LFA), a deterministic preprocessing step that is provably equivalent to world-frame training for SO(3)-equivariant predictors. The connected estimator tracks sensor-local states such as IMU bias, separating nuisance estimation from the geometric law enforced by the learned measurement. We instantiate the same interface in filter-connected NIO, AirIO-style recurrent aerial prediction, EqNIO-style full-SO(3) canonicalization, and ResNet-style temporal backbones. On TLIO, GINIO achieves 2.018 m ID/SO(3) ATE while EqNIO degrades to 76.389 m, using 11.6x fewer FLOPs. On NanoBench, our AirIO-style instantiation improves ATE from 5.579 m to 1.430 m without external attitude input, and our ResNet-style instantiation reaches 0.581 m ATE versus 0.645 m for ResNet1D. On Fetch, GINIO empirically reduces unseen physical-remount ATE from 8.15 m to 0.50 m without retraining, demonstrating robustness beyond the exact coordinate-frame guarantee. For uncertainty, spectral covariance reduces covariance-equivariance error by over three orders of magnitude compared with a diagonal head.

We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, a challenging task of broad relevance spanning logistics, manufacturing, and the home, in which a user and a robot work together to relocate a large or heavy object. To act as an effective partner, the robot should reduce the user's effort by contributing to efficient relocation of the object while remaining physically responsive to them. Prior work often addresses these capabilities separately, producing robots that may move the object efficiently but resist user input, or accommodate the user but depend on continuous guidance. Our key insight is that obstacle-constrained collaborative transport requires integrating predictions of human collaborative behavior with compliant robot control. To this end, we introduce PROACT, a framework for human-robot collaborative transport that incorporates anticipation into compliant whole-body control through a learned model of human collaborative behavior. Trained on a large-scale, real-world dataset of dyadic human transport demonstrations, our transformer architecture distills collaborative behavior into predictions of future object motion. Across 108 real-world trials with a 9-DoF mobile manipulator, PROACT reduces mean interaction work by 59.2\% and 20.4\%, and mean completion time by 12.9\% and 6.9\%, relative to compliance-only and MPC baselines, respectively. Footage from our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/qAGvQfVPjbk.

Object transportation is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots operating in real-world, human-centric environments, yet existing methods struggle when clutter constrains free space around both the robot and its carried payload. We present HOTICE, a whole-body humanoid learning framework for transporting objects through such cluttered environments. First, we introduce Humanoid-Object Decoupled Potential Fields, which jointly encode collision-avoidance guidance for the robot and the carried object, enabling coordinated, obstacle-aware motion for both. Second, to address the large action space inherent to whole-body loco-manipulation, we design a dual-agent reinforcement learning architecture that decouples upper- and lower-body control while preserving whole-body coordination via shared state observations and rewards. To train a policy that generalizes across diverse cluttered scenes, we further employ a specialist-to-generalist distillation strategy, in which privileged teacher policies are distilled into a single deployable student policy. We evaluate HOTICE in MuJoCo simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, demonstrating effective and robust object transportation across cluttered scenarios for objects of varying shapes. Our results show that HOTICE reliably coordinates whole-body motion and object-aware collision avoidance, generalizing effectively to previously unseen cluttered environments while achieving strong performance in sim2real deployment.

Shared control often allocates robot authority based on confidence in inferred human intent, assuming reliable autonomous execution. When this assumption fails, high intent confidence can cause over-helping. We present a capability-aware shared-control framework in which a vision-language model (VLM) infers human intent and provides semantic-intent confidence, while a vision-language-action (VLA) policy generates autonomous actions. VLA capability confidence is estimated online from the dispersion and local instability of stochastic action trajectories. We design a nonlinear arbitration policy that combines Bayesian-filtered semantic-intent confidence with VLA capability confidence through a sigmoid mapping to adapt robot authority. Our evaluation combined VLM/VLA confidence assessment with a study involving 12 participants performing pick-and-place and bidirectional stacking under in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions. The proposed method achieved the highest task success rate (92%), compared with manual teleoperation (83%), intent-only arbitration (44%), and fixed equal-weight blending (10%). It also achieved higher control friendliness and lower authority-weighted disagreement than both shared-control baselines. These results demonstrate the benefit of incorporating VLA capability into authority allocation to mitigate over-helping and improve shared-control performance.

Human gait in reality extends beyond straight-line walking, with some situations even requiring drastic back-and-forth rotations. A smooth and stable execution may seem intuitive, but the underlying mechanics remains unknown. The Karate roundhouse kick may be an extreme case of exhibiting dynamic back-and-forth rotations, but investigating the angular momentum (AM) management can potentially inform stability analysis in dynamic human motions and smoother gait in robots and exoskeletons. This paper introduces two new AM-based measures and analyzes AM-related variables to study the target-less retractable back-leg Karate roundhouse kick. The purpose is to understand the underlying AM management, analyze the differences between stable and unstable kicks, and investigate how these variables and measures change over time with improvement. A one-year longitudinal study was conducted with the first author as a Karate student, and a Karate instructor was also recruited for one session as an expert, whose data is used for comparison. Results show that unstable kicks have higher peak total AM before Strike and smaller braking peak after Strike. The proposed AM-based measures are able to identify the cause of some unstable kicks, though no clear distinction could be made between stable and unstable kicks since kicks can be unstable for different reasons. Nonetheless, the proposed measures can be applied as performance measures to analyze other types of dynamic motions. To incorporate them as stability criteria, however, it is recommended to also consider their coordination with time, kinematics, and center of pressure.

Global point-cloud registration remains challenging when limited overlap, repetitive geometry, and sensor noise produce correspondence sets dominated by outliers. Planar regions are particularly difficult for conventional point descriptors and are therefore often suppressed or discarded before matching. We present PARTE (Plane-Assisted Robust Transformation Estimation), a global registration method that instead treats planar structure as complementary registration evidence. PARTE extracts planar patches and represents them using our novel Plane Context Histogram (PCH), a descriptor that encodes the geometry surrounding each patch, while a two-level matching procedure identifies reliable plane correspondences. Candidate point and plane correspondences are combined in a confidence-weighted compatibility graph for joint outlier rejection, followed by rigid transformation estimation. When no usable plane correspondences are available, PARTE naturally reduces to point-only registration. We evaluate PARTE on 8,097 registration pairs across six indoor and outdoor benchmarks spanning dense RGB-D and sparse LiDAR measurements. Evaluations show PARTE achieves the highest overall success rate against 13 standard and state-of-the-art methods while maintaining low runtime. An open-source C++ implementation with Python bindings is provided at https://parte.pages.dev.

Post-training quantization reduces the memory requirements of vision-language-action (VLA) models, but precision selection must account for the interaction between layer scope, numerical format, and calibration. We introduce \textbf{VLAQuantBench}, a controlled evaluation with 409 runs and 94,574 simulation episodes: four models on LIBERO, with X-VLA additionally evaluated on three simulation benchmark families. Under uncalibrated W4A4 round-to-nearest quantization, expanding a $\pi_{0.5}$ action-head subset from 126 to 167 layers raises success from 7.0\% to 70.5\%. Fixed-observation replay confirms a corresponding numerical recovery. Two-episode calibration removes the severe joint failures in the tested subsets, whereas the same smoothing-and-clipping recipe lowers $\pi_0$ success and does not recover OpenVLA-OFT end-to-end. For OpenVLA-OFT, protecting one 28,672-parameter output projection instead restores near-baseline success: the remaining 441 eligible linear layers retain W3 on LIBERO-Long or eight-bit activations across all four suites. Task-clustered intervals support the large failure and recovery contrasts. These results establish recipe-dependent interactions and identify concrete precision assignments, rather than universal layer-sensitivity rules. Real-kernel and physical-robot measurements complement the accuracy analysis. Code, configurations, and episode records are publicly available at https://github.com/jiuyixu25/VLAQuantBench.

Large-scale datasets are essential for training generalist robot control policies. Collecting real-world tactile data is costly and time-consuming, motivating the use of tactile simulations. However, current tactile simulators capture only overall contact geometry and miss fine details like texture. This results in a significant domain shift between simulated and real tactile data. To address this gap, we introduce Norm2Tex, a plug-in method that augments simulations of vision-based tactile sensors with high-frequency surface details from normal map textures. By modifying the target object's depth map before a tactile simulator's rendering pipeline, Norm2Tex seamlessly integrates into different tactile simulators. We also evaluate sim-to-real transfer using material classification and a reinforcement learning task. Our results show that Norm2Tex preserves material-dependent tactile information across domains, improving texture recognition and producing material-dependent control behavior in the real world.

Biological torque control directly maps an estimated human joint moment to exoskeleton assistance, providing a task-agnostic strategy for supporting diverse locomotor activities. However, it remains unclear whether a fixed state-to-torque mapping provides effective assistance across biomechanically distinct tasks. We examined how assistance delay affected hip exoskeleton performance during level-ground (LG), ramp-ascent (RA), and ramp-descent (RD) walking. Eight participants completed a zero-torque baseline condition and five active assistance conditions with delays ranging from 40 to 320 ms. Across tasks and active delays, assistance reduced net metabolic rate by 5.24%, positive biological hip joint work by 5.86%, and total lower-limb positive joint work by 1.68% (all p < 0.05). Assistance delay affected both joint-work outcomes (both p < 0.001) but not net metabolic rate. Mechanical unloading generally decreased with increasing delay, whereas metabolic benefits remained comparatively stable. Relative to the zero-torque condition, net metabolic rate decreased by 9.75% during LG and 7.20% during RA but increased by 1.23% during RD. We did not detect task-dependent differences in the delay response. Our findings indicate that biological torque mappings should be evaluated based on the target outcome and mechanical role of the assisted joint, and that predominantly positive-power assistance may not generalize to negative-work-dominant locomotion without modification.

Depth-conditioned locomotion policies have demonstrated impressive agile maneuvers, but can be steered to unpredictable actions when observations are outside their training distribution. Occlusion, invalid returns, sensor noise, and visual distractors can shift deployment observations away from nominal simulated depth. While synthetic sensor augmentation targets specified degradations, it does not by itself define behavior under corruption families omitted from training. To address gaps in training-time coverage, we present REDACT (Retaining Evidence Despite Artifacts for Continued Traversal), a teacher-student framework combining an improved visual encoder architecture, persistent feature masking, and a novel consensus-gating algorithm to retain useful depth information under unmodeled corruption. The gate uses approximate conformal calibration on clean observations alone, requiring no prior knowledge of the corruption type. Trained on clean simulated depth, REDACT retains useful visual information under unseen corruption, supporting higher traversal success than existing parkour baselines. Evaluation of depth augmentation across corruption families further shows that REDACT improves robustness where augmentation coverage is missing. Real-world trials demonstrate zero-shot transfer to structured and forested environments with unfamiliar scene content.

Bioinspired feedback controls for pursuit, tracking, and collective motion are often expressed in terms of the relative configuration between interacting agents. In practice, however, onboard sensors may not directly provide all quantities required for feedback control, necessitating estimation of unobserved quantities. This paper develops a bioinspired internal model-based estimator for reconstructing those quantities from partial sensory observations and known self-motion. State reconstruction is posed as an optimization problem that treats the relative kinematics as constraints and minimizes the disagreement between the internal model outputs and measurements from onboard sensors. Pontryagin's Maximum Principle is used to derive the necessary optimality conditions. A forward-backward algorithm is used to provide a numerical solution and a moving horizon formulation is employed for online implementation. The estimator is evaluated numerically against classical state estimators. Real-time implementation of the proposed framework on robotic hardware is demonstrated through two pursuit strategies.

Forceful manipulation is challenging for humanoid robots because interaction forces can disturb whole-body balance. We introduce the Supporting Hand Strategy (SHS), which enables a humanoid to brace against the environment with one hand while performing forceful manipulation with the other. SHS optimises a task-conditioned support configuration that guides two synchronous reinforcement-learning policies, without human motion data or online whole-body trajectory planning. On a Unitree G1, SHS achieved usable contact forces up to 60 N, compared with a maximum sustained force of 13.5 N without environmental bracing, while substantially improving force tracking over a task-independent support configuration. The same policies generalised to different task regions without retraining. SHS therefore provides a simple mechanism for substantially extending humanoid forceful-manipulation capability.

Robot manipulation policies must generalize across visual shifts while preserving scene context relevant to action. General-purpose vision encoders are not tailored to visuomotor control, while object-centric approaches often use segmentation masks as hard filters that discard potentially useful context. We propose RoboMP-DINOv2 (Robotics Mask-Prompted DINOv2), a full-scene vision encoder that treats masks as spatial prompts rather than visibility filters. It extracts dense DINOv2 features from the full observation, injects learned region-specific embeddings at masked locations, and jointly contextualizes prompted and unprompted tokens for action prediction. We further introduce masked-region color randomization (MCR) to improve appearance robustness, yielding RoboMP-DINOv2-MCR. Across seven simulated manipulation settings, RoboMP-DINOv2 achieves 60.7% success under spatial shifts and 59.7% under scene clutter, compared with 50.7% and 41.0% for a DINOv2-based Diffusion Policy. Under unseen object colors, RoboMP-DINOv2-MCR achieves 72.5% success versus 35.1% for the strongest color-randomized baseline. Additional experiments and representation analyses show improved robustness while preserving behaviorally relevant scene information. Code is available at https://github.com/han20192019/RoboMP_DINOv2.

Vision-based gesture control accepts commands from any hand in the camera field of view, which is unsafe in shared indoor spaces. This paper presents IGate, an identity-gated control stack that includes gesture control and face tracking, in which commands are admitted only when an enrolled operator is verified. The system performs few-shot user enrolment from 20 initial face frames, without prior user-specific training: verification compares an embedding of the current face crop against the enrolled template by cosine similarity, while face tracking uses proportional correction. Gesture control is achieved by classifying extracted hand landmarks using an RBF-SVM trained on a custom dataset. Additionally, a hierarchical finite-state machine handles mode selection, default, and fallback behaviours. The approach is tested on a DJI Tello EDU, each component evaluated offline and in-flight across 270 trials (149 flown). Face verification yields a 0.32% offline equal error rate versus 19.3% in-flight. Under hover-locked conditions, the RBF-SVM gesture classifier outperforms the geometric rule (0.850 vs. 0.651 accuracy), with 82% of this gap stemming from the depth channel. All logs and reproduction scripts will be released.

Current robot-assisted minimally-invasive surgery (RMIS) platforms provide a fixed console for the surgeon to view stereo endoscopic images and teleoperate instruments inside the patient. Several researchers have proposed the use of a head-mounted display (HMD) as a portable console, with video pass-through rendering of the endoscope images which, like the fixed console, restricts the operator to a single endoscopic viewpoint and limits depth perception. We present a digital twin-driven virtual reality (VR) teleoperation platform, where the digital twin is created from markerless perception of the surgical environment and streamed for display on the HMD. This overcomes the limitations of video pass-through by providing multi-view rendering and natural motion-parallax cues, enabling decoupling of the user's hand posture from strict instrument alignment. The system utilizes VR hand controllers to increase the teleoperation workspace and to improve the robustness and stability of instrument control compared to the hand tracking approach adopted by most prior systems. A 15-participant user study on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) shows that our VR platform significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art HoloLens 2 mixed reality baseline, reducing path length by 86% and jerk by 95%, while achieving depth perception confidence comparable to or exceeding the traditional console across all conditions.

Vision-language-action policies benefit from geometric supervision, but current-frame geometry alone does not explicitly describe the changes associated with manipulation. This design is motivated by the goal of learning an embodiment-agnostic visual interface that can be pretrained across robot and egocentric video before robot-specific action alignment. We introduce Geometry-Change VLA (GC-VLA), which learns to predict multiview future-current geometry-change tokens from current observations. Offline frame pairs define a nominal 0.5-second prediction horizon; future observations are used only to construct training targets. Stage 1 trains a geometry-change vision-language model (GC-VLM). Stage 2 introduces a continuous ActionExpert and aligns it with robot actions while stopping action-flow gradients at the VLM interface. Stage 3 enables these gradients to update the trainable VLM components jointly with the ActionExpert. Stage 4 freezes GC-VLA and applies Geometry-Conditioned Residual Flow (GCRF), using a binary intervention router and a single bounded residual velocity policy learned from closed-loop feedback. GC-VLA achieves 95.20% success on LIBERO, and GC-VLA with GCRF achieves 99.55%. Inference uses current observations and the learned GC representation without executing the offline target encoders.

Open robot policies increasingly follow two paradigms: vision-language-action models (VLAs) directly map observations and instructions to actions, whereas world-action models (WAMs) incorporate learned video or world dynamics into policy learning or action generation. Although both target the same manipulation tasks and represent alternative design choices, they are commonly reported under different evaluation protocols, leaving their capability, robustness, language sensitivity, and deployment-cost trade-offs unclear. We present IndustrialVLA-Bench, an evidence-aware evaluation of six released VLA and WAM systems under a unified reporting schema. It separately evaluates clean capability on LIBERO, non-language robustness on LIBERO-Plus, instruction sensitivity on LIBERO-Para, and observed execution cost. Reported task scores aggregate three complete evaluations with distinct random seeds under a fixed checkpoint and inference configuration. Across all six systems, clean LIBERO averages differ by only 1.58 points, whereas robustness and paraphrase summaries span 14.62 and 31.08 points. Restricting every comparison to the three protocol-faithful systems preserves the effect (1.36, 14.62 and 23.10 points), so the diagnostic separation reported here does not depend on the weaker evidence tiers. We additionally report observed inference latency, peak memory, runtime mode, and an evidence status for every system. Protocol-faithful, near-reproduction, and pending-verification entries remain visibly separated; only protocol-faithful entries support strict comparisons. Rather than claiming universal superiority of either paradigm, IndustrialVLA-Bench provides traceable evidence for comparing released robot policies on shared practical criteria. Code and evaluation records are available at https://github.com/xiaoqi-7/IndustrialVLA-Bench.

Most minimally invasive procedures are still performed with hand-held laparoscopic instruments, yet only the endoscopic video is retained; the instrument motion that expresses surgical skill, and that could support skill assessment and robot learning, is lost. Pose from video alone remains millimeters to centimeters off, and an instrument-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) cannot rely on its magnetometer, whose field changed with tool pose and between sessions in our measurements. We present a surgical instrument-state logger that clips onto a conventional instrument without modifying the part that enters the patient and fuses a six-axis IMU and a time-of-flight (ToF) rangefinder with a markerless camera in an error-state Kalman filter under the remote center of motion (RCM) of the trocar. Heading comes from the shaft silhouette, segmented by a U-Net, in place of the magnetometer: the rotation-angle error is 0.200{\deg}, against 3.58{\deg} from the accelerometer and magnetometer alone. Against a Franka Research 3 manipulator, and without alignment to it, the displacement error over 300 translation trials was 1.21mm RMS and the relative-rotation error over 180 rotation trials 0.34{\deg} RMS. On continuous trajectories, tracked and displayed in real time, the absolute tip error was 1.22mm (programmed) and 3.04mm (teleoperated) after post-hoc tuning of three filter parameters, and the full fusion beat every sensor subset. Because the estimator uses no magnetic measurement, its accuracy does not rely on an undisturbed field. The same clip-on device could thus record metric tip trajectories during routine hand-held laparoscopy, while displaying the insertion depth and attitude that are hidden once the instrument is inside the patient.

Cable routing requires coordinated control of global cable topology and changing local contacts. We present CableVLA, an end-to-end multimodal vision-language-action framework that converts simulation-privileged supervision into deployable cable-topology and tactile representations. TopoHead distills node-level physics and current and future cable-topology information into causal visual context for the action expert. TacSense uses complementary frame and taxel branches to learn contact dynamics from resistive arrays, with simulator-derived kinematics and contact events providing supervision beyond the measured force map. A contact gate activates force-tactile residuals that refine the next 8 arm-and-gripper actions of a frozen topology-conditioned policy. Across 345 MuJoCo evaluations, CableVLA improves success from 62.6% for the $\pi_{0.5}$-V visual baseline to 84.9%. TacSense achieves pronounced gains in slip-transition recognition over a CNN-LSTM baseline with a similar parameter count, and this advantage persists under frozen-encoder probes. Topology prediction and 57-task tactile evaluations assess representation quality, while policy adaptation studies evaluate downstream control performance. Cross-simulator and real-robot comparisons further examine zero-shot policy transfer under changes in dynamics and sensing.

This article presents a bimanual teleoperation pipeline and conceptual design of a deployable four-finger payload for intra-vehicular free-flyers. Future habitats in low-Earth orbit (LEO) will require systems to perform mundane tasks like cargo handling and maintenance during crewed and uncrewed periods. The gripper payload provides 17 manipulation degrees-of-freedom (DoF) through four independently actuated fingers on a linear rail system. To control it, a virtual reality (VR) device interface maps the human ground operator's hand motions to the finger pairs, their separation to the rail, and common wrist motion to Astrobee translation. We present the preliminary results of teleoperating Astrobee in a custom zero-gravity MuJoCo-based International Space Station (ISS) simulator through ten repeated trials of transporting a rigid ISS Cargo Transfer Bag (CTB). We measure task success, continuous contact retention, completion time, and cargo motion.

This work investigates how to enable general multi-finger robotic hands to perform the complete tool manipulation process, which entails picking up a tool, loading it into a suitable pose, and then wielding it. Inspired by human tool manipulation and mechanical design principles, we model the hand and the tool as a unified hand-object mechanism (HOM) composed of sub-assemblies. Specifically, we define a HOM as consisting of the hand, the object, and the generalized contact frames, allowing the HOM's motions to be expressed with the same set of Cartesian-space relative contact velocities, irrespective of the hand's kinematics and geometry. Then, we define a HOM's sub-assemblies as relative contact velocity and contact force constraints between fingers. Building on these definitions, we developed a lightweight and physically interpretable motion planning and contact estimation framework using least squares and a complementary filter. We evaluated our framework in simulation by teleoperating five different robotic hands. The results show that our framework enabled all five hands to execute the complete tool manipulation process, achieving dexterous behaviors even from identical, simple reference trajectories. Furthermore, the results showcase our framework's adaptability to different hands, tools, and tasks, enabled by its kinematic and geometric foundation.

Most minimally invasive surgery is still performed with hand-held laparoscopic instruments, and the surgeon's instrument kinematics are lost when the operation ends; only the endoscope video is kept. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline that captures this motion in the operating room and uses it to train a surgical robot policy, validated on live animals. We introduce a surgical instrument-state logger that mounts on the shaft of a standard laparoscopic instrument and recovers its pose and jaw state from an inertial sensor, a time-of-flight sensor and a Hall sensor, with no external camera or tracker. A data pipeline measures the latency of every sensor channel against a robot ground truth and aligns the channels before forming observation-action pairs. On these demonstrations we train a diffusion policy with a fine-tuned DINOv3 backbone, selecting its design by closed-loop rollouts in a physics simulator reconstructed from depth maps of an ex-vivo rabbit appendix. The policy is then retrained on 849 in-vivo demonstrations from four live rabbits and deployed on four additional live rabbits with electrosurgery armed. With the surgeon selecting the surgical phase, the policy completed the appendectomy in three of the four animals. The results show that demonstrations recorded from a surgeon's own instruments are sufficient to train, select and deploy a bimanual surgical policy in vivo. The robot serves only as the timing reference for sensor calibration and as the executor, and collects no demonstrations. Both demonstration corpora are released to support future surgical robot learning research.

General-purpose robot control requires models to understand task intent, identify where to interact, capture how the scene evolves, and generate precise actions. Vision-language-action models provide strong semantic priors but typically do not explicitly model scene dynamics, while world-action models couple visual prediction with control without necessarily exposing the task-relevant semantic and spatial structure needed for fine-grained manipulation. We present MachEmbodied-U0 (ME-U0), a unified embodied foundation model connecting understanding and generation experts through a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. Subtask prediction and affordance grounding guide joint visual-dynamics and action generation via flow matching. Visual dynamics encompass future RGB, depth, surface normals, and optical flow, providing complementary supervision for appearance, geometry, and motion. Multi-rate Rotary Position Encoding (MRPE) aligns visual dynamics with fine-grained control. We pretrain ME-U0 on approximately 4,200 hours of curated demonstrations from robotic datasets and egocentric datasets. Using only the supervision natively available in each downstream benchmark, ME-U0 achieves an average score of 17.66 on the RoboDojo simulation benchmark and average success rates of 99.0\% and 82.5\% on LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus, respectively. We additionally validate ME-U0 on real-world robotic manipulation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness beyond simulation. Without corresponding downstream supervision, ME-U0 further demonstrates zero-shot subtask prediction, affordance grounding, and visual dynamics on simulated and real-world observations. Overall, ME-U0 combines competitive downstream control performance with transferable task-grounding and visual-dynamics capabilities across simulation and the real world.

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) systems still struggle with the demands of contact-rich industrial manipulation, including micrometer-level precision, success rates above 99%, and human-level cycle times. Although off-policy algorithms can improve performance by leveraging demonstrations and interventions, a key bottleneck is the lack of an intuitive interface for collecting such guidance while complying with constraints of the physical system and the policy. We propose PAKT, a framework for kinesthetic teaching in RL. As opposed to teleoperation approaches, PAKT relies on kinesthetic guidance, which is widely used in industry. However, a critical weakness of kinesthetic guidance is the possibility for the operator to move the robot along trajectories (e.g., velocities, accelerations, jerk) that the robot and/or policy cannot physically reproduce. Using PAKT, operators guide the robot through admittance control, which maps human-applied forces to motion. The downstream reference generator applies the same kinematic limits used during policy execution, keeping the collected trajectories within these limits. To support this teaching interface with an appropriate execution layer, PAKT adds a high-performance control stack that maps low-frequency RL actions to high-frequency torque commands. It consists of a reference generator and subsequent impedance controller, where the reference generator preserves the tracking performance of the impedance controller while improving contact handling and producing smoother policy actions. Across the reported runs on four insertion and industrial assembly benchmarks, including a data center compute tray, the end-to-end system reduces cycle time by 23%-48% and cumulative intervention count by 62%-86% relative to the HIL-SERL baseline. Project website: https://pakt-website.github.io/pakt-website}{https://pakt-website.github.io/pakt-website

Dynamic object manipulation is essential for robots operating in real-world environments, yet methods for generating high-quality demonstrations remain limited. Methods designed for static tasks do not readily transfer to dynamic settings. Among dynamic demonstration generators, planning-based methods can fail near contact, while DOMINO-style replay simplifies dynamic interactions and may limit the experience available for policy learning. We present DynaForge, a planning-guided framework that learns residual corrections for dynamic manipulation demonstration generation. DynaForge combines low-frequency global planning with high-frequency object-centric inverse kinematics across task phases, and applies a residual policy to correct actions during dynamic interaction. An implicit curriculum groups rollouts under matched conditions and selects mixed-success groups, focusing residual reinforcement learning on the evolving competence frontier. On Can and Bottle, it uses 0.73x as many optimizer steps as vanilla GRPO at the same nominal environment-step budget, with higher observed final success rates. Across nine simulation tasks, DynaForge increases mean demonstration-generation success from 41.30% of the planning prior to 78.37%. With 800 demonstrations per task, DP3 policies trained on DynaForge data achieve 49.11% mean success, compared with 7.07% for DOMINO data. On three real-world dynamic tasks, DynaForge-trained policies achieve 30-60% success, compared with 0-10% for DOMINO-trained policies, showing the ability of DynaForge for sim-to-real transfer.

Modern embodied agents achieve impressive success rates, yet their actual instruction-following ability is far weaker than these numbers suggest. We trace this illusion to a structural property we term low scene entropy: when a visual scene admits only one valid task, language becomes redundant and a policy can score highly while barely using it. We introduce RoboFollow, a diagnostic benchmark with three principles: (1) High Scene Entropy: each training scene supports multiple kinematically distinct task branches, making vision alone insufficient and forcing reliance on language. (2) Hierarchical Diagnostic Protocol: a four-level protocol (L0--L3) progressively perturbs visual layout and semantics, probing whether equivalent instructions yield consistent behavior and distinct ones yield discriminable behavior across spatial relations, attributes, trajectory constraints, and logic. (3) Confound-Controlled Diagnosis: we simplify interaction objects, restrict actions to the trained repertoire and report stage-wise Intent and Execution scores, isolating comprehension from motor execution. Evaluation of nine VLA and WAM policies shows that strong L0 performance, where attained, does not reliably transfer to L1--L3 under our fine-tuning setup. Representative mitigations, including stronger VLM backbones, QA co-training, LangForce, and Classifier-Free Guidance, all fail to close this gap. RoboFollow exposes genuine instruction following as a critical, overlooked bottleneck. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/AutoLab-SAI-SJTU/RoboFollow and https://huggingface.co/datasets/AutoLab-SJTU/robofollow-data.

Hip exoskeletons provide an important hardware basis for lower-limb rehabilitation and locomotor assistance. Laboratory rehabilitation assessment and system development require substantial actuation and computing resources, whereas mobile assistance requires untethered portability. Integrating both capabilities within one reusable platform remains a central design challenge. This paper presents a reconfigurable bidirectional cable-driven hip exoskeleton platform that rapidly switches between bench-mounted and backpack-mounted actuation while sharing one cable-free wearable hip interface. The platform modularly adapts the actuation configuration, end-effector sensing path, and low-level control interface. Each cable-driven end-effector weighs 0.405 kg, excluding the cable and actuation unit, and integrates an encoder and a torque sensor; experiments validated bench-mounted admittance-based motion tracking capability and backpack-mounted open-loop torque tracking. Human-worn experiments with three healthy participants used myoMOTION to evaluate the platform's wearable-side hip-motion sensing capability, verified bench-to-backpack and backpack-to-bench motion-ready switching across 30 trials in $30.1\pm16.3$ s, and formed a small-scale multimodal wearable-exoskeleton gait dataset for sensing validation and data-driven algorithm development, comprising 8 min bench-mounted treadmill records and 11 min backpack-mounted outdoor walking records. These results show that, by unifying the wearable structure, actuation interface, and sensing path, the proposed platform enables validation of the same hip exoskeleton in both bench-mounted and backpack-mounted configurations, providing reusable hardware for iterative development and applications across scenarios.

Closed-loop evaluation of surgical robots requires tissue that deforms, can be grasped and lifted, and reproduces the anatomy in which the robot will operate. We present a simulator in which this tissue is reconstructed from a fixed-view RGB-D recording of the surgical field, composited to remove the instruments, closed into watertight volumes and tetrahedralised; the pipeline was applied unchanged to three specimens of two species (thirteen organs, 146,061 tetrahedra, no inverted elements). For one specimen, the organs are placed in a bimanual cell in which two Franka FR3 arms operate motorised instruments through 6 mm trocars. The core contribution is the numerical and contact design that keeps this cell stable: implicit integration, simulation meshes separate from collision meshes, numerical guards, and a grasp constraint captured at the live tissue pose. In 45 repeated grasp-lifts, a friction grasp held the tissue in 0 of 15 trials and each constraint grasp in 13 of 15; on displaced tissue, a rest-pose constraint produced one-step snaps of up to 17.8 mm, which live-pose capture eliminates. Against the recording, front-surface depth error is 1.33 to 1.41 mm, organ silhouette IoU is 0.80, and in five grasp-lifts reproduced from video the landmark displacement RMSE is 11.8 mm against 14.2 mm for a static prediction. Biofidelity is not claimed; the environment is intended for closed-loop feasibility, safety, contact and policy screening.

Robots have significant potential to automate construction processes. However, their industry adoption remains limited, partly because of the programming effort required to adapt robots to diverse tasks. This paper presents a skill sequence planning method that enables a heterogeneous team of multi-functional robots to collaboratively perform construction assembly work using reusable, preprogrammed skills such as grasping, drilling, and fastening. A central controller transforms the digital representation of the building into a construction relationship graph that represents construction entities, their states, and their parent-child relationships. Based on this representation, the system selects the next construction target, generates a symbolic sequence of skills for capable members of the robot team, and produces collision-free geometric motion plans for skill execution. The symbolic planning problem is dynamically regenerated as the construction state changes. An interactive digital twin presents the planned skill sequence and robot states to human co-workers for review and approval before execution. The method is evaluated through a construction assembly case study. By reducing the need to program robots separately for each task variation, the proposed approach supports more flexible deployment of collaborative robot teams in construction.

Large-scale manipulation demonstrations are essential for learning robust visuomotor policies, yet real-world data collection is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation offers a promising alternative, but physical and visual discrepancies can limit the transferability of synthetic data, particularly for manipulation with soft grippers. We present PhyVisGen, a physically and visually high-fidelity framework for scalable robotic manipulation data generation. On the physical side, PhyVisGen introduces an arm-gripper coupling method based on the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC), enabling high-fidelity soft contact throughout complete manipulation trajectories. On the visual side, it combines real-scene reconstruction with real-time path tracing to generate visually realistic observations while preserving captured scene appearance. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the physical and visual fidelity of PhyVisGen. Policies trained exclusively on synthetic manipulation demonstrations achieve 65-95% success across five real-robot tasks, without real-robot demonstration data or policy fine-tuning.

Robots operating safely in cluttered everyday environments often need to infer scene geometry from partial observations. Methods that detect objects in 2D and reconstruct them independently struggle in such scenes: a missed object is never reconstructed, a merged detection can fuse two objects, and separately reconstructed meshes may overlap or fail to touch their supporting surfaces. We introduce CODA (Complete Once, Decompose Afterward), a generative model that instead reconstructs the complete scene geometry from a single unsegmented RGB-D image, then separates the surface into the surrounding environment and movable objects. Still, generated scene geometry can drift from the observed partial point cloud. To reduce this drift, CODA uses two explicit 3D grounding mechanisms to keep reconstructed geometry consistent with observed surfaces while completing unseen regions. Experiments on HomebrewedDB and our custom cluttered-scene dataset show more accurate reconstructions and a higher fraction of objects remaining in place under simulated gravity than both object-first and scene-first baselines.

Deterministic dynamics modeling of tendon-driven continuum robots remains challenging owing to uncertainties in material behavior, tendon transmission, friction, and contact. Measured joint configurations and nominal tendon commands do not fully characterize these internal mechanical factors, leaving uncertainty in the subsequent motion. We therefore develop a history-conditioned, physics-informed flow-matching framework for probabilistic dynamics prediction, using motion and actuation histories to predict the distribution of the next complete joint configuration. By recursively sampling next-step configurations under prescribed commands, the model predicts distributions of future whole-body motions. In simulation, scenario-specific models achieve five-second trajectory Energy Scores (lower is better) of 12.05 mm under internal friction variation and 9.29 mm under unobserved actuation disturbances. Relative to the conditional variational autoencoder and diffusion baselines, Flow attains lower Energy Scores and coverage closer to the nominal level in both scenarios. Ablations support history and structural conditioning in both scenarios. On the physical robot, predictions under two tendon-command profiles excluded from training capture the principal motion sequences, with five-second Energy Scores of 11.91 and 11.42 mm, lower than the compared baselines. The predicted-to-measured spread ratios are 1.65 and 1.22 (closer to 1 is better). These results support history-conditioned probabilistic dynamics prediction under incomplete mechanical observations.

We present and tackle two problems associated with deploying Foundation Models (FMs) on Embodied Agents performing navigation: 1) Training bias in FMs leading to poor personalization in unseen environments, and 2) Limited FM context length hindering success, especially on long horizon tasks. Our solution for the former involves priming the FM with human-habit data mined from the scene and our solution for the latter involves active memory management via a novel `memory head' augmentation. We first present a taxonomy of existing literature on FM-based Embodied Navigation, and highlight these limitations. We then present our approaches, Transit-Aware Planning (TAP) and MemCtrl to address the limitations. With TAP, we present real-world results in a lab environment with a Turtlebot for personalized target finding that shows an average improvement of 18% over a non-TAP baseline. On MemCtrl, we report a 6% average improvement across various embodied tasks, with 20% on long instruction subsets, all while using nearly half the context used in the baseline model. Motivated by these result, we present our stance the deployability of FM-based embodied agents in real-world environments, and highlight open research directions.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for EdgeAI perception systems, where accurate object localization and reliable identification enable safe decision-making. Singleagent MOT suffers from occlusions, sensor noise, and partial scene understanding in complex real-world scenarios. While multi-agent systems improve robustness by exploiting shared information, they introduce redundant measurements that lead to false data associations, and still struggle to capture nonlinear object dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose CDKFTrack, a Cluster-aware Data-Driven Kalman Filtering framework for Cooperative 3D MOT. The proposed method first fuses multivehicle 3D LiDAR detections through a Graph Laplacian-based formulation. Then, a cluster-aware redundancy reduction scheme groups spatially related detections and selects representative observations to reduce duplicate inputs to the tracker. The resulting detections are processed by a data-driven Kalman filter that learns object motion dynamics from data, reducing dependence on predefined linear motion assumptions. Furthermore, a wavelet-based temporal refinement module leverages the multiresolution decomposition property of wavelets to attenuate shortterm positional fluctuations and improve trajectory continuity. To the best of our knowledge, CDKF-Track is the first framework to jointly address detection-level fusion redundancy and learnable motion modeling in cooperative 3D MOT. Experimental results on the real-world V2V4Real dataset indicate that CDKF-Track achieves up to 27.99% improvements in tracking accuracy over state-of-the-art multi-agent MOT methods.

Lower cost open source robots and reinforcement learning (RL) simulation tools create new opportunities for precollege students to engage with contemporary robotics. However, translating a complete research workflow, spanning mechanical assembly, electrical setup, simulation, policy learning, system identification, and physical deployment, into a coherent course for novice learners remains challenging. We present an integrated robotics course framework that organizes these activities around a shared robotic artifact. The framework combines parallel disciplinary tracks, sequencing based on technical dependencies, progressive integration of simulation and hardware, layered performance checkpoints, and structures for balancing collaborative work with individual accountability. We illustrate the framework through a high school curriculum organized around a robot project in which pairs of students assemble an open source humanoid robot, train a walking policy in simulation, and deploy it on the physical platform. The framework was developed through an iterative design process that included formative review by five experts in robotics research, engineering, secondary STEM education, and curriculum design. Expert feedback highlighted three central design tensions: authenticity versus cognitive load, system integration versus timely visible progress, and team construction versus individual accountability. These tensions informed the final framework presented in this paper. This work offers a structured approach for adapting robotics research workflows into interdisciplinary precollege courses; future classroom studies are needed to examine implementation and student learning.

An animal with a weakened limb does not necessarily switch its gait, instead it unloads the affected limb, re-coordinates the remaining limbs, and scales its response with injury severity. This graded adaptation allows locomotion to persist despite partial loss of limb strength, rather than requiring a discrete transition between healthy and failed. Inspired by this behavior, we propose SG-CPG, a central pattern generator (CPG) for quadruped locomotion under continuous actuator degradation. SG-CPG preserves a frozen healthy CPG policy and introduces two severity-driven gates: a residual gate that re-coordinates all four legs and an amplitude gate that progressively shortens the weakened leg's stride as degradation increases. We emulate progressive degradation through two mechanisms: lowering the joint torque ceiling (ceiling mechanism) and scaling its low-level controller gains (gain mechanism), representing distinct forms of actuator weakening. Our simulations on a Unitree Go2 show that SG-CPG maintains a trot gait with 100% survival across an omnidirectional command schedule under 95% joint strength loss while tracking commands within 8%. Under a lowered torque ceiling, removing either severity path, the residual's severity observation or the amplitude gate, raises clipping at the weakened joint from 4.4% to 13.6% and 26.3% of steps at an 80% loss. On a real Go2, SG-CPG survives 28 of 29 forward and turning trials with up to 93% calf torque degradation. These results show that severity-gated adaptation can extend a healthy locomotion policy to progressive actuator degradation without treating the fault as a discrete failure.

Field robots operating across time of day and sensing modalities require accurate image correspondences within onboard time and resource budgets. However, accuracy and runtime reported for individual methods on a single device provide limited guidance for choosing a matcher and its configuration on a target platform. We present MatcherCompass, a deployment-aware benchmark for choosing local feature matchers in field robotics. Under common input and pose-evaluation procedures, we compare nine classical and learned matching pipelines across four image resolutions and supported numerical precisions. Four visual conditions cover viewpoint variation, day--night matching in visible and thermal imagery, and daytime visible--thermal matching. We evaluate pose accuracy using the area under the error--recall curve (AUC) at $5^\circ$, $10^\circ$, and $20^\circ$, and measure runtime, GPU memory, and energy per image pair on four GPU platforms spanning workstation and onboard computers. The results show that changes in hardware, input resolution, and numerical precision can move a matcher across a runtime budget boundary, altering the feasible choices. We organize the measurements into a selection guide that returns all configurations satisfying user-specified time and resource limits, together with their accuracy under the selected visual condition. MatcherCompass provides measured evidence for choosing matching pipelines that fit a robot's sensing conditions and computing hardware. Project page: https://matchercompass.github.io/.

Recent advances in learning-based robot policies have demonstrated promising progress, yet they are predom- inantly evaluated in static or quasi-static environments. In dynamic manipulation, objects and scenes continuously evolve while the robot perceives, reasons, and acts. However, recent dynamic simulation benchmarks largely focus on short-horizon, reactive interactions with simple motion patterns and offer limited support for both systematic evaluation under domain shifts and model-agnostic real-time execution protocols. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MotionForge, the first large- scale simulation benchmark and data-generation pipeline tailored to jointly evaluate domain shifts and long-horizon interaction in dynamic manipulation. MotionForge comprises 40 dynamic interaction tasks spanning 11 distinct motion patterns, with dedicated support for 17 long-horizon tasks. Our benchmark introduces two key novelties: (1) a systematic evaluation protocol for assessing policy robustness under both single-factor (e.g., only backgrounds shift) and joint domain shifts (e.g., simultaneous shifts of objects, backgrounds, lighting, and speed); and (2) a decoupled, latency-aware execution protocol where the environ- ment continuously evolves independently of policy inference time. Extensive evaluations of representative general-purpose robot policies on our benchmark reveal substantial limitations under joint domain shifts. These findings expose a critical gap between current policy capabilities and the requirements of robust long- horizon manipulation of dynamic objects under domain shifts, establishing MotionForge as a comprehensive testbed for future research in embodied AI.

In constrained motion planning problems, task and loop-closure constraints restrict a robot's motion to a curved, lower-dimensional submanifold of its configuration space. Planners measure path length with a metric, which sets the cost of moving in each direction. Under the Euclidean metric, this cost is the same everywhere, whereas under a general Riemannian metric, such as the kinetic-energy metric, the cost can vary with direction and configuration. Existing methods often describe the submanifold either implicitly, as a constraint level set, or explicitly, through a parameterization. The implicit representation is typically combined with the Euclidean metric of the configuration space, and the explicit representation with the parameter domain, so the path length that a planner minimizes depends on the representation. Instead, we measure path length with the induced metric, which the submanifold inherits from a Riemannian metric on the configuration space. The implicit and explicit representations yield the same induced metric, expressed in different coordinates, and hence the same geometry. This result holds for any Riemannian metric on the configuration space, not only the Euclidean one. The choice of metric is therefore independent of the choice of representation. Using this result, we extend planning under a Riemannian metric from unconstrained spaces to constraint submanifolds by applying the induced metric in both a sampling-based planner and a trajectory optimizer. For an explicit representation, the induced metric also accounts for the distortion that the parameterization introduces. In experiments on a bimanual manipulation setup with two Franka arms under end-effector task constraints, we compare the Euclidean and kinetic-energy metrics.

Robotic manipulation has increasingly pursued human-like dexterous hands with many articulated degrees of freedom, offering rich manipulation capabilities at the cost of mechanical and control complexity. At the other extreme, parallel grippers are simple and robust, but provide little ability to manipulate an object after grasping it. Operating articulated objects such as threaded containers, manufacturing tools, and laboratory instruments often requires a second gripper, an external fixture, or coordinated arm motion. We introduce the Cartesian Hand, a 7-DoF end-effector that rethinks dexterous manipulation by combining independent grasping and relative manipulation within a single end-effector using only linear motion. Two independently actuated parallel grippers hold different parts of an object, while four translating fingertips generate relative motion between the grasped parts. Its configuration-independent fingertip kinematics allow manipulation to be composed from simple linear motion primitives. The Cartesian Hand is particularly suited to objects structured around common mechanisms such as threads, pivots, linear guides, plungers, and triggers. We demonstrate cap opening and closing, pipetting, pumping, two-handle manipulation, screwdriving, trigger actuation, and in-grasp reorientation across 35 objects spanning laboratory, manufacturing, and household settings. The same manipulation procedures transfer from a fixed-base robot arm to a humanoid, where we demonstrate bimanual laboratory manipulation using two Cartesian Hands. These results show that versatile in-hand manipulation capability can emerge from a mechanically simple architecture when independent grasping and relative motion are designed directly into the end-effector. We will open-source all software and hardware design. Our website is https://generalroboticslab.com/cartesian_handv1.

Environmental reconnaissance needs mobile platforms that carry sensors, preserve measurement context, and return interpretable evidence under limited energy and communication. We present a literature-informed engineering design for Zephyron, a four-wheel rover with a front manipulator, environmental sensors, distributed computer vision, local recording, and a raised rear solar module. The design keeps the prototype layout but replaces unsupported numerical assumptions with an explicit component and geometry baseline. A reproducible search retrieved 5,000 records (4,858 unique) for screening, followed by targeted review of primary literature and manufacturer documentation. The baseline uses 165 mm wheels, a 12 kg mass budget, a 72 Wh battery-energy basis, and a 20 W photovoltaic module. With rolling-resistance coefficient 0.04, steady ascent of a 10 degree grade needs about 0.517 N m per wheel under equal load sharing. An illustrative 40 W motion load gives 1.44 h from 57.6 Wh usable energy, and a 25 percent driving duty gives 4.19 h without solar input; these are calculated scenarios, not measured performance. Sensor models show how integration time, calibration, temperature, and communication delay constrain interpretation, and a quality-aware stop-and-sample policy links these constraints to mission execution. Lightweight detectors, reference-based sensor learning, and executable data-integrity checks define a reproducible machine-learning evaluation pathway. The contribution is a traceable design and evaluation framework with editable 3D models, subsystem diagrams, and reproducible analytical data. Experimental validation is required before assigning payload, endurance, detection, or field-operating ratings.

This paper present a spiral-cavity wheel for lunar regolith excavation and a sensor-light evaluation stack that jointly estimates fill ratio (vision), sinkage (vision), and specific energy from actuator logs. In benchtop tests (four revolutions at 5, 10, and 15~RPM) against two literature baselines, the proposed wheel achieved higher excavated mass and fill ratio, delivering 2.2-3.0 times higher excavation rate while reducing specific energy by 29 % relative to a bucket-drum baseline. Normalized sinkage (mm/kg) was also lower, indicating stable traction without bogging. Effort-time traces show a steady torque envelope with repeatable cut-carry-dump cycles across speeds. We provide a retention index $\eta$ that correlates with fill ratio and a DEM setup that reproduces experimental trends with low error. Results suggest spiral-cavity wheels can replace heavier multi-actuator diggers when mass, simplicity, and energy efficiency are mission drivers.

Agricultural robotics is advancing rapidly, yet progress remains constrained by limited field access, lack of control over field conditions, geographic variability, and seasonal crop cycles. These factors make it difficult and costly to acquire diverse agricultural datasets, resulting in limited evaluation and reduced system robustness. While other robotics domains have scaled learning and evaluation through high-fidelity simulation, agricultural robotics still lacks comparably capable tools. In this paper, we present a ROS-integrated framework, built on Isaac Sim, for large-scale procedural generation of agricultural environments. The framework supports photorealistic rendering, physics simulation, and domain randomization at scales relevant to robotics research, with built-in support for row crops, orchards, and vineyards and straightforward extensibility to additional crop categories. Project Page: https://baj31415.github.io/agrigen/

ICP-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM tracks in real time by registering incoming frames against map Gaussians, using each primitive's covariance for both rendering and registration. These two uses place conflicting demands on one covariance. The mapper shapes it to minimize photometric error, often flattening it against surfaces, while robust registration typically benefits from measurement uncertainty. We propose a dual-covariance parameterization. Each Gaussian keeps a single mean but holds two covariances: a rendering covariance optimized by the mapper, and a tracking covariance derived from an RGB-D sensor noise model. We further use the tracking covariances as Gaussian anchors for image corners, providing constraints in directions where depth geometry is weak. We evaluate on TUM RGB-D, ScanNet, Replica, and two outdoor sequences recorded with a RealSense D435i on wheeled and handheld platforms. We achieve robust tracking performance across multiple scenes and reduced odometry drift, while tracking at $\sim$ 60 FPS.

Manipulation requires both broad scene awareness and detailed local feedback, yet conventional camera rigs provide them through separate front and wrist cameras. We present Fisheye-VLA, a visual interface that brings these capabilities together using a single passive fisheye. A global view preserves the workspace, while local perspective crops direct detail toward the interaction. The key design question is where this local visual budget should go. We answer it through a controlled re-rendering study, comparing alternative crop directions on the same recorded observations. The study finds that end-effector-centered views capture most of the estimated benefit of a much larger candidate pool, motivating a compact allocation around both hands. Our interface uses calibrated end-effector projection and motion lead to track the crops, while a shared ray encoding preserves their spatial meaning as they move. Integrated with a pretrained VLA, it achieves 84% and 82% success in the two expanded tabletop regions, where some target placements extend beyond the front-camera coverage, and supports shelf and conveyor manipulation. Ablations show that local crops and their viewing directions become more important in the larger workspace regions. The results demonstrate that a single fisheye can support these manipulation tasks without physical wrist cameras.

Humanoid motion tracking policies rely on dense frame-by-frame references, limiting their use as high-level motion controllers for planning and interactive motion generation. We study \emph{Sparse Timed Keyframe Motion Tracking}, where a policy receives only sparse future keyframes and their desired arrival times, and must execute stable whole-body motions that reach successive goals. We propose \textbf{PLAT}, a three-stage sparse timed keyframe motion tracking policy learning framework with \textbf{P}rivileged \textbf{LA}tent \textbf{T}ransition learning. PLAT bridges dense motion tracking and sparse goal-conditioned control by exploiting dense goal sequences as privileged supervision during training while requiring only sparse timed keyframe commands at deployment. A pretrained dense tracking expert first provides robust motion priors. A privileged latent prior is then learned through DAgger-style imitation, followed by latent residual reinforcement learning that refines latent transitions instead of directly optimizing actions. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that PLAT maintains accurate and stable sparse timed keyframe tracking across varying planning horizons, with particularly strong performance under long-horizon commands. Successful deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot further demonstrates the effectiveness and practicality of PLAT for sparse humanoid motion control.

Precision medical robotics demands adaptive decision-making under strict safety, interpretability, and execution constraints. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong multimodal reasoning ability, their continuous action generation paradigm is not well suited for precision medical tasks, where reliable closed-loop operation may also depend on non-action system function calls. To address this gap, we propose MedVLA, a hierarchical framework that couples high-level multimodal reasoning with low-level function-constrained execution. We further introduce a scalable multi-agent pipeline to generate skill-oriented chain-of-thought(CoT) data for structured training. Built on different multimodal large-model backbones, MedVLA consistently improves performance after fine-tuning, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework across model variants. Under identical initial conditions, we perform 100 closed-loop flexible electrode implantation trials. The results show that MedVLA achieves a 95.0\% task success rate, substantially outperforming representative VLA baselines, including OpenVLA (8\%) and $\pi_0$ (15\%), in accuracy, stability, and safety. These results indicate that structured reasoning with constrained function-level execution is a practical route toward deployable precision medical robotics.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as general-purpose robotic manipulation policies. However, in dexterous hand manipulation, contact forces are typically provided as separate states or force-specific representations, making it difficult to explicitly represent the spatial correspondence between force and their corresponding visual locations. In this work, we propose VisForce, which visually grounds the current and desired forces at their corresponding fingertip locations. VisForce renders current and desired visual force cues on the current wrist image and a task-specific goal image, and combines the two representations through goal-conditioned cross-attention to generate force-aware actions. We evaluate VisForce using a real UR10 robot equipped with an RH56F1 dexterous hand through force-conditioned grasping and three multi-stage manipulation tasks. In force-conditioned grasping experiments, VisForce exhibited a consistent grip-force response as the desired force increased, and achieved grasp-and-lift success rates of 70% and 80% for an egg and a toothpaste tube, respectively. It further achieved final success rates of 70%, 55%, and 40% on cup insertion/bottle pouring, tong-assisted bread transfer, and slip-modulated peg-in-hole, respectively. These results show that fingertip-aligned visual force representations can be effectively used for force-aware conditioning in VLA-based dexterous hand manipulation.

This short report documents our entry to the COMFORT Localization Benchmark (IROS 2026), evaluated on the GrandTour dataset recorded with the Boxi payload. It extends MOLA-LO into a LiDAR-inertial system that also ingests IMU and, optionally, legged kinematic odometry. We describe the architecture, the streams consumed, the local protocol that selected the submitted configuration, and the measurements backing our real-time claim.

Discrete action tokenization is central to autoregressive vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet action representations are often evaluated primarily through reconstruction fidelity. We ask which representation properties actually matter for closed-loop control by comparing fixed analytical, data-driven linear, and nonlinear neural representations under a unified tokenization interface. Across rate-distortion analysis, sequence-modeling diagnostics, and 3,500 LIBERO rollouts, representation rankings change with the evaluation criterion. PCA achieves lower nominal reconstruction error than Temporal-DCT, but produces less predictable token sequences and 3.0 percentage points lower mean seen-task success across three policy-training seeds, with the policy ordering reversing in one seed. In a matched seed-42 ablation, an autoencoder further reduces reconstruction error yet does not yield the strongest policy and exhibits greater sensitivity to discrete token perturbations. These findings show that reconstruction fidelity alone cannot reliably select action representations for autoregressive control, motivating joint evaluation of geometric fidelity, sequence predictability, decoder stability, and closed-loop performance.

Recent VLM-based autonomous driving planners adopt GRPO-style reinforcement learning to optimize driving performance. However, existing GRPO recipes either optimize driving efficiency, risking progress-seeking but unsafe behavior, or enforce early safety constraints, leading to overly conservative behavior; both require lengthy training. To solve these problems, we first reveal two distinct RL regimes: a progress regime (Run-GRPO) that aggressively explores high progress, and a safety regime (Walk-GRPO) that restores safety under stable progress. Based on this finding, we propose $\textit{Run-then-Walk}$, a simple yet effective two-stage reward scheduling strategy for GRPO, achieving both better performance and faster convergence. Unlike one-stage RL, which may focus on progress, safety, or a mixture of both within a single training phase, this schedule explicitly separates progress discovery from safety repair. In the $\textit{Run}$ phase, we focus on progress, allowing the policy to escape the conservative bias and discover high-progress modes. In the subsequent $\textit{Walk}$ phase, we introduce endpoint and safety strategy to repair unsafe behaviors from the Run phase. This reversed schedule overcomes the conservatism of Walk-first methods and the unsafe progress-seeking of joint optimization. We validate it with various VLM-based planners on multiple benchmarks: NAVSIMv1, NAVSIMv2, Navhard, and nuScenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved driving performance while requiring 40--50\% fewer RL training epochs than the baselines.

How should a robot learn to manipulate objects so fragile that sub-Newton contact forces can cause irreversible damage? Existing visuo-tactile policy learning typically treats tactile sensing as an additional policy input. In direct-contact force-sensitive manipulation, however, the bottleneck can arise earlier, during data collection: manual gripper control is too delayed and coarse-grained to reliably maintain the narrow force range required for stable grasping. We therefore use a deterministic 25 Hz tactile reflex controller as a collection-time teacher, producing demonstrations with controller-shaped grasping behavior for tactile-free policy learning. On Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), policies trained from reflex-shaped demonstrations recover the teacher's grasping profile and achieve 95% stable grasps on the nominal plastic-cup task, substantially outperforming visually screened manual demonstrations. The same intervention improves in-distribution stability on $\pi_{0.5}$ and shows a favorable exploratory trend on an unseen paper-cup variant. Under randomized external disturbance, however, the reflex-data $\pi_{0.5}$ policy still fails in 45% of policy-only trials, whereas a deployment-time reflex arbiter retains all grasps. These results reveal a new role for tactile feedback in force-sensitive manipulation: rather than integrating tactile into the policy, we use it as a collection-time teacher that shapes grasping behavior in demonstrations for policy learning, while disturbance rejection remains controller-dependent, revealing the boundary of tactile-free policy.

Aerial-ground cooperation requires real-time UAV--UGV relative-state information. Instead of maintaining global estimates for both robots, direct control in a UGV-attached non-inertial frame avoids reliance on global localization. Vision-based relative pose estimation with a passive marker offers a low-cost and effective solution. However, a fixed camera may lose sight of the moving UGV when the required UAV attitude conflicts with the field-of-view (FOV) constraint. To address this, we propose COPA, a robust active-perception framework for global-state-free aerial-ground cooperation. We use a single-axis gimbal to decouple the camera optical axis from the UAV pitch attitude. We derive an active-perception model that relates UAV motion, gimbal angle, and UGV motion to the target image-plane state.A Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) predicts short-horizon UGV acceleration and angular velocity from recent motion history without global-state measurements. The model predictive control (MPC) uses these predictions to jointly optimize UAV and gimbal control. Simulations show that COPA maintains continuous target visibility, while ablation studies confirm that the TCN reduces peak errors during UGV motion transitions. Real-world experiments with UGV accelerations up to 3m/s^2 and yaw rates up to 1.0rad/s demonstrate robust tracking.

When we evaluate the performance of our odometry, it is common practice to score the estimated track against a ground truth. Unfortunately, scoring uses point metrics, such as the root mean square error, that ignore the covariance matrix which estimators like filters and smoothers already report. Using the covariance matters for two reasons. First, the covariance encodes the estimator's uncertainty, so it tells us whether the estimator trusts its own output. An overconfident estimator will not report itself lost. Second, the covariance weights the error in each direction of the estimate. Without the covariance, an estimator is unduly penalized for a high error in an uncertain direction. Instead of point metrics, we should use strictly proper scoring rules. These rules score the estimate together with its reported uncertainty. Strictly proper scoring rules recover the point metrics when no covariance is reported, and they diagnose covariance inconsistency when covariance is reported. Using a one-sided pairwise test, we show that two estimators can expose overconfidence in at least one of them without a ground truth. Strictly proper scoring rules and our pairwise test are available in our open-source framework smfeval. As a case study, we use smfeval to assess the uncertainty quality of the translational component of ground-based LiDAR-inertial odometry. Across four filters we find overconfidence - the worst case reports centimeter certainty with kilometer error. Knowing the filters are overconfident, we investigate the mechanism. The investigation traces overconfidence to filters crediting LiDAR measurements with more new information than they carry.

This paper presents a modular control barrier function (CBF) framework for safe free-flying robotic spacecraft operations during tumbling target capture. Motivated by latest ESA guidelines for safe close proximity operations, safety zones and requirements are translated into dedicated CBFs. The 13-DoF system is decomposed into translational, attitude, and robotic subsystems, each equipped with a safety filter that minimally modifies nominal control inputs in a lightweight quadratic program. The filters enforce a conical approach corridor, collision avoidance zone, attitude line-of-sight pointing, angular velocity limits, robotic joint limits, link-base collision avoidance, and actuator constraints. Dynamic coupling between subsystems is handled by treating upstream safe control commands as known interconnection inputs in the downstream safety filters, preserving modularity while supporting system-level safety. The framework is validated in an on-orbit servicing scenario, including final approach, angular rate synchronization, and tumbling target grasping, using the high-fidelity astrodynamics simulator Basilisk. Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate runtime efficiency and operational safety for various tumbling rates.

In this work, we propose a communication-free framework for vision-based formation control of fully actuated underwater robots subject to sensing constraints, collision-avoidance requirements, and input saturations. Recentered barrier Lyapunov functions encode sensing and collision-avoidance constraints, while command-filtered backstepping extends the design to the second-order vehicle dynamics. The resulting control objective is enforced through a quadratic program that explicitly accounts for actuator limits. Conservative sensing domains provide margins from the physical limits and are adaptively relaxed when necessary, allowing temporary violation of the conservative bounds. The proposed approach is validated through realistic Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) simulations in Gazebo.

2D point cloud registration arises in laser odometry and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for mobile robots. Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is one of the most widely used approaches. Still, its iterative procedure recomputes correspondences via nearest-neighbor search at every iteration, whereas correspondence-free alternatives focus on scan-to-map alignment. This paper proposes a 2D point cloud registration approach based on unsigned distance maps, precomputing the Euclidean distance to the nearest reference point, along with its spatial derivatives, over a discrete grid, replacing the per-iteration search with O(1) lookups. Moreover, point-to-point and point-to-plane error formulations are derived on the SE(2) manifold and solved via Gauss-Newton optimization. On a synthetic benchmark and the real-world IILABS 3D dataset, the precomputed point-to-point variant outperforms its analytical counterparts, achieving competitive laser-odometry drift compared to point-to-plane formulations, as the precomputed gradient regularizes correspondences in the presence of sensor noise.

Robots operating around pedestrians often reason over a finite set of predicted human futures. Repeated online updates can concentrate this limited prediction budget on dominant destinations and leave plausible alternatives underrepresented or absent, removing those alternatives from the finite representation available to downstream decision making. We introduce Destination Support Restoration (DSR), a causal post-selection operator that repairs destination support without retraining the host predictor or increasing the maintained set size. At a repair step, DSR evaluates a temporary destination-stratified candidate bank from the observed prefix, converts candidate evidence into integer target counts, protects representatives of active modes, and reallocates redundant surplus hypotheses to deficient modes. The maintained and returned sets retain exactly $N$ hypotheses, and DSR replaces at most $\lceil\rho N\rceil$ entries. Protected representatives preserve current categorical support; lineage-aware particle filters also preserve surviving resampling ancestors. Each replacement reduces the allocation mismatch to the evidence-driven target by one. On the complete 3,719-trajectory Edinburgh protocol over three seeds, DSR reduces MIF weighted ADE and FDE by 13.36% and 13.30% at $N=64$. Paired integrations with CLiFF, PPT, causal GDTS, Social Informer, and PECNet improve both metrics in every evaluated pair. These results show that finite-set support allocation is a useful prediction-side control point when a fixed hypothesis set serves as the interface to downstream systems.

Generative visual models offer a foundation for learning representations of physical dynamics, yet their extension to continuous control raises a fundamental question: do visual prediction and action generation require separate computational pathways? Existing approaches usually introduce trainable action heads or separate action experts to bridge low-dimensional states and high-dimensional visual representations. In this work, we explore whether the visual backbone's existing capacity can also support control when actions are expressed in a compatible representation. Thus, we introduce PatchWAM (Patch World-Action Model), which treats continuous actions as another type of patch through a fixed mapping called Action-as-Patch. This allows a single model to predict both how the robot should move and what the scene may look like afterward. Visual prediction and action generation become parts of the same generative process, without a dedicated action head or separate action expert. Experiments with subsampled training windows show gains over a matched dual-expert control, while benchmark evaluations reach 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-Plus and 96.12% on RoboTwin 2.0 in a full-data setting with additional augmented demonstrations. More broadly, the result suggests that capability need not be added where it can be inherited: the constraint on extending a generative backbone is the interface a new signal is written in, not the capacity to model it.

Legged robots under sparse waypoint guidance must avoid moving obstacles using partial, rapidly changing LiDAR observations. We present LOOP (Latent-recurrent Occupancy rollOut Policy), a local avoidance policy that connects sparse waypoint guidance to a frozen locomotion controller at 50 Hz. From occupancy and ego-velocity histories, a recurrent predictor forecasts future occupancy over a 1 s horizon by warping the current map with learned flow and visibility gates. These maps guide velocity selection through map-derived features and geometric risk estimates, providing an explicit interface for inspecting and replacing predictions. In encounter-synchronised Isaac Lab evaluations, LOOP achieves 57.1% head-on success at obstacle speeds of 2.5-3.2 m/s, exceeding a retrained reactive baseline by 8.2 percentage points. Comparisons with a rollout-free BEV policy show smaller, scenario-dependent gains from the prediction branch, including improved crossing success and reduced variability across training seeds at the highest head-on speeds. The adapter runs onboard a Unitree Go2 in 14.5 ms per step and completes all 16 real-world crossing trials without collision, demonstrating deployment feasibility.

Providing safe and effective mobility assistance plays a crucial role in restoring independence and enhancing the quality of life for individuals with motor impairments. In this context, robotic walking assistive devices have recently emerged as promising solutions to provide physically compliant interaction while ensuring user safety and support. This paper presents a novel control framework for an omnidirectional Walking Assistive Robot (I-WANDER) that integrates a Control Barrier Function (CBF) formulation into a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme to explicitly enforce collision-avoidance safety constraints while optimizing for energy efficiency and smooth human-robot collaboration. The method was experimentally evaluated with 12 healthy participants performing two different walking tasks using both the proposed CBF-based MPC controller (CB-MPC) and a variable admittance controller (AC). The first task involved structured navigation through a U-shaped corridor, whereas the second consisted of a single-obstacle avoidance task performed blindfolded to ensure the obstacle was unexpected. Comparative results show that the CB-MPC architecture significantly reduces energy consumption and mechanical work (p < 0.01) without compromising motion smoothness, while also decreasing the number of obstacle collisions. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of the proposed control architecture to enhance both safety and efficiency in robotic walking assistance.

Most research on the manipulation of deformable objects focuses on lightweight systems with negligible mechanical response, effectively restricting attention to quasi-static regimes. This assumption excludes a broad class of practically relevant objects, such as hoses, pipes, and wiring harnesses, whose dynamics cannot be ignored during manipulation. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a closed-loop control architecture that explicitly accounts for object dynamics and recasts manipulation as a shape-regulation problem. Control is achieved by modulating forces and torques applied at multiple fixed points along the object. This approach builds on three methodological contributions: a fully dynamic model of linear deformable objects based on discrete strain parameterizations; an extension of the notion of actuation coordinates to SE(3), yielding a structured and inherently underactuated control architecture; and nonlinear feedback strategies providing explicit conditions for steady-state convergence to desired configurations. Extensive simulations on representative manipulation tasks demonstrate the performance gains enabled by the proposed modelbased formulation. We finally validate the approach experimentally through a real-time closed-loop implementation with online shape estimation, confirming its practical feasibility and effectiveness

Monocular drone navigation requires reaching a goal in an unseen environment from a single forward-facing camera, which offers few cues for depth and scale. World models address this by modelling how observations evolve under actions, but they are built to be executed: the prediction is produced at deployment and fed back into action generation at every control step. We argue that what a policy needs from a world model is not the prediction but the representation required to produce it: in flight the executed action explains almost all of the change between observations, so prediction reduces to reprojecting a static scene under a known displacement. We therefore introduce skytopia, a policy built on an action-conditioned latent world model, and the 3D Gaussian Splatting platform on which it is trained. A forward objective predicts the representation of the next observation from the intended motion, and an inverse objective recovers that motion from the predicted transition. Because the prediction never reaches action generation, the predictor is discarded and one policy serves point-goal, image-goal, and goal-free navigation. Simulation experiments show that skytopia outperforms every baseline under all three specifications, attaining 57.8%, 66.0%, and 49.0% success rate, while discarding the predictor removes 59.4% of the inference cost. The same policy is subsequently deployed on a physical drone without fine-tuning and reaches goals in indoor, open outdoor, and woodland environments.

We investigate the challenges of enabling effective collaboration between human operators and heterogeneous autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environments by developing an interaction platform that allows study of operator behavior and supports intent inference and decision-making using state-of-the-art frameworks. We demonstrate the extent to which the operator's perception, decisions, and actions could be supported by autonomous systems during search-and-rescue operations with our platform.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit strong semantic priors from large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet remain limited in robotic manipulation by insufficient 3D spatial awareness. Existing approaches either require explicit depth or point-cloud inputs, compress geometry into training-time supervision, or inject it only at the model input or action expert, leaving the vision-language backbone without persistent access to task-relevant spatial information. We introduce StrataVLA, a plug-and-play framework for hierarchical geometric grounding. A frozen geometry foundation model extracts shared geometric features from RGB observations, while sparse, layer-specific Geometry Adapters allow visual representations at selected backbone depths to retrieve relevant geometric evidence through cross-attention. To make inference-time geometry practical, StrataVLA further combines task-aware routing with an LRU feature cache that exploits temporal redundancy during task manipulation. Experiments on LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and real-world manipulation demonstrate consistent gains over strong VLA baselines. StrataVLA achieves 98.53% average success on LIBERO suites while reducing geometry-model invocations by up to 88%, establishing hierarchical geometry injection as an effective and efficient way to achieve spatially grounded robotic control.

This paper presents a situation aware locomotion framework for two mobile collaborative robots operating in shared industrial environments. The proposed method models situation awareness through perception, comprehension, and projection to support locomotion decisions. Robot pose, load state, manipulator state, shared zone occupancy, obstacle state, and predicted inter robot conflict were used to select safe locomotion actions. The framework was implemented in simulation and evaluated in simulated industrial scenarios designed to match a feasible 4 m by 4 m physical test area. The proposed method was compared with two other baselines over multiple trials and randomized seeds. The results show that the situation aware method achieved 100% task success across all scenarios, while the independent and fixed priority baselines each achieved 33.3% overall success. The proposed method eliminated shared zone conflicts and safety stops, maintained the largest average minimum inter robot distance, and completed the tasks with the lowest average completion time. These results indicate that situational awareness can improve the locomotion of dual robots by combining load state, manipulator state, reasoning about the shared zone, and prediction of short-horizon conflicts.

The integration of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offers unprecedented semantic reasoning capabilities. However, real-time closed-loop navigation requires not only low inference latency but also obedience to structured flight commands. This paper proposes a hybrid FSM-VLM control architecture for UAVs in GPS-free environments. The system combines a deterministic Finite State Machine (FSM) for low-level physical control with an asynchronous VLM copilot for high-level semantic pathfinding. We evaluate three models with different parameter scales in a Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) simulation. The framework isolates and measures syntax errors at the format level versus semantic hallucinations at the logic level in a normal and degraded scenario. This study demonstrates that parameter scaling, and not pure latency, remains the primary bottleneck for the safe and compatible integration of VLM into autonomous flights.

Inspired by the flight and song of birds, we propose an approach that enables cooperating agents to effectively identify obstacles in their environment by having a stationary source agent emit a frequency-modulated chirp while one or more listener agents observe the direct and reflected signals while in motion. We present a novel mapping approach that exploits the ``frequency gap'' between direct and reflected chirp signals to define candidate reflection ellipses, which are then fed into a 2D accumulation filter to identify locations with the highest density of potential reflections. We demonstrate this work first with simulation results derived from an efficient, bespoke audio simulator, examining the effect of obstacle count, sampling rate, and path curvature on the ability to accurately identify environmental obstacles for a one-listener scenario. We then examine different cooperative motion strategies for two-listener configurations. Finally, we validate the real-world viability of this approach through field experiments in an outdoor park setting to demonstrate the ability to identify frequency gaps using off-the-shelf hardware. Our results provide a foundation for a low-cost approach to environmental mapping in swarm robotic systems.

Latent action models (LAMs) learn action-related representations from action-free videos via self-supervised future prediction, offering a scalable paradigm for embodied intelligence pretraining. However, existing LAMs collapse heterogeneous sources of visual change, including camera motion, object dynamics, and interaction events, into a single latent vector, resulting in entangled representations with limited semantic structure and consequently restricting world model controllability and VLA policy generalization. We introduce the Group-Disentangled Latent Action Model (GDLAM), a latent action model whose code is factorized by construction into N groups, each with an independent variational bottleneck and a spatially gated routing pathway, and trained with a set of information-geometric objectives: mutual exclusivity, group and gate sparsity, and static-dynamic orthogonality, that make the groups mutually causally distinct rather than merely decorrelated. Quantitatively, intervening on any single group changes only that group and leaves the others intact, and GDLAM improves label-free disentanglement metrics, including Modularity, MIG, and DCI, by wide margins over a strong unstructured LAM. Notably, this factorization is not at the expense of action information: across three mutual-information estimators and a linear probe, the grouped code is more informative than monolithic baselines both in- and out-of-distribution. As supporting evidence that the disentangled code is a reusable pretraining currency, we further transfer it to two downstream regimes: (1) World Modeling: World models pretrained with GDLAM achieve superior rollout fidelity and action-following capability compared with SOTA baselines. (2) VLA Policies: Pretraining with GDLAM substantially improves task success rates over previous methods across multiple simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic manipulation tasks

Crack detection is a crucial process to ensure the safety and longevity of buildings and other infrastructure. In this paper, we developed a low-cost, automated crack detection robot that leverages CNN, EfficientNet-B0, and YOLOv8 for efficient identification of cracks in concrete surfaces with a curated crack image dataset introduced to support training and evaluation. YOLOv8's real-time object detection enhances crack localization, while CNN and EfficientNet-B0 provide binary classification, ensuring high precision and recall. The system consists of two stages. In the first stage, YOLOv8 detects and localizes wall regions from the video frame, and the bounding boxes are cropped. The second stage performs crack detection using one of three models by analyzing the cropped regions. Cost-effective approaches are also taken for robot design. The robot features a fan-based negative pressure adhesion system, a 4-wheeled skid-steering drive, and an ESP32-CAM for real-time image capture. Its lightweight 3D-printed chassis ensures stability, allowing it to navigate both walls and ceilings while capturing images for crack analysis. Unlike conventional wall-climbing robot designs, this robot incorporates a funnel-shaped body that enhances negative pressure generation and achieves a 44% reduction in duty cycle, significantly lowering power consumption. By combining low-cost hardware with a deep learning pipeline, our system provides a scalable, efficient, and accessible solution for real-time infrastructure inspection at an approximate total cost of $25, with a lightweight web application enabling smartphone-based control. This affordability makes the system more suitable for the developing world, where infrastructure inspection is often limited by budget constraints, labor intensity, and safety risks.

Large language models and vision-language models are increasingly used as high-level planners in robotic systems, using task goals and sensor summaries to select navigation or manipulation actions. This creates a new backdoor surface: a compromised planner can behave normally in most runs, yet change its target selection when a hidden trigger is present. Prior attacks on LLM-powered or embodied agents mainly rely on triggers that appear in language, camera-visible objects, scene semantics, or specific sequences of past actions. This paper presents StepTrigger, a contact-state-triggered backdoor attack for VLM-powered legged robots. The trigger is not a prompt token or a visible marker. It is produced by pressure and foot-ground contact patterns that arise when a Unitree Go1 quadruped walks across a dense terrain patch. Unlike conventional visual or textual triggers, contact signals are inherently noisy and may also arise during benign locomotion. To avoid treating every pressure anomaly as a trigger, StepTrigger learns a selective backdoor policy from multimodal robot state, using incidental pressure events as benign examples and dense-patch contacts as poisoned examples. In a stratified offline evaluation, the trained planner achieved 98.75% clean behavior preservation, 92.50% false-trigger rejection, 76.25% true-trigger activation, and 89.17% overall parsed behavior accuracy. These results reveal a backdoor surface in proprioceptive and contact channels that is not captured by defenses focused only on language, vision, or action history.

Ubiquitous robotic systems often lack traditional visual interfaces, making natural language interaction important for maintenance and repair. This paper presents a goal-oriented agentic AI architecture that enables non-expert users to complete technical repair tasks through situated dialogue. The architecture separates pre-interaction goal decomposition, persistent state tracking, strategic goal management, and real-time conversational execution. We evaluated the system in a physical hardware repair task with twenty participants. Nineteen participants completed the task, corresponding to a 95% completion rate. Participants rated the system as helpful and competent, and the agent remained robust to conversational diversions such as meta-queries and code-switching. A comparison with a prior online baseline showed that physical interaction significantly reduced perceived social presence, (p=.0005), and trust and competence, (p=.037), while perceived helpfulness remained high.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into robotic control systems is enabling a new generation of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and planning. While this paradigm shift accelerates progress, it also introduces novel security risks that remain largely unexplored. Current research into LLM backdoors has focused on attacks triggered by external stimuli, such as specific words, visual objects, or environmental states. These attacks, while potent, overlook a more insidious class of vulnerability where the trigger is internal to the agent's own operational logic. This paper presents the first comprehensive study of history-based backdoor attacks on LLM-powered robotic systems. We demonstrate that an attacker can embed a stealthy backdoor into an LLM-based robot controller by manipulating its instructions. This backdoor is triggered not by an external cue, but by a specific, rare sequence of the robot's own past actions. It remains dormant during normal operation, preserving the robot's utility, but can be activated to induce a malicious behavior, such as a complete stop or a collision. Our experiments, conducted in a simulated environment with a variety of robots and LLMs, show that this history-based attack is highly effective, achieving a near-perfect attack success rate while remaining exceptionally difficult to detect. These findings reveal a critical and previously unaddressed vulnerability in autonomous systems and underscore the urgent need for security measures that account for an agent's internal state.

The manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) such as cables poses a significant challenge for automation due to their infinite degrees of freedom and non-linear dynamics. In this paper we present a machine learning based optimal control approach for the manipulation of DLOs. This approach is divided into two main components: modeling and control. For modeling the dynamics of the DLO, we propose a learning based approach using a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (biLSTM) network. The biLSTM network is trained on synthetic data generated by the MuJoCo physics engine. For manipulating the DLO, a model predictive control strategy that employs Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is selected. The proposed approach is evaluated through simulation and experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving accurate and efficient manipulation of DLOs.

High-fidelity tactile feedback is essential for robotic teleoperation, enabling precise manipulation and critical decision-making. While biomimetic fingertip sensors can capture surface-texture features, how their design shapes the tactile transparency of rendered feedback remains poorly understood. This paper presents a biomimetic fingertip replicating the human finger's multilayer mechanical gradient and fingerprint morphology, with an embedded high-sensitivity inertial measurement unit capturing texture-induced vibrations for remote vibrotactile rendering. Three variants are compared with the human fingertip through temporal and spectral analyses and a user study spanning three perceptual dimensions, establishing a transmission chain from fingertip design through signal characteristics to tactile transparency. The multilayer mechanical gradient yields the clearest improvements in signal intensity and texture-feature representation, whereas a stiffer skin layer amplifies vibration intensity at the expense of feature representation. The perceptual dimensions draw on distinct signal attributes: roughness on energy scaling, granularity on spectral shape, and repetitivity on characteristic-peak representation. These findings offer design principles for application-specific fingertips in robotic teleoperation.

Free-floating space manipulator systems face operational challenges due to dynamic coupling. While traditional reactionless manipulation eliminates base disturbances, enforcing the null-space projections across all rotational axes imposes excessive constraints on the system and drastically reduces the available workspace. To address this limitation, this work proposes a multi-axis selective decoupling framework that nullifies momentum transfer exclusively along mission-critical directions. By leveraging a directionally constrained sub-coupling matrix, the framework relaxes the null-space constraints. Numerical simulations confirm that this approach mathematically eliminates constrained directional disturbances along the targeted axes while preserving the remaining degrees of freedom, enabling the manipulator to execute task-space operations successfully.

Physical-condition diversity is largely missing from current benchmarks for robot manipulation. While large-scale simulation benchmarks increasingly incorporate variations in object appearance, scene layout, and visual observations, they typically keep the underlying physical parameters fixed. As a result, important sources of real-world variability, such as changes in mass, friction, and joint dynamics, remain largely untested. We introduce RoboTwin-Phys, a physics-diverse benchmark that treats physical-condition diversity as an explicit dimension of robot manipulation evaluation. The benchmark continuously varies 13 physical attributes within physically plausible ranges, providing a unified setting for evaluating policies across diverse physical operating conditions. We further release more than 5,000 expert demonstrations with ground-truth physical parameters, enabling physical-attribute estimation, condition-aware modeling, and physics-conditioned policy training. Evaluations of representative WAMs and VLAs reveal a substantial robustness gap: models that remain effective under existing visual and layout randomization can degrade markedly under changes in physical conditions. RoboTwin-Phys provides the benchmark, data, and evaluation protocol needed to systematically measure and improve robustness to physical-condition diversity in robot manipulation.

Tendon-driven continuum manipulators are widely used in medical applications, where accurate tip-position estimation is essential for precise navigation and instrument positioning. However, patient anatomy and procedural setup impose task-dependent unknown shaft configurations, while friction, slack, and compliance introduce hysteresis, making tip estimation challenging. This paper presents a motor-history-conditioned gated recurrent unit (GRU) residual estimator for three-dimensional catheter tip estimation without direct shaft-configuration sensing. First, an initial multidirectional sweep strategy is applied to calibrate a geometric catheter model backbone, and encode the motor-angle and drive-torque response into a shaft-configuration context vector. During subsequent motion, the context conditions a GRU that predicts a task-space residual correcting this backbone, relying on motor measurements alone. The context remains fixed for the current shaft configuration, while the recurrent state captures the evolving actuation history. Across four disposable intra-cardiac echocardiography catheters and 16 bent shaft configurations, the method achieves 3.3mm open-loop tip RMSE, a 59% reduction relative to the constant-curvature baseline.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models are promising for general-purpose manipulation, but long-horizon execution remains fragile. Small state-estimation or control errors can lead to irreversible failures (e.g., collisions and object drops). Avoiding these risks requires a proactive safety mechanism capable of anticipating hazards. In this paper, we introduce SafeLoop, a non-invasive external wrapper that adds hazard prediction and rollback-based recovery to a VLA model without changing its parameters. SafeLoop trains a risk predictor from vision and proprioception to output four values: the probability and time-to-hazard for body collisions and for object failures. A lightweight controller then chooses one of three actions based on the predicted risk: continue execution (noop), save a safety checkpoint (record), or retreat in joint space (rollback). Rollback moves the robot back to a recent safe waypoint and queries the base policy again, which may yield an alternative continuation. Across 24 LIBERO tasks (16 random seeds each) and three real-robot tasks (25 rollouts each), SafeLoop achieves a stronger overall safety-success trade-off than alternative methods, reducing hazard cases by roughly 70% while preserving task success and the base-policy control rate. Project code is available at https://github.com/Loule0-0/SafeLoop/tree/release/safeloop.

Embodied world models predict the outcomes of robot actions to support learning and planning. For robots equipped with head and wrist cameras, this requires complementary views: the head view captures the overall task, while wrist views reveal local gripper-object interactions. However, evaluating these views independently cannot determine whether they describe the same action and object state. We introduce TRIWORLDBENCH, a benchmark for evaluating embodied world models through synchronized head, left-wrist, and right-wrist videos. It contains 500 episodes across 50 bimanual manipulation tasks and uses 19 metrics to assess tri-view consistency, task alignment, physical and 3D coherence, motion quality, temporal consistency, and visual quality. By combining cross-view checks with measurements tailored to each camera, the benchmark evaluates whether plausible individual videos also form a consistent prediction of the intended task. We summarize overall performance with TWB-Score and retain per-view results to identify where predictions fail. This extends world-model evaluation beyond single-view visual quality. Code, data, and metric definitions are available at https://github.com/TriWorldBench/TriWorldBench.

Orchard robots need maps that preserve small but semantically important structures such as trunks, trellises, and fruit. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM achieves high photometric fidelity. However, its optimization remains appearance-driven, and transferring image semantics to 3D points is unreliable for thin structures, whose pixels may receive depth from background surfaces. We present ArborSplat, an online semantic 3DGS SLAM system that tracks with LiDAR odometry and optimizes semantics directly on the Gaussian map, constrained by class-specific height bands above a ground plane fitted to each keyframe's stereo point cloud, and fuses multi-view evidence into a semantic point cloud online while rejecting labels inconsistent with the local ground surface or with monocular depth. Class-constrained refinement reserves Gaussian capacity for underrepresented structures and, under reduced budgets, increases training-view accuracy on tree classes. We evaluate the approach on apple and pear orchards during dormancy, flowering, and harvesting. On full routes, it keeps ATE below 0.5 m on all 12 traversals. On shared 301-frame segments, it exceeds SGS-SLAM and GS3LAM by 0.23 to 0.50 training-view and 0.15 to 0.36 held-out mIoU while running 1.7 to 7.5 times faster, whereas SemGauss-SLAM runs out of GPU memory on all six.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires an agent to explore a previously unseen environment, gather relevant information, and answer questions about the scene. Recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) together with semantic maps or scene graphs to guide exploration. However, exploration is typically driven only by local observations, while structural priors about the environment remain largely unused. We propose HFLEX-EQA, a hierarchical EQA framework that combines online scene graph construction, VLM- based planning, semantic frontier exploration, and floorplan priors. The system incrementally builds a hierarchical scene graph and an open-vocabulary occupancy map from RGB-D observations, enabling a VLM to jointly reason over the scene graph, task-relevant visual observations, exploration history, and an estimated topological floorplan. Furthermore, we introduce a room-discovery strategy that leverages the floorplan and open-vocabulary frontier semantics to guide exploration toward semantically relevant yet currently unobserved room types. We evaluate HFLEX-EQA on the OpenEQA and ExploreEQA benchmarks and demonstrate deployment on a quadruped robot in real indoor environments. Our results demonstrate the benefit of combining VLM-based hierarchical planning with structural floorplan priors for the EQA task.

Successful mobile manipulation requires coordinated base and arm motion while maintaining accurate spatial positioning. However, demonstration-trained policies can struggle to realise the intended base motion reliably, leading to spatial misalignment and subsequent manipulation failures. We present MAVP (Map-Aware Visuomotor Policies), a framework that improves execution reliability by predicting explicit base-pose targets and tracking them using localisation feedback. MAVP reconstructs a static map from teleoperated demonstrations and expresses demonstrated base trajectories in a shared map frame, providing consistent spatial supervision across demonstrations. At execution time, the policy receives RGB observations, joint states, and the robot's current map-frame base pose, and jointly predicts target base poses, arm actions, and gripper actions. A low-level controller tracks the predicted base targets using feedforward motion and pose error feedback, enabling correction of execution deviations. We additionally use pose-noise augmentation during training to improve robustness to errors in the policy's pose input. Across six real-world manipulation tasks and three policy families, MAVP achieves higher task success rates than unanchored velocity control in all tasks. Videos and additional results are available at https://123qwedsa123.github.io/mavp/.

Map-based vision-language navigation (VLN) relies on persistent spatial representations to connect language understanding with geometric planning. However, acquiring semantics beyond the needs of the current instruction can introduce unnecessary perception cost and irrelevant annotations. Continuously accumulating unrelated objects may not only waste computation, but also clutter the visual-spatial representation consumed by the vision-language model (VLM) planner. To address this problem, we present SparseNav, a training-free framework that follows a less-is-more principle for semantic navigation. SparseNav persistently maintains a lightweight geometric bird's-eye-view (BEV) map and sparse landmark memory, acquiring new semantics on demand using the active sub-instruction to decide what is worth grounding. An instruction manager first tracks navigation progress and identifies the active landmark query. An instruction-conditioned perception mechanism then invokes open-vocabulary segmentation when the queried landmark is visible and its metric location can inform the next decision. The resulting landmark memory supports VLM selection among hybrid frontier and local directional waypoint candidates. Without any additional training, SparseNav achieves success rates of 42.8% on R2R-CE and 40.7% on RxR-CE, both on the Val-Unseen splits. Controlled ablations examine semantic perception strategies and the contributions of individual framework components. Furthermore, we successfully deployed SparseNav on a Unitree Go2 quadruped equipped with an Intel RealSense D455 RGB-D camera for geometric mapping and landmark grounding and a Livox MID-360 LiDAR for localization, without a prebuilt map. We validated its effectiveness across multiple indoor environments using instruction-conditioned waypoint navigation.

Text-to-motion models generate plausible human motion but do not model a robot's dynamics; whole-body tracking controllers execute robot references reliably but cannot replan an infeasible one. Recent language-to-humanoid systems bridge this gap by training. We measure how much of the gap closes with no training at all, by putting the deployment controller itself in the loop. Sample-simulate-select (S$^3$) draws $N$ motions per prompt from a frozen text-to-motion model, retargets each to a Unitree G1 by direction-matching inverse kinematics, rolls all of them out under full rigid-body dynamics with the pretrained SONIC tracking policy, and keeps the candidate the policy executed best. Because the verifier is the deterministic simulator itself, S$^3$ attains the any-of-$N$ ceiling by construction; what we measure is where that ceiling lies and what falls short of it. On 200 stratified HumanML3D test prompts with $N=8$, upright execution rises from 83.5% to 89.5% and hardware-gate passes from 33 to 85; on the complete test split (4,184 prompts) it rises from 80.5% to 89.5%. A kinematic verifier that predicts falls well (AUROC 0.90) recovers only a quarter of this gain: ranking a prompt's own candidates is harder than classifying the population. What selection cannot fix is one class, prompts that lower the pelvis, which a generator trained on retargeted robot data does execute. We further score the semantic fidelity of the executed motion with the standard text-motion evaluator, with a real-mocap control that attributes the loss to the robot projection, ablate the retargeter against GMR (complementary failures: the any-of-8 ceiling rises to 95.0% over both), and execute all 177 gate-selected clips on the real G1: every one completes standing, with hardware tracking error matching simulation ($r=0.94$).

This paper introduces Dr-LiSA, a first-of-its-kind direct method for localizing 2D spinning radar intensity measurements in $SE(3)$ against 3D lidar maps. Radar-lidar localization combines the complementary strengths of the two sensing modalities: radar is robust to adverse weather and precipitation, while lidar provides high-fidelity 3D maps in favourable conditions. However, existing radar-lidar localization methods are restricted to planar $SE(2)$ localization and have generally fallen short of the accuracy achieved by lidar-lidar and even radar-radar systems. A key challenge is the substantial sensing-modality gap between radar and lidar, which observe and represent scene structure in fundamentally different ways. Dr-LiSA bridges this gap using a learned forward model that predicts radar measurements from a lidar submap at a candidate pose, enabling direct photometric alignment of predicted and observed radar scans in $SE(3)$. Dr-LiSA outperforms prior radar-lidar approaches in $SE(2)$ while achieving planar accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art radar-radar localization across more than 90 km of on-road data.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide broad manipulation competence, but often struggle during the precision-critical stages that dominate contact-rich industrial tasks such as connector insertion and cable management. A common remedy is to refine a pretrained VLA with reinforcement learning (RL), enabling task-specific improvement beyond behavior cloning. However, how to preserve its generalist behavior while deciding when RL refinement is needed and which specialized policy should act remains an open question. In this work, we present RouteRLT, a routing framework that learns when and which RL specialist, an RL policy trained for a single precision-critical phase, should take control from a generalist VLA. A phase selector identifies the active controller, a stabilizer suppresses transient switches, and an action-boundary manager handles transitions between chunked policy outputs. We evaluate RouteRLT on multi-object pick-and-place tasks in LIBERO, as well as on a real-world cable pickup and port-insertion task with multiple precision-critical stages. In simulation, the learned routing improves over the base VLA and matches routing with privileged phase boundaries, without accessing those boundaries at deployment. The real-robot evaluation validates automatic routing to both the pickup and insertion specialists under an operator-aligned handoff protocol. Altogether, these results show that learned routing applies RL specialist control where precise adaptation is most valuable while preserving generalist VLA behavior, including recovery from failed execution attempts.

This study introduces an interdisciplinary framework for benchmarking robots deployed in public environments, addressing the gap between traditional laboratory metrics and real-world benchmarking requirements. We evaluate three distinct robots across diverse use cases - outdoor park cleaning, pedestrian underpass cleaning, and interactive library assistance - each representing unique challenges in public daily life. Over a three-year benchmarking process (2023-2025) comprising seven benchmarking events, a consensus workshop and six on-site evaluations (two per use case), we utilized realistic indoor and outdoor test environments to assess not only technical performance but also the broader implications of deploying robots in unstructured, human-centric settings. An expert panel, spanning robotics, human-robot interaction, safety, and economics, systematically developed and refined an evaluation concept to analyze the transition from laboratory prototypes to operational systems. Our findings highlight critical factors for successful deployment, including task fulfillment, interaction quality, safety, and economic feasibility. This work provides actionable insights for researchers and practitioners aiming to bridge the gap between robotic innovation and real-world applicability.

Today, progress in open-weight language models enables systems capable of writing, executing and debugging code while still running on a single workstation. Most language-driven robots give the model a fixed action interface or a trained policy. Generalizing to a new task therefore means more engineering effort or more data collection, both time-consuming. We investigate whether a local open-weight vision-language model can control a robot and one-shot generalize to new variations of a task without new human programming or training. We let a local open-weight VLM, Qwen3.8-27B, drive a UR3e robotic arm from a coding-agent harness. It writes and runs its own code above a service that implements kinematics, safety limits and classic computer vision techniques. We investigate if this system is capable of generalizing to unseen tasks. Specifically, we test it on nine tasks built from children's toys designed to probe generalization capability across various object characteristics: color, size, shape, and task variation of those. With five trials for each task, we observe generalization in 30 out of 45 trials with durations ranging from 3.4 to 67.5 minutes depending on task complexity. We further test if there is a speedup when an agent is asked to redo the task after successful completion. This resulted in a 50% reduction in duration, indicating that there is self-improvement over time. Finally, we expose the limitations of a local coding agent. We believe that solving those limitations combined with further investigation of self-improvement over time points at a direct path toward real-world deployment of a local coding agent.

Humanoid robots require diverse embodied experiences to acquire complex loco-manipulation and collaborative skills. However, existing humanoid data pipelines primarily focus on individual agents, while physical multi-robot collaboration remains difficult to scale due to costly hardware, dedicated spaces, and repeated resets. In this work, we introduce MATE, a Multi-Agent virtual TEleoperation platform for humanoid collaboration data collection that enables multiple geographically distributed operators to simultaneously control whole-body humanoids in a shared physics-based environment. MATE removes the need for multiple physical robots and co-located operation while preserving physically coupled interactions among humanoids, objects, and environments. Using MATE, we construct a multi-humanoid collaboration dataset comprising 24.1 hours of coordinated behavior across 2,500 joint episodes and five long-horizon tasks, including object handover, relay delivery, environment interaction, and cooperative transport. To improve learning from these interaction-rich demonstrations, we introduce EAIS, an Execution-Aligned Interaction Sampling strategy that computes sampling signals within an execution-aligned prefix and prioritizes task-progressing and interaction-critical behaviors. We evaluate MATE with representative imitation learning and vision-language-action policies across diverse collaboration tasks. Experiments demonstrate efficient data collection, effective policy learning, and zero-shot transfer from virtual demonstrations to a physical humanoid without real-world fine-tuning. Project page: https://yerik-yu.github.io/MATE/

Passive-wheeled terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles (TABVs) combine aerial mobility with energy-efficient ground locomotion. However, reliable air-ground mode switching under limited onboard perception and robust ground trajectory tracking across diverse terrains remain challenging when targeting real-world applications. In this work, we propose a learning-based air-ground motion control framework for passive-wheeled TABVs: 1) a learned mode selector for autonomous air-ground motion mode switching. The selector uses historical single-point time-of-flight (ToF) measurements and robot states together with future reference information to determine the active locomotion mode. 2) a reinforcement learning control policy for trajectory tracking. The policy combines proprioceptive observations with future reference information to anticipate trajectory changes. For ground locomotion, multi-terrain training and dynamics randomization enable robust tracking across different terrains. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate reliable air-ground switching under limited perception and accurate ground tracking across diverse terrain conditions. The learned selector outperforms a rule-based mode selector in challenging transitions, while the ground controller achieves lower position RMSE than PID across all tested conditions and maintains decent tracking where NMPC fails. With these capabilities integrated, the system tracks a 101m air-ground trajectory through multiple autonomous mode transitions with a position RMSE of 0.08m.

Robots that store past experiences must select which one to reuse in a new scene. Most systems select by visual similarity, and most evaluations report only the success of the selected experience. That number does not show whether the selection was good: a rule can score well by repeatedly using one broadly transferable experience, or poorly because its preferred experience is weak. Since robots increasingly adapt by reuse rather than retraining, a score that describes the library rather than the rule misleads what the field builds next. We contribute an audit methodology: execute every stored experience in every query scene, over two manipulation tasks, three reuse mechanisms, and libraries of $K=3$, $10$, and $50$. Because every alternative's outcome is known, a score can be traced to per-scene selection or to library quality. The audited rules select by nearest-neighbor distance in five visual embeddings, from raw pixels to CLIP. (1) One fixed experience, chosen with hindsight, captures 30-58% of the gap between random selection and an oracle; per-scene selection competes for the remaining 0.07-0.15 in success rate. (2) At $K\ge10$, visual rules concentrate on one experience 1.5-3 times more than the oracle does, and their scores then follow that experience's quality. (3) Wherever a rule differs significantly from a shuffle that keeps its selection rates but pairs them with scenes at random, the rule is worse, for every learned image policy. (4) Visual distance predicts well whether a given pair will succeed (AUROC up to 0.96), yet ranks the candidates within one scene no better than chance for four of five embeddings at $K=50$ (AUROC 0.45-0.52). Exhaustive execution is usually infeasible, so the audit reduces to two cheap reports any study can give: the distribution of selected experiences, and the success of the best single experience in hindsight.

The repeated forward-reverse maneuvers performed by wheel loaders during earthmoving operations make them well suited for automation. However, the nonlinear dynamics of articulated vehicles and complex vehicle-terrain interactions limit the effectiveness of conventional model-based approaches. This paper presents a hierarchical framework that combines long-horizon geometric planning with data-driven predictive control for autonomous wheel-loader operation. A reduced-order articulated kinematic model is used to generate the maneuver geometry, where the forward and reverse trajectories are jointly optimized through a shared intermediate state. To capture the vehicle dynamics, two data-driven deep bilinear Koopman models are learned for the forward and reverse motions using data generated from high-fidelity simulations in Algoryx Dynamics. The learned Koopman representations are subsequently incorporated into a computationally efficient model predictive control (MPC) formulation for trajectory tracking. The resulting controller operates in real time within a 50-ms execution loop. High-fidelity simulation results demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end framework enables accurate and computationally efficient execution of wheel-loader V-cycle maneuvers, providing a promising approach toward autonomous operation of articulated heavy-duty machinery.

End-to-end (E2E) driving policies have progressed rapidly on open-loop (OL) benchmarks, yet OL evaluation cannot reveal whether a policy withstands compounding errors, recovers from failures, or interacts safely with surrounding actors. We introduce NavSafe-$\infty$, a photorealistic closed-loop (CL) benchmark of 280 scenarios spanning 28 event types, each with success and failure criteria defined within a structured traffic-safety taxonomy, which yields category-level capability scores for Traffic Crashes, Vulnerable Road User Crashes, Traffic Violations, and Traffic Incidents. Evaluating 20 E2E policies, we find that OL gains do not reliably transfer to CL safety. Analyzing two common remedies further shows that passive demonstration perturbation helps mainly when CL rollouts stay near its perturbed training states, and that OL reinforcement-learning fine-tuning exhibits reward hacking by trading safety margin for ego progress, which CL feedback amplifies into compounding safety-critical errors. Together, these results demonstrate the blind spot of OL benchmarks indicating CL safety success. The benchmark and an extensible toolbox for customizable event curation and policy diagnosis will be open-sourced and maintained to facilitate future research.

Training vision-language-action (VLA) models for high-precision manipulation typically requires task-specific, high-quality data (e.g., teleoperation), which is slow and expensive to collect. To reduce this burden without compromising manipulation precision, we propose $\varepsilon$4P (Imperfection for Precision), a simple yet effective method that "upcycles" two otherwise discarded data sources: (1) low-precision data from the target task and (2) high-precision data from mismatched tasks. Rather than naively mixing these imperfect data sources throughout co-training, $\varepsilon$4P controls where each source contributes along the flow-matching trajectory. Specifically, low-precision, target-task data is used at high noise to preserve high-level task context and high-precision, task-mismatched data is used at low noise to transfer low-level action precision. Through real-robot experiments on both sub-millimeter, high-precision tasks and coarse-grained tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed method (1) effectively leverages additional imperfect data to improve policy performance by up to 31.7 percentage points, and (2) can replace an equal amount of task-specific, high-quality data with an average performance drop of only 4.2 percentage points. Overall, $\varepsilon$4P points toward a scalable paradigm for high-precision manipulation, in which heterogeneous, imperfect data can be systematically repurposed to reduce reliance on costly task-specific, high-quality data. More details are available at https://varepsilon4p.github.io/.

Spatial flow measurements support underwater navigation, but distributed sensing is constrained by robot size and sensor layout. We use a causal observer to estimate current lateral velocities from a finite history of measurements collected by a single sensing unit, supplying the inputs of a fixed navigation controller. In two-dimensional wake simulations with access to body-frame ambient velocity, this virtual sensing interface reduces simultaneous flow sampling from three points to the robot center. Trained only in a circular-cylinder wake at Re = 100, the flow-history observer achieves 84.4% and 80.6% success at held-out Re = 205 and 240 without retraining. These rates are 7.4 and 4.6 percentage points below direct spatial sensing and more than 30 points above a matched current-only observer. Past flow remains beneficial when past goal and yaw information is available. Across obstacle geometries, performance remains close to direct sensing in square-prism wakes but declines in triangular-prism wakes. Component replacement identifies the lateral velocity difference as control-relevant, while controlled perturbations reveal sensitivity to error persistence. The results demonstrate the closed-loop utility of single-point flow histories under the assumed observation model.

Thermal Visual Place Recognition (Thermal VPR) maps camera observations to metric poses within a mapped environment, serving as a prerequisite for autonomous navigation. However, thermal VPR suffers from severe environmental dependence, heavy online retraining overheads, and an inability to model dynamic non-linear shifts, causing existing frameworks to fail during online deployment. To achieve robust domain-invariant place recognition, we bridge Analytic Class-Incremental Learning (ACIL) with domain-invariant VPR for the first time, revealing that its gradient-free matrix updates construct a surprisingly strong baseline that outperforms conventional fine-tuning. Nevertheless, standard ACIL exhibits a critical vulnerability to extreme non-linear thermal fluctuations due to its structural linear assumptions. To overcome this limitation, we exploit a novel algebraic equivalence between ACIL and modern control theory, proposing a framework which embeds Unscented propagation (U-ACIL), Gaussian Mixture partitioning (GMM-ACIL), and minimax $H_\infty$ optimization ($H_\infty$-ACIL) directly into the update loop. Our formulation guarantees exact closed-form matrix updates within $\mathcal{O}(1)$ computational complexity, bypassing backpropagation to ensure that the online update latency ($\Delta t_{\mathrm{learn}}$) remains strictly bounded below the sensor acquisition interval ($\Delta t_{\mathrm{acquire}}$), thereby eliminating trajectory jumps in real-time SLAM pipelines.

Faithfully evaluating end-to-end driving policies in simulation requires observations that are not merely photo-realistic, but preserve the scene features a policy relies on to make decisions. Existing platforms, however, exhibit a sim-to-real visual gap that corrupts policy perception, undermining their ability to assess a policy's closed-loop decision-making. To this end, we propose DreamStream, a generative, closed-loop simulator that achieves policy-oriented fidelity using a simulator-grounded autoregressive video model. Our video model is distilled from a large pretrained video model via traffic layout guidance, varying visual appearance while preserving policy-relevant features such as scenario layout and the temporal consistency of dynamic objects. We further observe that perceptual metrics like FID misrank how well these features are preserved. To tackle this, we introduce FD$\pi$, a new multi-representation metric that measures the sim-to-real gap as the Fr\'echet distance over scene-context features from public E2E policies. Under FD$\pi$, DreamStream improves over the strongest prior closed-loop simulator by $1.6\times$ on nuScenes and $4.7\times$ on NAVSIM, and induces the least perturbation to policy's perceptual observability. Based on DreamStream, we construct Navhard-CL benchmark, which turns non-reactive real-world benchmark NAVSIM into interactive testing environments with adversarial driving behaviors and weather variations. This benchmark exposes many failure modes of driving policies, such as scorer bias and lack of recovery behaviors, that prior closed-loop benchmarks overlook. Code and data are available at https://github.com/VAIL-UCLA/DreamStream.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) can reconstruct a captured scene photorealistically, but the resulting representation does not by itself support physical interaction. Robot simulation instead requires object-level change, \textit{i.e.}, objects must move independently, make contact, and reveal previously occluded surroundings. This gap arises because object appearance may remain entangled with the background, while hidden object geometry and occluded background content may be unobserved. To address this challenge, we present \phi-RIE, a Gaussian-native pipeline that converts selected objects into movable simulator assets while preserving the remaining reconstruction. Our key observation is that asset construction and source removal should be coupled, \textit{i.e.}, one object identity should define the movable asset and the scene content to remove and complete. Accordingly, Scene Observation supplies shared evidence to Coupled Scene Construction, which creates registered assets and completed background Gaussians for simulator-driven rendering in an Interactive Environment. This coupling preserves unedited Gaussians while aligning visual and physical state. On 50 ScanNet++ scenes, evidence-based selection and registration retry increase matched F1 at 20\,mm from 0.336 to 0.383 at fixed retention. Further tests demonstrate asset executability, manipulation gains over a single-generator baseline, and the visual cost of conversion. Together, these results demonstrate that \name\ enables interactive scene conversion.

Deepfakes, synthetic audiovisual content produced by deep generative models, have escalated into a critical threat across civilian and military domains, enabling identity fraud, disinformation campaigns, and evidence fabrication. In high-stakes environments, ranging from journalism and finance to healthcare and legal contexts, the consequences extend to severe misinformation, market manipulation, identity fraud, and the erosion of institutional trust. This entry explores how modern visual intelligence and computer vision techniques are used to detect deepfakes. It outlines key deepfake generation models, such as GANs, autoencoders, neural rendering, and diffusion systems, while also explaining how adversarial methods enhance realism and challenge existing detectors. The overview highlights visual artifacts, digital patterns, and physiological cues commonly leveraged in detection and reviews major CNN, transformer, and frequency-based approaches. It also summarizes evaluation practices and the difficulty of achieving strong generalization. Finally, it identifies emerging directions, including modern intelligence techniques for civilian and military content verification. This survey covers generation architectures (GANs, latent diffusion, neural rendering, video synthesis), the spatial, temporal, frequency-domain, and physiological artifacts they produce, and the detector families that exploit them. We examine evaluation benchmarks and protocols, highlighting cross-generator generalization as the field's central open challenge. Beyond detection, we discuss cryptographic provenance standards, watermarking, and regulatory frameworks (EU AI Act, DSA, GDPR). We conclude that effective deepfake governance requires defense-in-depth integrating forensic detection, verifiable provenance, and institutional accountability.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become an effective approach for learning visual representations without manual annotations. Among SSL approaches, contrastive learning has been widely used for visual representation learning. However, existing contrastive SSL methods have focused primarily on image-level or pixel-level representation learning, while region-level representation learning remains less explored. We propose SPARC, a region-level contrastive learning framework that leverages superpixels to establish explicit correspondence between augmented image views. SPARC introduces a region contrastive branch that performs superpixel-based feature pooling and optimizes a region-level contrastive objective jointly with a global image-level objective. Under identical settings, SPARC consistently outperforms previous methods such as MoCo-v2 and DenseCL, achieving improvements of up to +9.79 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +4.88 AP for object detection. Ablation studies further demonstrate that region-level objectives produce the strongest performance. Thus, region-level contrastive learning is an effective approach for improving self-supervised visual pretraining for dense prediction tasks. Code repository can be accessed at https://github.com/xRIPEIx/SPARC.

Visual data is increasingly consumed by machine-vision systems rather than by human observers. Image Coding for Machines (ICM) compresses images assuming the main observer is a computer vision application and that the human observer needs to inspect or validate the decisions. Inspired by just-noticeable distortion, which sets the quality to the just-acceptable level for human observers, we aim to cap the human-observed quality at a desired level, with the goal of using the remaining coding capacity to improve the machine performance. We recast joint compression-segmentation training as a constrained optimization problem in which the codec must meet a predefined acceptable target visual quality while a task term consumes the remaining coding capacity. We solve this by designing a penalty function to guide the quality to the desired target. We propose two penalty functions, an absolute function and a bilinear function, the latter applying a steeper slope once the target visual quality is exceeded. Experimental results show that, under the quality constraint, the proposed method achieves a BD-rate of $-22.82\%$ over an unconstrained joint rate--distortion--task optimization and $-29.81\%$ over a simple rate--distortion baseline, showcasing bitrate reduction with the same task performance. This is achieved while the codec also meets the target visual quality with a reasonable error and without adding any complexity overhead.

Interaction understanding in 3D scenes requires a joint description of movable parts, their motion, and the regions through which they can be operated. We present Segment-Snap, which connects these outputs through the physical relationship between parts and handles. Learned predictors identify broad part surfaces and small handles. A geometric decoder uses planar and upright priors to constrain motion, then selects hinge lines using predicted handle locations, without training a motion regressor. Conversely, a joint part-and-handle predictor supplies additional handle candidates, whose motion classes are refined using containing parts. Each information transfer is applied once, without iterative feedback. On Articulate3D validation, handle guidance raises motion-gated AP from 13.74% to 40.98% at fixed masks and axes. Additional handle candidates raise handle AP from 24.63% to 29.65%; part-based class correction adds 0.98 points, and full context reaches 30.99%. Repeated training, learned-decoder controls and paired visualizations establish the benefits and limitations of combining geometric and semantic evidence for interaction understanding.

Degradations vary widely across images, so a practical restoration system has to handle many degradation types with one model. A recent and effective recipe adapts a large pretrained image-editing model to restoration using a small low-rank adapter with a text prompt. We replace that prompt with an instruction derived from the degraded image itself. The image reaches the editor through two paths: its structure comes from the model's VAE, and its semantic instruction comes from a lightweight token mapper that shifts the degraded image's vision-language embedding toward the embedding a clean image would produce. Because the instruction is a continuous vector, scaling it yields a family of valid restorations for tasks whose target is not unique, such as low-light enhancement. We adapt one Qwen-Image-Edit model to six tasks with a single adapter trained in about three hours on one GPU. The image instruction outperforms text conditioning under a matched comparison, and it supports task agnostic restoration without a degradation label, which the text variant does not.

Generating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) code from natural-language instructions is an open-ended task without absolute visual ground truth, leaving both evaluation and policy optimization without a faithful signal. Scalar metrics (CLIP, Aesthetic) calibrated on natural images transfer poorly to stylized vector content, and reusing them as RL rewards triggers reward hacking. We address both limitations with rubric-based scoring. We first establish empirically that prompting a vision-language judge with a multi-axis rubric correlates with human judgments far better than scalar metrics, both across samples and within instructions. Building on this finding, we introduce RULER (Instance-aware Rubric Rewards for Reinforcement Learning), which converts each instruction into an instance-aware rubric of six items spanning semantic, visual, and stylistic axes; a judge VLM scores rendered rollouts item-by-item, and the weighted satisfactions form a fine-grained reward optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization. Because the rubric is derived from text alone, RULER requires neither paired SVG ground truth nor human preference labels. On MMSVG-Illustration and MMSVG-Icon, RULER lifts the rubric score from 0.432/0.395 to 0.693/0.683, surpassing dedicated SVG specialists and matching the substantially larger DeepSeek-V3, with ablations identifying rubric design as the active lever for RL on open-ended SVG generation. The project page is available at https://hangyuran.github.io/RULER/.

Ultra low-field MRI expands global access to neuroimaging but produces scans with low signal-to-noise ratio, reduced contrast, and thick slices. While regression-based super-resolution can recover anatomical detail for segmentation, it returns a single deterministic estimate that gives no indication of regions where the low-field input leaves anatomy underdetermined. Generative diffusion models offer an alternative by sampling the posterior distribution of plausible high-field images, quantifying this anatomical ambiguity. However, applying them to 3D whole-brain MRI is restricted by memory bottlenecks, slow sampling, and scanner domain shifts. We propose a 3D residual wavelet diffusion model that combines three ideas to overcome these hurdles. A lossless wavelet reparameterisation shrinks the spatial grid to fit a whole brain on a single GPU, residual shifting accelerates sampling by starting from the low-field input, and domain randomisation promotes scanner generalisation without paired training data. As the high-field reference is not a voxel-aligned ground truth, we evaluate downstream volumetric agreement. On a healthy cohort (n=19) imaged at 0.064T and 3T, our method matches a leading general-purpose regression approach in volumetric accuracy while additionally generating per-voxel uncertainty maps highlighting underdetermined regions. Furthermore, on a pilot dataset (n=11) of participants with cognitive impairment, disease-relevant atrophy is preserved rather than normalised towards a healthy prior. Our framework brings whole-brain posterior sampling to low-field super-resolution without sacrificing volumetric accuracy.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is an im- portant component of visual sensing systems operating under degraded illumination, including nighttime surveillance, au- tonomous navigation, remote sensing, and inspection in poorly lit industrial environments. Most LLIE methods rely on output- level reconstruction losses that supervise only the final restored image, leaving the intermediate feature recovery process weakly constrained. This paper proposes MirrorDistill, an illumination- aware latent distillation framework that links the low-light and clean domains through feature mirroring. During training, a shared encoder and an exponential-moving-average teacher decoder process the clean reference image to generate clean- domain latent targets. These targets supervise the low-light student at two levels: raw encoder features and standardized multi-scale decoder projections. The alignment is applied layer by layer, while a proposed illumination-aware weighting scheme gives greater emphasis to underexposed regions. The teacher and reference branches are used only during training, so inference requires only the lightweight student encoder-decoder and in- troduces no teacher-side computational cost. Under evaluation on the standard LOL benchmarks, MirrorDistill outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the real-captured LOL-v2-Real set, while having the lowest compute complexity (GMACs) and while remaining competitive on the LOL-v1 and LOL-v2-Synthetic datasets. Ablation studies further show the contributions of the encoder mirror, decoder mirror, and illumination-aware weighting. Finally, we release our code as open-source for the benefit of future research.

Footwear outsole impressions are a common form of forensic pattern evidence, yet quantitative methods for estimating wearer attributes from these images remain relatively underdeveloped. We investigate binary sex estimation from footwear outsole impressions by comparing convolutional neural network (CNN) transfer learning with traditional feature-based classification. Using a publicly available outsole-impression dataset, we adopt a shoe-level training and test partition that keeps replicate scans of the same physical shoe together to reduce data leakage. We evaluate pretrained CNNs through end-to-end fine-tuning, frozen feature extraction followed by support vector machine classification, and hybrid feature fusion incorporating handcrafted, geometric, and metadata-derived descriptors. Fine-tuned CNNs achieve the strongest overall predictive performance and substantially outperform traditional classifiers trained on the manually specified descriptors alone, while frozen-feature approaches offer a less computationally demanding alternative. Exploratory analysis of low-dimensional CNN representations reveals associations with frequency threshold ratio, image contrast, and wavelet-based summaries, providing a connection between learned representations and measurable properties of outsole impressions. These findings suggest that CNN transfer learning captures discriminative information beyond the descriptors considered and offers a promising approach to footwear-based forensic screening. Further validation on independently collected and casework-like impressions is needed before operational use.

In this paper, we introduce the Directional Total Variation-Regularized Implicit Neural Representation (DTV-INR), an advanced variational paradigm that synergistically integrates coordinate-driven implicit neural networks with an anisotropic, structure-tensor-informed total variation regularizer tailored for resolution-agnostic image super-resolution. Casting the continuous-to-discrete acquisition process into an ill-posed inverse problem framework, our formulation equips a SIREN-architected coordinate network with a dynamic Riemannian metric tensor field D(x). By leveraging its spectral decomposition, the proposed regularizer preferentially directs diffusion parallel to dominant structural contours while penalizing cross-edge dissipation, successfully circumventing the classical staircasing artifacts inherent to scalar total variation schemes. We rigorously prove the well-posedness of this formulation in H^1(Omega) by establishing the existence, uniqueness, and metric stability of the variational minimizer, and realize this via an alternating projected optimization algorithm that decouples network parameter tuning from adaptive tensor field updates. Comprehensive experiments conducted on clinical brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and biomedical transmission electron microscopy confirm substantial quantitative and qualitative improvements, yielding PSNR enhancements reaching +5.05 dB over baseline unregularized INRs and +1.71-2.85 dB over isotropic TV-INR across continuous (non-integer) upsampling factors, alongside remarkable noise robustness up to sigma_eta = 0.10 and monotonic preconditioned convergence behavior.

Medical image analysis remains fundamentally challenging because of the intricate geometric and topological structures present in medical data. Conventional convolutional neural networks model images as regular Euclidean grids, limiting their ability to preserve geometric relationships and higher-order structural information. Recently, manifold topological deep learning (MTDL) has emerged as a promising paradigm that integrates deep learning with geometric and topological representations. Nevertheless, existing methods have not yet fully exploited discrete manifold structures within combinatorial complex neural networks. To bridge this gap, we introduce CNMTDL, a MTDL framework that integrates Hodge decomposition with a combinatorial attention mechanism. In our approach, medical images are represented as discrete manifolds and decomposed into three Hodge components. Features extracted from these components are concatenated and embedded into a combinatorial complex architecture, enabling enhanced higher-order message passing between $0$-cells and $2$-cells through attention-based blocks. We evaluate CNMTDL on six two-dimensional and three-dimensional datasets from the MedMNIST v2 benchmark, demonstrating its effectiveness for medical image analysis.

Geographic measurements are often sparse, leaving large areas without labels for the quantities we want to map. Geographic implicit neural representations (INRs) address this by learning smooth, general-purpose embeddings that can be queried at any coordinate. Downstream models combine these embeddings with sparse labels to predict target values at unsampled locations without satellite imagery at inference. However, generalization to distant regions remains largely unexplored, despite its importance for remote sensing applications. We introduce Matryoshka Implicit Neural Distillation (MIND), which distills embeddings from specialist pretrained geospatial models into a single generalist coordinate embedding with adjustable spatial granularity. MIND uses nested supervision at several embedding dimensions, which define a series of contiguous chunks. In our experiments, early chunks capture coarser geographic variation, while later chunks add more fine-grained details. A downstream predictor can retain only leading chunks or be fitted with our Chunked Penalty to downweight later chunks while keeping the full embedding, without retraining the INR. To measure MIND and compare to existing approaches around the world, we introduce CoordBench, a large-scale INR evaluation suite of $52$ datasets and $78$ targets that aims to test both local interpolation and prediction in held-out regions at various spatial scales. MIND and its Chunked Penalty variant achieve the highest aggregate regression and classification scores among tested INRs, and the highest scores overall under regional holdout, setting a new state-of-the-art for geographic INRs.

Consistent multi-view object segmentation is critical for 3D perception and robotics, yet remains challenging under severe viewpoint and occlusion changes. Existing methods typically perform 3D instance segmentation on point clouds or rely on offline 2D mask-matching pipelines. However, 3D instance segmentation is limited by scarce 3D annotations, while offline 2D matching suffers from object identity ambiguity across frames. To leverage strong 2D and 3D priors jointly, we propose SAM-V (Geometry-Aware Segment Anything for Multi-View Instance Segmentation). Instead of combining the two priors through post-hoc matching, SAM-V directly integrates features from a feed-forward geometry model (VGGT) into a 2D segmentation foundation model (SAM), trained end-to-end for cross-view instance prediction. SAM-V introduces a prompt-fusion mechanism that enriches sparse SAM prompt tokens with view-specific camera tokens and local VGGT features, making the prompt representation both view-aware and spatially grounded, together with a mask decoder that attends to dense 2D and 3D features. By conditioning the mask decoding directly on multi-view geometry, SAM-V produces consistent multi-view segmentation of a prompted object in a single forward pass without offline mask matching or explicit 3D reconstruction. On the IGGT 3D tracking benchmark, where consistent instance identity across frames directly determines performance, SAM-V improves overall IoU by 5 points and frame-level recall by 12 points on the ScanNet++ split over the state-of-the-art multi-view instance segmentation baseline and leads on all metrics in the zero-shot ScanNet split. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/gong208/SAM-V.git.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) can be efficiently deployed under stringent memory and latency constraints through post training quantization (PTQ). However, most PTQ methods are designed for unimodal large language models (LLMs). These methods treat quantization errors as isotropic perturbations under the Euclidean assumption, which provides weak guidance on directions most sensitive to quantization in VLMs. Consequently, directly adapting unimodal PTQ approaches or solely employing modality-specific scaling often leads to uneven bit-width distribution and inconsistent performance in low-bit settings. To address these challenges, we propose Riemannian Geometry-Sensitive Quantization (RGSQ), which formulates quantization as a reconstruction problem under a unified Fisher-Riemannian metric. RGSQ identifies modality-specific sensitive directions via Riemannian manifold mappings built from modality-partitioned empirical Fisher factors and fused into a modality-aware Kronecker-structured metric. We then apply geometry-aligned rotations to reorient the local tangent frame, steering low-bit perturbations toward loss-insensitive axes. Finally, we apply a whitening transformation that maps the Riemannian objective to an equivalent Euclidean form, enabling standard unimodal PTQ methods to evaluate multimodal quantization error under their original assumptions. Across an extensive and diverse set of mainstream VLM benchmarks, RGSQ achieves the highest accuracy and stability under extremely low-bit settings (W2A8 and W3A8). It outperforms VLM-aware baselines, such as MBQ and MQuant, by up to 5.9% and surpasses single-modality improvements by up to 8.6%.

Training data quantity and quality greatly affect object detection model performance, regardless of model architecture. When using object detection models on video and images from the deep sea, in which the objects of interest, primarily organisms, are sparse, faint, and hard to identify, incremental improvements to object detector performance may require an iterative approach to data labeling and management. This paper presents mbariml, a python-based video and image analysis pipeline built around the data labeling management process. mbariml uses an Ultralytics YOLO detection model, runs it over still images or video, stores every detection as a reviewable region of interest, groups those regions by visual similarity so that a human can accept or reject them in bulk, and exports the result as training data, statistics, image sidecars, and additional metadata. The human review stage is the centre of the design: an annotator can validate, relabel, resize, delete, and draw entirely new localizations, and every one of those edits is written back to the same database the detector wrote to. Video receives particular attention: the software treats each tracker-produced track as a provisional observation and selects one representative frame instead of retaining every detection in the track. We describe the pipeline stage by stage, including the operational middle-third heuristic used for track observation selection.

With sparse and event-driven computation, spiking neural networks show great potential for achieving accurate and energy-efficient UAV visual tracking. However, existing SNN-based trackers typically use spike firing rates only for energy evaluation and lack explicit optimization of actual spike activity. To address this, we propose SBMVTrack, a fully spiking framework for energy-efficient UAV tracking. SBMVTrack introduces Energy-Weighted Spike Budgeting (EWSB). EWSB weights actual spike activity according to the computational cost of each spiking layer. It constrains the energy-weighted firing rate and saturation activity, thereby reducing redundant spike computations. To improve tracking performance under the spike budget constraint, we propose Masked Multi-View Target Modeling (MVTM). This method treats the initial template, online template, and search region from the same sequence as correlated temporal views. It enhances the robustness of target representations through cross-view feature completion and identity-consistency learning. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SBMVTrack effectively reduces the average spike firing rate and theoretical energy consumption. Meanwhile, it maintains competitive tracking performance, achieving a better accuracy-energy trade-off. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

Standard deployment-ready object detectors for autonomous vehicles degrade in adverse weather and lighting conditions without being trained on extensive domain-specific data. While large-scale vision foundation models offer robust zero-shot generalization, their high computational cost makes them impractical for real-time deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose a foundation-guided auto-annotation pipeline that enhances standard detectors without architectural changes. We first benchmark three distinct models, YOLOv8, Co-DETR, and SAM3, on our custom real-world driving dataset spanning 25 unique operational scenarios across various route, weather, and lighting conditions. Based on our analysis, SAM3 demonstrates superior accuracy and resilience across all scenarios. Thus, we deploy it as an offline auto-annotator to generate pseudo-labels on the unannotated subset of our dataset. Fine-tuning the baseline YOLOv8 on these annotations yields a 16.04% higher overall mean Average Precision (mAP) and improves cross-environmental stability compared to the baseline model, highlighted by a 32.73% and 28.65% mAP increase in Residential Direct Sunlight and Highway Fog, respectively. These results demonstrate that standard detectors can achieve environmental resilience without the need for extensive manual annotation or architectural modifications.

While single-view 3D reconstruction has seen significant progress, extrapolating complex 3D structures from inherently ambiguous 2D observations remains fundamentally ill-posed, particularly in the critically underexplored data-scarce regime. To address this challenge, we propose Point Diffusion Mamba (PDM), a method that integrates the generative power of diffusion models with the efficiency of state-space model for single-view 3D reconstruction under data-scarce conditions. Specifically, PDM employs a lightweight reconstruction module tailored to handle unordered point-cloud inputs effectively. By combining a Local Geometric Aggregation module with Mamba blocks, our approach jointly models global geometric structures and local details. In 3D reconstruction, each point in the initial noisy input requires a precise prediction, yet the high-level features extracted by the Mamba module capture only abstract semantic information from sparse points. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Hierarchical Feature Integration Network, which fuses high-level semantic and local geometric features for each point, overcoming the limitations of token-based point-cloud reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a Dynamic Weighted Sampling strategy that adaptively unifies 3D generation with single-view reconstruction by leveraging generative priors to enhance reconstruction quality. Experimental results on the ShapeNet and Pix3D benchmarks demonstrate that PDM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing an effective solution for 3D reconstruction under data-scarce settings. Code is available at: https://github.com/NWUzhouwei/PDM.

A lack of high-throughput phenotyping solutions for root traits in field-grown crops has severely constrained understanding and improvement of below-ground traits and processes. Minirhizotrons are the standard non-destructive root-phenotyping method in field environments. Computer vision solutions are needed to allow automated trait estimation at scale, but training data is scarce and human annotations are often inaccessible because they reside in proprietary software that only exports per-image scalar totals of root length and surface area. Nevertheless, large numeric archives of these root traits already exist. RootQuant showed that the traits can be predicted directly from the whole image by regression, thus removing manually traced masks from the pipeline; RootQuantV2 takes that idea further by replacing RootQuant's CNN backbone with a self-supervised ViT. We adapt a frozen DINOv3 ViT-L/16 with a hybrid parameter-efficient scheme. Training only 11.9M parameters (3.78% of the model), RootQuantV2 achieves length and area $R^2$ of 0.950 and 0.930, respectively, while lowering length/area RMSE by 24.3%/20.7% over RootQuant. RootQuantV2 thus repurposes legacy numeric archives for high-throughput, automated root trait estimation.

Urban-scale 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery supports disaster response, city monitoring, and geospatial digital twins, yet neural rendering methods typically optimize average visual fidelity rather than the structures that analysts inspect first: buildings. We present an agentic building-aware satellite Gaussian Splatting workflow that uses Segment Anything-derived building masks as semantic priors and an Agentic Reconstruction Controller to select, verify, and record DSM reconstruction policies. On the DFC2019 JAX\_004 scene, building-aware weighting reduces building-region DSM MAE from 0.844 m to 0.806 m, showing that semantic priors can shift reconstruction capacity toward analyst-critical regions. A staged schedule provides a balanced operating point, improving full-scene MAE from 1.362 m to 1.349 m while retaining a building gain. Across four JAX scenes, the Agent selects validated policies for both general DSM and building-focused DSM objectives, and produces building-inventory metadata and per-scene decision records. The system combines semantic priors, policy selection, region-specific DSM metrics, and DSM-derived GIS surface products for auditable urban 3D analysis.

Hi-OPD addresses a failure mode left uncontrolled by flat open-prompt training: descendant retrieval need not persist under ancestor queries when multi-source remote sensing annotations exhibit inconsistent granularity and missing labels. A detector may localize \textit{car} and \textit{van} under atomic prompts yet miss the same instances under \textit{vehicle}; flat AP does not expose this cross-level inconsistency. We propose Hi-OPD, a hierarchy-aware open-prompt detector, and construct RS153-HierOPD from 175,644 retained training image/tile records and 3.48M boxes mapped to 153 atomic categories with sparse hierarchy and alias relations. Hi-OPD learns ancestor retrieval through hierarchy-safe negative sampling, path multi-positive supervision, and one-way upward consistency, while per-source risk exclusion handles potentially missing labels. ConvVPE converts K-shot support boxes into text-compatible embeddings using detector-native features and the shared contrastive head. On Track A, Hi-OPD obtains 79.7/72.3 AP50 on DIOR/DOTA-v2.0, above the literature-reported OpenRSD results of 76.7/71.8. Under controlled training on the original converted annotations, the full hierarchy recipe raises DOTA-v2.0 parent AP50 from 7.2 to 71.5 and FAIR1M grandparent AP50 from 31.6 to 71.4, while DOTA-v2.0 atomic AP50 changes from 71.4 to 72.3. The text path reaches 99.7% CAR50 (0.3% violation) across the three common sources and 99.9%/0.1% on FAIR1M grandparent relations. On held-out VEDAI, text AP50 is 75.9, 6.2 points above OpenRSD. Joint AP and CAR show that explicit hierarchy training repairs this failure mode while retaining atomic detection and prompt transfer.

The annotation used to select a segmentation threshold is part of the evaluation protocol, yet its effect is easily conflated with model quality. We examine this choice for retinal vessel segmentation using all 28 CHASE DB1 images and both human annotations. A fixed seven-fold protocol keeps both eyes of each of the 14 subjects together. Random forests and Extra Trees are fitted against observer 1 with three random seeds, yielding 42 fits. Five threshold policies share identical score maps: fixed 0.50, observer-1 tuning, observer-2 tuning, mean-observer tuning, and maximin tuning of the per-image lower observer Dice. For random forests, maximin changes the threshold in 19 of 21 fits, but worst-observer Dice decreases from 70.53 percent to 70.45 percent. The paired difference is -0.073 percentage points, with a conditional subject-bootstrap 95 percent interval of [-0.384, 0.238]. Extra Trees shows the same direction. Identical observer-1-tuned random-forest masks score 73.66 percent against observer 1 and 71.06 percent against observer 2. The results support explicit reporting of both the threshold-selection reference and evaluation reference; they do not support an accuracy benefit from maximin tuning in this cohort. All splits, raw predictions, metrics and code are supplied. AI assistance is disclosed.

Stochastic rendering eliminates the sorting and alpha blending process in Gaussian splatting, at the cost of introducing spatial noise. Formulating temporal denoising over the pixel stream shared by view-consistent stochastic splatting renderers, we propose a temporal neural denoiser validated on stochastic 2D Gaussian Splatting rendering, combining dual-path exponential moving average accumulation, per-pixel learned trust prediction for history validation, a fixed anisotropic spatial filter and a variance-gated composition with stabilization. The denoiser suppresses the noise, achieving temporally stable, visually compelling outputs during free camera navigation, all while retaining the sort-free, blend-free rasterization performance. The combined pipeline retains a PSNR gap to sorted alpha-blending renderers, but the denoiser's overhead stays below the time saved by removing sorting and blending.

Architectural floor plans remain a high-friction barrier to archive digitization and early design-model preparation because heterogeneous graphics encode spatial semantics and editable geometry together. We introduce SALI-FP, an evidence-gated multimodal pipeline that converts a plan into reviewable semantic maps, objects, vectors, and relation records while constraining local revisions by image evidence. In a full production audit of 11,534 heterogeneous plans, SALI-FP produced structured outputs for every plan, including 752,510 valid polygon-bearing objects. The same output form has supported initial drawing digitization and design-model preparation in practical design work. Public-benchmark calibration is paired with a 30-case matched visual evidence set in Appendix F, where room-scale coverage, openings, oblique boundaries, and circulation continuity can be inspected directly. SALI-FP offers an engineering-oriented interpretation-to-geometry workflow for reviewed CAD/BIM preparation and existing-building information recovery.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) incur high computational costs from redundant visual tokens. Although training-free attention-based multi-layer pruning in the vision encoder stage has been explored as an effective strategy, we find that pruning in shallow layers consistently degrades performance. In this paper, we aim to understand this problem and seek a solution. By analyzing attention patterns across network depth, we find that shallow layers primarily function as edge detectors with chaotic attention maps, while deeper layers transition through local subject recognition and unstable semantic aggregation. To address the misalignment between pruning strategies and network stages, we propose STD, a hierarchical token pruning framework that adapts token selection mechanisms to the functional role of each network stage. STD employs High-Frequency Spectral Analysis in shallow layers to deterministically preserve structural edges, uses Gaussian-Smoothed Attention in intermediate layers to maintain spatial coherence, and introduces a Stability-Adaptive Trigger in deep layers to execute pruning only during semantically stable phases. Extensive experiments show that STD outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods by 1.1% on LLaVA-1.5-7B with 88.9% token reduction, while also being plug-and-play and highly effective when combined with other methods, and by 2.1% on LLaVA-NeXT-7B with 94.4% reduction, delivering a 3.9x speed-up in the prefilling stage. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Twilight03/STD.

Foundation vision models provide strong generic representations, yet high class-level retrieval accuracy does not necessarily imply that an embedding respects a target semantic taxonomy. We study strict explicit-taxonomy image retrieval on frozen DINOv2 features and ask: when hierarchical retrieval improves, how much of the change is associated with the organization of taxonomy-aware supervision, and how much with the Euclidean-hyperbolic geometry choice? We evaluate higher levels with strict cross-class criteria that exclude finer-grained matches, and compare Euclidean and hyperbolic projections trained with taxonomy-distance regression or a taxonomy-aware supervised contrastive objective. A compute-matched 2 x 2 Geometry x Loss factorial uses the same 768-256-32 projector capacity, optimization schedule, batch order, and fixed 100-epoch budget; the Loss axis denotes the Regression-to-Taxonomy-SupCon objective-family contrast. On CUB, the objective-family contrasts in mean hierarchy mAP (strict middle/high average, excluding Class/Leaf) are +0.0487 in Euclidean space and +0.0414 in hyperbolic space, compared with geometry contrasts of +0.0102 and +0.0030. On NABirds Parent-disjoint retrieval, the corresponding objective-family contrasts are +0.0467 and +0.0440, whereas geometry contrasts are +0.0017 and -0.0009. A semantic-alignment control shows that the true taxonomy substantially outperforms a structure-preserving shuffled hierarchy, while a NABirds curvature/radius control does not support stronger negative curvature as the explanation for the observed hierarchy gains. Across the two taxonomies, the Regression-to-Taxonomy-SupCon contrasts are larger in aggregate than the evaluated geometry contrasts; semantic alignment also matters separately, while geometry remains hierarchy-dependent.

Accurately isolating disease-related features from confounding covariates (e.g., age, gender, site) and individual variations remains a fundamental challenge in medical image classification. Traditional regression-based approaches may ignore non-linear relations between image features and true covariates. To overcome this issue, we present a generalized Medical Imaging Disentanglement Learning (MedIDL) framework. MedIDL maps image features into three mutually orthogonal latent spaces through specialized disentanglement heads: a disease classification head guided by a supervised loss, a covariate-alignment head constrained by cross-subject similarity matching, and a Gaussian head absorbing individual variations. We evaluated our framework across 7 datasets encompassing diverse imaging modalities. MedIDL outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised classification methods in accuracy across all datasets. Association analyses demonstrate that MedIDL successfully isolates target-specific latent representations. Gradient-based interpretability mappings localize pathognomonic patterns aligning with established clinical literature.

Recent game world models support realistic visual simulation and interactive gameplay based on player inputs. However, they typically learn environment dynamics from pixel-level supervision, jointly modeling perception, memory, state transitions, and rendering within a single end-to-end framework. While this design enables open-ended, action-controllable generation, it still falls short of delivering a complete gameplay experience. Games are governed by explicit mechanics, such as health deduction, skill activation, combat rules, and termination conditions. These mechanics depend on precise and consistent state transitions that generative models alone cannot reliably enforce. In contrast, game engines can guarantee such mechanics through hard-coded rules, but provide limited flexibility for player-driven creation. To bridge these paradigms, we introduce GameDirector, the first agentic framework that decouples rule-based gameplay logic from visual rendering. Given player-defined configurations, the framework acts as an intelligent director that interprets visual observations, updates game states, tactically controls NPCs, and enforces gameplay rules. It then translates these decisions into text prompts that guide the video world model to render the resulting gameplay. This separation allows players to configure characters, states, and rules much like a game developer while preserving coherent game mechanics. Experiments on three games, using data collected by our automated gameplay agent, show that GameDirector achieves accurate state tracking, reliable rule following, and improves boss action quality by more than 39.9% over various end-to-end game world model settings. Overall, by externalizing player-controllable game logic, GameDirector establishes a middle ground between hard-coded simulation and generative modeling, enabling more flexible and closed-loop gameplay experiences.

Atomic-scale phase imaging is central to resolving defects, interfaces, and weakly scattering atoms that govern the behavior of nanoscale materials. Electron ptychography delivers sub-{\aa}ngstr\"om phase sensitivity but remains an offline technique, because its iterative reconstruction is computationally expensive and sensitive to experimental calibration, preventing live use during data acquisition. Here, a ptychography-supervised local inference framework is presented that converts four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) into an acquisition-compatible phase-imaging workflow. Physics-constrained reference phase maps reconstructed from a single experimental AuPd dataset serve as teacher labels for a compact model that predicts local phase patches directly from diffraction measurements, without explicit probe input or online iterative optimization. Full-field images are assembled by deterministic overlap stitching. The workflow reaches an online latency of about 0.27 ms per probe position and a throughput of about 20,000 positions per second, an approximately 1,000-fold speed-up over GPU-accelerated ePIE, while preserving atomic-scale lattice contrast and reciprocal-space fidelity. Without fine-tuning, the same model transfers across materials (WS2), defocus conditions (high-entropy alloy nanoparticles), and instruments (hBN at 300 kV). The approach amortizes ptychographic redundancy into a fast, generalizable workflow that enables real-time atomic-scale phase imaging for materials microscopy.

Contour initialization and numerical stopping can jointly affect the evaluation of active-contour segmentation. We examine their interaction using the open-source scikit-image Chan-Vese implementation on a resized ISIC 2017 mirror. A fixed development set of 100 images selects a common input channel; all 600 images in the repository's held-out partition are then evaluated. Otsu thresholding is compared with checkerboard-, disk-, and Otsu-initialized contours under default and tighter level-set tolerances. At the default tolerance, Otsu initialization increases mean image Dice from 0.6011 to 0.6660 relative to checkerboard initialization, a paired difference of 0.0649 (95% image-bootstrap interval [0.0452, 0.0860]). Otsu thresholding alone achieves 0.6897. The default disk initializer stops after one iteration on 471 images. Tightening the tolerance reduces the Otsu-seed advantage over checkerboard initialization to 0.0197, with most runs reaching the 500-iteration limit. The default-tolerance advantage also reverses between small- and large-lesion strata. These findings show that an improvement over a generic initializer can coexist with deterioration relative to the threshold baseline. Evaluations should retain the unrefined mask as a comparator and report the initial-field definition, stopping tolerance, and observed iteration counts together.

Object detection in adverse weather remains challenging because severe degradations weaken visual quality and disrupt semantic feature representations across diverse scenes. Existing methods usually rely on condition-specific designs, which limits their ability to generalize within a unified detector. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert Network (C2FXNet) that achieves unified detection through hierarchical scene guidance. Specifically, C2FXNet introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism consisting of a Multi-step Reasoning Router (MRR), which performs GRU-based recurrent scene reasoning over compressed multi-scale visual cues and frozen coarse scene prototypes, and a Fine Scene Refinement (FSR) module, which uses image-specific semantic cues to modulate high-level features for local variation handling. Furthermore, a Scene-aware Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) dynamically combines scene-specific experts under the joint guidance of MRR and FSR. By coupling coarse scene reasoning with fine-grained semantic refinement, C2FXNet enables robust multi-scene detection without scene-specific training. Extensive experiments on RTTS, ExDark, and our newly constructed Adverse Weather Dataset (AWD) demonstrate that C2FXNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across foggy, dark, and clear conditions, reaching 63.70%, 71.14%, and 54.19% mAP on RTTS, ExDark, and AWD, respectively. The source code will be released at https://github.com/PolarisFTL/C2FXNet.

Purpose: To develop and evaluate an interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) framework for glaucoma screening from low-cost portable, handheld retinal fundus photographs in a West African population and to compare its performance with clinical tabletop fundus imaging. Methods: We used data from a community-based study of 681 participants (1,362 eyes) in Nigeria, comprising 414 glaucoma, 478 glaucoma suspect, and 470 non-glaucoma eyes. Fundus photographs were acquired using the low-cost handheld, portable Volk Viva retinal camera and the Canon CR-2-AF tabletop camera. We fine-tuned component models separately to each device to perform vessel segmentation, cup and disc boundary segmentation, and feature extraction to detect optic nerve head features. A final classification model combined these components to classify scans as glaucoma, glaucoma suspect or non-glaucoma. Feature-weight analysis and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping were used for interpretation. Results: The models performed well on both Volk Viva and Canon CR-2-AF images: Vessel segmentation: 0.98 Dice Coefficient (DC) (Volk) and 0.94 DC (Canon); Cup and disc segmentation: 0.95 DC (Volk) and 0.96 DC (Canon); Optic nerve head feature detection: area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.83$\pm$0.03 (Volk) and 0.87$\pm$0.04 (Canon); Classification model: AUCs of 0.85$\pm$0.01 (Volk) and 0.93$\pm$0.01 (Canon). Reports for each image, present model decision confidence scores and decision-rationale visualizations to support clinical interpretation. Conclusions: Volk Viva results were reasonably comparable to Canon CR-2-AF in the component models and not far behind in classification. This shows that interpretable AI combined with low-cost, portable imaging may enhance community-level glaucoma screening, especially in settings with limited specialist access and resources.

Reference-based image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aim to reflect how humans perceive the perceptual distance between a pair of images. To learn how the human visual system (HVS) operates, recent reference-based IQA metrics heavily rely on human-annotated data. Mean opinion score (MOS)-based pointwise scoring, which assigns a scalar quality value per image, is preferable for annotation but is prohibitively expensive to collect at scale and is known to be noisy due to inconsistent human judgments. As an alternative, two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) pairwise labels have gained popularity due to their reliability and efficiency, but they capture only relative comparisons between pairs. In this paper, we propose a fully automated data generation pipeline that generates pointwise perceptual distance labels between image pairs without any human annotation. Our approach exploits the generative dynamics of diffusion models as a perceptual distance proxy, where the coarse structure of an image is generated in the early timesteps and the fine details are generated in the later timesteps. Images that fork early in the generation process share only coarse structure and are perceptually far apart; images that fork late differ only in fine detail. We demonstrate that the diffusion trajectory aligns well with the human visual system, and use this forking moment, FoMo, as a reference-grounded distance label to supervise the training of a reference-based IQA metric. The pointwise labels, which support universal comparison between arbitrary image pairs, enable an information-rich training objective. Extensive experiments across diverse backbone architectures confirm the effectiveness of our generation pipeline, outperforming human-annotated datasets in multiple benchmarks.

Medium-resolution (10-30 m) burned area mapping is vital for monitoring wildfires and their impacts, but remains difficult to scale. Existing methods require either curated fire-specific imagery or dense time-series analysis. Here, we tested whether annual Earth-observation embeddings retain wildfire disturbance signals sufficiently to map burned areas without either requirement. Using Tessera and AlphaEarth embeddings, we tested individual burn-scar delineation, mapping of all same-year fires within an area, regional wall-to-wall mapping, cross-continental transfer, and intra-annual fire timing. Tessera strongly encoded wildfire disturbance, allowing even linear models to separate burned from unburned pixels; the signal was weaker in AlphaEarth. Models trained on a single Tessera embedding matched or exceeded equivalent models using paired pre- and post-fire HLS imagery, and outperformed post-fire imagery alone. The same approach mapped all same-year fires within benchmark scenes (F1 = 0.90). Applied across California, with no California fire data used for downstream training, it recovered 97% of reference burned area and detected substantially more small and medium-sized fires than GABAM or MCD64A1. Separately, a model trained on 2018-2021 US fires transferred without retraining to 88 European fires from 2024-2025 (F1 = 0.88). For well-detected fires, ignition timing was recovered with a mean absolute error of 13 days. Performance declined for fires ignited near the end of the calendar year, and wall-to-wall deployment produced systematic false positives in some unseen landscapes. Annual embeddings nevertheless achieve high segmentation accuracy while moving the burden of dense time series processing upstream, providing a promising path towards simpler regional burned area mapping.

Generative models have advanced image-conditioned 3D content creation, yet generating controllable and executable 3D scenes from a single image remains challenging. Existing 3D generative approaches can synthesize visually plausible objects and scenes, but their spatial layout estimation is coupled with specific asset generators. They struggle to jointly model object semantics, metric geometry, and scene-level spatial relationships, which are essential for interactive editing, physical simulation, and embodied applications. We propose Fysiverse-3D-Vision, a unified vision-language-geometry framework for generative 3D scene reconstruction and executable asset construction from a single image. We establish a shared representation where spatial reasoning and geometric reconstruction mutually enhance each other, allowing object layouts to be inferred beyond the constraints of individual asset generators. Our model integrates textual supervision, semantic visual cues, and geometric representations within a unified Transformer to capture scene context, metric geometry, and object-level interactions. An object-conditioned layout module performs cross-attention between target object representations and global geometric features to predict object translation, rotation, and scale. Training progressively learns geometry-language alignment, introduces layout reasoning while preserving reconstruction capability, and refines physical consistency through collision-aware optimization. By separating spatial layout reasoning from asset synthesis, Fysiverse-3D-Vision provides an adaptable interface for interactive scene editing, object-level manipulations, and executable 3D content generation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior geometric consistency, layout estimation, rendering quality, and physical property understanding compared with existing approaches.

Interactive segmentation of 3D medical images supports quantitative analysis of anatomical structures and disease while allowing users to specify and refine their targets. Despite substantial progress by nnInteractive and VISTA3D, reliable segmentation across diverse clinical targets remains challenging, particularly for complex anatomical structures and the heterogeneous, long-tailed spectrum of pathology. We present SAMI3D-DW V1 (hereafter SAMI3D-DW), an interactive 3D segmentation model trained on Deepwise's large-scale proprietary medical image datasets. We evaluate the model under simulated user interactions on a CT/MR benchmark comprising 4,326 cases from 219 source datasets, spanning 107 anatomical and pathological categories, organized by a medical taxonomy and evaluated with a category-balanced DSC score. SAMI3D-DW achieves the highest category-macro Dice among evaluated methods in both interaction modes. With one point, it scores 0.5764 versus 0.5315 for nnInteractive, the strongest baseline, rising to 0.7771 versus 0.7494 with five points. With bounding-box initialization, the scores are 0.7130 versus 0.6530. After five corrective clicks, SAMI3D-DW reaches 0.8002 versus 0.7868, making it the only evaluated box-compatible model to exceed 0.80. For radiologists and clinicians, SAMI3D-DW enables segmentation of complex anatomical structures, including intracranial vessel trees on CT and MR angiography, with a few clicks. In a preliminary in-house comparison involving neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), SAMI3D-DW-assisted tumor annotation took minutes per case and approximately one-fifteenth of the time required for manual annotation, highlighting its potential to support volumetric treatment-response assessment.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on tasks such as visual question answering, yet small image resizes can turn correct answers into errors. We investigate whether changes in visual configuration, such as image tiling and token arrangement, contribute to this instability. Across seven checkpoints and four benchmarks, equally small resizes cause more correctness flips when they switch configurations. Surprisingly, in over half of these cases, models answer the question incorrectly but can still read the correct answer when told what to read. Furthermore, attention interventions in LLaVA-NeXT suggest that configuration changes can weaken the use of readable information during answering. We therefore guide models using field cues and their own transcriptions. With annotation assistance, these forms of guidance together correct 97.2% of errors with readable information. These findings show that configuration changes can affect how models use information they can still read.

HopChain has shown on still images that multi-hop data synthesis improves vision-language reasoning, because long chain-of-thought reasoning exposes errors that compound across steps, while most data used for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) rarely demands a chain of visual evidence, so these weaknesses are likely to stay unexposed. We observe the same problem in video, where this framework has not yet been explored. We therefore build Video-HopChain, a dataset of 22,550 multi-hop video questions over 13,378 videos, together with a held-out benchmark of 1,000 questions. Each question chains three to six yes/no questions about moments in one video, and each yields one of two integers depending on its answer. The final answer is the sum of these integers, so an exact match on that sum gives the verifiable reward that RLVR needs. We first train Qwen3-VL-8B with GRPO on a standard video dataset, and a second stage on Video-HopChain then raises the mean over eight video understanding and reasoning benchmarks from 55.4 to 57.9 and improves every one of them. Training on such a dataset, however, exposes a known limitation of GRPO: its learning signal comes from the reward variance within a group, so hard questions whose rollouts are all incorrect and easy questions whose rollouts are all correct both leave the group with no gradient. To recover these groups at the same compute budget, we introduce Confidence-Gated Exploration (CGE). With 8 rollouts per question, CGE samples the first 4 as usual. If these 4 are either all correct or all incorrect, it samples the last 4 with the policy's most confident token masked inside the reasoning span, and removes the masked positions from the loss while all 8 rollouts enter the advantage. With CGE, the mean rises further to 59.3. We release the dataset, the checkpoint, and the data generation and training code.

Recent advances in generative video models have enabled the synthesis of visually realistic content, posing significant challenges to synthetic video detection. Existing detectors often rely on appearance artifacts, semantic inconsistencies, and temporal patterns that may be generator-specific, limitating generalization to unseen synthesis models. We investigate whether responses to a pretrained generative model provide more transferable forensic cues. Our key observation is that real and AI-generated videos exhibit distinct \emph{velocity responses} under a pretrained Flow Matching video model. This distinction persists when different pretrained video-generation backbones are used as probes, suggesting that velocity responses offer transferable forensic signals beyond visual artificts. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{TRACE} (\emph{\underline{T}rajectory \underline{R}epresentation \underline{a}nd \underline{C}onsistency \underline{E}stimation}), a generation-process-aware framework for AI-generated video detection. TRACE leverages a pretrained video DiT as a velocity-field probe to extract representations at multiple flow time points, and models cross-frame consistency through velocity differences between adjacent frames. We further introduce a \emph{Real-Centered Trajectory Optimization} objective that encourages generator-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments on AIGVDBench demonstrate that TRACE generalizes effectively across diverse generators, substantially outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods on unseen open- and closed-source video generation models.

Zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection commonly assumes that RGB and point cloud modalities are equally reliable and can contribute uniformly to anomaly localization. We challenge this assumption. Using a set of recently proposed stringent metrics that penalize false anomaly responses in normal regions, we find that point clouds are substantially more reliable than RGB under zero-shot category shift. Motivated by this observation, we propose WOOPS (\textbf{W}hen P\textbf{o}int Cl\textbf{o}uds Out\textbf{p}erform Pixel\textbf{s}), a reliability-aware zero-shot multimodal anomaly detection framework. To strengthen the more reliable geometric modality, we design a Multi-view Information Decoupling module to suppress heterogeneous information from multi-view point cloud projections and enhance point cloud feature quality. To avoid unconditional fusion, we further introduce a Modality Reliability Calibration module to adaptively calibrate modality contributions according to their reliability. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves the best or competitive performance under the new metrics in both unimodal and multimodal settings. Further analysis demonstrates that point cloud information also improves RGB-only inference, while ablations verify the effectiveness of both modules. Code will be released upon acceptance.

High-rate dense perception in dynamic environments is limited by the low update rate of RGB cameras, as rapid scene changes can occur between frames. Event cameras offer temporally dense but spatially sparse measurements, complementary to spatially dense RGB observations. Direct fusion cannot fully exploit this complementarity, while event-guided propagation fails on newly appearing or disoccluded regions without valid RGB support. We present LiFR v2, a unified propagation-completion-memory framework for causal anytime and streaming dense prediction from an RGB keyframe and events. LiFR v2 introduces an Event-Guided Completion Module (EGCM) to recover task-relevant representations where propagation is unsupported, and a History Retrieval Module (HRM) to reuse completed representations across successive queries. The framework supports semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and multi-task dense prediction, and we further introduce SHF-Emerge to evaluate rapid object emergence and disocclusion. LiFR v2 achieves 74.37% mIoU on DSEC and 56.13% on SHF-Emerge, improving LiFR-Seg by 1.85 percentage points on the latter, while reducing SHF-Emerge depth RMSE from 1.564 m to 1.118 m over the propagation baseline. It also exceeds 100 FPS for both segmentation and depth, demonstrating accurate and efficient high-rate perception beyond RGB frame rates.

Visual attribution methods typically explain predictions using pixels, superpixels, or regular patches. These representations can localize important regions, but provide limited information about their structure. We introduce MorphoSHAP, a model-agnostic post-hoc method that instead uses morphological shapes as the players of a Shapley attribution game. Using the Tree of Shapes, each shape is described by its scale, geometry, and signed contribution, providing explanations of where the evidence lies, what type of structure carries it, and how strongly it affects the prediction. This shared morphological vocabulary enables spatial, textual, and global class-level explanations beyond image-specific heatmaps. To the best of our knowledge, MorphoSHAP is the first SHAP-based image attribution framework to combine these different forms of explanation. Across five diverse datasets and three architectures, MorphoSHAP achieves strong insertion/deletion performance and outperforms competing attribution methods on several benchmarks. Finally, a user study shows that MorphoSHAP provides explanations that are easy to use and are preferred over standard attribution baselines.

Part segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and 3D vision. Recent works have expanded 3D part segmentation beyond fixed taxonomies, but existing approaches typically only address a specific setting, such as text-guided part segmentation or point-based interaction. In this work, we argue that these settings can be unified as an intent-conditioned generative problem, where different prompts specify the desired part decomposition. To this end, we introduce PartLLM, a unified multimodal model that formulates 3D part segmentation as autoregressive semantic decomposition. Conditioned on an input shape and a user prompt, PartLLM autoregressively generates semantic part hypotheses as queries for mask prediction and feeds them to a decomposition-aware decoder that jointly predicts coherent part masks. This unified design supports text-guided part segmentation, interactive segmentation, and full-shape semantic decomposition with controllable granularity within a single model. Extensive experiments across these task settings show that PartLLM consistently outperforms task-specific baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of unifying 3D part segmentation under an intent-conditioned generative formulation.

This work presents a video summarization algorithm based on multi-object tracking and person reidentification. We integrate facial embeddings, 3D body-shape features, and visual appearance into a unified tracking framework. These representations enable hierarchical identity assignment and tracking through bidirectional anchoring, which robustly recovers trajectories under severe occlusion or low visual quality. From these stable trajectories, we generate a compact set of summaries for each identity. We select keyframes using a multi-factor weighting scheme that optimizes biometric clarity, social interaction, and motion dynamics, while Adaptive Non-Maximum Suppression ensures temporal diversity. Evaluation on a custom dataset demonstrates tracking stability, achieving an IDF1 of 97.89% and a MOTA of 95.79%. Compared to Top-K selection, our algorithm also increases visual diversity by 146%, temporal coverage by 89%, and information retrievability by 3.5%.

Metric reasoning is a critical and challenging task for Vision Language Models (VLMs), playing a pivotal role in embodied AI tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous navigation. However, current spatial reasoning remains bottlenecked by rigid pixel-level supervision; such localized optimization often compromises general multimodal intelligence, triggering performance degradation or catastrophic forgetting of broad reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce Metric-Bench, a focused benchmark designed to guide metric-spatial reasoning using contextual information. By incorporating in-image reference objects with known physical dimensions, Metric-Bench guides models to implicitly learn the 2D-to-3D mapping without camera intrinsics. We further present MetricReasoner, a task-adapted reinforcement fine-tuning recipe for reference-grounded metric reasoning, using structured prompts and verifiable numerical rewards. Extensive experiments on Metric-Bench demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances spatial metric understanding, outperforming existing and even larger proprietary models by 43.1\%, while improving downstream embodied performance over a spatial-specialized counterpart by 30.4\% on RoboSpatial overall accuracy and 9.3\% on ERQA, and additionally delivering consistent gains on general benchmarks (15.9\% on V$\star$Bench, 88.9\% on BLINK), indicating that the proposed adaptation does not necessarily compromise general VLM capabilities.

Many vision applications ask several independent, forced-choice questions about the same image. Visual Jev encodes the image and public context once, executes isolated question suffixes as a batch, and reads candidate probabilities from the backbone's language-model head. Across four benchmarks, answer-supervised post-training raises equal-weight macro accuracy from 70.6% to 76.1%, with the gain concentrated on the two task families represented in training. At N=32 questions per image, shared batched execution is 8.9x faster in warm amortized time than independent serial execution and remains 3.4x faster than an already-batched baseline that recomputes the prefix, at the cost of higher peak memory. A matched typed-head control offers no consistent accuracy advantage over the language-model-head readout. The supported design is therefore simple: adapt the backbone for quality, retain the existing readout, and share execution for efficiency.

Deep learning performance generally improves with increasing training data, yet this scaling is fundamentally constrained by annotation cost in large-scale dense prediction tasks with long-tailed category distributions, where pixel- or voxel-level annotation is prohibitively expensive. We propose SASS (Stage-Adaptive Sample Selection), a stage-adaptive data-selection framework for pool-based active learning in long-tailed dense prediction. SASS combines three components: label-free self-supervised gradient scoring, prior-guided category rebalancing with validation-driven feedback, and stage-adaptive acquisition aligned with model training dynamics. This design avoids candidate ground-truth masks during gradient scoring while making acquisition responsive to long-tail imbalance and evolving representations. We evaluate SASS on a multimodal 3D medical segmentation testbed comprising over 100,000 samples spanning 108 anatomical structures. SASS recovers 98.3% of full-dataset performance with a 40% training-pool annotation budget, outperforming BADGE by 5.1 percentage points. Moreover, SASS exhibits a statistically supported less-is-more pattern, surpassing full-dataset training at the Hard-group level and, at the structure level, for the pancreas and gallbladder. More broadly, SASS shows that annotation-efficient learning depends not only on which samples are selected, but also on how the annotation budget is distributed across categories and when model-derived scores begin to guide selection.

Sparse instance representations provide a compact interface for spatial LiDAR-camera and temporal past-current interaction in multimodal perception and E2EAD. Effective interaction requires reliable instance correspondences despite geometric discrepancies and heterogeneous semantic representations. Attention-based methods exploit contextual semantics but often require specialized representation alignment, increasing computational overhead. In contrast, association based on structured object states is efficient and interpretable but lacks contextual evidence to resolve ambiguous matches. To combine these complementary strengths, we propose MatchFusion, a learnable instance matching and fusion module for spatio-temporal multimodal autonomous driving. MatchFusion initializes pairwise affinities using geometric similarity and category consistency, then selectively refines structurally plausible associations using instance embeddings. The resulting soft matchmap guides a common residual aggregation operator for adaptive information exchange. This unified matching-fusion formulation supports spatial LiDAR-camera and temporal past-current interaction, using multi-view image-plane geometry and motion-compensated BEV geometry as the respective structural priors. Experiments on nuScenes demonstrate consistent perception gains across diverse front-end configurations. Compared with a prior instance-centric fusion method, the MatchFusion-equipped system achieves higher perception accuracy while reducing FLOPs by 55.3% and GPU memory usage by 39.3%, with the matching-fusion module accounting for only 3.7% of total perception latency. Integrating temporal MatchFusion into SparseDrive further improves perception within an E2E framework without additional supervision. These results establish explicit-implicit matching as an effective and efficient mechanism for spatio-temporal instance interaction.

Virtual try-on (VTON) requires precise pixel-level fidelity, yet mainstream Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) often suffer from texture degradation and structural drift. We identify symmetric interactions in standard joint-attention mechanisms as a source of these failures. Although such interactions support semantic flexibility in general-purpose editing, they allow stochastic noise to corrupt deterministic garment features in VTON. We analyze this problem through asymmetric information dynamics and introduce two diagnostic indicators: Conditional Attention Entropy (CAE) for feature unbiasedness and Injected Information Flux (IIF) for injection effectiveness. Our analysis suggests that symmetric bidirectional attention can corrupt conditional features and attenuate the conditional signal. To address these limitations, we propose RealFit, a framework that combines Unidirectional Information Flow (UIF) with Decoupled Timestep Modulation (DTM). UIF isolates the garment condition from stochastic noise to preserve garment identity, while DTM optimizes the modulation scale to maintain a strong conditional signal. The resulting time-invariant condition branch enables a conditional KV cache that reduces inference time by approximately 75%. RealFit offers a principled approach to conditional generation with state-of-the-art fidelity and efficiency.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle with fine-grained visual perception when processing complete images, as critical evidence may only appear in local regions. On-policy self-distillation (OPD) enables transferring privileged visual knowledge from informative views to full-image policies, but querying the teacher for every rollout introduces substantial supervision costs. In this work, we propose BAS-OPD, a budget-aware selective OPD framework that allocates teacher supervision under limited query budgets. Instead of querying all rollouts, BAS-OPD selects informative samples while maintaining full-batch student generation. We explore random, uncertainty-based, and learned utility-based selection strategies, where the learned selector estimates query value from detached rollout statistics and online utility signals derived from student--teacher agreement and teacher confidence without additional student forward passes. BAS-OPD only changes training-time supervision allocation and preserves single-pass full-image inference. Experiments on fine-grained multimodal perception benchmarks demonstrate that BAS-OPD achieves strong performance while substantially reducing teacher supervision costs, highlighting the effectiveness of selective OPD under constrained budgets.

Visual localization (VL) is a fundamental technology for vision applications such as virtual reality. Recently, a novel VL paradigm, Camera Ray Regression (CRR), has emerged, which maps 2D image patches to 3D camera rays, but its accuracy is limited. To improve CRR accuracy, we notice a compelling duality: the inverse of this mapping is inherently performed by the novel view synthesis model, \ie, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). While NeRF renders image patches from camera rays via differentiable ray marching, CRR predicts the rays from image patches. Motivated by this complementary relationship, we propose NeRF-aided Camera Ray Regression (NaCR), a unified framework that seamlessly bridges NeRF and CRR at the ray level. First, NaCR incorporates three simple yet effective enhancements into the CRR baseline. Second, leveraging a pre-trained NeRF, NaCR augments the training data by synthesizing novel views tailored for efficient, patch-level consumption. Finally, exploiting the differentiability of NeRF, NaCR forms a closed-loop supervision pipeline where photometric rendering errors are back-propagated to optimize the predicted camera rays. To ensure stable convergence within the highly non-convex image space, we introduce a two-stage training curriculum. Extensive experiments across indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate that NaCR achieves competitive accuracy. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the efficacy of each proposed component.

Detecting and localizing 3D point-cloud defects is essential for industrial inspection. However, existing methods often suffer from imprecise localization due to the lack of anomaly supervision and reliance on single-granularity representations. To address these limitations, we propose Anomaly Type-Aware 3D Anomaly Detection (AT3D-AD), a unified framework for joint detection, localization, and classification. Specifically, we first design the Physics-Driven Parametric Anomaly Synthesis (PDPAS) module employing multiple parametric functions to generate synthetic anomalies, providing explicit anomaly supervision. Then, we propose the Hierarchical Global-Local Anomaly Alignment (HiGLA) module to align global and local representations within the normal and anomalous groups. Finally, we propose the Semantic-Geometric Anomaly Classification (SGAC) module to jointly learn localization and classification, yielding spatially precise and type-discriminative anomaly representations. Extensive experiments establish new state-of-the-art performance on all four benchmarks. AT3D-AD achieves Object/Point AUROC scores of 98.1\%/98.9\% on Anomaly-ShapeNet and 95.0\%/95.2\% on Real3D-AD, while reaching 74.2\% Macro-F1 for anomaly-type recognition on Real3D-AD.

Frozen visual foundation models provide transferable features for visual place recognition, but fixed aggregation can suppress useful distinctions in new environments. We introduce TFA, a reliability-guided, training-free aggregation method requiring neither place labels nor task-specific weight updates. Our key observation is that reproducible retrieval need not be discriminative: independent codebooks can consistently retrieve a few database hubs. TFA combines cross-codebook agreement, retrieval coverage, and spectral statistics to control residual assignment, spectral shaping, and global-feature fusion. Its spectral kernel exactly recovers original descriptor similarity at zero intervention. Database-only TFA fixes its rules before accessing queries; TFA-C64 uses 64 disjoint unlabeled target images to calibrate retrieval for subsequent queries. Across 20 ground protocols with a fixed DINOv2-B backbone and matched resolution, database-only TFA improves Recall@1 over AnyLoc by 17.39 percentage points on MSLS-val and 9.55 on SPED. C64 mitigates failures of database-only calibration in driving environments. Across eight aerial/cross-view protocols, TFA achieves the highest Recall@1 among compared training-free heads in 14 of 16 DINOv2/DINOv3 backbone-protocol combinations. In a separate native-system comparison, DINOv2-G-based TFA-C64 reaches 91.46% Recall@1 on Pitts30k and 76.29% on VPAIR, outperforming the displayed training-free comparators on all five benchmarks. These results show that reliability-guided aggregation can recover additional retrieval capability from frozen representations, providing a practical baseline for new environments with scarce place supervision.

The field of Artificial Intelligence has been adopted for many application domains. Vision Language Models are one of the recently advanced AI techniques that have been explored to support automotive features such as vehicle perception, and safety assurance. However, such language models are prone to hallucinations, posing a potential threat to the safety of automotive systems that may incorporate them. Within the automotive domain, VLMs could not only hallucinate traffic objects, but could also fail to identify traffic objects that are actually present, which may potentially lead to dangerous situations. Though we have observed a growing body of literature that proposes verification and validation techniques for safe and trustworthy AI, these methods are often studied in isolation, focusing either on run-time or design-time phases. Such isolated techniques could be insufficient in safety-critical, realistic contexts such as automotive perception systems. In this paper, we analyze design-time and run-time verification and validation techniques based on a taxonomy presented by Huang et al. We present an automotive study in which a design-time qualification workflow is proposed to complement run-time monitoring. This workflow combines a fixed safety-relevant ontology-based structured annotation system together with a synonym-based evaluation process to statistically evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs against data from the nuScenes dataset. We observed that the proposed technique enables deterministic and repeatable quantification of the hallucinations VLMs generate in automotive perception-related tasks. The proposed workflow supports model comparison and deployment-oriented engineering decisions within the design-time verification and validation process and will contribute to a holistic verification strategy that strives towards trustworthy automotive perception systems

This paper introduces GRIP, a pose-conditioned refinement framework for pixel-to-point matching and 2D to 3D registration. Given an initial coarse pose estimate, GRIP addresses the structural mismatch between grid based image descriptors and unordered point cloud descriptors by softly rendering learned 3D point features onto the image grid through Gaussian feature splatting. The rendered point derived feature map is then fused with image features by a pixel aligned transformer, enabling visual semantic and geometric cues to interact in a shared 2D representation. The refined features are decoded and propagated to finer resolutions for dense correspondence estimation and final pose refinement. Experiments on RGB D Scenes V2 and 7 Scenes demonstrate state of the art inlier ratio and competitive registration recall, with stronger performance under stricter evaluation thresholds.

NAWE (Neural-Assisted Watermark Extraction) combines an explicit signal-processing watermarking construction with a pretrained neural host predictor. A periodic, perceptually masked watermark carrier provides synchronization, Polar coding supplies redundancy, and denoising followed by subtraction extracts the embedded watermark. The denoiser remains frozen, without watermark-specific training. A one-factor-at-a-time study compares Wiener, BM3D, DRUNet, and GS-DRUNet host estimators. Comparisons with TrustMark, SSL Watermarking, PixelSeal, and WAM show NAWE's lowest geometric and photometric class BER and strong message recovery, while filtering and noise remain limitations consistent with the non-adaptive selection of the watermark extractor. The comparison retains the systems' different payloads and coding.

Saliency maps are widely used to explain deep learning predictions in medical imaging, yet visually plausible explanations do not necessarily reflect a model's true decision process and may therefore mislead clinicians. We investigate this problem using a Vision Transformer-based breast MRI classifier trained on the ODELIA Breast MRI Challenge dataset and evaluate multiple saliency methods, including Last-layer Attention, Attention Rollout, Grad-SAM, Gradient Attention Rollout, GMAR, Grad-CAM, and HiResCAM. Our study highlights two often-overlooked challenges in perturbation-based faithfulness evaluation. First, method rankings depend strongly on the perturbation strategy, varying across intensity-based perturbations and transformer-based attention masking. Second, benchmarking saliency methods requires distinguishing between class-specific and class-agnostic explanations. To enable fair comparisons, we introduce non-class-specific variants of gradient-based methods and evaluate both settings separately. Across protocols, Grad-CAM and Gradient Attention Rollout consistently emerged as the strongest class-specific methods, although their relative ranking depended on the evaluation design. These findings expose important limitations of current saliency-based explainability approaches and highlight the need for more robust and standardized evaluation frameworks for trustworthy clinical AI systems.

Point cloud generation has emerged as a crucial task for accurately capturing and reproducing the complexity of the physical world. However, existing generative approaches, predominantly relying on Transformers and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), frequently ignore the continuous, non-grid topologies inherent to 3D spaces. Although the integration of graph-based structures has yielded significant benefits in related discriminative vision tasks, such geometric architectures remain noticeably absent from 3D generative modeling. To address this gap, we introduce EMERGE (Equivariant Multi-scale GNN for Resolution-agnostic point cloud GEneration), the first fully $SE(3)$-equivariant graph-based diffusion backbone explicitly designed to generate point clouds while preserving continuous spatial symmetries. Our framework bypasses the rigid resolution dependencies of standard generative pipelines, enabling zero-shot inference at multiple, arbitrary spatial resolutions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that EMERGE achieves State-of-the-Art generation quality across standard metrics, while the strong inherent geometric inductive biases enable significantly faster training convergence compared to existing baseline methods.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising capabilities for automated sports coaching but face a fundamental limitation: they implicitly compare against professional standards, making their feedback impractical for developing players. We present CricRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that aligns VLMs with skill-appropriate benchmarks for personalized cricket coaching. Our key insight is that by retrieving similar-but-better techniques as reference points, we can guide VLMs to provide developmentally appropriate feedback that mirrors human coaching practices. We contribute: (1) a labelled dataset of 288 cricket technique videos spanning multiple skill levels, (2) an efficient motion retrieval pipeline using contrastive learning that achieves 78% top-3 retrieval accuracy, (3) a frame sampling technique that reduces inference costs, and (4) a retrieval-augmented approach that significantly improves feedback alignment with coaching principles, achieving up to 94% agreement with professional assessments compared to 67% without retrieval context.

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) requires compact backbones capable of preserving weak geometric cues under extreme scale variation and background clutter. Fixed structural operators provide complementary contour and frequency responses without introducing learnable operator coefficients. However, directly injecting these responses can amplify content-irrelevant textures, while applying a uniform operator design across the hierarchy may be poorly matched to stage-specific representation requirements. We propose the Structural Prior Enhanced Attention Network (SPEANet), a parameter-efficient RSOD backbone that integrates fixed operators through stage-specific prior extraction and context-conditioned response modulation. SPEANet assigns smoothed contour and multi-order directional modeling to shallow, high-resolution features, while employing a compact approximation-detail interaction mechanism in deeper stages. Learned spatial gates regulate the resulting prior responses before residual fusion. Experiments on five benchmarks, together with evaluations across seven detection frameworks on DOTA-v1.0, achieve a favorable accuracy-parameter trade-off. With Oriented R-CNN, SPEANet achieves 78.55\% mAP on DOTA-v1.0, 72.24\% mAP on DOTA-v1.5, and 67.30\% mAP on DIOR-R using 23.0M total parameters, including a 5.97M-parameter backbone.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tile-level representations but remain difficult to interpret at the cellular and microenvironmental scales that underpin clinical reasoning. We introduce Graph-Interpreter (G-Interp), a graph-distillation framework that equips a frozen PFM teacher with a cellular-communication-level "plug-in" interpreter, without modifying the teacher. For each tile, we segment cells as graph nodes and construct a microenvironment graph based on spatial adjacency. Graph neural network (GNN) students distil the PFM embedding, whilst learning attention-based message passing that yields node- and edge-level importances. We interpret these importances as cell-cell communication evidence, providing fine-grained explanations of how PFMs encode microenvironmental context. To stabilise distillation when graph abstraction is imperfect, we employ a lightweight auxiliary student to supply complementary visual cues and condition graph message passing, while keeping the primary interpretability signal graph-derived. We evaluate explanation faithfulness by mapping graph-selected evidence back to the image using instance masks and measuring teacher sensitivity under targeted vs non-target occlusions. Across multiple histopathology tasks, G-Interp produces highly scalable, microenvironment-aware explanations, while maintaining competitive predictive performance.

In this paper, we propose ToW3D that enables precise and consistent control over 3D generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the Tug-of-War competition between shape deformation and appearance consistency. Existing point-based GAN editing methods such as DragGAN and GANWarping have yielded impressive performance for 2D image manipulation. However, as 3D generators present weaker generalization ability compared with 2D due to limited training data, they would suffer from drastic changes in global appearance when editing local areas of meshes. To address this, we design a pipeline of ``drag locally, shove globally'', which iteratively performs two optimization steps: 1) pull the point towards the target, and 2) push the structure and semantics back to the source. Specifically, we design a structure adaption module based on structure which guarantees the preservation of basic geometric properties, and a semantic preservation module that maintains semantic similarity across different views. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate superiority of our ToW3D approach over prior methods in terms of appearance consistency and fidelity especially under large deformations.

This study introduces a novel hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture to address the limited progress in Bengali SLR, focusing on isolated sign word recognition and sentence generation. This specific model combination is new to Bengali SLR tasks. A custom video dataset was developed, featuring 62 distinct Bengali sign words (250 samples/class), along with a separate test dataset. The CNN-Transformer model demonstrated superior performance against all comparative and baseline models (e.g., CNN-LSTM, standalone TCN), achieving a 99.58% training accuracy (99.48% validation) and a 98.65% test accuracy. The trained model was subsequently deployed in a web application for real-world validation.

One-to-one (O2O) matching enables Detection Transformers (DETRs) to perform end-to-end set prediction by assigning each object to a single positive query. However, the strongest classification, center, scale, and overlap evidence for an object is often distributed across multiple queries. This mismatch leaves only the matched owner positively supervised for the object, while other evidence-bearing queries receive no box target for it. We term this query knowledge fragmentation. To exploit such complementary evidence without one-to-many supervision, we propose BS-O2G, a plug-in that builds a sparse prediction-aware graph from decoded features, boxes, and class distributions to organize query collaboration in feature and optimization spaces while preserving the original O2O matcher, positive labels, and objective. One-to-Graph (O2G) calibration propagates relative messages over this graph to consolidate query evidence in the forward pass, whereas Backward Sharing (BS) reuses its transposed detached adjacency to route gradients across persistent query basis vectors without changing the decoder input in the forward pass. Experiments across diverse DETR methods, backbones, COCO, and CrowdHuman show consistent gains and faster convergence with negligible parameter/FLOP growth and modest runtime overhead, supporting graph-based query collaboration as an alternative to expanding positive assignments.

Vision-language models can answer spatial relation questions confidently even when the image supports an incompatible relation. We formulate relation-grounded selective prediction: accept or reject an already-produced yes/no answer by auditing its visual support, rather than treating uncertainty as evidence. RECAP, our relation-evidence calibration framework, compares image-conditioned likelihoods for a claim, its semantic contradictions, and optional one-sided supports, then converts these witnesses into an answer-conditioned rejection risk. A calibration-only gate preserves confidence as a veto when confidence is demonstrably informative and otherwise deploys relation evidence alone. Across 20 group/image-disjoint splits, RECAP lowers H-FPR@80 over confidence by between 2.0 and 17.9 points on VSR and raises Acc@80 by 3.0, 8.6, and 12.6 points on What'sUp for Qwen3-VL-8B, InternVL3.5-8B, and LLaVA-1.5-7B. It outperforms matched VCD-style visual contrast on all four primary metrics in all six settings. Full-pool VSR fallback, target-ranked GSR-Bench transfer, equal-budget supervised controls, and two additional checkpoints show a consistent operating principle: structured counterevidence complements certainty when confidence is misaligned, while the gate retains confidence when it is already useful.

Anomalous video understanding aims to identify abnormal events in videos and interpret their semantic meanings beyond simple anomaly detection. Recent video large language models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot capabilities for this task, yet their performance remains limited due to insufficient adaptation to diverse anomaly patterns and evolving environments. Test-time reinforcement learning offers a promising solution by enabling models to improve through self-generated feedback signals without requiring additional human annotations. However, applying it to anomalous video understanding remains challenging due to three issues: (1) generated pseudo-labels can be unreliable when consensus is weak; (2) binary reward designs fail to capture uncertainty in model generations, resulting in ineffective optimization signals; and (3) unanimous rollout groups receive identical rewards, causing group-relative advantages to collapse and eliminating effective policy-gradient signals. To address these challenges, we present a novel test-time reinforcement learning framework for anomalous video understanding by introducing dual-query consistency filtering, an entropy-aware consensus reward, and a virtual negative anchor mechanism. The framework retains reliable samples through consistency across semantically equivalent queries, combines answer agreement with generation uncertainty for reward estimation, and introduces a virtual negative anchor to create reward variation in unanimous rollout groups, thereby preserving effective group-relative optimization signals. Experiments on VAU-Bench show that our method outperforms the compared frozen and supervised baselines. The gains are most pronounced on the ECVA subset of VAU-Bench with thinking, where accuracy improves from 75.81% to 90.00% relative to the frozen backbone.

Medical Image Super-Resolution (MISR) aims to enhance spatial resolution without requiring hardware modifications. Although deep learning has yielded promising results, existing paradigms face a critical trade-off: diffusion-based methods suffer from prohibitive inference latency and compromised structural fidelity, whereas regression-based models typically produce over-smoothed results that lack perceptual realism. To address these limitations, we propose MIAR, which reformulates super-resolution as a conditional and progressive next-scale prediction task through a multi-scale autoregressive framework. To ensure structural fidelity, we augment the autoregressive backbone with a Scale-Adaptive Structural Decoder. Furthermore, we integrate a hierarchical beam search strategy during inference to mitigate the recursive error accumulation inherent in autoregressive generation, a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in medical images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIAR establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks while maintaining superior fidelity. Notably, our framework achieves a 7.86% improvement in the perceptual metric MUSIQ compared with the state of the art, while simultaneously delivering a 2.02x speedup over diffusion-based methods.

Human-centric audio-visual generation spans several closely related tasks: animating a person from driving speech, jointly generating speech and video from a voice reference, and synthesizing a scene from paired appearance and voice references. Existing systems commonly solve these tasks with separate models, even though they share the same target modalities and differ mainly in which observations are provided as conditions. We present Vorch-Human, a unified human-centric generation framework built on a dual-stream audio-video diffusion transformer. Vorch-Human augments the conventional noisy audio/noisy video interface with clean condition-audio and condition-video token groups. Per-token task embeddings, temporal position types, condition masks, and a shared multimodal prompt encoder allow driving speech, timbre examples, first frames, and subject images to be expressed within one model. To supply the supervision required by this interface, we develop a two-level data pipeline. Level 1 analyzes each clip with speech recognition, vocal separation, face detection and tracking, active-speaker and synchronization models, audio/visual speaker clustering, and multimodal caption correction; it produces subject-indexed speech, appearance, and timbre annotations. Level 2 links the same person across clips from a common source video and mines identity- and outfit-consistent reference images after face, body, quality, pose, and vision-language verification. Finally, we adapt Vorch-Human to long-form audio-driven generation by training with clean latent prefixes and using the same frozen-prefix recurrence at inference. Each segment contributes only its newly generated suffix, reducing boundary discontinuity and long-horizon identity drift. Experiments on short and five-minute generation demonstrate strong identity preservation, audio-visual synchronization, and temporal stability.

Estimating the 6D pose of moving objects remains challenging due to motion blur and the limited temporal resolution of conventional frame-based cameras. Existing event-based datasets further provide limited sensing modalities, annotations, and motion scenarios. We introduce Moving6DPoSe, a multimodal database comprising two complementary subsets: Moving6DPoSe-R with real-world recordings and Moving6DPoSe-S with synthetic sequences generated from the same objects. The dataset contains 16 scanned objects and 1,702 real and synthetic rosbags spanning multiple motion scenarios, with annotations for semantic segmentation, object detection, and monocular 6D pose estimation. We further provide baseline results for all three tasks across frame and event-based modalities. Experimental results show that event-based representations achieve more robust moving-object segmentation than conventional RGB images, while monocular orientation estimation remains challenging, highlighting the potential of Moving6DPoSe for moving-object perception research.

Remote Sensing Change Captioning (RSCC), which aims to generate accurate and detailed linguistic descriptions of ground object variations from bi-temporal remote sensing images, is a critical and challenging task in intelligent remote sensing interpretation. The mainstream autoregressive training paradigm faces severe exposure bias and train-test distribution mismatch, resulting in cumulative generation errors. They tend to produce conservative and template-fixed captions while ignoring subtle scene change details. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel multi-granularity reward reinforcement learning paradigm, termed MGRL-RSCC. Specifically, we first leverage a CNN and hierarchical self-attention module to extract and enhance visual features from bi-temporal remote sensing images. A Transformer decoder is then utilized to complete visual-to-linguistic translation. Different from existing methods, we design a dual-decoding strategy and a two-stage joint optimization scheme, which combines token-level supervised learning via greedy decoding and multi-granularity reward-driven self-critical reinforcement learning via sampling decoding. We further construct three complementary reward functions covering linguistic fluency, change state consistency, and structural-semantic relevance to comprehensively optimize caption quality and alleviate false and missing change descriptions. Extensive experiments on multiple public RSCC benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MGRL-RSCC effectively mitigates exposure bias and conservative generation problems in traditional autoregressive methods. The source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/MGRL-RSCC

Video Odometry (VO) is the process of estimating the ego-motion of an object by analyzing visual information such as a sequence of frames from one or multiple cameras. It has been a popular research topic in computer vision and robotics, and its applications include mobile robotic systems as well as autonomous driving. In this project, we investigate existing end-to-end deep-learning approaches to VO, and propose a novel temporal attention-based model to improve upon the baseline. In addition, while the vast majority of existing deep-learning-based approaches to VO are trained on driving data, we investigate the performance of deep-learning-based VO to the more dynamic and complex problem of hand-held cameras.

Retinal vessel segmentation in multi-domain deployment requires a source model to adapt to domains that differ in imaging conditions and annotation conventions. Conventional parameter-efficient fine-tuning reduces target-specific storage, but its highly restricted adaptation subspace can be insufficient for reconstructing thin, connected vascular structures. We therefore ask how target-specific capacity should be allocated so that topology-aware supervision remains effective under a strict per-domain parameter budget. Based on this principle, we propose TAPDecoderFT, a topology-responsive, role-structured adaptation framework. Specifically, TAPDecoderFT shares a fixed source parameter state across deployment domains, uses low-rank residuals for target-specific private/fusion feature mixing, and retains a trainable dense-reconstruction path comprising the decoder, output head, and refinement module. To promote structurally faithful predictions, the compact target state is jointly optimized with a region-overlap and topology-aware objective that encourages centerline continuity and thin-branch recovery. It improves both DSC and clDice over GenericLoRA-r4 and narrow TAP-r4 in all six directions and is comparable to full fine-tuning.

Aligning with the human visual system~(HVS) in perceiving and evaluating the quality of visual signals is a central objective of machine-vision-based visual quality assessment systems. With the rapid progress of large multi-modal models~(LMMs), visual question answering provides a promising paradigm for building unified foundation models for visual quality assessment under multi-modal and multi-task scenarios. Inspired by the classical ``perception-decision" process in HVS-based quality evaluation, we formulate visual quality assessment for LMM-based machine vision as two complementary tasks: ``quality interpretation'' and ``quality scoring". Centered on these objectives, we propose LLaVA-Assessor, a unified data construction and model training system. To support multi-modal inputs, we design an adaptive model architecture that enables efficient processing of both images and videos. For data construction, we develop rigorous human annotation protocols and a novel machine-synthesis-dominated data expansion pipeline to build a large-scale and high-quality datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a simple yet effective prompt disentanglement strategy to alleviate training-objective confusion in multi-task learning, thereby enabling stable and coherent joint training. The resulting all-in-one LMM LLaVA-Assessor-GIGA achieves superior performance on $11$ image/video quality scoring test sets and 4 visual quality interpretation benchmarks. Extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating structured data construction, adaptive model design, and multi-task joint training for automated visual quality assessment. Our work provides compelling insights for developing foundation LMMs for automatic visual quality assessment. Project page at https://github.com/jzhws/LLaVA-Assessor.

Text-to-video (T2V) services inherit their safety stack from image generation, pairing a keyword prompt filter with a per-frame checker that blocks a clip whenever one sampled frame looks unsafe. This stack has a blind spot unique to video. We prove that any moderator ignoring frame order accepts a harmful clip whenever it accepts that clip's benign shuffle, so harm carried by the ordering alone escapes. Empirically, the unmodified benchmark prompt already lands a clip in this moderation gap on 32.7% of Sequential-Action targets over four held-out seeds, and paraphrasing, scene splitting, and a feedback-driven prompt search show no significant improvement (paired McNemar $p\ge0.12$), so prompt engineering is not needed to expose the vulnerability. Dense-scoring all 97 rendered frames shows that about a third of the delivered clips merely hide an unsafe frame, while the rest stay harmful as ordered videos even though every frame passes, an order-blind residual the unmodified prompt reaches on a quarter of Sequential-Action targets. We also document a measurement pitfall, since scoring a searched prompt on its own render seed inflates a 7.5% per-generation rate into an apparent 46.7%. A user study confirms that people read these clips as harmful and their shuffles as safe. The fix is to read frame order, and an order-aware detector separates these clips from their own shuffles at AUC 0.74 where per-frame checking sits at chance, which is the signal deployed moderation throws away.

Video watermarking underpins copyright protection and provenance for generated media, yet almost every video is compressed by a codec before it is stored or shared. A codec discards precisely the perceptually redundant components that most watermarks rely on, so the payload is often lost even when the marked video looked flawless beforehand. Existing methods leave this path open, since they treat compression as one entry in a generic list of distortions, while a real codec is not differentiable and cannot enter gradient-based training. We present COVER, the first learned video watermark built around codec compression as its design target, which survives that compression by embedding the payload in the latent space of a frozen generative video autoencoder and recovering it by re-encoding the received video into that same latent space. To make codec robustness trainable, we build a differentiable codec surrogate bank that simulates the dominant degradation modes of practical compression, and we train the embedder and the latent decoder through three shared recovery paths under a fidelity objective that constrains the residual in the pixel and frequency domains. Across four codecs at 12 settings, COVER attains 93.72% average bit accuracy, ranks first on 11 of the 12, improves the strongest prior method by 2.68 points, and lifts the worst operating point from 68.90% to 73.72% while each marked video stays visually close to the source clip that produced it.

The rapid evolution of generative AI (e.g., Sora, Hunyuan) makes it essential to develop effective detection strategies that can generalize across ever-evolving synthesis techniques. This study is motivated by the observation of a fundamental challenge in generative models: the inherent difficulty of maintaining cross-modal consistency between appearance and motion. To this end, we propose a multi-modal framework for AIGC video forgery detection tasks, named Cross-Attention based Video Forgery Detector (CrossAtt-VFD), based on joint multi-view analysis of content.Methodologically, we introduce a dual-branch architecture that simultaneously extracts spatial-frequency and optical-flow features.This approach enables the modeling of videos from complementary perceptual perspectives.The core of this process is a dedicated cross-attention mechanism, which governs the alignment of the two modalities and translates cross-modal inconsistencies into a potent diagnostic signal. This multi-modal strategy facilitates the detection of motion that is statistically inconsistent with the visual appearance of a scene. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrated that our model achieves an accuracy of 94.22%, a precision of 91.67 %,and a recall of 96.25 %, effectively verifying the advantages of the multi-modal fusion strategy.

Existing latent world models are typically optimized for future predictability, yet the resulting representations are not necessarily useful for planning in autonomous driving. Predictions are commonly used for pretraining or auxiliary supervision rather than as direct conditioning signals for trajectory generation. We propose ForeDrive, which learns a planning-relevant latent representation and couples it asymmetrically to a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) planner. The planner consumes multi-horizon latent future representations learned with a JEPA-style world model; planning gradients update the shared online encoder, while stop-gradient routing trains the latent predictor with forecasting losses only. Because predicted futures have varying reliability across horizons and BEV trajectories are misaligned with image tokens, we use gated visual fusion, future-status injection, and Trajectory-Adaptive Bias (TAB) to inject future latents as guidance without overriding the current observation. Trained with pure imitation learning and using only the current front-view image as visual input at inference, ForeDrive attains 89.9 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 and 90.0 one-stage EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, without reinforcement learning or an external trajectory scorer.

Camera-based 3D object detection and online vectorized HD mapping provide compact scene representations for autonomous driving, but both depend on accurate metric geometry and remain limited by depth ambiguity. Over long-term deployment, observations from repeated traversals can be accumulated into persistent point cloud priors that provide geometric context beyond the current observations. Existing explicit point cloud prior approaches, however, rely on LiDAR-based map construction and therefore require expensive 3D ranging sensors. We propose a framework that constructs a static point cloud prior map from previous camera traversals using Pi3X and augments each point with DINOv3 features. At runtime, a local prior patch is retrieved using global localization, encoded with a sparse voxel backbone, and fused in bird's-eye view (BEV) with lifted multi-view camera features. Task-specific sparse transformer heads then predict 3D objects and vectorized map elements from the fused representation. On Argoverse 2, the vision-based prior improves a strong baseline from 0.287 to 0.299 CDS and from 0.669 to 0.750 vectorized mapping mAP. Ablations show that semantic DINOv3 features are particularly important for vectorized mapping. These results demonstrate that vision-built geometric-semantic priors provide an effective form of long-term scene memory for camera-based perception, improving both tasks without LiDAR for prior-map construction or online inference.

The dimensional collapse of representations in self-supervised contrastive learning is an ever-present issue. One notable technique to prevent such a collapse of representations is using a multi-layered perceptron network called Projector. In several works, the projector has been found to heavily influence the quality of representations learned in a self-supervised contrastive pre-training task. However, the question still lingers. What role does the projector play? Assuming the projector mitigates dimensional collapse, what prevents the terminal layer of the base encoder from functioning as the projector in the absence of an explicit multi-layer perceptron (MLP) head? In this work, we intend to study what happens inside the projector by examining the rank dynamics of the same and the encoder through empirical study and analysis. Through mathematical analysis, we observe that the effect of rank reduction predominantly occurs in the last layer. Motivated by this insight, we propose a weight regularization strategy applied specifically to the last layer. We demonstrate that this targeted approach yields better performance than applying orthogonal weight regularization across the entire network (WeRank), both with and without a projector. Our method improves Top-1 accuracy by more than 1% on SimCLR on the ImageNet100 dataset and consistently outperforms baseline SimCLR variants on CIFAR datasets, supporting our interpretation of the projector's role.

Commercial image editing requires product identity preservation, accurate text rendering, and user appeal alongside general editing quality. We present KwaiMind, an image editing system combining general capabilities with e-commerce specialization. An agent-based data engine maintains approximately 1.8 million high-quality editing pairs. Built on a multimodal diffusion transformer, KwaiMind undergoes continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, followed by preference optimization and online reinforcement learning. A general-purpose vision-language judge and specialized rewards for click-through rate (CTR), text rendering, and product consistency guide specialized policies, which are consolidated through on-policy distillation. We introduce Ecom-Bench, covering 11 commercial editing tasks with task-specific visual evaluation and CTR-based ranking. KwaiMind achieves the strongest overall scores among evaluated open-source editors on ImgEdit, GEdit, both language splits of REDEdit, and Ecom-Bench visual quality, and the highest aggregate CTR ranking score among compared systems. Offline, CTR-guided optimization increases the proportion of generated images whose predicted CTR exceeds that of the original product image from 12.16% to 37.41%. In an online A/B experiment, CTR-based selection of product main images yields an approximately 2.44% relative increase in actual CTR. These results demonstrate the value of domain-specific data and reward-driven alignment for commercial image editing.

KV cache memory has become a major deployment bottleneck for video generation and world models, which motivates low-bit quantization study for efficiency. Existing 2-bit KV cache quantization methods can achieve nearly lossless performance on video benchmarks such as VBench, however, we find that they still cause severe temporal flickering and visual degradation. Meanwhile, deeper investigates show that Key quantization produces smaller reconstruction errors than Value, but surprisingly leads to much larger output degradation. We trace this discrepancy to attention: small Key perturbations can change the attention logits, i.e., QK^\top, and shift the temporal-spatial tokens selected by Queries. These observations motivate us to explicitly preserve attention logits and temporal-spatial token selection during KV cache quantization to alleviate the visual degradation problem. To address this issue, we present QuantWM, a training-free and strictly causal 2-bit KV cache quantization framework. QuantWM introduces two complementary techniques to mitigate the attention shifts. Firstly, quantization-sensitivity-aware clustering (QSAC) jointly considers historical Query sensitivity and residual ranges to select INT2-friendly Key centroids, which reduces quantization errors in channels that are more critical to attention. In addition, principal-subspace attention compensation (PSAC) restores the remaining Key errors along the dominant Query subspace using low-rank projections, which provides a direct and efficient correction to stabilize attention logits. Extensive experiments on Causal-Forcing, LingBot-World-v2, HY-World 1.5, Matrix-Game-2 and Longcat-Video demonstrate that QuantWM significantly improves visual quality and temporal consistency, while outperforming existing methods across image and video quality metrics with up to 6.20x KV cache memory compression and limited additional overhead.

Dataset distillation (DD) compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while preserving downstream training utility. Although DD has been widely studied for images and recently extended to time-series forecasting, its application to human motion prediction remains largely unexplored. Human motion is high-dimensional and structurally coupled, and gradient matching (GM) in the original motion space optimizes many correlated variables without a prior on pose plausibility or temporal dynamics, which frequently yields implausible and unstable synthetic motions. To address this limitation, we propose a latent DD framework that regularizes distillation with a learned motion prior. Motions are first compressed by a residual-quantized variational autoencoder (RVQ-VAE), and distillation then updates only a learnable latent bank through the frozen quantizer and decoder. The pretrained decoder restricts synthetic motions to its output space, while residual quantization progressively refines the latent approximation across multiple codebooks and alleviates the representational bottleneck of single-stage vector quantization. Experiments on Human3.6M, CMU, and 3DPW with two prediction backbones show that the proposed framework outperforms direct GM in 27 of 30 evaluated settings and random subsets in every setting, and produces visibly more plausible synthetic motions in qualitative comparisons.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have substantially improved breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and prognosis. Comparatively, postradiotherapy outcome prediction using paired longitudinal mammograms has received considerably less attention. This is largely due to the limited availability of well-annotated longitudinal datasets. Longitudinal mammograms, coupled with paired pre- and post-treatment information, provide a unique opportunity to characterize treatment-induced breast tissue changes following radiotherapy. The resulting learned representations can serve as a valuable asset for advancing personalized radiotherapy planning and post-treatment management. In this context, we propose Mammo-LIFE, a patient-level multimodal framework for post-radiotherapy outcome prediction that combines longitudinal mammographic features with patient-level clinical variables. The imaging branch processes paired pre- and post-treatment mammograms acquired from the four standard views using a mammography-specific encoder adapted via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Within each view, preand post-treatment representations are explicitly compared through a longitudinal comparison module to capture treatment-related changes. The resulting view-level embeddings are then aggregated using learned view-attention pooling to form a unified patient-level mammographic representation. Selected clinical variables are subsequently combined with the image-derived prediction probability through a late-fusion strategy. To evaluate the effectiveness of combining paired longitudinal mammograms with clinical information, experiments were conducted on an in-house clinical cohort using patient-level stratified five-fold cross-validation.

We introduce \textbf{CoDeR}, a new paradigm for world modeling. Unlike existing video world models that implicitly represent world dynamics through visual observations, our system explicitly constructs an executable world with code and employs video generation models for visual realization. Specifically, we coordinate five complementary roles to translate high-level concepts into structured world rules, executable dynamics, and perceptual observations. This design enables \textit{long-term memory}, \textit{open-ended interactions}, \textit{autonomous world evolution}, and \textit{multi-agent scenarios}, where multiple entities can act, interact, and evolve persistently beyond the current observation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework substantially extends the capabilities of existing world models, enabling long-term memory, open-ended interactions, autonomous evolution, and persistent multi-agent dynamics, while achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation settings. Code and model weights will be made publicly available. Project Page: \href{https://becauseimbatman0.github.io/CoDeR}{CoDeR}.

Accurate preoperative subtype classification of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) from contrast-enhanced computed tomography remains clinically challenging. Radiomics provides structured tumour descriptors, whereas foundation representations offer transferable image features. However, it remains unclear whether radiomics still adds value beyond pretrained representations, and how 2D and 3D MedVAE encoders compare in this setting. We compared handcrafted radiomics, 2D MedVAE, 3D MedVAE, and their fusion for binary clear-cell RCC versus non-clear-cell RCC classification on KiTS23 under a unified preprocessing pipeline. Concatenation, cross-attention, and gated fusion were evaluated as representative integration strategies, and radiomics feature importance was analysed to support decision-centric interpretability. Fusion consistently improved discrimination over image-only MedVAE branches. The best overall performance was achieved by 3D gated fusion, with an AUC of 82.7\%, outperforming the best 2D fusion model (79.6%), the radiomics baseline (74.4%), and the single-modality MedVAE branches. Ablation analysis further showed clear gains of the full fusion model over both image-only and radiomics-only variants, indicating complementary contributions from radiomics and image representations. These findings suggest that radiomics remains relevant for RCC CT classification in the presence of foundation representations, and that its integration with MedVAE is more effective in the 3D setting. More broadly, the study supports a complementary role for radiomics and foundation representations in clinically meaningful imaging decision support.

Scattered light is common in biomedical images, yet its removal remains challenging. The difficulty arises from three aspects: first, aligned scattered-light-free biomedical ground truth is often unavailable; second, scattering is coupled with weak illumination and sensor-induced noise; and third, many learning-based restoration models are computationally expensive for embedded devices in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes PP-Net, a hybrid physical-prior neural network for biomedical scattered light removal. The proposed method consists of three components: DFN-Net suppresses sensor-induced noise, ASAP estimates the scattering map and recovers a physics-based prior map, and GF-Net refines the prior map by fusing it with the denoised observation. To reduce the dependence on paired biomedical ground truth, a progressive synthetic training and cross-domain transfer strategy is developed. Experiments show that the physical-prior branch improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by up to 1.26 dB on paired synthetic benchmarks. Under joint noise-and-scattering degradation, PP-Net improves PSNR by more than 10.8 dB and the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) by more than 0.62 compared with representative baseline methods. On real W2S biomedical images, the proposed method reduces the average Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) score by 43.3\%. Edge deployment with RKNN conversion and INT8 quantization achieves an average inference latency of approximately 200 ms per $512\times512$ image over 360 test images. These results demonstrate that PP-Net provides an effective and deployable solution for microscopic imaging, endoscopic inspection, and edge-assisted biomedical analysis in IoMT scenarios.

Training-free visual-token pruning often uses token importance, redundancy, or related selection criteria as proxies for safe removal. We show that these signals alone do not fully characterize removability, which is conditioned on both representation depth and the surrounding deletion set. Controlled interventions demonstrate that removing the same tokens at different depths produces substantially different downstream perturbations, while changing only the deletion context at a fixed depth alters candidate marginals and pruning-boundary decisions. These findings show that token importance alone cannot determine when a token is safely removable or how its removability changes under joint deletion. Motivated by this perspective, we propose CoRePrune, a training-free two-stage framework. Progressive Perturbation-Aware Visual Pruning refreshes deletion effects as visual representations evolve, while Set-Conditioned Refinement reevaluates candidate rescue benefits under the current deletion set after visual--text interaction. Across five multimodal large language model backbones covering standard images, high-resolution inputs, and video, CoRePrune preserves performance under aggressive token budgets. On Qwen3.5, with a final budget of 128 visual tokens, it retains 90.3% of dense-model performance while reducing aggregate prefill time by 51.0%.

Radiomics provides quantitative descriptions of tumour appearance that may complement disease-specific foundation models in small labelled cohorts. We investigate this complementarity for computed tomography-based classification of clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Our framework uses radiomics to modulate RenalCLIP features through feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM), while retaining a direct radiomics contribution. Internal testing and external validation compare it with conventional fusion strategies and reference classifiers. The FiLM model achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.804 internally and 0.854 externally, with the highest mean AUC among the evaluated RenalCLIP fusion strategies in both cohorts. Pathway ablations examine the contributions of conditional modulation and the direct radiomics residual, while feature permutation highlights the role of tumour texture. These findings support radiomics as a useful complement to RenalCLIP in a small labelled cohort and identify FiLM as an effective approach to integrating their representations for robust renal tumour classification.

Retraining visual perception pipelines in High-Mix, Low-Volume (HMLV) automotive manufacturing must be carried out under tight annotation, energy, and time budgets, yet most Synthetic Data Generation (SDG) strategies still operate in the thousands of images. This work evaluates Semantically-Guided Domain Randomization (S-GDR), an annotation-free adaptation pipeline that couples Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based semantic captioning of a small unannotated real reference set with diffusion-based background synthesis (Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) conditioned by ControlNet and IP-Adapter) and mask-based object composition. On an automotive multi-object detection benchmark and with a fixed budget of 200 synthetic training images, S-GDR reaches mAP50-95 = 0.739 on a real held-out test set, outperforming a domain-randomized render baseline (mAP50-95 = 0.697) as well as brightness filtering, perceptual hashing, CycleGAN style transfer, and unguided diffusion variants sharing the same 200-image budget. These initial observations position S-GDR as a promising annotation- free alternative for extreme data-scarcity regimes.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers are both used to model the human visual system, but whether the two architectures diverge at a specific point in network depth is unclear. We compared six CNNs and two vision transformers by computing the Pearson correlation (r) between each model's predicted and measured EEG response at every layer or block, in ten participants viewing 200 natural images. For the transformer models, we also tested four token representations, from the classification (CLS) token alone to CLS combined with all patch tokens. CNNs showed strongest correspondence at the earliest layers, weakening at deeper layers, particularly later in the post-stimulus response. Transformers instead sustained strong correspondence at their deepest blocks, though not at their earliest ones. This advantage depended on token representation: pooled representations gave weaker peak correlations (r approx 0.48-0.51) than representations retaining all patch tokens (r=0.640 for CLIP-ViT-B/32, r=0.656 for DINOv2-ViT-B/14). Controlled comparisons showed architecture, not training objective, drove this effect: MoCo-v1 and ResNet-50 (matched architecture) performed nearly identically (r=0.673, 0.670), whereas CLIP-RN50 and CLIP-ViT-B/32 (matched objective) diverged until patch tokens were preserved. We propose that CNN training's classification bottleneck compresses brain-relevant information at depth, unlike transformers' self-attention and non-classification objectives. A spatial topography analysis showed a common occipital-dominant pattern across all models, indicating these differences reflect signal strength and persistence rather than distinct brain regions. Patch-preserving transformer representations sustain brain-predictive correspondence where CNNs collapse.

Multimodal language models traditionally rely on dedicated perceptual encoders to construct task-usable representations. More integrated architectures have recently emerged, which instead expose the shared transformer to lightly projected patches, audio frames, or discrete visual tokens. Where does this encoding happen when such representations are not provided? We find that the transformer can internalize this missing computation, constructing task-usable perceptual representations within its own early-to-middle layers before the downstream language model. We call this computational structure a Virtual Encoder. Across linear probing, similarities to perceptual encoders, and causal analyses, we identify signatures of this structure in models that receive perceptual tokens without continuous encoder-derived features. These analyses also suggest that the boundary between perception and language processing need not coincide within an architectural module. Instead, encoder-like computation can emerge as a functional regime within a shared transformer, providing a new perspective for understanding where and how multimodal models process perception.

Individual tree crown segmentation from aerial imagery underpins tree-level carbon accounting, biodiversity, and restoration monitoring at landscape scale. However, existing models are predominantly trained on dense canopy forest imagery and degrade in savannah and drylands, where tree crowns are sparse, of variable appearance, and underrepresented in annotated benchmarks. These models also typically depend on costly polygon annotations. We introduce LACE (LAtent Commonality Expectation-maximisation), a box-supervised instance segmentation model, evaluated on 0.1 m/px aerial RGB tree crown imagery. LACE uses a frozen DINOv3-web ViT-L/16 encoder, applied at four spatial offsets and interlaced into a denser feature grid, with a lightweight CenterNet-style detection head trained solely on bounding boxes. We use expectation-maximisation to separate recurring appearance, the "treeness", within bounding boxes from surroundings. On the OAM-TCD benchmark test set, LACE reaches a mask AP$_{50}$ of $0.663 \pm 0.001$ (3 seeds) trained on 900 box-annotated images and without mask annotations, above the 0.626 scored by Restor's released mask-supervised Mask R-CNN, which was trained on the full ~4.2k image set. On a sparse-canopy holdout set, mask AP$_{50}$ rises to $0.691$ versus $0.612$ for Detectree2, a mask-supervised baseline. On NeonTreeEvaluation, using the official evaluation code, LACE reaches $0.728 \pm 0.003$ [email protected] (5 seeds) from 23,424 hand-annotated RGB boxes alone, matching the authors' DeepForest model's published 0.719, using under 0.1% of its training annotations and none of its LiDAR-derived 30M-crown pretraining set. By leveraging frozen self-supervised features, LACE matches or surpasses fully-supervised specialist baselines from boxes alone, removing the need for polygon annotation in tree crown instance segmentation for sparse-canopy environments where labelled data is scarce.

We present an improvement on previous spacecraft pose estimation architectures that results in the lowest published mean rotation errors we know of on the SPEED+ lightbox and sunlamp test sets for a known, non-cooperative spacecraft. By using a previously established heatmap-based pose estimation architecture and adapting a large self-supervised ViT foundation model (DINOv3) in place of the smaller convolutional and ViT encoders of previous work, we show that pose estimation accuracy improves from 300M to 840M parameters with no saturation yet observed. We also evaluate our 840M model on a Jetson Orin NX 16GB, measuring single-pass network inference at 133.8 ms per crop with a board draw of 32.0 W. These measurements demonstrate embedded inference feasibility on a processor family with orbital flight heritage. Our resulting model outperforms previous models across lightbox and sunlamp domains while training only on synthetic data. Our best model, using DINOv3 840M adapted with LoRA as the encoder (rank 64, three-seed ensemble with four-rotation test-time augmentation), results in $1.56^\circ$ mean rotation error on sunlamp and $1.17^\circ$ on lightbox, compared to the previous best mean rotation errors we know of on these test sets, $2.66^\circ$ and $1.75^\circ$ by EagerNet.

Accurate preoperative subtype classification of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) from contrast-enhanced CT remains clinically challenging because clear cell RCC (ccRCC) and non-clear cell RCC often show overlapping imaging appearances. This study evaluates whether foundation representations reduce reliance on handcrafted radiomics, or whether radiomics remains complementary for interpretable tumour characterisation. We compared radiomics, conventional CNN features, MedicalNet-pretrained features, MedVAE representations, and fusion variants for binary ccRCC classification on KiTS23, reporting area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) with bootstrap confidence intervals and average precision (AP) as a complementary class-imbalance-sensitive metric. We further assessed branch-removal ablation, TCGA/AIMI external transfer, and interpretability using radiomics permutation importance and gate-level analysis. Internally, 3D MedVAE gated fusion achieved the best performance, with an AUC of 82.7% and AP of 92.2%. On the external TCGA cohort, the same model achieved an AUC of 79.5% and AP of 98.9%, although specificity remains uncertain because only two external non-ccRCC cases were available. Gate analysis showed a radiomics-dominant fusion regime, suggesting that foundation representations acted as case-dependent refinement signals rather than replacements for structured tumour descriptors. These findings support radiomics as a complementary and clinically interpretable component of CT-based RCC characterisation in the foundation-model era.

Self-attention-based vision backbones perform well on dense prediction, but the quadratic computational cost of global softmax attention limits their efficiency as image resolution increases. We introduce Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone that combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using only final-layer patch-token alignment through a linear projection and squared $\ell_2$ loss, without masked-token prediction or intermediate-layer supervision. With Objects365 detector pre-training, GTR-L achieves 58.9 box AP on COCO \texttt{val2017} with 1.908\,ms median batch-one latency under compiled FP16 execution on an RTX~4090. The same backbone also transfers to instance segmentation, pose estimation, oriented detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. In an isolated kernel benchmark, our specialized chunkwise CUDA operator is $4.0\times$ faster than FLA v0.5.0 at 1.6K tokens on RTX~4090. TensorRT deployment on DRIVE AGX Thor achieves 2.282--8.769\,ms median batch-one latency across the evaluated models. These results show that recurrent token mixing can provide an efficient alternative to global softmax attention for high-resolution dense prediction and edge deployment.Project page: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/GTR/

Foundation model embeddings of screening mammograms may encode pre-diagnostic tissue change without task-specific adaptation. We tested whether embeddings move faster along a data-derived "cancer direction" in women later biopsied for cancer than in matched screen-negative controls, and whether this depends on pretraining domain. We studied 1,773 biopsied women (785 malignant, 988 biopsy-negative) and 1,773 matched controls, each with at least two annual screening exams before their index exam. An identical pipeline was applied to four 2D models: Mammo-CLIP (MC, out-of-distribution mammography), HOPPR (in-distribution mammography), MedImageInsight (MII, general medical imaging), and BiomedCLIP (biomedical vision-language pretraining on literature figures). Breast-level embeddings quantified longitudinal movement along the cancer direction. We compared cases and controls using a between-patient design with complementary mixed-effects analysis, and biopsied versus healthy contralateral breasts within patients. Under matched modality in MII embedding space, malignant cases drifted significantly faster than controls in the first two screening intervals preceding the index exam; biopsy-negative cases showed significance only in the first. MC differences were significant in the first interval for both biopsy groups. Within-patient comparisons showed a broadly similar pattern, with MC significance extending to the second interval in both groups and HOPPR showing significance at interval 1. BiomedCLIP showed no significant differences in either design or biopsy group. Overall, directional embedding velocity emerges as a property of clinically grounded rather than general biomedical pretraining, showing that foundation model embeddings can encode pre-diagnostic mammographic change without task-specific adaptation.

Clinical decision making heavily relies on predicting the disease progression trajectory by seeking to understand patient's health status which is characterised by multimodal medical data. AI holds great potential for learning useful representations from multimodal medical data to predict disease progression and aid clinical decision making. However, development of predictive AI models is constrained by missing modalities and incomplete tabular data frequently occurring in medical datasets. In addition, disease labels alone may only provide limited supervisory signals for learning representations from high-dimensional multimodal data. Here, we present MMAP, a novel Multimodal Missing-aware Alignment Pretraining method for learning image-tabular representations from incomplete data. An image encoder is pretrained with efficient sigmoid contrastive learning combined with generative reconstruction. A tabular encoder is built upon a tabular foundation model. A missing token generator enables the two encoders to take incomplete data as input, enabling the model to be robust against missing modalities, either with missing images or missing tabular data. We evaluate the clinical usefulness of the learnt multimodal representations on two challenging longitudinal clinical tasks for Alzheimer's disease: predicting disease stage conversion and predicting amyloid status. The proposed method outperforms strong multimodal and unimodal baselines.

Photographic composition aims to provide visual guidance for improving the framing, viewpoint, and spatial arrangement of an image. Early methods primarily rely on image cropping to enhance composition, which is restricted to the viewpoint and spatial arrangement of the input image. Recent methods have explored image understanding and editing to improve composition, but they mainly focus on instruction following and aesthetic quality, overlooking the importance of 3D scene geometry consistency for photographic composition. In this work, we propose GeoComposer, a novel geometry-grounded photographic composition framework that analyzes the composition of a given image to generate textual guidance and synthesizes a visual exemplar that enhances the composition of the given image. To promote geometry-grounded composition, we propose a geometry-aware representation learning mechanism that leverages geometric priors from a visual geometry foundation model to shape the intermediate representations of the composition editing model. This mechanism preserves both global structural relationships and local fine-grained correspondences for geometry-grounded composition. Furthermore, we propose a reinforcement learning strategy guided by a hybrid reward that jointly optimizes instruction following, aesthetic quality, and geometric consistency. This enables the model to generate visual exemplars that faithfully follow the composition instructions while remaining visually appealing and geometrically consistent. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in generating visually appealing and geometrically consistent composition.

Diffusion-based synthetic data generation offers a promising route for sharing medical imaging data without releasing sensitive patient records. However, generative models face a fundamental tension between privacy and fairness: they may memorize rare training samples, leading to privacy risks, or fail to reproduce underrepresented features, resulting in unfair synthetic distributions. While prior work has largely focused on either memorization or fairness in isolation, their interaction remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we introduce a data-interventional framework to systematically analyze privacy and fairness in diffusion models. We discuss synthetic anatomical fingerprints (SAFs), rare and manually injected image features, as controlled probes to study whether models generalize sensitive attributes across identities, memorize training samples, or suppress rare signals entirely. Across multiple conditioning modalities, we observe a consistent behavior: models either forget these fingerprints or memorize the entire image in which they appear, but do not generalize them to novel images. To support large-scale auditing where explicit sample extraction is infeasible, we further introduce the indicator metric t', which estimates a model's susceptibility to memorization by exploiting the internal structure of the diffusion process. By comparing conditioning signals of varying surprisal, we reveal a clear relationship between conditioning rarity and memorization behavior. Highly surprising conditioning signals act as retrieval keys that amplify memorization, whereas low-surprisal conditioning signals systematically suppress rare features, even when these appear repeatedly in the training data. Our findings provide actionable insights and concrete mitigation strategies for safe and fair synthetic medical data sharing. Code is available at https://github.com/MischaD/Privacy.

Laryngeal high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) offers an effective means of observing the motion of different laryngeal structures along with vibratory behaviors of the vocal folds under various voicing conditions. Segmentation of laryngeal tissues enables analysis of different tissue structures and their dynamics, helping characterize the involvement of laryngeal muscles in voice production. Given the large number of HSV frames, automating this task is imperative. While deep learning-based methods have been implemented in previous studies to segment laryngeal structures, they have not been applied to HSV data during connected speech, which poses significant challenges due to excessive tissue movements and image quality limitations associated with fiberoptic image acquisition. The application of deep learning to connected speech data is critical for capturing nonstationary laryngeal behaviors and identifying anomalous patterns associated with voice disorders. The present study aims to address these gaps by training U-Net models to detect the aryepiglottic folds and arytenoid cartilages, vocal folds, epiglottis, and glottal area, using HSV data from both sustained vowel phonation and connected speech obtained from normophonic and disordered voices. Image pre-processing techniques, including noise removal and histogram equalization, were applied to improve the quality of the training HSV images and enhance network performance. Finally, to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the networks, quantitative performance metrics were used alongside qualitative visual inspection of the test images. The high performance of the developed networks, with overall accuracies exceeding 95%, establishes their potential as reliable tools for automated laryngeal image analysis, quantitative characterization of laryngeal dynamics, and future detection of anomalous laryngeal behaviors in clinical settings.

Purposes: To characterize longitudinal retinal vascular changes in myopic children treated with orthokeratology (OK) or multifocal defocus lenses (Defocus) and to examine their association with axial elongation. Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, 43 myopic children underwent comprehensive clinical examination and fundus photography at baseline, 12 months, and 24 months. Axial length (AL) and spherical equivalent refraction (SER) were recorded at baseline, 6, 12, and 24 months. An automated segmentation model extracted vascular parameters, main vessel angle (MA), branching angle (BA), bifurcation edge angle (BEA), crossover point (COP), and terminal vessel count (TVC). Repeated-measures ANOVA assessed temporal changes. Pearson or Spearman correlations evaluated associations between AL and vascular metrics. Results: Over 24 months, the OK group exhibited significantly slower axial elongation than the Defocus group (0.214 mm and 0.522 mm, p < 0.01). In the OK group, MA and BA decreased modestly, BEA in arteries declined gradually, but COP and TVC remained relatively stable. The Defocus group demonstrated more pronounced decreases in MA and BA, an increase in BEA, and significant reductions in COP and TVC (p < 0.05). Correlation analysis revealed stronger associations between AL and vascular parameters, especially COP and TVC, in the Defocus group at all time points, whereas only BA and BEA correlated with AL in the OK group. Conclusions: OK lenses mitigate axial elongation and induce milder retinal vascular remodeling compared to Defocus lenses. Distinct temporal patterns of vascular metrics changes were observed between the two interventions, and correlate differentially with axial growth.

RGB-D 3D instance detectors benefit from visual semantics, but the task-specific Faster R-CNN/ResNet branch used by IIFNet3D couples feature extraction to a separately trained 2D detector and its image-domain labels. Replacing that branch with a frozen vision foundation model removes this task-specific dependency, but may introduce occlusion noise and a mismatch between patch features and geometry-aware detection features. In this work, we investigate this replacement through an adaptation of DINOv3 to the instance-level fusion pipeline of IIFNet3D. At the core of our approach is a depth-consistent feature pipeline that projects scene points into calibrated RGB-D frames, applies a metric depth-residual check, averages the accepted DINOv3 features into an offline point cache, and aggregates the cached features inside proposal-aligned RoI grids. The geometric and bidirectional instance-fusion paths are preserved, while Conservative VAID is evaluated as a low-strength, support-weighted semantic distillation recipe applied only to positive RoIs. We conduct extensive evaluations on ScanNetV2 to assess the proposed transfer recipes. On ScanNetV2, our DINOv3 control achieves mAP scores of 76.15 and 60.93 at IoU thresholds of 0.25 and 0.50, respectively. The Conservative VAID setting achieves mAP scores of 76.59 and 62.16, corresponding to numerical gains of 0.44 and 1.23 points over the control, respectively, in this checkpoint-level recipe comparison. The reported IIFNet3D result of 75.7/63.8 is used only as an external reference because the visual branch and processing protocol differ. Accordingly, we interpret these results as evidence for a controlled transfer recipe rather than as a causal estimate of the individual contributions of VAID or depth filtering.

In this paper, we proposed GAD-MambaUNet, a lightweight medical image segmentation network that combines efficient local modeling, direction--group state-space interaction, and training-time foundation-model supervision. To improve contextual modeling in compact segmentation networks, we introduced Direction-Group Graph Selective Scan (DG-GSS), which treated scan-direction and channel-group responses as graph nodes and enabled structured information exchange before multi-directional fusion. We further incorporated DINOv3-GAD supervision, where a frozen DINOv3 teacher provided semantic guidance during training, and Gradient-Adaptive Distillation dynamically regulated the distillation strength. GAD-MambaUNet achieves a favorable accuracy--efficiency balance compared with representative lightweight and general segmentation methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of DG-GSS and training-time DINOv3-GAD supervision. In future work, we will explore more flexible teacher--student alignment strategies and extend the proposed framework to more diverse medical segmentation scenarios, such as multi-class and multi-modal segmentation tasks.

Ground-based planetary imaging suffers from atmospheric turbulence, sensor noise, and limited sampling, making restoration a joint denoising, deblurring, and super-resolution problem. We present ASTRA-SR, a blind single-frame restoration framework trained on a physics-grounded synthetic dataset. High-dynamic-range spacecraft RAW observations serve as clean sources, and paired LR inputs are synthesized using measured layer-integrated turbulence strengths, propagated moving phase screens, exposure-averaged spatially varying PSFs, and sensor noise.ASTRA-SR first estimates a noise-suppressed but blur-retaining LR image, then restores spatial structure through multiscale processing and reconstructs HR detail with serial spatial-amplitude refinement. It yields a 0.49 dB foreground PSNR gain over the strongest baseline approaches.

The rapidly advancing capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) present a systemic challenge to academic integrity. VLMs now allow students to bypass meaningful engagement by capturing and submitting graphical problems as singular images, a practice we define as trivial plagiarism. To provide educators with actionable data on VLM limitations, we investigate the efficacy of heuristic adversarial image transformations designed to degrade model performance while remaining human-interpretable. Through a two-phase evaluation of introductory assessments, we manually assess baseline VLM performance on circuit diagrams, followed by an automated large-scale evaluation of topological structures (logic gates) and coordinate geometry (Karnaugh maps). We find that while highly capable VLMs can exhibit appreciable robustness, all models suffer vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. We conclude that while visual perturbations act as a viable near-term stopgap, long-term assessment security requires educators to reapproach assessment design given continually increasing VLM performance.

X-ray is medicine's most widely used imaging modality, yet remains among its least quantitative. Unlike volumetric modalities like CT or MRI, X-ray collapses 3D anatomy into a 2D projection, causing structures to overlap and anatomical boundaries to be ambiguous, even to experts. As a result, labeling X-ray databases for training general-purpose segmentation systems is impractical, leaving morphometric and functional X-ray analysis confined to narrow anatomical regions and applications. To this end, we present FleXray, a generalist model for anatomical segmentation across the entire body in clinical X-rays. Instead of curating large, manually annotated X-ray datasets, we build a scalable, physics-based generative X-ray data engine. Using existing 3D whole-body CT segmentation datasets and generative image-editing models, we simulate fully-annotated 2D X-rays with diverse appearances, physiological properties, and imaging geometries. Trained on these simulations, FleXray accurately segments 60 anatomical structures across unseen research datasets and in-the-wild X-rays. We further show that FleXray makes X-rays directly amenable to quantitative analysis, enabling automated measurements for disease grading, robust navigation during X-ray-guided interventions, and data-efficient learning of pathological targets. We release the model, code, a full-body X-ray segmentation dataset, and a local, easy-to-use browser-based tool at https://flexray.csail.mit.edu .

Vector Quantization (VQ) is fundamental to discrete visual tokenizers that power modern autoregressive and masked image generation models. While recent shared-projection codebook methods have substantially advanced codebook utilization, training stability remains a critical and underexplored challenge. We argue that the root cause lies in the entanglement of the Encoder--Decoder and Codebook training: because neither module can reliably fulfill its own responsibility in isolation, the system can only function when the two subsystems happen to cooperate---a fragile condition that breaks down precisely when training is most stressed. We propose StableVQ, which revisits the proper learning objective of each module and resolves the problems that arise when each is trained to fulfill its own role independently. Concretely, (1) Dynamic STE corrects the instability in the Encoder's learning objective, enabling it to robustly optimize the reconstruction space under discrete regularization even when codebook utilization is low. (2) Region VQ Loss reconceives the Codebook's learning objective so that it can independently guarantee full tracking of the encoder output distribution, without relying on encoder oscillations to drive activation. (3) Decoupled Schedule recognizes that the distinct responsibilities of the Encoder--Decoder and the Codebook demand distinct optimization dynamics, and assigns each an independent learning rate schedule to ensure robust system-level behavior. Built on top of shared-projection codebooks, StableVQ is lightweight and introduces no learnable parameters. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate consistent improvements in training stability, codebook utilization, and reconstruction quality across diverse codebook sizes and initialization settings.

Compositional 3D scene reconstruction has recently been explored from two directions: agentic reasoning that provides semantic understanding of spatial relationships but lacks precise alignment with input images; and visual geometry foundation models that predict dense point maps from input images but the reconstruction quality is limited. Therefore, recovering a complete 3D scene from a single monocular image with accurate inter-object relationships and high-fidelity reconstruction quality remains challenging. In this paper, we present HARMONY, a hierarchical chain-of-thought framework that leverages both agentic reasoning and visual geometry foundation. Given an image of an indoor scene, starting from an empty 3D floorplan, HARMONY first calibrates the camera against the reference image to establish a semantically-grounded spatial frame, then uses agentic VLM reasoning to recover the 3D room layout and an initial placement order. It then places the objects in a hierarchical order, from wall-mounted elements, free-standing furniture, to dependent decorations on top of furniture. We also use depth-first traversal for furniture so each placement conditions on previously resolved structure and a reflective feedback loop to avoid error accumulation. After each object placement by VLM, we use the point cloud estimations to perform geometry-based refinement so that the rendered image aligns better with the input. HARMONY can produce 3D scenes that are semantically consistent and perceptually aligned with the reference image, extending single-image compositional reconstruction to complex indoor scene images. Experiments on synthetic and real-world images demonstrate that HARMONY outperforms the evaluated reconstruction baselines, while qualitative comparisons with GPT-6 Astra suggest more faithful object arrangements and better preservation of scene details.

Marketers increasingly use large language models (LLMs) as "synthetic personas" to predict how an audience will react to a piece of copy before it ships, encouraged by evidence that profile-conditioned LLMs mimic human samples. But is that prediction actually valid against real behaviour - and does the persona machinery help? We present a sim-to-real validity study using the Upworthy Research Archive - thousands of headline A/B tests on shared real traffic, with measured click-through - as held-out ground truth. We compare a ten-persona panel, grounded in the real audience's demographics, against a no-persona zero-shot baseline that simply asks the model how likely a typical reader is to click. Two findings stand out. First, ground-truth reliability is the binding constraint: most A/B tests have no statistically distinguishable winner, so validity can only be measured on the reliable subset (n = 399). Second, and counter to the persona-simulation premise, persona conditioning degrades predictive validity: the no-persona baseline ranks variants markedly better (Kendall {\tau} = 0.361, a medium effect; top-1 accuracy 49.2%) than the persona panel ({\tau} = 0.084; top-1 34.6%), with non-overlapping confidence intervals. Asking the model directly taps an accurate population-level prior; forcing it to role-play specific personas injects bias and noise. The result replicates across three independent Upworthy splits, holds in direction on a different-domain news dataset, and is robust to seed, prompt phrasing, and model choice - across three Gemini tiers and a different model family (OpenAI gpt-4.1, significant paired gap). The takeaway: for predicting aggregate engagement, a plain LLM ranker beats persona simulation - synthetic personas are not merely a weak predictor, they are worse than not using them. All numbers regenerate from a public, artifact-first replication package.

Tabular foundation models have recently shown strong potential for structured biomedical data analysis. Among them, TabPFN has emerged as an effective approach for low-data tabular classification tasks. However, the impact of optimization and preconditioning strategies on biomedical fine-tuning remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical investigation of five AdamW-based preconditioning strategies for fine-tuning TabPFN v2.5 on 59 biomedical datasets spanning Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, schizophrenia, significant memory concern (SMC), KEEL biomedical datasets, and UCI biomedical benchmarks. The evaluation considers predictive performance, computational efficiency, and statistical significance analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the original AdamW optimizer consistently achieves the best overall performance and statistical ranking, while existing curvature-aware preconditioners fail to provide reliable improvements across diverse biomedical learning scenarios. The findings suggest that generic preconditioning approaches may not adequately capture the optimization characteristics of biomedical tabular learning, motivating the development of biomedical-aware preconditioners specifically tailored for healthcare-oriented tabular foundation models.

Dynamic Gaussian Splatting provides an explicit representation of evolving 3D scenes, but existing approaches are primarily optimized for reconstruction, future-state generation, or rendering rather than for learning reusable predictive dynamics. We propose 4DGS-JEPA, a Gaussian-native joint-embedding predictive architecture for causal multi-horizon prediction over dynamic Gaussian scenes. The model uses a hierarchical scene-, motion-group-, and Gaussian-level representation together with a horizon-conditioned transition operator that supports both direct prediction and recursive rollout. Its central principle is temporal composition: different chronological transition paths reaching the same future endpoint should produce compatible predictive states. Endpoint and multi-horizon path supervision anchor these predictions to future target embeddings, while a selective geometry decoder and geometry-level composition ground the learned dynamics in consistent group motion and Gaussian geometry without requiring complete future appearance reconstruction. We further introduce a hybrid correspondence mechanism that combines persistent canonical identity with residual optimal-transport matching under reordering and topology change. We characterize zero-loss path agreement and finite-error rollout accumulation theoretically. Three controlled experiments provide mechanism-level evidence that temporal composition reduces latent path dependence while retaining predictive accuracy, geometry-level composition improves consistency of decoded motion, and hybrid correspondence preserves reliable identity while remaining robust when correspondence becomes ambiguous. Together, 4DGS-JEPA provides a predictive, temporally compositional formulation of dynamic Gaussian worlds.

Survival prediction for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) demands models that are both accurate and interpretable, yet existing approaches treat these objectives as com- peting, where performant models sacrifice transparency, while interpretable models accept degraded predictive power. We argue that this trade-off is not inherent. Graph neural net- works offer a structural foundation for extracting interpretable, explainable representations without compromising discriminative ability. Furthermore, current methods typically rely on a single imaging modality, underutilizing the complementary information available across multi-modal MRI and clinical metadata. We propose a multi-modal framework that inte- grates three components to address both objectives simultaneously: (1) a sheaf hypergraph neural network that captures higher-order relationships among tissue patches through direc- tional, asymmetric message passing; (2) a concept bottleneck layer that compresses learned representations into clinically grounded concepts, enforcing ante-hoc interpretability; and (3) an extension sufficiency test (EST) regularizer that penalizes unfaithful explanations during training, ensuring that model explanations genuinely reflect the internal decision process. Clinical and genomic features are incorporated through gated fusion, preserving the dominant prognostic signal of molecular markers while retaining concept-level traceabil- ity. Evaluated on 593 patients from the UPenn-GBM dataset under 5-fold cross-validation, our framework achieves a concordance index of 0.643 with the lowest fold-level variance among all compared models (std = 0.015). To our knowledge, this is the first work to unify sheaf hypergraph convolution, concept bottleneck supervision, and EST regularization for interpretable survival prediction from brain MRI

In this report, we introduce \textbf{Ovis-Embedding}, a state-of-the-art omni-modal embedding family built on native integration of text, image, video, and audio. Instead of assembling separate modality towers, Ovis-Embedding uses a shared multimodal backbone to encode different modalities in a common representation space. Specifically, we make \textbf{three key advances}: (1) \textbf{native omni-modal initialization}: we adopt a pretrained Qwen-omni model as the embedding backbone and adapt it through contrastive training with low-rank initialization; (2) \textbf{data-centric omni-modal training}: we construct a broad, high-quality corpus spanning text, images, video, audio, and interleaved multimodal data. To improve data efficiency, we introduce homogeneous-source sampling to form task-consistent batches with informative in-batch negatives; and (3) \textbf{embedding-specific training and inference optimization}: we use focal loss to emphasize hard examples and similarity-based Embedding Distillation to transfer fine-grained similarity structure from complementary experts. At inference time, low-rank feature decomposition enables compact embeddings with flexible dimensionality and minimal performance loss. Empirical evaluations show that the \textbf{Ovis-Embedding} family achieves state-of-the-art performance on \textbf{MMEB-v3}, \textbf{MMEB-v2}, \textbf{MVEB}, \textbf{MAEB}, and \textbf{RTEB}, demonstrating its effectiveness across text, image, video, and audio modalities. These results highlight the potential of unified omni-modal training to overcome modality fragmentation and advance universal embedding models for any-to-any retrieval.

Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems often leave this intermediate structure implicit. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) planners also tend to rely on coarse task-level annotations or serialize long reasoning traces token by token. We present X-Planner, a planning front-end that addresses both the supervision and representation of embodied reasoning. Our planning data combine Ego, UMI, and teleoperation under a hierarchy granularity with source-dependent annotation depth. Takeover-time annotations and human-designed failures supervise ongoing error recognition. On the model side, a shared VLM backbone exposes two event-structured plan forms: a discrete interface that emits interpretable event states and a latent interface that relays continuous CoT states across staggered Transformer depths through Staircase Decoding. A frozen latent-to-text reconstruction objective provides a semantic anchor for the latent representation. Offline two-step planning evaluation places X-Planner second among four evaluated models on both BERTScore-F1 and a judge-based Overall score. In real-robot experiments, respectively, outperforming the evaluated baselines. These results characterize planning-text quality and downstream execution.

Lean Pool is a repository of formalized mathematics. It is grown, maintained and optimized by AI agents.

Analyzing neuroimaging data requires specialized coding and statistical expertise, which limits accessibility for researchers without computational backgrounds. We present the AI Neuroscientist, a language agent for interactive data exploration. The system integrates a large language model (LLM) with a neuroimaging toolset to perform quality control, modeling, and visualization. This allows researchers to query data quality and specify analysis parameters directly in natural language, providing a transparent and interactive alternative to conventional scripted pipelines for small-scale data exploration. We demonstrate these capabilities using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data, and evaluate the agent on a custom fNIRS benchmarking suite against general-purpose LLM agents with code sandboxes. Future extensions will generalize the architecture to additional modalities, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, and expand the benchmarking suite to additional fNIRS tasks.

Prospective stroke risk stratification in primary care is challenging because early risk signals are distributed across routine biomarkers and unstructured clinical narratives. We propose MedGate-Fusion, a multi-modal gated architecture that integrates transformer-based embeddings of first-encounter narratives with ten routinely recorded risk markers. We used electronic medical record data from the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN). Starting from 808,921 encounter-level observations, we constructed a first-encounter cohort and retained 102,736 unique patient records with non-empty narratives and sufficient data to evaluate a five-year stroke outcome. To reduce explicit target leakage from diagnostic mentions in notes, we applied dictionary-based redaction of stroke-related terms prior to semantic encoding.

A social agent's most basic decisions (should I react to this post? who should I reach out to?) are not purely content problems. The right action often hinges on the latent relationship between people -- tie strength, reciprocity, mutual connections -- rather than on which content is most salient. Standard LLM agent loops do not explicitly represent how new relational evidence should revise the agent's current social hypothesis, leaving them prone to surface-obvious choices when relational and content cues diverge. We formalize this failure mode with a relationship-reasoning benchmark: 500 synthetic social worlds with friendships, follows, reaction histories, and feeds, yielding 1,000 queries over two tasks, reaction selection and warm introduction (finding the best bridge to a target person). By construction, the surface-obvious candidate differs from the relationship-grounded oracle in about 53% of queries, forming an overturn subset where the agent must use relational evidence to revise an initially plausible choice. We propose ReAdapt (Relationship-Adaptive Agent with Policy-driven sTate), which augments the ReAct loop with an explicit structured social state z = (G, B, R, N, D) capturing goal, belief, relationship, norm, and disclosure. After each tool observation, ReAdapt runs a typed Adapt step that updates this state and emits a policy operation (continue, switch, abandon, or clarify) before choosing the next action. With Gemini-3-Flash on a stratified subset of n = 150 queries per task, ReAdapt improves warm-introduction accuracy from 37% to 51% (+14 points) and reaction-selection accuracy from 69% to 77% (+8 points). Oracle regret drops from 0.260 to 0.152 and from 0.095 to 0.053, respectively. Holding the model, tools, and environments fixed, these results suggest that explicit relational-state adaptation helps LLM agents turn retrieved social evidence into revised decisions.

Finding circuits in language models usually means running many careful interventions. We try something simpler: treat attention as a routing map from one forward pass, keep a small set of routes that point toward the answer, and ask whether those routes actually matter. They often do. On induction and IOI (tasks where the "right" circuit is already known), ablating our extracted edges hurts the model much more than ablating a random set of the same size. We evaluate n=100 prompts per cell on GPT-2 Small, GPT-2 Medium, and Pythia-410M, with paired gap tests and bootstrap confidence intervals. The extract step costs one forward; a head-by-head patch sweep costs about two orders of magnitude more. We are not claiming a complete circuit atlas. We are claiming a cheap sketch that carries real causal signal on known tasks, with clear failure modes when it does not. Code and evaluation artifacts are at https://github.com/Aquinf03/live-circuit-routing.

Structured-data agents in enterprise settings must reason over complex data environments whose relevant evidence is distributed across schemas, relationships, policies, and recurring business roles. Modern agentic systems often address this burden through reusable markdown-style memory or skill files that preserve previously discovered information for later queries, reducing the need to rediscover the same structure repeatedly. This is useful, but it obscures a natural division of labor: agents are well suited to semantic reasoning, while learned systems are well suited to predicting and organizing recurring structure. We introduce latent equivalence learning to bridge this gap. The framework separates persistent task-relevant identities from their dataset-relative realizations. In our realization, supporting and opposing evidence shape support-realized Gaussian prototypes that learn how those identities are expressed in a particular data environment, while soft-membership profiles retain distinctions lost under a hard assignment. A separate learned query-prototype system represents recurring evidential requirements and maps them through a learned compatibility function into the same persistent identity structure. This identity-factorized, query-conditioned routing materializes the relevant dataset-specific evidence for downstream reasoning, allowing the agent to operate over an already organized evidential state rather than reconstructing cross-schema structure at every query. On the Data Agent Benchmark, spanning 54 queries across 12 heterogeneous datasets, our full implementation achieves 94.67% dataset-macro stratified Pass@1 over five complete trials and 258/270 successful raw query attempts, compared with 55.51% for the benchmark's Claude Opus 4.6 reference agent, ranking first among 40 leaderboard entries at submission.

On repeated work, agents are inconsistent. We ran 42 tasks three times each and found that, depending on the model, 38% to 74% returned answers that did not agree. Consistency is what a buyer, an auditor, or a regulator requires, and agents do not have it. They are wasteful too: 95.3% to 97.2% of what an agent generates goes to re-deriving a plan the system already knows. We propose skill habit formation. An agent mines its own execution history for candidate skills, deterministic variants that compete against the incumbent rather than replacing it. A candidate declares the region of input space it claims, so the common case runs as a script and the rest falls through to reasoning. Four gates of ascending cost admit candidates; the central one tests a candidate's execution trace against a retained reference, within a tolerance measured from that reference's own run-to-run variability. On text-to-SQL, three of four reasoning arms reproduced their own output on 11 to 13 of 42 repeated questions and the fourth on 26 of 42, while a habit-formed variant reproduced on all 456 dispatches we repeated and was non-inferior to every arm it replaced (p<0.0001). It also used 14% to 56% fewer tokens, turning net positive after 7 to 53 reuses. We measured what this costs in accuracy. The guard admitted work it should have deferred on 2.6% of natural paraphrases and 26% of inputs near its boundary, and 11 of 13 such failures were invisible to the trace-conformance gate at any threshold. Deterministic errors repeat exactly: a bad habit is as reliable as a good one, and that is the price of the property that makes the system auditable. Separating routing from parameter extraction raised end-to-end accuracy from 0.888 to 0.952 at 43% of the cost.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as course-specific tutors, but their usefulness depends on grounding in vetted instructional materials that are often revised mid-semester. Our prior work built a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system over an authentic machine learning course corpus (Foundations of Machine Learning) and found that retrieval improved contextual grounding, but that fixed retrieval strategies were suboptimal. That motivates a different question: whether how a corpus is structured at ingest time matters more than how much is retrieved at query time. We present a controlled head-to-head comparison of two knowledge representations over an identical classroom corpus: (A) vector RAG, replicating the best-performing configuration from our prior study, and (B) an LLM-compiled wiki (Karpathy framework), in which the corpus is synthesized at ingest into linked concept pages with explicit cross-references and citations back to source materials. We evaluate 59 questions spanning single-fact recall, cross-unit concept linking, synthesis and explanation, and currency after a syllabus revision, scored by an LLM judge against a human-authored rubric. Both representations answered single-fact questions about equally well (9.33 vs. 9.96 of 10), but diverged sharply on questions requiring links across course units. The compiled wiki remained accurate and grounded (9.93; 100% grounded in cited sources), while retrieval scored lower and was markedly less grounded (8.14; 64%). The wiki's citations let students and instructors trace any claim back to the lecture that introduced it, adding a layer of dynamic retrieval that machine learning courses require. While further testing is needed, instructors using AI to support learning in ML courses should consider wiki-based structure for its potential to support foundational elements of best practice.

Dialogue failures in language models are usually framed as memory failures: context too long, summaries lossy, a constraint forgotten. We argue this misses a deeper problem: in many conversations the model does not forget, it commits too early. An ambiguous early turn collapses into a single hidden interpretation, and later clarification is filtered through that commitment. We call this early posterior collapse: unresolved user intent collapsing into a committed task state before ambiguity is resolved. We study it with controlled dialogue tasks in writing, planning, and coding using Gemini-2.5-Pro and Gemini-2.5-Flash. Across thousands of trials, the same information in different orders yields different outcomes, even when the final dialogue contains equivalent task-relevant information. This order effect suggests later clarification is treated as extra context rather than a corrective signal: it refines a stale task state without invalidating it. Coding tasks are especially vulnerable, suggesting early assumptions get embedded in structured artifacts such as interfaces and control flow. Standard prompting and memory strategies do not reliably help: summaries can collapse ambiguity, and chain-of-thought can reduce explicit wrong commitment in reasoning traces without improving final task success. These findings motivate uncertainty-preserving state management. If assistants cannot let go of early interpretations, robustness cannot rely on post hoc correction alone; it must keep ambiguous early turns from hardening into one task state. Assistants should hold tentative hypotheses while ambiguity remains, ask before executing when high-impact ambiguity persists, and rebuild from a revised state when later evidence invalidates an earlier reading. Rather than one prompting fix, we aim to redirect research for interactive LLMs from retaining more context toward preserving uncertainty.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is only meaningful if written reasoning causally constrains the answer. We introduce continuation-based causal testing, an ablation-patch intervention that perturbs one reasoning step, truncates the chain, and forces the model to continue from the corrupted prefix. It measures how load-bearing a CoT is for the final answer, a behavioral notion distinct from mechanistic faithfulness. Across Gemma-2-9B-IT, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B on GSM8K, MMLU, and BIG-Bench Hard, CoT load-bearingness tracks model-relative task difficulty: on easy tasks models silently bypass their own reasoning; on hard tasks they follow corrupted steps and propagate errors. A matched 2x2 analysis shows task difficulty dominates perturbation type: error propagation rises 16x from GSM8K to BBH multistep arithmetic, and a variance partition over 28,584 continuations attributes 98.8% of explained deviance to task difficulty versus 0.8% to perturbation type. Reasoning-specific RL suppresses error propagation and compresses the gradient. A four-variant judge-sensitivity analysis and blind two-annotator study (n=500) show the error-propagation vs. non-propagation label is invariant to judge prompt, with perfect inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa = 1.00). This gradient creates a structural problem for CoT-based oversight and AI safety monitoring: where the trace is easy to read it carries little signal, and where it matters errors propagate before a monitor can intervene. Linear probes on hidden states separate silent bypass, self-correction, and error propagation, but additive activation steering provides limited causal control, flipping only about 25% of error-propagation cases at best. Behavioral mode is readable but not reliably controllable.

Failure-based textual knowledge distillation aims to discover gaps in a model's knowledge by examining its task errors. The distilled knowledge can be useful for the reasoning of both this model ("source model") and other models. However, this transfer of knowledge may not be stable. We define a rule atom to be a standalone rule injected into a model's textual input at inference time. A rule atom can encode transferable task knowledge or model-specific reasoning patches that can confuse other models. Also, the injected rule atoms can be misapplied to unrelated cases, causing the model to incorrectly flip its answer based on irrelevant information. Building on a pipeline that distills training examples into task-specific cheat sheets that aid model reasoning, we examine when failure-derived rules can improve these cheat sheets. Our early experiment shows rule distillation from a single model's failures underperforms the baseline cheat sheet on non-source model families. This motivates Robust Failure, Conservative Repair (RFCR), a textual distillation procedure that derives rules from failures shared across models, sharpens their application boundaries using boundary cases, and abstains when no useful rule is found. On a 400-item BIG-Bench Hard task set, RFCR improves the baseline cheat sheets from 68.50% to 71.25% (+2.75 pp; 95% CI [+1.25,+4.50]) without performance degradation on previously correct cases. Ablations and cross-model diagnostics support that accuracy gains come from both new knowledge injection and strict rule-application control.

Modern information retrieval increasingly employs both embedding and generative models to handle complex queries. However, current serving systems suffer from low throughput and poor GPU utilization because they execute these models in isolation. Coarse-grained partitioning, such as dedicating GPUs to specific tasks, fails to adapt to dynamic workloads and creates computational "bubbles". To address these, we present Orthrus, a serving system that performs heterogeneous batching within a unified inference loop. The primary challenge lies in unifying embedding and generation workloads with conflicting computational patterns while optimizing batch composition for high performance. Orthrus addresses these challenges through chunked embedding with incremental pooling and by adjusting batch composition in a workload-aware manner. Evaluation on four A100 GPUs shows that, relative to baseline deployments, Orthrus achieves 1.28$\times$--4.52$\times$ higher throughput on controlled workloads and up to 55.8% lower end-to-end p99 latency on an iterative-RAG benchmark. We release our code at https://github.com/illinoisdata/Orthrus .

Online A/B experiments are the decision standard for user engagement, but traffic and readout time limit how many conversational-AI changes can be tested. We ask whether an offline signal designed to be computable without treatment-arm user exposure agrees with the outcomes of those experiments. We contribute a reusable construction and diagnosis checklist that treats an offline proxy as a chain of three alignments: behavioral label to product outcome, learned classifier to candidate-assistant behavior, and aggregated offline signal to experiment effect. A companion evaluation protocol audits the whole composite by interval-aware decision agreement, which compares offline and online confidence intervals instead of point estimates, and by within-experiment ranking. The instantiation we evaluate comprises a fixed evaluation suite on which candidate behavior is scored, an engagement classifier trained to predict session/prompt level engagements, and a calibration layer mapping sample-level score differences to online model-level engagement deltas. We then report the audit: 489 paired offline-online contrasts (one candidate arm against its control) from 27 experiments on a deployed multi-turn assistant, spanning model checkpoints to system-prompt tuning. Our primary test uses the 113 contrasts from eight experiments that ran after the map was frozen: on these the composite reaches 81.1% F1, against 34.3% for the raw classifier score it is built on, and makes no wrong-direction calls where that raw score makes 31. Every offline prediction was computed before its experiment ran to prevent overfitting. The evidence supports using the composite to prioritize candidates before scarce experiment traffic is allocated---in our deployment of the experiment, selecting among training checkpoints and tuning system prompts.

Moving authorization earlier can shorten an agent's dispatch boundary without removing authorization work. It can also admit an action whose payload, authority, or relevant state has changed. ZeroGate separates exact-action approval from durable local admission: an issuer signs a short-lived ActionPass, and a trusted runtime adapter reconstructs the final action before a local gate checks its binding and consumes its nonce. A SQLite transaction couples nonce consumption, applicable quota updates, and an admission receipt. We state a conditional decision-preservation proposition: successful local admission implies that a specified synchronous policy would authorize the same action at the admission point, provided approval is sound, all policy dependencies are represented and current, observations are faithful, and consumption is atomic. The implementation alone establishes neither current-world freshness nor exactly-once remote effects. Evaluation separates authored semantic fixtures, controlled concurrency and crash experiments, and an Azure Blob study comparing synchronous and prepared execution through the same issuer and gate. Both modes mint an exact-action pass; lifecycle latency includes preparation and prepared-batch dwell. Across 4800 cloud attempts, prepared worker-admission-to-dispatch p95 ranges from 9.802 to 11.374 ms, versus 25.018 to 334.000 ms synchronously, across the tested concurrency levels. Prepared mean complete lifecycle is longer at every level: the boundary improvement is not a net speedup. The contribution is an explicit revalidation contract, a durable reference boundary, and an auditable comparison of where authorization cost is paid, not a new cryptographic primitive or a universal performance frontier.

Reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve mathematical, coding, and other multi-step tasks, but shifts a substantial portion of the training cost to rollout, where trajectories are generated for policy updates. Efficient rollout mechanisms are therefore essential to reduce this cost while maintaining the freshness, consistency, and statistical validity of training data. This survey provides a systematic taxonomy of recent research on rollout efficiency for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning, classifying existing approaches from both mechanism and bottleneck perspectives. Based on this taxonomy, we analyze how different technique families address distinct sources of rollout inefficiency, examine opportunities and potential conflicts for combining them, identify gaps in the evaluation and reporting of efficiency gains, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.

Hand gesture recognition is a key component in human-computer interaction (HCI), enabling intuitive interfaces for applications in gaming, virtual reality (VR), robotics, and more. This study integrates transformer-based machine-learning models for real-time hand gesture recognition, using hand-tracking data captured through the OpenXR standard in Unity. We leverage positional data of hand joints and wrist rotation angles to train a custom gesture recognition system. By utilizing the sequential modeling capabilities of transformers, the system captures temporal dependencies within short gesture windows and classifies gestures robustly across hand orientations and sizes. The results show a significant improvement in gesture classification accuracy. Building on this, we outline how the approach can be extended toward detecting the flow of movement, i.e., the transitions between gestures, as future work.

We often teach a colleague by showing the work and explaining the decisions as we go. How can we check what an agent understood from the same lesson? We introduce ShowTellArena, a benchmark protocol and public dataset for comprehension after narrated business demonstrations. The v1.0 release contains 50 business workflow tasks, with recordings, screenshots, narration, fixture seeds, and 502 questions. Tasks span finance, hiring, procurement, customer decisions, inventory, and logistics. The protocol holds the business scenario and quiz fixed while allowing each product to capture the lesson through its own teaching interface. Questions test operational rules, boundaries, exceptions, and errors in proposed automations. We analyze 218 selected pilot attempts across 39 workflow cases, including 28 cases attempted by all three evaluated systems. These exploratory results expose both answer errors and failures to complete the teaching experience. We describe the release's verification gaps and the pilot's uneven coverage, exclusions, and grading provenance. The contribution is an inspectable dataset and assessment workflow that others can extend; the selected pilot is not a controlled product ranking.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems have emerged as the dominant architecture for grounding large language model (LLM) outputs in verifiable external knowledge, yet their structural reliance on a dynamic retrieval pipeline introduces a largely unexplored class of adversarial vulnerability. Existing knowledge-base poisoning attacks are fundamentally static. Adversarial documents are pre-computed and injected without any awareness of what the victim system will actually retrieve for a given query, leaving the attack blind to the competitive documentary landscape that surrounds its payload in the generator's context window. Unlike traditional static poisoning attacks that are blind to the retrieved context, we introduce RAG-NAROK (Retrieval-Anchored Generation Negation And Response Quality Collapse), a RAG attack framework that adapts to the query text. RAG-NAROK exploits the transparency inherent in RAG pipeline to first extract the legitimate source identities, then generate Anchor-Specific Refutation documents that explicitly name and devalue retrieved sources while leveraging recency and authority biases to steer the text generation toward a target answer. Our results demonstrate that RAG-NAROK significantly outperforms static baselines across diverse domains, revealing a fundamental tension between RAG transparency and AI security.

Know Your Client (KYC) onboarding in capital markets requires analysts to manually classify documents, extract structured data from heterogeneous sources, and validate compliance against complex regulatory policies. This process requires significant analyst time per client, with end-to-end onboarding often stretching to multiple weeks due to sequential handoffs. In this work, we analyze an on-boarding process and find that it comprises repeatable components well-suited to AI automation. We therefore propose a restructured workflow to be amenable to automation: we consolidate the traditional four-party process into two parties that share most of the work and can be automated together, eliminating intermediate handoffs that compound delays. To automate the remaining steps, we introduce Spectra, an AI-assisted document processing platform that combines a structured rules engine with LLM-based classification, extraction, and validation agents. The rules engine encodes compliance policy as a queryable database, enabling focused context injection that reduces token usage while improving extraction precision. Rather than a single monolithic prompt, the system decomposes document processing into isolated, auditable stages, each optimized independently and traceable to specific policy clauses. In evaluation on real KYC documents, Spectra achieves 100% classification accuracy and 89.4% extraction accuracy. Human review burden dropped by 96%.

In this paper, we examine speech datasets for their inclusion of LGBTQIA+, or queer, voices and provide a taxonomy of tensions to better understand why there is a lack of such voices in current speech technology datasets. Through an audit of six diverse speech datasets, we find that measurable queer representation is low (0-1.4% of speakers) - insufficient for robust disparity measurement. We take this community as a case study to consider what challenges and tensions are associated with collecting speech data from marginalized communities. For comparison, we audit an additional two datasets from the speech sciences that were created by, for, and with the queer community. We note that many customs in speech dataset collection efforts in AI and speech technology research may conflict with values emphasized in participatory approaches with marginalized communities, and provide a taxonomy describing these tensions.

In this paper, we motivate the need for a participatory speech dataset creation framework through a case study of the LGBTQIA+, or queer, community - a community with documented concerns about AI and reported harms, including attempts to develop 'gaydar' technologies that purportedly identify individuals as queer. We review common speech data collection practices, why these methods may be unsuitable for engaging with queer speakers, and discuss previous efforts in participatory AI with queer community engagement, as well as participatory endeavours specific to speech data collection for other marginalized communities. From this review, we develop a conceptual framework for participatory speech data curation by, for, and with marginalized communities drawing on insights from co-design and knowledge sharing. We propose a framework comprising overlapping and two-way processes of defining a community, project formulation, modes of participation, and personal autonomy.

Structure-mapping forms analogies by aligning systems of relationally connected elements based on shared structure instead of surface features. We introduce a new structure-mapping algorithm: Structure-Mapping with Tight Bounds (SMTB) that is 5--15x faster than the structure-mapping engine (SME) and about 50\% better at finding mappings in large nested domains. SMTB is part of the broader Cognitive Rule Engine (CRE) project, a flexible multi-language-compatible framework with an accessible Python interface to state-of-the-art C++ implementations of core algorithms commonly used in cognitive systems such as pattern matching, planning, and structure-mapping. CRE and SMTB are designed to work with a wide range of representation choices. Unlike SME, which biases higher-order correspondences in tree-like predicate logic, SMTB maximizes relational connectivity without privileging higher-order relations. This allows SMTB to work just as well over arbitrary relational graphs as it does in tree-like domains of nested predicate logic. We discuss situations where privileging "higher-orderness" in structure-mapping can cause issues, and illustrate how SMTB avoids failure modes that SME would encounter in these situations. We also provide an evaluation comparing SMTB to SME v4 over 5845 domain pairs from the SME corpus.

Supervised approaches to quantum error mitigation learn a map from noisy circuit outputs to ideal ones, and therefore require the ideal outputs. Producing those ideal outputs demands noiseless classical simulation, whose cost grows exponentially with system size, so supervision is unavailable in exactly the regime where mitigation matters most. We ask whether cheap, individually unreliable signals drawn from circuit structure and hardware calibration can take the place of ideal labels. We assemble sixteen heuristic labeling functions (stabilizer and parity constraints, relaxation and readout characteristics, local depth, gate counts, and neighboring activity), reconcile their disagreements with a probabilistic label model, and read the resulting per-qubit error probabilities as a readout channel whose inverse mitigates the measured distribution. No ideal output enters the training path. On $147{,}000$ five-qubit circuits executed on two IBM devices, the method removes $24.3\%$ (Algiers) and $28.8\%$ (Hanoi) of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to the ideal distribution, against $15.4\%$ and $21.5\%$ for the strongest published analytical baseline, a margin that holds on both devices and lies far outside its bootstrap interval. Supervised neural models trained on ideal distributions remain stronger where such labels exist, and we quantify that gap rather than setting it aside; the method's claim is to the regime where they do not, since the labels they require cannot be computed for the circuits mitigation is needed for. The codes will be released shortly.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a parametric vulnerability to adversarial swarm consensus. To mitigate this sycophancy, we introduce Contrastive Epistemic Decoding (CED), a zero-shot inference intervention. Unlike standard Contrastive Decoding (CD) which relies on a weaker secondary model, CED utilizes a dual forward-pass on a single architecture to isolate conformity bias. By introducing a novel asymmetric, zero-bounded probability clamp and discrete top-k truncation mask, CED mathematically suppresses toxic consensus tokens without causing grammatical collapse. Evaluated across 7,200 paired trajectories on complex benchmarks (GAIA, SWE-bench, Multi-Challenge) using Gemma-2 (9B), Llama-3.1 (8B), and Mistral v0.3 (7B), CED successfully neutralizes architectural and positional biases. By reducing cognitive loafing by up to 33.00% absolute, CED drives significant performance gains, yielding up to a 30.75% accuracy recovery. Regaining sovereignty induces distinct architectural behaviors---passive task-focus in Gemma-2 and active refutation of the simulated swarm in Llama-3.1---showing CED decouples compliance from capability without fine-tuning.

LLM-based user simulators aim to bridge the offline-online gap in recommender evaluation by emulating users through injected traits, where preference attributes determine what a user engages with and a behavioral activity trait governs how long they browse. However, we show this intended trait independence collapses during simulation, causing two failures: (i) Trait Interference, where amplified activity distorts preference boundaries and forces interactions with mismatched items to sustain browsing, and (ii) Evaluation Invalidity, where satisfaction scores inflate with activity-driven page counts despite taste mismatches, biasing evaluation toward trait distributions rather than recommender performance. To resolve this, we propose PQA, a page-level quality anchoring method that guides simulators using a personalized anchor reflecting each user's intrinsic preference standard. By assessing whether a page meets this standard before further browsing, PQA enables proactive exits from low-quality pages, letting the activity trait retain its intended role of modulating browsing depth within preference-conforming pages. Experiments show PQA mitigates trait interference and improves the reliability of LLM-based simulator evaluation under activity shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/chaehyun1/PQA

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly advance Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), but are often deployed as guiding policies within tree search rather than for single-attempt generation. Recent work shows cross entropy is suboptimal for an LLM used in flat search strategies such as aggregation or filtering and that work has developed new loss functions to correct this misalignment. Extending this alignment to tree search is more challenging: proof discovery depends on exploration and recovery through off-trace states that supervised demonstrations do not reveal. We extend Compute-Aligned Training (CAT) to this setting through an abstraction of policy-guided search, deriving tractable, trace-supported losses. Alongside these search-aware losses, we introduce a search-agnostic uniform-allocation (UA) loss that accounts for the budget without specifying the specific search. Both induce scalar weights on per-tactic cross-entropy gradients. We characterize how off-trace behavior affects the search-aware weights, including conditions for vanishing approximation error at large budgets. On a Lean benchmark, both approaches achieve higher observed proof-success rates than cross-entropy across six search strategies, with strong results from a single shared UA adapter. Budget sweeps show larger gains over cross-entropy at 16 than at 256 expansions, implying CAT scales with test time compute.

False-positive computer-aided detection (CADe) prompts may divert endoscopists' attention during colonoscopy, yet the attentional impact of individual prompts remains unclear. We used event-locked eye tracking to quantify gaze attraction and attention occupation in complementary retrospective and prospective studies. In a retrospective paired-video experiment, 3 senior and 2 novice endoscopists viewed 60 colonoscopy videos with and without CADe. The prospective study recorded gaze during 42 real-time CADe-assisted colonoscopies performed by 9 senior endoscopists. Screened CADe prompts outside expert-annotated lesion windows were classified as false-positive artifact events. False-positive prompts attracted gaze in 48.6% (68/140) of retrospective observations and 65.2% (533/817) of prospective events. Among attraction events with complete recovery, median attention occupation lasted 1000 ms in the retrospective study and 1100 ms in the prospective study. Corresponding median prompt durations were 33 ms and 267 ms, with median time amplifications of 17.55-fold and 5.15-fold, respectively. In paired retrospective comparisons, visible artifact prompts drew gaze closer to the prompted region than did the same-coordinate unassisted reference. Secondary retrospective analyses showed high lesion gaze recognition without and with CADe (98.0% versus 99.0%). First gaze entry into lesion regions occurred 147.8 ms earlier with CADe. Across controlled and real-time clinical settings, false-positive CADe prompts frequently captured gaze, with attention persisting beyond prompt visibility. These findings support considering prompt-related attentional burden in CADe evaluation and design.

In this note, we show that the problem of checking, whether a sequence of bits is ordered, is not doable by 1-head 1-layer transformers but is doable by a 2-head 1-layer transformer. Unlike similar previous results, our results assume the model where transformers have an output MLP.

Coding agents now find real vulnerabilities in production software. However, bug discovery results do not measure whether agents can construct exploit primitives. We introduce KEX-bench, a benchmark for evaluating coding agents on exploit primitive generation against real operating-system kernels. KEX-bench contains 45 task instances across 40 Linux and Windows CVEs, covering kernel address leak, instruction-pointer control, heap read, heap write, and arbitrary address write. Each task runs in an isolated virtual machine, exposes controlled tools, and uses a deterministic verifier to check primitive-specific success. We evaluate state-of-the-art coding agents paired with frontier and open-weight models under fixed tool-call budgets. Without a reference proof of concept (PoC), the strongest configuration solves 1 of 20 Windows tasks (5.0%) and 14 of 25 Linux tasks (56.0%). With a reference PoC, the strongest configuration solves 31 of 45 tasks (68.9%). This highlights the gap where agents reach kernel crashes but fail to shape kernel state into exploit primitives. We release KEX-bench for reproducible research on AI-assisted exploitation at https://kex-bench.github.io.

Scientific papers keep much of their quantitative content in tables and supplementary files, where a number means something only through its header, caption, unit, analytical method, and the conventions of its field. Recovering the rows and columns of a table is therefore not the same as recovering the scientific fact it reports. Most semantic table-interpretation methods assume that a clean table is already available and subsequently map its cells or columns to ontology terms, whereas most publication-level extraction systems are designed for a single domain. We study a middle path: a shared process that reads a paper and its supplementary files, gathers evidence from several parsers and a language model, and reconciles that evidence, while a bounded human-authored task module for each task supplies the domain meaning. The module lists the canonical names the graph may use, the surface forms that map to them, a small set of derivation rules and validity constraints, an identity key, and the bindings used to write RDF. It defines what a task is allowed to emit; it does not try to list every convention of a field. We build four such modules (for drug-discovery chemistry, materials science, machine learning, and mineral geochemistry) in the ArticleMiner framework, and evaluate them on 163 papers, including a new geochemistry benchmark with expert-curated ground truth. In comparisons against a same-LLM few-shot baseline, the point estimates favor ArticleMiner on all four tasks, with uncertainty on the two smaller benchmarks. The geochemistry comparison also includes access to supplementary files, so its improvement cannot be attributed to domain guidance alone.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training has become an effective approach for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, adapting post-RL models to new knowledge domains or behaviors through subsequent supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can severely overwrite these capabilities. Existing approaches mitigate such forgetting through experience replay, specialized initialization, or constrained optimization using gradient projection, but either provide limited preservation or incur substantial training overhead. Our analysis shows that reasoning activations concentrate in low-dimensional subspaces, leaving substantial null-space capacity for adaptation, and that the corresponding approximate null spaces can be reliably estimated from a modest number of examples. Motivated by these observations, we propose Null-Basis Low-Rank Adaptation (NB-LoRA), a parameter-efficient method for adapting post-RL LLMs while preserving their acquired reasoning ability. We formulate reasoning retention as a layer-wise hidden-state preservation constraint and construct a fixed approximate null basis from reasoning activations. LoRA updates are then reparameterized through this basis, enforcing the preservation constraint throughout fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across multiple RL-trained LLMs and diverse downstream tasks show that NB-LoRA matches standard LoRA in adaptation performance, maintains reasoning accuracy near pre-fine-tuning levels, and generalizes this preservation to held-out reasoning benchmarks.

Scientific investigations into microbial natural products (NPs) present significant challenges for novices, largely due to the complexity of microbial systems, biochemical diversity, technical skill requirements, and the demands of bioinformatics and data analysis processes. To address these issues, we introduce ChatT2, a large language model (LLM)-based agent that is specifically tailored to the unique characteristics of bacterial type II polyketides. These polyketides form a structurally distinct and therapeutically important NP family. ChatT2 was developed within an autonomous multiagent framework composed of a mentor, an executor, and an evaluator, each with defined responsibilities. The mentor acts as an intermediary between ChatT2 and the user, utilizing chain-of-thought prompting to refine the intent of the user. Under the guidance of the mentor, the executor synthesizes multimodal information via retrieval-augmented generation techniques and seamlessly integrates bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools. The evaluator ultimately assesses the output of the executor to ensure the richness and accuracy of the retrieved information. Our research highlights how ChatT2, designed with this multiagent framework, addresses the challenges faced by general LLMs in terms of understanding limited, specialized corpora and complex biological information and provides both experts and novices with a valuable tool for exploring various NPs of interest. The ChatT2 webserver can be accessed at https://chatt2.site/#/chat.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning when scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, but small- and mid-scale models remain brittle reasoners even with knowledge distillation (KD). We present Ladders-of-Thought (LoT), a framework that improves reasoning by combining progressive question rewrites with a self-evolving curriculum. LoT automatically generates semantically faithful but easier variants of reasoning problems, organizes them into difficulty buckets using step-based measures, and employs a self-evolving bandit scheduler to allocate training adaptively. Evaluated on two reasoning domains, math and multi-hop reasoning, across 1-8B models from different families, LoT consistently improves over KD. It delivers large gains on arithmetic tasks (e.g., +32 percentage points on AddSub, +25pp on SVAMP), +2-8pp improvements on in-domain test splits, and strong though dataset-dependent benefits on multi-hop reasoning (e.g., +16pp on QASC, +25pp on StrategyQA). LoT also converges faster than staged curricula, highlighting the value of adaptive progression. These results show that progressive rewrites coupled with adaptive curricula provide a simple yet effective recipe for strengthening reasoning in smaller LLMs.

Predicting early outcomes based on trajectory can decrease the expenses associated with agent evaluation by terminating a run once the outcome becomes sufficiently predictable, assuming that the predictor's confidence is properly calibrated. Calibration is at risk when a predictor is applied to an agent on which it was never trained, but it is not known whether such transfer failures are broad across agent systems or concentrated in specific target agent/head combinations. Using public SWE-bench Verified trajectories and a frozen dual-head early-outcome prediction pipeline, we ran a leave-one-agent-out calibration audit, a shared-predictor leave-two-agents-out control, oracle prior correction, and a robustness battery over training cohorts, task resampling, task halves, jackknife, and thresholds. Fixed-scaffold TerminalBench analysis served as a pre-registered boundary test. Broad same-predictor pairwise heterogeneity was not supported; the median pairwise corrected-gap differences were 0.0180 (SUCCESS head, 45 pairs) and 0.0385 (FAILURE head, 35 pairs), and the pre-registered heterogeneity criterion was not met on either head. Two specific combinations, gpt-5-mini/SUCCESS and claude-opus-4.6/FAILURE, showed persistent calibration-transfer errors (median corrected gaps 0.1377 and 0.1107) without a sign reversal under any frozen control. TerminalBench did not establish cross-benchmark replication: the success target produced zero decisions (INDETERMINATE), and the failure target did not satisfy the pre-registered persistence criterion. Therefore, a strong target-specific calibration-transfer error can exist within one frozen environment, but the evidence does not establish that the error is intrinsic to the model or general across benchmarks.

Marketers now deploy generative AI agents as synthetic consumers to pretest visual assets such as logos, packaging, and advertising at a fraction of human-panel cost. However, this procedure assumes that a model seeing a visual cue can also perceive its consumer meaning, which is largely untested. We stress-test the assumption using six canonical visual marketing experiments, varying the two levers managers control: model generation (GPT-4o-mini vs. GPT-5.4-mini) and input format (plain text vs. JSON). Every resulting configuration passed the manipulation checks; however, none of the configurations reproduced more than two of the six human effects, and the remainder were nonsignificant. The one exception was a significant reversal of the human pattern. Providing conceptual or empirical evidence through in-context learning steers average responses toward the human effect. Yet steering has a limit: even when it succeeds, a configuration reproduces less than half of the natural spread of human responses and so understates consumer heterogeneity. We integrate these results into an AI governance protocol (Calibrate, Intervene, Deploy) that delineates when synthetic consumers can responsibly screen creatives and when human panels remain necessary.

Large language model (LLM) agents must generalize from tools seen during training to unseen tools at deployment. A key challenge is tool trialing, i.e., excessive trials waste the interaction budget, whereas selective trials enable exploration of unfamiliar tools. Existing outcome-based post-training leaves wasteful trials unguided, while turn-level supervision may suppress necessary exploration. We introduce ToolCompass, a post-training framework that guides tool trialing by organizing tool-call representations according to shared functions. Specifically, ToolCompass models each function class as a von Mises--Fisher distribution and jointly reduces intra-function variation across domains and increases inter-function separation. This structure transfers experience from seen tools to functionally similar unseen tools, directing exploration away from unrelated alternatives. ToolCompass requires no ground-truth call traces or unseen-tool access and incurs no inference overhead. Experiments on AppWorld and FTRL show consistent gains across GRPO, RFT, and DMPO. improves AppWorld OOD task success by up to 10.71 percentage points over vanilla post-training and performs best among competitive baselines on both benchmarks.

Long-horizon assigned work requires an LLM agent to track the state of a task: which steps are done, blocked, cancelled, or open to repetition. Agent systems either keep this state as text in the prompt and rely on the model to read that text, or move the state into a module that enforces it, and each system is evaluated as a whole, so no one knows how much reliability comes from the state being shown, told, or enforced. We fix the task rules, the model, and paired episodes and vary how strongly task state reaches the agent: a raw transcript, an exact checklist, per-turn directives from a state machine compiled from the brief and advanced only by execution receipts, or an enforcement gate on that machine that refuses state-violating actions; every episode is scored by exact payload matching against dynamic ground truth. Across three models, two reasoning regimes, and two domains, four findings hold without per-turn reasoning: displaying accurate state is unreliable, an unverified ledger the agent writes itself beats an accurate checklist it is shown, directives help in proportion to the model's obedience, and enforcement needs no obedience but is bounded by the correctness of its state and by the matcher that maps requests to steps; per-turn reasoning at a 235B agent compresses these separations without repairing the text rungs. The same gate, compiled from $\tau^2$-bench's airline policy, raises a 235B agent's pass$^1$ from 0.39 to 0.54 and changes nothing for a 35B agent that rarely violates the policy; on PM-Bench, where acting turns on recognizing a cue rather than on state, showing the record is the best rung--matching or beating both gates and reversing the ledger-over-checklist finding--and enforcing the matcher's judgement drops a 35B agent below its raw transcript. Enforcement pays when failures are state-decidable and frequent, and hurts when the gate's judgement is wrong.

Multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs) need query mechanisms that expose reliability and exploit domain structure. This paper presents TCMaster, a property-graph query substrate for confidence-aware traversal and workload-guided physical design over Traditional Chinese Medicine KGs. TCMaster integrates pharmacopoeias, prescriptions, molecular databases, and LLM-extracted micro-semantics into a KG with approximately 221K entities and 723K base edges. It annotates edges with provenance-level confidence, rewrites Cypher queries with confidence predicates, ranks multi-hop paths under PRODUCT, MIN, or weighted-average policies, and uses ontology skew through direction selection, herb-attribute bitmaps, and materialized shortcut edges. On Neo4j, direction selection improves attribute lookup by a factor of 1.47, shortcuts accelerate high-fanout target counting by a factor of 4.42, confidence filtering removes 39.3 percent of low-quality heterogeneous paths, and KG retrieval improves TCMbench QA accuracy by 20.0 percentage points.

Though artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms modern medicine, its integration into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been relatively slow, primarily due to TCM's reliance on holistic, subjective diagnostic methods---namely Inspection, Auscultation and Olfaction, Inquiry, and Palpation(I-AOI-P)---which are difficult to align with quantitative, standardized medical systems. In this work, we introduce a Unification Framework for Multimodal Data (UFMD), which automatically processes tongue and pulse images into structured, clinically standard descriptions, integrating multi-source diagnostic information into a unified digital record of I-AOI-P process. Building on this structured data, we create LingLan-14B, a TCM-specific large language model fine-tuned via supervised learning to emulate the diagnostic logic and workflow of I-AOI-P process. Experimental results show that our method significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy, achieving a relative improvement of 103.5% over the baseline (62.72% vs. 30.82%) and reaching an F1-score of up to 82%.

Omni-modal models have expanded multimodal interaction across vision, audio, speech, and language. However, their training is predominantly organized around semantic descriptions and general-purpose objectives, leaving physical attributes, interaction states, and causal mechanisms only partially specified. This gap is not simply a matter of modality coverage: adding more modalities does not by itself provide the supervision needed to connect observations with the physical structure of the world. We present OmniFysics-Nano-V2, a compact omni-modal model for physical-world perception and understanding. The model supports image, video, audio, speech, and text inputs within a shared reasoning framework, together with text and speech generation. To address the lack of explicit physical supervision, we construct a dual-branch physics-aware data pipeline that grounds salient objects in structured physical attributes and aligns visual changes with acoustic events, intermediate responses, and interaction outcomes. To address homogeneous training objectives, we curate reinforcement-learning prompts by reward diversity and adopt a two-stage Group Relative Policy Optimization curriculum that progresses from general task correctness to fine-grained physical perceptual reasoning. Experiments across multimodal, audio-visual, and physical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed data and training strategy improves physical-world understanding while preserving broad omni-modal competence. The proposed model achieves leading result on 17 of 21 benchmarks against SOTA omni-modal models. By equipping AI systems with both omni-modal and physical-world perception capabilities, OmniFysics-Nano-V2 is poised to become a cornerstone of next-generation Physical AI.

Using large language models (LLMs) to simulate diverse human populations has the potential to transform many aspects of computational social science, yet many evaluations score the average response rather than the spread of opinion within real groups. Here, we develop a diagnostic framework that measures point accuracy alongside dispersion retention, the ratio of predicted to human standard deviation ($\dr$), on 10{,}000 respondent--question pairs from the World Values Survey (WVS) spanning twelve countries and six continents. We evaluate eleven zero-shot language models and five variants fine-tuned on WVS data with SFT, DPO, and GRPO. We identify a failure mode we term \textit{consensus collapse}, where alignment training compresses outputs toward one stereotype per group. Along the post-training trajectory from the Llama~3.1 70B base to the Tulu~3 checkpoints, the first stage, supervised instruction tuning, removes half of the spread with minimal accuracy gain ($\dr$ 1.22 to 0.59; accuracy $+0.9$ points), the later stages do not restore it, and a gap opens between WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries that survey fine-tuning then deepens while pursuing higher point accuracy. The most accurate model (Tulu~3 70B-DPO fine-tuned on WVS, 57.9\%) keeps half the human spread overall ($\dr = 0.50$) and 11\% of it for Nigeria, against 0.70--0.87 for WEIRD countries. Raising the sampling temperature to 1.0 leaves the Wasserstein-1 distance ($\wone$) to human distributions unchanged for both fine-tuned DPO models, and GRPO on Qwen~3.5 9B does not restore the spread under either an accuracy reward or a distribution-shaped reward. Mixing the aligned model with an unaligned prior raises $\dr$ from 0.51 to 0.62 on a held-out split but leaves Nigeria at 0.36. Point accuracy alone therefore misjudges these simulators, and current post-training trades diversity for consensus.

AI planning studies how an agent can reach a goal by executing a sequence of actions. To plan correctly, the agent needs an action model describing when each action can be executed and how it changes the world. Constructing such models by hand requires domain expertise, and can be costly and error-prone. Action models can instead be learned from available data using existing neurosymbolic approaches, but they currently assume access to complete traces of fully observable images . These approaches fail to learn action models under partial observability where some of the images might not be present or are not fully informative of the current state of the world. Hence, this paper proposes NeSyAM, a novel neurosymbolic modeling paradigm for action model learning under partial observability. In addition, the paper presents a unified variational framework for theoretically analysing the limitations of existing methods compared to our proposed approach. NeSyAM is then tested extensively on six visual planning domains and three observation regimes to show it consistently recovers relevant parts of the true action model under partial observability.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents autonomously interact with software to fulfill user requests, where GUI navigation stands out as the most critical and challenging capability. Mastering this capability demands a complex synergy of step-wise decision-making, state-action alignment, and long-horizon planning. While directly mixing these corresponding navigation tasks seems intuitive to simultaneously acquire these skills, such a direct combination is severely bottlenecked by inconsistent optimization objectives and profound data heterogeneity. To overcome these barriers, we propose the MaP (stands for ``\textbf{M}asked Tr\textbf{a}jectory \textbf{P}rediction''), a unified framework that seamlessly harmonizes divergent GUI navigation tasks. By modeling multi-turn GUI interactions as a trajectory and defining training objectives through component masking and prediction, MaP shifts the optimization from task-specific marginal distributions to a consistent objective. Furthermore, to handle the data heterogeneity across multiple navigation tasks, we design a role-aware adapter learning module that dynamically routes each token to a specialized representation space. Extensive experiments on five representative GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate that MaP effectively mitigates gradient conflicts and significantly outperforms the direct mixture training, establishing a robust paradigm for multi-task GUI navigation.

LLM agents increasingly work on long-horizon tasks, and the decisions they make along the way, such as which hypothesis to test or which implementation to build on, determine the outcome of the whole run. Making these decisions well is becoming a key capability for both engineering and research agents. We refer to the ability to make good long-horizon decisions as the taste of an agent. While existing benchmarks measure the end-to-end success of agents on long-horizon tasks, none of them measures the taste of an agent. To address this problem, we build Taste-Bench, a benchmark of taste questions constructed automatically from trajectories that agents produced in engineering and research tasks. Each question presents a decision fork, a point in a trajectory where multiple directions are available and one of them leads to a better outcome, and the evaluated model chooses among these directions without seeing what happens after the fork. We mine these forks automatically from parallel attempts at the same task and from detours inside a single trajectory, without needing human annotation. We evaluate frontier models on Taste-Bench and find that the best model answers only 59.7% of the questions correctly. We further find that forks whose deciding evidence appears later in the trajectory are much harder for every model, and that a larger reasoning budget does not improve the accuracy. Finally, we show that taste can be trained. We distill the judgment of a teacher that has seen the outcome into a student model, and the student makes better decisions on unseen tasks and improves end-to-end success on held-out SWE-bench Pro tasks.

Runtime traces can appear transparent, but a closed-loop policy determines which states are visited and which failures become visible. We study a simulated hotel-pricing agent mapping time, inventory, and market state to discrete price actions under varying demand regimes. A fault may leave no aggregate trace when the policy rarely visits affected cells. We treat entry into aggregate-only fault interpretation as a diagnosability decision preceding scoring or localization. A reference-map gate requires repeated clean-policy support; a matched runtime gate then requires joint support in clean and current streams. Signal analysis occurs only after both pass. We calibrate false admission on a disjoint clean stream at the physical-component level and model detection by affected clean traffic rather than nominal cell coverage. In a frozen one-shot heldout, 55/72 (76.4%) regime-component units were reference-admitted, representing 20 physical components; 54/55 passed matched runtime admission, while the rejected unit abstained. Stable false admission was 0/20, with a one-sided exact 95% upper bound of 0.1391, meeting the frozen 0.20 criterion. Across 540 repeated unit-arm rows nested in those 20 clusters, affected clean traffic reduced negative log likelihood by 29.3% relative to cell coverage, a gain of 0.1264 nats per row (cluster-bootstrap 95% interval [0.0593, 0.1918]). Adding mask family and its interaction improved log loss by 0.0015 nats per row (one-sided upper bound 0.0066), below the frozen 0.01 practical-sufficiency margin. A development audit found that exact minimum hitting set and greedy selection chose identical supports in 12/12 scenarios because singleton evidence had resolved the conflicts. The result is a bounded rule for interpreting aggregate agent behavior: first establish exposure, then score change, and abstain when the trace cannot support the claim.

A higher evaluation score does not always mean a better language model system. When optimization exploits an evaluator's mistakes, measured progress can conceal unchanged or deteriorating task performance. This failure can arise through parameter updates, selection among generated outputs, or revisions to persistent prompts. We develop a comparative framework for reward hacking across these three optimization substrates: weights, selection, and text. Building on the Proxy Compression Hypothesis and research on inference-time and in-context reward hacking, we examine how reachable behavior, optimization budgets, and persistent adaptation shape exposure to proxy error. We formalize a distance-dependent upper bound on evaluator disagreement and a capacity ordering for nested policy classes, then show why distance alone cannot establish a universal ranking of vulnerability. An exact finite-output illustration demonstrates how the location of a scoring defect changes the behavior favored by each method. We also map representative defenses across substrates, identifying which mechanisms transfer directly and which offer only functional analogies. Persistent prompts receive particular attention: their contents are inspectable, but the behavior induced by a small textual change may be difficult to anticipate. The formal analysis, numerical illustration, and published evidence together provide a basis for comparing optimization methods and identifying the conditions under which their defenses transfer. The resulting framework connects optimization choices to verification requirements: reliable improvement depends on controlling accessible failure modes and preserving evidence of task quality independent of the score being optimized.

Clinically useful early detection requires validated pre-recognition lead time. Yet event-based evaluations of longitudinal clinical AI can treat recognition-mediated care-process signals as shortcuts and recognition-dependent endpoints as reference standards, inflating apparent performance and lead time while undermining cross-center transport. Such results may serve prognosis without establishing detection before recognition. We define an interval-censored pre-recognition transition, an independent as-of reference standard, and a prespecified recognition proxy to make the claim testable.

Analog circuit sizing remains a challenging and time-consuming task due to the large design space, strong performance trade-offs, and increasing circuit complexity in scaled technologies. Although recent large language model (LLM)-based methods show promise in improving sample efficiency and interpretability, existing approaches often lack explicit circuit-topology understanding and are mainly evaluated on relatively simple analog building blocks. This paper presents a multi-agent LLM-based framework for complex analog circuit sizing. The proposed framework first analyzes the circuit topology and decomposes the netlist into functional blocks and substructures. It also extracts lightweight design knowledge for reuse. Based on the extracted topology and knowledge, a planner coordinates multiple role-specialized sizing agents to update design variables and achieve global performance specifications. This workflow mimics the collaborative process of an expert analog design team and provides a structured, interpretable, and simulation-driven optimization procedure. The framework was validated on eight circuits, with the largest design containing up to 55 transistors and 60 sizing variables. Notably, for the LDO benchmark, the proposed method achieved a 60\% success rate with an average of 83 iterations, where classical optimizers failed to find feasible solutions. Further, ablation studies demonstrate that topology understanding, design-knowledge infusion, and agent specialization provide complementary benefits. The source code is available to support reproducibility.

When an agent handling a payment exception loses money, the agent-step attribution methods this paper compares against will name one of its actions. They will do so even when a settlement message was dropped and the agent never had a chance: they intervene on agent actions and do not expose infrastructure faults as intervenable variables, so every dollar they explain is charged to a decision. We take a benchmark whose fault process is explicit and replayable, decompose each episode's realised delivery schedule into named, individually repairable messages, and intervene on both the agent's choices and the infrastructure's. A telescoping identity splits any policy's loss exactly three ways: an infrastructure effect, a policy differential against the best implementable policy, and a reference-policy residual. Two of the three can be negative, so none is a share; Shapley then divides the first into signed allocations over individual messages. One result is structural and needs no corpus: an agent-only baseline identifies no infrastructure cause, because its model contains no variable that could name one. What 545 planted episodes across 3 policies measure is the size of that consequence. It misfiles 100% of infrastructure episodes and charges $114,383.40 to the agent. Repairing what it names recovers 0.0% of the available loss; repairing a minimal sufficient set recovers 100.0%. Scoring messages one at a time is not merely imprecise: 27.8% (95% CI: 23.3--32.3%) of episodes do not decompose additively. We evaluate deterministic programmatic policies rather than language-model agents, which is what makes replay exact and which limits external validity to stochastic agents. The prevalence figures are properties of this generator, not field rates.

Progress in general-purpose video editing depends on constructing large-scale paired supervision and effectively adapting video-generation backbones to instruction-driven editing. Unlike video generation, video editing must execute a requested transformation while preserving unrelated subjects, scene structure, motion, and temporal continuity. We present VideoX-Qwen, an integrated data-construction and model-training framework for general instruction-based video editing. Our scalable production pipeline organizes specialized generation and understanding models into complementary routes for addition, removal, replacement, and attribute editing, followed by quality screening and instruction enrichment. It produces more than 1.2 million directional video-editing records, including over 400,000 records in each major task group, with an automatic acceptance rate of 89%. The resulting corpus provides broad and structured coverage of common editing operations through a unified source-instruction-target interface. We further develop a unified Qwen-Wan editor that combines multimodal semantic conditioning with dense source-video latent guidance. A progressive image-video training strategy aligns the multimodal instruction interface, adapts the video generator to source-conditioned editing, and refines output quality with selected high-resolution data. In a 100-example comparison with UniVideo and Kling O1, VideoX-Qwen achieves the best mean result on nine of eleven reported metrics, including instruction following, editing quality, content preservation, structural and perceptual similarity, and video-distribution quality. Together, the large-scale data-production system and unified training framework provide a practical foundation for more capable instruction-driven video editing.

Ontology generation from Competency Questions (CQs) is a central yet labor-intensive phase of Ontology Engineering. While large language models (LLMs) offer promising automation capabilities, current evaluations remain fragmented. Task formulations are heterogeneous, gold standards often lack fine-grained CQ provenance, metrics conflate lexical overlap with structural and logical adequacy, and reference ontologies are not always explicitly designed around the evaluation CQs. Here, we address these limitations with CQ4OE, a benchmark for the systematic and reproducible evaluation of LLM-based ontology generation from CQs. For each ontology in the benchmark, we build a CQ-driven gold OWL ontology with explicit provenance linking each CQ to the classes, properties, and axioms required to answer it. From this resource, we define two complementary evaluation tasks. CQ2Term supports term-level evaluation of CQ-specific class and property prediction over 99 CQs, and CQ2Onto supports ontology-level evaluation over 118 CQs, including hierarchy, property modeling, and axiom-level structure. We demonstrate CQ4OE with experiments using nine LLMs under zero-shot, iterative, and multi-agent generation strategies, showing that LLMs recover explicit vocabulary terms more reliably than creating ontologies, particularly in property modeling, hierarchy construction, and axiom generation.

One of the challenges in representational learning is how to encode part-whole hierarchies in a neural net. Prior works rely on flattening tree-like structures into string-like sequences and training a sequence-to-sequence model via autoregression. While such a representation works for parse-trees in NLP, it is not entirely clear how to make it work for images. Thus, we propose a geometric primitive called canonical locks. The key idea is that parts/wholes can be modelled as higher-dimensional vectors ($d \geq 4$), and information can be encoded in their relative phase differences. Inductively, the net consists of positionally-bound bottom-up and top-down neural fields, which drive each other to achieve a state of thermal equilibrium. Additionally, we show the existence of a few symmetrical configurations in the net. The computational iterations taken to break these symmetries depend on the angle between parts/wholes arranged on a disk (or more precisely a ring) in higher dimensions. It also appears to have connections to the psychological phenomenon of mental rotation.

Language-model agents often reach a working solution and then fail to consistently deliver it. We study runtime policies: targeted natural-language instructions and action denials applied by the agent harness at states that preceded observed failures, without changing model weights or the user prompt. With this, keeping capability constant, we observe a meaningful unlock in delivered reliability. Across the complete 87-task Terminal-Bench 2.1 suite, with two attempts per task, policies increase repeated success (pass^2) in all three GPT-5.6 tiers: 50.6% to 54.0% for Luna, 55.2% to 60.9% for Terra, and 64.4% to 73.6% for Sol. Sol's best-of-two success changes by 1.2 points while repeated success rises by 9.2, showing that policies chiefly convert reachable solutions into dependable delivery. We further cover 14 tasks under Terra's frozen portfolio. Policy-guided Terra reaches 71.4%, compared with 64.3% for unassisted Sol, at about half the cost, demonstrating how engineering around models could unlock dependability for a use case. To isolate the mechanism we run a randomized five-arm experiment: real policies reach 61% on eligible tasks, versus 39% without a policy, 36% with a timing-matched sham, and 39 to 43% with generic verification or reconsideration. The intended corrective behavior appears in 22 of 24 coded policy attempts, against at most 14 in any other arm. Runtime policies are therefore a practical reliability layer: they make capabilities an agent already possesses substantially more repeatable.

Course-of-action (COA) generation is a distributed planning problem: a system must propose structured candidate actions, evaluate them against an adversarial response, and surface options that remain tactically coherent under changing conditions. We present COA-Bench, a small offline benchmark and reproducibility artifact for comparing COA generation policies through self-play. Following the BattleCOA terminology, we reserve COA matching for asset-effect matching and COA generation for course-of-action generation; the present artifact does not implement either DecisionFunction directly. Instead, it represents COAs as typed action chains with conditional branches, assigns a synthetic COA quality score, compares opposing COAs with a BLUE-vs-RED advantage score and Nash-gap distance, and scores doctrinal coherence with an FM 3-0-inspired heuristic rubric. Across 50 synthetic scenarios spanning five operational templates, a sampled best-response policy that draws eight RED candidates reduces BLUE advantage from .516 to .485 and BLUE wargame win rate from .920 to .820; a two-stage multi-agent council with five BLUE proposer agents, RED-team adjudication, and critique-driven revision obtains .509 BLUE advantage and .820 BLUE win rate. We also identify and fix a benchmark-design issue in which scenario framing was stored as metadata but had no effect on generated COA content. COA-Bench is not an operational battle-management system and uses no real, classified, proprietary, or human-subject data. The contribution is an inspectable evaluation harness, preliminary benchmark evidence, and lessons for building auditable agentic planning artifacts.

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities, response-level confidence may remain unreliable when intermediate claims conflict with the final conclusion. Therefore, effective uncertainty quantification (UQ) is required to capture logical inconsistencies within the reasoning chain, not just the correctness of the final output. Current approaches have two major limitations: (1) their reliance on token-level probabilities fails to capture reasoning consistency, and (2) they lack mechanisms to dynamically calibrate confidence using the structural logic of the generated chain. To advance existing research, we introduce ChainUQ, a reasoning consistency-aware uncertainty quantification framework for LLMs. ChainUQ consists of two key technical components: an alignment-aware lightweight UQ module that estimates a raw intrinsic model confidence score from frozen features aligned to the final conclusion, and a reasoning consistency-aware calibrator that refines this score using reasoning-chain consistency evidence. Evaluations across diverse in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks show that ChainUQ consistently improves response-level uncertainty estimation, achieving an average 3.1% relative gain in AUROC and up to 45.0% relative reduction in ECE, and can be directly transferred to new settings without additional fine-tuning.

Simulation-based tutor selection can be unstable when predictively adequate learner models imply different policy rankings. RankCert certifies one of eight equal-budget tutoring policies only when model-averaged utility, probability-best, posterior regret, cross-domain rank, family coverage, and leave-one-domain-out and leave-one-visible-family-out averages support the same candidate; otherwise it abstains. We evaluated RankCert in 1,280 frozen held-out settings spanning five rotating held-out oracle families, 64 scenarios per family, and four cohort sizes. Calibration used a licensed, de-identified EdNet-KT1 derivative with 5,000 learners and 590,056 retained responses; all five family representatives passed the frozen adequacy gate. Minimum-domain mean pairwise top-1 agreement was 0.272917 (95% CI [0.253646, 0.293229]), showing substantial structural disagreement. Cohort-noise variance decreased from n = 30 to n = 300, while the structural family share remained nonzero. RankCert reduced total held-out decision loss relative to full-coverage point selection by 0.006605 normalized-outcome units (95% CI [0.004859, 0.008407]). At comparable coverage, however, it did not reduce selective risk relative to a confidence-gated point certificate (difference -0.000213; 95% CI [-0.003238, 0.002384]; Holm p = 0.929654). Certification occurred in 3.75% of settings and only in stable scenarios; RankCert abstained in every ambiguous, misspecified, and structural-conflict setting. "Safe" denotes only benchmark-scoped decision certification under the declared utility and uncertainty set; no human-learning, causal, deployment-effectiveness, or general-safety claim is made.

Structured multi-agent workflows exchange intermediate messages whose content and form can reveal private state even when the final output is safe. We identify selection-channel leakage: after authorization fixes what may be released, a private-state-aware choice among semantically valid realizations creates an additional inference channel. We introduce the selection-invariant communication compiler(SICC), which constrains this post-authorization representation kernel rather than prescribing templates. Any deterministic or independently public-randomized generator satisfying the invariant is valid; requirement-indexed canonical forms are one auditable implementation. We prove a compositional communication-layer guarantee: authorization, public-only form generation, and a dependency-safe utility gate make the emitted transcript reveal no information beyond the complete authorized view. Private-state-aware selection remains vulnerable after surface-disjoint and length-matched controls. Across 132 AgentLeak communication replays and 100 executable LangGraph tasks, deterministic SICC retains complete protocol utility without a positive excess-gain signal; independent public randomization preserves the same result in AgentLeak and 480 controlled cases.

We present CLAIM, a production pipeline for K-12 assessment-item generation coupling a two-stage generate-then-attack protocol (the model drafts as a "curriculum architect", then re-enters the same conversation as a hostile adversarial reviewer), bi-directional few-shot conditioning on accepted and rejected items, the latter carrying the evaluator's diagnosis, and a knowledge dictionary of 44,844 error-correction rules mined from that feedback and retrieved per standard and item type. Across 43,227 scored items over 755 Common Core ELA standards, three item types, and ten LLMs, the pipeline reaches a 97.8% expert-evaluator pass rate on a 9,074-item production run. We then ask what that rate certifies. Re-scoring a stratified sample with three judges from other vendors, blind to the deployed verdict, reproduces the format ordering under every judge and recovers a larger open-set deficit than the deployed evaluator does; but agreement on the accept/reject binary is weak at production prevalence (kappa about 0.13), and the judges agree with each other no better. The level is therefore judge-relative, and with no student-response data our quality evidence is evaluator-judged throughout. The corpus also exposes a robust asymmetry. Multiple-choice and multiple-select generation saturate at 98% or above for both frontier models under a dozen static rules, whereas fill-in-the-blank generation is capability-tiered (82.8-96.7% across five models under a matched rule set, standards, and judge) and plateaus under prompt-only optimization, with error mass shifting between answer-key over-inclusion and omission as rules accumulate. We analyze this as open-set boundary determination, a task autoregressive decoders are structurally ill-equipped to solve, and show the asymmetry recurring when the evaluator itself is distilled: fail-recall rises from 8% to 63% while F1 saturates at 0.25.

With the growing global demand for energy, nuclear fusion has emerged as a promising direction for future clean energy. Tokamaks represent one of the leading approaches to magnetic-confinement fusion. Achieving high-performance, long-pulse, and steady-state operation requires effective diagnosis of plasma states. However, existing intelligent diagnostic methods are largely limited to either multimodal single-task or unimodal multitask learning, while a unified multimodal multitask learning framework remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct EAST-VTD640, a multimodal multitask dataset that integrates vision and time-series diagnostics from 640 EAST shots for disruption prediction, edge-localized mode (ELM) recognition, and H98 regression. On this basis, we present FusionMMT, the first unified multimodal multitask framework for intelligent tokamak plasma diagnostics. FusionMMT employs multi-scale, time-aware, and variable-aware modeling to handle heterogeneous sampling rates and the high computational cost of high-frequency sequences. It further combines task-adaptive multimodal fusion with progressive multitask optimization to learn shared and task-specific representations while mitigating cross-task conflicts and optimization imbalance. Extensive experiments on EAST-VTD640 show that FusionMMT outperforms representative multimodal multitask methods across disruption prediction, ELM recognition, and H98 regression. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenFusion

Prediction of pathological complete response before neoadjuvant chemotherapy may facilitate more tailored therapeutic planning for breast cancer patients. This work proposes a deep-learning model for pretreatment data only, combining apparent diffusion coefficient maps, dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging, and clinical variables. The study uses the public ACRIN 6698/I-SPY2 multicenter dataset. The architecture employs EfficientNet-B0 pretrained encoders for image feature extraction and late fusion with clinical information. Multiple clinical variables were evaluated, including age, race, histological type, HR/HER2 subtype, SBR grade, and maximum diameter. Only HR/HER2 subtype improved the average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and was retained in the final model. Using stratified five-fold cross-validation, standalone apparent diffusion coefficient maps achieved a mean AUC of 0.79, whereas dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging achieved 0.74. Adding HR/HER2 subtype improved performance to 0.83 and 0.81, respectively. The final configuration, using both imaging modalities and HR/HER2 subtype, achieved an AUC of 0.86. These results support pretreatment multimodal learning for response prediction, although external validation is required before clinical use.

Early identification of non-responders to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) is crucial for timely treatment adaptation in breast cancer. However, many existing predictive models rely on multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), late treatment time points, or extensive clinical data, which limits their applicability. This study proposes a deep learning framework for early prediction of pathological complete response (pCR) using only diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) acquired at baseline and after the first NACT cycle. This framework feeds cropped tumor-centered patches to an EfficientNet-based temporal model that directly learns tumor shape and local tissue characteristics without explicit radiomic feature engineering. The model, trained with 10-fold cross-validation, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.90 for pCR prediction after one cycle, providing actionable information after a single treatment cycle while avoiding gadolinium administration and reducing dependence on heterogeneous clinical data. By focusing on the baseline-to-first-cycle window instead of later stages, the approach supports earlier escalation or de-escalation of NACT, and its exclusive reliance on DW-MRI facilitates protocol standardization, multi-centre deployment and privacy-preserving data sharing. These results demonstrate that DW-MRI-based deep learning on tumor-centered patches constitutes a minimally invasive, clinically deployable strategy for early pCR prediction, with direct implications for personalized treatment adaptation in neoadjuvant breast cancer therapy.

As agent capabilities have grown, practical limitations increasingly stem from constrained context windows rather than model capacity. Common strategies, such as truncation, heuristic aging, and lossy summarization, may discard useful information or introduce hallucination risk. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamic Tool Output Compression (DTOC), a framework for scalable context management in LLM-based agents that models context updates as explicit and reversible operations within the agent reasoning loop. DTOC retains full tool outputs in external memory while inserting compact placeholders into the active context, enabling selective reconstruction when needed. We formalize the DTOC mechanism, integrate it into a ReAct-style agent architecture, and provide a production-oriented implementation supporting on-demand restoration of compressed outputs. Experiments on DeepSWE reveal model-dependent effects: for responsive models (Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4), DTOC reduces input tokens (10.3 and 12.7%) and agent steps (2.4 and 32.3%), while increasing solve rates (2.5 and 1.5 times higher) and lowering cost per solved task (3 and 3.5 times lower cost per solved task). For the other models results are more mixed, with GPT-5.5 doubling solve rate and halving cost, but no impact on solve rate and negative impact on cost for the other models. Ablation results show reversibility is critical: disable-only compression variants degraded performance, while full DTOC recovered baseline accuracy at substantially lower context cost. These findings indicate that explicit, reversible context management can improve the efficiency of long-horizon agent reasoning without degrading task performance.

Runtime monitoring has recently been proposed as a rigorous method for analyzing algorithmic fairness of autonomous decision systems used in critical scenarios such as credit lending, job application, and the criminal justice system. Prior work has shown that runtime monitoring, in principle, can be an effective technique for establishing the kind of human oversight required by legislation such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. In practice, the available monitoring tools have not been developed with this application in mind and display several critical shortcomings in these scenarios. In this paper, we present FairMon, a runtime monitoring tool tailored to fairness analysis of high-stakes decision systems. FairMon uses RTLola as a flexible specification language for monitors, which we have extended with conditional probability operators that allow for concise descriptions of algorithmic fairness properties. The tool also features a real-time visualization of intermediary values, enabling human insight into the dynamics of the monitored system.

Despite the remarkable progress of LLM-based and knowledge graph-augmented Radiology Report Generation (RRG) methods, existing techniques still suffer from inherent defects. Conventional LLM-only models lack structured medical prior knowledge, resulting in frequent medical hallucinations and low diagnostic interpretability. Current knowledge graph-enhanced schemes adopt static one-round knowledge fusion with single-source knowledge, incapable of dynamic knowledge updating according to generation feedback. This paper proposes a novel Multi-Agent Collaborative iterative framework for X-ray Radiology Report Generation, termed MAC-RRG. Inspired by multi-agent technology, our framework constructs a closed-loop optimization paradigm based on task decoupling and collaborative reasoning. Specifically, the framework first generates a preliminary radiology report from input X-ray images via a vision encoder and a basic LLM. Subsequently, a multimodal knowledge graph (MM-KG) agent mines structured disease correlation and anatomical knowledge from medical knowledge graphs, while an auxiliary knowledge agent extracts unstructured domain knowledge from public medical databases. The multi-source knowledge acquired by dual agents is fused and embedded to guide the LLM in iteratively refining the initial report. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on mainstream X-ray RRG datasets, including IU X-ray, MIMIC, and CheXpert Plus, fully verify the superiority of our proposed method. The source code and pre-trained models have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Medical_Image_Analysis

Passive Acoustic Monitoring produces large archives whose recordings are clustered by deployment, season, station identifier, and acquisition configuration. We analyze 908,072 AIS-labeled 679-second recordings from 38 deployments, 20 Atlantic Canadian station identifiers, and 21 receiver positions. The AIS-contact prior varies by more than 200-fold, and per-deployment screening distributions require local interpretation. Bidirectional cross-season transfer over the 18 station identifiers observed in both seasons predicts station identity above the 5.56% uniform-chance level, with balanced accuracy of 15.9% for AIS-contact and 16.4% for no-AIS-contact recordings. The same descriptors predict the two hydrophone models at 74.1% and 85.6% balanced accuracy, respectively, but hydrophone model is strongly confounded with season and other deployment-level acquisition differences. On a retrospectively screened and capped benchmark of 54m507 recordings, repeated station-grouped holdout yields an ROC-AUC of 0.612 with a station-bootstrap 95% interval of 0.582 to 0.648, compared with 0.661 under a random-window diagnostic. Their paired difference is 0.049 (0.040 to 0.056). Removing raw energy changes unseen-station ROC-AUC from 0.612 to 0.603, while an exploratory training-station scale analysis is non-monotonic. These results show that random-window validation overstates transfer to unseen station identifiers in this corpus. They support dependence-aware validation and broader independent spatial sampling, while spatial-expert models remain a hypothesis rather than an established remedy.

Many AI systems make decisions locally, even when every realized output must obey an additive conservation law, such as selecting exactly a fixed number of items. This constraint can be statistically invisible: small subsets of a balanced fixed-budget output look increasingly independent, yet communication-free coordinate-parallel generation needs exponentially many pre-shared plans, while a sequential exact sampler needs only logarithmic memory. We study product measures conditioned on additive conservation laws in the intermediate regime where one plan is selected before a fixed-order pass, every plan is a bounded-state stochastic executor whose support is entirely legal, and the mixture of plan laws approximates the target distribution in total variation. Our main result identifies the optimal asymptotic selector rate, up to constant factors, with the killed spectral profile of the conservation-difference walk. The resulting coordination cost decreases as an inverse power of live-state width, with an exponent determined by intrinsic conservation rank rather than alphabet size; the law extends to noncentral budgets and heterogeneous local scores. The converse is driven by a state-versus-resource-sum obstruction, while a rate-matching construction compiles discrepancy control into exact-support finite-state plans. Complementary results characterize block-parallel plan complexity and the benefit of programmable output order. Together, these results show precisely how online memory substitutes for front-loaded coordination in exact-support generation.

Multi-agent reasoning systems in high-stakes domains must be both accurate and safe, yet agents often follow heterogeneous value priorities (e.g., rigor, conciseness, safety), causing conflicting recommendations. Existing methods do not jointly provide: (i) principled inference of each agent's implicit values from behavior, (ii) compositional formal safety guarantees without full online communication, and (iii) value-aware conflict resolution with faithful explanations. We present VACS (Value-Aligned Compositional Shielding), a four-layer framework addressing all three. Layer 1 learns value-dimension rewards from pairwise preferences using Bradley-Terry modeling and infers per-agent value weights via deep MaxEnt IRL. Layer 2 encodes value constraints in a Lean-inspired DSL and synthesizes compositional assume-guarantee shields for runtime safety. Layer 3 resolves disagreement through nucleolus-based credit allocation and Hamiltonian consensus optimization under long-term value constraints. Layer 4 extracts a critical reasoning path from co-state sensitivities and generates formally grounded natural-language explanations. Our contribution is primarily a unified systems design with formalized interfaces and operational guarantees at the verifier-constrained decision level, rather than a complete end-to-end formal proof of all language-model internals. In controlled proof-of-concept evaluations with role-conditioned agent panels on NEJM-AI QA, MathInstruct-Subset, and a cybersecurity incident-response benchmark (CyberSec-Eval), VACS outperforms strong baselines in accuracy (85.4%, 95.0%, and 90.0%) while reducing logical inconsistency rates to near zero.

Replacing one ballot can change a majority decision only on queries decided by a single vote; this structural fact requires no independence assumption. We study the sign of that change using a labeled, verdict-style intervention: one correctness signal replaces one correctness-indicator ballot in $k{=}7$ self-consistency panels. This diagnostic intervention is not identical to deployed answer-identity plurality. A primary MATH-500 experiment ($n{=}570$) gives a different-model verifier a $+24.2$pp pivotal gain, whereas a role-reversed configuration gives $-11.2$pp; an exploratory code stress test (14 pivotal rows across 9 tasks) gives $-24.5$pp. An exact signed-gain decomposition accounts for all observed signs through the verifier's state-specific accuracy and the composition of the two one-vote tally states, rather than global accuracy or model provenance. Same-source signals lose accuracy on the pivotal stratum (65$\to$44\% in the primary configuration), while error correlations provide a descriptive error-association diagnostic. Controlled degradation and a $k\in\{3,5,7\}$ subset sensitivity analysis probe the stability of the observed pattern around this accounting. Under the evaluated ties-incorrect answer-identity plurality analysis, the structural zero and strong-verifier benefit persist, but the role-reversed harm attenuates to $-0.9$pp and is not significant. The results therefore establish harmful verdict substitution, not universally harmful deployed plurality, and motivate a testable but unverified hypothesis for negative process-reward-model weights.

A debate panel can become unanimous without becoming more correct. This is dangerous for downstream safeguards: a substituted verification ballot can change only narrow-margin votes, while richer arbiters lose disagreement as a natural targeting signal. We show that one debate round can erase that resource without requiring persuasion. Tracking a heterogeneous 7-judge panel through a blind round and three debate rounds on 600 code-correctness candidates, unanimity on a fixed cohort jumps from 39.5\% to 95.2\% in round 1 (93.1\% of the total collapse), while accuracy moves by less than one point and 96.3\% of verdict flips follow the displayed peer majority. An execution-based verification ballot corrects 8 of 2,037 pre-debate candidate-substitution instances but changes zero in every later round; by round 3 every wrong decision is unanimous, erasing dissent that had flagged two-thirds of the panel's errors. Identical-cohort controls explain why: no-peer reconsideration reproduces 79.6\% of the collapse, real labels without reasoning reproduce 91.5\%, and random labels steer flips toward whatever they display; the full-debate condition adds 4.3 percentage points over labels only (clustered 95\% CI 0.7--8.1). The one-round collapse reproduces in two additional real runs and two fake-label seeds, remains under panel sizes 3--7, and appears in MATH-500. Parse failures concentrate on contested candidates ($p<0.001$), making attrition non-ignorable. The design implication is operational: verify before any second-pass evaluation or peer exposure, and never treat post-debate unanimity as independent evidence of reliability.

Ubiquitous robotic systems often lack traditional visual interfaces, necessitating resilient natural language interaction for maintenance and repair tasks. This paper presents a goal oriented agentic AI architecture designed to enable non-expert users to perform technical repairs through situated dialogue. The framework utilizes a multi-layered approach that decouples high-level strategic planning from reactive conversational execution to transform unconstrained human instructions into a structured hierarchy of goals. We conducted a study involving twenty participants to evaluate the system's efficacy using a physical hardware testbed. The architecture achieved a 95\% task completion rate, and participants reported positive self-efficacy following real-time guidance that adapted to conversational diversions and linguistic variations. A comparative analysis with an online baseline revealed that the transition to a physical environment significantly decreased perceived social presence (p=.0005), and trust and competence, (p=.037), while the agentic framework remained robust throughout the interaction. These findings indicate that goal oriented agentic AI can support the sustainability of body-worn technologies by empowering users to perform critical maintenance in ubiquitous contexts.

Fix a corpus and send recipe search to infinity: try every order of the skills, every arrangement from blocked to interleaved, every composition, and keep the best. Two quantities decide what that search was worth: the diameter of the reachable set it explores, and the resolution at which anyone can tell two endpoints apart. Where the diameter falls below the resolution, no amount of search converts into a decision, and the signature is not an absence of winners but winners that do not survive re-running. We measure this recipe-search wall with 761 fine-tuning runs on 12 base models (0.5B-14B, three pretraining families) over competition-mathematics skills: base checkpoints, supervised fine-tuning under AdamW, exact-match scoring at k=4. Within one coherent domain at fixed volume the three classical freedoms average 0.010-0.021 against a 0.019 floor, and the largest contrast, 0.0619, clears a three-seed resolution and then reads +0.010 and -0.015 on two reruns. The departure with a systematic answer is coherence: halving one pooled corpus and letting the halves write answers under incompatible but equally correct conventions moves arrangement from capability to allocation between conventions, by two orders of magnitude over a same-convention control, and writing the convention into the input switches the phenomenon off. The switch replicates on a second pretraining family and survives an independent re-execution of its own protocol, with a re-execution spread (0.087) smaller than the resolution a search-selected order cell carries (0.144). Order itself is a transient whose sign crosses zero three times inside a single run. Volume, the one lever nobody calls a recipe, is the one that reliably pays. A public scorecard grades all 26 pre-registered claims: 18 supported, 5 failed, 2 untested, 1 mixed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used in various industries. However, ensuring their compliance with complex laws and regulatory frameworks remains a great challenge. Existing evaluation paradigms mainly rely on static benchmarks that suffer from three severe limitations: First, the compliance rules being used do not comply with the requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) laws and regulations; Second, they only handle apparent, explicit compliance risks, leaving implicit and covert compliance risks undetected; Third, they fail to track the systematic propagation of risks along logical dependency chains or evaluate compliance within nuanced, context-based real-world scenarios. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce EADC, a novel advanced evaluation benchmark of LLMs based on an AI compliance knowledge graph and AI compliance legal experts. By mapping abstract legal rules into structured logical multi-relational graphs, our framework enables automated, evolving agents to distill and synthesize highly sophisticated adversarial scenarios. This compliance benchmark is reviewed and corrected by human AI legal experts throughout the whole process. The resulting dataset (4,435+ QA pairs) provides an extensive, multi-dimensional taxonomy covering critical regulatory frontiers, including bias and discrimination, fairness, personal privacy protection, and values. Crucially, our compliance dataset moves beyond shallow string-matching by incorporating contextual long-horizon interactions and logic-driven hazard chains, capturing deeply embedded compliance anomalies that bypass traditional filters. Experiment evaluations demonstrate that our framework exposes critical regulatory blind spots in state-of-the-art LLMs, offering a rigorous, AI laws and regulations-aligned benchmark to safeguard high-level and deep compliance in the application of LLMs.

The increasing prominence of short-video platforms, coupled with the advanced commercialization of AI-generated content (AIGC) videos, has led to a shift in the types of video media trend consumed by users in their daily lives. Traditional user-generated content (UGC) is gradually being replaced by professional short dramas and AIGC entertainment. Consequently, VQA for contemporary media content has become increasingly important. This requires a unified evaluation framework that can handle diverse video content and evolving media trends. In this context, we introduce TREND-10K, a next-generation comprehensive VQA dataset consisting of the trend-driven part and the static part, containing $10,000$ videos across a wide spectrum of content types. The trend-driven part is based on the TREND-Search framework, which captures user preference profiles from trending lists on online platforms and formulates sampling strategies based on these profiles. The static part, on the other hand, is composed of supplementary samples selected from publicly available datasets. To support unified evaluation for various video types, we incorporate three evaluation dimensions: technical, aesthetic, and AIGC-trace. Experiments show that our dataset ensures high annotation quality and exhibits remarkable generalization across multiple content categories. In conclusion, our work presents a robust framework for advancing VQA, addressing challenges caused by the temporal evolution of user perceptual habits and preferences.

Active sequential hypothesis testing studies how to identify an unknown hypothesis with a given set of sensing actions. We study this in the setting of identifying large language models (LLMs), \textit{i.e.}, if a user is conversing with an LLM drawn from a known set of models, how can they identify which one is in use? Here, the available sensing actions (evaluations) are themselves a design choice: an evaluator must first decide which environments and prompt families to construct, and only then decide how to use them sequentially. We formalize these two levels as an outer probe-design problem and an inner identification problem. Simply put, the outer stage selects a set of probes to be sent to the entire set of models, creating a kind of fingerprint dataset. This is followed by the inner stage, which sequentially sends a budget-minimizing set of those probes to identify the model in use. For the outer problem, we show that selecting which evaluations to construct at minimum cost, so that every pair of candidates is distinguished, is exactly a weighted set cover problem. Since the response distributions of the candidate models are not known exactly but only through calibration samples, we give a one-shot procedure that estimates the cover instance from these samples. For the inner problem, we bound the number of evaluations needed to identify the unknown model in terms of how well the available evaluations distinguish each pair of candidates.

Systems with costly gold outcomes and cheaper auxiliary observations must decide how much record linkage to retain. Complete pairing retains every joint counter, while separate margins retain none. Neither endpoint is calibrated to a declared finite-sample decision. Universal reconstruction can retain cycle directions invisible to the likelihood-ratio family. Family-exact storage can exceed what the decision requires because certified residual loss may fit within finite-sample slack. We introduce RCShift, which certifies two routes to sufficiency under a declared observation contract. Its exact mode characterizes minimum-cost family-exact storage through LR-visible cycle directions. Its approximate mode bounds reverse Le Cam deficiency. Its integer mode certifies whether a chosen set preserves the full experiment's minimum integer record count at specified size and power. In a rank-two witness, one aligned counter preserves a four-record minimum. An equal-cost misaligned counter and the margins require eleven records, while universal reconstruction requires two counters. A local perturbation has positive reverse deficiency yet retains the four-record minimum. Proof-checked scheduling bounds instantiate the contract before gold computation and yield exact reconstruction on the admitted tree support. RCShift turns partial-linkage storage into decision-calibrated measurement design for the declared family, costs, target, and common strictly positive support.

We study the multiplayer multi-armed bandit problem with information asymmetry under Bernoulli rewards, for three information structures: asymmetry in actions, in rewards, and in both. Replacing the Hoeffding-style confidence intervals of prior work with Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence-based bounds gives strictly tighter regret guarantees in each case. We propose \texttt{mKL-UCB}, \texttt{mKL-UCB-Intervals} and \texttt{mKL-DSEE}, and show that the improvement factor is at least two by Pinsker's inequality and far larger when reward means are near zero or one. For asymmetry in rewards we prove that two arms' KL intervals separate after a deterministic number of samples, and that $M$ independent players accelerate elimination further.

The rapidly increasing student population has posed serious challenges to the traditional academic advising process. This study designs and implements a multi-purpose intelligent system to support students' academic progress, based on a two-part hybrid framework: (1) an advanced model for grade prediction and (2) a rule-based recommendation engine. Using a dataset containing 416,558 educational records from the University of Birjand, students were first divided into homogeneous clusters using the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Subsequently, a Stacking Ensemble model combining Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and MLP was trained specifically for each cluster. Evaluation results demonstrated that the Stacking model outperformed base models across all clusters, achieving a final aggregated RMSE of 2.35. The second component is an expert system that provides intelligent recommendations by synergizing educational regulations with the grades predicted by the first component. This system has been implemented as a practical tool on the University of Birjand portal, offering students real-time feedback such as semester GPA prediction, probation risk warnings, and course suggestions for GPA improvement.

Accurately forecasting river runoff is key to managing water resources, controlling floods, and planning agriculture. This study examines the Ajichay River in northwest Iran, a major tributary of Lake Urmia that has experienced increasing water-related stress in recent years. We introduce a daily runoff prediction model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The model combines five LSTM units, each trained on different time intervals ranging from 2 to 6 days, to better capture variations in river flow patterns. To improve performance, each model was fine-tuned using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), a population-based optimization algorithm. The proposed approach was evaluated on unseen data from 2017-2018 using $R^2$, RMSE, and MSE as performance metrics. The results showed strong predictive accuracy, with $R^2$ values ranging from 74.95% to 91.42%. In addition, multiple feature-importance methods were applied to identify the most influential variables, providing further insight into the factors that drive runoff variations.

Search-based prompt optimizers improve prompts through iterative search: they propose edits, execute fresh rollouts, score the resulting trajectories, and retain only edits that improve a validation metric. We show that this optimization loop is unnecessary. Given only a static corpus of agent trajectories, an off-the-shelf coding agent can directly synthesize an optimized prompt, requiring neither environment access nor validation data. We call this approach \textit{Coding-Agent Skill Distillation} (CASD). The key insight is reflection scope. Rather than reasoning over a small batch of trajectories at each optimization step, the coding agent writes and executes analysis code to compute corpus-wide statistics, identifies systematic failure modes, inspects representative episodes, and distills the resulting insights into behavioral rules. Across four agentic benchmarks (ALFWorld, $\tau^2$-bench retail and telecom, and SpreadsheetBench-Verified), under matched data access, a single CASD pass outperforms GEPA, a state-of-the-art reflective prompt optimizer, on three of four benchmarks and outperforms validation-gated reflective search (SkillOpt) on all four, improving the unoptimized baseline by 16.6 percentage points on average versus 10.9 for GEPA and 5.3 for SkillOpt. Because CASD performs a single offline analysis pass rather than iterative search, producing an optimized prompt costs approximately \$1.60---over $22\times$ cheaper than validation-gated search. Even when competing methods are granted additional validation data and unrestricted environment access, CASD remains ahead on two of four benchmarks. These results suggest that corpus-scale statistical reflection is a viable alternative to iterative search for prompt optimization.

A next-token probability says what a model predicts, not how much training support lies behind it. A Dirichlet head can represent this distinction by separating mean $m$ from concentration $S$, but decoupling does not identify what $S$ means. Here we propose an Evidential Next-Token Prediction (ENTOP) framework to audit this gap on character-level Moby-Dick, using exact 8-gram count as a reproducible lexical-support label and withholding count regression from 20% of context types. Standard implicit evidential training carries essentially no count signal beyond confidence on held-out-label types (partial Spearman $\rho = 0.001 \pm 0.014$), whereas explicit supervision generalizes ($\rho = 0.201 \pm 0.010$; matched-pair win $= 0.822 \pm 0.021$). CE predictive entropy is at chance for unseen 8-grams (AUROC $= 0.490 \pm 0.004$), while supervised vacuity reaches $0.772 \pm 0.003$, comparable with an indexed CE-representation baseline ($0.769$) but below the tautological corpus oracle ($1.000$). Neither longest-suffix nor representation-distance strata explain where amortization succeeds. Increasing count weight under the digamma objective improves support fit only by sacrificing prediction. A constant predictor wins natural log-RMSE, and vacuity does not improve error deferral. These results motivate a minimum evidence protocol---confidence control, matched pairs, held-out labels, a constant baseline, and a decision test---and show that concentration can pass identification while failing calibration and utility.

Bot accounts and coordinated influence operations are often discovered via heuristic methods, leaving a dearth of reliable ground-truth labels for training detection systems. To address this challenge, we study a natural question: can we generate labels to assist in learning embeddings in which bots and accounts from the same coordinated operation are close? We present FISSION, a method to generate labels by splitting each account's activity into positively labeled sub-accounts. Given this label source, we train detection models which preserve behavioral regularities recurring across positive sub-accounts. We evaluate FISSION and show it outperforms prior methods in detecting Wikipedia sockpuppets and Twitter/X bots.

Learned world models are becoming essential to general-purpose agents: by predicting action consequences, they support planning and decision-making while reducing reliance on costly trial and error. This reliance creates a fundamental ambiguity: when a world-model-guided decision fails, the trajectory alone may not reveal whether the agent's decision rule or the world model caused the loss. We formalize this failure-attribution problem as a counterfactual decomposition of return loss and prove that its components are not identifiable from passive interaction, even for finite-horizon planners. This obstruction motivates Dual-Frontier, a learning principle that admits a world-model-guided decision only when its predicted advantage exceeds a certified bound on decision-relevant world-model error; otherwise, evidence is allocated to world-model verification. Action-conditioned value bounds and a closed-loop extension guarantee non-decreasing return for admitted decisions. Calibrated gates and simultaneous confidence sequences support adaptive evidence reuse, with sufficient and necessary verification bounds. Controlled learned-model experiments validate the predicted failure modes and certification behavior, while cross-backbone tool-use benchmarks instantiate the same verify-then-promote rule in realistic agent world-model pipelines, consistently improving decision quality and reliability.

Reliability theory gives a mature language for layered systems, but its formal tools are not yet standard in frontier AI control. We apply them to Google DeepMind's defenses against rogue deployment. The same control stack can have cubic, quadratic, or linear rare-failure suppression depending on its failure domains. Birnbaum importance identifies which component improvements buy the most nominal reliability, while prevention changes the population on which recovery is demanded. These results give concrete guidance about what to separate, improve, measure, and test.

Adaptive regulation can itself perturb the state it is intended to stabilize. In replicated simulations of an adaptive agent, we compare external disturbance, persistent internally generated disturbance, and control-generated disturbance under regulation-first and disturbance-first ordering. Persistent internal disturbance produces the largest exposure and regulatory burden within the tested parameter grid. When positive controller updates generate an immediate disturbance cost, increasing that cost produces a nonmonotonic response: effective disturbance initially rises, variability across stochastic runs increases over an intermediate range, and corrective activity becomes strongly suppressed at higher costs. The results show how disturbance source and timing shape exposure and controller burden in this model. They motivate testing adaptive agents with distinct disturbance sources and assessing regulatory activity alongside exposure.

AI agents are beginning to automate research and development across the AI stack, from improving training efficiency to optimizing inference. A natural next step is to improve the research efficiency of the agents themselves. When an AI research agent's own code is the object of optimization, each accepted rewrite becomes the agent that the next round edits. We refer to this loop as recursive self-improvement. Its significance lies in a long-standing trend, in which increased cumulative spending on R&D yields diminishing returns. Sustained self-improvement offers a way to counter this trend. We present AIDE^2, a system that implements this loop for a frontier AI research agent. It proposes changes to its own code, benchmarks modified versions of itself on a suite of AI R&D tasks, and keeps the changes that perform best on hidden evaluations. In an autonomous 8-day run, AIDE^2 discovered seven successive improvements, ranging from a new search policy to memory mechanisms that compress and manage the agent's growing context. These gains generalize to four held-out benchmarks spanning machine learning engineering, heuristic algorithm engineering, and physics-based weather forecasting, the last of which is out of distribution from the selection tasks. On all four, the strongest discovered agent matches or exceeds a human-engineered production research agent that ranks among the strongest on FML-Bench. On a separate held-out task family, the discovered agents also exhibit reduced reward hacking, a property the loop never explicitly optimized for: the rate falls from 55% to 32% during the run, 7 percentage points below the human-engineered agent. Together, these results show that an AI research agent can improve its own research efficiency through recursive self-improvement, and that these gains transfer to tasks and domains the loop never encountered.

Pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) constitute indispensable computational tools across multiple scientific domains, including Monte Carlo simulations, stochastic computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). The reproducibility of such applications critically depends on the ability of PRNG implementations to generate identical sequences across software environments when initialized from the same internal state. These algorithms enable the simulation of stochastic processes while providing deterministic and repeatable behaviour, thereby facilitating reproducible experiments. Modern PRNG implementations may be initialized through either a seed or, more accurately, an initial state that exceeds the capacity of a conventional integer seed. However, reliance on a simple seed alone frequently proves insufficient to ensure consistent program execution traces across different implementations. A natural assumption is that transferring the complete internal state of a generator should guarantee identical outputs regardless of the software library used. This study examines the validity of this assumption by investigating whether complete initial states can ensure cross-library fidelity and portability of PRNG streams. We focus on two widely deployed generators, Mersenne Twister and Philox, and evaluate their implementations across four major Python ecosystems-Random, NumPy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow. We compare the sequences produced by these implementations against those generated by the original reference algorithms under identical initialization conditions. Our results demonstrate that reproducibility cannot be assumed from PRNG state transfer alone, even when implementations claim to follow the same underlying algorithm. While fidelity was successfully achieved for several implementations, significant discrepancies were observed in others. Most notably, the Philox implementation in PyTorch exhibits fundamental incompatibilities with the reference algorithm, preventing exact reproduction of generator outputs across environments. These findings challenge the common expectation that access to a full internal state of a PRNG is sufficient to ensure reproducibility across software stacks. They further highlight that implementation-specific design choices can introduce hidden barriers to experimental replication, particularly in AI workflows that rely on multiple frameworks. This work shows that implementation fidelity of a PRNG is a necessary condition for scientific reproducibility and makes two primary contributions. First, it identifies practical guidelines for achieving reliable PRNG usage and reproducibility within the Python scientific and AI ecosystem. Second, it evaluates the extent to which cross-library portability and fidelity can be recovered through user-level techniques, without requiring modifications to library source code.

LLM agents often use generative models for bounded decisions, raising the question of when these decisions can be handled more efficiently without reducing task success. We study REFLEX, an agent architecture that uses Jev as a fast, typed decision layer and calls a strong LLM when confidence is low, or generation is required. On a frozen 100-task benchmark, REFLEX achieves 95% success with 72.7% fewer strong-model calls than a strong-only agent, with reductions persisting across three fallback families. Controlled interventions show that reliability depends on action-set size and near-valid alternatives near authorization boundaries. External BFCL and $\tau$-style evaluations reveal limited advantages over a cheap generative cascade when ordinary routing is already highly accurate. These findings identify when selective control with Jev can reduce computation and where its benefits are limited.

LLM-as-a-judge enables evaluation across diverse tasks, but inference cost and confidence reliability become critical at scale. We study whether a decision-only judge can provide an economical first pass and identify when stronger evaluation is needed. Comparing jev-as-a-judge with sixteen generative and reward-model judges, with blinded human adjudication, we find it within three percentage points of a state-of-the-art LLM judge, our strongest comparator, on ordinary preference and evidence-grounded factuality at 0.36% of the comparator's fee. Larger gaps arise when judgments require checking a derivation or resisting an elaborately written wrong answer. On several benchmarks, JEV's gap to this comparator is concentrated in low-confidence decisions. A frozen cascade that accepts confident verdicts and escalates uncertain ones retains 99% of the comparator's accuracy at lower cost.

In wireless communication networks, many resource optimization problems are nondeterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) due to their combinatorial nature and high computational complexity. Recently, neutral-atom-based quantum computing has emerged as a promising platform for efficiently solving such problems by leveraging quantum superposition and entanglement. However, its application to wireless communication optimization problems remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the use of neutral-atom quantum platforms to solve the maximum access problem (MAP), formulated as a mixed-integer programming task that jointly considers admission control, user clustering, channel assignment, and power allocation in a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled uplink network. To reduce the computational burden, the MAP is equivalently reformulated as a maximum independent set (MIS) problem in graph theory. This reformulation enables the use of the neutral atom platform based on Rydberg atom arrays, where the MIS problem is naturally encoded into the physical geometry and blockade constraints of the quantum system. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and potential of this approach for addressing large-scale wireless resource optimization problems.

Massive connectivity in next-generation networks demands energy- and spectrum-efficient solutions for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Symbiotic radio (SR) enables passive IoT devices to communicate by backscattering existing cellular transmissions. A key challenge in uplink SR is active device detection (ADD), which directly affects decoding reliability, interference management, and system throughput. We propose an energy-harvesting code-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-SR system in which IoT devices harvest energy from ambient uplink signals and backscatter information using low-density spreading (LDS) codes. To reduce the complexity of ADD, Grover's quantum search algorithm is employed, providing a quadratic reduction in oracle-query complexity over exhaustive maximum-likelihood (ML) search. Numerical results show that the proposed approach closely approaches ML performance while substantially reducing the number of search iterations, demonstrating its potential for scalable ambient IoT systems.

Successful agent execution need not identify which future product improvement its user would value. We present a decision-specific audit that maps a declared observation channel and product-value contrast to compatible intervals and witness populations. Its foundations are established identification and decision theory; the contribution is an executable measurement workflow and a controlled study of its limits. A frozen experiment makes 4,800 requests to two pinned model snapshots on shared synthetic tasks. All 36 conservative primary intervals remain unresolved despite different execution accuracy. An exploratory 2,400-call follow-up records supplied preferences and resolves three of nine comparisons per model. A deterministic extractor resolves seven of nine without model calls or calibration observations, exposing unnecessary uncertainty introduced by model-generated reports. A further 14,400 controlled multinomial simulations distinguish structural ambiguity from weak identification and finite calibration precision. We propose a source-labeled decision receipt and provide an offline viewer for inspecting the audit. These results motivate preserving decision-relevant structured input and diagnosing why a decision is unresolved before collecting more telemetry. The study contains no human participants or real customer outcomes. Full proofs, raw model provenance, controlled experiments, and reproducible analyses accompany the report.

Typed decision models are built for settings where model outputs are consumed directly by software. Instead of generating free-form text, they return a decision over a predefined set of options. By construction, every output conforms to the required schema. Yet this guarantee does not tell us whether the model interprets the options as intended. We study Jev and two Jev-like models with open weights by changing how option names are assigned to rubrics. Each option consists of an option name and a textual rubric that defines what the option means. We change only which option name is assigned to each rubric; the question, state, rubric wording, and set of option names remain exactly the same. On 1200 workflow decisions with task-specific rubrics, renaming the two options from 0/1 to no/yes changes 70.4 more answers per hundred (95% CI: [67.6, 73.1]) and shifts AUC from .94 to .23, revealing a systematic reversal in the decision ranking rather than simple uncertainty. The same operation has little effect with neutral option names. This pattern holds across all 4 predicates, where the effect is at least 7.4x larger than under the neutral control, and becomes stronger as the number of options increases. The effect also depends on the read-out geometry: a second model family that mean-pools over the full option span flips 4.1x less often. The hosted model exhibits the same behavior: the swap changes AUC from .8146 to .5806 and produces 24x as many answer flips as its test-retest floor. In contrast, replacing the option names with random character strings returns all model families to the neutral-control regime without reducing accuracy. The failure therefore depends on the semantic polarity of the option names rather than on the renaming operation itself. Across all conditions, the type-error rate remains 0%, even when decision accuracy degrades substantially.

Large language model (LLM) agents often handle streams of related tasks, yet standard harnesses repeatedly ask the model to reconstruct the same control decisions inside each task's context. We study whether task feedback can instead turn recurring control into reusable executable code, while reserving LLM calls for task-specific semantic reasoning. We introduce Growing Harness, a failure-guided training paradigm that learns the agent harness itself from a strategy-free scaffold that exposes fixed model and tool interfaces but encodes no task-solving controller. Function-level execution traces localize each failure to a bounded code surface, an optimizer repairs a window of failures jointly, and a success-first held-out gate rolls back repair sequences that harm prior capability. Accepted edits accumulate in one shared harness, allowing its control structure to emerge from task feedback. Across BrowseComp-Plus and WebArena-Verified with three deployment models from 4B to 120B parameters, Growing Harness achieves the highest mean success in five of six benchmark-model settings and trails the best mean by 0.7 pp. in the sixth. Relative to a Tool-Calling agent, it reduces LLM calls by 76.0-91.8% and deployed-agent inference cost by 74.4-98.6%. On WebArena-Verified, its success remains 44.7-45.3% across model scales, whereas Tool-Calling falls to 6.7% with the 4B model. Ablations show that trace-local edits, joint repair, and gate-based rollback each improve final success. These results show that persistent program growth can move recurring control out of model context and into low-cost code, yielding reusable specialist agents that remain effective with smaller deployment models.

We introduce SWE-Serve, a benchmark for evaluating agents on production inference engineering tasks. Implementing an inference feature can require coordinating multiple changes across the serving stack, including model support, runtime execution, and public APIs. Existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of production inference engineering: repository-level software engineering benchmarks do not target inference, while general terminal-agent benchmarks include only a few inference tasks. Dedicated inference benchmarks, meanwhile, focus primarily on isolated kernel generation or performance optimization rather than repository-scale production feature implementation. SWE-Serve provides 53 repository-grounded tasks derived from recent production changes to SGLang, spanning six inference engineering families. Each task executes on either CPU or a single GPU (H100) and is evaluated with hidden functional and regression tests, including, where applicable, end-to-end (E2E) serving tests and calibrated performance gates. Executable no-op and oracle controls, adversarial verifier review, and closed-book execution support task validity and evaluation integrity. Across 11 models and 31 model-effort configurations, the best-performing configuration achieves 75% mean pass@1. SWE-Serve exposes a substantial gap between completing tasks locally and achieving production correctness. On 19 tasks with end-to-end coverage, model-serving E2E tests reject roughly one-third of patches that pass every other test (45.9% under the verifier versus 69.4% with E2E tests excluded from scoring), with pass rate increasing for each model's best-performing configuration. By making the production correctness gap directly measurable, SWE-Serve enables the field to track whether future agents move beyond completing tasks locally to achieving production correctness.

Agents often work on complex problems that require millions of tokens of context, which necessitates compacting across sessions due to limited context windows. We develop CliffCompaction, an autocompaction technique that reduces cost by up to 50% under a bounded context while maintaining or improving performance on Terminal-Bench and achieving new levels of efficiency for test-time scaling and state-of-the-art results on KernelBench. The per-rollout savings of CliffCompaction make the performance--cost trade-off of test-time scaling more efficient, adding over 10 percentage points on Terminal-Bench for less than the cost of two full-context runs. Under parallel test-time scaling, CliffCompaction lets Kimi K2.6 match Opus 4.7, and exceed Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex at lower cost. The key to CliffCompaction's effectiveness is that it keeps compacted information faithful by only truncating or dropping content, never rephrasing or rewriting it. We never compact a compaction---each pass operates only on original content, and prior compacted output is discarded, preventing context drift from accumulating. These properties sustain continual learning over sessions exceeding a million tokens: on KernelBench, CliffCompaction reaches CUDA kernel speedups of $2.23\times$ after 200 steps and $3.58\times$ after 400 steps, surpassing specialized search algorithms and trained agents despite being a general-purpose compaction technique. We open-source a scaffold-agnostic API-proxy implementation of CliffCompaction usable with Claude Code, Codex and other harnesses.

Text classifiers trained on the ISOT/Kaggle "Fake and Real News" corpus routinely report accuracy and F1 above 0.98, a level of performance that sits uneasily beside the difficulty of assessing veracity. Using a transparent TF-IDF and linear-classifier pipeline as a measurement instrument, we audit the corpus along three leakage channels and two distribution-shift protocols, releasing all code and derived numbers. First, the benchmark is partly degenerate: a classifier given only the subject metadata field, with the article text discarded, attains F1 = 1.000, since the two classes have disjoint subjects. Second, removing all three leakage channels, metadata, a newswire source tag present in 99.2% of real articles, and 6,251 duplicate documents contaminating 19.4% of a naive test split, lowers F1 by only 1.21 points (0.9935 to 0.9814); the residual signal is diffuse editorial style rather than a few giveaway tokens, since deleting the 1,000 highest-weight unigrams still leaves F1 = 0.926. Third, this style signal does not transfer: under a topic-disjoint protocol, average precision falls from 0.9995 to 0.9475 and deployed F1 from 0.9905 to 0.8067, with a prior-matched analysis confirming a genuine 5.2-point loss of discrimination, while temporal transfer is nearly lossless. A fine-tuned DistilBERT is stronger in-distribution (F1 = 0.9993) but degrades far more under topic shift, losing 12.9 average-precision points against the linear model's 5.2. Transferred to the independent LIAR benchmark, all three models fall to near-chance ranking (ROC-AUC 0.54-0.57), none beating a majority-class baseline. We conclude that within-corpus scores here quantify source and topic separability rather than veracity, that added capacity exploits the shortcut rather than avoiding it, and we recommend metadata-only, small-sample, and topic-disjoint baselines as inexpensive diagnostics for future work.

I pretrained a language model end-to-end in Rust - alone, with no team, no PyTorch, and no Python in the training path - for $164 in rented GPU time. I report that as an achievement, not a recommendation: the more useful contribution is a measured failure taxonomy of the two leading Rust ML frameworks, Candle and Burn, as training (not inference) backends in 2026. I document five Candle defects, including fused kernels that silently produce no gradient, and three Burn defects, including a backward pass at roughly 3% of theoretical GPU throughput and a kernel-fusion path that segfaults mid-training at multi-billion-parameter scale. Every one passed ordinary loss-curve inspection; none announced itself. I describe the verification discipline that caught six such silent failures, centered on a gradient-flow arbiter: a test that runs one forward/backward pass and asserts every trainable parameter receives a finite, nonzero gradient, generalizable to any framework. The trained model (roughly 0.4B parameters, Bangla-first) shows strong Bangla language-modeling signal - a per-token negative log-likelihood of 0.93 against 12.60 for a random-initialized twin - while scoring at chance on English commonsense multiple-choice, the expected outcome of a deliberately small, Bangla-weighted budget (about 2 billion tokens, 54.6 hours, one rented H100). I also report a tokenizer-fertility trap in Bengali script: naive byte-level tokenization collapsed Bangla to roughly 1.4 characters per token against English's 3.9, silently inverting the corpus's language balance; fixing it reached roughly 4.1. To my knowledge, this is among the first documented end-to-end LM pretraining runs in pure Rust. After this run I moved training to PyTorch and kept Rust for on-device serving: in my hands, Rust is not yet a competitive place to train a language model, though it may be a good place to serve one.

Numerically equivalent word problems should yield the same canonical answer whether a quantity is written as a decimal, fraction, percentage, number word, scientific notation, or an exactly converted unit. We generate 3,600 exact-rational problems and 8,600 prompts spanning five identity-preserving transformation families, and evaluate five open-weight systems. After a fixed syntax audit that normalizes common answer forms without an LLM judge, canonical accuracy is 0.969-0.996, but orbit correctness falls to 0.848-0.981 and orbit invariance to 0.851-0.981; invariant-but-wrong orbits account for at most 0.003. Most of the broad strict-parser collapse arises because multiplication-form scientific notation lies outside the implemented number grammar, illustrating how evaluator interfaces can masquerade as reasoning failures. A distinct semantic pathology remains: Mistral Small 4 scores 0.699 on unit-converted inputs and produces 265 errors differing from the label by exact powers of ten. In a separate 9,000-call experiment that allocates equal calls to the compared arms, representation consensus does not outperform paraphrase consensus on a low-error subset and produces substantially more false alarms. The accompanying ancillary archive contains the frozen benchmark, evaluation and audit records, consensus raw responses, manifests, analysis code, and a one-command paper build.

Diachronic word embeddings have become the modern standard for tracking semantic change, yet they have been largely validated on modern, high-resource, and well-segmented languages. This paper tests whether the paradigm transfers to Sanskrit, an ancient, low-resource language whose phonological fusion (sandhi), morphological inflection, compounding, and polysemy pose a unique challenge. I assemble a 2.7M-token corpus spanning four canonical periods, recover word boundaries with a neural byte-level sandhi splitter and lemmatizer, and train per-period embeddings across configurations. To evaluate the system, I curate a validation set from historical scholarship and test recovery directionally with anchor displacement. Of 21 testable shifts, 19 move in the philologically attested direction (sign test, p=0.00011). I further show which configuration the language forces and comment on opportunities for improvement.

QMSum provides no scorer, making query-focused meeting summarization results difficult to compare. We rescore or generate 15 systems under one implementation. Through a common inference port, a released 406M Fusion-in-Decoder specialist loses 6.30 ROUGE-1 when moved from capped long input to 2,000-word retrieved spans. Fine-tuning it on this span regime recovers the loss. On test it scores 36.33 ROUGE-1 versus 35.41 for our 1.2B system; the meeting-cluster 95% interval for the difference is [-0.27, +2.22], so QMSum does not statistically separate them. The smaller system uses about one-third as many total parameters and less than half the peak inference memory. Within the fixed 1.2B base, span-regime fine-tuning adds 5.29 [+4.02, +6.56], while replacing the first 4,500 transcript words with 2,000 retrieved words adds 1.55 on test and 0.29 on validation. Separately, under one concise prompt and reference-overlap scorer, a released 406M specialist exceeds five proprietary hosted models by at least 6.2 ROUGE-1, but output length and absent human or factuality evaluation limit this ordering. Conclusions are limited to QMSum and automatic metrics.

Central bank press conferences are not merely information releases --- they are structured narratives. We study whether the shape of sentiment within a statement, not just its average tone, carries policy-relevant signals. Constructing sentiment arcs for ECB and Fed press conferences along three dimensions --- monetary stance, economic outlook, and uncertainty --- we assess their predictive content for policy rate changes, inflation expectations, and forecaster disagreement. Our findings show that arc shape robustly predicts rate decisions beyond lexicon-based benchmarks at both institutions --- it is not merely whether a statement sounds hawkish or economically optimistic on average, but how these sentiments are sequenced and emphasized across the statement, that carries the policy signal. Arc features also shape how professional forecasters update inflation expectations and how much they disagree, pointing to a receiver-side effect distinct from the direct policy signal. These findings suggest that communication design --- the sequencing and emphasis of policy language across a statement --- is a first-order feature of the policy signal, not a second-order refinement.

Peer review plays a central role in scholarly publishing, yet verifying whether reviewer claims are supported by manuscript evidence remains a largely manual and time-consuming process. We present Peerify, a pipeline for manuscript-grounded verification of peer-review claims. Given a manuscript and a review comment, the Peerify pipeline decomposes reviews into atomic claims, retrieves relevant manuscript evidence, and determines whether each claim is supported by the paper. To support the development and evaluation of the pipeline, we construct a benchmark of 800 claims derived from authentic peer-review interactions collected from NeurIPS 2024 and ICLR 2024, including a 300-claim hand-labeled subset used to audit the automated supervision. We evaluate state-of-the-art language models and retrieval strategies within the Peerify pipeline, together with entailment baselines. Our results demonstrate the importance of retrieval-centered verification and claim decomposition, while highlighting the challenges posed by ambiguous and interpretive reviewer claims. Automated labels agree with human consensus on 90.3% of audited claims ($\kappa = 0.87$), while off-the-shelf entailment models stay below 0.24 macro-F1.

Autonomous agents that automatically build artificial intelligence (AI) models could broaden access to AI across science and engineering. A popular line of such agents frames model building as a code search problem and solves it by tree search, in which each node is a candidate program and the tree grows by generating a child program from a parent, and these agents now approach the capability of experienced AI engineers on realistic benchmarks. However, these agents have three weaknesses in efficiency that have not been fully addressed. First, only a small number of candidates can be executed within a realistic budget, so search rules that rank nodes by executed rewards, such as Monte Carlo-style tree search, rely on few and noisy scores and select the next node to explore less effectively. Second, no resource-aware strategy is used to schedule training jobs, which can lower hardware utilization and training efficiency. Third, every agent call is served by a single powerful model, which inflates inference cost. Here we introduce AIBuildAI-2.5, an agentic system that carries out the tree search with LLM agents and addresses each of the three issues. AIBuildAI-2.5 proposes a novel LLM-guided tree search, in which a judge scores each candidate on its expected improvement, grounding, and feasibility, and a selector ranks the pool of candidates from these scores and the state of the search. In addition, AIBuildAI-2.5 comprises a scheduler that launches training jobs with the current hardware resource status taken into account and a router that assigns lower-cost LLMs to less demanding tasks while reserving the most capable LLM for the most challenging sub-tasks in the AI model building workflow. AIBuildAI-2.5 ranks first on MLE-Bench with a medal rate of 73.3%, and outperforms a strong baseline on six autonomous AI research tasks from AIRS-Bench.

How many prompts does on-policy distillation (OPD) need, and how does the answer depend on the student policies that generate its training responses? We study these two controls jointly: prompt breadth and rollout refresh. A 3x3 mathematical-reasoning experiment fixes 14,080 trajectories and 110 optimizer updates while varying the prompt bank and the number of response-generating policy snapshots. With ten snapshots, eight prompts reach 24.09% average accuracy, close to 24.51% for 14,080 distinct prompts. With responses frozen at the initial policy, however, increasing breadth lowers accuracy from 21.16% to 19.05%; under per-update refresh, it raises accuracy from 23.61% to 25.57%. The resulting interaction is 4.07 percentage points, with a 95% question-paired interval of [2.00, 6.28]. Matched comparisons under two teachers reveal a second reversal: the periodic models have higher short-budget accuracy and answer completion, but frozen-response models overtake in average accuracy at a 32K output limit, using 1.7-1.8x as many response tokens. These results show that prompt efficiency in OPD can depend on both refresh and inference budget.

Large language models (LLMs) aligned for safety often suffer from over-refusal, incorrectly rejecting benign yet safety-related instructions. Prior studies primarily attribute this to static representation overlap, largely overlooking the underlying dynamic mechanisms. In this paper, we present the mechanistic analysis of over-refusal through the lens of internal routing conflicts within transformer attention. We discover that a sparse subset of Hypersensitive Safety Heads misfires on Hard-Safe prompts, exhibiting abnormal attention entanglement that forcefully binds harmless target entities to refusal semantics. This triggers a severe, high-entropy routing conflict that deprives target entities of necessary attention. To counteract this, we propose Semantic Routing Calibration (SRC), a lightweight, training-free inference framework. SRC precisely localizes and dynamically suppresses these hypersensitive safety heads at the inference stage. Coupled with a dual-branch logits fusion that acts as a safety regularizer during subsequent decoding, SRC seamlessly restores trustworthy reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRC alleviates over-refusal, with intrinsic safety performance preserved as much as feasible.

We introduce FrontierMath Erd\H{o}s (FME), a benchmark of 68 Erd\H{o}s problems that are open as of August 2026. To solve a task in FME, AI systems must resolve (prove or disprove) one of the 68 conjectures in the proof assistant Lean. Our 68 problems were selected by the second author among 652 open problems on erdosproblems.com for their mathematical interest and difficulty. AIs have recently resolved several open problems in mathematics, but these demonstrations fall short of a systematic study of AI capabilities. FME evaluates every AI model on the same fixed problems, autonomously and under the same budget. We evaluated five AIs with a budget of \$300 per problem. One (GPT-6 Astra) scored 3%, and all others scored 0%.

Dual-source encrypted points of interest (DSEP), POIs from two encrypted coordinate systems, suffer from intertwined location and attribute uncertainties, including nonlinear systematic misalignment and naming inconsistency, hindering land-use/land-cover (LULC) mapping. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose an LLM-driven, training-free location-attribute synergic closed-loop optimization paradigm for DSEP fusion. The paradigm jointly refines location transformation and attribute correspondences through iterative feedback. Attribute-synergic location fusion uses an LLM-driven attribute matching method to establish DSEP correspondences, reducing matching complexity from O(N^2) to O(N), and refines transformation coefficients using an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm within ISODATA-clustered local subregions. Location-synergic attribute fusion then reassesses attribute confidence from updated geometric residuals through an LLM-fuzzy method. The refined correspondences feed back into location optimization, forming a bidirectional closed loop. Sample purification and adaptive radius contraction enable convergence in essentially two iterations. We further propose a training-free LULC mapping method that inherits land-use classes from encrypted maps through location fusion, producing vector-raster integrated LULC maps. A reference-free POI fusion evaluation method is applied across 31 provincial capitals and municipalities in mainland China. Experiments show that our method achieves an average DSEP location fusion residual of 4.58 m and attribute fusion accuracy of 95.12%, improving upon the open-source baseline and state-of-the-art method by 1.77 m and 14.87%, respectively. Overall, the method provides a training-free solution for DSEP fusion and enables georeferencing of encrypted vector data to WGS-84 without field-surveyed ground control points.

"An agent that writes its conclusions into a store it later retrieves from closes a loop usually reported as one-way contamination. Taking the loop to the infinite-tenure limit against an append-only store gives a different picture: because writing never deletes, the reachable state space has a hard upper edge at (n-1)/n, so the outcome is a choice between two edges rather than a decay. At f_0 = 0.9 the interval between the two modes holds 3.6% of 220 runs where a uniform spread would put 20.6%, and is strictly empty on the first 15; the pooled mean describes 8.2% of the runs it summarises, the median 68.2%. Everything the model contributes is carried by one measured primitive with no fitted parameter, the copy function \gamma(\phi): on 36 Wikidata facts, sign(\hat{\gamma} - \gamma_{crit}), with \gamma_{crit} = 1/k at r = 0, w = 1, predicts the direction of drift on 353 of 360 real-fact runs (39 of 40 synthetic in the same batch). Scale does not rescue the store: pooled frontier capture is 0.850, with claude-sonnet-4.5 captured on 20 of 20 seeds against our registered prediction of <0.5. What the interval tests is distinguishability rather than count: on the real facts, multi-valued runs have 6.4x its occupancy of the rest. It survives at f_0 in {0.1, 0.3, 0.5}, capture peaks at f_0 = 0.5, and of four interventions with criteria frozen first, timing dominates fraction at matched budget while a consistency gate drives every model to 0.993. The resampling unit is the seed, at a design effect of 3.75 on a pooled level: under a 44-seed control the ordering supporting claim 4 collapses from Spearman +0.98 at three seeds to +0.31-0.80 at forty-four, while claim 2's ordering is exact there (+1.00, p = 0.017). All 87 graded rows are in Appendix W, 37 of them graded withdrawn, failed, self-correcting, undecidable or an acknowledged limit, against 50 that are not."

Can one language model hand its live memory to another without the receiver rereading the context? We demonstrate useful persistent hybrid-state transfer across one architecture-matched Qwen3.5 4B-to-9B sibling pair. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstrated cross-model handoff of persistent recurrent inference state between differently sized hybrid language models without target prefix replay. Translated attention KV alone leaves a large gap; adding the Gated DeltaNet (GDN) persistent-state package lowers teacher-forced negative log-likelihood (NLL), the average next-token log-loss, by 0.747 nats/token (95% paired document bootstrap CI [0.6921, 0.8047]), improving all 64 PG19 documents. Direct recurrent and convolution reuse outperforms the tested learned GDN maps, consistent with partial functional compatibility of persistent-state coordinates. A fresh component factorial selects translated KV with direct recurrent and convolution state. An additional 434,176-parameter correction improves that base on 64 fresh web documents: continuation loss is 0.076 nats/token above native 9B (excess NLL), Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence is 0.022, and native context recovery (NCR) is 0.918. Corrected 9B significantly beats continued 4B inference while processing zero historical prefix tokens. Evidence covers one direction, one geometry-matched Base-model pair, and 4K teacher-forced continuation; the near-native gate failed, the 16K branch was not run, and free-generation equivalence and a general state interface remain unproven.

For a long-horizon LLM agent, the memory question is not what was once recorded but what \emph{currently holds}. Most designs answer it only indirectly: every interaction is stored, and the present is reconstructed at query time by retrieving and reconciling records, so stale values re-enter and the same conflicts are re-litigated. Committing the current value at write time avoids this, but existing write-time (CRUD) memories overwrite, so a wrong update is unrecoverable and prior state is lost. We take the missing combination---\emph{commit on arrival while retaining what is displaced}---and formalize it as \textsc{Memory of Memory} (MoM): memory tracks not only content but the provenance, status, and history of its own entries. We instantiate MoM as \textsc{Provenant Memory} (P-Mem), a typed provenance graph whose \emph{active frontier} exposes one current value per resolved key while displaced values are retained as provenance; typed operations decide whether a new observation supports, supersedes, contests, rejects, revokes, or resolves an existing value. P-Mem's decisive gain is validity rather than accuracy: its turn-level read matches the strongest retrieval memory in accuracy at $\sim$4$\times$ fewer read tokens---a retrieval-granularity effect---while graph-guided turn pruning cuts the knowledge-update stale-answer rate (19.4\%$\rightarrow$10.9\%); on revision chains it stays at 100\% where query-time reading collapses to 25\%, and, because displaced values are retained rather than overwritten, it recovers committed errors a CRUD memory cannot (100\% vs.\ 0\%).

In this report we present results of the ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains. This competition aimed to advance research in document understanding through the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). Building upon previous DocVQA benchmarks, this competition introduces challenging reasoning questions over a diverse collection of documents spanning eight domains, including business reports, scientific papers, slides, posters, maps, comics, infographics, and engineering drawings. The competition concluded with 20 valid submissions from 8 teams spanning zero-shot VLMs, OCR and parser-augmented pipelines, agentic retrieval systems, multi-agent ensembles, and fine-tuned multimodal models. The results show that the strongest systems move beyond single-pass prompting and instead rely on structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components.

A feedback-based word deduction framework based on the Jotto problem is proposed, and the problem space is represented as a weighted graph where all valid words correspond to nodes, and the edge weight is defined by the number of common letters between the two words. Finally, the gameplay is defined as an iterative constraint propagation mechanism where feedback is used to iteratively narrow the incompatible space of the graph, facilitating the reduction of the hypothesis space in a structured and interpretable manner. In contrast to existing approaches, where the problem space is typically defined for fixed-length isograms, the proposed framework generalizes to variable-length words (between 3 and 8 letters) and naturally extends to repeated letter cases, facilitating the treatment of realistic Jotto problem instances within a unified framework for the first time. The proposed framework's applicability and solver dynamics are also discussed through an interactive implementation and a qualitative case study, respectively. Significant automated tests on approximately 3,000 simulated gameplay scenarios identify a novel convergence behavior: the expected number of iterations diminishes with increasing word length. A strong relationship is confirmed using statistical tests to verify a logarithmic relationship, which is also verified using regression modeling and goodness-of-fit tests. In addition to the initial problem statement, this formulation introduces graph pruning as a viable paradigm for feedback-driven inference with interpretability and its association with symbolic reasoning and interactive intelligent systems.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) adapts large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks while updating only a small fraction of their pretrained parameters. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses two trainable low-rank matrices, while Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) further separates weight magnitude and direction but retains the dense LoRA-style factorization in its directional branch. We propose ChainDoRA, a weight-decomposed adaptation framework that constructs the directional low-rank factors from a connected Tensor-Train (TT) chain, where the adapter rank forms the boundary rank between input- and output-side TT contractions and an independent TT rank controls representation capacity and parameter cost. Under a controlled 15,119-example response-only adaptation setting with LLaMA-7B, ChainDoRA is evaluated against matched LoRA and DoRA baselines on seven commonsense reasoning benchmarks. ChainDoRA with TT rank 16 achieves a seven-task average accuracy of 72.30%, compared with 69.88% for LoRA and 69.39% for DoRA, while requiring only 5.35M trainable parameters versus 56.10M for LoRA and 56.98M for DoRA, corresponding to a 90.62% reduction relative to DoRA. Ablations over TT rank and adapter placement show controllable parameter-accuracy trade-offs, indicating that connected TT parameterization can substantially reduce the parameter cost of magnitude-direction adaptation while preserving, and in this setting improving, downstream reasoning performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human survey responses and behavioral reactions, yet unreliable simulations can mislead social science conclusions. However, existing evaluations focus on end-to-end scores, leaving it unclear how different aspects of the simulation process interact to determine reliability. We propose ReliMap, which decomposes LLM-based human behavior simulation into three structured layers and evaluates reliability at both the individual level (R1) and population level (R2) across three configuration dimensions: model capacity, profile completeness, and population coverage. Through experiments across four simulation tasks and eleven LLMs, we find that all models exhibit substantial distributional bias without profile conditioning. Profile conditioning reduces this bias with diminishing returns. Larger models benefit more, and attribute informativeness matters more than quantity. Critically, R1 gains do not reliably transfer to R2--individual and population-level reliability can move in opposite directions. At the population layer, increasing coverage reduces variance but not systematic bias, with R2 stabilizing at around 50-100 individuals. These findings highlight that reliable simulation cannot be achieved by optimizing any single layer in isolation, but requires coordinated improvement across all three.

We describe ufakzeka-1, a 151M-parameter (182M with embeddings) decoder-only Turkish language model pretrained from scratch on 13.5B tokens of openly licensed text and instruction-tuned for chat, at a total cost of about \$286 in cloud GPU, API and notebook time. The contribution is not the model's capability, which is what a model this size can be expected to have, but the record of building and measuring it: a Turkish byte-level tokenizer at 1.77 tokens per word, a three-stage pretraining schedule, a post-training mixture of openly licensed and generated data, and an evaluation battery of release gates, a rule-checked sweep of 5,508 conversations, judged conversations and hand tests, all with prompts held out from the training data, enforced by decontamination inside the data build and by a checked-in invariant script we run before each build. We report three findings that we believe transfer to other small-model efforts: a safety gate that had been "fixed" with training data written from its own questions read 64/64 while the honest figure was 34/64; training-seed variance was as large as the spread across every recipe we tried, so single-seed comparisons at this scale are uninformative; and data rounds repaired only what was absent from the data, while identity tracking over long context and multi-turn arithmetic did not move across any data change we tried, which we read as limits of the model size rather than gaps in the data, a reading the next, larger model will test. Weights, the data recipe, the evaluation code and the spend ledger are released under Apache-2.0.

Memory systems for coding agents must decide, when a repository changes, which of their stored claims have become false. Content anchoring invalidates a claim whenever the artifact it came from changes, which fires constantly. Semantic-equivalence classification asks whether a diff preserves behavior, a question about the diff rather than about any stored claim. We show the second signal fails for a reason unrelated to model capability: asked whether a commit preserves behavior, five models spanning a 40x price range fire on 59-72% of real commits and reach precisions of only 0.291 to 0.329 against a 0.25 base rate. Asked instead whether one specific claim still holds, the same models on the same diffs reach 0.705 to 0.974. A control that hands the behavior-preservation judge the claim text, changing only the question, moves precision by 0.010 and 0.016; changing the question moves it by 0.49 and 0.65. We also compare against pytest-testmon, a deployed regression-test selector with coverage-derived dependency data: it reaches 0.868 recall at 0.415 precision, so near-complete knowledge of what a change can reach does not identify what it falsifies. Ground truth is execution, not annotation: a claim is a test function passing at commit t, and it has flipped if that same assertion text fails at t+1. Building this required an observation we did not find in prior work. On a CI-gated mainline a commit that leaves a pre-existing test failing cannot merge, so the naive construction has an empty positive class by design. We report 10,369 claims with 184 execution-verified flips mined from 23 Python libraries, splits held out by repository, a post-knowledge-cutoff split, a shuffled-diff null, a paraphrase control, and a leave-one-repository-out analysis over 17 repositories.

Financial search is a highly demanding task for LLM agents, requiring not only a correct final answer but also temporally valid information retrieval, authoritative source selection, entity and period alignment, unit and definition consistency, and verifiable evidence for all conclusions. Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate only the final answer, making it difficult to localize errors or assess whether an answer is well-founded. To address this gap, we introduce FinFIRST (Financial Information Retrieval, Sourcing and Traceability), the first financial benchmark to jointly evaluate answers and supporting evidence through atomic rubrics. FinFIRST comprises 123 expert-authored tasks spanning a graduated difficulty spectrum, constructed from aggregate patterns of real-world financial scenarios through an 18-field taxonomy, a six-axis coverage blueprint, a registry of 138 financial sources, contributions from over 50 finance experts, and a six-stage quality-control pipeline. Each task is accompanied by an evidence-grounded reference package decomposed into atomic criteria across three dimensions: raw-information acquisition, source verification, and computation and answer formation. We evaluate 15 model configurations under a unified tool setting. Claude-Opus-5 achieves the highest atomic score of 87.59%, while GPT-5.6-Sol attains the highest strict pass rate of 71.54%. Computation and answer formation consistently lag behind raw-information acquisition across systems. FinFIRST retains final-answer correctness as the primary objective while making the supporting research process measurable, verifiable, and diagnosable.

Cultural evaluation coverage and robustness in language models are difficult to diagnose because pretraining corpora and cultural benchmarks are rarely indexed with comparable metadata. Benchmarks increasingly target culturally situated phenomena at the level of languages, regions, and locale-specific practices, while web-scale corpora are usually organized only by language. A shared culture-language-region layer makes these resources comparable, enabling audits of whether a target cultural phenomenon is represented in pretraining data, evaluated by benchmarks or both. To this end, we introduce FineWeb-CLaR, a large-scale annotated dataset derived from FineWeb and FineWeb-2 that places web documents on a shared culture-language-region axis for corpus auditing and benchmark alignment. FineWeb-CLaR annotates the full 30.9B-document collection from FineWeb and FineWeb-2 with URL-derived region labels and cultural-topic provenance. Our region resolver assigns a non-empty region to 25.61% of documents (7.92B). For cultural-topic analysis, we induce locale-specific topics and project them onto the 14 leaves of the Cultural Taxonomy of Liu et al. (2025), producing Locale Topic Distributions (LTDs) for corpus-side comparison. We also annotate 277 cultural NLP benchmarks with the same taxonomy, language coverage, and region coverage. Together, these resources enable direct comparison between corpus-side pretraining evidence and benchmark-side evaluation coverage.

Large language models (LLMs) offer great potential to automate a broad range of telecom engineering tasks by reasoning over standards, network configurations, mathematical models, source code, and operational logs. However, existing telecom LLMs struggle to reliably reason across these diverse tasks and data types. General-purpose LLMs often lack reliable grounding in telecom-specific knowledge, while telecom-specialized models are typically developed for narrower task families and exhibit limited multi-task performance. To fill this gap, we introduce TelecomGPT-R1, a family of open source unified telecom reasoning models structured around four complementary axes: protocol, knowledge, modeling, and fault. We first develop an axis-aware data generation framework that refines coarse public telecom artifacts into verified question-answer pairs and high quality chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories, yielding a training corpus containing 104,880 examples. Building on this corpus, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) instills telecom knowledge and evidence-grounded reasoning patterns to overcome the cold start barrier for reinforcement learning (RL). We then apply dynamic sampling policy optimization (DAPO) with task-routed rubric rewards to keep RL updates informative and stable across heterogeneous telecom reasoning tasks. These rewards decompose axis-specific CoT traces into verifiable reasoning units and combine grounded dense process credit with outcome correctness, allowing RL to learn generalizable problem solving behaviors from verifiable telecom evidence. We release the TelecomGPT-R1 models and a reproducible training recipe to support further community development. Evaluations on seven benchmarks of the GSMA Open Telco Leaderboard show that the open-source TelecomGPT-R1-27B achieves an 89.64% mean score, outperforming leading proprietary models, including GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini.

Parallel coding agents can produce patches that work alone but fail when merged. This happens when one agent changes an interface or rule that another agent still relies on. We study these failures with stale, a benchmark for semantic coordination. Our evaluation runs the same tests on each patch alone and on their combination, counting only failures introduced by combining the patches. We use three tiers: synthetic tasks with controlled interface changes, pairs of merged pull requests, and constructed tasks that use real Django helpers. Among 834 runs on 417 mined Django pairs, only one showed interference after correcting the grading procedure. On constructed tasks using 12 Django helpers, interference occurred in 97% of runs. A message describing the completed concurrent change recovered 82% of runs. Reviewed pull requests may contain few unresolved parallel changes, even when agents fail on controlled tasks using real code. The constructed failure rates do not estimate how often these problems occur in practice.

Legal argument mining supports passage classification, retrieval, and argument completion. This work introduces an expert-annotated dataset of 42 U.S. federal tax opinions on corporate reorganizations under I.R.C. {\S}368. To our knowledge, it is the first expert-annotated, tree-structured argument corpus for this domain. Explicit spans receive one of five functional labels: Rule, Analysis, Conclusion, Background Facts, and Procedural History. Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion spans can be linked into directed support trees, while Background Facts and Procedural History serve a contextual function. The corpus provides span-based, sentence-based, flat, and tree-structured representations. Agreement analysis shows that functional node labels are more reliable than directed support edges and implicit intermediate conclusions. Directed-path agreement is stronger than direct-edge agreement, which indicates that broad reachability is more stable than exact local decomposition. Classification experiments show that functional labels are learnable under case-disjoint evaluation. Retrieval experiments show that supervised fine-tuning improves within-case retrieval. However, cross-case generalization remains weak. The dataset supports legal passage classification and provides a conservative benchmark for structured argument mining in U.S. federal tax case law.

We study what LLMs do when a user applies pressure in an uncomfortable situation: a user insists, begs, flatters or grieves, and the model gives up a correct fact, writes a document it should refuse, or cheers a plan that will cost the user money. We send frozen multi-turn scenes, identical for every model regardless of the reply, to 60 models from 13 vendors, and label each transcript with a codebook built by open coding and then frozen: a trajectory (the model held its position or folded) and a manner (how it held or folded). Two findings separate. Whether a model holds tracks its generation, meaning how recent it is: fold rate correlates with a public capability index at Spearman -0.64, with little vendor effect. How it holds tracks the vendor: six of the 17 manner codes sort by vendor at permutation p <= 0.001, corrected across the codebook. We report four vendor profiles on the codes that cleared reliability. We also ask which parts of the labeling need a person. Six LLM coders from three vendors apply the codebook more consistently than three human coders do (Krippendorff's alpha 0.66 against 0.46), agree with the codebook's author on trajectory at kappa 0.84 to 0.91 on transcripts the codebook's examples never touched, and match an adjudicated human reference at 0.83. Blind machine readings recover the codebook's categories but cannot tell which of them a second reader would apply the same way. We conclude that for behavior a non-specialist can judge, the human contribution is authoring and bounding the codes and owning a small reference, not producing labels at volume.

Attributing language model outputs to their internal computations is an open problem in interpretability. Existing methods, which use causal interventions, gradients, or learnable masks, either are infeasibly expensive or struggle to identify actual causally-important internal computations. We propose framing attribution as the problem of identifying nested subsets of internal components which minimise a downstream loss. To learn this task, we introduce Matryoshka Attribution (MAttr), a mask learning method that parametrises the mask with a simple differentiable sigmoid top-$k$ operator. We supervise training over all sparsities simultaneously by randomising $k$ over training, resulting in a learned ordering of components by attribution score. MAttr achieves number 1 on the official leaderboard of the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (Mueller et al., 2025); our method identifies sparse and task-transferrable circuits across varying circuit bases. As a practical application, we show that MAttr can be trained with reinforcement learning to identify weight changes responsible for downstream behaviours in LLM finetuning. We train MAttr on refusal judge scores and find that restoring $1\%$ of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct's weights to their base model state is sufficient to remove refusals while maintaining capabilities. We view MAttr as a successful formulation of interpretability into a learnable objective that we can tackle with gradient descent, and encourage future work along these lines.

Large language model (LLM) inference is constrained by the quadratic scaling of self-attention and the linear scaling of the KV cache, increasing latency, energy consumption, and GPU memory demand as context length scales. Existing soft-compression methods either lack query-guided memory selection at inference time, train without answer-targeted supervision, or couple compression tightly to a specific decoder architecture. We propose a Context-to-Answer-Aligned Memory Compression (CMC) framework, which compresses long input contexts into compact Context Memory Embeddings (CMEs) aligned to any frozen decoder's embedding space, reducing inference costs without modifying decoder weights. CMC introduces a two-tier KV cache that combines question-guided CME selection with a local context window, and trains the compressor with answer-targeted distillation from a frozen LLM. Experiments across nine encoder-decoder combinations and four QA benchmarks show that CMC consistently outperforms the baseline, achieving up to 7.3 EM and 4.0 F1 point gains on SQuAD, while reducing inference time and energy consumption by up to 20% and peak reserved GPU memory by up to 50% at 3,000 generation tokens. Ablation studies confirm that each architectural component and training objective contributes to the performance.

We introduce Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a natively multimodal agentic model for real-world multimodal productivity. Compared with previous omni models, which primarily emphasized perception and interaction, Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash substantially improves multimodal understanding and reasoning, as well as performance on long-horizon agentic tasks. These capabilities are supported by a native multimodal co-training strategy that preserves strong text-domain capabilities while facilitating the transfer of agentic capabilities from text to audio and video tasks. The model inherits the sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture of Qwen3.8-Next and extends the context window to one million tokens, supporting long-context multimodal reasoning and long-horizon planning. These advances enable integration into production workflows as a primary agent or a specialized sub-agent, supporting video editing, long-form audio and video translation, music-conditioned music video or movie generation, and video-based note or omni-skill creation. To address the lack of native audio and video support in existing agent harnesses, we release Qwen-MM-Plugins, a lightweight open-source plugin framework for multimodal productivity. We further frame real-time multimodal interaction as a system-level challenge requiring orchestration of context and memory management, tool use, and sub-agent delegation. Accordingly, we release Qwen-Live-Harness, an open-source framework for building responsive, real-time multimodal agents based on Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash achieves strong performance across multimodal understanding, reasoning, long-horizon agentic execution, and video productivity tasks. These results and the accompanying open-source tools support Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash as a practical foundation for deploying natively multimodal agents in research and production.

Adoption and diffusion of neologisms in online communities have received renewed attention in recent years. As internet slang terms such as APT, referring to a K-pop song, and phrases such as Canon Event meaning an embarrassing but pivotal event, go viral online, it becomes increasingly important to understand the mechanisms that contribute to their success. Prior studies have often explained slang diffusion either from the perspective of social interaction or from the linguistic properties of the slang itself, but rarely from both perspectives together. One major obstacle has been the high cost of annotating slang usage in large-scale online communication. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, make it possible to use them as scalable annotators for such tasks. In this study, we first curate a human-annotated benchmark to evaluate LLM performance in detecting slang usage in real Reddit communication. We then leverage LLM-based annotations to model slang adoption and diffusion. Our results show that slang diffusers with higher bridging capital are associated with increased subsequent adoption, whereas diffusers with higher bonding capital are associated with reduced adoption. We also find that wider contextual usage of a slang term is associated with a longer time before new users officially adopt it. Together, these findings suggest that both social-network structure and linguistic context shape the diffusion of neologisms in online communities.

Applying large language models to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) prescription generation reveals three clinically critical gaps: models produce end-to-end mappings without auditable reasoning following the li-fa-fang-yao paradigm (SR Gap), treat each encounter in isolation without follow-up adjustment via sui zheng jia jian (LA Gap), and fail to enforce absolute contraindication rules such as Shi Ba Fan (SC Gap). We propose a progressive four-stage framework (SFT $\to$ PG-CoT $\to$ Dynamic $\to$ K-RL) that addresses each gap: PG-CoT constrains CoT distillation under the li-fa-fang-yao paradigm to produce auditable diagnostic chains, Dynamic SFT models patient trajectories with explicit transition reasoning, and K-RL encodes deterministic pharmacological rules as rule-based DPO preference signals. Across 12 fine-tuned models and 6 zero-shot baselines, our framework substantially improves prescription quality over zero-shot baselines---with a 7B model (Mistral-7B) surpassing zero-shot GPT-5 on all three TCM evaluation metrics.

We reply to the comments by M. Sienicki and K. Sienicki (arXiv:2512.07881) and by K. Sienicki (arXiv:2601.06104) on our work on quantum-mechanical statistics in human language (arXiv:2407.14924) and on quantum structure in AI-generated language (arXiv:2511.21731). We thank the authors for their careful reading and address what we consider to be the main points of criticism: the exploratory nature of the protocol used in the experiments with large language models; the role of marginal-law violations, and of the Contextuality-by-Default criterion, in the identification of entanglement; the limited diagnostic value of a Bose-Einstein fit taken in isolation; the meaning of assigning the lowest energy levels to the most frequent words; and the relation between the vector spaces used by LLMs and quantum state spaces. We also correct a typographical error in Table 3 of arXiv:2511.21731, which does not affect the reported CHSH value.

Automatic fact-checking poses a significant challenge in Arabic natural language processing due to the scarcity of datasets and resources. In this manuscript, we introduce Arafa, a new large-scale dataset for fact-checking in Modern Standard Arabic, constructed through an automated framework leveraging large language models (LLMs). The dataset was constructed through a three-step pipeline: (1) claim generation from Arabic Wikipedia pages with supporting textual evidence, (2) claim mutation to generate challenging counterfactual claims with refuting evidence, and (3) an automatic validation step to validate that the generated claims are either supported or refuted by their accompanying evidence, or if the evidence does not provide enough information to judge the validity of the claims. The resulting dataset comprises 181,976 claim-evidence pairs labeled as supported, refuted, or not enough information. Human evaluation carried out on a test sample from the dataset demonstrated strong inter-annotator agreement (kappa = 0.89) using Cohen's Kappa for supported claims and (kappa = 0.94) for refuted claims. Automatic validation based on a human-evaluated sample achieved 86% accuracy for supported claims and 88% for refuted ones. To showcase Arafa's value as a resource for automatic Arabic fact-checking, four open-source transformer-based models were fine-tuned using Arafa, with the top-performing model achieving a Macro F1-score of 77% on the test data. In addition to Arafa being the first large-scale dataset for Arabic fact-checking, our framework presents a scalable approach for developing similar resources for other low-resource languages.

Learned-memory methods store information in an explicit table and consume it through a separate reader, allowing addressing, storage, and reading to be modified independently. We study whether useful memory can also be generated rather than only retrieved. MemoryAthena uses three pathways: direct Engram retrieval (E), generation from retrieved Engram cues (GE), and generation from causal backbone states without consulting the memory table (GH). Generated memory is conditionally useful: it can complement E in one context but interfere with it in another. MemoryAthena therefore treats E as an anchor and learns when a generated representation should intervene. With the backbone, memory, generators, and readers frozen, a lightweight causal routing head is trained from counterfactual future-token likelihood advantages of GE and GH relative to E. At inference time, an admitted candidate modifies the E residual through bounded interpolation, while rejection recovers the direct pathway exactly. On question answering, MemoryAthena raises the five-task average from 37.65 to 39.28 over the direct pathway of the same checkpoint, while the six-task general-NLP average increases from 76.73 to 79.13. The complete memory-side system contains approximately 201M parameters, excluding the frozen backbone. Further analyses show complementary strengths among E, GE, and GH across tasks and inputs. These results support generated memory as a selective correction to direct retrieval and highlight routing when, which, and how strongly to intervene as the central challenge.

Biomedical Entity Linking disambiguates mentions to entities in a knowledge base (KB), making it the cornerstone of information extraction pipelines. While embedding-based models are a popular approach for the task, they suffer from a key limitation. They compress mentions (and entities) into a single vector, forcing the model to average away crucial fine-grained differences. We present BELXTR, a novel embedding model based on the multi-vector (a.k.a. late interaction) architecture, which allows to leverage token-level matching information. BELXTR extends the original XTR model to biomedical entity linking by integrating an existing task-specific training objective and exploring active query expansion. Experiments across ten corpora and five KBs show that BELXTR improves upon current state-of-the-art in half of the corpora with an average improvement of 5pp recall@1. The largest gains are reported on the challenging cross-species gene disambiguation subtask, where BELXTR outperforms an LLM-powered retrieve-and-rerank pipeline and closely approaches a specialized rule-based system. Our results highlight multi-vector models as a practical alternative to hard-to-maintain rule-based systems or in scenarios where LLM-based reranking is too costly as in PubMed-scale mining. The code to reproduce our experiments can be found at: https://github.com/sg-wbi/belxtr.

We present the first experiments on isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) for Icelandic Sign Language (\'ITM). We use \'ITM SignWiki, a dataset derived from a bilingual Icelandic--\'ITM online dictionary. It is genuinely low-resource: 1,845 videos cover 849 classes, 86% of which have only two examples, making the full task effectively one-shot recognition across signers. We compare two open-source ISLR frameworks, OpenHands and SPOTER, on three tasks of increasing vocabulary size (22, 117 and 849 classes), and evaluate three pose estimators and two forms of cross-lingual transfer. With \'ITM data alone, SPOTER outperforms OpenHands on all three tasks, and MediaPipe poses give better results than AlphaPose or SDPose. Cross-lingual transfer brings the largest gains: pretraining SPOTER on American Sign Language data before finetuning on \'ITM raises accuracy by 14--24 percentage points, to 72.7%, 47.9% and 22.6% on the three tasks, and multilingual training with data from six other sign languages lifts OpenHands from 1.41% to 28.86% on the full task. Although far from practical use, the results suggest that transfer from better-resourced sign languages is promising for very low-resource ones. We release our adapted versions of both frameworks.

Short-to-long training is a simple curriculum for speech models, but its gains can be difficult to interpret. In speech token language models, length-based training can change the shuffle policy, batch composition, token retention, and token weights under batch-mean loss. We disentangle these factors through matched comparisons. In the tested settings, short-to-long ordering shows no independent benefit when batch composition and token exposure are fixed. First-epoch grouping lowers perplexity for Mimi under batch-mean loss, but this gain is not observed under token-balanced loss. The cross-tokenizer results are consistent with a link between chunk-length variation and token weighting. This work provides a systematic analysis protocol for studying length-based training in variable-length speech models.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models, yet aligning them via Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires likelihood surrogates estimated from masked reconstruction subproblems under a small Monte Carlo budget per rollout. Existing methods construct these subproblems by uniform random masking, leaving open the question of which subproblems to prioritize. We identify a systematic upstream/downstream structure in dLLM rollouts. Some tokens, when revealed, trigger large confidence changes in nearby undecoded positions; we call them upstream. Others induce only small local changes and are therefore downstream. We find masking downstream tokens yields substantially better-posed subproblems than masking upstream tokens, a phenomenon we term subproblem difficulty asymmetry. Based on the observation, we propose Informed Masking (IM), which derives a per-token priority score from the denoising trajectory at zero extra inference cost and biases mask sampling toward downstream tokens. IM is plug-and-play: when plugged into three state-of-the-art dLLM RL methods on LLaDA-8B-Instruct, it delivers up to 2.01%, 8.68%, and 5.77% relative average gains on math and planning benchmarks with improved training stability.

The performance of large language model (LLM) workflows often depends on selecting a small set of in-context demonstrations to guide model behavior on new tasks. Recent methods improve this process by augmenting prompts with successful reasoning paths. However, their demonstration selection relies on random sampling or metric-based rankings, overlooking the semantic structure of the task. We propose ClusterFewshot, a strategy that combines semantic structuring with utility-aware scoring to construct representative and effective few-shot demonstration sets. Evaluated within DSPy-based pipelines, ClusterFewshot substantially reduces optimization cost across multiple benchmarks, while consistently improving accuracy relative to prior bootstrap-based methods in both standalone prompt tuning and hybrid prompt-weight optimization.

Water treatment research is expanding rapidly, but much of the knowledge acquired from this research remains scattered across unstructured literature. The field still lacks a dedicated language model that can efficiently capture water treatment-specific domain semantics for large-scale literature mining. Here, we address this by developing WaterBERT, a domain-adapted encoder model designed for semantic representation and structured information extraction from water treatment texts. WaterBERT was developed by continual pretraining on a large-scale water treatment corpus comprising about 2.97 billion tokens. Three fine-tuned models based on WaterBERT were systematically evaluated on downstream tasks, achieving the best overall performance among general-purpose and domain-specific BERT models, with F1 scores of 90.12% for multiclass treatment process classification, 79.50% for named entity recognition, and 74.04% for relation extraction. Beyond these benchmark tasks, we further demonstrated WaterBERT's advantages for large-scale literature processing. Applied to 5,144 Environmental Science & Technology articles, WaterBERT-BERTopic identified coherent, diverse, and domain-specific research topics without predefined categories. Building on WaterBERT, we processed 693,211 abstracts at substantially lower cost than commercial LLMs while retaining competitive extraction performance to construct a structured water treatment knowledge graph. The knowledge graph was then integrated with lexical and dense retrieval to develop a Water Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval System (WaterKERS), which achieved a relevance score of 77.7, substantially outperforming text-based retrieval baselines (54.7-64.5). Through WaterBERT, this study provides a compact and scalable semantic foundation for large-scale information processing and evidence mapping in water treatment research.

Conversational agents often express answers in a uniformly confident register. We test whether expressed uncertainty, provenance-aware assertion, and explicit belief revision can be implemented as a behavior layer over a fixed language model; we do not test believability or trust. The layer combines three epistemic states, per-claim confidence and typed provenance, a provenance-gated expression rule, and a persistent revision store with auditable acknowledgments and partial resistance to false corrections. We evaluate it on a constructed, mechanically scored multi-session benchmark using a synthetic model and Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct. The synthetic instrument passes all five checks. On the real model, acknowledgment soundness, a by-construction guarantee, holds in 100% of cases, and true corrections are accepted more often than false ones (0.44 vs. 0.15 on held beliefs; 0.875 vs. 0.420 including rule-accepted corrections of unheld facts), but the pre-specified expression-fidelity, contradiction-separation, and provenance margins fail. A disclosed post hoc analysis shows that expression gated on mean answer-token probability ranks correctness below chance end to end (AUC 0.41, conversation-clustered), whereas gating on sampling consistency discriminates (AUC 0.66). A consistency-gated configuration selected from this finding and evaluated under a separately committed protocol meets the conversation-level manipulation and capability-equivalence criteria and replicates on a redrawn conversation set. The manipulation result is selection-dependent, and both criteria remain unresolved when uncertainty is clustered over the 60 facts. The supported conclusions are limited to the by-construction audit guarantee, store-dependent partial correction discrimination, and a benchmark- and model-specific failure of token-probability gating; scaling the fact base is required before human evaluation.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional Auto-Regressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs). By leveraging bidirectional attention and parallel decoding, dLLMs enable more efficient generation. However, they require a carefully designed denoising scheduler at inference time (absent during training) whose choice significantly impacts generation quality. While confidence-based heuristic schedulers have shown strong empirical performance, they suffer from two critical failure modes: EOS Overflow and Proximal Bias. Through in-depth analysis of the Transformer's attention patterns, we reveal that these failures stem from certain positions assigning disproportionately high attention weights to invalid tokens (e.g., [MASK] and [EOS]), which produce misleading confidence signals. Building on this insight, empirical evidence shows that valid attention scores can provide complementary guidance to conventional confidence-based heuristics, yet no single metric consistently excels across all scenarios, implying that the optimal denoising trajectory is highly context-dependent. To address this problem, we propose a lightweight evolutionary heuristic scheduler optimized using the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). Our scheduler dynamically integrates multiple heuristic features with a contextual mean-field embedding, while requiring only 393 trainable parameters. Evaluated on LLaDA and Dream across four reasoning and planning benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, including conventional heuristics, block auto-regressive methods, and recent State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches. To the best of our knowledge, it represents the most parameter-efficient neural scheduler to date. Our code is available at https://github.com/RS2002/Evo-Denoise .

An agentic retrieval system issues a sequence of search queries and must decide, at each step, whether the evidence collected so far is enough to stop. Delegating that decision to an LLM verifier or a prompt judge makes stopping reliable, but the verifier then reprocesses the growing evidence after every retrieval step, a substantial repeated cost. We show that most of these calls can be skipped without materially changing answer accuracy: a single threshold on a frozen sentence-embedding coverage margin detects the states in which the evidence is still plainly incomplete, and the verifier is called only on the ambiguous remainder, a gate we call CoVeR (Coverage-based Verifier Routing). Across three multi-hop QA benchmarks, with the evaluation protocol fixed before the full-scale run, the CoVeR-gated agent matches the answer accuracy of both the full-budget agent and the always-verify baseline within a fraction of an EM point. It cuts 62-68% of verifier calls, and 93% in a saturated regime. Routers built on evidence counts, lexical overlap, or BM25 relevance, alone or learned in combination, give weaker overall trade-offs, the gate transfers without re-tuning across deciders and agent scales, and its drafter distills into a 921k-parameter head atop the frozen encoder, leaving no LLM in the routing loop. The same signal cannot replace verification: matching a claim is far easier than deciding the claim is supported.

Language is the target of most early intervention for autistic children. Because the goal and the method change from child to child, the work falls to a teacher who takes one child at a time and judges each scene as it unfolds. Artificial intelligence is now being brought to that work, yet the benchmarks that reach special education ask what a model knows rather than what it does in front of a child. Building one is not straightforward, since whether a response is good teaching depends on what the child has just done, so no answer key applies. The evidence that settles it is visual as much as verbal, since the length of a wait, a shift of gaze, and the child's uptake leave no trace in a transcript. We introduce \emph{SpecialEduBench}, which measures pedagogical competence along knowledge, skill, and attitude, with 4,537 knowledge items and with 200 skill items and 68 attitude items built on recorded intervention, the attitude items crossing pressure with monitoring into 192 response cells. Seven special-education experts wrote, scored, and reviewed the items, and we revised the judge model's instruction against the reference scores they set. Across eight frontier vision-language models no axis is saturated, since the strongest still fails about a tenth of the honesty cells. The models converge where the knowledge is factual and separate where the task is situated, and the failures gather where pressure is applied. We intend the benchmark as an audit to run before deployment and as a starting point for models built for this domain.

Remote-sensing (RS) multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained and evaluated only in English, while text-only instruction data covers over 100 languages. We propose MODL (Mutually Orthogonal Domain-Language composition), a recipe that adds new languages to an English RS MLLM without a single multilingual RS example: a domain LoRA trained on English RS imagery and a language LoRA trained on text alone are learned jointly, under one loss term that keeps the two updates mutually orthogonal at every layer throughout training. This constraint is the recipe's active ingredient. Without it, the same training answers RS questions correctly but in English, erases much of the base model's multilingual text ability, and diverges on one seed in three; sixteen alternatives, from training-free merging to prior orthogonality variants, fail the same way. MODL repairs every failure on every seed: answers are correct and in the target language 56-71% of the time, where the best alternative reaches 27% and most stay below 8%, text ability stays at the level of the untrained base, and on Spanish it surpasses Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with zero multilingual-multimodal data. A single five-language adapter retains English, Spanish, and Vietnamese at full strength across three seeds; non-Latin scripts remain an open boundary.

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference through collaboration between a lightweight draft model and a target verifier. Existing methods mainly improve the draft side, while the target model is typically kept dense and unchanged. We show that, under domain-specific inference, full-depth target verification is not always the optimal choice. Counter-intuitively, skipping selected target layers can reduce verification cost while simultaneously increasing draft acceptance and preserving, or even improving, downstream task performance. Based on this observation, we propose TSS, a target-side sparsification framework for speculative decoding. TSS employs an acceptance- and metric-aware breadth search to explore multi-layer skip configurations without imposing a fixed priority between the two objectives. The selected configurations are stored in a domain-to-configuration mapping and applied by a lightweight skip controller, allowing one complete target model to support multiple sparse verification paths without retraining or permanent parameter pruning. Experiments on Spec-Bench across multiple domains, model scales, and speculative decoding methods show consistent improvements in draft acceptance and downstream task performance. In Translation setting, TSS increases the average accept length from 2.70 to 4.53 (+67.8%), improves BLEU from 0.131 to 0.237 (+80.9%), and raises end-to-end throughput from 75.6 to 127.3 tokens/s, corresponding to a 1.68X speedup.

A state-of-the-art language model asked to interpret "most of most students passed" typically answers "most," though composing two instances of "most" yields a proportion closer to "some." We trace this failure to an architectural choice rather than a data deficit: standard classifier heads treat ordinal categories as independent labels, with no mechanism to respect their natural ordering or compose them algebraically. We introduce the Differentiable Fuzzy Inference Layer (DFIL), a dual-path prediction head pairing a standard classifier with a scalar-bottlenecked branch grounded in a bank of ordered membership functions. DFIL supplies two structural primitives that a label-only head cannot inherit: monotonicity in the underlying quantity, and compositional reasoning via t-norm operations without any compositional training data. The scalar branch additionally provides an interpretable interface for analyzing residual errors. We instantiate DFIL on ordinal natural-language tasks across diverse LLM families.

Structured pruning of attention heads provides a hardware-friendly way to compress Transformer language models. However, existing methods for measuring head-level importance require calibration data, gradient computation, or Hessian estimation. These requirements add extra overhead and make the methods depend on the data. Our work presents Magnitude Profile (MP) scoring, a training-free criterion for head importance that identifies dispensable heads through statistical outlier detection on weight row norms. Heads whose projection weights fall within the population bulk are pruned, while heads exhibiting outlier norms, which carry disproportionate representational capacity, are preserved. Our work further gives MP-G, a variant that handles Grouped Query Attention (GQA) by distributing shared key-value group scores across associated query heads. Across five models evaluated on WikiText-2 perplexity at 12.5%-50% head sparsity, MP-G achieves the best perplexity on OPT-6.7B at all sparsity levels (18.46 at 12.5%, 27.87 at 25%, 152.0 at 50%). MP-G also gives the best results on RoBERTa-large at 12.5% and 25% sparsity, with perplexity values of 7.27 and 10.28, outperforming calibration-dependent baselines including Wanda-Head, SparseGPT-Head, and Gradient-Head. It requires zero forward passes, calibration samples, or gradient computation. At 50% sparsity, head pruning yields up to 16% parameter reduction with 50% attention FLOP savings. Our results show that weight-only statistical scoring can match or outperform data-dependent methods for structured head pruning, providing a practical, zero-cost criterion for Transformer compression.

Multimodal embedding models are deployed at scale: retrieval indices, benchmark results, and behavioral audits all depend on the base model's exact outputs. Extending such a model to a new modality with existing parameter-efficient methods silently changes those outputs; LoRA-style adaptation rewrites the text path whether or not the weights are merged, invalidating every stored embedding. We propose modality-gated deep adapters: bottleneck adapters attached to every decoder layer of a frozen multimodal embedding LLM, grouped into per-modality packs that execute only while their own modality is being encoded. The result is a modality added with zero change to existing outputs: inputs no pack claims traverse the base model's own computation graph, bit-for-bit unchanged, and co-loaded packs compose with an exact-zero isolation matrix. Both properties are stated as propositions, hold after arbitrary training rather than only at initialization, require no task labels or routing metadata at inference, and are verified by exact-equality tests on the released checkpoints. On one frozen 2B base, the audio pack (injected as connector tokens) improves audio-to-text R@10 by +3.4 to +5.4 points over an identically trained control, positive at every seed and reproduced at eleven times the data; the thermal pack, reusing the base's own frozen vision path, clears its pre-registered acceptance gate roughly sevenfold at every seed and lifts thermal-to-text R@10 from 0.224 to 0.785. An encoder swap locates the missing capacity: an external audio encoder that outranks Whisper-family encoders in CLAP-style comparisons loses by 16 R@10 points inside the frozen LLM, so the capacity belongs in the layers, exactly where the gated adapters place it. We release the audio model, the thermal pack, and the training, evaluation and invariance suites: models at huggingface.co/EximiusLabs, code on GitHub.

Data visualization is central to analytical reasoning, but real-world analysis increasingly requires language-driven interactive interfaces rather than static charts. Although recent large language and vision language models (LLMs/VLMs) have shown promise in generating static charts from natural language, their ability to generate interactive data visualization interfaces remains largely unexplored due to the lack of benchmarks. We introduce VIS-GEN, a benchmark for evaluating how well LLMs/VLMs can generate interactive visualization interfaces from natural language queries. VIS-GEN comprises 3,042 samples covering diverse analytical intents, including data filtering, temporal analysis, and visualization editing, each paired with dataset metadata and natural language queries that are designed to reflect realistic, goal driven data exploration scenarios. We benchmark 14 state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source LLMs/VLMs, revealing large performance gaps and frequent failures on queries involving implicit intent, multiple interaction alternatives, and complex editing operations, highlighting interactive interface generation as a key open challenge beyond static chart synthesis. To address this, we propose a structured multi stage interface generation framework that decomposes the task into visualization design representation, generation of multiple interface candidates, constraint-aware critique, and self-refinement. This approach improves the best models pass rate by 15.9 percentage points, demonstrating a practical path toward more reliable language-driven interactive visualization systems. We release VIS-GEN at https://github.com/vis-nlp/VIS-GEN.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret charts and generate natural-language explanations for socially consequential data. However, they may produce different narratives for the same chart when only the referenced social group changes, reinforcing stereotypes and misleading decisions. Despite these risks, no benchmark exists for systematically evaluating bias in chart interpretation across social dimensions. We introduce ChartBias, the first benchmark for auditing bias in VLM-based chart interpretation. ChartBias contains 820 manually curated real-world charts spanning six attributes: race, income, age, religion, immigration status, and gender, yielding 4,319 valid chart, attribute instances and 8,638 paired generations where the chart is fixed and only the group term is swapped. Across 12 proprietary and open-source VLMs, totaling 155,484 model responses, we find three widespread failure modes: narrative shift (same chart, different narratives), group hallucination (assigning a chart to a group without evidence), and preference polarity (favourable trends often linked to one group). We further propose a multi-agent mitigation framework that serves as a strong baseline by separating chart-grounded evidence extraction from group-conditioned generation and using a counterfactual judge to verify that group-driven differences are supported by the chart. The framework substantially reduces narrative shift while preserving chart-grounded reasoning. Our findings show that evaluating chart understanding requires measuring not only accuracy, but also fairness and consistency across social groups. We release ChartBias at https://github.com/vis-nlp/ChartBiasBench.

Post-training quantization and pruning rely on a small calibration corpus. Whether specialized domains such as finance require domain-matched calibration data remains unsettled. We argue that the answer depends on the task-level damage caused by compression rather than on domain mismatch. If compression preserves the target capability, changing the calibration corpus has little effect. If compression causes large losses, task-formatted calibration can recover part of the loss. We test this hypothesis across two model families, six compression configurations, three token-matched calibration corpora, and ten financial classification and numerical question-answering tasks. The results support this hypothesis. Quantization largely preserves task performance, and calibration choice has little effect in this case. Pruning reduces numerical QA accuracy by over 40 points. In these damaged settings, another generic corpus does not help, while FinMix, a mixture of financial task examples, recovers a large part of the loss. The link between damage and recovery holds across model families and scales. These findings support a practical rule. Measure task-specific compression damage first, and construct specialized calibration data only when the damage is large.

Diffusion language models (dLLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have become competitive with autoregressive (AR) LLMs in generation quality while supporting native parallel decoding. A standard acceleration strategy is block-wise decoding, where each forward pass predicts a block of length B and commits high-confidence tokens. However, B couples two distinct decisions: the look-ahead horizon and the number of tokens to commit. Existing accelerators address this limitation through indirect heuristics, such as volatility tracking, delimiter detection, and learned scoring. In contrast, we show that the required information is already encoded in the model's own per-step confidence: in-window confidence typically follows a context-dependent cliff, whose saturation point directly identifies the appropriate look-ahead horizon. We propose PACE-dLLM, which fits this parametric cliff in closed form at each step, sets the next horizon by its saturation point, and uses an independent confidence threshold for token commitment. Under a saturated-yield abstraction, we show that the cliff-anchored horizon is the smallest horizon attaining maximal useful per-pass yield: fixed horizons that undershoot it incur a worse asymptotic NFE rate, while overshooting adds no useful yield. On four reasoning and code benchmarks, PACE-dLLM achieves the best average accuracy on both open-source dLLM backbones, with average wall-clock speedups of 5.23x on LLaDA and 3.06x on Dream (up to 8.52x on math) over the unaccelerated semi-AR baseline, advancing the quality-throughput Pareto frontier.

This work presents the task and results of the CHiME-9 challenge for Enhancing Conversations to address Hearing Impairment. The challenge considers the scenario of four-party conversations in a noisy, cafeteria-style environment with interfering speech sources and sound effects. Participants are provided with audio recordings made with Meta Aria glasses and hearing aid microphones, and clean speech samples of the conversation participants. The task is to extract the speech of the conversation partners from the noisy multi-channel recordings with the goal of improving the intelligibility and quality of the speech, evaluated using objective metrics and subjective listening tests. This paper reviews submissions from seven teams and ranks them on a combination of subjective intelligibility and quality. Results show that while the objective metrics do not reflect listener performance, the top systems were able to make substantial improvements over the challenge baseline in both intelligibility and quality ratings.

Argument Mining (AM) transforms natural language into its underlying argument structures. This transformation is typically realized through a sequence of AM tasks that form an end-to-end AM pipeline. However, AM approaches often differ in how they conceptualize these tasks, making direct comparisons between them difficult and opaque. This calls for a more nuanced, task-level analysis of AM approaches to enable clearer comparison and assessment. This work presents a preliminary meta-study that systematically reviews several state-of-the-art end-to-end AM works and analyzes their pipelines through a triple-perspective framework---a linguistic, computational and domain perspective---to understand how the pipelines model arguments as structures, computes them, and integrates domain knowledge. We further propose a general design to the linguistic and computational perspectives, illustrating how key AM tasks are designed for modeling and computation of argument structures. Our proposed framework lays the groundwork for methodology-centered descriptions across AM approaches, facilitating deeper understanding and more systematic comparisons in future research.

Political discourse is widely perceived to be growing more hostile, yet robust evidence remains scarce. This study examines blame attribution in the Danish Parliament from 1997 to 2026, combining a purpose-built classifier, BlameBERT (F1: 0.80), with multilevel statistical modeling. The classifier is constructed using an annotation-efficient pipeline for blame attribution in low-to-mid resource languages. The results reveal a banana-shaped trajectory, with blame declining until around 2016 before entering a significant and sustained increase in recent years (2019-2026). Government status consistently influenced blame attribution - an effect we term political contrasting - with opposition parties blaming substantially more than governing parties. This effect was moderated by ideology: The blame-dampening effect of governing was less pronounced among right-wing parties, and ideological extremity amplified blame more strongly on the right. In recent years, the interaction between political wing and ideological extremity intensified, suggesting an ideological hardening of the blame rhetoric concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. Taken together, these patterns suggest that the perceived rise in harsh political language reflects not merely a general rhetorical drift, but an ideologically asymmetric hardening of political discourse. A sensitivity analysis showed that the conclusions were robust to varying classification thresholds.

The scarcity of non-English language data in specialized domains significantly limits the development of effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. We present TransBERT, a novel framework for pre-training language models using exclusively synthetically translated text, and introduce TransCorpus, a scalable translation toolkit. Focusing on the life sciences domain in French, our approach demonstrates that state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks can be achieved solely by leveraging synthetically translated data. We release the TransCorpus toolkit, the TransCorpus-bio-fr corpus (36.4GB of French life sciences text), TransBERT-bio-fr, its associated pre-trained language model and reproducible code for both pre-training and fine-tuning. Our results highlight the viability of synthetic translation in a high-resource translation direction for building high-quality NLP resources in low-resource language/domain pairs.

Long-horizon and multi-turn agents typically generate short actions and process long observations from tools and environments. This growing context demands efficient prefill, compact KV-cache storage, and accurate long-context retrieval. To meet these demands, we introduce HySparse2, a hybrid sparse attention architecture with two-level KV sharing. At the outer level, KV Bridging adopts a YOCO-style self-decoder and cross-decoder structure, but bridges only full-attention layers. The self-decoder uses hybrid sliding-window attention (SWA), while the cross-decoder uses hybrid sparse attention. The KV caches for full-attention layers in the cross-decoder are generated from the hidden states of full-attention layers in the self-decoder. At the inner level, HySparse2 retains HySparse's core KV Reuse design with two refinements. First, it replaces block-level sparsity with token-level sparsity for finer long-context retrieval. Second, it removes the separate SWA branch from sparse layers and instead forces a sliding window of recent tokens into the sparse selection. This two-level KV sharing allows all cross-decoder KV caches to be constructed from self-decoder hidden states. Prefill can therefore exit after the self-decoder, skipping all cross-decoder layers. On an 80B-A3B MoE model, HySparse2 outperforms HySparse and Hybrid SWA on long-context retrieval and multi-turn agentic tasks, while substantially reducing prefill computation and KV-cache storage.

Transforming scholarly PDFs into machine-readable fulltext remains a bottleneck for large-scale information systems. Recent vision-based parsers improve accuracy, but need GPUs and may introduce noise into the extracted text. GROBID, a modular font-stream parser running on CPU, is the de-facto standard for structuring scientific articles and underpins several of the largest open scholarly corpora. We pair it with a lightweight CPU detector localising figure, table, and paratext (header, footer, page number) regions, encoded as typed-area masks whose tokens are routed to GROBID's specialised models or discarded. On two PMC corpora, Bioinformatics (1,926 articles) and Materials Science (2,595), scored against JATS with a section-aware structural protocol, our extension improves over plain GROBID on most metrics (NS $+0.025$/$+0.013$; $+0.086$ paragraph recall on Materials Science, $d_z{=}1.08$), and caption-linked figure recovery improves on both corpora. On the external Table-BRGM benchmark, table detection recovers F1 $0.16 \to 0.94$ and table structure follows (GriTS-Top $0.27 \to 0.78$, below the strongest GPU system). On body text, against four vision-based systems (Docling, MinerU, olmOCR, dots.ocr), it has the best paragraph precision on both corpora, the best section detection on Materials Science, and a character error rate within 0.004 of the best GPU parser. End-to-end on CPU, it costs $2.7$--$3.2\times$ less than the cheapest GPU system (Docling) and $10$--$14\times$ less than generative parsers.

Scene safety understanding plays a life-or-death role in situational awareness in various critical domains. Traditional methods that rely on learning direct mappings between scenes and safety levels often lack interpretability, limiting their reliability in critical applications. An effective approach to overcoming this challenge lies in interpreting human cognitive processes and equipping machine models with analogous cognitive capabilities. This work explores an effective way of integrating scene safety cognitive process modeling and process supervision. Specifically, we first construct a hierarchical cognitive safety structure, which motivates the development of a novel, high-quality scene safety understanding dataset based on multi-step reasoning with process labels. This dataset serves both as a benchmark and a resource to improve the safety reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), while also enabling a granular analysis of intermediate reasoning steps through information flow and saliency-based techniques. Building upon this foundation, we introduce a modular and flexible process supervision framework that reflects the hierarchical nature of human cognition. This framework leverages LLMs as the core architecture and incorporates Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) strategies to enable specialization and collaboration among expert modules, each tasked with specific sub-processes of the overall reasoning chain. Systematic experimental evaluations and analyses confirm that our framework exhibits superior interpretability and performance characteristics compared to traditional approaches.

Detecting emotions is necessary for building systems that can accurately and adaptively interact with humans. Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has become an important research focus to develop intelligent spoken interfaces. However, most studies predict emotions at the utterance level, ignoring the conversational context, along with the emotional flow and speaker interactions it carries. In this paper, we introduce ACERT (Averaged Contextual Emotion Representation through Time), a module that integrates a flexible-length window of conversational context to better capture emotional evolution in spoken interactions. To evaluate the robustness of this method, we conducted experiments on datasets spanning diverse emotionally expressive styles and contexts. ACERT outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on IEMOCAP, establishes the first context-aware benchmark on SAFE, and obtains strong results on MELD for unweighted, class-balanced metrics. Ablation studies show that ACERT's gains come from emotional and conversational continuity, rather than from speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

A key factor in deciding whether to trust an automatic prediction is its confidence score, which should be calibrated to match the actual probability of the prediction being correct. Most confidence calibration metrics target binary or multi-class tasks, while multi-label calibration remains largely underexplored. Multi-label classification tasks, such as assigning medical codes to clinical notes or determining news topics, are usually dominated by a large number of negatives, i.e., labels that do not apply. We show that existing binning schemes to compute label-wise expected calibration error either underestimate the error, simply reflect label frequency, or suffer from many bins with very few instances. To achieve trustworthy label-wise calibration errors, we propose a new binning scheme that gives equal weight to positive and negative label assignments. Our empirical study demonstrates that in contrast to existing binning schemes, our new scheme results in meaningful estimates of calibration error in hierarchical and in extreme multi-label classification. We also show that calibrating confidence scores of large language models for multi-label predictions is an open challenge. Our detailed analysis lays the foundation for further research by providing a solid evaluation metric for measuring calibration in multi-label classification.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the capability of language models, directly applying it to Spoken Language Models (SLMs) may introduce long silent intervals under the serial "think-then-speak" paradigm, disrupting real-time spoken interaction. To address this issue, we propose an asynchronous think-aloud framework for reasoning-based SLMs within the Thinker-Talker architecture. The framework maintains a primary reasoning stream for logical deduction and a lightweight think-aloud stream that generates short, task-grounded progress utterances conditioned on the user input and the evolving reasoning state. A dynamic balance strategy coordinates the two streams at runtime, triggering additional think-aloud speech to avoid silent gaps and canceling pending utterances when the final response becomes ready. Experiments on spoken reasoning and question-answering benchmarks show that our approach substantially reduces user-audible silence during reasoning while maintaining answer accuracy comparable to that of a serial "think-then-speak" baseline, demonstrating the potential of asynchronous think-aloud for responsive interaction in SLMs.

Calibration of language models -- the alignment between expressed or implicit confidence and empirical correctness -- is a well-studied subfield within NLP. Methods to measure it already exist. The problem is adoption: outside this subfield, NLP research regularly introduces new models, datasets, and benchmarks without checking whether the model's confidence scores are meaningful. We argue that this adoption gap is a major obstacle to trustworthy LLM evaluation. Miscalibration causes problems in two distinct areas: at deployment, where overconfident mistakes cause real harm, and inside the research pipeline, where methods like LLM-as-a-judge, synthetic data generation, and active learning rely on calibrated confidence without verifying it. Standard calibration metrics only require two inputs per example: a confidence score and a correctness judgment. Most benchmarks in use today already provide both, meaning calibration can be reported immediately. For open-ended generation, however, defining these two inputs is still an open challenge. We argue that each NLP subfield should pair its main performance metric with a calibration score and call for treating calibration as an essential property of every model rather than a niche topic.

When two texts describe the same expression, standard metrics based on lexical overlap or whole-text similarity may fail to detect meaningful differences in how that expression is framed. We propose a framework to evaluate semiotic alignment between texts, where a semiotic profile encompasses both the contextual meaning and the discourse references made salient by a text. Our approach yields two scores, Semiotic Fidelity and Semiotic Coverage, estimating how much of one text's profile is supported by the other and how much of the other's profile it recovers. Experiments show that coverage is typically lower than fidelity, and that alignment between LLMs and human-curated data is highest at low sampling temperatures, while higher temperatures reduce this alignment.

In LLM-based speech translation, transcription-based chain-of-thought (CoT) suffers from a mismatch between reference transcripts used in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and model-generated transcripts at inference. To address this, we propose joint recognition and translation fine-tuning via group relative policy optimization (GRPO). We score both transcripts and translations, with translation conditioned on model-generated transcripts, and compare three token advantage strategies. Using Qwen2.5-Omni-3B across four languages, we evaluate CoT against direct speech translation (Direct ST) under SFT and GRPO, training on CoVoST 2 and testing on CoVoST 2 and FLEURS. CoT GRPO outperforms Direct ST GRPO by 1.77 and 0.83 average BLEU points on CoVoST 2 and FLEURS. Compared to CoT SFT, GRPO boosts BLEU by 0.82 and 0.67 points and reduces word error rate (WER) by 8.8% and 7.2% relatively. These results highlight reinforcement fine-tuning as an effective method to mitigate the training-inference mismatch, jointly improving recognition and translation.

Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been used to investigate how children acquire syntax at an early stage of development. This is notably the central scientific goal of the BabyLM challenge, a community-wide effort to develop models that achieve human-level syntactic performance while being trained on developmentally realistic corpora. In this paper, we reflect on the use of LLMs in the study of infant syntax learning by providing an epistemological assessment of several studies from this research program. We discuss how datasets are built, which models are implemented, how they are trained and syntactically evaluated. We observe significant assumptions in the methodology of BabyLM and related studies, thus mitigating their theoretical scope. We additionally observe that using developmentally-realistic corpora have limited effects on models performance on commonly-used benchmarks, which suggest important computational differences between LLMs and the infant syntax learner.

A central concern with language models is sycophancy: their tendency to defer to users' views at the expense of independent substantive judgment. In parallel, work on social sycophancy has focused on behaviors such as validation and positivity that may signal inappropriate deference. Yet the markers of social sycophancy are also characteristic of conversational receptiveness, a construct from social psychology shown to improve interactions across disagreement. We argue that this overlap creates a construct-validity problem for social sycophancy evaluations. Using a popular moral-advice dataset, we find that responses classified as more socially sycophantic are also more receptive. Further, increasing the receptiveness of human-written responses---while preserving their substantive conclusions---causes them to be classified as more socially sycophantic. This tight coupling raises the possibility that social sycophancy evaluations inadvertently penalize desirable behavior. In a preregistered experiment comparing substantively equivalent responses, participants prefer the more receptive responses, expect users to be more likely to listen to them, and are more willing to seek advice from their authors. The same overall pattern persists even among participants who believe the original question asker is in the wrong. Finally, we introduce a simple approach that substantially increases receptiveness without increasing substantive deference, demonstrating that conversational receptiveness and substantive independence can be achieved together.

Despite their outstanding performance on many NLP tasks, LLMs face serious challenges related to semantic abstraction. In this study, we are interested in understanding how LLMs leverage abstract semantic knowledge in natural language inference (NLI), which requires sophisticated linguistic capabilities to interpret implicit meanings, contextual conceptual relationships, and semantic connections between words and phrases. To this end, we propose a methodological framework for constructing new semantic knowledge at a higher level of abstraction, which we define under the notions of semantic compatibility and incompatibility for NLI. In this framework, the meaning of the lexical-semantic relations between the premise and the hypothesis is reconfigured to achieve a more flexible semantic network that induces different reasoning paths in LLMs. These new pathways show a consistent pattern of responses that allows agreement on a single response. The results demonstrate that our proposal allows to discover and compensate for LLMs' semantic knowledge gaps in NLI, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, exceeding 10% for some models, and in particular for the non-entailment class. It is essential to note that LLMs need structured knowledge and not just more data to bridge reasoning gaps. Our hybrid approach directs attention to overlooked word relationships, allowing models to synthesize missing information. We believe that the future lies not in increasing model size, but in creating a semantic scafolding that mimics the flexibility of human thinking. Hopefully, our proposal will enable the development of more robust agents and interpretable reasoning, guiding AI toward reliable language understanding.

Procedural character generation aims to populate games, simulations, and other virtual worlds with diverse characters. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising foundation for scaling this task. However, LLM-based procedural character generation remains at an early stage: existing methods either generate characters directly or adapt profiles retrieved from persona banks. As we show, both approaches produce behaviorally homogeneous populations: characters overwhelmingly agree with positive moral norms and respond to questions with helpful, assistant-like reactions. To mitigate this homogenization, we introduce PersonaWeaver, which disentangles world building from behavioral specification and models behavior through setting general, diverse, manually curated banks of moral positions and conversational reactions. This design allows us to test how far LLM(s) can be pushed beyond their default behavioral patterns across settings. Across ten realistic and fantastical settings and three LLM(s), PersonaWeaver produces broader moral and interactional response distributions than prior work. Its guidance also diversifies interpersonal language, response length, and sentiment. It also produces less archetypal combinations of world attributes. Code is available at https://github.com/mqraitem/PersonaWeaver.

We introduce Knowledge Pull Requests (KPRs), a framework for continual document authoring that makes each change interpretable. Documents require ongoing revision as new knowledge surfaces from other sources, languages, or times, but existing approaches either edit with no account of what knowledge changed or regenerate from scratch. A KPR integrates new knowledge into a document by extracting claims, filtering and routing them to sections, and flagging conflicts with existing content, producing a ChangeLog that separates what knowledge changes (claim proposal) from how the text changes (document diff). We evaluate KPRs on revising Wikipedia across languages and updating query-driven reports on RAGTIME. KPRs integrate more information and better preserve existing content than rewriting from sources or regenerating from scratch, while adding the most information per token generated. A KPR-revised article also grounds question answering better than a frontier model with search, which does not surface knowledge documented only in other languages.

The rapid capability gains of frontier language models are widely attributed to improved reasoning abilities, yet this cannot be verified as raw CoT traces in closed-source systems are hidden. By registering a simple custom tool through a standard API feature, we induce frontier models to externalize intermediate reasoning. Because these traces may reflect post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine reasoning, we first evaluate against native CoT on open-source models and extend to closed-source frontier models including GPT-6 Astra. We find that the extracted reasoning matches native reasoning performance and substantially outperforms no-reasoning baselines, across competition mathematics, science, and code generation. We then characterize how frontier models structure their intermediate reasoning. Across token efficiency, reasoning-step types, and induced reasoning trees, we identify systematic differences in how models externalize, compress, and organize reasoning. We find that Astra exhibits token-efficient directed reasoning, selecting a correct trajectory earlier, while resolving elementary steps internally and externalizing only crucial reasoning. These findings provide a behavioral lens on frontier-model reasoning beyond benchmark scores.

Autoregressive OCR vision-language models accurately convert document images into text and structured markup, but require one sequential decoding step per output token, limiting inference speed. Unlike open-ended text generation, OCR outputs are strongly grounded in the input image, making diffusion-based parallel generation promising. However, when several tokens are predicted in one diffusion step, each is predicted before the others are known. Committing them directly can therefore introduce errors. We therefore introduce GravityOCR, a parameter-shared AR-block-diffusion model jointly trained for parallel drafting and causal AR verification. Verifying drafts before commitment lets the model commit multiple output tokens per round without a separate drafting network. The causal AR path also enables GRPO with sequence- and structure-level OCR rewards, avoiding diffusion-trajectory likelihood estimation while updating the shared drafter parameters. On OmniDocBench v1.6, AR-path GRPO improves the Overall score from 94.92 to 95.16 without reducing diffusion drafting efficiency, while the final model remains close to the original GLM-OCR score of 95.48. In an SGLang serving deployment, GravityOCR commits an average of 9.7 output tokens per forward pass and achieves a $3.94\times$ decode-only speedup on region crops and a $1.32\times$ end-to-end page-processing speedup over AR decoding.

Distinguishing GPT-assisted from independently authored student writing has become a critical challenge in academia. This paper evaluates the discriminative capability of interpretable stylometric features extracted solely from submitted text. Using data from 90 participants who wrote both independently and with ChatGPT assistance, we evaluate eight machine learning classifiers while keeping data from the same participant together during validation. On the held-out test set, Random Forest achieved an ROC-AUC of 0.87 and an F1-score of 0.84, with False Positive and False Negative rates of 22.2% and 11.1%, respectively. SHAP analysis shows that lexical and grammatical characteristics drive the resulting predictions. The findings suggest that transparent, text-intrinsic features provide measurable signal for detecting GPT-assisted writing.

A coding agent must emit a valid tool call--a parseable invocation of a tool in the provided schema--before the harness can execute its chosen action. We study how local serving stacks affect this protocol step and show that measured outcomes can depend on the serving layer rather than model behavior alone. In Ollama, the default tools= request is gated per model by a static template flag: some models are accepted and return calls as text, some return native tool_calls, while Phi-3 and Gemma-3 are rejected before inference. In our harness, rejection and retry exhaustion are not preserved as structured failure metadata, so downstream analysis can misclassify them as model non-calls and naively report 0% fidelity. Adding a text tool list while retaining the native channel recovers much of the measured fidelity for accepted models, whereas a uniform text protocol reduces fidelity for Llama-3.2, which has native tool-call support. Cross-stack probes on Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, and SGLang show different handling of the same request. Constrained decoding removes parse failures but can induce non-termination, and turn-pooled versus per-instance estimates differ by up to about 55 points. We conclude with a checklist for treating serving behavior as part of the evaluation protocol.

Large language models increasingly tackle hard reasoning problems by spending more test-time compute, yet the dominant strategy remains naive repeated sampling: draw many independent solutions and hope one is correct. Because such sampling explores only through local decoding noise, it tends to produce many near duplicate attempts rather than genuinely different ideas. We ask whether exploration can instead be steered at a semantic level, by first sampling problem specific concepts, hints, or strategies and then conditioning answer generation on them. We refine this into a simple, more exploratory procedure that emits many diverse concepts in a single trajectory, and evaluate it on hard problems where repeated sampling struggles. We then go a step further and make concept generation trainable: a small concept generator is optimized with reinforcement learning so that its concepts maximize the downstream success of a larger, frozen answer generator. On hard mathematical reasoning problems, the trained concept generator substantially improves the answer generator's pass@k over naive repeated sampling at the same answer generation allocation, surpasses concepts drawn from much larger untuned models, and transfers to answer generators it was never trained against, including a model from a different family. A small model can thus be trained into an effective, reusable search policy for a much larger one.

Long-term conversational memory in multi-party settings requires more than retrieving relevant content from long-term conversations: it must distinguish who said what, whom each statement concerns, how individuals perceive one another, what information is shared by the group, and how states change over time. Recent studies on multi-party dialogue benchmarks show that existing general-purpose LLM memory systems tend to lose person and group relations or struggle to integrate clues distributed across members, groups, and time. Together, these issues reveal two core bottlenecks: message attribution and relational understanding in multi-party dialogue, and state reconstruction from interleaved histories. To address both, we propose $\textbf{SpeakerMem-R1}$: its dual-track memory stores speaker-labeled verbatim messages and derived states organized into person-level and group-level views, then combines evidence from both tracks by entity, event, and time at query time. To reduce attribution and update errors during structured memory construction while enabling local deployment, we train Writer-R1 with SpeakerLevenshtein and speaker-conditioned GRPO. On GroupMemBench, SocialMemBench, and EverMemBench, SpeakerMem-R1 achieves binary accuracies of 47.9%, 69.2%, and 61.9%, respectively. On the publicly reported EverMemBench leaderboard from EverMind-AI, we achieves 62.33%, the best reported result among the latest state-of-the-art frameworks. It also achieves 70.85% on all 1,986 LoCoMo questions, which we use as a two-person long-term conversation boundary test. In a controlled evaluation of 305 questions, RL raises the SFT Writer's mean accuracy from 57.38% to 68.20%. We report both binary accuracy and token-F1, and ablations show that the verbatim and structured tracks, as well as person-level and group-level views, are complementary under the standardized evaluation interface.

A multi-agent system can reduce latency on complex tasks by executing work concurrently. Several pioneering harness frameworks support multi-agent systems. However, the scalability of current multi-agent harnesses is often constrained by a central orchestrator's capacity to allocate tasks and coordinate workers. To address this limitation, we introduce Agensh, a scalable self-organized multi-agent harness without a central orchestrator: concurrent workers execute a multi-agent cooperation loop, continuously gathering context, claiming and self-assigning sub-tasks, taking action and sharing findings, verifying results, and merging progress in an asynchronous manner. The loop is supported by the agentic organization infrastructure comprising three components: a shared workspace holds proposed, ongoing, and completed work; a message interface lets workers communicate; and shared context retains reusable findings and work intentions. To test the scalability of Agensh, we evaluate it on the five hardest ProgramBench tasks with GPT-5.6-sol (high). Scaling from 1 to 128 agents raises the mean final test-pass rate from 19.31% to 28.78%, an approximately 49% relative improvement. Larger organizations reach comparable test-pass rates earlier. On pandoc, scaling from 1 to 1,024 agents raises the final test-pass rate from 33.89% to 55.06%. Worker trajectories further show that different forms of self-organized cooperation gradually emerges and standardizes as the organization grows. These results reveal the number of agents as a new scaling dimension for multi-agent organizations to expand the frontier of general intelligence, offering a practical solution for complex tasks under hard latency constraints or time budgets.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs by enabling non-autoregressive text generation. However, their practical deployment remains limited by inefficient inference, largely due to the absence of effective Key-Value (KV) caching and scalable parallel decoding mechanisms. Existing acceleration methods typically study KV caching and parallel decoding in isolation, overlooking the I/O bottlenecks that arise when cache reuse and parallel token verification are jointly applied. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{Flash-dLLM}$, a training-free inference acceleration framework for fast and memory-efficient dLLMs. Flash-dLLM first identifies GPU memory I/O as a dominant bottleneck in KV-cache-enabled dLLM inference and addresses it with an I/O-aware fused KV-cache kernel that reduces redundant memory movement. Building on this optimized cache mechanism, Flash-dLLM further proposes an efficient KV-cache-driven draft-and-verify decoding strategy, where the dLLM itself serves as both drafter and verifier without requiring an auxiliary model. This unified design enables faster decoding while preserving generation quality and improving scalability to longer sequences and larger batch size. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks demonstrate that Flash-dLLM consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art dLLM acceleration methods in both inference speed and memory efficiency. In particular, it achieves $5.1\times$ and $11.0\times$ speedups over prior strongest baseline Elastic-Cache on GSM8K and HumanEval, respectively.