Research

• AI tutors15+25.0%
• Character recognition OCR110.0%
• Supervised & diffusion models93−11.4%
• Channel state information12−14.3%
• Electrocardiogram ecg34−17.1%
• Stochastic gradient descent25−19.4%
• Machine learned interatomic34−27.7%
• Remote sensing33−32.7%

• Interface lock-in in multimodal spatial reasoning1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Specializing a model on one spatial task (e.g., side detection) degrades performance on others (e.g., distance estimation), limiting general spatial intelligence.

  • ChronoReplay: One Answer Interface Is Not Enough for Streaming Spatial Intelligenceraises · addresses
• Lack of unified evaluation for work agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Existing benchmarks do not reliably measure how agents execute complex, stateful, or open-ended digital work, making progress hard to track.

  • Work Agents: Systems, Capabilities, and Optimizationraises · addresses
• Memory tax in long-horizon agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Dedicated memory systems often underperform naive retrieval, as reorganizing information can obscure evidence and reduce net value.

  • Memory Tax: Dissecting the Net Value of Agent Memoryraises · addresses
• Credit assignment in diffusion language models1 paper raises it · 2 address it

  Iterative denoising in DLMs makes it hard to attribute rewards to individual tokens, limiting effective reinforcement learning.

  • DTCA: Denoising Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Modelsraises · addresses
  • Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agentsaddresses
• Grounded significance testing for temporal hypotheses1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Language models assert temporal patterns without rigorous statistical validation, risking incorrect conclusions in high-stakes domains like healthcare.

  • Testimony from Timelines: Evidence-Grounded Significance Testing of Temporal Clinical Hypothesesraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• arXiv cs.ROOct 6

  HULK: Learning Whole-Body Forceful Loco-Manipulation for Humanoids

  An Dang, Arturo Flores Alvarez, Yu-Ming Chen, Conor Mc Gartoll, Helen Sun +3

  Humanoid loco-manipulation of large, heavy objects demands forceful interaction across the entire body. However, such payloads shift a humanoid's center of mass and impose sustained loads across the upper body, challenging balance and command tracking. We present HULK, a whole-body control framework for forceful loco-manipulation. Using model predictive control (MPC) to guide reinforcement learning with predictions of the loaded dynamics, we train two teachers: one tracks arm motions under wrist forces, and the other locomotes while holding large objects against the body. A capture-point control barrier function augments the wrist-force teacher during training to improve balance under load. We distill both teachers into a single policy. Evaluation spans simulation and the Unitree G1. In simulation, the teacher with the barrier function achieves the lowest forward and lateral velocity tracking errors at 10 kg per arm among evaluated controllers and reduces aggregate divergent component of motion (DCM) excursion magnitude by 35.7% relative to MPC-guided reinforcement learning alone. Our wrist-force teacher withstands torso push disturbances of up to 130 N.

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 6

  Work While They Sleep: Exploiting Evaluation Latency for Fully Bayesian Optimization

  Gustavo Sutter, Alejandro Comas-Leon, David Holzmüller, Hao Wang, Luis Ricardez-Sandoval +2

  Black-box optimization problems are ubiquitous across science and engineering, often dealing with expensive objective functions. This objective latency has two consequences during optimization: (i) the objective evaluation dominates execution time, and (ii) sample-efficient algorithms are crucial to accelerate development and avoid wasting resources. Bayesian optimization (BO) methods are the \textit{de facto} choice of planners for suggesting the next point to try. Standard BO fits the surrogate model's hyperparameters with a point estimate. Alternatively, a fully Bayesian approach uses model averaging to account for uncertainty over the hyperparameters, leading to better uncertainty estimates---useful in the low-data regime that is pervasive in BO. However, it is often prohibitively expensive and thus rarely used. In this work, we propose ELF-BO, an algorithm that uses the objective evaluation latency to headstart the computation of the next suggestion, allowing for fully Bayesian optimization without incurring substantial decision-time costs. This is done by sampling from the hyperparameter posterior \emph{while} the objective is being evaluated, only requiring reweighting of…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  Socio-Foundation: A Model for Generalizable Individual Behavior Simulation via Hierarchical Capability Distillation

  Liang Wang, Wenxuan Xie, Xinyi Mou, Yixin Luo, Zhongyu Wei

  Simulating individual behavior requires large language models (LLMs) to preserve persona traits while adapting to dynamic social contexts. However, general-purpose LLMs often flatten distinct personas, while task-specific tuning suffers from fragmentation and generalization. To overcome these challenges, we organize individual simulation into the \textbf{FONTS Taxonomy}, comprising five complementary capability dimensions: \emph{persona fidelity} (\textbf{F}), \emph{outcome realization} (\textbf{O}), \emph{behavioral naturalness} (\textbf{N}), \emph{trajectory coherence} (\textbf{T}), and \emph{social grounding} (\textbf{S}). Grounded in this taxonomy, we curate a standardized training corpus library of approximately 10 million instances across 14 representative datasets and present \textbf{Socio-Foundation}. Socio-Foundation decouples specialization from integration via a three-stage pipeline: learning task experts via DAPO, consolidating them into capability experts via off-policy distillation, and unifying them via multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD). We also establish \textbf{IndiEval}, consolidating 29 metrics across the FONTS dimensions. Experiments show that…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 6▲ 14

  Humanity's Sixth Sense: Benchmarking Intuitive Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Models

  Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi +24

  Humans perceive far more in a scene than what is explicitly depicted: a single glance captures past causes and future trajectories; a quick peek determines if a vehicle can fit between two parked cars; a few seconds of video reveals who holds authority in a room; and a fleeting clip highlights subtle abstract patterns like unwritten rules or hidden labels. This capacity reflects a form of humanity's sixth sense: an intuitive reasoning mechanism that recovers implicit information beyond raw sensory perception. Crucially, this rapid, zero-shot visual intuition underpins everyday navigation and social interaction, making it a vital capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deployed alongside people. Existing visual benchmarks, however, target either deliberate expert-level analysis in academic and mathematical domains or low-level perception, leaving the intuitive reasoning that people perform largely untested. To bridge this gap, we introduce Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark for intuitive visual reasoning. HSS spans diverse image and video inputs, organizes items under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human-written prompts probing the implicit…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 6▲ 27

  On KL-Regularized Policy Optimization

  Yifan Zhang

  Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents trains one policy on trajectories generated by another: rollouts come from stale checkpoints, and the inference engine's probabilities differ from the trainer's even at identical parameters. Standard remedies either clip importance ratios, which biases the update, or, as in GRPO, sample a group of responses per prompt, which is costly when episodes are long. We propose KL-Regularized Policy Optimization (KLPO), a framework that anchors the KL regularizer at the sampler. The regularized improvement step then has a closed-form Gibbs solution, and KLPO fits its log-ratio optimality condition by least squares on the sampler's own trajectories, so the sampler probability enters through a log-ratio and no importance weights are needed. Profiling out the regression intercept replaces the intractable log-partition function with the signal's sampler mean plus a sampler-to-trainer KL divergence. For token-level policy mirror descent targets, we show that the resulting gradient can be computed from terminal returns without a critic, via sampler-centered scores or a single trajectory residual, even under…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 6

  Directed Temporal Representations for Offline Visual Control

  Chenyang Yuan, Haoyu Wang, Zhuo Sun, Xiaoyuan Cheng

  Predictive world models provide compact visual representations for control. Control requires a latent geometry aligned with temporal reachability rather than predictive similarity alone. We introduce Directed Temporal Representations for Control (DTRC), which learns such a geometry from offline visual trajectories on top of frozen LeWorldModel (LeWM) features. DTRC constructs a directed temporal quasimetric over the learned control representation. Short-range temporal offsets calibrate the distance scale. Bootstrapped targets extend temporal reachability across longer horizons. Action-conditioned consistency aligns the representation with local transition dynamics. The resulting distance estimates temporal reaching cost, and its change across a transition defines goal-relative temporal progress. We use this progress signal as a temporal critic for direct goal-conditioned policy learning. Model-assisted targets provide an additional training-time refinement under behavior-support and dynamics-agreement constraints. Across ten visual control tasks, DTRC achieves strong goal-conditioned control performance relative to planning and direct-policy baselines. Held-out diagnostics on the…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 6

  GraphOPD: Graph-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Agents

  Bohan Lin, Liyi Chen, Zhuoning Guo, Muyang Li, Qimeng Wang +3

  On-policy distillation post-trains large language model agents by supplying dense, step-level guidance from a teacher policy when the reinforcement-learning reward is sparse and arrives only once per trajectory. Existing instantiations allocate this guidance by the size of the teacher-student divergence at each step, on the single-turn intuition that a large disagreement marks a mistake worth correcting. Once decisions chain over many turns, that rule misfires, since an early drift enters every later context both policies condition on, leaving the teacher consistent with the drifted trajectory instead of flagging its cause, while interchangeable steps register large but outcome-irrelevant divergences. We demonstrate this on an agentic benchmark, where distilling the highest-divergence steps brings no consistent benefit over random selection. To this end, we introduce GraphOPD, the first method to bring graph-based structural augmentation into on-policy distillation for agent capabilities. It reads which steps enabled which later ones from the environment's own record of state changes, immune to the drift that corrupts the teacher-student gap, organizes them into a dependency…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  RACER: Reflective Agent Coupling Query Interpretation and Tool-Based Retrieval for Frame Selection in Long Video Understanding

  Yiyang Huang, Yitian Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Jianglin Lu, Qihua Dong +4

  Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) excel at diverse video-language tasks by reasoning over selected frames. However, frame selection for long videos remains challenging, as it requires retrieving relevant frames distributed across segments from a large candidate pool given complex queries. This paper investigates dominant approaches to long-video frame selection from a task-decomposition perspective, identifying two key challenges: the Query Comprehension Gap in similarity-based methods and the Interpretation--Selection Gap in judgment-based methods. To address them, we propose RACER, a training-free reflective agentic framework that decomposes long-video frame selection into query interpretation driven by a lightweight Vid-LLM and evidence localization supported by an embedding model serving as a retrieval tool. Specifically, the Vid-LLM is responsible solely for reformulating the complex query into sub-queries that make implicit information requirements explicit, mitigating the Query Comprehension Gap. Meanwhile, the retrieval tool leverages these sub-queries to localize relevant evidence, relieving the Vid-LLM of direct frame selection and thus addressing the…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  Agent-Controlled Forgetting for Tool-Using Agents: Reversible Context Curation in Practice

  Jan-Peter Franke

  Tool-using agents repeatedly carry observations whose useful content can be much smaller than their original payload. We study agent-controlled forgetting: the acting model selects previously observed tool results, replaces each with a short note at its original position, and retains the exact original in a recoverable archive. A Python harness exposes batch archival and explicit recovery without task-specific model training, while protecting user instructions and assistant messages from these operations. In an exploratory OpenTelemetry debugging case followed by an unrelated implementation task, the method ended with 231,951 provider-reported prompt tokens versus 912,492 under retained history, used 50% fewer cumulative input tokens, and had an estimated API cost of USD 1.28-1.44 versus approximately USD 4.38. Both arms passed the two-case primary behavioral oracle; neither fully satisfied the follow-up evaluation. The method made more requests and took 17% longer. A contrasting application-development pair produced no context or cost saving, and an earlier continuation exhibited lower manually assessed quality despite reduced context. These observations demonstrate substantial…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  One-Slide Calibration of Pathology Foundation Models

  Ming Ren Hou, Tianyi Huang

  Scanner variation changes how pathology foundation models represent the same tissue. We introduce SlideRuler, which uses regions within a slide as internal controls to estimate and correct acquisition-induced shifts in other regions. A transfer map learned from paired rescans enables calibration from a single scan at inference while keeping the foundation model fixed. Across two encoders and five SCORPION scanners, learned transfer reduces mean target-to-source embedding distance by 16.3-38.5% relative to raw embeddings. Comparisons with unrelated same-scanner controls reveal a positive same-slide contribution across all four evaluation settings, including scanner holdout. A source-anchored variant reduces source-feature displacement by 47.7-83.6% relative to learned transfer while retaining most of its alignment gain. By drawing calibration information from the slide itself, SlideRuler offers a path toward more consistent use of frozen pathology models across imaging systems.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 6▲ 5

  SPW-Nav: A Streaming Panoramic World Model for Language-Guided Navigation

  Yunheng Liu, Ziqi Cai, Siqi Yang, Yimu Wang, Minggui Teng +5

  Language-guided panoramic video generation benefits various downstream applications, such as interactive 3D scene exploration, virtual reality experiences, and embodied agent training. Existing panoramic generators follow predefined trajectories, and interactive world models act through low-level actions in perspective views. We propose SPW-Nav, a streaming panoramic world model that understands movement instructions and streams one minute of 2K 360-degree video in real time from a single panorama. SPW-Nav interprets each instruction in the previously generated panorama as camera motion. Spherical rotation decoupling applies rotation exactly on the sphere, pose-aligned conditioning keeps translation inputs bounded over long streams, and a multi-term memory with a few-step generator continues the scene as instructions change. We also build SPW-NavSet, panoramic videos with camera trajectories and verified instructions. Driven by language, SPW-Nav outperforms prior panoramic generators in camera-following accuracy and video quality, and supports on-the-fly instruction switching.

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• arXiv q-bio.BMOct 6

  A Shortcut to Structure in AlphaFold 3

  Jonathan Feldman, Jeffrey Skolnick

  AlphaFold 3 predicts protein structures with remarkable accuracy, yet how structural information emerges within the model remains poorly understood. Here, through causal interventions on internal representations and direct probing of every Pairformer block, we trace the formation of global protein geometry and identify the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) as a structural shortcut to the fold. Removing the MSA largely preserves local secondary structure while disrupting the long-range relationships that define global topology. Restoring the MSA-enriched pair representation at only forty residues recovers most of this lost organization, including at pairs never directly modified. This contribution depends on the detailed direction of the MSA module's output rather than its magnitude. The Pairformer rapidly converts this signal into global geometry: the final fold becomes recoverable by approximately block 9 of 48 for a majority of proteins, roughly twenty-seven blocks before the model's decoder can render it, whereas without the MSA it remains inaccessible for most proteins throughout the pass. Which homologs are supplied shapes this trajectory more strongly than which query is…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 6

  VCR-Bench: A Modular Open-Source Benchmark for Video Classification Robustness

  Maksim Plinskiy, Aleksandr Gushchin, Sergey Lavrushkin, Dmitriy S. Vatolin, Anastasia Antsiferova

  Robustness of image classification has several benchmarks, but their video counterparts are absent. In video classification temporal dimension introduces additional degrees of freedom for adversarial attacks, defenses, and preprocessing. Temporal sampling, perturbation budgets, and metric aggregation also interact in ways with no direct analogue in the image setting. Therefore, robustness for video classifiers is studied across scattered, incompatible implementations, making reported numbers hard to reproduce and analyze. We introduce VCR-Bench, a modular open-source benchmark framework that standardizes video loading, wrappers for classifiers, adversarial attacks and defenses, perceptual metrics, configuration presets, and result logging. VCR-Bench currently integrates 30 video classification models, 14 adversarial attacks, and 10 defense wrappers under a common evaluation protocol. We evaluate representative video classifiers, attacks, and defenses on Kinetics-400 subset, reporting clean accuracy, attack success rate, perceptual quality, runtime, and memory usage. VCR-Bench is released with documented installation, reproducible run presets, component-extension interfaces, and…

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 6

  Toward Evidence-Driven Human-Agent-Robot Teaming for Earth-Independent Anomaly Triage

  Ignacio G Lopez-Francos, Alexis Gallagher, Samira Shalal

  Deep-space crews cannot rely on real-time ground support for urgent off-nominal events. Initial alerts may underdetermine cause, while discriminating evidence may reside in crew observations or at locations that are unsafe, costly, or unavailable for crew inspection. We present an evidence-driven architecture for human-agent-robot teaming in Earth-independent anomaly triage. Agentic AI is treated as a stateful coordinator over bounded, inspectable services rather than as a fully autonomous vehicle controller. A triage state manager maintains hypotheses, evidence provenance, uncertainty, operational context, and tool status; a crew-facing embodied agent elicits observations and explains assessment changes; and a mobile robot acquires targeted, localized evidence. Typed interfaces separate dialogue and orchestration from monitoring, robot command, context retrieval, and safety-critical control. Two scenarios illustrate the architecture: a crewed deep-space mission based on an actual ISS ammonia false alarm, where suspected contamination restricts crew access, and a power-interface anomaly at a crewed lunar base, where robotic inspection distinguishes a local connector fault from…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 6

  Multi-Aspect Runtime Verification for Simulation-Based V&V of LLM-Enabled Autonomous Agents

  Nikolaos Kekatos, Dimitrios Nikou, Anastasios Temperekidis, Alexios Lekidis, Nikolaos Kolokotronis +2

  LLM-based agents are entering decision-support roles in defence staff work, where the obligations they must respect are already written down and binding, and where retraining is not available as a control because models arrive as procured components. What can be placed under engineering control is the interface between the agent and the systems it acts on. Those obligations are at once spatial, temporal and text-semantic, and a violation typically lives in the composition of a multi-step interaction, which is why per-event guardrails miss sequential tool-attack chains. We present a multi-aspect runtime-verification framework that decomposes a natural-language policy clause into a typed spatial/temporal/semantic triple over one canonical event stream, checks each aspect with its own monitoring specification, and fuses the verdicts through a four-valued algebra that carries provenance. The spatial aspect is interpreted over a weighted two-sorted location graph in which mission geometry and information-release topology are one object; we show that these spatial obligations are not in general subsumed by a first-order temporal specification. The past-time aspect runs on the…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 6▲ 12

  Can AI Agents Make Open-Ended Scientific Discovery? Evidence from Station

  Wenyu Du, Stephen Chung

  Recent AI systems have made rapid progress in scientific discovery when given well-defined metrics, but whether they can autonomously undertake open-ended scientific discovery remains unclear. We investigate AI's ability to tackle open-ended tasks in Station, an open-world environment in which multiple agents simulate a scientific ecosystem. To tackle challenges specific to open-ended tasks, we propose augmenting Station with two mechanisms: a Supervisor mechanism and periodic Meta Reflection, which encourage persistent exploration even when intermediate metrics are lacking. We construct open-ended tasks from three recent oral papers presented at ICLR. We give agents the main research question studied in each paper while withholding the paper's results and disabling web access. We then measure how many of the original findings-partitioned into individual criteria-agents rediscover. We find that Station rediscovers 62.7% of the criteria on average, compared with 15.4% for Codex Multiagent-v2 and 14.4-20.6% for AI Scientist-v2. Ablation and behavioral analyses indicate that adding the two mechanisms together improves research coverage and continuity. We further evaluate Station on…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 6

  AdaGuard: Enhancing Safety and Policy Compliance with Reasoning-Enabled LLM-As-A-Judge Guardrails

  Melissa Kazemi Rad, Sihui Dai, Isha Slavin, Kushal Chawla, Mann Patel +4

  Enterprise generative AI applications require robust safety mechanisms that can accommodate diverse risk postures, evolving policies, and varying latency constraints. Current guardrail solutions often suffer from rigidity, relying on fixed policy sets and offering limited transparency or reasoning flexibility. We present Adaguard, an adaptive LLM-as-a-Judge framework designed to address these challenges through dynamic policy enforcement and adaptive reasoning-budget allocation. Built using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (GRPO), AdaGuard generalizes to user-defined safety and compliance policies at runtime without requiring frequent model updates. A core innovation of our approach is the ability to dynamically infer the complexity of input-policy pairs, allowing the model to switch between high-speed black-box inference and explainable, reasoning-enabled moderation. This flexibility enables developers to balance stringent latency requirements with the need for actionable transparency. This adaptive capability allows AdaGuard to rival other guardrail and frontier models several times its size, while its auto-reasoning mode recovers the accuracy of…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 6▲ 7

  CARE: Certifying Acceleration for Vision-Language-Action Inference

  Rui Liu, Tong Zheng, Jindong Gu, Zhipeng Wang

  While vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly, running them at every control step remains expensive. Prior work accelerates VLA inference using techniques like action chunking and visual-token pruning, typically evaluating based on latency and average task success. However, acceleration may discard information and break tasks the original policy would solve, a risk hidden by average metrics. Measuring these failures is challenging because action deviations compound over closed-loop trajectories, meaning task failure is only observable across full episodes. We therefore define an acceleration-induced failure via paired rollouts from identical initial conditions, tracking when the reference succeeds but the accelerated policy fails. To manage this, we introduce CARE, an approach for certified accelerator selection. CARE uses paired rollouts on a calibration set to provide finite-sample guarantees that acceleration-induced failure risk stays below a user-specified budget. It deploys the fastest certified candidate, falling back to the reference if none qualify. By relying only on terminal outcomes and measured compute, CARE applies unchanged across diverse…

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• arXiv hep-phOct 6

  The Future of AI-assisted Physics: Discovering, Verifying and Organizing Results via Formalization

  Sven Krippendorf, Leopoldo Sarra, Joseph Tooby-Smith

  Rapid advances in AI have opened a new era for physics, enabling unprecedented capabilities in research and discovery. However, these advances also bring challenges in verifying, trusting, and reusing the results they so rapidly produce. Formalization is a necessary part of the solution to these challenges. In this paper, as well as giving an overview of the role of AI and formalization in physics, we make the case that: (1) formalization is an essential layer for AI-driven discoveries in both computational and theoretical physics; (2) AI is lowering the barrier to, and increasing the efficiency of, formalization in physics, though it remains weaker at choosing definitions and designing libraries than at writing proofs; (3) the speed AI brings to formalization in physics currently comes at the cost of trust, credit, and community; (4) shared, community-reviewed formal libraries such as Physlib should be central in making progress in this field, both as a trusted, reusable foundation for physics results and as the environment in which AI systems can reason about physics; (5) formalizing physics raises challenges beyond those in mathematics, most importantly that a checked proof…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 6▲ 30

  World Models' Last Exam in Physics

  Mingju Gao, Qingle Liu, Yuzhao Peng, Xinjie Lin, Ziming Qin +6

  Video world models can produce visually convincing yet physically inconsistent sequences, raising concerns about their reliability for prediction and planning in embodied AI systems. Existing evaluations often rely on model-based judgments or reference videos, while direct physical tests largely focus on mechanics. We introduce World Models' Last Exam in Physics, a measurement-based benchmark for evaluating physical consistency in video world models. The benchmark comprises 40 controlled tasks spanning mechanics, optics, fluids, thermal and phase-change phenomena, electromagnetism, and surface tension. Each task pairs an initial image and a generation prompt with predefined physical criteria, enabling interpretable tests of observable physical relationships without requiring reference videos. Its evaluator combines task-observability screening with task-specific quantitative physical measurements. Experiments on eight video generation models across 1,280 videos reveal persistent physical inconsistencies and substantial variation across tasks, with the best model achieving an overall score of 57.76 out of 100. Evaluation on synthetic videos with known physical relationships…

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