Robotics
Papers
Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.
Saturday 29 August
Collecting contact-rich robot experiences at scale remains a major bottleneck for generalizable manipulation. Beyond data quantity, robot learning also requires diverse experiences across embodiments, viewpoints, and scenes. Human egocentric videos provide abundant physical interactions, but each video captures only a narrow slice of experience under a single body, camera trajectory, and environment. We propose AnyWorld, a cross-embodiment world modeling framework that expands a single human interaction into diverse robot-native rollouts without paired human-robot demonstrations. Our model factorizes an interaction into action, camera, and embodiment: action controls capture the motion structure, camera controls specify viewpoint evolution, and the target embodiment context defines the acting body and its interaction geometry. This formulation enables independent recomposition of embodiment, viewpoint, and scene factors, allowing a single model to generate many robot-domain experiences while preserving the underlying dynamics and object interactions. We train the model with large-scale human interaction pretraining followed by mixed-embodiment fine-tuning. Experiments show that our model supports controllable recomposition across embodiments, viewpoints, and scenes, and we further demonstrate that the generated data can improve manipulation performance on the RoboCasa GR1 tabletop benchmark and a real IRON humanoid robot. Beyond aggregate gains, we test whether unpaired human experience can be recomposed into robot-native video-action pairs that target a policy gap. Controlled IRON interventions correct a spurious completion prior and establish language-grounded spatial target selection; an action-only counterfactual intervention fails to learn the latter reliably, showing that both action calibration and visual recomposition are necessary.
Computation and Language
When Patients Cut In: Extending Clinical Conversational AI Safety to Interruptions
Clinical voice agents are now deployed in routine care, where real patients do not wait their turn: they interrupt. These systems typically use a cascaded architecture (speech-to-text -> LLM -> text-to-speech), so when a patient cuts the agent off mid-utterance, clinically required content can be lost even when the model handles cooperative transcripts well. Yet clinical conversational-AI benchmarks almost universally assume patients wait for the agent to finish, missing interruption-induced loss of required content. We present a transcript-based evaluation of interruption recovery, adapting conversation-analytic overlap categories into three operational types (recognitional, competitive, transitional sub-unit) and testing four deployment-oriented, non-reasoning LLM configurations across four cells spanning history-taking (information gathering) and FAQ (information provision), scored on whether the agent preserves the clinically required content. In the gathering cells, target-question failure varied across models; in the provision cells, where arms are directly comparable, failure rose for every model. Rankings differ across cells, and competitive FAQ interruption produced 30/30 provision-coverage failures for all four models (Wilson 95% CI: 88.6-100.0%; baseline 0/30 for three, 4/30 for Llama). A brief apology marker ("sorry to interrupt") shifts recovery by tens of percentage points, inconsistently across models, and for one it reduces recovery. Interruption robustness therefore cannot be a single score: evaluation must be content-grounded, reported per cell, and matched to the deployment's interruption profile.
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Computation and Language
Anchoring Speech with Semantics: A Multimodal Adapter Mechanism for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages
Low-resource ASR remains difficult because scarce transcripts provide limited supervised evidence for target-side generation. To address this gap, we propose SAMA-ASR, a lightweight adapter mechanism that augments the decoder with semantic anchors from auxiliary translations and an acoustic anchor from speech; in principle, the mechanism can be applied to similar encoder–decoder multitask speech models. Through cross-modal adaptation, SAMA-ASR conditions decoder states on translation-derived semantic embeddings and a speech embedding, combining utterance-level meaning with speech-grounded evidence before token prediction. At evaluation time, these semantic anchors can be generated automatically by an upstream speech-to-text translator rather than supplied as oracle translations. Experiments on two 30-hour datasets covering the low-resource Sinitic varieties Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka show that SAMA-ASR improves over acoustic, prior prompt-based, and semantic-only translation-guided baselines and remains effective in practical automatic semantic-anchor settings; translator-capacity analyses show that useful semantic anchors can be produced by a compact ST model.
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Computer Vision
AGRICAM: A Track-Mounted Crop Pollination Monitoring Robot
Insect pollination is critical for global food production, yet monitoring pollinators at commercial farm scale remains a challenge. Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have enabled detailed analysis of pollinator behaviour, but monitoring must trade-off detail against spatial coverage and human or technological resources. This paper presents the Automated Guided Robot for Insect and Crop Activity Monitoring (AGRICAM), a purpose-built robotic system designed to meet the requirements of large-scale pollination monitoring in protected cropping systems. AGRICAM operates autonomously on low-cost, easily installed track for movement along crop rows, without disrupting farm operations or insect behaviour. The platform integrates two RGB cameras, microclimate sensors, GPS and RFID modules, motion sensors, and 4G cellular network connectivity for data transmission. A web interface enables remote device configuration and scheduling. The system autonomously captures video and image data of insects' locations and local environmental conditions. These are transferred to the cloud and analysed using computer vision models to quantify pollinator visitation and spatio-temporal activity variation. We deployed the system on a commercial blueberry farm to demonstrate and test its capability. It successfully mapped insect pollination patterns across 80 m long industrial polytunnels over 30 hours. This data enabled spatial analyses of insect activity we used to confirm a uniform pollinator distribution within polytunnels, as desired by the farm management team. The data also highlighted variation of insect activity associated with time of day and microclimate. AGRICAM therefore has been shown to be a scalable, automated crop pollination monitor that can support data-driven decisions to enhance pollination management, thereby improving crop productivity and food security.
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Computer Vision
Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Anti-UAV Detection via Evidential Fusion and Conflict-Discounted Belief Aggregation
Anti-UAV perception systems must remain reliable when sensor streams degrade under occlusion, fast motion, or modality-specific failure. Existing multimodal anti-UAV systems fuse RGB and thermal streams deterministically, without modeling predictive uncertainty, and cannot express doubt when streams disagree. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) produces calibrated per-class uncertainty in a single forward pass. EDTC already exploits this for thermal-only perception, yet cross-modal evidential fusion remains unaddressed. This paper extends EDTC to multimodal RGB-Thermal perception via Discounted Belief Fusion (DBF), which converts inter-modal conflict into uncertainty mass before aggregating stream opinions. Bounding boxes are resolved by selecting the lower-uncertainty modality. On the Anti-UAV benchmark, multimodal fusion consistently outperforms either single stream (test Acc 0.670 vs. 0.604 IR, 0.598 RGB) at real-time speed (at least 38 FPS). However, DBF is empirically indistinguishable from undiscounted averaging: near-zero inter-modal conflict on this presence-dominated benchmark leaves the discounting step inert. The fused uncertainty is well-calibrated (ECE 0.057) yet expectedly a weaker localization failure detector than spatial variance (AUROC 0.626 vs. 0.739). The null result is structural: the benchmark's near-universal presence and vacuous miss-encoding jointly suppress inter-modal conflict, a diagnosis that delimits where conflict-aware fusion provides measurable benefit.
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Computer Vision
Generalization over Memorization: Generalization-Aware Diffusion Adaptation for Single-Image Multi-View Synthesis
We present the winning solution to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Grand Challenge on Single-Image Guided Multi-Angle Image Synthesis. It ranks first among 293 registered teams; 56 teams obtained at least one scored submission on the public Phase-A leaderboard. With only 40 training scenes, the challenge requires 26 target views from one RGB model and one forward pass per view; it prohibits explicit geometry, external rendering, chained generation, candidate selection, and post-processing. We identify a critical model-selection failure: shared training and validation scenes make memorization appear as transferable view control. We therefore introduce GoM. Short for Generalization over Memorization, the framework combines scene-disjoint validation, exposure-matched selection, and targeted diffusion adaptation. Its synthesis model adapts a 4B rectified-flow DiT using rank-32 LoRA, optimizer restarts, late-checkpoint averaging, and VAE decoder tuning. More than 300 offline experiments and 24 online submissions show that validation design and training-trajectory control can matter as much as architecture scale in small-data generative modeling.
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Computer Vision
Background-Free Objectness Learning for Class-Agnostic Detection
Object detectors are typically trained under closed-set supervision, where unlabeled regions are implicitly treated as background. Under incomplete annotations, this assumption introduces objectness bias: visually valid but unlabeled objects are used as negatives, tying objectness to the annotated taxonomy rather than generic object structure. This limitation is particularly problematic for class-agnostic and open-world detection. This paper proposes Background-Free Objectness Learning (B-FOR), a dense class-agnostic detection framework that learns objectness without explicit background supervision on unlabeled regions. B-FOR formulates detection as the prediction of dense multi-scale object-center and scale fields, from which object hypotheses emerge as local spatial structures. Supervision is confined to reliable annotated regions through spatially structured soft targets, avoiding foreground-background discrimination. To support decoding from emergent local maxima, the paper further introduces displacement-aware scale fields that model object extent as a spatially varying property of the learned objectness field. Experiments on PASCAL VOC, MS-COCO, and Open Images demonstrate strong generalization to unseen categories and cross-dataset object distributions. B-FOR improves recall by more than +10 AR points over prior class-agnostic baselines. Ablation studies show that both localized objectness supervision and displacement-aware scale fields are critical for class-agnostic localization under incomplete annotations. Code available at: https://github.com/Daniaawan/B-FOR.
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Computer Vision
Compact Snapshot Spectral Imaging with Calibration-Free Aperture Diffraction
Snapshot Spectral Imaging (SSI) provides high-dimensional temporal-spatial-spectral observation to uncover intrinsic physical characteristics. However, its complex system and repetitive calibration requirements hinder edge applications. Here, we propose a compact, cost-effective, calibration-free SSI method, Aperture Diffraction Imaging Spectrometer (ADIS), which consists only of a diffractive lens with a binary mask and a Bayer-filtered sensor, requiring no additional physical footprint compared to standard RGB cameras. ADIS disperses and multiplexes wavelengths, mapping energy to distinct sensor locations, enabling full-resolution recovery from superpixel-level encodings. ADIS directly leverages theoretically computed PSFs to enable calibration-free spectral reconstruction, while tolerating lens-dependent variations across different optical configurations and bridging the gap between simulation and reality. To achieve SSI by solving a sparsely-constrained inverse problem, we introduce the Orthogonal Diffraction-Aware Unfolding Framework (ODAUF) with Voxel Shift Transformer (VST) for improved orthogonal diffraction perception. Integrating VST into ODAUF forms the efficient Orthogonal Diffraction-Aware Unfolding Voxel Shift Transformer (ODAUVST), delivering excellent recovery and reduced parameters. By elaborating on theory, systematic and comprehensive comparing, and demonstrating real SSI results, we validate the superiority of ADIS, achieving calibration-free full-resolution SSI within a commercial camera footprint.
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Numerical Analysis
Entropy-Stable and Physical-Constraint-Preserving DGSEM for Symmetry-Reduced General-Relativistic Hydrodynamics on Stationary Spacetimes
We develop an entropy-stable and physical-constraint-preserving discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method for symmetry-reduced general-relativistic hydrodynamics on prescribed stationary spacetimes. Using a local orthonormal transformation, the fluid variables are expressed in a form for which the relativistic hydrodynamic algebra and the admissible set are independent of the spatial metric, while the spacetime geometry enters through stationary coefficients. This separation allows entropy-conservative special-relativistic fluxes to be combined with a compatible discretization of the geometric source terms. On affine tensor-product meshes, the resulting DGSEM is conservative and satisfies a semidiscrete entropy inequality, while the transformed variables provide a convex framework for physical-constraint preservation. For practical stabilization, we use a geometry-only causal speed that is sufficient for both classical local Lax–Friedrichs entropy dissipation and the physical-constraint-preserving Lax–Friedrichs splitting. The fully discrete method combines this stabilization with SSP Runge–Kutta time stepping, oscillation elimination, and conservative local-orthonormal-state scaling. Numerical experiments cover smooth and strongly shocked special-relativistic flows, an axisymmetric jet, stationary Michel accretion, Schwarzschild Bondi–Hoyle flow, and four Kerr accretion cases. The results demonstrate the designed high-order accuracy in smooth regimes and robust performance for demanding relativistic flows on curved stationary backgrounds.
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Artificial Intelligence
Localizing Emergent Failures in Agentic AI: Recovering Minimal Repair Families via Counterfactual Replay
Failures in agentic AI systems can arise from interactions among messages exchanged by multiple large language model (LLM) agents. Pointwise attribution cannot distinguish a jointly necessary repair from alternative singleton repairs. We formulate Minimal Repair Family Recovery (MRFR): recovering all inclusion-minimal event sets whose counterfactual replay restores task success within a declared size bound. We propose Graph-Constrained Joint Replay (GCJR), which slices failure-relevant events from an execution dependency graph, constructs graph-feasible singleton and pair candidates, and verifies them by replay with paired clean counterparts. For fixed replay outcomes, GCJR is exact within its declared graph domain. On 90 in-scope cases from a 120-DAG controlled benchmark, GCJR achieves 1.000 Family Exact Match while reducing mean replay calls from 56.3 to 25.3 (55.1%) relative to exhaustive search. On a 24-case, four-agent LLM pilot, it again achieves 1.000 Family Exact Match and reduces mean model calls from 21.0 to 10.0 (52.4%); single-event replay misses jointly necessary repairs.
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Computer Vision
Using Channel Representations in Regularization Terms: A Case Study on Image Diffusion
In this work we propose a novel non-linear diffusion filtering approach for images based on their channel representation. To derive the diffusion update scheme we formulate a novel energy functional using a soft-histogram representation of image pixel neighborhoods obtained from the channel encoding. The resulting Euler-Lagrange equation yields a non-linear robust diffusion scheme with additional weighting terms stemming from the channel representation which steer the diffusion process. We apply this novel energy formulation to image reconstruction problems, showing good performance in the presence of mixtures of Gaussian and impulse-like noise, e.g. missing data. In denoising experiments of common scalar-valued images our approach performs competitive compared to other diffusion schemes as well as state-of-the-art denoising methods for the considered noise types.
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Programming Languages
Fine-grained Causal Reversibility for Asynchronous Channel-based Programming
Causal reversibility has emerged as an effective technique for debugging concurrent systems. In particular, rolling back and replaying a concurrent program with causal consistency has been found very helpful in debugging concurrency bugs. In channel-based communication, queue ordering creates dependencies that prevent causally independent actions from being rolled back and replayed. To enable efficient rollback and replay without being constrained by queue dependencies, it is necessary to analyse causal dependencies between messages in queues and reorder independent messages. This paper presents revGo, a core of the Go programming language assuming unbounded asynchronous channels. Our rollback-and-replay semantics allows us to reorder messages in the queue if they are not causally related in the forward execution. It is shown that reordering independent messages generates no configuration with non-reachable processes. By reordering independent messages, rollback and replay are implementable with minimality by assigning unique keys to communications.
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Artificial Intelligence
Computational Depth Measurement in Thermographic Video: Overcoming Spatial Overfitting via Spatio-Temporal Decoupling
Accurate through-thickness measurement of subsurface delamination depth in Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) is important for structural assessment because defect location determines affected load-bearing layers. Optical pulsed thermography (OPT) provides a two-dimensional thermal video rather than volumetric measurements, so depth must be inferred from temporal heat-diffusion responses. A challenge is spatial dataset bias: when calibration defects follow regular grids, regression models may memorize their geometry instead of learning physical relationship between thermal decay and depth. This work introduces a spatio-temporal decoupling architecture that separates spatial defect localization from temporal depth measurement. Defect regions are first localized using segmentation methods, after which thermal responses are spatially averaged and converted into sixteen physics-informed temporal, energy, statistical, and geometric features. These features expose the one-dimensional heat-conduction relationship while withholding pixel coordinates from the depth model. Four regression models are evaluated using specimen-level cross-validation: Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Advanced Multi-Layer Perceptron (Adv-MLP), and XGBoost. Unregularized trees and over-parameterized Adv-MLP exhibit calibration collapse under geometric shifts, with errors exceeding 0.5 mm. In contrast, regularized XGBoost with L1/L2 penalties and column sampling maintains cross-specimen calibration, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.056 mm and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.085 mm. Predicted depths are merged with masks to generate Delaunay-triangulated three-dimensional defect models in three to five seconds per specimen. Results show that mathematical regularization and spatio-temporal decoupling reduce spatial memorization in thermal-video depth regression.
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Computer Vision
SGPDFuse: Semantically-Guided Physics-Disentanglement General Multi-Modal Image Fusion
Multimodal image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate complementary sensor data into a single representation that preserves intrinsic scene reality while eliminating environmental interferences. Most existing approaches rely on blind feature aggregation, which excels at signal accumulation but fails to distinguish essential content from physical degradations. We propose SGPDFuse, which bridges this gap by mapping inputs into a physics-disentangled structural representation via a Semantic-Physical Parametric Bridge (SPPB) built on pretrained vision foundation models, utilizing the Intrinsic-Variation principle to decouple invariant scene attributes from transient environmental factors. To guide this decomposition, we introduce a Semantic Alignment mechanism: we explicitly anchor the fused representation to salient semantic features in the same foundation model feature space via cosine similarity to preserve critical targets, while enforcing physical texture fidelity through Gram-matrix regularization to strictly eliminate unnatural artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGPDFuse achieves state-of-the-art performance across infrared-visible, multi-focus, and multi-exposure benchmarks using a single architecture.
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Computation and Language
Attribute-Based Activation Steering of LLMs for Group-Specific Explanation Generation
To effectively enable people to understand new topics, explanations should be tailored to their backgrounds and abilities. Prompting alone has been shown to be insufficient for creating such explanations, and other computational methods are missing so far. Therefore, this paper investigates whether LLMs can be steered to generate explanations that are tailored to a specific group of people. To this end, we propose an approach that first identifies group-specific attributes in terms of explanatory style and knowledge of a specific target group. Building on activation engineering, it then computes attribute-based steering vectors and adds them to the internal activations of an LLM during inference to enable a fine-grained steering. In our experiments, we assess the steering effectiveness in terms of specificity and factuality of the generated explanations. Additionally, we evaluate the explanations in a study with human experts from different target groups. Compared to prompting and state-of-the-art steering baselines, our approach tailors the explanations significantly better to the target group while maintaining the best specificity-factuality balance.
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Cryptography and Security
Asymmetric Phase Coding Video Watermarking
Existing video watermarking systems are symmetric: the party that can verify a mark holds the extractor weights or generator secret and can therefore also embed one. Benchmarks confirm the consequence, reporting that white-box forgery defeats all evaluated methods. We present a training-free video watermark that removes the shared secret. The signer embeds a complete Ed25519 signature into the phase spectrum of the chroma plane; any party holding the 32-byte public key and public per-video metadata verifies offline, with no model, no registry, and no network. The payload, 1024 bits of signed message with error correction, is an order of magnitude above common learned payloads and is carried by three design elements: a run-length temporal layout whose decoder identifies payload groups by correlation and never reads a frame index, a payload-free search that recovers scale, rotation, and translation from the carrier itself, and a closed-loop signing procedure that selects each video's embedding strength by self-verification through the unchanged public verifier. On 1000 uncurated real-world clips the system ships a verifying signature for 99.3% of the corpus and accepts a wrong public key zero times in 1000 attempts. An attack-aware acceptance gate yields embeddings that survive H.264 re-encoding at 100% and 50% rescaling at 97.4% on gated clips. The signature also verifies through a real display and capture loop, an axis absent from published evaluations.
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Computer Vision
Ground-to-Satellite Localization in Unconstrained Image Collections for 3D Scene Reconstruction
Ground image localization with respect to satellite imagery is a key enabler for metrically-accurate, geo-localized 3D scene reconstruction from unconstrained image collections. Existing cross-view localization methods have strict requirements such as panoramic imagery or known initial locations, limiting their applicability for in-the-wild reconstruction settings. We propose a robust hierarchical cross-view localization framework that leverages geometric constraints from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) models derived from unconstrained ground image collections. Our method generates coarse-to-fine pose hypotheses through a cross-view matching approach and aggregates noisy predictions across SfM model(s) using Kernel Density Estimation to recover consensus alignments while filtering outliers. Experiments demonstrate reliable localization performance from challenging image collections. Empirically we found satellite-referenced alignment enables accurate metric scale estimation, doppelgänger detection, and merging of disjoint SfM reconstructions, resulting in more complete, geo-localized site models than are possible with SfM alone.
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Artificial Intelligence
Imag-Eval: a language-grounded framework for interpretable Text-to-Image instruction following evaluation
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet their evaluation remains constrained by benchmarks that are often difficult to interpret and insufficiently diagnostic. Existing skill-based evaluations tend to overlook critical failure modes that strongly impact usability but fall outside standard taxonomies, such as global incoherence arising from missing parts or physically implausible configurations (e.g., floating objects). In addition, prompt difficulty is typically controlled along a single dimension; either prompt length or the number of elements to generate. To address these limitations, we introduce Imag-Eval, a controlled benchmark designed to assess how T2I models ground compositional natural-language instructions into visual outputs. Unlike prior work that conflates surface linguistic complexity with compositional difficulty, Imag-Eval explicitly seeks to disentangles these factors by independently varying both the number of instances and the combination of constraints (rules), while avoiding error propagation. This design enables fine-grained and interpretable analysis of where cross-modal instruction following fails. Our benchmark comprises 1,140 prompts and 8,842 combined rules, and we evaluate it on several state-of-the-art models. Complementing this analysis with an additional study of over 2,000 prompts from a concurrent benchmark, our results suggest that, for structured skills, compositional difficulty is primarily governed by the number of grounded rules and their binding to instances,, rather than by prompt length alone.
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Computation and Language
Toward Cultural Alignment: Human-Centered Evaluation of Multimodal AI Stories Across Five African Communities
In this paper, we examine how well AI-generated multimodal stories align with the lived practices, relationships, language, values, and visual expectations of the communities they represent. We conduct a community-grounded mixed-methods evaluation with 19 culture representatives across five African communities, combining quantitative annotations with qualitative focus group discussions. We find that cultural alignment depends not simply on recognizable cultural markers, but on how those markers fit social, linguistic, procedural, and visual context. From these evaluations, we develop a taxonomy of cultural alignment comprising five broader cultural marker categories and eight recurring mechanisms of misalignment. We additionally evaluate five multimodal LLM judges to examine whether automated evaluation can approximate community-grounded judgments at scale. Judge reliability and score calibration vary substantially across communities, with no single judge performing consistently across all five settings. These findings motivate community-calibrated evaluation pipelines in which automated judges are validated against community judgments to determine where they can be trusted and where human review remains necessary.
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Robotics
AdaVLA: Adaptive Step Flow Matching for Training-free Acceleration of Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, built upon Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have significantly enhanced robotic capabilities by leveraging internet-scale knowledge and multimodal reasoning. However, the intensive computational overhead of VLAs constrains on-device deployment, hindering real-time responses to environmental changes. While various acceleration techniques have been proposed, they often rely on fine-tuning or access to training datasets, which are frequently unavailable due to privacy and proprietary concerns. Moreover, although flow-matching-based VLAs have emerged as efficient alternatives to standard diffusion models, current acceleration efforts largely target VLM inference costs, failing to address the iterative ODE solving process inherent in flow matching inference. To address these limitations, we propose AdaVLA, an online, training-free adaptive framework for fast yet accurate flow-matching-based Vision-Language-Action models. We introduce a novel metric derived from the flow matching trajectory curvature to quantify action generation confidence during inference. This metric enables the dynamic reduction of inference steps and the adaptive adjustment of MLP pruning ratios through an efficiently computed importance evaluation, requiring no access to training data. Experimental results on the LIBERO benchmark using a Jetson AGX Orin device demonstrate that our method achieves $1.87\times$ and $2.24\times$ speedups for $\pi_{0.5}$ and X-VLA, respectively, with negligible degradation in success rates. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach on real-world robotic tasks using SmolVLA.
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Artificial Intelligence
Hyper-Fold: Exploring the Expressive Limit of Sequence-Geometry Learning for Proteins via Hypergraph Modeling
Protein structure modeling rests on a single computational primitive: the interaction between what a residue is (sequence content) and where it sits (three-dimensional geometry). What is the expressive limit of this layer class? We show that the complete bilinear operator over content-geometry outer products–the sufficient statistic of all second-order interactions–is the expressive ceiling, while the additive message passing of mainstream geometric GNNs is provably blind to content-geometry binding. We then introduce Hyper-Fold, a rank-K separable convolutional backbone approaching this ceiling at message-passing cost: each radius neighborhood is organized into a sequence hyperedge and a contact hyperedge, modulated by an edge-conditioned matrix-valued operator factorized into K learned basis operators with geometry-generated coefficients. Across enzyme function prediction, fold classification, and ligand binding site detection, Hyper-Fold and its hierarchical variant Hyper-Fold-Deep achieve the best results among protein-specific structure encoders; Hyper-Fold-Pocket, an anchored set-prediction head, surpasses UniSite-3D on UniSite-DS and two zero-shot benchmarks with no sequence language model features, 68x fewer parameters, and 4.8x lower latency–suggesting that a sufficiently expressive 3D backbone recovers information that fusion architectures previously borrowed from evolution-scale pretraining.
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Artificial Intelligence
Benevolent Bias in Multi-Turn Human-Agent Dialogue
Bias in human-agent interaction can manifest not only through hostile language but also as benevolent bias, whereby unequal treatment hides behind a warm, positive tone. To make it detectable, we operationalise benevolent bias along two dimensions, tone and treatment, yielding three classes: neutral support, overt bias, and benevolent bias. Building on these definitions, we construct BENEVDIAL, a class-balanced corpus of 362,880 multi-turn support dialogues spanning user and agent demographics, roles, and generators, to support controlled evaluation. We then test two detector families on it: off-the-shelf safety detectors and prompted large language model (LLM) judges. Our findings reveal a notable detection gap: off-the-shelf detectors reliably flag overt bias yet largely fail to identify benevolent bias. LLM judges improve sensitivity when guided by explicit detection criteria, but this comes at the cost of increased misclassification of neutral supportive statements as benevolent bias, a tendency that is further exacerbated by the presence of demographic context. These findings suggest that fair monitoring of human-agent dialogue must look beyond surface cues to whether the agent's treatment is disparate.
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Software Engineering
AgentLogs: A Dataset for Opening the Black Box of Cloud Agents on GitHub
Coding agents now complete development tasks in real software projects and submit the results as pull requests. A pull request shows the outcome of an agent's execution but not the process behind it, such as which files the agent read, which commands it ran, or how many tokens it consumed. This is recorded only in the agent's log, and no existing dataset provides such logs of real-world use, including failed agent executions, across a wide range of repositories. We introduce AgentLogs, a large-scale dataset of activity on GitHub's cloud agent platform on public repositories, collected without requiring opt-in from developers. AgentLogs comprises 363,624 tasks and 635,886 sessions, each session an execution of the agent, in 40,565 popular public repositories, with 75,631,136 log entries that record each session step by step, including prompts, intermediate reasoning, tool calls (e.g., file edits, git operations, and GitHub interactions), and token usage, together with the linked pull requests, timelines, workflow runs, and users. Sessions are included regardless of their outcome. AgentLogs enables research on agent behavior and failure modes, efficiency and cost, task formulation, human-agent collaboration, and repository adoption. A demonstration video can be found at: https://youtu.be/ZnFpjuK9Azg
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Artificial Intelligence
How Identity and Opinion Shape Political Sycophancy in LLMs
As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly encourage users to disclose personal profiles for tailored assistance, measuring their political alignment becomes increasingly important. However, many existing benchmarks for assessing political behavior rely on closed-ended questions and do not fully capture how a model's stance may adapt to user-provided context during interaction. We introduce a framework that disentangles two distinct triggers of political sycophancy: opinion (aligning with explicit narratives) and identity (stereotyping based on demographic labels). Using 450 manually-checked political dilemmas as controlled probes, we evaluate 13 instruction-tuned LLMs. We uncover a dissociation: a model's susceptibility to explicit opinions does not necessarily predict its susceptibility to identity cues, and vice versa. When both signals are present, their effects are generally sub-additive rather than simply additive. Additionally, system-level personas primarily shift a model's baseline stance while having limited effect on the stance shift caused by user opinion or identity. Ultimately, our results suggest that LLM political stance is interactively and steerably vulnerable rather than being a fixed trait, highlighting how personalization may amplify identity- or opinion-conditioned shifts in the model's behaviors.
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Machine Learning
PokaiTrainer: Scaling Equilibrium Search to Competitive Pokémon VGC
Decision-time equilibrium search carried poker to superhuman play, but it has so far relied on tractable subgames: a handful of actions per decision, chance confined to card deals, one player moving at a time. Competitive Pokémon in its official doubles format (VGC) breaks all three assumptions at once. Both players act simultaneously from joint menus in the hundreds, each joint action resolves to hundreds of stochastic outcomes, and the opponent's reserves and stat allocations are hidden. No prior Pokémon agent performs equilibrium search, and whether it scales to this regime was open; we show that it does, and report what it took. PokaiEngine, our Rust battle engine, enumerates a joint action's full weighted outcome distribution in one pass, at ${\sim}99\%$ parity with Pokémon Showdown and a fraction of the cost of sampling it. PokaiTrainer adapts Student of Games to this scale and trains it by self-play over hundreds of human teams. Each decision is solved by counterfactual regret minimization as a Bayesian matrix game over public belief states, subgames grow under an explicit compute budget, and value targets are harvested from the interior of every solve and grounded by realized outcomes. The strength is in the search. The network's policy alone loses even to a shallow heuristic search. PokaiTrainer is, to our knowledge, the first VGC agent rated on the live Showdown ladder. Under open team sheets it wins 59% of 150 best-of-three sets against a human field averaging ${\sim}1320$ Elo, holds a 1350-1400 Elo band, and at its peak reached 1492 Elo, entering the format's top 500.
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Computer Vision
Bayesian-Optimized Superpixel-GrabCut for Traceable Optic Disc Segmentation
Optic disc (OD) segmentation is essential for diagnosing ophthalmic pathologies from retinal fundus images. However, prevailing deep learning approaches operate as opaque black boxes, lacking the inference-stage mathematical traceability–a critical requirement for algorithmic auditing and failure analysis in clinical workflows. This paper presents a fully algorithmically traceable and trainable segmentation pipeline that jointly combines superpixel decomposition, hybrid brightness-proximity superpixel scoring, morphological regularization, iterative GrabCut refinement, and elliptical shape fitting. The hyperparameter optimization is formulated as an objective function and solved via Bayesian optimization to eliminate manual parameter tuning. A quantitative evaluation on the Drishti-GS dataset demonstrates that our method achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.9536, matching state-of-the-art performance. By maintaining explicit mathematical transparency across all processing stages, our framework offers a deterministic, traceable alternative to black-box architectures for medical review and debugging.
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Computer Vision
RLG-TPV: Radar- and LiDAR-Guided Tri-Perspective View Fusion for Camera-Radar 3D Object Detection
Tri-Perspective View (TPV) representations describe 3D scene structure through top, side, and front feature planes, but existing TPV lifting is primarily camera-based, leaving the depth of sampled image evidence ambiguous along projected camera rays. We propose RLG-TPV, a multimodal TPV framework for camera-radar 3D object detection in which radar and training-time LiDAR provide complementary geometric guidance during representation construction. A ray-guided deformable-attention lift weights sampled image features using LiDAR-supervised camera depth probabilities and radar frustum occupancy, while radar additionally refines the depth distribution before lifting. Because conventional radar provides limited elevation information, LiDAR-derived class-occupancy targets supervise the side and front planes during training; the corresponding heads are removed at inference, so deployment requires only cameras and radar. For temporal aggregation, Doppler-guided temporal fusion aligns past features using a motion field anchored by measured radar radial velocity, with gating that limits warping in regions without supported motion. An RCS-aware radar scatter further allows radar evidence to spread over spatial neighborhoods conditioned on radar cross section. On the nuScenes validation set, RLG-TPV achieves 0.4981 mAP and 0.5959 NDS, reducing orientation and velocity error by 31.9% and 30.7% relative to the published CRN baseline. Ablation studies show that ray-level geometric guidance is a major contributor to the final performance.
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Machine Learning
HalluPrism: When Multimodal Uncertainty Should Diagnose, Not Decide
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can assign similar confidence to answers that fail for different reasons. We propose HalluPrism, a behavioral diagnostic that re-runs an answer after visual degradation, blank-image replacement, and grounding or relation checks. These targeted probes yield a signature over visual-perturbation sensitivity (V ), image-removal confidence retention (L), and grounding/relation-probe instability (A). Across 58K+ examples from four benchmarks and four MLLMs, image-removal confidence retention is most prevalent, while grounding/relation-probe instability better separates failure families. Only 18 of 48 source-target checks are diagonally aligned, so the coordinates should be interpreted jointly rather than as independent causal sources. With the dataset fixed, the joint signature improves failure-family AUROC from 0.634 to 0.769 on HallusionBench and from 0.707 to 0.817 on VizWiz, with smaller gains on POPE and VSR. In pooled XGBoost analysis, AUROC rises from 0.78 with scalar confidence to 0.95 with (V, L, A) and 0.97 when confidence is added. The same signature does not automatically improve correctness ranking. The three tested direct scalarizations can harm it. These results separate failure diagnosis from abstention scoring: multimodal uncertainty should characterize failure structure before it is used to decide whether to abstain or correct.
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Human-Computer Interaction
An Eye-Tracking Dataset for Viewing Distance Categories in Real-World Scenarios
Estimating viewing distance from gaze behavior is essential for understanding user intent and enabling distance-aware interactive systems. However, most existing eye-tracking datasets have been collected in constrained settings, such as laboratory environments or static tasks. Consequently, they only partially capture viewing behaviors in real-world situations where viewing distance changes with natural head and body movements. We introduce GazeDepth, an eye-tracking dataset collected from 19 participants using a wearable tracker during tasks reflecting real-world scenarios. GazeDepth includes fixed-distance viewing scenarios with constant observer-target distances at near (33 cm), middle (50 cm), and far (300 cm), as well as variable-distance viewing scenarios in which participants shift gaze among targets at different depths in indoor and outdoor environments. The dataset provides synchronized gaze data, pupil size, 3D eye-vectors, and head-motion signals, along with distance labels. Statistical analyses showed that distance-related gaze features, such as vergence angle and estimated viewing distance, differed consistently across viewing-distance categories. In addition, classification models trained on GazeDepth further demonstrated that the dataset captures gaze characteristics that distinguish the three viewing-distance categories, supporting gaze-based distance inference and distance-aware interaction in realistic scenarios.
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Cryptography and Security
A Broadcast Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search in the Standard Model: Tightly Secure in Multi-User, Multi-Challenge Settings
However, no known work considered the functionality requirement in its most realistic setting. We propose a new security definition of BAEKS in the multi-user (with adaptive corruptions) and multi-challenge (both in terms of ciphertext and trapdoor in an interleaved manner) settings. We also study the question of the unforgeability of BAEKS. In fact, our strong hiding requirement already implies a significant amount of unforgeability. We then propose a new BAEKS construction in the bilinear pairing groups. We prove this scheme achieves adaptive tight full-hiding security under (almost) standard MDDH assumptions. Restricting our BAEKS construction for a single receiver also gives an efficient and tightly secure PAEKS construction. We further run experiments to implement and evaluate our scheme.