Research

• General in-context learning for embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without retraining, improving robustness in real-world deployment.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Cost and latency in embodied control loops1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  High computational and time costs limit real-time applicability of agentic systems in dynamic environments.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Physical-state verification and failure recovery1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Agents must reliably detect and correct errors in physical interactions to avoid irreversible failures in real-world tasks.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Long-horizon task preservation in embodied agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it

  Maintaining progress over extended sequences is critical for complex, multi-step tasks in robotics and navigation.

  • Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?raises
• Open-source stacks for generalist computer-use agents1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Closed systems hinder reproducibility and systematic study of agent design for real-world computer tasks.

  • OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Useraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Training & fine-tuning42+90.9%
• AI safety29+61.1%
• Computer vision29+31.8%
• Federated learning48+29.7%
• Evals60+25.0%
• Code models13+18.2%
• Quantum machine learning24+14.3%
• Image & video generation20+5.3%

• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  Look, Reason, Draw a Region: Recursive Refinement for Spatial Context Prediction

  Wajeeha Tahir, Anna Tegon, Lionnus Kesting, Gamze İslamoğlu, Kristóf Karacs +2

  Spatial context prediction requires visual grounding and spatial reasoning to identify vacant regions relative to objects in a scene. Spatial relationships and physical constraints remain challenging for large vision-language models (VLMs). Recursive reasoning has demonstrated strong performance on discrete and abstract reasoning tasks, motivating its use for improving spatial context prediction in natural images. Weight sharing enables higher accuracy with a small trainable parameter count. We introduce Spatial-TRM, a compact recursive model with frozen vision-language features, a convex region decoder, and just 11.2M trainable parameters. This weight-tied reasoner supports six spatial relationships, three reference frames, and open-vocabulary anchor objects. On the RoboSpatial-Home benchmark, Spatial-TRM achieves 29.51% context accuracy, a gain of 9.02 percentage points (44.0% relative) over a separately trained single-step model with the same parameter count. Including the frozen encoders, the model has 877.8M total parameters, approximately $15\times$ fewer than the reported 13B size of RoboPoint. These results show that repeated refinement improves spatial context prediction…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Optimist Deep Research: An Iterative, State-Centric Agent for Autonomous Literature Research

  Gihan Panapitiya

  Most retrieval-augmented systems treat literature search as a single retrieval step followed by summarization. Real literature research works differently: the investigator's understanding of the question changes as they read, new subquestions appear, and evidence is weighed, not just collected. We present Optimist Deep Research, an open-source agent that runs literature research as an iterative evidence-acquisition process over an explicit, mutable research state. A research question is broken into a tree of subquestions, each served by search intents that are translated into source-specific queries over arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, PubMed, Semantic Scholar and the web. Results are merged into a canonical, provenance-preserving document registry through a conservative four-tier deduplication hierarchy. The registry is expanded by citation snowballing until a saturation criterion is met, and then screened, ranked and allocated to subquestions round-robin. Documents are read in parallel into a structured evidence store of claims with support, location, type and strength. A critic reviews the state along eight dimensions and returns research actions rather than a binary verdict: it…

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• arXiv physics.flu-dynOct 16

  How the elastic axis folds the transonic flutter boundary: shock energy transfer and conformally calibrated active learning

  Ashray Saxena, Sharad Shrivastava

  Isogai's case A, a pitch-plunge aerofoil whose elastic axis lies half a chord ahead of the leading edge, has a folded transonic flutter boundary in inviscid flow: near the bottom of the transonic dip several flutter speeds coexist at one Mach number. We map this boundary, and the family obtained by moving the elastic axis, with coupled unsteady Euler simulations, a Gaussian-process surrogate of the damping coefficient trained by batch active learning, and split conformal prediction on independent random simulations, which turns the surrogate into stability calls with a distribution-free error rate. Three failure modes of time-domain damping labels that leave no trace in the residuals are documented, and the half-degree mean incidence left by the common one-degree start is shown to raise the flutter speed at the dip by 2.8%, more than any numerical setting. With 80 simulations the learned case A boundary labels 64 of 65 independent runs correctly, and calibrated calls are wrong in at most 1.6% of cases. Over Mach number, elastic axis and flutter speed index, 193 simulations and 40 calibration runs show that the fold exists only for elastic axes more than about 0.4 chord ahead of…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  FlashReFocus: Interactive Image Refocusing in Seconds

  Ching-Heng Cheng, Chia-Ming Lee, Ming-Ching Chang, Xin Li, Yu-Lun Liu +1

  Single-image refocusing changes the focal plane and depth of field of a photograph after capture. It is inherently interactive: users try many focal points and blur strengths on one image, so each edit should be fast and change only the blur. Recent generative methods, however, rerun large diffusion models for every edit. We observe that the two sub-problems differ in kind: recovering the all-in-focus image is ill-posed and needs a generative prior, whereas rendering blur is largely determined by depth and the focal plane. We therefore propose FlashReFocus, which runs diffusion once per photograph and renders every edit with a lightweight network. To address the ill-posed restoration, a one-step diffusion deblurrer with a decoder refiner recovers fine detail efficiently while balancing fidelity and perceptual quality. For precise control, the renderer is conditioned on an explicit defocus map and uses defocus-bias attention, which lets pixels at similar defocus share information without interference from pixels at other depths; in-focus content stays unchanged, and editing the map yields tilt-shift and two focal planes. To further test generalization to unseen cameras, we collect…

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• arXiv quant-phOct 16

  Learning angles for quantum approximate optimization

  Johannes Jakubik, Isabelle Wittmann, Zaheed Gaffoor, Gciniwe Simphiwe Baloyi, Craig Mahlasi +3

  The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and its variants are leading algorithms to help solve challenging combinatorial optimization problems. QAOA maps these problems to Ising Hamiltonians such that their ground state is the desired solution. Candidate solutions are then drawn from a variational quantum circuit. The performance of QAOA hinges on a set of variational angles. However, finding good angles is an instance-specific and computationally expensive non-convex classical optimization task. Here, we learn the mapping from the problem instance to high-quality QAOA angles. Our learned models replace the per-instance optimization, that we call the solver, with a single forward pass that is several orders of magnitude faster than the solver with a near identical quality. Our models further generalize to unseen topologies such as Barabási-Albert and 2D grid graphs. Experiments on quantum hardware confirm that QAOA samples with angles produced by our open-source models are indistinguishable from solver angles. Crucially, models sensitive to the topology of the problem instance increase the quality of the QAOA angles. Our work amortizes a major bottleneck in QAOA by…

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• arXiv cs.PFOct 16

  The Optimal Ranking Tradeoffs Between Two Ranking Scores in Two-Class Classification

  Sébastien Piérard, Adrien Deliège, Marc Van Droogenbroeck

  The accuracy, true negative rate (negative class recall), true positive rate (positive class recall), negative predictive value (negative class precision), positive predictive value (positive class precision), class-specific intersections over unions, class-specific F-scores, Cohen's kappa, and balanced accuracy are scores that one intuitively wants to maximize when developing machine learning methods. However, they lead to different rankings of such methods. So, how can we establish a ranking that is an optimal tradeoff between any pair of these scores? It turns out that all these scores are special cases of ranking scores: a continuum of scores parameterized by the relative importance values assigned to the true negative, false positive, false negative, and true positive outcomes. Since all these scores are known to induce meaningful rankings, we seek the optimal tradeoffs among them. We consider the tradeoff between two scores to be optimal when it minimizes the Fréchet variance regarding the Kendall distance (also known as the bubble-sort distance) between rankings. For any given set of classifiers to rank, the optimal tradeoff lies at the center of the shortest (geodesic)…

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• arXiv eess.SYOct 16

  Distributed Performance Boosting through Neural Control for Plug-and-Play Networks

  Danilo Saccani, Leonardo Massai, Giancarlo Ferrari-Trecate

  We address the problem of improving the performance of pre-stabilized networked systems subject to plug-and-play (PnP) operations, namely additions or removals of subsystems. While distributed baseline controllers can preserve stability after a PnP transition, augmenting them with expressive neural policies can invalidate the formal stability guarantees. To overcome this issue, we build on recently proposed Performance Boosting controllers based on the Internal Model Control (IMC) principle, which reduce closed-loop stability to a finite $\ell_2$-gain requirement on an auxiliary operator. In the distributed setting, this operator is formed by interconnecting local neural operators that exchange information only between neighboring subsystems. We then derive free parametrizations of this interconnection, namely explicit maps from unconstrained trainable variables to interconnected neural operators satisfying a prescribed network gain bound for every parameter value. The obtained distributed neural controller can therefore be trained by unconstrained gradient-based optimization without stability constraints or projection steps, while retaining the prescribed gain bound at every…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  CoTA++: Understanding the Repeat Curse in dMLLMs from an Information Flow Perspective

  Qiyan Zhao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Shijie Han, Zhepeng Li +2

  Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iterative denoising with bidirectional attention, which precludes the standard autoregressive key--value cache. Practical deployments therefore rely on approximate caching that reuses intermediate states across denoising steps. Such caching, however, often makes a response repeat one token at adjacent positions in a run that breaks the sentence, a failure we term the \emph{Repeat Curse}. Tracing the context-token information flow reveals three disruptions. Within a step, caching disperses the attention that anchors a position on nearby context tokens. Across steps, similarity-based refresh is not staleness-aware, so some positions are decoded against stale key--value states. Across layers, the deep-layer entropy of the context fails to converge where repetition arises. We accordingly propose CoTA++, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that counteracts each disruption where it originates: Context-Token Attention Re-anchoring re-forms the attention routing against the current context, Decode-Aware Refresh reserves part of the cache's refresh budget for the positions about to be committed, and Context-Token…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Data-Efficient Classifier Pretraining Through Diffusion Models

  Qinyu Li, Yee Whye Teh, Chris Holmes, Joel Jaskari

  Machine learning with limited data is susceptible to overfitting, especially with modern deep neural networks. Prior to the introduction of AlexNet, reconstruction-based pretraining with auto-encoder and denoising auto-encoder were found to be beneficial, partially due to the limited size of the training sets at the time. Motivated by these traditional approaches, we propose DiffPT, a simple diffusion modeling approach to pretrain a given classifier backbone for limited domain-specific training data. We experiment on time-series data, standard natural-image benchmarks, and medical imaging datasets, and contrast the diffusion approach to a multitude of modern and traditional un/self-supervised methods. While contrastive pretraining performs better on CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet in low-data regimes, DiffPT is particularly effective on medical imaging and time-series tasks, where it outperforms self-supervised baselines across a range of low-data regimes. Our results suggest that DiffPT is a simple and effective approach for data-efficient classifier pretraining on different modalities.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  I2V-DETACH: Source Grounding Detachment for Unauthorized Image-to-Video Generation

  Chanhui Lee, Yeonghwan Song, Yewon Kang, Jeany Son

  Recent diffusion models have advanced image-conditioned video generation, but their accessibility raises risks of unauthorized manipulation. Image immunization has emerged as a promising defense for Image-to-Video (I2V) protection, yet existing methods often rely on degrading visual quality or temporal coherence. In this work, we revisit I2V immunization as reducing source-content preservation, shifting the focus from output degradation to weakening source-conditioned content propagation. To this end, we propose I2V-DETACH, an image immunization method that prevents unauthorized I2V generation through source grounding detachment. I2V models preserve source content by propagating source-image cues into video latents during denoising. Accordingly, I2V-DETACH disrupts this process in two complementary ways: it suppresses source-video grounding to reduce source cue propagation, and strengthens intra-video interactions to shift denoising toward video-side dynamics with reduced reliance on the source image. To obtain informative optimization signals, we initialize auxiliary video latents with source-oriented states that remain within the source-conditioned generation regime while…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 16

  Annotrace: A Workbench for Step-Level Annotation of Agent Traces

  Arun Josephraj Arokiaraj, Chenyi Huang, Bin Wu, Sahan Bulathwela

  Every study of why LLM agents fail begins by labelling traces by hand, and every such study builds its own throwaway tool. Observability platforms record agent traces but offer no structured labelling; annotation tools label text but have no notion of a step, a delegation or a tool call, leaving it unclear what the smallest unit of execution to label should be. Annotrace reads six trace formats, including OpenTelemetry GenAI, LangSmith and Langfuse, and turns each run into an ordered, nested list of steps. The annotator writes their own labelling codebook; a frontier model proposes a starting set from a sample of their own traces, answers first, and is asked exactly the questions the human is asked, making annotation a joint human-AI process. Annotrace measures agreement between any two annotators, human or AI. On a multi-agent question-answering corpus it reproduces a previous manual effort's 235 annotation units exactly, and two models labelling the same traces agree 91% of the time at $κ= 0.82$.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16▲ 42

  Xiaomi-Lens-0 Technical Report

  Pei Fu, Yike Liu, Yue Sun, Hanmo Wang, Xiuwen Xi +11

  Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) answer questions about whole images well, yet they still struggle with fine-grained region understanding. A key reason is that text-only supervision never specifies which regions support an answer. To close this gap, we present Xiaomi-Lens-0, a 4B MLLM built on Qwen3.5 that predicts masks from its own visual representations. Specifically, a lightweight decoder combines vision-encoder patch features with the language model's mask-token states, termed visual latents, so that mask supervision reaches the shared backbone without an additional segmentation encoder. Because each latent decodes to a mask, the model can interleave reasoning with region-specific latents and thus think with visual latents, while grounded reasoning traces supervise the intermediate regions referenced during chain-of-thought. As a result, across all eight RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg splits, Xiaomi-Lens-0 gains 5.6 points on average over Qwen3.5 in referring comprehension and achieves the highest segmentation cIoU among compared models. Moreover, it surpasses Qwen3.5 across all perception benchmarks. Homepage: https://seerray-lab.github.io/Xiaomi-Lens-0

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 16

  Verbalising Model's Computation for Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Detection

  Yujing Wang, Yulan He, Wenya Wang, Hanqi Yan

  Current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) verification methods detect reasoning faithfulness from model outputs or static activations, but are limited in explaining how unfaithfulness develops during generation. We introduce VERITAS to verbalise the model's computation: how different reasoning anchors emerge, transfer across layers, and surface in the output. VERITAS adopts the layer-wise Jacobian projection to produce a verbalised account of the model's internal reasoning evolution at each generated CoT token. By training a classifier on the extracted features along the traces, we show that these structured features provide insightful perspectives on how and where reasoning diverges toward unfaithfulness. Experiments on four datasets from FaithCoT-Bench and BonaFide show that VERITAS achieves a significant performance gain over LLM-as-Judge, with a 28.4% gain in balanced accuracy, and an average improvement of 16.0% over activation probing. Further analysis shows VERITAS can be generalised to different datasets and model architectures. Our work shows that verbalising model computation provides a richer and more interpretable lens on CoT faithfulness, moving beyond detection toward a…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  DeDiCa: A Scalable Deconfounding Discrete Causal Generative Model

  Kunchangtai Liang, Adrián Javaloy, Antonio Vergari, Isabel Valera

  We introduce DeDiCa, a practical framework for efficient causal inference with discrete variables and hidden confounding that revisits classical probabilistic modeling through a tensorized parameterization of causal Bayesian networks, enabling tractable inference. Given a causal graph, DeDiCa is trained once on observational data by maximum likelihood, exactly marginalizing over hidden confounders, and can then estimate any (proxy-)identifiable interventional query. Despite this deliberately simple parameterization, DeDiCa matches state-of-the-art neural causal generative models in ATE estimation, while supporting memory-efficient CPU training and exact interventional inference in milliseconds. Compared with causal foundation models, DeDiCa scales more effectively with additional observational samples and achieves competitive accuracy at substantially lower inference time and memory. DeDiCa provides a tractable, accurate, and scalable approach to causal inference in discrete settings with hidden confounding.

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 16

  NestedVLA: Learning to Consolidate and Generate Skills for Vision-Language-Action Models

  Guodong Du, Wanyu Lin

  Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models promise generalist robotic agents, yet consolidating skills learned across heterogeneous tasks and environments remains difficult: training data is fragmented across platforms, joint multi-task training suffers from interference, and model merging tends to introduce parameter conflicts or require architectural changes. We instead advocate a paradigm in which skills are first learned independently and then consolidated post hoc. To this end, we propose NestedVLA, which replaces parameter aggregation with parameter generation: a nested hypernetwork, conditioned on the target task, synthesizes task-adaptive action-expert parameters that compose with a frozen base VLA. Task-specific compressed VLM residuals are retained separately. This formulation enables flexible task-conditioned skill reuse while mitigating interference. Across three RL benchmarks (MetaWorld, ManiSkill, CALVIN), NestedVLA outperforms the strongest model-merging baseline by 41 pp on average, matches per-task fine-tuning within 1 pp on ManiSkill, and substantially closes the gap on CALVIN, pointing toward a storage-efficient route to skill consolidation. Code is available at…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  Agentic Image Generation in the Wild

  Yifan Li, Bowen Qin, Kun Zhou, Haochen Zhao, Zikang Liu +6

  Agentic image generation pairs an image generator with a search agent that retrieves references from the web, extending generation beyond the generator's training data. Real-world requests, however, often concern entities that appeared only days ago. We call this setting Image Generation in the Wild. In this setting, the web offers limited visual evidence, search results are crowded with easily confused entities, and the target is rarely shown on its own. To study this setting, we build an automated pipeline that synthesizes prompts from recent headlines and keeps only those whose real search results are highly confusing, yielding requests that are hard to solve yet natural to ask. With it, we construct Savanna, a benchmark of 500 prompts across 16 subcategories. On Savanna, even harness frameworks built on the frontier models retrieve a correct reference for only about half of the prompts. We then propose Locate-Corroborate-Isolate, a paradigm in which the agent first pins down the target's identity through text search, then verifies candidate images against multiple sources, and finally crops a clean reference for the generator. Trained on 15K trajectories that follow this…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  Beyond Marginal Influence: Interaction-Aware Memory Selection for LLM Agents

  BHVSP Subrahmanyam, Neeraj Choudhary

  LLM-agent memory selection often uses retrieval rankings based on record relevance or individual influence. Such rankings cannot identify sufficient subsets under redundant or jointly necessary evidence. We study per-decision memory sufficiency: selecting a small subset that preserves full-memory behavior. To separate search error from model error, we introduce JointCoreBench, a benchmark with nine interaction families, six workflow domains, natural-language decisions, and exact sufficient-set oracles, and JointCore, a relevance cost-ordered group-deletion baseline that tests blocks before individual records. On 6,912 exact conditions, cost-ordered JointCore recovers a minimum-cost sufficient set in 100.0% of cases, reduces subset evaluations from 30.00 to 11.13 (62.9%), and achieves 87.8% active-memory savings. Across four 12B-70B model families and 432 tasks per model, its unweighted mean is 10.28 versus 16.00 model queries and 50.6% versus 43.1% minimum-cost recovery relative to cost aware singleton deletion. Both methods preserve full-memory behavior under the deterministic primary interface. Tests with physical deletion, UNKNOWN masks, PENDING sentinels, counterfactual…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 16

  ADT: All-Atom Diffusion Tokenizer for 3D Molecular Structures

  Xuantuo Huang, Encheng Su, Aoran Wang, Pan Tan, Shengyong Xu +4

  Discrete structural tokenization provides a promising route to autoregressive 3D molecular generation. Yet, existing tokenizers face a trade-off between compact representation and all-atom reconstruction: atom-level tokens preserve atomic details but produce long sequences, while compact residue-level protein tokens typically omit side-chain geometry. To overcome this limitation, we propose All-atom Diffusion Tokenizer (ADT), which decouples token granularity from reconstruction resolution. ADT uses one structural token per atom for small molecules and one token per protein residue that jointly represents backbone and side-chain geometry. To mitigate geometric distortion introduced by quantization, we leverage the generative capacity of diffusion models to recover fine-grained atomic geometry beyond deterministic decoding from discrete tokens. Extensive experiments across small molecules and proteins demonstrate that ADT achieves strong reconstruction from compact discrete representations while enabling high-quality autoregressive generation of both small molecules and all-atom protein structures. These results establish compact structural tokens as an effective discrete…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 16

  SCALE: Improving Guidance-Free Visual Generation via Self-Contrastive Alignment for Likelihood Estimation

  Jiwan Hur, Dong-Jae Lee, Dongyeun Lee, Gyojin Han, Junmo Kim

  Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is essential for improving sample quality in visual generation, but it incurs substantial sampling overhead. Existing guidance-free approaches halve this cost by approximating the CFG with a single model inference, but their performance is bounded by the CFG and inherits its limitations. In this paper, we propose self-contrastive guidance (SCG), which contrasts the model's prediction on real and self-generated samples to obtain a direct, model-based signal that pushes generation toward the true data manifold. Integrating SCG into the standard likelihood objective via reparameterization yields Self-Contrastive Alignment for Likelihood Estimation (SCALE), a guidance-free training framework that produces SCG-enhanced predictions in a single forward pass. Across class-conditional and text-to-image generation on diffusion and autoregressive models, SCALE consistently outperforms CFG-mimicking guidance-free baselines and improves further when combined with DPO, demonstrating that the self-contrastive signal yields gains complementary to both CFG and preference-based fine-tuning.

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• arXiv cs.ROOct 16

  Expand-and-Prune: Test-Time Candidate-Space Adaptation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

  Fabian Schmidt, Karol Fedurko, Markus Enzweiler, Abhinav Valada

  Candidate-based end-to-end driving planners reason over a finite set of trajectory hypotheses. However, for sparse planners, a limited candidate set may provide insufficient support for scene-relevant maneuvers, while fixed downstream candidate budgets do not account for prediction uncertainty. To address these challenges, we introduce Expand-and-Prune, a test-time framework that jointly adapts candidate support and capacity without updating learned parameters. The framework expands the native candidate set using semantic driving intent and temporally propagated predictions and then uses uncertainty in intermediate trajectory scores to adaptively prune the resulting candidates. Across four heterogeneous candidate-based planners and four benchmarks, Expand-and-Prune consistently improves planning performance. It achieves state-of-the-art results on LangAuto, increasing the Driving Score from 68.2 to 75.9, while providing further improvement on Bench2Drive, Fail2Drive, and NAVSIMv2, with particularly strong improvements in out-of-distribution scenarios. Moreover, in its full instantiation, 72.5% of selected trajectories originate from the newly introduced intent-guided or temporal…

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