Daily Papers

Evolutions in the world, such as water pouring or ice melting, happen regardless of being observed. Video world models generate "worlds" via 2D frame observations. Can these generated "worlds" evolve regardless of observation? To probe this question, we design a benchmark to evaluate whether video world models can decouple state evolution from observation. Our benchmark, STEVO-Bench, applies observation control to evolving processes via instructions of occluder insertion, turning off the light, or specifying camera "lookaway" trajectories. By evaluating video models with and without camera control for a diverse set of naturally-occurring evolutions, we expose their limitations in decoupling state evolution from observation. STEVO-Bench proposes an evaluation protocol to automatically detect and disentangle failure modes of video world models across key aspects of natural state evolution. Analysis of STEVO-Bench results provide new insight into potential data and architecture bias of present-day video world models. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/STEVOBench/. Blog: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/blog/2026/outofsight/

Embodied agents are expected to accomplish real-world goals by deciding for themselves how and when to interact with their surroundings. For many such goals, changing the physical state of the world is the means rather than the end: the agent changes the state of a system through interaction, observes the feedback, and explores until it either achieves the goal itself (e.g., discovering physical laws) or learns what the goal requires; it acts to know. Manipulation benchmarks stop at acting to change, with the target state given; scientific discovery benchmarks evaluate knowing but replace physical experimentation with symbolic actions or numerical queries. We introduce EmbodiedLab, a benchmark in which a robot must act to know. Quantitative science experiments make this setting controllable: the parameters of the system are resampled for every instance, so the result cannot be known in advance, yet it can be scored exactly. Across 30 experiments in five disciplines on 14 apparatus platforms, the agent receives an objective and the apparatus, chooses its own procedure, and operates a physics-based simulated laboratory, reading the instruments through its cameras. Evaluation checks what the agent came to know, grounded in readings recorded during the episode, as well as the physical state the task requires; every experiment is verified to be solvable. We evaluate six frontier models in their developers' coding agents with native observation and control, with added perception and motion planning, and with manipulation skills distilled from the strongest agents. With native control, even the strongest agent succeeds less than half the time; for every agent, most failures arise in interacting with the apparatus, and manipulation skills help weaker agents more than perception and planning. The benchmark and its evaluation code are available at https://github.com/HexaFuture/EmbodiedLab.

Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.

Many social and environmental phenomena are associated with macroscopic changes in the built environment, captured by satellite imagery on a global scale and with daily temporal resolution. While widely used for prediction, these images and especially image sequences remain underutilized for causal inference, especially in the context of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where causal identification is established by design. In this paper, we develop and compare a set of general tools for analyzing Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATEs) from temporal satellite data that can be applied to any RCT where geographical identifiers are available. Through a simulation study, we analyze different modeling strategies for estimating CATE in sequences of satellite images. We find that image sequence representation models with more parameters generally yield a greater ability to detect heterogeneity. To explore the role of model and data choice in practice, we apply the approaches to two influential RCTs -- Banerjee et al. (2015), a poverty study in Cusco, Peru, and Bolsen et al. (2014), a water conservation experiment in Georgia, USA. We benchmark our image sequence models against image-only, tabular-only, and combined image-tabular data sources, summarizing practical implications for investigators in a multivariate analysis. Land cover classifications over satellite images facilitate interpretation of what image features drive heterogeneity. We also show robustness to data and model choice of satellite-based generalization of the RCT results to larger geographical areas outside the original. Overall, this paper shows how satellite sequence data can be incorporated into the analysis of RCTs, and provides evidence about the implications of data, model, and evaluation metric choice for causal analysis.

Recent work shows that pre-trained, instruction-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) perform well at mapping from instructions and observations to high-level plans, but struggle to realize such plans as reliable low-latency action sequences in unfamiliar environments. At the same time, world-model controllers excel at fast observation-to-action control, but lack open-ended task guidance. In this work, we combine these strengths into a single system, Instruct-to-Act, where we train a world-model controller to act autonomously at high frequency when conditioned on sparse, higher-latency, and high-level text instructions generated by a VLM planner. To train controllers to be language-instructable, we relabel segments of controller policy rollouts with synthetic instructions and jointly optimize a behavior-cloning objective along with existing reward-maximizing and world-modeling objectives. We evaluate our proposed approach across seven embodied environments, including three multi-agent environments where VLM planners coordinate through language while trained controllers serve as their actuators. Under matched observation and action spaces, our decoupled approach consistently outperforms controller-only and direct VLM action-generation variants, preserves fast control, and lets us swap in different pretrained VLM planners without fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with strong vision-language-action and multi-agent RL baselines on six of seven tasks.

Fast changing states or volatile environments pose a significant challenge to online optimization, which needs to perform rapid adaptation under limited observation. In this paper, we give query and regret optimal bandit algorithms under the strict notion of strongly adaptive regret, which measures the maximum regret over any contiguous interval I. Due to its worst-case nature, there is an almost-linear Omega(|I|^{1-epsilon}) regret lower bound, when only one query per round is allowed [Daniely el al, ICML 2015]. Surprisingly, with just two queries per round, we give Strongly Adaptive Bandit Learner (StABL) that achieves O(n|I|) adaptive regret for multi-armed bandits with n arms. The bound is tight and cannot be improved in general. Our algorithm leverages a multiplicative update scheme of varying stepsizes and a carefully chosen observation distribution to control the variance. Furthermore, we extend our results and provide optimal algorithms in the bandit convex optimization setting. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithms under volatile environments and for downstream tasks, such as algorithm selection for hyperparameter optimization.

Navigation is a fundamental capability in embodied AI, representing the intelligence required to perceive and interact within physical environments following language instructions. Despite significant progress in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which exhibit remarkable zero-shot performance on general vision-language tasks, their generalization ability in embodied navigation remains largely confined to narrow task settings and embodiment-specific architectures. In this work, we introduce a cross-embodiment and cross-task Navigation Foundation Model (NavFoM), trained on eight million navigation samples that encompass quadrupeds, drones, wheeled robots, and vehicles, and spanning diverse tasks such as vision-and-language navigation, object searching, target tracking, and autonomous driving. NavFoM employs a unified architecture that processes multimodal navigation inputs from varying camera configurations and navigation horizons. To accommodate diverse camera setups and temporal horizons, NavFoM incorporates identifier tokens that embed camera view information of embodiments and the temporal context of tasks. Furthermore, to meet the demands of real-world deployment, NavFoM controls all observation tokens using a dynamically adjusted sampling strategy under a limited token length budget. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple navigation tasks and embodiments without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Additional real-world experiments further confirm the strong generalization capability and practical applicability of our approach.

Physical-field reconstruction and forecasting depend on both measurement density and spatial layout, yet evaluation under a single observation pattern does not characterize performance when that pattern changes. We introduce PDE-OBS, an integrated benchmarking platform spanning numerical data generation, model training, and inference and evaluation under varying observation conditions. It combines 560,000 fields and trajectories from seven partial differential equation families with configurable observation operators and seven adapted baseline methods for stationary reconstruction and short-horizon forecasting. Separating observation construction from physical records allows users to specify parameterized patterns and deterministic mixtures for training and testing while preserving prediction targets and data splits. The evaluation protocol uses references trained for each test pattern to compare models on identical test observations and targets, alongside equal-count groups for spatial-layout comparisons. On a 14,000-record subset, we evaluate 441 trained models under nine test patterns, yielding 3,969 evaluations. Mean cross-pattern error exceeds mean matched-pattern error in all 49 PDE-method pairs, and this finding persists in a configuration-matched subset of 117 models. Denser test observations do not consistently reduce error for a fixed model. Mixed-pattern training on five completed pairs reduces large single-pattern transfer errors, although destination-trained references usually remain more accurate. Together, the benchmark and findings support systematic evaluation of observation-pattern sensitivity and provide a reusable workflow for developing methods under changing measurement conditions. Code: https://github.com/ru1ch3n/PDE-OBS.

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

This paper studies communication-aware safe control for discrete-time linear multi-agent systems under limited information exchange. The main challenge lies in the coupling between remote-state estimation and safe controller design, since estimation errors affect the state evolution through the controller gains, while the controller design must account for the resulting observer-induced state perturbations to guarantee safety. To address this challenge, a distributed k-hop observer is developed to reconstruct unavailable remote states, and a uniform observer-error bound is derived. The effect of the observer-induced state perturbation on closed-loop safety is accounted for in both the construction of local εi-robust safe invariant (RSI) sets and the enforcement of pairwise relative-state safety constraints. The resulting safety conditions ensure that all agents remain within their local RSI sets while all pairwise relative-state safety constraints are satisfied. A linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based optimization method is developed to jointly synthesize the distributed observers, local controllers, and RSI sets. A case study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the post-training of large language models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach to achieve generation aligned with human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allows for policy training with a simple binary cross-entropy loss without a reward model. The objective of DPO is regularized by reverse KL divergence that encourages mode-seeking fitting to the reference policy. Nonetheless, we indicate that minimizing reverse KL divergence could fail to capture a mode of the reference distribution, which may hurt the policy's performance. Based on this observation, we propose a simple modification to DPO, H-DPO, which allows for control over the entropy of the resulting policy, enhancing the distribution's sharpness and thereby enabling mode-seeking fitting more effectively. In our experiments, we show that H-DPO outperformed DPO across various tasks, demonstrating superior results in pass@k evaluations for mathematical tasks. Moreover, H-DPO is simple to implement, requiring only minor modifications to the loss calculation of DPO, which makes it highly practical and promising for wide-ranging applications in the training of LLMs.

Preference Optimization (PO) has proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants, following the offline Direct Preference Optimization objective, have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are contributing signals of KL divergence and rewards to the loss function. However, human preference is not affected by each word in a sequence equally but is often dependent on specific words or phrases, e.g. existence of toxic terms leads to non-preferred responses. Based on this observation, we argue that not all tokens should be weighted equally during PO and propose a flexible objective termed SparsePO, that aims to automatically learn to weight the KL divergence and reward corresponding to each token during PO training. We propose two different variants of weight-masks that can either be derived from the reference model itself or learned on the fly. Notably, our method induces sparsity in the learned masks, allowing the model to learn how to best weight reward and KL divergence contributions at the token level, learning an optimal level of mask sparsity. Extensive experiments on multiple domains, including sentiment control, dialogue, text summarization and text-to-code generation, illustrate that our approach assigns meaningful weights to tokens according to the target task, generates more responses with the desired preference and improves reasoning tasks by up to 2 percentage points compared to other token- and response-level PO methods.

Sequential recommendation (SR) models capture continuously observed behavior, but a returning user may have no interactions for months or years. We define this setting as Zero-Observation Reactivation: the user has a pre-gap history, while the platform observes no behavioral signals during a macro-gap Delta t. Under a chronologically aligned Gap-Synthesize Protocol on three Amazon datasets (Video Games, CDs & Vinyl, and Movies & TV), Hit@10 decreases monotonically across the evaluated gap buckets and reaches its lowest level beyond one year. The pattern appears across recurrent, unidirectional, and bidirectional SR backbones. We propose DeltaGate, a lightweight output-layer plugin that keeps the backbone frozen and routes each representation dimension between the personalized history and a learned, zero-initialized global prior. The gate is conditioned jointly on Delta t and the personalized representation. In a controlled diagnostic, we hold the personalized representation fixed and vary Delta t to isolate the trained gate's response to the gap input. In the >365d Video Games bucket, DG-SASRec reaches 0.047 Hit@10 versus 0.031 for SASRec, while DG-BERT4Rec reaches 0.046 versus 0.025 for BERT4Rec, with 66K trainable parameters (2--4% overhead). End-to-end retraining attains higher absolute accuracy but changes the backbone embeddings; the frozen plugin preserves zero backbone drift, uses about 40x fewer trainable parameters, and retains observable dimension-wise routing. The source code is available at https://github.com/jdding/DeltaGate.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted increasing attention due to their impressive temporal dynamics, energy efficiency, and brain-inspired mechanisms. Although SNNs have demonstrated promising performance in image classification tasks, recent studies have shown that they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations are added to input images to mislead model predictions. Existing defense methods mainly focus on training strategies, while the role of input encoding remains less explored. An observation is that the robustness advantage of Poisson encoding over direct encoding may benefit from its inherent randomness. Motivated by this, we propose a stochastic quantization encoding method that encodes the input image with controllable randomness adjusted by the quantization scale, thereby improving the adversarial robustness of SNNs. We further show that this method constitutes a general framework that reduces to both Poisson encoding and direct encoding under different choices of the quantization scale. Since it enhances robustness at the input encoding stage, it can be combined with existing training-based defenses for further gains. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed stochastic quantization encoding method. To sum up, this work highlights the importance of input encoding for the adversarial robustness of SNNs, providing a new perspective for understanding and improving it.

Prompt optimization can improve multi-agent LLM systems, but the prompts being optimized often serve two entangled roles: generating task-relevant content and specifying execution-critical protocols, such as message routing, output formatting, and termination signals, on which the underlying code relies. As a result, a prompt edit intended to improve content generation can inadvertently corrupt the protocol and cause the entire agent pipeline to fail. Our key observation is that these two roles have different representations: execution protocols are typically structured, while task-relevant content is usually expressed in unstructured language. Based on this, we propose control-data flow separation, where execution-critical control is represented as typed, validated program objects, while task-relevant language remains the optimizable data flow for agent communication. This design allows optimizers to improve multi-agent behavior without exposing the routing or formatting interface to prompt drift. Across synthetic reasoning, collaborative review generation, and insurance rating workflows, our framework empirically achieves 100% eventual protocol validity while consistently improving task performance.

Radiomap blind prediction aims to infer radiomaps from observable representations of the propagation environment and base station configuration without field measurements. In practice, the observable representations are inherently incomplete. Thus, the target radiomap is not fully determined by the inputs when generalizing to unseen configurations or environments. Under incomplete observation, we establish a population-level theory of deterministic radiomap blind prediction that identifies the conditional mean as its optimal target and separates prediction error into reducible predictor approximation and irreducible uncertainty caused by missing physical information. The framework further characterizes the train-test risk gap and the uncertainty reduction enabled by observation enrichment. Building on it, we reveal the dual role of propagation priors: they provide physically grounded guidance, yet their implementable forms may bias the attainable predictor. This motivates RadioDecomp, which treats a prior-guided predictor as a correctable base and learns its remaining predictable discrepancy through residual refinement. To evaluate RadioDecomp across distinct propagation-prior designs, we instantiate it with a feature-guided monolithic base and a LoS-Shadow structured base, yielding RadioFR and RadioLSR, respectively. Across random, cross-configuration, and cross-environment settings, experiments confirm the benefit of propagation-related representations and show that both instantiations improve upon their respective bases. Further controlled studies on base capacity, training-support coverage, and observation coarsening corroborate the proposed analysis.

Training humanoid whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies requires costly robot demonstrations with aligned robot-view observations and controller-compatible whole-body state-action labels. Egocentric human demonstrations offer scalable supervision but have misaligned views and sparse motion cues. Existing approaches either pretrain policies that still require robot data for adaptation or generate controller-specific commands that limit reuse. Conversion also requires robot-view observations aligned with the generated whole-body motion. We present KODA (Kinematics-Observation Data Alignment), which converts egocentric RGB demonstrations into whole-body VLA training data using a reusable canonical trajectory to guide robot-view synthesis and generate controller-specific whole-body state-action supervision. KODA first generates a simulator-checked whole-body trajectory using a sparse tracker with sampling-based command optimization. This generated trajectory directly determines the onboard camera poses used to synthesize corresponding robot-view observations. The motion, observations, and task instruction form a canonical record. For each deployment controller, KODA optimizes commands to track the stored motion and records the corresponding action labels and proprioceptive states. When switching controllers, KODA retains this canonical record and regenerates whole-body state-action supervision for co-training with matching robot demonstrations. We evaluate KODA on four Unitree G1 loco-manipulation tasks using two whole-body controllers, SONIC and HEFT. With robot data held fixed, macro-average success on conditions covered by human demonstrations but absent from robot data improves by 45.0 and 46.25 percentage points, respectively. Under both controllers, this metric shows an upward trend across the evaluated human-data budgets, suggesting potential for further scaling.

This paper presents a novel method for exerting fine-grained lighting control during text-driven diffusion-based image generation. While existing diffusion models already have the ability to generate images under any lighting condition, without additional guidance these models tend to correlate image content and lighting. Moreover, text prompts lack the necessary expressional power to describe detailed lighting setups. To provide the content creator with fine-grained control over the lighting during image generation, we augment the text-prompt with detailed lighting information in the form of radiance hints, i.e., visualizations of the scene geometry with a homogeneous canonical material under the target lighting. However, the scene geometry needed to produce the radiance hints is unknown. Our key observation is that we only need to guide the diffusion process, hence exact radiance hints are not necessary; we only need to point the diffusion model in the right direction. Based on this observation, we introduce a three stage method for controlling the lighting during image generation. In the first stage, we leverage a standard pretrained diffusion model to generate a provisional image under uncontrolled lighting. Next, in the second stage, we resynthesize and refine the foreground object in the generated image by passing the target lighting to a refined diffusion model, named DiLightNet, using radiance hints computed on a coarse shape of the foreground object inferred from the provisional image. To retain the texture details, we multiply the radiance hints with a neural encoding of the provisional synthesized image before passing it to DiLightNet. Finally, in the third stage, we resynthesize the background to be consistent with the lighting on the foreground object. We demonstrate and validate our lighting controlled diffusion model on a variety of text prompts and lighting conditions.

Components of cyber physical systems, which affect real-world processes, are often exposed to the internet. Replacing conventional control methods with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in energy systems is an active area of research, as these systems become increasingly complex with the advent of renewable energy sources and the desire to improve their efficiency. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are vulnerable to specific perturbations of their inputs or features, called adversarial examples. These perturbations are difficult to detect when properly regularized, but have significant effects on the ANN's output. Because DRL uses ANN to map optimal actions to observations, they are similarly vulnerable to adversarial examples. This work proposes a novel attack technique for continuous control using Group Difference Logits loss with a bifurcation layer. By combining aspects of targeted and untargeted attacks, the attack significantly increases the impact compared to an untargeted attack, with drastically smaller distortions than an optimally targeted attack. We demonstrate the impacts of powerful gradient-based attacks in a realistic smart energy environment, show how the impacts change with different DRL agents and training procedures, and use statistical and time-series analysis to evaluate attacks' stealth. The results show that adversarial attacks can have significant impacts on DRL controllers, and constraining an attack's perturbations makes it difficult to detect. However, certain DRL architectures are far more robust, and robust training methods can further reduce the impact.

This article presents an in-depth review of the topic of path following for autonomous robotic vehicles, with a specific focus on vehicle motion in two dimensional space (2D). From a control system standpoint, path following can be formulated as the problem of stabilizing a path following error system that describes the dynamics of position and possibly orientation errors of a vehicle with respect to a path, with the errors defined in an appropriate reference frame. In spite of the large variety of path following methods described in the literature we show that, in principle, most of them can be categorized in two groups: stabilization of the path following error system expressed either in the vehicle's body frame or in a frame attached to a "reference point" moving along the path, such as a Frenet-Serret (F-S) frame or a Parallel Transport (P-T) frame. With this observation, we provide a unified formulation that is simple but general enough to cover many methods available in the literature. We then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method, comparing them from the design and implementation standpoint. We further show experimental results of the path following methods obtained from field trials testing with under-actuated and fully-actuated autonomous marine vehicles. In addition, we introduce open-source Matlab and Gazebo/ROS simulation toolboxes that are helpful in testing path following methods prior to their integration in the combined guidance, navigation, and control systems of autonomous vehicles.

Video is a scalable observation of physical dynamics: it captures how objects move, how contact unfolds, and how scenes evolve under interaction -- all without requiring robot action labels. Yet translating this temporal structure into reliable robotic control remains an open challenge, because video lacks action supervision and differs from robot experience in embodiment, viewpoint, and physical constraints. This survey reviews methods that exploit non-action-annotated temporal video to learn control interfaces for robotic manipulation. We introduce an interface-centric taxonomy organized by where the video-to-control interface is constructed and what control properties it enables, identifying three families: direct video--action policies, which keep the interface implicit; latent-action methods, which route temporal structure through a compact learned intermediate; and explicit visual interfaces, which predict interpretable targets for downstream control. For each family, we analyze control-integration properties -- how the loop is closed, what can be verified before execution, and where failures enter. A cross-family synthesis reveals that the most pressing open challenges center on the robotics integration layer -- the mechanisms that connect video-derived predictions to dependable robot behavior -- and we outline research directions toward closing this gap.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into text-to-speech (TTS) systems has improved speech expressiveness, yet interpretable emotional control remains challenging. Existing approaches primarily rely on external conditioning or global activation steering, offering limited insight into the internal representations underlying emotional control. In this work, we analyze emotion-related variation in the semantic hidden states of LLM-based TTS models using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to identify sparse latent features. Our analysis shows that emotional variation is distributed across multiple sparse latent features, while intervening on a small subset enables interpretable emotion control. Building on this observation, we introduce a feature-level intervention framework for bidirectional emotion induction and suppression without modifying backbone parameters. We further show that distinct latent features are associated with specific acoustic attributes (e.g., pitch), suggesting that emotional expression arises from coordinated latent contributions rather than a single global shift. Empirically, steering these sparse latent features achieves comparable or superior emotion induction and suppression performance relative to global steering and existing TTS baselines.

This paper proposes SoftGM, an octopus-inspired distributed control architecture for segmented soft robotic arms that learn to reach targets in contact-rich environments using online obstacle discovery without assuming full obstacle geometry at the start of each episode. SoftGM formulates each arm section as a cooperative agent and represents the arm-environment interaction as a graph. SoftGM uses a two-stage graph attention message passing scheme following a Centralised Training Decentralised Execution (CTDE) paradigm with a centralised critic and decentralised actor. We evaluate SoftGM in a Cosserat-rod simulator (PyElastica) across three tasks that increase the complexity of the environment: obstacle-free, structured obstacles, and a wall-with-hole scenario. Compared with six widely used MARL baselines (IDDPG, IPPO, ISAC, MADDPG, MAPPO, MASAC) under identical information content and training conditions, SoftGM matches strong CTDE methods in simpler settings and achieves the best performance in the wall-with-hole task. Robustness tests with observation noise, single-section actuation failure, and transient disturbances show that SoftGM maintains comparable performance under non-ideal simulated conditions while keeping control effort bounded, suggesting that selective contact-relevant information routing improves resilience in the tested settings.

Image diffusion models have been utilized in various tasks, such as text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis. Recent research has introduced tuning methods that make subtle adjustments to the original models, yielding promising results in specific adaptations of foundational generative diffusion models. Rather than modifying the main backbone of the diffusion model, we delve into the role of skip connection in U-Net and reveal that hierarchical features aggregating long-distance information across encoder and decoder make a significant impact on the content and quality of image generation. Based on the observation, we propose an efficient generative tuning framework, dubbed SCEdit, which integrates and edits Skip Connection using a lightweight tuning module named SC-Tuner. Furthermore, the proposed framework allows for straightforward extension to controllable image synthesis by injecting different conditions with Controllable SC-Tuner, simplifying and unifying the network design for multi-condition inputs. Our SCEdit substantially reduces training parameters, memory usage, and computational expense due to its lightweight tuners, with backward propagation only passing to the decoder blocks. Extensive experiments conducted on text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of efficiency and performance. Project page: https://scedit.github.io/

Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive ability to generate high-quality images conditioned on the textual input. However, these models struggle to accurately adhere to textual instructions regarding spatial layout information. While previous research has primarily focused on aligning cross-attention maps with layout conditions, they overlook the impact of the initialization noise on the layout guidance. To achieve better layout control, we propose leveraging a spatial-aware initialization noise during the denoising process. Specifically, we find that the inverted reference image with finite inversion steps contains valuable spatial awareness regarding the object's position, resulting in similar layouts in the generated images. Based on this observation, we develop an open-vocabulary framework to customize a spatial-aware initialization noise for each layout condition. Without modifying other modules except the initialization noise, our approach can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module within other training-free layout guidance frameworks. We evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on the available Stable Diffusion model and COCO dataset. Equipped with the spatial-aware latent initialization, our method significantly improves the effectiveness of layout guidance while preserving high-quality content.

Robot manipulation alternates between low-risk transit phases that call for fast execution and high-risk contact stages that demand slow, precise motion. Yet existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) only inherit a single fixed speed from training demonstrations. Prior efforts to accelerate VLAs through model compression, KV-cache reuse, or reinforcement learning only shift the policy from one fixed speed to another, and leave deceleration almost unexplored. We observe that the magnitude of each predicted action already governs how fast the robot moves, opening a direct route to controllable execution speed. We turn this observation into TempoVLA, a single VLA whose execution speed is controlled by an explicit condition. TempoVLA combines two coupled components. (1) A data-side Variable-Speed Trajectory Augmentation (VSTA) that re-times demonstration to any target speed by merging or splitting actions while preserving its motion semantics. (2) A model-side conditioning mechanism that feeds the speed to the policy. Statistics show that VSTA reaches the requested speed with negligible motion error. Experiments in simulation and on real-world tasks demonstrate that TempoVLA achieves flexible speed control in both directions, while VSTA additionally boosts the default 1times performance via better data utilization. Furthermore, by cooperating with a large multimodal model, TempoVLA realizes dynamic speed control, accelerating through low-risk phases and decelerating for high-risk ones.

Play behaviour serves as a positive welfare indicator in dairy calves, yet the influence of space allowance under commercial conditions remains poorly characterized, particularly at intermediate-to-high allowances (6-20 m2 per calf). This study investigated the relationship between space allowance and play behaviour in 60 group-housed dairy calves across 14 commercial farms in the Netherlands (space range: 2.66-17.98 m2 per calf), and developed an automated computer vision pipeline for scalable monitoring. Video observations were analyzed using a detailed ethogram, with play expressed as percentage of observation period (%OP). Statistical analysis employed linear mixed models with farm as a random effect. A computer vision pipeline was trained on manual annotations from 108 hours on 6 farms and validated on held-out test data. The computer vision classifier achieved 97.6% accuracy with 99.4% recall for active play detection. Calves spent on average 1.0% of OP playing reflecting around 10 minutes per 17-hour period. The space-play relationship was non-linear, with highest play levels at 8-10 m2 per calf (1.6% OP) and lowest at 6-8 m2 and 12-14 m2 (<0.6% OP). Space remained significant after controlling for age, health, and group size. In summary, these findings suggest that 8-10 m2 per calf represents a practical target balancing welfare benefits with economic feasibility, and demonstrate that automated monitoring can scale small annotation projects to continuous welfare assessment systems.

Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

Recent large-scale text-driven synthesis models have attracted much attention thanks to their remarkable capabilities of generating highly diverse images that follow given text prompts. Such text-based synthesis methods are particularly appealing to humans who are used to verbally describe their intent. Therefore, it is only natural to extend the text-driven image synthesis to text-driven image editing. Editing is challenging for these generative models, since an innate property of an editing technique is to preserve most of the original image, while in the text-based models, even a small modification of the text prompt often leads to a completely different outcome. State-of-the-art methods mitigate this by requiring the users to provide a spatial mask to localize the edit, hence, ignoring the original structure and content within the masked region. In this paper, we pursue an intuitive prompt-to-prompt editing framework, where the edits are controlled by text only. To this end, we analyze a text-conditioned model in depth and observe that the cross-attention layers are the key to controlling the relation between the spatial layout of the image to each word in the prompt. With this observation, we present several applications which monitor the image synthesis by editing the textual prompt only. This includes localized editing by replacing a word, global editing by adding a specification, and even delicately controlling the extent to which a word is reflected in the image. We present our results over diverse images and prompts, demonstrating high-quality synthesis and fidelity to the edited prompts.

Large language models (LLMs) offer impressive performance but are impractical for resource-constrained deployment due to high latency and energy consumption. Knowledge distillation (KD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from a large teacher to a smaller student model. However, conventional KD, notably approaches like Forward KL (FKL) and Reverse KL (RKL), apply uniform divergence loss across the entire vocabulary, neglecting token-level prediction discrepancies. By investigating these representative divergences via gradient analysis, we reveal that FKL boosts underestimated tokens, while RKL suppresses overestimated ones, showing their complementary roles. Based on this observation, we propose Token-wise Distillation (ToDi), a novel method that adaptively combines FKL and RKL per token using a sigmoid-based weighting function derived from the teacher-student probability log-ratio. ToDi dynamically emphasizes the appropriate divergence for each token, enabling precise distribution alignment. We demonstrate that ToDi consistently outperforms recent distillation baselines using uniform or less granular strategies across instruction-following benchmarks. Extensive ablation studies and efficiency analysis further validate ToDi's effectiveness and practicality.

We present TokenDial, a framework for continuous, slider-style attribute control in pretrained text-to-video generation models. While modern generators produce strong holistic videos, they offer limited control over how much an attribute changes (e.g., effect intensity or motion magnitude) without drifting identity, background, or temporal coherence. TokenDial is built on the observation: additive offsets in the intermediate spatiotemporal visual patch-token space form a semantic control direction, where adjusting the offset magnitude yields coherent, predictable edits for both appearance and motion dynamics. We learn attribute-specific token offsets without retraining the backbone, using pretrained understanding signals: semantic direction matching for appearance and motion-magnitude scaling for motion. We demonstrate TokenDial's effectiveness on diverse attributes and prompts, achieving stronger controllability and higher-quality edits than state-of-the-art baselines, supported by extensive quantitative evaluation and human studies.

Humans routinely rely on memory to perform tasks, yet most robot policies lack this capability; our goal is to endow robot policies with the same ability. Naively conditioning on long observation histories is computationally expensive and brittle under covariate shift, while indiscriminate subsampling of history leads to irrelevant or redundant information. We propose a hierarchical policy framework, where the high-level policy is trained to select and track previous relevant keyframes from its experience. The high-level policy uses selected keyframes and the most recent frames when generating text instructions for a low-level policy to execute. This design is compatible with existing vision-language-action (VLA) models and enables the system to efficiently reason over long-horizon dependencies. In our experiments, we finetune Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and π_{0.5} as the high-level and low-level policies respectively, using demonstrations supplemented with minimal language annotations. Our approach, MemER, outperforms prior methods on three real-world long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks that require minutes of memory. Videos and code can be found at https://jen-pan.github.io/memer/.

World models are rapidly becoming a core infrastructure for embodied intelligence and interactive agents: they provide controllable simulators in which agents can perceive, act, forecast, and acquire scalable experience. Yet current video generation world models are still organized around isolated control interfaces, such as camera trajectories, robot actions, or hand-joint signals. This fragmentation is increasingly a scaling bottleneck. The central challenge is not the absence of controllable generators, but the lack of a unified and extensible learning framework that can absorb heterogeneous action supervision while preserving a shared model of world dynamics. In this work, we introduce Worldscape-MoE, a Mixture-of-Experts world model built on Diffusion Transformers for scalable heterogeneous action control. Our key observation is that different controls specify different interfaces to the same underlying world: although their representations differ, they constrain shared physical regularities, scene dynamics, and interaction semantics. Worldscape-MoE operationalizes this observation through modality-aware control injection, shared and control-specific experts, and a progressive MoE tuning strategy that supports continual extension to new action modalities. Experiments across locomotion, robotic manipulation, and egocentric hand control show that heterogeneous supervision improves rather than interferes with individual control capabilities. Worldscape-MoE achieves strong results on WorldArena, improves locomotion and hand-control metrics, exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization, and demonstrates scaling behavior as additional control data and experts are integrated.

Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial detail and the benefits of large-scale visual pre-training. While there exist policies that do operate on dense patch features like large vision-language-action models (VLAs), they tend to be heavy and slow, inheriting the full cost of a billion-parameter vision-language model (VLM) backbone. We close this gap with Patch Policy, a minimal architectural extension that enables transformer-based policies to consume dense pre-trained patch tokens directly without the computational overhead of a full VLM. At its core is a block-causal attention mask that preserves the temporal causality of standard policies while letting the model attend over many patch tokens per observation, alongside other state information. Patch Policy is lightweight, fast, and highly effective. Across four simulated and three real-world environment suites, our method achieves a 40% relative improvement over policies using state-of-the-art global-pooled representations. Furthermore, it surpasses fine-tuned OpenVLA-OFT by 18% while using roughly 0.7% of the parameters. We believe Patch Policy provides a pipeline for the robotics community to readily leverage continuing progress in visual representation learning, without sacrificing the training efficiency or inference speed required for high-frequency, reactive control. Videos can be viewed at https://patch-policy.github.io

Manipulating a Rubik's Cube with a single dexterous hand is a challenging test of sustained, contact-rich control: the hand must execute successive layer turns while keeping the cube secure. Each turn requires some fingers to support the cube while others push a moving layer, release contact, and reset for the next move. To learn this coordination, we introduce FINGR (Future-supervised Interaction Network with Geometric Representations), a policy that combines finger-relative geometry with future interaction prediction. A shared point encoder expresses the cube relative to each fingertip and aggregates its points without depending on cubie indexing. Learned future tokens share the observation encoder and receive supervision for contact-force changes, layer-turn progress, and finger joint displacement at multiple time scales. The resulting representation conditions a flow policy that directly generates finger actions. On a real dexterous hand, our policy achieves 99.0% success over 300 turn attempts, compared with 79.7% for the base flow policy. Integrated with grasping and table-assisted regrasping, the policy solves all ten scrambled 2times2times2 cubes in a mean complete-system time of approximately 137 seconds. The project website is available at https://www.lyt0112.com/projects/FINGR

Recent years have seen substantial progress in diffusion-based controllable video generation. However, achieving precise control in complex scenarios, including fine-grained object parts, sophisticated motion trajectories, and coherent background movement, remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce TrackGo, a novel approach that leverages free-form masks and arrows for conditional video generation. This method offers users with a flexible and precise mechanism for manipulating video content. We also propose the TrackAdapter for control implementation, an efficient and lightweight adapter designed to be seamlessly integrated into the temporal self-attention layers of a pretrained video generation model. This design leverages our observation that the attention map of these layers can accurately activate regions corresponding to motion in videos. Our experimental results demonstrate that our new approach, enhanced by the TrackAdapter, achieves state-of-the-art performance on key metrics such as FVD, FID, and ObjMC scores. The project page of TrackGo can be found at: https://zhtjtcz.github.io/TrackGo-Page/

How to enable robots to predict the outcomes of their own motion intentions in three-dimensional space has been a fundamental problem in embodied intelligence. To explore more general spatial imagination capabilities, here we present AirScape, the first world model designed for six-degree-of-freedom aerial agents. AirScape predicts future observation sequences based on current visual inputs and motion intentions. Specifically, we construct an dataset for aerial world model training and testing, which consists of 11k video-intention pairs. This dataset includes first-person-view videos capturing diverse drone actions across a wide range of scenarios, with over 1,000 hours spent annotating the corresponding motion intentions. Then we develop a two-phase training schedule to train a foundation model -- initially devoid of embodied spatial knowledge -- into a world model that is controllable by motion intentions and adheres to physical spatio-temporal constraints.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent--environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent--environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit a wide range of capabilities, such as writing robot code from language commands -- enabling non-experts to direct robot behaviors, modify them based on feedback, or compose them to perform new tasks. However, these capabilities (driven by in-context learning) are limited to short-term interactions, where users' feedback remains relevant for only as long as it fits within the context size of the LLM, and can be forgotten over longer interactions. In this work, we investigate fine-tuning the robot code-writing LLMs, to remember their in-context interactions and improve their teachability i.e., how efficiently they adapt to human inputs (measured by average number of corrections before the user considers the task successful). Our key observation is that when human-robot interactions are formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process (in which human language inputs are observations, and robot code outputs are actions), then training an LLM to complete previous interactions can be viewed as training a transition dynamics model -- that can be combined with classic robotics techniques such as model predictive control (MPC) to discover shorter paths to success. This gives rise to Language Model Predictive Control (LMPC), a framework that fine-tunes PaLM 2 to improve its teachability on 78 tasks across 5 robot embodiments -- improving non-expert teaching success rates of unseen tasks by 26.9% while reducing the average number of human corrections from 2.4 to 1.9. Experiments show that LMPC also produces strong meta-learners, improving the success rate of in-context learning new tasks on unseen robot embodiments and APIs by 31.5%. See videos, code, and demos at: https://robot-teaching.github.io/.

We introduce controlgym, a library of thirty-six safety-critical industrial control settings, and ten infinite-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE)-based control problems. Integrated within the OpenAI Gym/Gymnasium (Gym) framework, controlgym allows direct applications of standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like stable-baselines3. Our control environments complement those in Gym with continuous, unbounded action and observation spaces, motivated by real-world control applications. Moreover, the PDE control environments uniquely allow the users to extend the state dimensionality of the system to infinity while preserving the intrinsic dynamics. This feature is crucial for evaluating the scalability of RL algorithms for control. This project serves the learning for dynamics & control (L4DC) community, aiming to explore key questions: the convergence of RL algorithms in learning control policies; the stability and robustness issues of learning-based controllers; and the scalability of RL algorithms to high- and potentially infinite-dimensional systems. We open-source the controlgym project at https://github.com/xiangyuan-zhang/controlgym.

Incorporating the successful paradigm of pretraining and finetuning from Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing into decision-making has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this paper, we study Imitation Learning from Observation with pretrained models and find existing approaches such as BCO and AIME face knowledge barriers, specifically the Embodiment Knowledge Barrier (EKB) and the Demonstration Knowledge Barrier (DKB), greatly limiting their performance. The EKB arises when pretrained models lack knowledge about unseen observations, leading to errors in action inference. The DKB results from policies trained on limited demonstrations, hindering adaptability to diverse scenarios. We thoroughly analyse the underlying mechanism of these barriers and propose AIME-v2 upon AIME as a solution. AIME-v2 uses online interactions with data-driven regulariser to alleviate the EKB and mitigates the DKB by introducing a surrogate reward function to enhance policy training. Experimental results on tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite and Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of these modifications in improving both sample-efficiency and converged performance. The study contributes valuable insights into resolving knowledge barriers for enhanced decision-making in pretraining-based approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/argmax-ai/aime-v2.

This paper presents the observation of four-top-quark (tttt) production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. The analysis is performed using an integrated luminosity of 140 fb^{-1} at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected using the ATLAS detector. Events containing two leptons with the same electric charge or at least three leptons (electrons or muons) are selected. Event kinematics are used to separate signal from background through a multivariate discriminant, and dedicated control regions are used to constrain the dominant backgrounds. The observed (expected) significance of the measured tttt signal with respect to the standard model (SM) background-only hypothesis is 6.1 (4.3) standard deviations. The tttt production cross section is measured to be 22.5^{+6.6}_{-5.5} fb, consistent with the SM prediction of 12.0 pm 2.4 fb within 1.8 standard deviations. Data are also used to set limits on the three-top-quark production cross section, being an irreducible background not measured previously, and to constrain the top-Higgs Yukawa coupling and effective field theory operator coefficients that affect tttt production.

Generating human motion with precise spatial control is a challenging problem. Existing approaches often require task-specific training or slow optimization, and enforcing hard constraints frequently disrupts motion naturalness. Building on the observation that many animation tasks can be formulated as a linear inverse problem, we introduce ProjFlow, a training-free sampler that achieves zero-shot, exact satisfaction of linear spatial constraints while preserving motion realism. Our key advance is a novel kinematics-aware metric that encodes skeletal topology. This metric allows the sampler to enforce hard constraints by distributing corrections coherently across the entire skeleton, avoiding the unnatural artifacts of naive projection. Furthermore, for sparse inputs, such as filling in long gaps between a few keyframes, we introduce a time-varying formulation using pseudo-observations that fade during sampling. Extensive experiments on representative applications, motion inpainting, and 2D-to-3D lifting, demonstrate that ProjFlow achieves exact constraint satisfaction and matches or improves realism over zero-shot baselines, while remaining competitive with training-based controllers.

Region-instructed layout control in text-to-image generation is highly practical, yet existing methods suffer from limitations: (i) training-based approaches inherit data bias and often degrade image quality, and (ii) current techniques struggle with occlusion order, limiting real-world usability. To address these issues, we propose LayerBind. By modeling regional generation as distinct layers and binding them during the generation, our method enables precise regional and occlusion controllability. Our motivation stems from the observation that spatial layout and occlusion are established at a very early denoising stage, suggesting that rearranging the early latent structure is sufficient to modify the final output. Building on this, we structure the scheme into two phases: instance initialization and subsequent semantic nursing. (1) First, leveraging the contextual sharing mechanism in multimodal joint attention, Layer-wise Instance Initialization creates per-instance branches that attend to their own regions while anchoring to the shared background. At a designated early step, these branches are fused according to the layer order to form a unified latent with a pre-established layout. (2) Then, Layer-wise Semantic Nursing reinforces regional details and maintains the occlusion order via a layer-wise attention enhancement. Specifically, a sequential layered attention path operates alongside the standard global path, with updates composited under a layer-transparency scheduler. LayerBind is training-free and plug-and-play, serving as a regional and occlusion controller across Diffusion Transformers. Beyond generation, it natively supports editable workflows, allowing for flexible modifications like changing instances or rearranging visible orders. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate LayerBind's effectiveness, highlighting its strong potential for creative applications.

Existing driving automation (DA) systems on production vehicles rely on human drivers to decide when to engage DA while requiring them to remain continuously attentive and ready to intervene. This design demands substantial situational judgment and imposes significant cognitive load, leading to steep learning curves, suboptimal user experience, and safety risks from both over-reliance and delayed takeover. Predicting when drivers hand over control to DA and when they take it back is therefore critical for designing proactive, context-aware HMI, yet existing datasets rarely capture the multimodal context, including road scene, driver state, vehicle dynamics, and route environment. To fill this gap, we introduce BATON, a large-scale naturalistic dataset capturing real-world DA usage across 127 drivers, and 136.6 hours of driving. The dataset synchronizes front-view video, in-cabin video, decoded CAN bus signals, radar-based lead-vehicle interaction, and GPS-derived route context, forming a closed-loop multimodal record around each control transition. We define three benchmark tasks: driving action understanding, handover prediction, and takeover prediction, and evaluate baselines spanning sequence models, classical classifiers, and zero-shot VLMs. Results show that visual input alone is insufficient for reliable transition prediction: front-view video captures road context but not driver state, while in-cabin video reflects driver readiness but not the external scene. Incorporating CAN and route-context signals substantially improves performance over video-only settings, indicating strong complementarity across modalities. We further find takeover events develop more gradually and benefit from longer prediction horizons, whereas handover events depend more on immediate contextual cues, revealing an asymmetry with direct implications for HMI design in assisted driving systems.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have been remarkable, but generating multilingual design logos that harmoniously integrate visual and textual elements remains a challenging task. Existing methods often distort character geometry when applying creative styles and struggle to support multilingual text generation without additional training. To address these challenges, we propose LogoDiffuser, a training-free method that synthesizes multilingual logo designs using the multimodal diffusion transformer. Instead of using textual prompts, we input the target characters as images, enabling robust character structure control regardless of language. We first analyze the joint attention mechanism to identify core tokens, which are tokens that strongly respond to textual structures. With this observation, our method integrates character structure and visual design by injecting the most informative attention maps. Furthermore, we perform layer-wise aggregation of attention maps to mitigate attention shifts across layers and obtain consistent core tokens. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multilingual logo generation.

Chiral magnons, the quanta of handed spin waves, transport spin angular momentum without energy loss due to Joule heating. The recently discovered altermagnets were proposed to host chiral magnons arising from a non-relativistic exchange mechanism, similar to that in ferromagnets but without net magnetization, offering a stray-field-free platform for efficient magnon spin-current manipulation. In this work, we directly observed chiral magnons in the altermagnetic prototype MnTe using polarized inelastic neutron scattering. Furthermore, the magnon chirality was found to be reversibly switched by magnetic-field control, establishing a robust foundation for functional altermagnetic magnonics.

Taming the generation outcome of state of the art Diffusion and Flow-Matching (FM) models without having to re-train a task-specific model unlocks a powerful tool for solving inverse problems, conditional generation, and controlled generation in general. In this work we introduce D-Flow, a simple framework for controlling the generation process by differentiating through the flow, optimizing for the source (noise) point. We motivate this framework by our key observation stating that for Diffusion/FM models trained with Gaussian probability paths, differentiating through the generation process projects gradient on the data manifold, implicitly injecting the prior into the optimization process. We validate our framework on linear and non-linear controlled generation problems including: image and audio inverse problems and conditional molecule generation reaching state of the art performance across all.

Vision-language models are increasingly employed as multimodal conversational agents (MCAs) for diverse conversational tasks. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely explored for adapting MCAs to various human-AI interaction scenarios. Despite showing great enhancement in generalization performance, fine-tuning MCAs via RL still faces challenges in handling the extremely large text token space. To address this, we learn a compact latent action space for RL fine-tuning instead. Specifically, we adopt the learning from observation mechanism to construct the codebook for the latent action space, where future observations are leveraged to estimate current latent actions that could further be used to reconstruct future observations. However, the scarcity of paired image-text data hinders learning a codebook with sufficient coverage. Thus, we leverage both paired image-text data and text-only data to construct the latent action space, using a cross-modal projector for transforming text embeddings into image-text embeddings. We initialize the cross-modal projector on paired image-text data, and further train it on massive text-only data with a novel cycle consistency loss to enhance its robustness. We show that our latent action based method outperforms competitive baselines on two conversation tasks across various RL algorithms.

Low latent prediction error does not establish that a world model distinguishes the consequences of its actions. We introduce an evaluation protocol that traces the same intervention through simulator state, raster observations, target embeddings, and predictor outputs. Exact simulator-state forks in a controlled deformable-physics testbed reveal distinct bottlenecks. Changed commands alter particle motion, yet 41.5% of one-step raster pairs are identical. Observation loss is not the whole explanation: among 579 high-visibility counterfactuals, median predictor-to-target response is 0.0051 and 0.0217 across two seeds, falling to 0.0027 and 0.0116 after variance normalization. An isotropic state perturbation matched to the target counterfactual embedding shift produces 190x and 53x larger predictor changes on the same visible pairs, isolating action-path under-use rather than a dead or globally shrunk predictor. MSE-only training gives 8.36x lower 10-step latent error in matched seeds, but in spectrally concentrated spaces; one VICReg target encoder is also strongly concentrated, so neither error nor rank alone certifies physical state. Finally, stiffness remains near chance even from full-resolution rasters and mechanical state while privileged material parameters decode perfectly, indicating weak identifiability under this excitation rather than encoder discard. These results motivate auditing physical effect, observation visibility, representation geometry, and action dependence separately.

For industrial control, developing high-performance controllers with few samples and low technical debt is appealing. Foundation models, possessing rich prior knowledge obtained from pre-training with Internet-scale corpus, have the potential to be a good controller with proper prompts. In this paper, we take HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) building control as an example to examine the ability of GPT-4 (one of the first-tier foundation models) as the controller. To control HVAC, we wrap the task as a language game by providing text including a short description for the task, several selected demonstrations, and the current observation to GPT-4 on each step and execute the actions responded by GPT-4. We conduct series of experiments to answer the following questions: 1)~How well can GPT-4 control HVAC? 2)~How well can GPT-4 generalize to different scenarios for HVAC control? 3) How different parts of the text context affect the performance? In general, we found GPT-4 achieves the performance comparable to RL methods with few samples and low technical debt, indicating the potential of directly applying foundation models to industrial control tasks.

The causalimages R package enables causal inference with image and image sequence data, providing new tools for integrating novel data sources like satellite and bio-medical imagery into the study of cause and effect. One set of functions enables image-based causal inference analyses. For example, one key function decomposes treatment effect heterogeneity by images using an interpretable Bayesian framework. This allows for determining which types of images or image sequences are most responsive to interventions. A second modeling function allows researchers to control for confounding using images. The package also allows investigators to produce embeddings that serve as vector summaries of the image or video content. Finally, infrastructural functions are also provided, such as tools for writing large-scale image and image sequence data as sequentialized byte strings for more rapid image analysis. causalimages therefore opens new capabilities for causal inference in R, letting researchers use informative imagery in substantive analyses in a fast and accessible manner.

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

Language-conditioned manipulation policies typically process instructions and observations through shared network parameters. This task-state entanglement provides a pathway for observation leakage -- networks learn scene-to-action shortcuts that bypass language grounding entirely. DISC eliminates this failure structurally. Rather than conditioning a universal policy on language, DISC uses a hypernetwork to generate the entire parameter set of a task-specific visuomotor policy from the instruction alone. The generated policy never directly accesses language; therefore, its task-awareness must come from the language. Consequently, observation leakage has no pathway to emerge. On the other hand, generating coherent high-dimensional policy weights is itself a challenging problem. We address it with a two-stage hypernetwork whose refinement stage embeds the structure of gradient-based optimization as a feed-forward inductive bias, producing globally consistent parameters without actual gradient computation. Trained entirely from scratch on standard data budgets, DISC outperforms all entangled baselines on LIBERO-90 and Meta-World, with advantages that widen on complex, long-horizon tasks -- and surpasses the large-scale pretrained π_0 despite using no external pretraining data. On a real-world benchmark where all tasks share identical visual context, DISC substantially outperforms entangled alternatives, directly confirming that language-generated policy parameters, not visual shortcuts, drive behavior. The hypernetwork further learns a semantically structured parameter manifold that enables few-shot adaptation from minimal demonstrations and robust generalization across paraphrased instructions. Our code is available at: {https://github.com/ReNginx/DISC}.

Flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) models generate an action chunk by iteratively denoising Gaussian noise, but typically execute only a short prefix before replanning with updated observations. Under this receding-horizon paradigm, the unexecuted remainder---the action tail---is discarded, and the next chunk is regenerated from fresh noise. We show that this discarded tail retains transferable denoising progress: action-tail initialization can match or outperform a native 10-step Gaussian baseline using fewer denoising steps. However, the optimal denoising budget varies substantially across samples, indicating that tail reuse should be adapted to the updated environment. Based on this observation, we introduce VLA-Rolling, a lightweight inference framework that reuses action tails through three stages: action-tail inheritance, per-action confidence estimation, and confidence-guided refinement through renoising and denoising budget allocation, while the underlying VLA remains frozen. Across π_{0.5}, SmolVLA, X-VLA, and MolmoAct2 on LIBERO, MetaWorld, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, VLA-Rolling reduces action-chunk inference cost in all 16 model--benchmark pairs, achieving up to a 1.48times speedup, while improving success rate in 14 pairs by up to 15.08 percentage points. These results show that action tails are not merely discarded predictions, but reusable intermediate states that enable more efficient and accurate VLA inference. These results demonstrate that the action tail can support the generation of better actions with fewer denoising steps. Our project is available at https://chenbao123ww.github.io/VLA-Rolling/.

We present WorldDirector, a highly controllable video world model framework designed for persistent dynamic object memory and unrestricted viewpoint exploration. Unlike existing world models that entangle physical dynamics with pixel rendering and rely on continuous visual observation to sustain motion, our framework explicitly decouples semantic motion orchestration from visual generation. By leveraging an LLM to coordinate 3D trajectories with camera movements and subsequently employing these orchestrated trajectories as control signals for video generation, our approach ensures strict physical logic and appearance stability, successfully preserving the exact visual identities of dynamic entities even when they re-enter the scene after prolonged periods out of view. Experimental results demonstrate that our method supports the synthesis of complex and extended events with unprecedented controllability and persistent dynamic object memory. Project Page: https://worlddirector.github.io/

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that meaningfully affect the world and cover the range of possible outcomes, without getting distracted by inherently unpredictable, uncontrollable, and stochastic elements in the environment. To this end, we propose an unsupervised RL method designed for high-dimensional, stochastic environments based on an adversarial game between two policies (which we call Explore and Control) controlling a single body and competing over the amount of observation entropy the agent experiences. The Explore agent seeks out states that maximally surprise the Control agent, which in turn aims to minimize surprise, and thereby manipulate the environment to return to familiar and predictable states. The competition between these two policies drives them to seek out increasingly surprising parts of the environment while learning to gain mastery over them. We show formally that the resulting algorithm maximizes coverage of the underlying state in block MDPs with stochastic observations, providing theoretical backing to our hypothesis that this procedure avoids uncontrollable and stochastic distractions. Our experiments further demonstrate that Adversarial Surprise leads to the emergence of complex and meaningful skills, and outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised reinforcement learning methods in terms of both exploration and zero-shot transfer to downstream tasks.

LA-RCS (LLM-agent-based robot control system) is a sophisticated robot control system designed to autonomously plan, work, and analyze the external environment based on user requirements by utilizing LLM-Agent. Utilizing a dual-agent framework, LA-RCS generates plans based on user requests, observes the external environment, executes the plans, and modifies the plans as needed to adapt to changes in the external conditions. Additionally, LA-RCS interprets natural language commands by the user and converts them into commands compatible with the robot interface so that the robot can execute tasks and meet user requests properly. During his process, the system autonomously evaluates observation results, provides feedback on the tasks, and executes commands based on real-time environmental monitoring, significantly reducing the need for user intervention in fulfilling requests. We categorized the scenarios that LA-RCS needs to perform into four distinct types and conducted a quantitative assessment of its performance in each scenario. The results showed an average success rate of 90 percent, demonstrating the system capability to fulfill user requests satisfactorily. For more extensive results, readers can visit our project page: https://la-rcs.github.io

Visual navigation using only a single camera and a topological map has recently become an appealing alternative to methods that require additional sensors and 3D maps. This is typically achieved through an "image-relative" approach to estimating control from a given pair of current observation and subgoal image. However, image-level representations of the world have limitations because images are strictly tied to the agent's pose and embodiment. In contrast, objects, being a property of the map, offer an embodiment- and trajectory-invariant world representation. In this work, we present a new paradigm of learning "object-relative" control that exhibits several desirable characteristics: a) new routes can be traversed without strictly requiring to imitate prior experience, b) the control prediction problem can be decoupled from solving the image matching problem, and c) high invariance can be achieved in cross-embodiment deployment for variations across both training-testing and mapping-execution settings. We propose a topometric map representation in the form of a "relative" 3D scene graph, which is used to obtain more informative object-level global path planning costs. We train a local controller, dubbed "ObjectReact", conditioned directly on a high-level "WayObject Costmap" representation that eliminates the need for an explicit RGB input. We demonstrate the advantages of learning object-relative control over its image-relative counterpart across sensor height variations and multiple navigation tasks that challenge the underlying spatial understanding capability, e.g., navigating a map trajectory in the reverse direction. We further show that our sim-only policy is able to generalize well to real-world indoor environments. Code and supplementary material are accessible via project page: https://object-react.github.io/

Visual generation is evolving from generative models used through a single invocation into agentic control processes that can plan, select tools, inspect intermediate synthesized outputs, revise failures, and reuse prior experience. In most existing systems, the controller is an LLM or VLM, while visual generation models serve as tools or executors. However, existing work lacks a consistent criterion for determining when a generation system becomes agentic. Planning depth, tool use, multi-role collaboration, and reinforcement learning are often treated as evidence of agenticity, even though none of them necessarily determines which generation decisions the controller can make. We organize the field according to what the controller can directly control in the generation process. At L1 Conditioning Control, the controller prepares the input to a predetermined generator but does not control which visual operation is executed. At L2 Execution Control, it selects and invokes actual generation, editing, rendering, or other content-modifying operations. At L3 Outcome-Adaptive Control, it observes an intermediate outcome and uses that observation to change a subsequent operation within the current task. At L4 Experience-Adaptive Control, it retains experience from completed tasks and uses that experience to change decisions on future tasks. L0 Fixed Support separately denotes generators, editors, evaluators, reward models, benchmarks, and fixed pipelines without a deployed controller that makes generation-level decisions. These levels describe a progressively broader decision-making scope rather than model size, system complexity, output quality, tool or role count, or training method. Applying this framework across image, video, editing, 3D, world, slide, and user-interface generation reveals how controller capabilities have evolved and how their mechanisms are distributed across levels.

Game world models have made rapid progress toward real-time interactive generation. Yet action control is still predominantly implemented as feature conditioning, leaving the model to learn from training data how each action should move the visual world. This formulation is poorly matched to a broad class of planar-camera worlds, such as top-down and isometric games. In these worlds, player motion induces a geometrically well-defined planar camera displacement. We observe that the key to spatially consistent control in such worlds is to represent the effect of each action directly in world coordinates. To this end, we introduce ActionRoPE, a parameter-free action interface that converts action-driven camera displacement into world-coordinate rotary positions. As a result, tokens corresponding to the same world location retain the same positional address across time. These world coordinates further expose a spatial asymmetry in generation: regions covered by the initial observation are geometrically known, while newly revealed regions remain to be synthesized. We therefore propose Coordinate-Conditioned Noise Scheduling (CNS), which assigns token-wise denoising schedules according to this known-new structure. It allows observed regions to stabilize earlier, while new content is generated with reference to them. Compared with four representative action-conditioning mechanisms, our approach follows the commanded motion more faithfully and reduces the revisit drift by 66% over the strongest baseline. The same interface transfers across video backbones from 1.3B to 33B parameters and to out-of-distribution scenes. Project Page: https://teawhite.cn/ActionRoPE/

Super resolution techniques can enhance the spatial resolution of remote sensing images, enabling more efficient large scale earth observation applications. While single image SR methods enhance low resolution images, they neglect valuable complementary information from auxiliary data. Reference based SR can be interpreted as an information fusion task, where historical high resolution reference images are combined with current LR observations. However, existing RefSR methods struggle with real world complexities, such as cross sensor resolution gap and significant land cover changes, often leading to under generation or over reliance on reference image. To address these challenges, we propose CRefDiff, a novel controllable reference guided diffusion model for real world remote sensing image SR. To address the under generation problem, CRefDiff leverages a powerful generative prior to produce accurate structures and textures. To mitigate over reliance on the reference, we introduce a dual branch fusion mechanism that adaptively fuse both local and global information from the reference image. Moreover, the dual branch design enables reference strength control during inference, enhancing the models interactivity and flexibility. Finally, the Better Start strategy is proposed to significantly reduce the number of denoising steps, thereby accelerating the inference process. To support further research, we introduce RealRefRSSRD, a new real world RefSR dataset for remote sensing images, consisting of HR NAIP and LR Sentinel2 image pairs with diverse land cover changes and significant temporal gaps. Extensive experiments on RealRefRSSRD show that CRefDiff achieves SOTA performance and improves downstream tasks.

Initialization-free bundle adjustment (InitFree BA) aims to recover camera poses and scene structure directly from image observations, avoiding the geometric initialization stages of conventional structure-from-motion pipelines. Recent methods based on Object-Space Error (OSE) formulations and Variable Projection (VarPro) show encouraging optimization behavior from random camera configurations. However, existing evaluations primarily measure optimization success, leaving unclear whether a low OSE objective yields a valid metric 3D reconstruction. We revisit InitFree BA experimentally through a unified evaluation framework combining a C++ implementation of existing OSE formulations with a Blender-based dataset generator providing exact ground truth and controlled camera configurations and observation densities. Our experiments reveal a previously overlooked optimization--reconstruction gap: projective solutions with similarly low OSE values can lead to substantially different Euclidean reconstructions after metric upgrade. We identify initialization priors, landmark observation density, and metric-upgrade stability as key factors governing reconstruction success. Overall, our results suggest that the main challenge of InitFree BA is not merely minimizing OSE objectives, but obtaining projective reconstructions that admit reliable metric upgrade. We believe that the proposed benchmark, implementation, and analysis establish stronger experimental foundations for future research on initialization-free bundle adjustment, a problem largely unexplored within the computer vision community. Project page is available at https://github.com/simonwebertum/InitFreeBA.git.

The advent of video-action models offers a promising path for robot control. Nevertheless, we argue that repurposing video generative models designed for digital content creation is inherently inadequate for physical environments. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VA 2.0, a video-action foundation model built from the ground up for embodiment. Four core design principles showcase its evolution from LingBot-VA. (1) Departing from traditional reconstruction-focused VAEs, we introduce a semantic visual-action tokenizer, which aligns visual representations with both semantics and actions, improving instruction following and action precision in subsequent policy learning. (2) Given the strictly causal nature of temporal dynamics, we adopt a causal pretraining paradigm, training from scratch to circumvent the catastrophic forgetting that frequently occurs when adapting bidirectional architectures. (3) To meet the demands of high-frequency inference, our model employs a sparse MoE backbone, expanding model capacity without compromising efficiency. (4) Real-time closed-loop control is realized through an enhanced asynchronous inference scheme, which predicts future latents in parallel with action execution while re-grounding each rollout on the latest observation via learned forward dynamics. Real-world deployment validates LingBot-VA 2.0 as a robust foundation model, as evidenced by its few-shot generalization across complex manipulation tasks.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in general-purpose video understanding. However, their application to real-world surveillance remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale domain-specific datasets and the limitation of passive observation from fixed viewpoints. In surveillance scenarios, critical visual evidence can be easily missed when targets are distant, small, occluded, or move beyond the current camera view. In this work, we introduce CamVLM, a new framework for Thinking with Cameras, which enables LVLMs to actively acquire visual evidence in real-world surveillance by continuously controlling camera viewpoints. We first construct CCTV-Anomaly, a large-scale surveillance video understanding dataset containing 14,133 videos across 10 anomaly categories, with detailed captions and event annotations. We further formulate viewpoint control as an active visual perception problem and build CamTrack-53K, an object-centric viewpoint trajectory dataset for learning camera actions. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning based viewpoint policy optimization framework, which models camera control as a sequential decision-making process and learns long-horizon observation strategies beyond supervised trajectory imitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CamVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance under both passive observation and dynamic viewpoint settings, validating the effectiveness of active camera-based reasoning for surveillance video understanding. Our datasets, model, and code will be available at https://github.com/xiaozhang79/CamVLM.

Spatial intelligence requires more than describing object locations. Under incomplete observation, models must identify and acquire missing evidence, interpret it in a common spatial frame, and act on it. We introduce VA-Bench to evaluate the complete observe-reason-act-revise loop. General-purpose MLLMs learn procedural context from RGB-only demonstrations, actively select camera viewpoints, issue metric Cartesian commands, and revise them from execution feedback. Models receive no privileged object poses, oracle trajectories, or learned action heads. A fixed model-agnostic controller executes only model-specified targets. VA-Bench contains 14 base task families (11 single-arm and three dual-arm), seven held-out geometry/layout variants, and a long-horizon five-object composition track. We evaluate 12 primary model conditions in three independent runs over the same 20 physically verified seeds per base task, reporting terminal success, nine trajectory-level behavioral diagnostics, and subtask progress. First, the best-performing model scores 100.0% on target localization and 78.9% on spatial relations in the annotated run. Its three-run macro-average task success is only 53.93+/-3.17%. Second, active camera control significantly improves task success over passive multi-view observation. In one matched comparison, success rises from 27.86% to 57.50%. Third, held-out geometric transfer can reduce task success by over 30 percentage points. No model completes a strict long-horizon episode, despite substantial partial progress. VA-Bench thus tests whether general-purpose MLLMs can turn visual demonstrations and actively acquired evidence into successful embodied action.

Goal-conditioned manipulation policies are steered by a goal image, a picture of the desired post-manipulation scene synthesized from the current observation and a language instruction. The prevailing assumption is that better image-editing quality yields better goals, so goal generators are built and compared using general image-editing metrics. We show this assumption is false. Across two independent goal-conditioned policies on CALVIN, the image editors that top aggregate editing-quality leaderboards (Gemini 3 Pro Image and GPT Image 1.5) produce worse control targets than our proposed far smaller finetuned open models, and the gap widens sharply for the multi-step (long-horizon) tasks robots actually face. A per-dimension analysis explains why. Downstream policy success is governed almost entirely by manipulation adherence (selecting the right object and the right final state; Spearman ρapprox 0.9 with success), while photorealism and aesthetic fidelity, precisely where large proprietary editors excel, are uncorrelated with success (ρapprox 0). This dissociation holds on both CALVIN and the real-world-aligned SIMPLER-Bridge benchmark. We then present SGE-Goal, a spatially-grounded decomposed editing framework that predicts initial and final 2D edit-region masks before goal-image synthesis. SGE-Goal turns open base models (FLUX.1 Kontext, FLUX.2 klein) into the strongest goal generators we evaluate on CALVIN, and second only to Gemini 3 Pro Image on SIMPLER-Bridge. Base models fine-tuned with SGE-Goal also hold up under chaining far better than the best proprietary editor, sustaining roughly seven times the success rate at the longest (five-step) chains. We release code, datasets, checkpoints, and a human-aligned diagnostic evaluator. Our results argue that goal generators must be selected by downstream utility, not by editing-quality leaderboards.

Remote sensing image (RSI) interpretation typically faces challenges due to the scarcity of labeled data, which limits the performance of RSI interpretation tasks. To tackle this challenge, we propose EarthSynth, a diffusion-based generative foundation model that enables synthesizing multi-category, cross-satellite labeled Earth observation for downstream RSI interpretation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, EarthSynth is the first to explore multi-task generation for remote sensing, tackling the challenge of limited generalization in task-oriented synthesis for RSI interpretation. EarthSynth, trained on the EarthSynth-180K dataset, employs the Counterfactual Composition training strategy with a three-dimensional batch-sample selection mechanism to improve training data diversity and enhance category control. Furthermore, a rule-based method of R-Filter is proposed to filter more informative synthetic data for downstream tasks. We evaluate our EarthSynth on scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation in open-world scenarios. There are significant improvements in open-vocabulary understanding tasks, offering a practical solution for advancing RSI interpretation.

Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in W_infty. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

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

Tool-augmented LLM agents call APIs whose intermediate outputs, such as presigned URLs, session tokens, and OAuth state parameters, are observation contracts: artifacts whose later use is constrained by the external system that produced them. We show that observation contract compliance (preserving the temporal validity and byte-level integrity) is an emergent, regression-prone capability: it is neither guaranteed by general tool-use ability nor consistently improved by larger or newer models. To measure this, we introduce ContractBench, a benchmark of 33 dual-axis tasks that probe two orthogonal failure modes no existing benchmark evaluates: validity failures (using an artifact after expiry) and integrity failures (corrupting an artifact's bytes through the observation-to-action pipeline). Our evaluation is deterministic and programmatic, with a virtual clock controlling time and SHA-256 hashes verifying byte integrity. We assign each outcome a failure label drawn from real-world API specifications. We evaluate 38 models and report four findings: (i) no evaluated model clears 80%, with Claude-Opus-4.6 leading at 77.8%, revealing that current frontier models still fail to comply with observation contracts; (ii) a sharp within-family capability cliff in Qwen 3.5 between 4B (0%) and 9B (56.6%), smoothing to 70.7% at 397B-A17B: what emerges across the cliff is mid-trajectory restraint, not tool-call competence; (iii) non-monotonic scaling across the GPT-5 family: agentic post-training can erode compliance through sycophancy-driven regression; (iv) our failure taxonomy works as an actionable in-context reward signal, yielding +7.1 pp on 42 paired GPT-5.1 failures.

How would we know whether a machine truly understands the world? We argue that one key capability is observational theory learning: acquiring reusable theories from pure observations and applying them to new situations. Current visual reasoning benchmarks focus primarily on the latter, presenting each task as a few-shot puzzle grouped by a common rule. We introduce BabyTheorist, a benchmark for controlled training and evaluation of observational theory learning. BabyTheorist generates continual streams of before-after visual observations from hidden compositional programs; during training, learners see only the resulting transitions, with no program labels, task identities, or support sets. To support theory learning and evaluation, BabyTheorist controls the program language, a curriculum over program complexity, recurring frequent subprograms, and a continual train-test protocol with level skipping. Seven representative baselines plateau well below ceiling, with the gap widening as the curriculum advances---evidence that BabyTheorist isolates a capability current program-learning approaches do not yet address.

Unlike most reinforcement learning agents which require an unrealistic amount of environment interactions to learn a new behaviour, humans excel at learning quickly by merely observing and imitating others. This ability highly depends on the fact that humans have a model of their own embodiment that allows them to infer the most likely actions that led to the observed behaviour. In this paper, we propose Action Inference by Maximising Evidence (AIME) to replicate this behaviour using world models. AIME consists of two distinct phases. In the first phase, the agent learns a world model from its past experience to understand its own body by maximising the ELBO. While in the second phase, the agent is given some observation-only demonstrations of an expert performing a novel task and tries to imitate the expert's behaviour. AIME achieves this by defining a policy as an inference model and maximising the evidence of the demonstration under the policy and world model. Our method is "zero-shot" in the sense that it does not require further training for the world model or online interactions with the environment after given the demonstration. We empirically validate the zero-shot imitation performance of our method on the Walker and Cheetah embodiment of the DeepMind Control Suite and find it outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/argmax-ai/aime.

Generative models, like flows and diffusions, have recently emerged as popular and efficacious policy parameterizations in robotics. There has been much speculation as to the factors underlying their successes, ranging from capturing multi-modal action distribution to expressing more complex behaviors. In this work, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of popular generative control policies (GCPs) on common behavior cloning (BC) benchmarks. We find that GCPs do not owe their success to their ability to capture multi-modality or to express more complex observation-to-action mappings. Instead, we find that their advantage stems from iterative computation, as long as intermediate steps are supervised during training and this supervision is paired with a suitable level of stochasticity. As a validation of our findings, we show that a minimum iterative policy (MIP), a lightweight two-step regression-based policy, essentially matches the performance of flow GCPs, and often outperforms distilled shortcut models. Our results suggest that the distribution-fitting component of GCPs is less salient than commonly believed, and point toward new design spaces focusing solely on control performance. Project page: https://simchowitzlabpublic.github.io/much-ado-about-noising-project/

Achieving robust, human-like whole-body control on humanoid robots for agile, contact-rich behaviors remains a central challenge, demanding heavy per-skill engineering and a brittle process of tuning controllers. We introduce ZEST (Zero-shot Embodied Skill Transfer), a streamlined motion-imitation framework that trains policies via reinforcement learning from diverse sources -- high-fidelity motion capture, noisy monocular video, and non-physics-constrained animation -- and deploys them to hardware zero-shot. ZEST generalizes across behaviors and platforms while avoiding contact labels, reference or observation windows, state estimators, and extensive reward shaping. Its training pipeline combines adaptive sampling, which focuses training on difficult motion segments, and an automatic curriculum using a model-based assistive wrench, together enabling dynamic, long-horizon maneuvers. We further provide a procedure for selecting joint-level gains from approximate analytical armature values for closed-chain actuators, along with a refined model of actuators. Trained entirely in simulation with moderate domain randomization, ZEST demonstrates remarkable generality. On Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid, ZEST learns dynamic, multi-contact skills (e.g., army crawl, breakdancing) from motion capture. It transfers expressive dance and scene-interaction skills, such as box-climbing, directly from videos to Atlas and the Unitree G1. Furthermore, it extends across morphologies to the Spot quadruped, enabling acrobatics, such as a continuous backflip, through animation. Together, these results demonstrate robust zero-shot deployment across heterogeneous data sources and embodiments, establishing ZEST as a scalable interface between biological movements and their robotic counterparts.

Foundation models are transforming Earth Observation (EO), yet the diversity of EO sensors and modalities makes a single universal model unrealistic. Multiple specialized EO foundation models (EOFMs) will likely coexist, making efficient knowledge transfer across modalities essential. Most existing EO pretraining relies on masked image modeling, which emphasizes local reconstruction but provides limited control over global semantic structure. To address this, we propose a dual-teacher contrastive distillation framework for multispectral imagery that aligns the student's pretraining objective with the contrastive self-distillation paradigm of modern optical vision foundation models (VFMs). Our approach combines a multispectral teacher with an optical VFM teacher, enabling coherent cross-modal representation learning. Experiments across diverse optical and multispectral benchmarks show that our model adapts to multispectral data without compromising performance on optical-only inputs, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings, with an average improvement of 3.64 percentage points in semantic segmentation, 1.2 in change detection, and 1.31 in classification tasks. This demonstrates that contrastive distillation provides a principled and efficient approach to scalable representation learning across heterogeneous EO data sources. Project page: magenta{https://wolfilip.github.io/DEO/}.

World models of embodied agents predict future observations conditioned on an action taken by the agent. For complex embodiments, action spaces are high-dimensional and difficult to specify: for example, precisely controlling a human agent requires specifying the motion of each joint. This makes the world model hard to control and expensive to plan with as search-based methods like CEM scale poorly with action dimensionality. To address this issue, we train a lightweight policy that maps high-level actions to sequences of low-level joint actions. Composing this policy with the frozen world model produces a lifted world model that predicts a sequence of future observations from a single high-level action. We instantiate this framework for a human-like embodiment, defining the high-level action space as a small set of 2D waypoints annotated on the current observation frame, each specifying a near-term goal position for a leaf joint (pelvis, head, hands). Waypoints are low-dimensional, visually interpretable, and easy to specify manually or to search over. We show that the lifted world model substantially outperforms searching directly in low-level joint space (3.8times lower mean joint error to the goal pose), while remaining more compute-efficient and generalizing to environments unseen by the policy.

Chunked vision-language-action (VLA) policies predict multi-step robot controls, conditioning each update on the current visual observation alone. Yet robot actions cause contact, occlusion, and object motion, and the geometry that later decisions depend on can change before the next visual update arrives. Spatial VLAs improve current-frame geometry. Temporal VLAs aggregate past frames. Neither maintains an action-updated scene prior across chunks. We argue for a persistent action-updated scene state across control calls, and introduce EvoScene-VLA. Its recurrent scene prefix carries a geometry-aware scene state across chunks. At each vision-language model (VLM) call, the VLM combines scene information from the current observation with the action-updated prior from the previous chunk; the action decoder outputs both the next action chunk and a compact scene update. This update becomes the next prior, which the VLM corrects against the new observation when the next call arrives. Each control call therefore starts from a scene prior that reflects both recent actions and fresh visual evidence. During training, Scene Predictor supplies future scene-token targets, and Geometric Anchor aligns scene slots with frozen depth and 3D teachers. We discard both modules at deployment. On 31 RoboTwin tasks, EvoScene-VLA raises average success from 87.2% to 89.1% in fixed evaluation and from 86.1% to 88.5% in randomized evaluation. On the Galaxea R1-Lite real robot, EvoScene-VLA outperforms all baselines.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can integrate long visual histories, reason under partial observability, and infer behavior from a few examples. Yet vision-language-action (VLA) models generally inherit pretrained representations without using this contextual capacity as episode memory. Memory-dependent policies address this gap through purpose-built history mechanisms. PonderPounce instead reuses an MLLM's native causal context as robot memory. Ponder, a System2 MLLM, accumulates episode observations, demonstrations, and prior cognition in its native causal context and can generate subgoal text and demonstration reasoning for internal use. Pounce, a System1 VLA, receives the current observation, instruction, and proprioception directly; through the Ponder--Pounce interface, it asynchronously receives only the newest continuous cognition token and its age. Both are jointly trained end to end without a purpose-built memory module or separate bridge pretraining. Optimized serving achieves p50 latencies of 78ms for cognition refresh and 25ms for action-model invocation, supporting 20Hz action playback. On RoboMME with base-scale training data, PonderPounce reaches 60.83% with 9B and 50.04% with 0.8B under the same Pounce architecture and interface, versus 44.51% for FrameSamp+Modul and 17.93% for the current-observation π_{0.5}. With 9x data, it reaches 75.54% versus 57.88% for FrameSamp+Modul. On RoboCasa-DC, the same interface learns from action supervision alone and reaches 12.5% versus 11.6% for the strongest published demonstration-conditioned baseline, falling to 8.6% when cognition is replaced by a learned null state.

Pretrained generative Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) capture rich pixel-level visual and language-conditioned structure through large-scale image and video generation training. A growing line of robot policies builds on this generative prior, but how it should be transferred to control remains unclear, and existing approaches commonly instantiate this transfer through future visual prediction. We ask a more basic question: what a pretrained generative DiT actually contributes to action learning, and how this prior should be adapted for control. We introduce NowWAM, a future-target-free co-training formulation that denoises the current observation and predicts robot actions from the same visual stream, directly coupling the native generative objective to the action-facing representation across the denoising trajectory. Under matched controlled settings, past and future visual targets perform comparably, while restricting training to the clean endpoint substantially reduces robustness, suggesting that a separate future target is not essential for generative adaptation, while the denoising trajectory remains an effective interface for control. On LIBERO-Plus, NowWAM reaches 87.7% with FLUX2-Klein, improving over the future-target co-training baseline by 6.1 points while halving training visual tokens (784 to 392) and reducing step time from 2.85 s to 1.63 s, a 1.8x speedup. With the pure text-to-image Z-Image backbone, NowWAM further reaches 87.8%, showing that strong control adaptation is not tied to video generation or image-editing backbones.

Frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can control robots without robot-specific training, but how their capabilities compare and interact with post-trained vision-language-action (VLA) and world action model (WAM) policies across manipulation demands remains to be thoroughly evaluated. In this report, we evaluate GPT-6-Astra on EBench as the core of an agent that controls a robot through an agent harness under the same visual and proprioceptive observation protocol as post-trained policies. We study two agent configurations: direct control, in which the agent generates waypoint commands directly, and harness with policy, in which it can also invoke a post-trained VLA or WAM policy for action execution. Under direct control, the agent achieves competitive overall performance relative to post-trained policies. It leads on short-horizon tasks and exhibits the least performance variation across generalization dimensions, whereas it underperforms post-trained policies on long-horizon tasks, tabletop manipulation, and high-precision contact-rich tasks. In the harness with policy, invoking a post-trained VLA or WAM combines the complementary strengths of both components, raising overall task success to the level of the strongest compared post-trained policies while substantially reducing token cost. However, performance remains below the per-task upper bound of the standalone components due to suboptimal policy invocation, fixed-instruction execution without subgoals, and grasp disruption when the agent resumes control. Overall, our study characterizes the capability boundary of a frontier MLLM agent and suggests directions for improving future agent harness design. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/EBench-Astra-Tech-Report/

Building an agent that can mimic human behavior patterns to accomplish various open-world tasks is a long-term goal. To enable agents to effectively learn behavioral patterns across diverse tasks, a key challenge lies in modeling the intricate relationships among observations, actions, and language. To this end, we propose Optimus-2, a novel Minecraft agent that incorporates a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for high-level planning, alongside a Goal-Observation-Action Conditioned Policy (GOAP) for low-level control. GOAP contains (1) an Action-guided Behavior Encoder that models causal relationships between observations and actions at each timestep, then dynamically interacts with the historical observation-action sequence, consolidating it into fixed-length behavior tokens, and (2) an MLLM that aligns behavior tokens with open-ended language instructions to predict actions auto-regressively. Moreover, we introduce a high-quality Minecraft Goal-Observation-Action (MGOA)} dataset, which contains 25,000 videos across 8 atomic tasks, providing about 30M goal-observation-action pairs. The automated construction method, along with the MGOA dataset, can contribute to the community's efforts to train Minecraft agents. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Optimus-2 exhibits superior performance across atomic tasks, long-horizon tasks, and open-ended instruction tasks in Minecraft. Please see the project page at https://cybertronagent.github.io/Optimus-2.github.io/.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language-driven perception and control. However, the high computational cost of VLA models poses significant efficiency challenges, particularly for resource-constrained edge platforms in real-world deployments. However, since different stages of VLA (observation, action generation and execution) must proceed sequentially, and wait for the completion of the preceding stage, the system suffers from frequent halting and high latency. To address this, We conduct a systematic analysis to identify the challenges for fast and fluent generation, and propose enabling VLAs with the ability to asynchronously parallelize across VLA stages in a "streaming" manner. First, we eliminate the reliance on action chunking and adopt action flow matching, which learns the trajectory of action flows rather than denoising chunk-wise actions. It overlaps the latency of action generation and execution. Second, we design an action saliency-aware adaptive observation mechanism, thereby overlapping the latency of execution and observation. Without sacrificing performance, StreamingVLA achieves substantial speedup and improves the fluency of execution. It achieves a 2.4 times latency speedup and reduces execution halting by 6.5 times.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in active flow control (AFC), yet progress in the field remains difficult to assess as existing studies rely on heterogeneous observation and actuation schemes, numerical setups, and evaluation protocols. Current AFC benchmarks attempt to address these issues but heavily rely on external computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers, are not fully differentiable, and provide limited 3D and multi-agent support. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FluidGym, the first standalone, fully differentiable benchmark suite for RL in AFC. Built entirely in PyTorch on top of the GPU-accelerated PICT solver, FluidGym runs in a single Python stack, requires no external CFD software, and provides standardized evaluation protocols. We present baseline results with PPO and SAC and release all environments, datasets, and trained models as public resources. FluidGym enables systematic comparison of control methods, establishes a scalable foundation for future research in learning-based flow control, and is available at https://github.com/safe-autonomous-systems/fluidgym.

World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning. However, existing world-action models couple world prediction and action execution at the same temporal resolution, forcing the world branch to model near-term frame variations that are redundant and weakly informative. We posit that strictly binding world prediction and action execution to the same temporal rhythm may underutilize the potential of the video branch for embodied control. Therefore, we propose AHA-WAM, an Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Model built on a dual Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that reorganizes world-action modeling around this temporal asymmetry. AHA-WAM instantiates the video DiT as a low-frequency world planner that maintains rolling key-value memory over past observations and exposes reusable layerwise latent context encoding long-horizon scene evolution, while a high-frequency action DiT executes short action chunks in closed loop by querying this context through layerwise joint attention. To support asynchronous execution, we introduce horizon-adaptive offset training and Observation-Guided Video-Context Routing (OVCR), which together let the action expert exploit long-horizon world context while remaining responsive to real-time execution state without rerunning the video DiT. Experiments on RoboTwin and real-world manipulation tasks show that AHA-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance without any robot-data pretraining, attaining 92.80% average success on RoboTwin and 78.3% success across 4 real-world tasks, while reaching 24.17 Hz closed-loop control with a 4.59x speedup over Fast-WAM.

Robotic simulators are a cornerstone of modern research in aerial robotics, serving both as a vehicle for the development of new control algorithms and as the data source for training reinforcement learning (RL) policies. Yet, existing quadcopter learning environments often face a trade-off between physical fidelity, multi-agent support, and the throughput required by modern deep RL pipelines. In this paper, we present MuJoCo-Drones-Gym, an open-source Gymnasium-compatible multi-drone environment built on top of the MuJoCo physics engine. MuJoCo-Drones-Gym supports an arbitrary number of Bitcraze Crazyflie 2.x nano-quadcopters and exposes a modular API for selecting (i)~the physics model (rigid-body MuJoCo, explicit Python dynamics, or any subset of ground effect, blade drag, and inter-drone downwash), (ii)~the action interface (per-motor RPMs, collective normalized thrust, velocity setpoints, or PID waypoint commands), and (iii)~the observation space (kinematic state vectors, RGB / depth / segmentation cameras, or neighbourhood adjacency information). A PettingZoo ParallelEnv wrapper enables drop-in multi-agent reinforcement learning, while a suite of seven task environments, hover, velocity tracking, multi-drone hover, waypoint navigation, formation flight, gate racing, and a generic multi-agent template, demonstrates the breadth of the interface. We describe the environment design, the underlying physics and quadcopter dynamics, and illustrate its use through control and learning examples that mirror those of the closely related gym-pybullet-drones project, while taking advantage of MuJoCo's improved contact handling, rendering, and parallelizability.

LLM-agent services repeatedly execute small deterministic transitions between model and tool calls: route an outcome, update state, and emit the next effect. We ask when this control path exposes enough concurrent work for GPU execution, and what changes when a GPU-computed route decision remains on device. We formalize the ready-cohort boundary using fixed-partition share F, exact offline share P*, local upper bound U, and online achieved share A. Under zero service time, unlimited capacity, and equal relative launch deadlines, a specialized dynamic program computes P* exactly. In a stationary Poisson replay of one pinned 851-session public trace panel, the primary condition at 100,000 target active sessions, K=256, and a 50 ms launch deadline gives F=30.19%, P*=43.00%, and U=45.85%. Exact packing recovers 81.83% of the opportunity lost at fixed window boundaries. The outcome-derived route key is a conditioning proxy, not proof of executable identity. A separate mechanism study keeps a GPU-computed binary decision on device instead of returning four bytes to the host and redispatching. Across four named GPU placements, the device-resident path is faster in all 36 configurations; within-placement row-median ratios range from 1.19x to 2.39x. Across both admissible mechanisms, all 14,557,440 tested batched invocations match a separately implemented host oracle. A fixed nested device graph that removes no host decision is slower in all 60 configurations across five placements. Together, the studies establish two measurable gates for GPU agent control: deadline-feasible cohort supply and observation placement. A joined finite online runtime is required to measure A, CPU displacement, and service-level benefit.

While improving prediction accuracy has been the focus of machine learning in recent years, this alone does not suffice for reliable decision-making. Deploying learning systems in consequential settings also requires calibrating and communicating the uncertainty of predictions. To convey instance-wise uncertainty for prediction tasks, we show how to generate set-valued predictions from a black-box predictor that control the expected loss on future test points at a user-specified level. Our approach provides explicit finite-sample guarantees for any dataset by using a holdout set to calibrate the size of the prediction sets. This framework enables simple, distribution-free, rigorous error control for many tasks, and we demonstrate it in five large-scale machine learning problems: (1) classification problems where some mistakes are more costly than others; (2) multi-label classification, where each observation has multiple associated labels; (3) classification problems where the labels have a hierarchical structure; (4) image segmentation, where we wish to predict a set of pixels containing an object of interest; and (5) protein structure prediction. Lastly, we discuss extensions to uncertainty quantification for ranking, metric learning and distributionally robust learning.

Action chunking---predicting and executing multiple actions instead of a single action---has proven to be a critical component for learning effective robotic control policies. However, our precise understanding of why action chunking improves performance has remained limited. In this work we seek to close this gap. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in both simulated and real-world settings, we show that existing hypotheses for the success of action chunking---temporal consistency, horizon reduction, and representation learning---fail to explain the success of action chunking. Instead, we find that action chunking benefits from greater non-Markovian expressivity and reduced compounding error compared to Markovian policies, but, in many settings of interest, these effects can be fully captured by delayed policies, which at each step predict a single action based on the observation k steps in the past. We then show that there exists an additional benefit of action chunking that we refer to as implicit ensembling. In particular, by learning a diversity of temporal relationships (that is, a_t | o_t, a_t | o_{t-1}, ldots), action-chunked policies exhibit behavior matching that of a model ensemble, increasing their robustness and generalization ability over policies that only learn a single temporal relationship. Building on these insights, we show that in simulated and real-world robotic control settings, we can match the performance of action chunking without action chunking---by deploying an action chunking policy as an ensemble of policies with randomized delays. Furthermore, we propose a policy class that amplifies the benefits of action chunking by explicitly instantiating an ensemble, and which we show significantly improves over the performance of action chunking in many domains.

Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. While some preprocessed Earth observation datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. In this work, we introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label Earth observation dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery and auxiliary data describing terrain properties such as land use. M3LEO spans approximately 17M 4x4 km data chips from six diverse geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework configured using Hydra to accommodate its use across diverse ML applications in Earth observation. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for seamless integration with our framework. We show that the distribution shift in self-supervised embeddings is substantial across geographic regions, even when controlling for terrain properties. Data: huggingface.co/M3LEO, Code: github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.

Unified humanoid policies handle agile whole-body motion, yet stumble on a simple demand: staying balanced on one leg. On our single-leg-balance benchmark, eight released state-of-the-art general policies hold a clean single-leg stance on 0 of 90 test motions; they stay up only by stepping or hopping, recovering from imbalance rather than preventing it. Prevention needs the capture point (xCoM), the center of mass (CoM) extrapolated by its velocity, which has never driven a hardware policy because it requires a base linear velocity no on-board sensor provides; expressed relative to the support foot, that velocity cancels exactly, leaving an observation reconstructible from encoders and IMU alone. We put this first deployable dynamic-CoM observation directly into the actor that runs on hardware, and pair it with a reward library translated term by term from human postural control, under one principle: prevention over repair. Trained by asymmetric FastSAC with a privileged critic and no distillation, the resulting policy, FDDC (First Deployable Dynamic-CoM), holds clean single-leg balance on 86 of 90 held-out motions across nine stratified pose classes and transfers to a real Unitree G1; in ablation, the dynamic-CoM observation is the single largest driver: removing it alone costs 40 points of clean single-leg balance. We release the full stack with the first method-agnostic, reproducible sim2sim benchmark for humanoid single-leg balance, scoring each policy in a simulator distinct from its training one, a step toward turning balance from a per-task trick into a capability the field can measure.

Pixel-wise Earth-observation (EO) foundation models are now achieving state-of-the-art performance via generated spatial embeddings. However, how these models scale and how best to spend a pretraining budget remain poorly understood. We present the largest controlled scaling study for EO to date: 395 training runs on 1,024 GH200 superchips within a fixed pixel-wise Barlow Twins family, each evaluated on 15 downstream tasks. We find that pretraining loss barely predicts downstream performance (|Pearson r| < 0.2), so selecting models by loss wastes a large share of the compute. We also find that, as the training budget grows, the encoder and the data should grow together while the projector stays fixed, which gives a simple rule for allocating compute. Using this rule, we train a family of pixel-wise models (0.5B and 1B, with a 2B model in training) and distill them into compact students for embeddings-as-data deployment. The 21-million-parameter distilled TESSERA v2-1B-M in aggregate outperforms all open and proprietary models tested, some of which are orders of magnitude larger. These students produce Matryoshka representations that are inexpensive to serve: a 16-dimensional prefix keeps 92% of the full 128-dimensional performance at 1/8 of the storage. Upon completion of training we plan to release v2 global embeddings covering 2017-2025. Together, these results give a concrete, empirically grounded recipe for scaling pixel-wise EO foundation models: train large encoders, select by downstream performance, and distil into flexible student models. All code will be released at https://github.com/ucam-eo/tessera.

The primary axes of interest in image-generating diffusion models are image quality, the amount of variation in the results, and how well the results align with a given condition, e.g., a class label or a text prompt. The popular classifier-free guidance approach uses an unconditional model to guide a conditional model, leading to simultaneously better prompt alignment and higher-quality images at the cost of reduced variation. These effects seem inherently entangled, and thus hard to control. We make the surprising observation that it is possible to obtain disentangled control over image quality without compromising the amount of variation by guiding generation using a smaller, less-trained version of the model itself rather than an unconditional model. This leads to significant improvements in ImageNet generation, setting record FIDs of 1.01 for 64x64 and 1.25 for 512x512, using publicly available networks. Furthermore, the method is also applicable to unconditional diffusion models, drastically improving their quality.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating detailed chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, these responses are often excessively long, containing redundant reasoning steps that inflate inference cost and reduce usability. Controlling the length of generated reasoning without sacrificing accuracy remains an open challenge. Through a systematic empirical analysis, we reveal a consistent positive correlation between model entropy and response length at different reasoning stages across diverse LRMs: the thinking phase exhibits higher entropy, reflecting exploratory behavior of longer responses, while the final answer phase shows lower entropy, indicating a more deterministic solution. This observation suggests that entropy at different reasoning stages can serve as a control knob for balancing conciseness and performance. Based on this insight, this paper introduces Phase Entropy Aware Reward (PEAR), a reward mechanism that incorporating phase-dependent entropy into the reward design. Instead of treating all tokens uniformly, PEAR penalize excessive entropy during the thinking phase and allowing moderate exploration at the final answer phase, which encourages models to generate concise reasoning traces that retain sufficient flexibility to solve the task correctly. This enables adaptive control of response length without relying on explicit length targets or rigid truncation rules. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that PEAR consistently reduces response length while sustaining competitive accuracy across model scales. In addition, PEAR demonstrates strong out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness beyond the training distribution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/PEAR.

Most reported gains from agent-optimization methods are one-shot: an agent is optimized against a fixed benchmark and the resulting improvement is reported as if it were a stable property of the method. This does not test the setting that matters for deployed agents, where optimization is applied recursively as new failures and new tasks appear over time. The central question this raises is whether optimizer-driven gains compound: after an agent has been optimized once, can it be optimized again on newly arrived tasks without eroding the gains the first round produced? We study this question with a two-phase continual-learning evaluation built from hard tasks in Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparing three approaches to agent-harness optimization (GEPA, Meta Harness, and RELAI's Verifiable Continual Learning, RELAI-VCL) under identical optimization budgets. All three methods improve over the baseline agent in the conventional, static, single-phase setting. However, once new tasks are introduced, the methods diverge sharply: GEPA's optimized agent transfers below the unoptimized baseline, Meta Harness transfers well but fails to improve further once given a second optimization budget, and RELAI-VCL is the only method that both transfers positively to unseen tasks and continues improving after those tasks are folded into the optimization objective, reaching the highest pass rate at every evaluated stage and the highest lifelong average pass rate overall (76.4% vs. 66.0% for GEPA, 64.6% for Meta Harness, and 58.7% for the baseline). Our key observation was that optimization gains compounded only when regression control was built into the optimization loop, providing an inductive bias against shortcut solutions that fail to generalize.

World action models integrate future visual dynamics with robot action prediction, but their scalability remains limited by the need for action-annotated robot trajectories. Observation-only videos contain rich evidence about interaction dynamics, but existing approaches typically use them either to pretrain visual representations that must later be adapted for control, or to infer latent actions that are subsequently grounded to robot commands. We present NAVA-WAM, which introduces native action-prior learning by directly pretraining the action policy from observation-only videos, avoiding indirect representation-to-control transfer or a separate latent-action model. Our training consists of two stages. First, we pretrain on observation-only videos, where future-video flow-matching supervision over visual transitions is propagated through transition-structured joint attention to optimize the Action-DiT and learn action-relevant priors. Second, we use action-labeled demonstrations to post-train the Action-DiT for robot control through joint video--action flow matching, while asymmetric attention decouples the visual branch from iterative action denoising and enables efficient action-only inference. Extensive experiments show that NAVA-WAM consistently outperforms prior approaches under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, while demonstrating strong action-label efficiency and effective real-robot generalization. These results establish native action-prior learning as an effective approach to directly pretrain action policies from observation-only videos, providing a scalable path beyond action-labeled robot data.

Astra can act, yet reliable manipulation depends on the system through which it observes and controls the world. We introduce PhysEvo, a framework for physical recursive self-improvement (RSI) around a single frozen model. A task agent executes robot tasks; a meta-agent uses the resulting trajectories to diagnose failures, revise tools and skills, and test corrections. The meta-agent can also improve its own diagnostic tools, so retained revisions support both later action and later self-improvement. This process develops joint-level control, evidence-seeking observation, and reusable manipulation skills without model-weight updates or a separately trained action policy. Across 42 RoboDojo tasks, held-out-layout evaluation of retained task-specific deployment versions yields a five-dimension average score of 68.14/100 and 62.00% success, compared with 47.17% for RoboDawn's one-shot Astra agent, the strongest published reference in our comparison. On eight manipulation tasks challenging direct Astra, PhysEvo achieves 55.00% success, compared with 1.25% for the direct-Astra reference. Deploying the simulation-evolved harness on AgileX PiPER and continuing skill revision yields 90.60/100 average score and 84.00% success across 25 trials on five real-world tasks. PhysEvo turns the consequences of action into persistent, testable changes to how a frozen model acts and improves.

Robot policies often convert sensing and control into fixed-rate observation-action sequences, leaving physical time implicit in sequence position. This assumption breaks when observation rates or delays vary, or when inference latency changes. We introduce Chronos Policy, which makes physical time explicit by conditioning on observation capture times and desired action execution times. We study two ways to incorporate time into a diffusion transformer: adding timestamp embeddings to token features, or encoding physical time in positional encoding through time-aware rotary positional encodings (time-aware RoPE). We find that time-aware RoPE is more robust, allowing attention to depend directly on physical time while keeping token content unchanged. During training, we temporally randomize which observations are sampled and when the action chunk begins, exposing the policy to a wider range of sensing and execution schedules that may occur during deployments. This also enables learning from asynchronous, multi-rate data without forcing all measurements onto a fixed temporal grid. Across simulation and real-world experiments, Chronos Policy improves performance on dynamic tasks, where observation-to-action timing is critical, and on multisensory tasks, where the relative timing between observations matters. On standard quasi-static tasks, it preserves nominal performance while improving robustness to changes in sensing and inference timing.

General-purpose robot policies should be modeled as dynamical systems, yet many VLA and generative imitation policies still rely on present observations or short windows. This Markovian shortcut fails in memory-dependent manipulation: identical observations can demand different actions after different histories. We present Chronos, a physics-informed full-history framework for non-Markovian long-horizon manipulation. The key idea is to elevate observation history from auxiliary context to the latent state of the policy dynamics. At each physical control step, Chronos forms one state-representative token by fusing observation and proprioception, so the token sequence is aligned one-to-one with physical time. A selective state space model propagates this causal historical state, which conditions a multimodal coarse action prior through implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE). This prior is then refined by a second-order Schrodinger-inspired bridge that predicts acceleration fields, yielding smoother and more physically grounded robot motion. Across 16 simulated tasks and 4 real-world experiments, Chronos is evaluated on precision insertion, general manipulation, and memory-dependent long-horizon control. On RMBench, where success requires remembering task phase, Chronos achieves 73.6% average success, outperforming Markovian VLA baseline pi0.5 by +62.4 percentage points, a 6.6x relative gain, while using 10x fewer parameters. It also surpasses the memory VLA Mem-0 by 22.8 points while using over 30x fewer parameters. In real-world dual-arm experiments using a single RGB camera, Chronos achieves 78% average success over four tasks, including 72% on the three memory-dependent tasks, whereas pi0.5 achieves 7% overall and 0% on the memory-dependent subset. These results suggest that history should not be treated as auxiliary context, but as the latent state of the manipulation policy.

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models are highly effective for generalist robot manipulation, yet their reliance on computationally expensive VLM encoding and multi-step iterative action generation imposes a significant latency bottleneck. The resulting inference latency makes it difficult for robots to respond quickly, especially in dynamic environments. We address this limitation with RAVEL (Rolling Asynchronous VLA Enabling Low-Latency Control), an asynchronous inference framework that addresses the computational bottlenecks of both the VLM backbone and the action expert. To reduce the delay from multi-step action denoising, RAVEL allows near-term actions to be executed after a single denoising step by carrying partially denoised future actions forward in a rolling buffer. To avoid blocking on slow VLM encoding, RAVEL decouples VLM encoding from rolling action generation, allowing the action expert to operate continuously using the latest available VLM context, while a lightweight Fast Observation Pathway (FOP) directly conditions the action expert on current observations. Across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, RAVEL consistently achieves substantially lower response latency while maintaining the task capability of the underlying VLA, enabling high-frequency and responsive closed-loop control.

Endowing robot policies with anticipatory capabilities has proven effective in improving control performance. However, existing methods predominantly rely on explicit supervision derived from future observations, in either pixel or latent space, at the cost of additional architectural and computational complexity. Departing from explicit future supervision, we ask whether such foresight can be elicited directly from the action signal. To this end, we propose AdaPolicy, an Action-driven anticipatory policy framework that shapes future-aware representations via cascaded next-chunk prediction. Specifically, an Online Action Head jointly produces the current action chunk and an evolved latent state. Building on this state, a cascaded Unrolled Action Head forecasts the next chunk, and the resulting loss flows back through the evolved state to instill implicit foresight into the online policy. Importantly, this training-only unroll requires no future-observation encoding, keeping AdaPolicy lightweight to train with zero inference-time overhead. Experiments on MetaWorld, RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO, and real-world deployments demonstrate consistent gains across diverse settings, including up to 14 percentage points on millimeter-precision tasks such as earphone assembly and shoelace threading. More details and visualizations are available at https://teee111.github.io/AdaPolicy/{https://teee111.github.io/AdaPolicy/}.

This paper documents our characterization study and practices for serving text-to-image requests with stable diffusion models in production. We first comprehensively analyze inference request traces for commercial text-to-image applications. It commences with our observation that add-on modules, i.e., ControlNets and LoRAs, that augment the base stable diffusion models, are ubiquitous in generating images for commercial applications. Despite their efficacy, these add-on modules incur high loading overhead, prolong the serving latency, and swallow up expensive GPU resources. Driven by our characterization study, we present SwiftDiffusion, a system that efficiently generates high-quality images using stable diffusion models and add-on modules. To achieve this, SwiftDiffusion reconstructs the existing text-to-image serving workflow by identifying the opportunities for parallel computation and distributing ControlNet computations across multiple GPUs. Further, SwiftDiffusion thoroughly analyzes the dynamics of image generation and develops techniques to eliminate the overhead associated with LoRA loading and patching while preserving the image quality. Last, SwiftDiffusion proposes specialized optimizations in the backbone architecture of the stable diffusion models, which are also compatible with the efficient serving of add-on modules. Compared to state-of-the-art text-to-image serving systems, SwiftDiffusion reduces serving latency by up to 5x and improves serving throughput by up to 2x without compromising image quality.

Video generation has been used to generate visual plans for controlling robotic systems. Given an image observation and a language instruction, previous work has generated video plans which are then converted to robot controls to be executed. However, a major bottleneck in leveraging video generation for control lies in the quality of the generated videos, which often suffer from hallucinatory content and unrealistic physics, resulting in low task success when control actions are extracted from the generated videos. While scaling up dataset and model size provides a partial solution, integrating external feedback is both natural and essential for grounding video generation in the real world. With this observation, we propose VideoAgent for self-improving generated video plans based on external feedback. Instead of directly executing the generated video plan, VideoAgent first refines the generated video plans using a novel procedure which we call self-conditioning consistency, allowing inference-time compute to be turned into better generated video plans. As the refined video plan is being executed, VideoAgent can collect additional data from the environment to further improve video plan generation. Experiments in simulated robotic manipulation from MetaWorld and iTHOR show that VideoAgent drastically reduces hallucination, thereby boosting success rate of downstream manipulation tasks. We further illustrate that VideoAgent can effectively refine real-robot videos, providing an early indicator that robots can be an effective tool in grounding video generation in the physical world. Video demos and code can be found at https://video-as-agent.github.io.

Modern deep-learning super-resolution (SR) techniques process images and videos independently of the underlying content and viewing conditions. However, the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) to image details changes depending on the underlying image characteristics, such as spatial frequency, luminance, color, contrast, or motion; as well viewing condition aspects such as ambient lighting and distance to the display. This observation suggests that computational resources spent on up-sampling images/videos may be wasted whenever a viewer cannot resolve the synthesized details i.e the resolution of details exceeds the resolving capability of human vision. Motivated by this observation, we propose a human vision inspired and architecture-agnostic approach for controlling SR techniques to deliver visually optimal results while limiting computational complexity. Its core is an explicit Human Visual Processing Framework (HVPF) that dynamically and locally guides SR methods according to human sensitivity to specific image details and viewing conditions. We demonstrate the application of our framework in combination with network branching to improve the computational efficiency of SR methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing FLOPS by factors of 2times and greater, without sacrificing perceived quality.

We present CadLLM, a training-free method to accelerate the inference throughput of diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs). We first investigate the dynamic nature of token unmasking confidence across blocks and steps. Based on this observation, we present a lightweight adaptive approach that controls the generation block size, step size, and threshold based on the average confidence of unmasked tokens. We further reduce softmax overhead by dynamically leveraging a subset of the vocabulary to regulate sampling breadth. CadLLM is a plug-and-play, model-agnostic method compatible with KV-cache-based dLLMs. Extensive experiments on four popular tasks demonstrate that CadLLM yields up to 2.28x throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline with competitive accuracy.

Scaling test-time compute with multi-path chain-of-thought improves reasoning accuracy, but its effectiveness depends critically on the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing approaches address this trade-off in rigid ways: tree-structured search hard-codes exploration through brittle expansion rules that interfere with post-trained reasoning, while parallel reasoning over-explores redundant hypothesis paths and relies on weak answer selection. Motivated by the observation that the optimal balance is phase-dependent and that correct and incorrect reasoning paths often diverge only at late stages, we reformulate test-time scaling as a dynamic expand-reduce control problem over a pool of hypotheses. We propose HyPER, a training-free online control policy for multi-path decoding in mixture-of-experts models that reallocates computation under a fixed budget using lightweight path statistics. HyPER consists of an online controller that transitions from exploration to exploitation as the hypothesis pool evolves, a token-level refinement mechanism that enables efficient generation-time exploitation without full-path resampling, and a length- and confidence-aware aggregation strategy for reliable answer-time exploitation. Experiments on four mixture-of-experts language models across diverse reasoning benchmarks show that HyPER consistently achieves a superior accuracy-compute trade-off, improving accuracy by 8 to 10 percent while reducing token usage by 25 to 40 percent.

Interactive game world models typically autoregress visual observations directly in pixel or latent space, forcing structured properties such as pose, geometry, and occlusion to be implicitly maintained by the same generative sequence. Over long horizons, errors in these latent world properties accumulate, making consistency and controllability fragile. We explicitly model the evolving world state, delegate exact geometric computation to a fixed, zero-parameter renderer, and leave the neural model to synthesize appearance. We instantiate this idea as Marionette, a world model for interactive games with articulated characters. First, a two-stage autoregressive dynamics model predicts an explicit and interpretable 276-dimensional 3D world state comprising multi-entity articulated skeletons, metric root trajectories, and rotations. Second, a zero-parameter graphics bridge converts the predicted state into pose-control videos, computing world-space geometry and occlusion in closed form. Third, a control-conditioned video-diffusion observation model synthesizes photorealistic RGB observations from the resulting structured controls. Our experiments establish two properties of Marionette. First, the predicted world state is directly controllable. Forcing a mismatched action stream changes root-aligned joint error by 31% across 48 held-out segments. Second, long-horizon behaviour is determined in the state, and can be repaired there. Left free, the two generated characters drift to 21.2 m apart (recorded sessions stay near 5 m) and a third of frames show ground penetration. Two rules imposed on the explicit state, a terrain collider and a separation cap, cut penetration by 66% and keep the pair engaged, with no change to the observation model. Routing appearance through the predicted state costs no fidelity we can detect, at an FVD of 831 against 799 for recorded pose.

Neural speech codecs face a fundamental tension in the language-model era: tokens that support high-fidelity reconstruction are not necessarily easy for autoregressive models to predict. Our controlled analysis of diverse codec and self-supervised speech representations shows that clearer phoneme structure before discrete code assignment is consistently associated with easier autoregressive token prediction. Yet phoneme structure alone is insufficient for high-fidelity reconstruction, which also requires reconstruction-relevant acoustic detail. Guided by this observation, we introduce ReLMCodec, a low-bitrate single-codebook speech codec built upon a preserve--control--refine principle: it preserves the linguistic organization of frozen self-supervised learning (SSL) features at the quantizer input, controls reconstruction-driven drift through Pre-quantization Anchor-Preserving Adaptation (PAPA), and refines the quantized latent space with a training-only WavLM-Large L24 teacher to reduce phoneme-level token fragmentation. Together, these components allow acoustic detail to support waveform reconstruction while keeping the resulting token sequence predictable for autoregressive models. At 650 and 800 bps, ReLMCodec moves the empirical single-stream predictability--reconstruction frontier in our evaluations, with gains that carry over to downstream text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis in both intelligibility and speaker similarity.

Deep generative models (DGMs) have been widely developed for graph data. However, much less investigation has been carried out on understanding the latent space of such pretrained graph DGMs. These understandings possess the potential to provide constructive guidelines for crucial tasks, such as graph controllable generation. Thus in this work, we are interested in studying this problem and propose GraphCG, a method for the unsupervised discovery of steerable factors in the latent space of pretrained graph DGMs. We first examine the representation space of three pretrained graph DGMs with six disentanglement metrics, and we observe that the pretrained representation space is entangled. Motivated by this observation, GraphCG learns the steerable factors via maximizing the mutual information between semantic-rich directions, where the controlled graph moving along the same direction will share the same steerable factors. We quantitatively verify that GraphCG outperforms four competitive baselines on two graph DGMs pretrained on two molecule datasets. Additionally, we qualitatively illustrate seven steerable factors learned by GraphCG on five pretrained DGMs over five graph datasets, including two for molecules and three for point clouds.

Chain-of-Thought significantly enhances a model's reasoning capability, but it also comes with a considerable increase in inference costs due to long chains. With the observation that the reasoning path can be easily compressed under easy tasks but struggle on hard tasks, we explore the feasibility of elastically controlling the length of reasoning paths with only one model, thereby reducing the inference overhead of reasoning models dynamically based on task difficulty. We introduce a new tuning and inference strategy named CoT-Valve, designed to allow models to generate reasoning chains of varying lengths. To achieve this, we propose to identify a direction in the parameter space that, when manipulated, can effectively control the length of generated CoT. Moreover, we show that this property is valuable for compressing the reasoning chain. We construct datasets with chains from long to short for the same questions and explore two enhanced strategies for CoT-Valve: (1) a precise length-compressible CoT tuning method, and (2) a progressive chain length compression approach. Our experiments show that CoT-Valve successfully enables controllability and compressibility of the chain and shows better performance than the prompt-based control. We applied this method to QwQ-32B-Preview, reducing reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer.

We study building embodied agents for open-ended creative tasks. While existing methods build instruction-following agents that can perform diverse open-ended tasks, none of them demonstrates creativity -- the ability to give novel and diverse task solutions implicit in the language instructions. This limitation comes from their inability to convert abstract language instructions into concrete task goals in the environment and perform long-horizon planning for such complicated goals. Given the observation that humans perform creative tasks with the help of imagination, we propose a class of solutions for creative agents, where the controller is enhanced with an imaginator that generates detailed imaginations of task outcomes conditioned on language instructions. We introduce several approaches to implementing the components of creative agents. We implement the imaginator with either a large language model for textual imagination or a diffusion model for visual imagination. The controller can either be a behavior-cloning policy learned from data or a pre-trained foundation model generating executable codes in the environment. We benchmark creative tasks with the challenging open-world game Minecraft, where the agents are asked to create diverse buildings given free-form language instructions. In addition, we propose novel evaluation metrics for open-ended creative tasks utilizing GPT-4V, which holds many advantages over existing metrics. We perform a detailed experimental analysis of creative agents, showing that creative agents are the first AI agents accomplishing diverse building creation in the survival mode of Minecraft. Our benchmark and models are open-source for future research on creative agents (https://github.com/PKU-RL/Creative-Agents).

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). Prior research indicates that RL effectively internalizes search strategies, enabling long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, with backtracking emerging naturally as a learned capability. However, the precise benefits of backtracking, specifically, how significantly it contributes to reasoning improvements and the optimal extent of its use, remain poorly understood. In this work, we systematically investigate the dynamics between SFT and RL on eight reasoning tasks: Countdown, Sudoku, Arc 1D, Geometry, Color Cube Rotation, List Functions, Zebra Puzzles, and Self Reference. Our findings highlight that short CoT sequences used in SFT as a warm-up do have moderate contribution to RL training, compared with cold-start RL; however such contribution diminishes when tasks become increasingly difficult. Motivated by this observation, we construct synthetic datasets varying systematically in the number of backtracking steps and conduct controlled experiments to isolate the influence of either the correctness (content) or the structure (i.e., backtrack frequency). We find that (1) longer CoT with backtracks generally induce better and more stable RL training, (2) more challenging problems with larger search space tend to need higher numbers of backtracks during the SFT stage. Additionally, we demonstrate through experiments on distilled data that RL training is largely unaffected by the correctness of long CoT sequences, suggesting that RL prioritizes structural patterns over content correctness. Collectively, our results offer practical insights into designing optimal training strategies to effectively scale reasoning in LLMs.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) enhances the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation during inference. However, existing approaches primarily rely on output-level sampling while overlooking the role of model architecture. In mainstream Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs, we observe that varying the number of activated experts yields complementary solution sets with stable accuracy, revealing a new and underexplored source of diversity. Motivated by this observation, we propose Dynamic Experts Search (DES), a TTS strategy that elevates expert activation into a controllable dimension of the search space. DES integrates two key components: (1) Dynamic MoE, which enables direct control of expert counts during inference to generate diverse reasoning trajectories without additional cost; and (2) Expert Configuration Inheritance, which preserves consistent expert counts within a reasoning path while varying them across runs, thereby balancing stability and diversity throughout the search. Extensive experiments across MoE architectures, verifiers and reasoning benchmarks (i.e., math, code and knowledge) demonstrate that DES reliably outperforms TTS baselines, enhancing accuracy and stability without additional cost. These results highlight DES as a practical and scalable form of architecture-aware TTS, illustrating how structural flexibility in modern LLMs can advance reasoning.

Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source of output diversity. Our preliminary study shows that different thinking languages occupy distinct regions in a model's thinking space. Based on this observation, we study two repeated sampling strategies under multilingual thinking-Single-Language Sampling and Mixed-Language Sampling-and conduct diversity evaluation on outputs that are controlled to be in English, regardless of the thinking language used. Across extensive experiments, we demonstrate that switching the thinking language from English to non-English languages consistently increases output diversity, with a clear and consistent positive correlation such that languages farther from English in the thinking space yield larger gains. We further show that aggregating samples across multiple thinking languages yields additional improvements through compositional effects, and that scaling sampling with linguistic heterogeneity expands the model's diversity ceiling. Finally, we show that these findings translate into practical benefits in pluralistic alignment scenarios, leading to broader coverage of cultural knowledge and value orientations in LLM outputs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/Multilingual-LoT-Diversity.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by LLMs promise adaptive, reasoning-driven enterprise workflows, yet granting agents autonomous control over tools, memory, and communication introduces attack surfaces absent from deterministic pipelines. While current research largely addresses prompt-level exploits and narrow individual vectors, it lacks a holistic architectural model for enterprise-grade security. We introduce AgenticCyOps (Securing Multi-Agentic AI Integration in Enterprise Cyber Operations), a framework built on a systematic decomposition of attack surfaces across component, coordination, and protocol layers, revealing that documented vectors consistently trace back to two integration surfaces: tool orchestration and memory management. Building on this observation, we formalize these integration surfaces as primary trust boundaries and define five defensive principles: authorized interfaces, capability scoping, verified execution, memory integrity & synchronization, and access-controlled data isolation; each aligned with established compliance standards (NIST, ISO 27001, GDPR, EU AI Act). We apply the framework to a Security Operations Center (SOC) workflow, adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as the structural basis, with phase-scoped agents, consensus validation loops, and per-organization memory boundaries. Coverage analysis, attack path tracing, and trust boundary assessment confirm that the design addresses the documented attack vectors with defense-in-depth, intercepts three of four representative attack chains within the first two steps, and reduces exploitable trust boundaries by a minimum of 72% compared to a flat MAS, positioning AgenticCyOps as a foundation for securing enterprise-grade integration.

Real-world image super-resolution (SR) increasingly relies on Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbones, whose internal activations can be dominated by a small number of massive channels. Yet improving perceptual quality in these models still typically requires fine-tuning the network or attaching additional adapters, leaving this structured activation space largely unexplored for adaptation. We investigate whether dominant channels can instead serve as a compact adaptation interface for frozen DiT-based SR models. We first characterize their behavior in pretrained SR backbones and show through controlled interventions that they strongly affect reconstruction quality. Building on this observation, we introduce SPARK, a lightweight input-conditioned controller that predicts bounded per-channel affine transformations for only the selected channels, while keeping the SR backbone and VAE frozen. Dominant channels are identified through an online activation-ranking procedure, and only a small predictor conditioned on the low-resolution VAE latent is optimized. Experiments on three DiT-based SR backbones across DIV2K, RealSR, and DRealSR show consistent gains in both fidelity and perceptual quality while modulating only eight channels per stream and block. Controlled comparisons further show that these gains cannot be explained by parameter budget or access to the selected channels alone.

Recent advances in CV and NLP have been largely driven by scaling up the number of network parameters, despite traditional theories suggesting that larger networks are prone to overfitting. These large networks avoid overfitting by integrating components that induce a simplicity bias, guiding models toward simple and generalizable solutions. However, in deep RL, designing and scaling up networks have been less explored. Motivated by this opportunity, we present SimBa, an architecture designed to scale up parameters in deep RL by injecting a simplicity bias. SimBa consists of three components: (i) an observation normalization layer that standardizes inputs with running statistics, (ii) a residual feedforward block to provide a linear pathway from the input to output, and (iii) a layer normalization to control feature magnitudes. By scaling up parameters with SimBa, the sample efficiency of various deep RL algorithms-including off-policy, on-policy, and unsupervised methods-is consistently improved. Moreover, solely by integrating SimBa architecture into SAC, it matches or surpasses state-of-the-art deep RL methods with high computational efficiency across DMC, MyoSuite, and HumanoidBench. These results demonstrate SimBa's broad applicability and effectiveness across diverse RL algorithms and environments.

Why do pretrained diffusion or flow-matching policies fail when the same task is performed near an obstacle, on a shifted support surface, or amid mild clutter? Such failures rarely reflect missing motor skills; instead, they expose a limitation of imitation learning under train-test shifts, where action generation is tightly coupled to training-specific spatial configurations and task specifications. Retraining or fine-tuning to address these failures is costly and conceptually misaligned, as the required behaviors already exist but cannot be selectively adapted at test time. We propose Vision-Language Steering (VLS), a training-free framework for inference-time adaptation of frozen generative robot policies. VLS treats adaptation as an inference-time control problem, steering the sampling process of a pretrained diffusion or flow-matching policy in response to out-of-distribution observation-language inputs without modifying policy parameters. By leveraging vision-language models to synthesize trajectory-differentiable reward functions, VLS guides denoising toward action trajectories that satisfy test-time spatial and task requirements. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, VLS consistently outperforms prior steering methods, achieving a 31% improvement on CALVIN and a 13% gain on LIBERO-PRO. Real-world deployment on a Franka robot further demonstrates robust inference-time adaptation under test-time spatial and semantic shifts. Project page: https://vision-language-steering.github.io/webpage/

We critically examine the limitations of current AI models in achieving autonomous learning and propose a learning architecture inspired by human and animal cognition. The proposed framework integrates learning from observation (System A) and learning from active behavior (System B) while flexibly switching between these learning modes as a function of internally generated meta-control signals (System M). We discuss how this could be built by taking inspiration on how organisms adapt to real-world, dynamic environments across evolutionary and developmental timescales.

We present a stochastic coupled emulator of E3SM version 3, built on the SamudrACE framework, which couples an atmosphere emulator (ACE2) with a full-depth ocean emulator (Samudra). We replace the deterministic atmosphere emulator with its stochastic counterpart, ACE2S, and fine-tune the coupled system with a probabilistic objective, so that the atmosphere acts as a source of internal variability for the ocean. Trained on 105 years of a pre-industrial control simulation and evaluated on an independent 400 years, the emulator reproduces E3SMv3's mean climate state with biases much smaller than existing model-to-observation differences. Relative to a deterministic baseline, stochastic training maintains internal variability across timescales, most notably in the ENSO power spectrum, eddy-rich SST anomalies, and sea ice variability in the marginal ice zone. The emulator captures daily precipitation accurately up to the 99.99th percentile, but underestimates the rarest tropical extremes. These results show that stochastic coupled emulators can reproduce long-timescale variability with high fidelity, while extrapolation to unseen extremes remains a key challenge.