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ELSA3D: Elastic Semantic Anchoring for Unified 3D Understanding and Generation

Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Yifan Shen, Onkar Susladkar, Yuanzhe Liu, Xiaona Zhou, Ismini Lourentzou (cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG)

Unified 3D foundation models aspire to generate 3D assets and reason about them in language within a single backbone, but their text-3D interaction remains largely implicit. Existing methods concatenate text and 3D tokens into a flat sequence and rely on self-attention, collapsing coarse structural cues and fine geometric details into one undifferentiated representation. We introduce ELSA3D, a unified 3D model that addresses this with elastic semantic anchoring, structuring language and geometric reasoning jointly along matched abstraction scales. ELSA3D represents geometry with a scale-aware octree tokenizer and introduces Anchor Tokens, sparse cross-modal units that select semantic cues, route them to the most relevant 3D scale, retrieve scale-specific geometric evidence, and write the fused signal back into the unified representation, keeping interaction sparse yet precise. A lightweight per-block router makes both computation and reasoning elastic, choosing which text tokens instantiate anchors at which geometric scale so that cross-modal capacity concentrates where alignment is most needed. ELSA3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across image-to-3D generation, text-to-3D generation, and 3D captioning, outperforming the strongest unified baseline while roughly halving FLOPs and inference latency relative to the non-elastic version of the same model.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Lift3D-VLA: Lifting VLA Models to 3D Geometry and Dynamics-Aware Manipulation

Jiaming Liu, Qingpo Wuwu, Nuowei Han, Hao Chen, Zhuoyang Liu, Fan Fei, Yueru Jia, Chenyang Gu, Yandong Guo, Boxin Shi, Shanghang Zhang (cs.RO, cs.CV)

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding and spatial reasoning. While some VLA approaches attempt to incorporate 3D information, they are constrained by limited data availability and geometric information loss in current 3D encoding pipelines, and fail to jointly capture 3D geometry and temporally structured actions in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we introduce Lift3D-VLA, a unified VLA framework that equips models with explicit 3D point cloud reasoning and enables temporally coherent action generation. First, building upon our previous work Lift3D, an enhanced 2D model-lifting strategy is proposed to geometrically align 3D points with pretrained 2D positional embeddings. This design enables direct point-cloud encoding within the VLA vision encoder while minimizing spatial information loss. Based on explicit 3D inputs, we propose Geometry-Centric Masked Autoencoding (GC-MAE), a dual-objective self-supervised framework that reconstructs the current point cloud while predicting its future geometric evolution. This formulation allows the 2D vision encoder to internalize both 3D structure and physical dynamics. To fully exploit 3D representations, we further design layer-wise temporal action modeling, which leverages multiple layers of the LLM to collaboratively predict action chunks, enabling temporally consistent predictions. Across 22 simulated tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks, Lift3D-VLA achieves 10.8% and 11.1% higher mean success rates on MetaWorld and RLBench than the best-performing prior VLA methods, and outperforms the strongest real-world baseline by 4 percentage points, while exhibiting stronger generalization to out-of-distribution perturbations.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Embodied Human-Robot Interaction via Acoustics: A MARL Approach with AcoustoBots for Spatial Data Physicalization

Shiqi Liu, Narsimlu Kemsaram, Prateek Mittal, Pengyuan Wei, Sriram Subramanian (cs.RO)

Traditional data physicalization is often static and disconnected from real environments, limiting its ability to convey embodied spatial dynamics and engage users. To address this limitation, we present AcoustoBots, a mobile acoustophoretic data-physicalization platform in which TurtleBot3 robots carry upward-facing 8 x 8 ultrasonic phased arrays. Each array levitates a particle whose height (1-10 cm) encodes a local urban scalar value, such as population density, noise, or traffic. A MARL (Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning) policy based on the Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) algorithm, with centralized training and decentralized execution, selects collision-aware navigation actions, while a high-rate Gerchberg-Saxton-Phased Array of Transducers (GS-PAT) acoustic controller maintains trap stability and updates array phases to achieve the commanded height during motion. This creates a closed perception-display-action loop. We evaluate single-robot city-to-city traversal and dual-robot cooperative coverage on a 4 m x 3 m scaled UK map using PhaseSpace-based localization for repeatable multi-robot trials. Results show stable in-motion levitation and consistent, location-dependent height rendering, with task success rates of 90% and 80% for the single and dual-robot regimes, respectively, over 10 trials per regime, and low collision counts. These findings support acoustophoretic levitation as a simple, glanceable, robot-mediated communication cue for embodied human-robot interaction in spatial analytics.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

VisCoP: Visual Probing for Video Domain Adaptation of Vision Language Models

Dominick Reilly, Manish Kumar Govind, Le Xue, Srijan Das (cs.CV)

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at general visual reasoning but experience significant performance degradation when deployed in novel domains that exhibit substantial distribution shifts from their pretraining data. Existing domain adaptation methods rely on finetuning standard VLM components; however, depending on which components are updated, these approaches either limit the model's ability to learn domain-specific representations or cause catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired capabilities. We introduce Vision Contextualized Probing (VisCoP), a parameter-efficient adaptation framework that augments the VLM vision encoder with a compact set of learnable visual probes. By learning domain-specific visual representations through these probes while requiring only minimal updates to pretrained model components, VisCoP effectively adapts to new domains without sacrificing existing knowledge. We evaluate VisCoP across three challenging adaptation settings: cross-view (exocentric to egocentric), cross-modal (RGB to depth), and cross-task (human understanding to robot control). Across all scenarios, VisCoP consistently outperforms existing domain adaptation strategies, achieving superior target-domain performance while preserving the pretrained VLM's capabilities on the source domain. These results demonstrate that lightweight visual probing provides an effective and robust solution for adapting VLMs under substantial distribution shifts. Code, models, and evaluation protocols are available at https://github.com/dominickrei/VisCoP.

Published: October 15, 2025

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies

Tianxing Chen, Yue Chen, Zixuan Li, Junyuan Tang, Kailun Su, Haoran Lu, Weijie Wan, Baijun Chen, Songling Liu, Haowen Yan, Honghao Su, Zhiyang Dou, Kaixuan Wang, Dandan Zhang, Yunze Liu, Yan Qin, Qiwei Liang, Qiwei Wu, Zijian Lin, Wenwei Lin, Yuran Wang, Minghua He, Tianshu Wu, Ruihai Wu, Jingquan Zhou, Kai-Chong Lei, Haibao Yu, Yuanfeng Ji, Weiyang Jin, Guanyu Lin, Xiaofan Li, Qi Xiong, Renjing Xu, Zhongyu Li, Wenhao Chai, Enze Xie, Ziwei Wang, Yao Mu, Hao Dong, Wojciech Matusik, Mingyu Ding, Wenbo Ding, Ping Luo, Masayoshi Tomizuka (cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.GR)

Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities. Many rely on simple, short-horizon, or skill-narrow tasks with limited capability coverage, and are often conducted only in simulation or only in the real world. Simulation enables scalable feedback but misses physical deployment challenges, while real-world evaluation is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to reproduce. We introduce RoboDojo, a unified sim-and-real benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of generalist robot manipulation policies. RoboDojo includes 42 simulation tasks and 18 real-world tasks covering diverse and complementary manipulation capabilities. The simulation benchmark evaluates five dimensions: generalization, memory, precision, long-horizon execution, and open-vocabulary instruction following, while the real-world benchmark exposes policies to challenging physical-world deployment conditions. RoboDojo supports scalable evaluation through heterogeneous parallel simulation in Isaac Sim and provides RoboDojo-RealEval, a reproducible real-world evaluation system with remote cloud access, standardized hardware, scene reset, evaluation protocol, and deployment interface. Together with XPolicyLab, policies can be integrated once and evaluated across simulation and real-world settings with minimal adaptation. We integrate 30 policies into XPolicyLab and evaluate them on RoboDojo, establishing a public leaderboard and systematic analysis of current policy performance. The website is available at http://robodojo-benchmark.com/.

Published: July 05, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Vision as Unified Multimodal Generation

Xiaoyang Han, Jianhua Li, Kewang Deng, Zukai Chen, Xuanke Shi, Sihan Wang, Boxuan Li, Linyan Wang, Siyi Xie, Xin You, Jinsheng Quan, Zhongang Cai, Haiwen Diao, Ziwei Liu, Lei Yang, Dahua Lin, Quan Wang (cs.CV)

We formulate computer vision as unified multimodal generation, where heterogeneous visual tasks are expressed in the native text and image generation spaces of a unified multimodal model, without task-specific architectures. Under this formulation, SenseNova-Vision uses natural-language instructions and optional visual prompts to specify tasks, target regions or views, and decoding conventions, and generates responses as text for symbolic outputs, images for dense spatial predictions, or mixed text-and-image outputs for compositional tasks. To support large-scale training, we convert diverse computer vision annotations into instruction-response examples compatible with these generation spaces, resulting in the SenseNova-Vision Corpus, a computer-vision instruction-response corpus spanning text, image, and mixed targets. Starting from an off-the-shelf pretrained unified multimodal model, SenseNova-Vision is trained primarily on this corpus, with auxiliary multimodal data used as a capability-preserving mixture, and requires no task-specific prediction heads or architectural modifications. The resulting model covers a broad range of vision tasks, including detection, OCR, keypoint estimation, segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal prediction, point maps, and camera pose estimation, while supporting language-defined variants that combine category, color, region, and other visual cues. Experiments show that a single unified model can match leading task-specialized systems across structured visual understanding, dense geometric prediction, segmentation, and multi-view visual geometry. These results suggest unified multimodal generation as a scalable route for integrating computer vision capabilities into general-purpose foundation models. The model and corpus are publicly available.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RynnWorld-4D: 4D Embodied World Models for Robotic Manipulation

Haoyu Zhao, Xingyue Zhao, Siteng Huang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Zhongyu Li (cs.RO)

Robotic manipulation in the open world requires not only recognizing what a scene looks like, but also anticipating how its 3D structure moves under interaction. We argue that synchronized RGB, depth, and optical flow, namely RGB-DF, provide a physically grounded representation that captures the underlying 4D dynamics of a scene. Compared to 2D pixel videos, this multi-modal synergy aligns visual appearance with geometric structure and temporal motion, creating a representation space significantly closer to the low-level end-effector actions demanded by robotic systems, thereby narrowing the gap between world prediction and policy learning. Building on this insight, we introduce RynnWorld-4D, a generative model that co-produces future RGB frames, depth maps, and optical flow from a single RGB-D image and a language instruction within one unified diffusion process. This 4D world model features a tri-branch architecture that integrates cross-modal attention with frame-wise 3D RoPE, ensuring that appearance, geometry, and motion evolve consistently. To supply training data at scale, we curate Rynn4DDataset 1.0, a massive dataset of over 254.4 million frames across egocentric human and robotic manipulation videos with high-quality pseudo-labels for depth and optical flow. We further propose RynnWorld-4D-Policy, an inverse dynamics head that consumes the internal 4D representations of RynnWorld-4D in a single forward pass, bypassing expensive multi-step denoising, to output robot actions in a closed-loop manner. Experiments show that RynnWorld-4D produces temporally and spatially coherent 4D predictions, and that RynnWorld-4D-Policy achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world dexterous bimanual manipulation tasks, particularly excelling in tasks demanding spatial precision and temporal coordination.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RynnWorld-Teleop: An Action-Conditioned World Model for Digital Teleoperation

Haoyu Zhao, Xingyue Zhao, Hangyu Li, Biao Gong, Kehan Li, Siteng Huang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Zhongyu Li (cs.RO)

Scaling robot learning requires massive, diverse trajectory data, yet collection is currently bottlenecked by physical teleoperation, where every demonstration binds operator time to specific hardware and workspaces. We introduce digital teleoperation, a paradigm that decouples data collection from physical constraints by replacing the real robot with a generative world model. In this framework, an operator's hand-pose stream drives a robot-centric generative world model to synthesize high-fidelity egocentric videos from a single reference image. The recorded pose stream serves as an embodiment-agnostic action label transferable to any target robot via standard retargeting, yielding complete state-action trajectories for imitation learning independent of physical hardware. We instantiate this paradigm in RynnWorld-Teleop, a system that integrates depth-aware skeletal conditioning, progressive human-to-robot training on a video Diffusion Transformer, and streaming autoregressive distillation. This pipeline compresses the generative process into a single-pass inference, enabling 40+ FPS, real-time interactive generation on a single H100 GPU. Policies trained exclusively on RynnWorld-Teleop-generated data achieve effective zero-shot Sim2Real transfer across dexterous and diverse bimanual tasks. Moreover, augmenting real-world datasets with our digitally teleoperated data consistently improves success rates, demonstrating that RynnWorld-Teleop serves as a high-fidelity, scalable data engine for the next generation of robotic agents.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

ProxyPose: 6-DoF Pose Tracking via Video-to-Video Translation

Ruihang Zhang, Felix Taubner, Pooja Ravi, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, David B. Lindell (cs.CV)

Tracking the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose of objects and surfaces from monocular video is a long-standing problem in computer vision. To tackle this problem, existing methods require inputs beyond the video itself-such as 3D models, depth maps, object masks, or task-specific learned features-and they struggle with textureless, transparent, reflective, or deformable surfaces. Here, we introduce ProxyPose, which recasts 6-DoF pose tracking as video-to-video translation. Given only a video and a single marked pixel in the first frame, a fine-tuned video diffusion model translates the input into a proxy video-a synthetic video depicting a colored polyhedron undergoing the same local rigid-body motion as the surface region at the marked pixel. Because the proxy's geometry and appearance are known by construction, recovering its full 6-DoF trajectory reduces to classical pose estimation with off-the-shelf solvers. This formulation leverages large-scale video pre-training to absorb the hardest aspects of pose tracking-handling challenging materials, occlusions, and deformations-into the translation step, while operating at the pixel level with no assumptions about object identity, boundaries, or global rigidity. ProxyPose achieves state-of-the-art 6-DoF pose tracking accuracy without the additional inputs required by competing methods and after fine-tuning the video model only on synthetic data. We further demonstrate that ProxyPose extends to face tracking, camera pose estimation, and challenging in-the-wild scenes that are beyond the reach of existing approaches. Project page: https://ruihangzhang97.github.io/proxypose/.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

From RGB Generation to Dense Field Readout: Pixel-Space Dense Prediction with Text-to-Image Models

Zanyi Wang, Xin Lin, Haodong Li, Dengyang Jiang, Yijiang Li, Pengtao Xie (cs.CV)

Large-scale text-to-image models are attractive backbones for dense prediction because RGB generation pretraining learns rich semantic, structural, and geometric priors. Existing generative and editing approaches reuse these priors by casting dense prediction as target generation: annotations such as depth, normals, alpha mattes, masks, and heatmaps are encoded into an RGB-trained VAE latent space and decoded back as image-like targets. We argue this inherits more of the generative output interface than dense prediction requires: unlike RGB synthesis, dense prediction asks for pixel-correct, task-native fields on the same image plane, not new RGB content to be rendered. Our key observation is that a pretrained DiT already organizes RGB inputs through a patch-to-token-to-patch lattice on the image plane, so each token indexes a fixed output patch whose channels can carry task-native quantities instead of RGB appearance. We instantiate this as ReChannel: we keep the VAE encoder for the DiT's input distribution but drop the target-side decoder, adapt the frozen DiT with task LoRA, and map each token to its p x p x K_t pixel-space patch through a shared token-local linear head--about 33K parameters, no spatial mixing. Using FLUX-Klein, we evaluate on six dense prediction tasks and over a dozen benchmarks. This minimal interface sets new state-of-the-art on trimap-free matting, KITTI depth, and referring segmentation, and stays competitive on normals, saliency, and pose. In a matched 4B setting it is more accurate and 2.48x faster than an edit-plus-latent-decode counterpart--dense perception can benefit from generative pretraining without inheriting its output interface.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

MonoIR-RS: Infrared Remote Sensing Vision-Language Learning with CLIP and VLM Adaptation

Jiaju Han, Ma Yaqi, Yahui Chai, Xuemeng Sun, Xin Li, Qike Zhang, Yingying Zhao, Xiang Chen, Luwei Yang, Chengyin Hu, Jiahuan Long (cs.CV)

Infrared remote-sensing imagery captures intensity structure, object-background contrast, and illumination-invariant cues often invisible in RGB imagery. Yet, most remote-sensing vision-language resources and models focus on visible-band semantics, leaving infrared vision-language understanding underexplored. We introduce MonoIR-RS, a large-scale infrared remote-sensing vision-language dataset and benchmark that couples IR-aware data construction with CLIP-style contrastive adaptation and VLM instruction tuning. Built from the same source pool and split as FusionRS, MonoIR-RS retains the infrared image as the model-facing modality, yielding 600,000 synthesized infrared images and 59,032 retained IR-aware caption records. The model experiments use this retained language-supervision subset, whose captions rewrite supervision around grayscale structure and infrared-style contrast instead of RGB appearance. We show that the synthesized infrared imagery is markedly closer to real thermal imagery than a grayscale conversion on the AVIID benchmark. We fine-tune five CLIP backbones and six VLM backbones, and calibrate them against zero-shot behavior: IR-aware adaptation lifts CLIP mean recall by up to 12.8 points and drives VLM captioning IR-cue coverage to 100% while reducing residual RGB-color leakage to near zero. By isolating the infrared modality from RGB-IR dual-modal learning, MonoIR-RS offers a controlled, reproducible testbed for aligning infrared remote-sensing evidence with language.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Calcification Classification in Mammography Across Multi-Site Datasets

Xuan Liu, Derek L. Nguyen, Emily C. Barre, Jennifer Thomas, Thomas Lynch, Jeffrey R. Marks, E. Shelley Hwang, Marc D. Ryser, Joseph Y. Lo, Lars J. Grimm (cs.CV)

Deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have shown strong performance in breast cancer diagnosis, particularly for classification tasks in mammography. However, domain shifts across multi-site datasets remain a challenge, especially when models are applied to unseen domains. In this work, we proposed a calcification classification framework to improve malignant versus benign breast disease classification across multi-site mammography datasets. The framework consisted of two components: (1) an unsupervised domain adaptation module based on style transfer models (AdaIN and CycleGAN) to generate vendor-specific and technique-specific training samples without additional annotations, and (2) a supervised classification module using Swin Transformer V2 as the backbone. We evaluated the proposed method on three datasets: cross-validation on OPTIMAM (National Health Service, United Kingdom; n=2994), followed by external validation on EMBED (Emory University; n=125), and Duke Calcification Dataset v1 (n=788). These datasets cover multiple vendors and include both full-field digital mammography and synthetic 2D images derived from digital breast tomosynthesis. The proposed framework improved cross-site performance for both EMBED (AUC 0.68 to 0.72) and the Duke Calcification Dataset (AUC 0.68 to 0.73). These findings indicate that domain adaptation can reduce domain shifts and improve the generalization for calcification classification across multi-site datasets.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Graph Convolutional Attention: A Spectral Perspective on Graph Denoising and Diffusion

Shervin Khalafi, Igor Krawczuk, Sergio Rozada, Charilaos Kanatsoulis, Antonio G Marques, Alejandro Ribeiro (cs.LG, cs.AI)

Denoising graphs is a fundamental problem in graph learning and the core operation of graph diffusion models. Attention-based architectures like graph transformers have recently shown promise in denoising graphs. However, our principled understanding of attention-based graph denoising remains limited, making it unclear whether standard attention is the right mechanism for this task. Here we show that, under a denoising objective, linear attention is suboptimal and can only learn an average spectral denoising filter over the training distribution. This creates a fundamental limitation as graphs often vary spectrally across the distribution. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Spectral Attention, which directly utilizes the input graph spectrum and provably outperforms linear attention by a margin governed by the spectral diversity of the distribution. We then derive Graph Convolutional Attention (GCA), a practical and permutation-equivariant realization of this idea that implements spectral denoising through graph-filtered queries and keys. For stochastic block models, GCA provably matches the idealized Spectral Attention mechanism. We further show that the softmax operation, that follows the attention, provides additional denoising by approximately projecting noisy eigenvectors onto the clean eigenspace. Empirically, replacing linear attention with GCA consistently improves graph denoising and diffusion on synthetic and real datasets, with gains strongly correlated with spectral diversity. In DiGress, GCA matches standard graph-transformer performance without computing expensive structural features, and when combined with the recently proposed PEARL positional encodings, avoids explicit eigendecomposition computations resulting in faster inference without degrading quality. The code can be found here: github.com/shervinkhalafi/graph_conv_att

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Rethinking Indic AI from a Lens of Cultural Heritage Preservation

Aparna Madva, Sharath Srivatsa, Srinath Srinivasa, Tulika Saha (cs.AI, cs.CL)

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes inroads into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, there is significant interest in studying how AI impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of this civilization. AI is seen as a ''double-edged sword'' where on the one hand, it can enable access and inclusion for a large population, on the other, it can homogenize worldviews and exclude underrepresented languages and worldviews. In this paper, we try to characterize this problem by addressing the extensive characteristic nature of Indian linguistics and the way they closely connect to cultural practices and worldview. We then perform a longitudinal survey of how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have evolved in this space, tracing the historical development of Indic NLP, covering key milestones, methodological shifts, and resource creation efforts. In addition, the paper also examines the structural and sociolinguistic characteristics of Indian languages, such as rich morphology, complex scripts and grammar rules, diglossia, and large dialectal variation, and explains how these create unique challenges for building AI foundation models. We then discuss the growing role of Indic foundation models and analyze how these models address these long-standing resource and representation gaps. Finally, we propose a research direction called 'Culture Sensing', which re-imagines AI based on hermeneutic reasoning. Culture Sensing aims to address open problems such as ensuring equitable performance across low-resource languages and producing outputs that are culturally meaningful. By bringing together past work, current techniques, and emerging trends, this paper outlines research directions that can guide the next phase of Indic NLP and contribute to the development of more robust and inclusive Indic foundation models.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

OmniLayout: A Schematic-Coupled Multimodal Benchmark for Constraint-Aware Geometric Reasoning in PCB Layout

Taiting Lu, Kaiyuan Lin, Mingjia Wang, Haolin Ye, Runze Liu, Yuxin Tian, Vahe Melkonyan, Haoyu Wang, Muchuan Wang, Chufan Hong, Yifan Yang, Sung-Liang Chen, Yi-Chao Chen, Yicheng Jin, Mahanth Gowda (cs.CV)

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in 3D spatial reasoning, spatial grounding, and fine-grained geometric understanding. However, their ability to reason about densely packed object placement under strict spatial and functional constraints remains largely unexplored, despite being a fundamental challenge in practical electronic design automation (EDA) workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniLayout, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on printed-circuit-board (PCB) layout placement reasoning under real-world geometric, routing, and connectivity constraints. OmniLayout contains 1,681 industrial-grade schematic-coupled PCB layouts and includes four tasks: (1) geometric reasoning for IC physical placement, with 77.24K placement instances constrained within PCB board boundaries; (2) routability-aware placement reasoning, generating physically valid component placements; (3) electrical functionality, preserving schematic-specified connectivity and electronic functional correctness; and (4) tool-augmented agentic reasoning for invoking external tools to accomplish tasks (1)-(3). Our results reveal substantial limitations of current LLMs in PCB layout placement, including weak geometric reasoning, poor routability optimization, and inconsistent preservation of electrical functionality.

Published: July 03, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

On the feasibility of dependency parsing of non-human sequences without a gold standard. Is evaluation possible in other species?

Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Catherine Hobaiter, Thore Bergman, Morgan Gustison (cs.CL)

Dependency parsing consists of finding a tree representation for a sequence. Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to develop parsing methods without a gold standard during model training. In human languages, an unsupervised parser can be evaluated because some gold standard is usually available or can be created. For other species, a gold standard is unknown. Thus one may conclude that it is impossible to determine the accuracy of an unsupervised parser and, consequently, dependency parsing is unfeasible in other species. However, here we apply recent advances in network science to demonstrate that the proportion of correct edges retrieved by a parser must be high for the sequences of vocalizations or gestures that non-human primates produce due to the fast decay of the sequence length distribution. In contrast, human language sequences lack that property. Therefore, evaluation without a gold standard is feasible in non-human primates but a hard problem in humans.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs

Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin Li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Minjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang (cs.CL)

Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

UniLM-Nav: A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Last-Mile Navigation

Zhuofan Zhang, Tianxu Wang, Guoxi Zhang, Yixiong Lin, Xilin Wang, Hongming Xu, Qing Li, Song-Chun Zhu, Lifeng Fan (cs.RO)

Mobile manipulation requires a robot to navigate to a target object or receptacle and then perform intended manipulation. However, reaching the vicinity of the target does not guarantee a manipulation-ready base pose, a problem known as last-mile navigation. Prior methods for last-mile navigation either rely on manual pose annotation or task-specific training, limiting their scalability to open-vocabulary settings with fine-grained spatial constraints. We propose UniLM-Nav, a unified framework for zero-shot open-vocabulary last-mile navigation. UniLM-Nav decomposes last-mile navigation into view selection, task-conditioned affordance grounding, and geometry-aware base-pose reasoning, all resolved with a shared multimodal large language model (MLLM) backend. Specifically, UniLM-Nav first selects a reference view that best captures the target object or receptacle from recently collected observations. It then grounds task-relevant affordance point in the selected view and lifts the result into the robot-centric coordinate frame. Finally, conditioned on the grounded affordance, task context, and robot geometry, it infers a manipulation-ready base pose for the robot. We evaluate UniLM-Nav on the OVMM benchmark, where it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method, MoTo, by 3.13 percentage points. Analyses show that the components of our method are crucial to final performance, and that the choice of MLLM also has a substantial effect. We further deploy UniLM-Nav on a Unitree B2 quadruped robot with a 6-DoF Unitree Z1 manipulator, validating its applicability to real-world mobile manipulation tasks.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

PerCaM-Health: Personalized Dynamic Causal Graphs for Healthcare Reasoning

Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Saba A. Farahani, Di Huang, Hung Cao, Ramesh Jain, Amir M. Rahmani (cs.LG)

Personalized healthcare decisions require reasoning about how physiological and behavioral variables influence an individual patient over time. Existing temporal causal discovery methods are poorly matched to this setting: cohort-level models provide stable but non-personalized structures, while per-patient discovery is unreliable because individual trajectories are short, noisy, irregular, and non-stationary. This creates a fundamental gap between population-level causal modeling and the patient-specific, time-varying mechanisms needed for intervention reasoning. We introduce PerCaM-Health, a framework for learning personalized dynamic causal graphs from longitudinal health data. The framework learns a knowledge-guided population temporal graph, then conservatively adapts and evolves it using patient-specific temporal evidence and rolling-window updates, producing interpretable and auditable graph sequences. By coupling these graphs with temporal structural equations, the framework enables patient-level counterfactual queries, such as estimating short-horizon outcome changes under hypothetical behavioral interventions. Experiments on a semi-synthetic dynamic health benchmark show that PerCaM-Health improves graph recovery, dynamic edge tracking, and intervention direction accuracy compared to cohort-level, per-patient, and non-personalized temporal baselines. These results demonstrate that jointly modeling personalization and temporal evolution yields more reliable causal structure and intervention reasoning.

Published: May 08, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Neural-ESO: A Dual-Pathway Architecture for Provably Robust Learning-Based Control

Fan Zhang, Richie Suganda, Jinfeng Chen, Wenhua Liu, Hantao Fu, Bin Hu, Qin Lin (cs.RO, eess.SY)

A learning-enabled disturbance-rejection framework based on a Neural Extended State Observer (Neural-ESO) is presented in this letter. Unlike existing learning-based control methods that largely rely on the learned model once deployed, Neural-ESO adopts a dual-pathway architecture: a predictive pathway uses a neural network to provide a feedforward disturbance estimate that accelerates convergence, while a corrective pathway employs a conventional ESO to compensate prediction errors and prevent over-reliance on the neural component. Using Lyapunov theory and a small-gain analysis, we show that enforcing a Lipschitz bound on the learning component guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop error dynamics. The proposed framework is validated on a quadrotor landing task subject to strong ground-effect disturbances across normal and out-of-distribution scenarios, demonstrating accuracy-robustness trade-off and greater operational reliability during training, deployment, and transfer compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

CAIRN: Cross-Room 3D Scene Understanding with Topology-Aware Large Multimodal Models

He Liang, Chenyang Ma, Yiming Zhang, Sangyun Shin, Andrew Markham, Niki Trigoni, Yuhang He (cs.CV)

Existing 3D scene-grounded Large Language Models (3D-LLMs) focus on answering questions grounded in simplified single-room 3D scenes, lacking the ability to reason over real-world household environments containing multiple interconnected rooms and diverse object categories. We introduce CAIRN, a topology-aware 3D-LLM for multi-room 3D scene understanding. CAIRN aligns transformer attention with scene hierarchy, giving the model explicit awareness of object-level relations and room-level connectivity. It enriches object tokens with room-local relational context via a graph neural network, introduces learned room tokens for room-level abstraction, and applies a hierarchical attention mask with geometric bias to route information according to scene topology. CAIRN is developed on CAIRN-MR, a benchmark we introduce on HM3D for multi-room 3D scene understanding, covering grounding, captioning, and four question-answering tasks that progressively evaluate from intra-room perception to cross-room reasoning. Experiments show that CAIRN outperforms prior 3D-LLMs by a large margin across all CAIRN-MR tasks while remaining competitive on five single-room benchmarks.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

GraphBU: MILP Instance Generation with Graph-Native Block Units

Xiaolei Guo, Chenyu Zhou, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge (cs.LG, math.OC)

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) instances used for solver development are hard to obtain when models come from private or application-specific pipelines. A generator must keep the structure that solvers and learned policies rely on. Existing general generators usually choose their generation unit from a formulation template, summary statistics, local graph edits, or blocks found after recombination. These units do not explicitly record how a local part of the MILP is coupled to the rest of the instance. We propose GraphBU, a graph-native generator whose basic unit is a local subproblem plus its interface. The method promotes coupling nodes into master constraints or boundary variables and uses the resulting block units for compatibility-checked replacement. The analysis focuses on the properties needed by this construction: promotion separates interfaces, replacement can preserve feasibility under an interface-slack condition, and the graph construction is invariant to row-column permutations. On MILP instances generation, this unit keeps graph statistics close to the source family, preserves feasibility on most datasets, and improves downstream Predict-and-Search training. Genrated by GraphBU, The average graph-statistical similarity was approximately 0.934, the average feasibility was approximately 96.7%, and the average increase in the main index of downstream PS was approximately 8.0%.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

The Large Cancer Assistant (LCA): A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Framework for Scalable Clinical Decision Support in Oncology

Ghassen Marrakchi, Basarab Matei (cs.AI, cs.LG)

- Objective: Multimodal deep learning models in oncology are currently limited by monolithic designs that rigidly couple data ingestion, clinical routing, and artificial intelligence (AI) inference. To address this inflexibility, we propose the Large Cancer Assistant (LCA), a model-agnostic, post-hoc orchestration framework designed for scalable clinical decision support. - Methods: The LCA is mathematically formalized as a 7-tuple architecture grounded in the principle of Algorithmic Impermeability, ensuring the orchestration logic remains strictly independent of underlying black-box AI models. We introduce the Entry Theory, leveraging Geometric Deep Learning (GDL) to standardize multimodal patient data along distinct structural and medical axes. The system dynamically orchestrates data via a Cancer Switching Module and intentionally isolates the core AI execution from volatile hospital IT infrastructures by outputting a Standardized Intermediate Payload (SIP). - Results: A Proof of Concept (PoC) validated the orchestration logic across four technical scenarios. The framework executed a nominal flow with negligible orchestration overhead. It empirically demonstrated algorithmic impermeability by maintaining an invariant routing projection during AI model swaps, and it validated strict failure-safety by achieving a 100\% recall rate in generating targeted Supplementary Data Requests (SDR) under injected data anomalies. Multi-protocol execution capability was also successfully verified. - Conclusion: By structurally decoupling multimodal ingestion from feature inference, the LCA provides a highly adaptable and modular orchestration foundation. The SIP establishes a clear architectural boundary, natively setting the stage for downstream Electronic Medical Record (EMR) interoperability as an independent future paradigm.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Origin-Destination Matrix Estimation in Microscopic Traffic Simulations Considering Credit Assignment

Donggyu Min, Seongjin Choi, Dong-Kyu Kim (cs.LG)

This paper focuses on dynamic origin-destination matrix estimation (DODE), a crucial calibration process necessary for the effective application of microscopic traffic simulations. The fundamental challenge of the DODE problem in microscopic simulations stems from the complex temporal dynamics and inherent uncertainty of individual vehicle dynamics. This makes it highly challenging to precisely determine which vehicle traverses which link at any given moment, resulting in intricate and often ambiguous relationships between origin-destination (OD) matrices and their contributions to resultant link flows. This phenomenon constitutes the credit assignment problem, a central challenge addressed in this study. We formulate the DODE problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and propose a novel framework that applies model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Within our proposed framework, the agent learns an optimal policy to sequentially generate OD matrices, refining its strategy through direct interaction with the simulation environment. This approach was evaluated through a toy experiment on the Nguyen-Dupuis network and a case study utilizing an actual highway subnetwork spanning Santa Clara and San Jose. Experimental results show that the proposed method consistently improves calibration performance relative to the strongest conventional baseline, reducing link-flow MSE by 23.7% in the toy experiment and by 59.2-88.3% in the real-world case study. By reframing DODE as a sequential decision-making problem, our approach addresses the credit assignment challenge through a learned policy and provides a novel framework for calibration of microscopic traffic simulations.

Published: November 09, 2025

Last updated: July 07, 2026

A Gibbs posterior sampler for inverse problem based on prior diffusion model

Jean-François Giovannelli (stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP)

This paper addresses the issue of inversion in cases where (1) the observation system is modeled by a linear transformation and additive error, (2) the problem is ill-posed and regularization relies on a Bayesian strategy, (3)~the prior is modeled by a diffusion process adjusted on an available large set of examples. In this context, it is known that the issue of posterior sampling is a thorny one and the paper introduces a Gibbs algorithm. It appears that this avenue has not been explored, and we show that it is particularly effective and remarkably simple. In addition, it provides clear elements regarding convergence guarantees in a specific case and arguments supporting such guarantees in practical cases. The results are clearly confirmed by numerical simulations based on a toy example.

Published: February 11, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Life Style Levels: Neighborhood Delineation using Geospatial Data

Srivatsa Kulkarni, Debarag Banerjee (cs.CL)

Fine-scale socioeconomic information is often unavailable across rapidly ur-banizing regions of the developing world, like India, limiting the ability to delineate intra-urban variations in affluence and deprivation. This study pro-poses a scalable, grid-based urban delineation framework using building morphology derived from open-source satellite imagery. Urban areas across 59 Indian cities and towns are partitioned into high-resolution spatial grids and characterized using interpretable morphological indicators, which are combined into a transparent, rule-based scoring framework to delineate areas with contrasting levels of urban affluence. The resulting classifications are validated through ground-level Google Street View observations, revealing a sharp contrast between the grid classes which are consistent with the ex-pected effects of the lifestyle affluence indicators. We further investigate density-based clustering of building footprints in Mumbai to identify dense urban settlements, demonstrating that the resulting clusters exhibit substan-tial spatial overlap with known informal settlements across the city. Finally, we conduct an exploratory analysis mapping consumer loan delinquency across the derived affluence classes. By relying entirely on publicly available geospatial data, the proposed framework provides a scalable, interpretable, and cost-effective approach for granular urban affluence mapping across In-dian cities.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

SMART: A Machine Learning and Monte Carlo Framework for Rapid Analysis of Stochastic Transistor Aging and Process Variation in Digital Circuits

Arash Esshaghi, Siavash Es'haghi, Gholamreza Shahabadi, Alireza Moradi (cs.LG, cs.AR)

As CMOS technology scales into the deep nanometer regime, digital circuit reliability is increasingly threatened by the combined stochastic effects of Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) and Process Variation (PV). Traditional reliability analysis methods, which rely on computationally intensive simulations or extensive lookup tables, fail to scale efficiently for large designs, creating a critical bottleneck in design space exploration. To address this, we propose SMART, a novel framework that integrates Machine Learning (ML) with Monte Carlo simulation to enable rapid, high-fidelity reliability analysis. SMART employs Random Forest regression to predict gate delay distributions directly, bypassing time-consuming atomic model parameter extractions. Crucially, the model utilizes Bayesian Optimization for automated hyperparameter tuning, ensuring maximum predictive robustness across diverse libraries. Experimental validation on ISCAS85 benchmark circuits demonstrates that SMART achieves a 94.54% reduction in analysis time compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a remarkable average accuracy error of just 1.63%. By shifting computational complexity to an offline training phase, the proposed framework offers a scalable, accurate solution for designing resilient, reliability-aware digital systems.

Published: July 06, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Beyond Reactivity: Measuring Proactive Problem Solving in LLM Agents

Gil Pasternak, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Julia White, Dhruv Atreja, Matthew Thomas, George Hurn-Maloney, Ash Lewis (cs.AI)

LLM-based agents are increasingly moving towards proactivity: rather than awaiting instruction, they exercise agency to anticipate user needs and solve them autonomously. However, evaluating proactivity is challenging; current benchmarks are constrained to localized context, limiting their ability to test reasoning across sources and longer time horizons. To address this gap, we present PROBE (Proactive Resolution Of BottlEnecks). PROBE decomposes proactivity as a pipeline of three core capabilities: (1) searching for unspecified issues, (2) identifying specific bottlenecks, and (3) executing appropriate resolutions. We apply PROBE to evaluate leading LLMs and popular agentic frameworks, showing that even state-of-the-art models struggle to solve this benchmark. Computing our consistent measurements across frontier LLMs and agents, we find that the best end-to-end performance of 40% is achieved by both GPT-5 and Claude Opus-4.1. Additionally, we demonstrate the relative capabilities of each model and analyze mutual failure modes. Our results highlight the current limitations of autonomous action in agentic systems, and expose promising future research directions.

Published: October 22, 2025

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Estimation of instrument and noise parameters for inverse problem based on prior diffusion model

Jean-François Giovannelli (stat.ML, cs.LG, math.NA, stat.AP)

This article addresses the issue of estimating observation parameters (response and error parameters) in inverse problems. The focus is on cases where regularization is introduced in a Bayesian framework and the prior is modeled by a diffusion process. In this context, the issue of posterior sampling is known to be thorny, and a recent paper proposes a notably simple and effective solution. Additionally, it opens an remarkable flexibility when it comes to estimating observation parameters. The proposed strategy enables to define an optimal estimator for both observation parameters and image of interest. Furthermore, the strategy provides a means for uncertainty quantification. In addition, MCMC algorithms allow for the computation of estimates and properties of posteriors, while offering some guarantees. The paper presents several numerical experiments that clearly confirm the computational efficiency and the quality of both estimates and uncertainty quantification.

Published: February 12, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RSF-GLLM: Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph QA via Recurrent Soft-Flow and Decoupled LLM Generation

Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Ananth Muppidi (cs.CL, cs.AI)

Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs faces a critical challenge: traditional retrieve-then-read pipelines break differentiability, preventing the retriever from learning to bridge the semantic gap where intermediate nodes lack lexical overlap with the query. To address this, we propose RSF-GLLM, a framework decoupling differentiable graph reasoning from answer generation. Our Recurrent Soft-Flow (RSF) module employs a GRU-guided query updater to propagate continuous relevance scores, utilizing a dynamic gating mechanism to traverse semantically dissimilar bridge nodes via structural cues. We introduce flow sparsity regularization to theoretically guarantee convergence from soft probabilities to discrete reasoning paths. These paths are extracted and textualized to fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM), ensuring generation is grounded in factual topology. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ demonstrate that RSF-GLLM achieves competitive performance with superior inference efficiency compared to LLM based computationally expensive approaches.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

DepthWeave-KV: Token-Adaptive Cross-Layer Residual Factorization for Long-Context KV Cache Compression

Anna Cordoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesus Olivera (cs.AI)

Long-context language model inference is increasingly limited by the memory bandwidth and capacity required to store key-value caches, yet existing compression methods often apply uniform budgets across layers or tokens and degrade retrieval when lexical cues and semantic states require different preservation. We introduce DepthWeave-KV, a token-adaptive cache compression method that factorizes key and value states across neighboring transformer layers using shared low-rank channel bases while retaining lightweight token-specific residuals where attention behavior is sensitive. DepthWeave-KV combines cross-depth residual factorization with a token-conditional depth router that allocates higher reconstruction rank to instruction-bearing and retrieval-critical tokens, and uses calibration-free online error tracking from attention-output probes to adapt compression during generation without retraining the base model. A fused CUDA implementation jointly performs basis lookup, residual dequantization, and attention projection to reduce decode-time memory traffic. Across LongBench, Needle-in-a-Haystack, L-Eval, and long-form QA and summarization benchmarks, DepthWeave-KV achieves near-full-cache task quality with substantially lower memory use, improving average score and retrieval accuracy over prior compressed caches while reaching 8.3x KV memory reduction and 72.8 tokens per second at 64K context.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

The Axiom of Consent: Friction Dynamics in Multi-Agent Coordination

Murad Farzulla (cs.MA, cs.CY)

Multi-agent systems face a fundamental coordination problem: agents must coordinate despite heterogeneous preferences, asymmetric stakes, and imperfect information. When coordination fails, friction emerges -- measurable resistance manifesting as deadlock, thrashing, communication overhead, or conflict. This paper derives a formal framework for analyzing coordination friction from a single axiom: actions affecting agents require authorization in proportion to stakes. From this axiom of consent we establish the kernel triple (alpha, sigma, epsilon) -- alignment, stake, and entropy -- as sufficient statistics for a resource-allocation configuration, and propose a friction functional whose simplest form is F = sigma(1+epsilon)/(1+alpha): friction rises in stakes and entropy and falls in alignment. This form is a phenomenological ansatz, not a theorem, and its empirical adequacy is left open. The Replicator-Optimization Mechanism governs selection over strategies: lower-friction configurations persist longer, making consent-respecting arrangements dynamical attractors rather than normative ideals. We give formal definitions, a measurement apparatus, and machine-checked Lean 4 proofs of the core comparative-statics, with illustrative applications to cryptocurrency governance and political legitimacy.

Published: January 10, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Bridging Physical Reasoning and Task Generalization via Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment

Han-Jun Ko, Jr-Jen Chen, Haobo Yuan, Hsin-Ying Lee, Tiancheng Shen, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang (cs.AI, cs.CV)

Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to generalize in interactive physical reasoning, particularly under unseen tasks and environments. Two key failure modes are prominent: hallucinated chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that contradicts physical reality, and misalignment between the model's reasoning and actions. We present VAORA (Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment), a novel reward design that directly addresses both issues. VAORA introduces two complementary rewards: Visual Alignment Reward, which anchors VLM reasoning to the visual context independent of the agent action itself, and Visual-Action Alignment Reward, which grounds reasoning in the visual outcome induced by the model's action. Together, these rewards suppress hallucinated CoT and reduce the gap between reasoning and behavior. To improve training stability, we further employ smooth, dense rewards by estimating success probabilities using a pre-trained in-domain expert agent. Experiments on PHYRE and Virtual Tool support our performances across novel-task and unseen-environment settings, confirming that grounded and generalizable physical intelligence can be induced through VAORA.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Agent Step Value: Probing the Observer Effect in Black-Box Traces

Andrew Zhang, Chengzhan Li (cs.AI)

Final-answer scores hide which agent transitions helped or harmed a trace. We introduce Agent Step Value (ASV), a replay framework that scores before/after states with a stateless LLM evaluator over a fixed candidate set. ASV reports entropy movement and Bayesian surprise measure belief movement, while offline gold-margin gain measures movement toward a reviewed target. It also quantifies evaluator-channel sensitivity by replaying the same frozen transitions under changed projection, rationale, prompt, or scoring rules. In a 100-question open-QA study with live PubMed retrieval and DeepSeek log-probability scoring, ASV evaluates 1,100 transitions. Entropy movement is 0.000 while mean Bayesian surprise is 2.693, exposing near-one-hot belief pivots. Under a 128-token rationale-conditioned protocol, mean gold-margin gain is -2.335 (95\% CI [-3.395, -1.272]); direct one-token scoring on the same traces gives +4.033. A 100-transition component audit traces the reversal to short generated rationales over full states. ASV turns prompt sensitivity into a measured channel effect and localizes the largest rationale-conditioned losses to extraction and audit.

Published: July 05, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework

Jacky Kwok, Shulu Li, Pranav Atreya, Yuejiang Liu, Yixing Jiang, Chelsea Finn, Marco Pavone, Ion Stoica, Azalia Mirhoseini (cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.MA, cs.RO)

Scaling pre-training, post-training, and test-time compute have become the central paradigms for improving the capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we identify verification, the ability to determine the correctness of a solution, as a new scaling axis. To unlock this and demonstrate its effectiveness, we introduce LLM-as-a-Verifier, a general-purpose verification framework that provides fine-grained feedback for agentic tasks without requiring additional training. Unlike standard LM judges that prompt LLMs to produce discrete scores for candidate solutions, LLM-as-a-Verifier computes the expectation over the distribution of scoring token logits to generate continuous scores. This probabilistic formulation enables verification to scale along multiple dimensions: (1) score granularity, (2) repeated evaluation, and (3) criteria decomposition. In particular, we show that scaling the scoring granularity leads to better separation between positive and negative solutions, resulting in more calibrated comparisons. Moreover, scaling repeated evaluation and criteria decomposition consistently lead to additional gains in verification accuracy through variance and complexity reduction. We further introduce a cost-efficient ranking algorithm for selecting the best solution among candidates using the verifier's continuous scores. LLM-as-a-Verifier achieves state-of-the-art performance on Terminal-Bench V2 (86.5%), SWE-Bench Verified (78.2%), RoboRewardBench (87.4%), and MedAgentBench (73.3%). Beyond verification, the fine-grained signals from LLM-as-a-Verifier can also serve as a proxy for estimating task progress. We build an extension for Claude Code, enabling developers to monitor and improve their own agentic systems. Finally, we show that LLM-as-a-Verifier can provide dense feedback for RL, improving the sample efficiency of SAC and GRPO on robotics and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Published: July 06, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

FreqDepthKV: Frequency-Guided Depth Sharing for Robust KV Cache Compression in Long-Context LLM Inference

Anna Córdoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesús Olivera (cs.AI)

Long-context LLM inference is increasingly limited by the memory and bandwidth cost of KV caches, yet aggressive compression can remove the layer-specific evidence needed for retrieval and multi-step reasoning. We introduce FreqDepthKV, an inference-time cache compression method that factorizes adjacent-layer KV states into shared low-frequency depth components and sparse high-frequency residuals. A lightweight online probe assigns attention heads to shared-depth, residual-depth, or exact cache modes according to their contribution to reconstruction-sensitive attention logits, allowing the compression policy to adapt to prompt structure without retraining. Across long-context question answering, needle retrieval, summarization, and code generation benchmarks, FreqDepthKV preserves task accuracy under substantially smaller cache budgets. With a 32k-token prefill window, FreqDepthKV reaches 58.3 Exact Match, 63.0 F1, 32.5 ROUGE-L, and 48.1 pass@1, closely matching full KV while outperforming prior compressed-cache methods. It also improves decoding throughput to 70.4 tokens/s, reduces TTFT to 2.06 seconds, and lowers peak KV memory to 6.2 GB, achieving a 3.9x effective compression ratio.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Point as Skeleton: Accumulated Point Cloud Enhanced Autoregressive Generation for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Simulation

Songbur Wong, Xiaosong Jia, Junqi You, Bo Zhang, Pei Xu, Renqiu Xia, Yuping Qiu, Shaofeng Zhang, Zelin Zhao, Xuechao Yan, Yuchen Zhou, Yurui Chen, Wen Guo, Hang Xu, Junchi Yan (cs.CV)

Evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) remains challenging, as existing driving simulation methods often trade off closed-loop interactivity (e.g., CARLA) and real-world visual fidelity (e.g., nuScenes). We present Point as Skeleton, a generative sensor simulation framework for state-updated autoregressive driving video generation, in which an autoregressive generator synthesizes visual observations from step-wise updated ego states, actor states, scene maps, and point-cloud skeleton conditions. To support closed-loop rollout, we introduce Reset-and-Roll, which adapts rolling diffusion inference to simulation by preventing future-conditioned latent states from being committed across simulation steps. To stabilize error accumulation during step-wise autoregressive rollout, we introduce point-cloud skeletons that decouple foreground and background assets and project them into camera-view painted-point and template-depth conditions, providing appearance and geometric cues. We further implement a nuPlan-based renderer-level closed-loop generative interface for evaluating generation under ego deviations from the original log. Experiments on nuScenes and nuPlan show that Point as Skeleton improves autoregressive generation quality during closed-loop rollout, demonstrating its potential for visually faithful closed-loop driving simulation. The code is available at https://github.com/krauwu/point-as-skeleton.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenes

Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Lun Liu (cs.CV)

Nighttime color constancy still remains a challenging problem in computational photography due to low-light noise and complex illumination conditions. We present RL-AWB, a novel framework combining statistical methods with deep reinforcement learning for nighttime white balance. Our method begins with a statistical algorithm tailored for nighttime scenes, integrating salient gray pixel detection with novel illuminant estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop the first deep reinforcement learning approach for color constancy that leverages the statistical algorithm as its core, mimicking professional AWB tuning experts by dynamically determining image-specific parameters at inference time, without requiring ground-truth illuminants or reference images. To further facilitate cross-sensor evaluation, we introduce the first multi-sensor nighttime dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization capability across low-light and well-illuminated images. Project page: https://ntuneillee.github.io/research/rl-awb/

Published: January 08, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

FootsiesGym: A Fighting Game Benchmark for Two-Player Zero-Sum Imperfect-Information Games

Chase McDonald, Nathan Tsang, Wesley N. Kerr (cs.AI, cs.GT)

We present FootsiesGym, an open-source environment for learning in a non-trivial two-player, zero-sum, imperfect-information game. Built on HiFight's minimalist 2D fighting game Footsies, it isolates the cyclic, non-transitive strategic interactions of fighting game neutral play while remaining simple enough for efficient analysis. We provide a vectorized simulator that enables high-throughput training on standard hardware, making the environment accessible and reproducible. We describe the design of the environment, benchmark several reinforcement learning algorithms, and discuss open research directions it enables. The code is available at https://github.com/como-research/FootsiesGym.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

No-Regret Gaussian Process Optimization of Time-Varying Functions

Eliabelle Mauduit, Eloïse Berthier, Andrea Simonetto (stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC)

Sequential optimization of black-box functions from noisy evaluations has been widely studied, with Gaussian Process bandit algorithms such as GP-UCB guaranteeing no-regret in stationary settings. However, for time-varying objectives, no-regret is unattainable under pure bandit feedback unless strong and often unrealistic assumptions are imposed. We propose a novel method for optimizing time-varying rewards in the frequentist setting, where the objective has bounded RKHS norm almost surely. Time variations are captured through uncertainty injection, enabling heteroscedastic Gaussian process regression that adapts past observations to the current time step. As no-regret is unattainable in general in the strict bandit setting, we relax the latter allowing additional queries on previously observed points. Building on sparse inference and the effect of uncertainty injection on regret, we propose W-SparQ-GP-UCB, an online algorithm that achieves no-regret with a vanishing number of additional queries per iteration. To assess the theoretical limits of this approach, we establish a lower bound on the number of additional queries required for no-regret, proving the efficiency of our method. Finally, we provide a comprehensive analysis linking the temporal regime of the function to achievable regret rates, together with upper and lower bounds on the number of additional queries needed in each regime.

Published: November 29, 2025

Last updated: July 07, 2026

DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Yaqi Wu, Xiaolei Guo, Chenyu Zhou, Jiaqi Huang, Xianfa Zhang, Junxu Zhang, Zhuo Yu, Zhubo Shi, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge (cs.CL, cs.IR)

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each new document potentially revealing missing facts, bridge entities, query defects, or sufficient support for answering. Existing methods provide useful operations such as iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence critique, and sufficiency judging, but typically organize them within method-specific pipelines or predefined control topologies. This leaves underexplored how to learn a shared state-conditioned policy that chooses among currently valid evidence operations. We introduce DynaKRAG, which formulates multi-hop evidence acquisition as state-conditioned control over atomic evidence operations. At each step, a validity layer constructs the executable action set, and a learned controller selects the next operation. The resulting transition updates the evidence state and may enable new operations at subsequent steps. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, DynaKRAG achieves F1 scores of 0.5998 on HotpotQA, 0.5340 on 2Wiki, and 0.3061 on MuSiQue, outperforming the strongest controlled baseline on all three benchmarks. Replacing the learned controller with a uniform-valid policy reduces F1 by 3.96--5.78 points, while removing sufficiency feedback hurts all three datasets. Controlled retrieval-cap experiments further show that additional retrieval is not uniformly beneficial. Together, these results demonstrate the benefit of coordinating retrieval, diagnosis, and gap-directed acquisition under an evolving evidence state.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Industry Classification of GitHub Repositories Using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)

Kevin Xu, Alexander Quispe (cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.DB)

GitHub hosts hundreds of millions of public repositories, but the platform exposes no native mapping from repositories to standardized industry sectors. This gap limits empirical work on the geography of innovation, the industrial composition of open-source production, and the diffusion of new technologies across economic sectors. We present NAICS-GH, a publicly released corpus of 6,588 GitHub repositories drawn from source pools covering the United States, the European Union, and Australia, each labeled with a 2-digit sector from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS 2022). Labels are produced by a retrieve-and-verify pipeline that combines BAAI/bge-large-en embeddings, FAISS retrieval, and GPT-4.1 rubric scoring. The pipeline narrows about 1.37 million source repositories to 31,178 candidate repository-sector pairs and retains 6,588 high-confidence labels with score at least 8. Re-running the retrieval pipeline end to end reproduces the candidate set to within 0.03 percent. On a 2,421-repository human-validated random sample, the released labels attain 96.98 percent precision, with Wilson 95 percent confidence interval [96.23, 97.59]. We benchmark six pretrained encoders on the released corpus; RoBERTa-large reaches 86.45 percent F1 and 86.35 percent accuracy on a held-out 20 percent test set. The dataset, Croissant metadata, pipeline code, prompts, and fine-tuned checkpoint are released under CC-BY-4.0 and MIT licenses.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

RMISC: A Large-scale Real-world Multivariate Corpus for Time Series Foundation Models

Qian Sun, Yong-Ming Tian, Jia-Wei Huang, Cheng Feng, Shao-Qun Zhang (cs.AI)

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of multivariate modeling using time series foundation models (TSFMs), which achieve advanced zero-shot generalization. Modern multivariate TSFMs are predominantly pretrained on multivariate synthetic data, which is easier to scale but may fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and cross-variable relationships present in real-world time series. This raises a key question: Whether and to what extent the leading TSFMs trained with the real-world corpus perform better than those trained with synthetic data? To answer this, we establish the RMISC corpus, a considerably large-scale, high-quality, openly accessible, real-world, and multivariate time series archive that contains around 200 datasets and 142 billion time points across diverse domains. Furthermore, we pretrain four advanced TSFMs on univariate, synthetic multivariate, and real-world multivariate data and evaluate their zero-shot generalization capabilities on standard in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks. Experimental results show that incorporating real-world multivariate data predominantly improves the generalization performance for both univariate and multivariate TSFMs. These results provide a deeper understanding of how real-world multivariate data contributes to the development of stronger TSFMs.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Mykola Lukashchuk, Thijs van de Laar, Bert de Vries (cs.AI)

Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

Published: June 03, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

EgoVerse: An Egocentric Human Dataset for Robot Learning from Around the World

Ryan Punamiya, Simar Kareer, Zeyi Liu, Josh Citron, Ri-Zhao Qiu, Xiongyi Cai, Alexey Gavryushin, Jiaqi Chen, Davide Liconti, Lawrence Y. Zhu, Patcharapong Aphiwetsa, Baoyu Li, Aniketh Cheluva, Pranav Kuppili, Yangcen Liu, Dhruv Patel, Aidan Gao, Hye-Young Chung, Ryan Co, Renee Zbizika, Jeff Liu, Xiaomeng Xu, Haoyu Xiong, Geng Chen, Sebastiano Oliani, Wenkai Xuan, Chenyu Yang, Xi Wang, James Fort, Richard Newcombe, Josh Gao, Jason Chong, Garrett Matsuda, Aseem Doriwala, Marc Pollefeys, Robert Katzschmann, Xiaolong Wang, Shuran Song, Judy Hoffman, Danfei Xu (cs.RO, cs.CV)

Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer with experiments replicated across multiple labs, tasks, and robot embodiments under shared protocols. We find that policy performance generally improves with increased human data, but that effective scaling depends on alignment between human data and robot learning objectives. Together, the dataset, platform, and study establish a foundation for reproducible progress in human data-driven robot learning. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egoverse.ai/

Published: April 08, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Doomed from the Start: Early Abort of LLM Agent Episodes via a Recall-Controlled Probe Cascade

Kai Ruan, Zihe Huang, Ziqi Zhou, Qianshan Wei, Xuan Wang, Hao Sun (cs.AI)

Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance. We turn this signal into a practical abort cascade: one distribution-free calibrated gate per round, with per-round recall budgets jointly searched so that eventually-successful episodes survive all gates at a user-specified global rate; this episode-level guarantee is the one that matters in deployment, since false-abort risk accumulates across gates. Across two agent models on TextCraft, the cascade meets every recall target from 90% to 97% and, at the 90% target, saves 47.1% +/- 10.3% (Qwen-2.5-7B) and 37.2% +/- 8.8% (Llama-3.2-3B) of inference compute, 1.6--1.7x the best single-gate policy. An otherwise-identical cascade reading only behavior saves roughly half as much, and adding behavioral features to the probe yields no further gain: the hidden states capture what behavior reveals. Finally, we characterize the sample complexity of certifying high recall targets, telling practitioners which recall promises their data can, and provably cannot, back. The code will be released soon.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Hypothesis-driven Model Expansion under Uncertainty for Open-World Robot Planning

Anxing Xiao, Hanbo Zhang, Tianrun Hu, David Hsu (cs.RO)

We consider an open-world planning setting in which service robots must operate in unknown environments with incomplete knowledge of objects and actions. Traditional closed-world approaches with pre-programmed knowledge bases fail when robots encounter unexpected situations and tasks, posing a fundamental challenge for autonomous knowledge expansion in human environments. In this work, we propose an open-world planning framework that enables robots to automatically generate, verify, and update hypotheses about their abstract world models. Our key insight is to explicitly maintain uncertainty-aware knowledge expansion and integrate hypothesis verification into goal-reaching planning. The framework leverages foundation models to generate initial hypotheses over states and transitions, and applies automated planning to produce action sequences that jointly address hypothesis verification and task execution. Through iterative execution and refinement, the robot expands its knowledge by incorporating verification feedback from the foundation models when hypotheses prove incorrect. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that our framework enables autonomous knowledge expansion and effective operation in open-world settings. These results indicate that integrating uncertainty-aware model expansion from robot foundation models with planning advances the practical deployment of household service robots.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Clustering-Embedded Model Predictive Path Integral Control: Avoiding Averaging-Induced Failure and Enabling Efficient Cluster Selection for Dynamic Obstacles

Zidong Liu, Kaixin Chang, Xu Chen (cs.RO)

With the widespread availability of parallel computing hardware, sampling-based motion planning methods such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control have become increasingly powerful for complex nonlinear systems in non-smooth task spaces. However, the sampling and forward-simulation pipeline in MPPI suffers from averaging-induced failure in cluttered environments, where the importance-weighted update averages incompatible rollouts and leads to hesitation or even collision when an obstacle lies directly ahead. This paper proposes Clustering-Embedded MPPI (CE-MPPI), a framework that architecturally resolves the averaging-induced failures inherent in standard MPPI within non-convex environments. Rather than simply mitigating interference, CE-MPPI redefines the control law by integrating a high-fidelity pruning and clustering stage. By leveraging density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) alongside a novel geometric direction feature that is extracted from collision-derived reference points, the system isolates feasible trajectory modes from the noise of infeasible rollouts. This is paired with an intelligent selection logic that optimizes for minimum cost in static scenes while actively steering opposite to obstacle flux in dynamic environments. Experiments in 2-D JAX-accelerated simulations show that CE-MPPI alleviates obstacle-front hesitation and avoids persistent coupling with moving obstacles in dynamic scenes. In particular, real-world tests on a 6-DoF UR5e manipulator with CUDA-parallel rollouts in Isaac Gym achieve a 48\% reduction in time-to-goal and a 12\% shorter end-effector path.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

EntroPath: Maximum Entropy Path Ensemble Embedding for Manifold Learning

Przemysław Rola (cs.LG, q-bio.QM, stat.ML)

We introduce EntroPath, a manifold learning method that recovers geodesic geometry from data graphs through ensembles of diffusion paths. Many existing graph-based embeddings rely either on locally normalised random walks or on shortest-path distances. The former can concentrate diffusion in densely sampled regions, while the latter are sensitive to spurious shortcut edges in the graph. EntroPath instead builds its dissimilarities from the maximum entropy random walk (MERW), which aggregates the full ensemble of k-step paths between points rather than relying on any single trajectory. We show that the resulting free-energy dissimilarity converges to squared geodesic distance in the short-time limit, via Varadhan's heat-kernel formula. The diffusion depth k interpolates smoothly between local neighbourhood structure and global manifold geometry, and the symmetrised kernel admits an exact Gram factorisation connecting EntroPath to kernel methods. We further provide scalable extensions via landmark projection and diffusion-potential pseudotime. Across synthetic manifolds and single-cell benchmarks, EntroPath consistently matches or outperforms diffusion- and shortest-path-based methods, while remaining competitive with neighbourhood-preserving embeddings (UMAP, t-SNE) on local-structure metrics. Its gains are most pronounced on manifolds with non-uniform sampling density and well-separated branching trajectories, where path-ensemble diffusion more faithfully preserves the underlying geodesic geometry.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Pitwall: Faithful Natural-Language Race-Strategy Briefings from a Calibrated Real-Time Monte Carlo Engine

Juan S. Santillana (cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.AP)

Live sports commentary is grounded generation under a deadline: statements concern real, named athletes, the grounding state changes every few seconds, and no reference text exists at generation time. We present Pitwall, a production system that generates natural-language Formula 1 strategy briefings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, treating faithfulness as an architectural property rather than an aspiration: every published sentence is decomposed into typed factual claims (positions, gaps, tyres, pace, overtakes, race control) and each claim is verified against the probabilistic race state that prompted it. The same verifier gates the fine-tuning data: of 3,045 model-written targets, only the 81.9% whose every claim is state-supported are retained, the rest falling back to a provably faithful template, so the generator never sees an ungrounded target. Verification is meaningful because of the grounding substrate: a vectorized Monte Carlo engine (N=2,000 per-lap race continuations) calibrated on 126 races (2018-2024) and validated on fully held-out 2025-2026 seasons (winner-in-top-3 90.3% over 155 backtests; held-out Brier 0.0745). A recurring finding spans both halves of the system: virtues trade off and must be gated separately. In simulation, calibration-optimal is not decision-optimal; in generation, fine-tuning on richer targets buys vividness that collapses into hallucination when the grounding state is sparse -- a failure a four-base replication traces to base-model instruction adherence, not scale, and that sparse-context auditing removes from the production model. End-to-end operation -- live timing to verified trilingual briefings -- was confirmed at two consecutive live Grands Prix (Austria and Britain, 2026); at Silverstone a timestamped probability trace, committed to disk before the outcome was known, locked onto the eventual winner ten laps before the flag.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Universal Algorithm-Implicit Learning

Stefano Woerner, Seong Joon Oh, Christian F. Baumgartner (cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV)

Current meta-learning methods are constrained to narrow task distributions with fixed feature and label spaces, limiting applicability. Moreover, the current meta-learning literature uses key terms like "universal" and "general-purpose" inconsistently and lacks precise definitions, hindering comparability. We introduce a theoretical framework for meta-learning which formally defines practical universality and introduces a distinction between algorithm-explicit and algorithm-implicit learning, providing a principled vocabulary for reasoning about universal meta-learning methods. Guided by this framework, we present TAIL, a transformer-based algorithm-implicit meta-learner that functions across tasks with varying domains, modalities, and label configurations. TAIL features three innovations over prior transformer-based meta-learners: random projections for cross-modal feature encoding, random injection label embeddings that extrapolate to larger label spaces, and efficient inline query processing. TAIL achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard few-shot benchmarks while generalizing to unseen domains. Unlike other meta-learning methods, it also generalizes to unseen modalities, solving text classification tasks despite training exclusively on images, handles tasks with up to 20× more classes than seen during training, and provides orders-of-magnitude computational savings over prior transformer-based approaches.

Published: February 16, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Socially-Aware Autonomous Doorway Traversal and Payload Delivery for Emergency Assistance

Andrew Snowdy, Ananya Trivedi, Sarvesh Prajapati, Lorena Maria Genua, Taskin Padir (cs.RO)

In this work, we focus on the scenario of a robot-assisted emergency evacuation. We consider two capabilities relevant to such a setting. The first is opening doors ahead of the people being evacuated, so that their path toward an exit stays clear. The second is retrieving rescue equipment and delivering it to the emergency responders carrying out the evacuation. From a systems perspective, this involves several tasks at once. The robot must locate ADA-compliant door buttons and the rescue equipment it needs to retrieve. Additionally, it must remain aware of the people around it and adapt its behavior to them, so that it supports the evacuation rather than getting in the way. We address these demands with a behavior tree at the core of our framework. This structure is chosen for its ability to select high-level tasks based on environmental triggers, and to extend to new situations as they arise. We evaluate the system in 105 trials on the Toyota Human Support Robot, across five hardware and three simulation scenarios. These trials capture the decisions the robot must make in this setting: whether to press a door button, yield to a nearby person, walk through a door someone else is holding, or first retrieve rescue equipment before traversing the door. Overall, the system completes 97 of the 105 trials successfully. These results suggest our framework provides a practical basis for robotic assistance in broader emergency response tasks. Code and video demonstrations are available at https://github.com/AndrewSnowdy/hsr_mm_control.

Published: July 06, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi Objective Battery Management in Dairy Farms

Marcos Eduardo Cruz Victorio, Karl Mason (cs.AI)

The dairy industry in Ireland has a large potential for the integration of renewable energy and the reduction of carbon emissions. However, researchers of distributed generation control are mainly focused on residential and commercial applications. To contribute to the effective integration of renewable energy in the dairy sector, this paper presents a multi-objective optimisation control system based on differential evolution and multi agent Deep Reinforcement Learning. The proposed control is organised in two layers: the upper layer uses dynamic pricing, and the lower layer is based on multi-agent reinforcement learning for battery management. This paper also simulates the electrical response of the proposed control system in a rural distribution circuit. The simulation results show that the proposed control framework can improve profits from energy arbitrage up to 18% compared to using Rule-based models, increase the use of distributed generation without significantly increasing cost, and comply with the Irish grid code in terms of voltage variation.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

AirflowAttack: Thermal-Airflow Adversarial Perturbations against Infrared Remote-Sensing Vision-Language Models

Cong Su, Jiaju Han, Xuemeng Sun, Chengyin Hu, Qike Zhang, Jiujiang Guo, Yiwei Wei, Jiahuan Long (cs.CV, cs.AI)

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed on infrared (IR) remote sensing imagery in security-critical settings, yet their adversarial robustness remains unexamined. We present AirflowAttack, to our knowledge the first adversarial attack for IR remote-sensing VLMs and the first to weaponize thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior. A lightweight generator synthesizes a single input-agnostic perturbation regularized toward physically plausible airflow patterns. Optimized on one surrogate CLIP model, it attains a mean zero-shot scene-classification attack success rate (ASR, the fraction of samples whose top-1 class changes) of 48.5% across five diverse CLIP backbones, far exceeding four IR-specific physical baselines (27.7--37.0%). Applied to six state-of-the-art VLMs, it cuts scene-classification accuracy by up to 38.2% relative, yet paradoxically makes some models more confident in their IR analysis, confabulating the perturbation as genuine thermal evidence such as temperature gradients and convection. Ablations show the airflow prior raises physical plausibility at no measurable cost to attack success. Together with a benchmark spanning eleven models and four tasks, these findings expose critical vulnerabilities in the rapidly expanding IR VLM ecosystem.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Gaussian Process Latent Factor Regression for Low-Data, High-Dimensional Output Problems

Edward T. Stevenson, Eric T. Wolf, Mei Ting Mak, N. J. Mayne, Miles Cranmer (cs.LG, astro-ph.EP, astro-ph.IM, stat.ML)

In the sciences, regression tasks often require predicting high-dimensional outputs from few training examples. Multi-output Gaussian processes excel in low-data regimes but typically struggle with high-dimensional outputs. Compress-then-predict pipelines such as PCA-GP (principal component analysis plus Gaussian process regression) handle high dimensionality, but rely on bases optimized for reconstruction rather than prediction. To address this gap, we propose a model that represents each output as a linear-Gaussian decoding of a low-dimensional latent state drawn from a Gaussian process prior. By analytically marginalizing the decoder weights, we couple compression and prediction in a single objective that scales to high-dimensional outputs. We refer to this model as Gaussian process latent factor regression (GPLFR). We demonstrate GPLFR by building the first spatially resolved emulator of global climate models for rocky exoplanets.

Published: June 04, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Assessing the Operational Impact of Poisoning Attacks over Augmented 3D Point Cloud Public Datasets for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Marwan Lazrag, Badis Hammi, Lorena Gonzalez-Manzano, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro (cs.CR, cs.CV, cs.LG)

Poisoning attacks against public datasets lead to major concerns, such as (i) misclassification of perceived objects when the poisoned data is used for training and (ii) embedding of backdoors that may eventually be triggered later on, when specific conditions in the system apply over the learned models. Its impact over data augmentation models is unclear. While data augmentation reduces the likelihood of poisoning attack success, some valid questions remain. Is data augmentation affecting the impact of poisoning attacks? can it increase the number of poisoned samples or injected backdoors? We explore in this paper some of these questions. We assess the effects of augmenting poisoned 3D point cloud datasets and validate that poisoning is able to evade the sanitizing nature of augmentation techniques when using the concrete case of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) techniques to exemplify the case of data augmentation processing. We also validate that poisoning propagates over the augmented datasets and perturbs the decision made by general-purpose classifiers, in the end. All the experimental material (including tools, datasets, and classifiers) is publicly available, to facilitate reproducibility and to foster further research in the topic.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Mitigating Domain Shift in Conditioned Floor Plan Generation: Synthetic Pre-training for Data-Efficient Adaptation

Matthieu Ospici, Arnaud Gueze, Luc Bourrat, Adrien Bernhardt (cs.CV)

Robustness to domain shift is a key requirement for floor plan generative models to be applicable beyond the single dataset they were trained on, as floor plans vary widely across regions due to distinct architectural cultures, spatial constraints, and construction practices, while acquiring new annotated datasets remains costly and domain-specific. Yet, no prior work has studied this robustness in the context of conditioned floor plan generation. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models from two fundamentally different generative paradigms across three public datasets (RPLAN, MagicPlan and Swiss Dwellings) and show that they are highly sensitive to domain shift, with up to an order of magnitude performance degradation when transferred across domains. To mitigate this with minimal target-domain supervision, we introduce a procedural method to generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset that enforces strict physical constraints (non-overlapping rooms, valid door placement, graph consistency) while intentionally sacrificing architectural realism through highly irregular spatial arrangements and aggressive geometric perturbation of room shapes. We show that pre-training on this synthetic data considerably improves zero-shot cross-domain performance, outperforming in-domain training on MagicPlan. Furthermore, it provides a highly effective initialization for fine-tuning, accelerating target domain adaptation and outperforming real-world initialization baselines by up to 40% in a low-data regime.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Data Analysis in the Wild: Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Real-World Data Complexities

So Hasegawa, Shailaja Keyur Sampat, Lei Liu, Wei-Peng Chen (cs.CL, cs.AI)

Current benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in data analysis often fail to reflect real-world settings. They typically focus on fact retrieval from small tables and overlook the challenges of large multi-tabular datasets, external knowledge integration, and exploratory insight discovery. We introduce DataGovBench, a benchmark derived from governmental open data designed to evaluate LLMs in practical scenarios. The benchmark includes two tasks: Table QA that requires solving complex decomposable questions and producing textual answers or visualizations, and Table Insight that evaluates the ability of models to generate expert-level findings through exploratory data analysis. Comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs, both with and without agentic frameworks, reveal significant performance gaps across both tasks. These results suggest that current LLM-based systems remain far from satisfying the demands of real-world data analytics. DataGovBench provides a challenging benchmark for advancing research on LLMs capable of both answering analytical queries and discovering insights from data. Code and sample data are available at https://github.com/SoHasegawa/datagovbench.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

Prompt-Adapter Context Routing for Parameter-Efficient Multi-Shot Long Video Extrapolation

Anna Córdoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesús Olivera (cs.CV, cs.AI)

We present PACR-Video, a parameter-efficient framework for multi-shot long video extrapolation that preserves recurring entities, scene structure, visual style, and causal progression without full generator fine-tuning. PACR-Video keeps a text-to-video diffusion transformer frozen and augments it with low-rank temporal adapters conditioned by learned shot-role prompt tokens. To maintain long-horizon coherence, it builds a recursive prompt bank that stores compact entity, location, action, and style prompts from previous shots, then routes them through adapter gates according to predicted narrative dependencies. A Shot-Local/Story-Global tuning objective combines next-shot reconstruction, cross-shot identity contrast, and prompt sparsity regularization, while an adapter composition schedule balances early-shot visual consistency with later-shot event progression and viewpoint change. Across six multi-shot and long-video benchmarks, PACR-Video outperforms text-to-video, tuning-based, memory-augmented, streaming, and recursive-context baselines on distributional quality, semantic alignment, identity consistency, temporal smoothness, motion stability, transition coherence, and human preference. These results show that compact prompt routing and lightweight temporal adaptation provide sufficient controllable capacity for stable long video extrapolation.

Published: July 07, 2026

Last updated: July 07, 2026

FIELDS: Face reconstruction with accurate Inference of Expression using Learning with Direct Supervision

Chen Ling, Henglin Shi, Hedvig Kjellström (cs.CV)

Monocular 3D face reconstruction estimates a 3D morphable model (3DMM) representation from a single image, providing geometry-aware expression codes that are useful for facial expression analysis and affect understanding. Despite strong progress, most pipelines are trained with image-level self-supervision and evaluated primarily by geometric fidelity, which does not necessarily maximize the affective utility of the learned expression representation and may encourage intensity-amplifying shortcuts when affect supervision is naively coupled. We propose FIELDS (Face reconstruction with accurate Inference of Expression using Learning with Direct Supervision), a task-driven framework that learns FLAME expression codes for facial expression recognition (FER) under a geometric plausibility constraint. Using hybrid 2D/3D supervision, FIELDS improves affect prediction in both in-domain and external evaluations while maintaining competitive geometric fidelity on held-out and out-of-domain 3D benchmarks.

Published: November 26, 2025

Last updated: July 07, 2026