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.

• Code models23+2200.0%
• Training & fine-tuning61+1933.3%
• AI safety44+1366.7%
• Small LLMs11+1000.0%
• Robotics29+866.7%
• Evals97+781.8%
• Image & video generation34+580.0%
• Computer vision44+528.6%

• arXiv cs.IROct 17

  GRaSP: Latency-Aware Optimization for Geo-Distributed Retrieval-Augmented Generation

  Hardik Ruparel, Raj Kumar Pandey, Pramod Kumar

  Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly served across geo-distributed cloud and edge infrastructures, where wide-area latency, cross-region egress cost, and data-residency rules compete with retrieval quality. Conventional pipelines rank by semantic similarity alone and ignore where content lives, inflating tail latency and cost. We formalize the Geo-RAG Selection Problem (GRaSP), a drop-in re-scoring layer that decays relevance by latency and adds an optional cost penalty under a cardinality budget and per-region caps, with no retraining. We first settle its complexity: the base formulation is a linear objective over a partition matroid, solved optimally by an O(N log N) greedy algorithm, rather than NP-hard as a knapsack framing suggests, with hardness entering only under an additive egress budget. On a five-node CloudLab testbed emulating a four-region WAN over the Natural Questions corpus (2.68M passages), GRaSP's benefit is placement-dependent: under uniform placement it cuts fetch latency at negligible quality cost; under topical (residency-like) placement it traces a recall-latency Pareto frontier that dominates relevance-only, nearest-k, and a…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 17

  A Cross-Domain Evaluation of Prompting Techniques for Large Language Models

  Kevin Krazius, Tim Schlippe, Paul Libbrecht

  Prompt engineering has become a central mechanism for guiding the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a wide range of reasoning and language understanding tasks [1], [2]. However, existing studies frequently evaluate prompting techniques using different LLMs, datasets, or task settings, making direct comparisons across methods and domains difficult [3]. Consequently, in this paper we present a controlled cross-domain evaluation of Zero-Shot prompting, Few-Shot prompting, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and automatic prompt optimization based on a PE2-inspired optimization pipeline [4]-[6]. All experiments were conducted with the same LLM and evaluated on six benchmark datasets covering arithmetic reasoning, logical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and factual verification. The results show that no prompting strategy consistently outperforms the others across all domains, and pairwise statistical comparisons of the highest-performing configurations revealed no significant differences. RAG achieves the highest overall average accuracy of 78.33% when 300 examples are available for retrieval, while Few-Shot Prompting achieves comparatively high accuracies across…

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• arXiv eess.SYOct 17

  ATLAS: Expert-Guided Sustainable Satellite Backhaul for Off-Grid Wildlife Monitoring

  Hao Fang, Miao Zhang, Haoyuan Zhao, Long Chen, Yi Ching Chou +3

  Remote wildlife monitoring increasingly depends on high-fidelity cameras and sensors deployed far from grid power and terrestrial networks. Low Earth orbit satellite links can provide connectivity in these settings, but their high power draw and variable bandwidth, combined with intermittent on-site solar harvesting, make continuous backhaul infeasible. Current systems therefore filter at the edge, with motion triggers that waste limited energy and bandwidth on environmental artifacts, or fixed vision models that cannot follow evolving expert objectives. We present \textsc{ATLAS}, an expert-guided edge-to-cloud system that treats satellite backhaul as a scarce resource for off-grid wildlife monitoring. \textsc{ATLAS} uses foundation models to compile natural-language expert intent into semantic scoring logic, combines semantic relevance with environmental and energy state, and uses a constrained reinforcement-learning scheduler to decide which clips to upload and when. As a representative case study, we deployed \textsc{ATLAS} for over six months across 18 off-grid salmon-monitoring river sites. \textsc{ATLAS} achieves a mean clip-selection accuracy of $87.4\%$, exceeding mean…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 17

  A Symmetry-Matching Approach to Blind-Spot Reduction in Sparse Autoencoders

  Csaba Balogh

  Language models can treat semantically distinct inputs as interchangeable at the representation level, creating blind spots that standard sparse autoencoder (SAE) objectives do not target. In safety-critical settings such as clinical dosage extraction, legal clause interpretation, or financial amount verification, such failures can propagate silently into downstream decisions. We study this problem as one of feature-basis orientation. Building on a symmetry-matching view from algebraic error-detection theory, we add a differentiable $V_{\mathrm{Gini}}$ regularisation term to SAE training that penalises uneven perturbation response within a specified family. Across GPT-2, Gemma 2, and Qwen 2.5, a frozen multi-seed evaluation shows that $V$-regularisation raises both relative and absolute lower-tail responses while reducing response-profile imbalance, with no material general-text reconstruction degradation. JumpReLU and minimum description length (MDL) objectives remain close to the Standard SAE profile under the same protocol. Family-geometry controls show that the effect is not explained by template duplication or a single dominant perturbation family, and held-out probes plus…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 17

  CAT-RAG: Improving Secure Code Generation with Category-Aware Agentic Retrieval

  Mahdieh Abazar, Lorenzo De Carli, Benjamin Tan

  Despite rapid progress in LLM-based code generation, security vulnerabilities remain widespread, and retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) can further amplify risk when retrieved knowledge is verbose or vulnerable to poisoning. Existing secure RACG approaches inject security knowledge at a fine-grained vulnerability level, causing prompt overhead and diluted model attention when a query implicates multiple related weaknesses. We propose CAT-RAG, an agentic security category-aware retrieval-augmented code generation framework. CAT-RAG performs adaptive category selection via an LLM as a categorizer agent and operates either as a standalone security layer or as a drop-in add-on to RACG pipelines, requiring no modification to the underlying model. We replace CWE-level retrieval with compact, language-specific security categories. These categories provide a higher-level abstraction over individual CWE weaknesses, organizing them by the security concern they share, such as Input Validation and Injection Attacks, rather than merely grouping related entries. Each category consolidates best practices and secure code examples into a single, prompt-efficient representation. We perform…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 17

  Compositional Activation Steering Across Languages and Behaviors with Contextual Gates

  Daniil Gurgurov, Akansh Maurya, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann, Hitomi Yanaka

  Activation steering has emerged as an effective and precise way to influence the behaviours of language models. However, composing multiple steering directions to control several behaviours simultaneously remains challenging, particularly in multilingual settings and with training-free steering vectors. We address this challenge with contextual steering, jointly training gates that adapt the strength of fixed steering directions to the current hidden state and interactions between interventions. Across a broad range of languages, behavioural attributes, and models, our approach outperforms constant-strength steering and four strong baselines, including prompting. It also better preserves general knowledge and keeps the model's internal computation closer to that of the prompted model. Our analysis further shows how jointly trained gates adapt their contributions during composition, explaining the mechanisms underlying effective compositional steering.

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• arXiv cs.HCOct 17

  Leveraging Mental Models for Human-Centered Explanations: A Systematic Design Approach Illustrated by Explainable Fake Review Identification

  Sidra Naveed, Md Shajalal, Gunnar Stevens, Alexander Boden

  Explainable AI (XAI) often prioritizes model fidelity over user intelligibility, yielding explanations that satisfy technical transparency yet fail to support human sense-making. We propose a human-centered approach, MIND-X (Mental-model INtegrated Design for eXplainability), which aligns explanations with users' mental models, commonsense concepts, and judgment heuristics. Using fake review detection as a case study, we contribute: (1) a qualitative study (n=10) that elicits how people assess review credibility and produces an actionable, design-guiding taxonomy of perceptual cues; (2) a set of design principles that link those cues to explanation strategies and prompt LLMs to generate adaptive, language-based explanations; and (3) a quantitative evaluation (n=166) showing that these explanations offer distinct advantages over token-level transparency methods widely used in explainable text classification in terms of understandability, satisfaction, perceived trust, persuasiveness, and decision-making support. Rather than claiming general superiority, our evaluation illustrates how grounding explanations in users' everyday reasoning practices can produce more intelligible and…

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• arXiv cs.SEOct 17

  RXSynth: A Seed-Grounded Corpus for Studying Java Runtime-Exception Bugs

  Parnian Eslamloo, Banani Roy

  Existing Java bug benchmarks offer limited method-level data for studying runtime-exception detection. Filtering Defects4J, Bugs.jar, Bears, and BugSwarm yields only 170 real buggy/fixed method pairs across seven unchecked exception types. We introduce RXSynth, a corpus of 4,275 synthetic Java method pairs generated from real bug/fix exemplars. We select the generator using structural alignment with real seeds and validate pairs using a two-stage patch-anchored procedure that identifies the labelled exception risk and checks whether the repair removes it. Independent JVM execution confirms patch-local validity for 84.2% of a stratified sample of 500 pairs. Provenance records enable evaluation without overlap between generation exemplars and test bugs. Structural analyses show good alignment within the represented size range, but compression of larger methods. We use RXSynth to compare isolated-method detection with pair discrimination when the repair is visible. Under provenance-controlled evaluation, supervised isolated-method ROC-AUC is about 0.55-0.64. Stronger zero-shot models reach about 69% accuracy but identify only 41.2% of repaired methods correctly. In contrast,…

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• arXiv cs.AIOct 17▲ 5

  HybridResearcher: Bridging the Structured-Unstructured Boundary for Deep Research Agents

  Soyoung Yoon, Peiran Xu, Han Wang, Ruofan Wu, Xiaodong Yu +6

  While LLM agents are increasingly capable of gathering and synthesizing evidence from a single homogeneous source, such as structured tables or unstructured data, real-world analytical questions frequently span heterogeneous sources. For example, answering one enterprise question may require both a result computed over an internal database and evidence found on the web. Recent evaluations on benchmarks like HybridDeepResearch show that even frontier agents struggle when evidence must cross this boundary. While these benchmarks have exposed the limitation, methodologies to explicitly teach cross-source reasoning remain absent. To address this, we introduce HybridResearcher, a 4B agent trained to bridge evidence across the structured and unstructured boundary. To build it, we synthesize cross-source bridge trajectories by starting with validated single-source tasks-such as existing text-to-SQL or web search queries-and fabricating the missing source around a bridge entity drawn from the seed's own output. We retain a sample only when strict construction gates confirm that neither side alone suffices, ensuring the data requires true cross-source interdependence. Finally, we train on…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 17

  Predicting Individual Differences in Lipreading From Eye-Tracking and Pupillometry During Silent Visual Speech

  Puneet Kumar, Satyarth Malik, Gao Zheng, Guoying Zhao, Xiaobai Li

  Lipreading ability varies widely, including among people who are hard of hearing. Although mouth-directed attention is linked to speechreading outcomes, it remains unclear how much lipreading skill can be inferred from viewing behavior and which signals carry this information. We examine whether individual differences in lipreading ability are reflected in viewing behavior during silent speech and quantify the contributions of gaze dynamics, pupil-linked signals, and spatial viewing allocation. We introduce the Lipreading Perception Study (LiPS) dataset and a tracker-independent preprocessing pipeline that synchronizes SR Research EyeLink gaze and pupil recordings with the stimuli. Twenty-four adults (age 32 $\pm$ 10 years) completed a four-alternative forced-choice silent lipreading task. An extreme-groups protocol yielded 18 participants labeled as stronger or weaker lipreaders. Each participant-trial included four aligned views: lip-region images, frame-level gaze, pupil summaries, and spatial viewing proportions. A four-branch neural network with cross-modal attention predicted labels using participant-disjoint splits and systematic ablations. The full model reached accuracy…

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• arXiv cs.LGOct 17

  Distribution-Based Regularization for Reward Fine-Tuning Diffusion and Flow Models

  Romeo Passaro, Jeongjae Lee, Jong Chul Ye, Michael M. Bronstein, Yoshua Bengio +2

  Reward fine-tuning is an effective way to adapt pretrained diffusion and flow-matching models to downstream objectives, but aggressive optimization often leads to mode collapse and distributional drift. Existing methods attempt to control this drift with reverse-KL regularization, implemented as an $\ell_2$ penalty on the velocity field; however, this functions by indirectly constraining sampling dynamics rather than directly acting on the generated distribution. To address this, we propose DFR (Distributional Functional Rewards), which augments the task reward with a distribution-dependent, per-sample reward that acts explicitly on the generated distribution. Formally, we generalize the KL-regularized objective from expected rewards, which are linear in the model's distribution, to convex functionals of it. The first variation of this objective defines an effective, distribution-dependent reward that directly penalizes deviation from the pretrained distribution. This formulation yields additive per-sample rewards for the Fréchet distance (FD), maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and DreamSim diversity, recovering several recently proposed rewards as special cases. Across various…

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• arXiv cs.CROct 17

  Peer Pressure: Execution-Verified Co-Evolution of Attacker and Defender Populations for Code Security

  Khushbu Pahwa, Yubin Ge, Daniele Bonadiman, Xiaofei Ma, Yi Zhang

  LLM code agents increasingly ship code with little oversight, yet defenders trained on static vulnerability datasets fall behind adapting adversaries. We co-train attacker and defender instead, and let execution decide every reward: an attacker (Red) edits a real repository and earns nothing unless its patch applies, builds, passes the tests, completes its development task and reproduces a real exploit in an isolated container, whose path also labels the entry point, the critical operation and the trace between them. Peer-Relative Policy Optimization (PRPO) makes both sides populations of LoRA adapters over one frozen base and credits each against same-role peers that faced an identical condition, placing the population inside the policy-gradient baseline rather than the opponent pool, with a tournament preserving diversity. Matching cancels the condition's difficulty: at equal coverage it is worth 2.3 points of balanced accuracy over a baseline computed on other conditions, and it matches a within-policy control at half the verifier spend. PRPO's 7B diff reviewer reaches 64.8% balanced accuracy on four unseen applications in three untrained languages, 5.5 points above supervised…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 17

  LastWords: Boring Problems Revisited

  Huayang Li, Richard Sproat

  In 2022, the second author published a Last Words piece in Computational Linguistics in which he pointed out that, despite the advances in AI up to that point, there were still some problems in natural language processing that on the one hand seemed trivial and perhaps boring, but on the other were hard to solve using purely neural methods. One such problem discussed in that context was text normalization, and a particular subproblem of that, namely number name reading. The piece came out just a few months before the first release of ChatGPT, and needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Indeed, as we document here, the problem (of number name reading) has practically been solved, at least by one of the latest frontier models. However, we believe that there are still open issues for such limited domain, constrained and limited resource problems, and that in some future machine learning approach, the massive resources of the latest frontier models would not be needed to solve them.

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 17

  Multi-Speed Field Evaluation of a Semi-Autonomous Precision Sprayer for Weed Control in Vegetable Crops

  Md Khairul Islam, Boyang Deng, Yuzhen Lu, Daniel Brainard, Ajit Srivastava

  Machine vision-guided precision spraying is promising for sustainable vegetable production by enabling site-specific weed targeting, reducing herbicide application while protecting crop yield and quality. However, the effects of operating speed of sprayer systems on the integrated detection-tracking-actuation pipeline remain insufficiently characterized under field conditions. This study evaluated a semi-autonomous, tractor-based spraying system for targeted weed control in radish and quantified performance across three operating speeds. A five-season dataset comprising 10,599 images and 84,311 annotated instances across seven classes was curated for model development. A YOLOv11-medium model was integrated with ByteTrack tracking and a customized 12-nozzle sprayer on a semi-autonomous electric tractor. Field trials were conducted at 0.13, 0.27, and 0.45 m/s (i.e., 0.3, 0.6, and 1.0 mph) to characterize speed-dependent changes in weed detection, targeting, actuation, and crop damage. At the lowest speed of 0.13 m/s, the system achieved 94.6% mAP@50 and 93.2% recall for weed and crop detection. However, increasing platform speed substantially reduced system performance, with weed…

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• arXiv stat.MLOct 17

  Scalable and Adaptive Distribution Regression via Random Features

  Yinsong Wang, Xiao Liu, Yu Ding

  Distribution regression seeks to learn mappings from probability distributions to response variables and has emerged as a unifying framework for kernel methods, multi-instance learning, and set-valued learning. Despite its success, kernel-based distribution regression remains computationally expensive and sensitive to kernel choice, motivating scalable and adaptive representations. Building on random feature approximations, we develop a finite-sample analysis of Random Feature Distribution Regression (RaDR) under two-stage sampling. Our perturbation analysis separates the effects of distribution-level sampling, finite within-bag sampling, and random feature approximation. We establish sufficient feature-budget conditions under which RaDR preserves the order of our excess-risk upper bound for exact two-stage kernel distribution regression while maintaining computational efficiency. We further propose Adaptive Random Feature Distribution Regression (A-RaDR), a unified score-guided framework that adaptively allocates random features according to downstream learning objectives. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and 41 real-world datasets demonstrate that RaDR delivers substantial…

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• arXiv cs.ITOct 17

  Query-Dependent Reading for Quantized Inner-Product Estimation: A Minimax Separation

  Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Siddharth Bhandari, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

  We study quantization for inner-product estimation when storage and reading have separate budgets. In the static bit-probe model [Yao, 1981], an encoder stores $w$ bits about $x$ before seeing a query $y$, and a reader probes at most $r<w$ bits to estimate $x^\top y$. Both vectors lie in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean unit ball. Protocols may be randomized, and computation is unrestricted. Performance is measured by $d$ times the worst-case mean-squared error over $x,y$, averaged over protocol randomness. First, we show that query-independent reading cannot benefit from extra storage. Any such reader is equivalent to fully reading an $r$-bit message, even when later reads depend on previously returned bits. At fixed positive rates $W=w/d$ and $R=r/d$, the normalized minimax error converges to $1/(4^R-1)$, independent of $W$. The upper bound was already known [Ordentlich and Polyanskiy, 2025]. We prove the matching lower bound for arbitrary scalar decoders, extending the result for unbiased compressors [Safaryan et al., 2020]. Then, we show that query-dependent reading makes extra storage useful. We construct a two-batch protocol using Gaussian projections and random thresholds,…

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 17

  Measuring Data Diversity with Embeddings: A Taxonomy and Benchmark for Diversity Measures

  Cantao Su, Anna Wegmann, Esther Ploeger, Dong Nguyen

  Diversity is a critical property of text corpora, with direct implications for training data curation, test set design, and model generalization. However, its measurement remains fragmented and poorly understood. Existing embedding-based diversity measures vary widely in how they are computed and can yield substantially different diversity scores on the same data, yet no systematic comparison of their empirical behaviour exists. We make two contributions toward addressing this gap. First, we present a taxonomy of 21 embedding-based diversity measures, organizing them into four families based on their underlying computations. Second, we introduce EmbDivBench, a benchmark that evaluates these measures along three conceptually distinct components (variety, balance and disparity) on both simulated and natural text data. Although Mean Pairwise Distance is the most commonly used measure, our experiments show that it is outperformed by several alternatives on the three diversity components, with Graph Entropy being the best choice overall. Lastly, we distil these findings into practical recommendations for diversity measure selection.

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• arXiv cs.CLOct 17

  Do We Need the Largest LLMs for Every Clinical Decision?

  Ali H. Lazem, William Teahan

  Large clinical language models often require multi-GPU infrastructure, limiting local deployment. We introduce CERTA, a decision-level statistical certificate that determines when a quantized model may substitute for its native BF16 reference and escalates decisions that cannot be certified to it. Across eleven instruction-tuned models, both general-purpose and domain-adapted, from three families (7-72B), we evaluated 2,500 clinical-verification decisions from de-identified patient contexts (2,484 patients), with patient-disjoint calibration and testing. In the higher-power operational analysis, round-to-nearest 8-bit quantization at BF16 storage served 99.8-100% of held-out decisions across all eleven models; formal finite-sample guarantees were assessed separately using the exact split-sample procedure. In the same operational analysis, the class-conditional 4-bit frontier reduced the amortized, BF16-equivalent deployment cost to 25.8% and 27.3% of the BF16 reference for Qwen2.5-72B and HuatuoGPT-o1-72B, respectively, with measured peak memory of 43.0 and 42.7 GB, below the nominal capacity of a single 48 GB accelerator. Deployment on that specific hardware was not directly…

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• arXiv cs.CVOct 17

  Goal Images Are Control Targets: Spatially-Grounded Goal-Image Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation

  Riddhi Chatterjee, Ritish Shrirao, Kushagra Mehrotra, Viswanath Gopalakrishnan

  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 $ρ\approx 0.9$ with success), while photorealism and aesthetic fidelity, precisely where large proprietary editors excel, are uncorrelated with success ($ρ\approx 0$). This dissociation holds on both CALVIN and the real-world-aligned SIMPLER-Bridge benchmark. We then present SGE-Goal, a…

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• arXiv cs.SEOct 17

  When Does UML Software Modeling Pay Off? A Contingency Model of Industrial Modeling Value

  Kleinner Silva Farias de Oliveira

  With the emergence of specification-driven development (SDD), software modeling has regained strategic importance as a way to translate human intentions, requirements, and design decisions into precise specifications that can guide both developers and AI-assisted development tools. Despite the renewed relevance of modeling in SDD, empirical evidence remains limited on when its benefits outweigh the socio-technical effort required to create, communicate, synchronize, and maintain software models in industrial practice. This study investigates when software modeling generates value in industrial practice. We analyzed 405 survey responses collected from software practitioners. The questionnaire combined closed items concerning UML use, benefits, barriers, and improvement mechanisms with open-ended questions about current use, difficulties, and worthwhile contexts. Most respondents associated modeling with integration discussions (90 percent) and shared understanding (82 percent), but also reported time pressure (85 percent) and the effort required to create and maintain models (80 percent). Selective modeling, model-code synchronization, and collaborative support emerged as…

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