Papers

This paper presents a real-time semantic world modeling framework specialized for precision agriculture using autonomous robots. The framework combines probabilistic mapping of objects and their semantic attributes, updated through Bayesian inference, with a graph-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach implemented using $g^2o$, a general framework for graph optimization. This integration enables accurate mapping and localization without relying solely on GPS. By leveraging semantic information such as plant type, size, and health, the robot can perform tasks while mapping and localizing itself within a field of crops. The proposed framework was validated through Gazebo simulations and physical experiments on an indoor field with artificial plants using Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot. A YOLOv8n object detection model was trained to extract object and semantic data from depth camera observations. These simulations and experiments demonstrate that the system can successfully perform real-time mapping of up to at least 400 plants.

Connected vehicles use millimeter-wave (mmWave) sidelinks for the data rates cooperative driving demands, and emerging designs select the carrier band from sensed rainfall. We show that this weather awareness is an attack surface: an adversary who spoofs only the rainfall input dictates the victim's carrier frequency, and through it its communication range, without transmitting on the channel. We evaluate the attack in MilliCar, an ns-3 module that runs the selected band as the real 3GPP NR V2X carrier with per-band propagation, beamforming, and blockage. Forcing the band up to 73 GHz holds an eight-vehicle platoon's reliable range at 38 m while the honest baseline doubles it to 82 m; forcing it down to 5 GHz sustains 97% long-range reception but collapses the transport block to a third and quadruples long-range latency to 12.5 ms. We then implement the defense the mechanism implies. Rain loss grows linearly with distance while path loss grows logarithmically, so a receiver that tests measured SINR against the attenuation its reported weather predicts flags force-up with 98% probability within 1.5 s at a 1% false-alarm rate, and re-selection then restores long-range reception from 60% to 75%. The same test is structurally blind to force-down, because the 5 GHz fallback is nearly rain-immune. An advecting rain cell that swings the local rate from 15 to 81 mm/h leaves every result unchanged. Weather-aware band selection therefore requires an authenticated meteorological input; physical cross-checking covers one half of the threat.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of jointly estimating the system states and partially unknown dynamics within distributed sensor-equipped networks, particularly in scenarios where only partial state observations are available. To address this issue, we propose an observer-based dynamic cooperative learning framework incorporating online distributed Gaussian Process (GP) regression, which enables accurate estimation despite incomplete in measurements and deficient GP models. In addition, a novel data collection strategy is introduced, with theoretical conditions ensuring feasible data acquisition. Moreover, we also derive an error upper bound encompassing state estimation and model estimation, leveraging the deterministic error bounds of GPs. Empirical simulations demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing distributed GP-based methods.

Quantum long short-term memory (QLSTM) models extend recurrent sequence learning with variational quantum circuits, but their optimization behavior can vary substantially across random initializations and temporal contexts. This paper evaluates a recursive QLSTM architecture against a standard QLSTM for one-step-ahead prediction of daily minimum and maximum temperature. Using daily weather observations from Toronto and identical training settings, we compare convergence, predictive accuracy, and generalization across input windows of 8, 16, and 32 days over 20 random seeds. The recursive model consistently reaches a near-optimal test loss earlier, reduces mean absolute error and root mean squared error, and exhibits a smaller generalization gap. These results indicate that recursive quantum feature transformations can improve stability and out-of-sample performance for compact hybrid quantum–classical temporal models.

Word-in-Context (WiC) remains challenging for language models, despite recent progress on lexical-semantic tasks. We hypothesise that this difficulty arises not only from comparing two contextual uses of a word, but also from the absence of an explicit sense inventory that specifies the relevant level of semantic granularity. We evaluate open LLMs on WiC and traditional Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) under similar settings. We find that providing candidate senses, similar to what is done in traditional WSD, improves WiC performance in all settings. In general, explicit sense information helps models make more consistent and targeted judgements. Human evaluation further shows that many apparent WiC errors reflect label ambiguity or mismatches between model and annotator sense boundaries rather than simple failures of lexical understanding. In particular, results show that LLMs overthink the sense distinction often leading to errors based on overly fine-grained distinctions.

Crystal structure refinement is a fundamental inverse problem in materials characterization, where structural parameters are optimized to reproduce experimental diffraction data. Conventional approaches, such as least-squares and likelihood-based optimization, rely on local search and often struggle with non-convex, noisy, and highly correlated parameter landscapes, particularly when integrating multiple diffraction modalities. Joint refinement of X-ray and neutron data is especially challenging due to their complementary but competing sensitivities, which are typically combined through scalarized objectives requiring manual weighting and leading to suboptimal solutions. We propose CrystalMO-TuRBO, a multi-objective trust region Bayesian optimization architecture for joint crystal structure refinement. The method models X-ray and neutron discrepancies as separate objectives and transforms the problem into a normalized maximization setting. A two-phase optimization strategy is introduced: Phase 1 performs global exploration using parallel trust-region Bayesian optimization across multiple scalarizations to identify promising regions of the parameter space, while Phase 2 conducts localized refinement within a shrinking region to achieve high-precision solutions. This design explicitly separates global search from fine-grained optimization, addressing the unique accuracy requirements of refinement tasks. We evaluate the proposed method on experimentally collected X-ray and neutron diffraction data from single-crystal Ho2Ti2O7. Results demonstrate improved convergence, robustness, and parameter precision compared to classical refinement methods and Bayesian optimization baselines on refinement of a single-crystal pyrochlore material system.

Current dense visual SLAM systems rely almost exclusively on 8-bit tonemapped Low Dynamic Range (LDR) inputs, limiting their robustness in extreme lighting where shadows and highlights trigger tracking drift and mapping collapse. Conversely, existing raw and High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction pipelines operate strictly offline. They depend on Structure-from-Motion preprocessing and are not suited for large inter-frame motion. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first online Gaussian SLAM framework that tracks and maps directly on single-exposure 16-bit linear HDR imagery. Our method rests on three core components: an architecture-agnostic HDR Gaussian Splatting module featuring an MLP-free logarithmic parameterization of Gaussian color features; a Reinhard range-compressed photometric objective; and structure-guided spatial gradient weighting. Combined, these components allow our approach to outperform a direct HDR adaptation of MonoGS in both trajectory and reconstruction accuracy, while rendering natively in linear scene radiance for post-rendering processing. The same formulation runs unchanged on standard 8-bit inputs, roughly halving the MonoGS baseline error. Furthermore, our HDR Gaussian module transfers seamlessly to SplaTAM, Gaussian SLAM, and DROID-W, eliminating all tracking failures these systems suffer on challenging illumination sequences. To enable this research, we introduce RawSLAM: a dataset of 10 real-world indoor sequences featuring 16-bit RAW imagery, aligned depth, IMU measurements, and external OptiTrack poses. Code and dataset will be made publicly available soon.

Referring scene understanding for embodied robots requires grounding object- and relation-centric language queries from a designated viewpoint. While a local semantic Gaussian map can support such grounding within one agent's observations, cooperative settings require this ability to remain effective after independently reconstructed maps are aligned and fused. In this setting, the referred target or its contextual landmark may come from another agent's observations, while spatial relations must still be interpreted from the querying robot's viewpoint. We formulate this problem as cooperative referring Gaussian grounding over fused maps, which requires geometric alignability, instance-level semantic comparability, and view-conditioned relation reasoning. Existing language-aware Gaussian methods mainly focus on single-map querying, whereas Gaussian registration methods optimize geometric or photometric alignment without preserving language-grounding-oriented semantic compatibility. We propose CoRef-GS, a cooperative referring Gaussian splatting framework. CoRef-GS constructs local open-vocabulary instance-aware Gaussian maps, then aligns partially overlapping maps with a cross-agent alignment module by geometric and semantic consistency, and grounds queries using a view-conditioned mask relation graph. We further introduce CoQuad-Ref, a dual-quadruped benchmark spanning both real-world and simulated indoor scenes. Experiments show that, on simulated scenes, CoRef-GS reduces the rotation error from 2.58{\deg} after coarse initialization to 0.15{\deg} after refinement, and improves real-world referring mIoU over ReferSplat from 52.6% to 68.8%. The established benchmark and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/ruojiruoli17/CoRef-GS.git.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for safety-critical engineering, yet their reliability in regulated functional-safety workflows remains underexplored. We introduce SAFARI (Safety-Aware Functional Automotive Risk Inference), the first industrial benchmark for LLM-assisted automotive Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA) under ISO 26262. It contains 3,000 de-identified industrial HARA cases and evaluates two coupled tasks: open-ended hazard analysis and standards-grounded risk assessment. To evaluate open-ended HARA artifacts, we propose the first reference-anchored LLM-as-a-judge protocol with high expert correlation. Experiments with nine frontier LLMs show that models often produce plausible hazard narratives but remain weak at ISO 26262 risk classification, with the best ASIL macro-F1 reaching only 0.261. Chain-of-Thought prompting provides limited benefit and often degrades categorical risk assessment. Error analysis further localizes major failures to scenario-critical context omissions during hazard generation and to controllability misjudgments during risk assessment, indicating where expert oversight should be concentrated. The dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/xixi47520-hash/HARA.

Human manipulation videos provide rich motion and interaction cues for acquiring robot skills without robot demonstrations. Video generation models synthesize such demonstrations from an initial scene image and task instruction, avoiding the need to record demonstrations for each task. However, the recovered motion captures only one scene-specific realization, leaving task structure, geometric relations, and constraints implicit. We present V2-STRep, a zero-shot framework that converts generated video motion into reusable robot skills through VLM-grounded structured task representations. The representation specifies motion phases, references, and task-relevant constraints, with targets described by minimal geometric structures: points, point-normals, axes, planes, and full 6D poses. VLM-provided 2D image-space cues are lifted into 3D using RGB-D observations to reconstruct task geometry and candidate grasp poses. Geometry-specific rules transfer motion to new scenes, while task-constrained trajectory optimization couples grasp selection with complete robot motion planning. It preserves task requirements while using remaining rotational freedom to accommodate joint limits. Updating deployment grounding and constraints enables reuse under new compatible instructions without generating another video. Experiments on six real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improved execution success over baselines, reliable cross-scene transfer of successfully acquired skills, and adaptation to changed deployment instructions. Details are available on the project website: https://tuwien-asl.github.io/V2-STRep/.

Discrete diffusion, including remasking and uniform-state samplers, generate a sequence by writing multiple token positions per step, drawing each from a per-position distribution and choosing which positions to write from those same distributions. For domains of general interest (pixels, phonemes, or words) there are inherent dependencies between tokens. We show that a step matches the training distribution only when the positions it writes are conditionally independent given the tokens already fixed, that no product of per-position distributions can match a dependent group, and that per-position distributions do not determine whether a group is dependent: two joint distributions can have identical per-position marginals while differing in which combinations of values occur. On ScanAndAdd, a synthetic task whose joint distribution is available in closed form, we verify that every group of two or more undetermined positions a confidence ranking writes is dependent, and measure the generated distribution to be $29\times$ the sampling-noise floor total variation while per-sample metrics are $1.0$.

PJR$^+$ is a polynomial-time verifiable proportionality axiom for approval-based committee elections, but its known polynomial-time verification procedure relies on general submodular-function minimisation. We show that its objective is a maximum-closure problem and give a direct mincut formulation of the problem on a bipartite graph. Using an almost-linear-time maximum-flow algorithm, this yields an $\mathcal{O}(m(nk)^{1+o(1)})$-time verifier, where $n$, $m$, and $k$ are the numbers of voters, candidates, and committee members, respectively. The dependence of this bound on each parameter separately is almost linear: it is linear in $m$, and almost linear in $n$ and $k$. The verifier also returns an explicit group witnessing a violation and admits a slower but immediately implementable variant based on the preflow–push mincut algorithm. Finally, for the parameterised axiom $\alpha$-PJR$^+$, where $\alpha$ is used as a multiplier in the group size, we demonstrate how to compute the largest value of $\alpha$ for which a committee still fails the axiom using this mincut formulation.

Connected-vehicle safety evaluations rely on coupled traffic and network simulations, but standard channel models ignore radio resource competition in 5G NR sidelink Mode-2, reporting unrealistically high message delivery in dense traffic. This study introduces resource-competition losses without requiring full protocol reimplementation. We labeled 10.5 million reception outcomes from ns-3 5G-LENA traces (calibrated on 3GPP scenarios and driven by SUMO trajectories) to fit NS3Learn - a closed-form model capturing half-duplex loss, scheduling collisions, receiver capture, and decoding. Evaluation spanned two signalized urban networks, six penetration levels (1-100%), and five random seeds per condition. NS3Learn achieved a mean absolute deviation of 0.06 in per-instant delivery compared to ns-3 5G-LENA, outperforming alternative models (0.44 and 0.55 deviation). Fitted parameters transferred to a distinct intersection with only 20% additional error. Crucially, using realistic communication models reversed simulated traffic speed trends and more than doubled predicted hard-braking events. The framework transfers reception realism between simulators via model distillation instead of full reimplementation. Every stage maps directly to an explicit physical mechanism. Researchers and transportation agencies can maintain existing simulation pipelines while accurately accounting for dense-traffic packet loss and denial-of-service impacts. Adapting to new radio configurations requires only offline refitting rather than code modification.

We study the Bayes-optimal spherical linear model as the ambient dimension and sample size grow proportionally, under a quantitative Marchenko–Pastur spectral-regularity condition on the design. This condition is satisfied by normalized i.i.d. designs with standardized entries of finite fourth moment, but does not require entrywise independence or impose conditions on the singular vectors. Under this condition, we prove a quantitative all-temperature TAP approximation and characterize the posterior geometry. For the natural finite-aspect-ratio TAP functional, the normalized spherical free energy and the TAP optimum differ by $O_P(p^{-1})$. Each is within $O_P(p^{-1/2})$ of its explicit deterministic equivalent, and this fluctuation scale is sharp. Uniformly over all global TAP maximizers, the normalized squared Euclidean distance to the spherical posterior mean is $O_P(p^{-1})$. We also prove that the posterior mass outside a data-dependent band determined by the ridge estimator has sharp exponential order. More precisely, uniformly over sufficiently small band widths $\varepsilon$, the logarithm of this mass is at most $-cp\varepsilon^2+O_P(1)$. For every fixed geometrically admissible width, a spherical-cap construction gives a matching exponential-order lower bound on this mass. For every deterministic sequence of widths $\varepsilon_p\gg p^{-1/2}$, the corresponding bands capture asymptotically all posterior mass.

Learning visual policies for locomotion and manipulation requires coordinating contact with the environment and can incur substantial computation and GPU memory costs. First-order policy gradients (FoPG) reduce training cost through differentiable simulation, but local optimization can converge to unintended contact patterns. To address this shortfall, we propose Sampling-Guided Policy Search (SGPS), which couples recurring action-target refinement by sampling-based model-predictive control with first-order policy optimization. Behavior cloning initializes the policy from sampled actions; training then alternates sampling-based refinement with short-horizon FoPG updates under perturbed initial states and randomized dynamics. For visual policy training, we use a decoupled FoPG formulation that excludes rendering from the computation graph, enabling direct learning from depth observations without a state-policy teacher. On a single GPU, SGPS learns policies for locomotion, obstacle traversal, crate pushing, and bimanual carrying on simulated Unitree Go2 and G1 robots. Our experiments further show that refinement improves policy learning beyond initialization and tracking alone. For hardware deployment, the distilled policy transfers zero-shot to a real Go2 and uses onboard depth to autonomously trot, crawl, clear hurdles, and switch between these behaviors.

Answer grounding in document visual question answering remains an open challenge: most benchmarks lack grounding annotations or provide limited-quality labels, while constructing grounded datasets still requires costly manual effort. We introduce DocAttriBench (DAB), a large-scale benchmark for fine-grained, element-level source attribution in Document VQA, grounding answers to specific layout elements such as text blocks, tables, and images. To build DAB, we propose a Mask-based Perplexity-Derived Attribution method (MAPPET) that combines document layout and language modeling to identify the most informative element for each answer. MAPPET measures the increase in perplexity after masking candidate elements and attributes the answer to the element contributing most to model confidence. Applying MAPPET to multiple existing Document VQA datasets yields DAB, with 237k documents and 296k question-answer pairs with element-level grounding. We benchmark grounding-capable multimodal LLMs on DAB, evaluating answer accuracy, attribution accuracy, and overall answer quality. Results show that while larger models generally achieve higher answer accuracy, even the strongest models often fail to localize the supporting elements. DAB provides a scalable benchmark for developing grounded, verifiable, and trustworthy Document VQA models. Dataset and code are available at https://aimagelab.github.io/DocAttriBench/.

This paper presents the kinematic and dynamic modeling, trajectory generation, and stability analysis of an 8-degree-of-freedom (DOF) biped robot walking on flat and inclined terrain. Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters and homogeneous transformations are used to derive the forward kinematics, while closed-form inverse kinematics maps the desired hip and swing-foot Cartesian trajectories, generated with cubic splines, to joint angles. Joint torques are computed using the Newton-Euler iterative algorithm, and dynamic stability is evaluated using the zero moment point (ZMP) criterion. A genetic algorithm (GA) optimizes the hip height, maximum swing-foot lift, and frontal-plane tilt angle by minimizing the work done by the joints subject to a ZMP feasibility penalty. Simulation results in MATLAB show that the nominal 8-DOF model remains ZMP-stable for step completion times down to 0.5 s and for slope inclinations up to 22.5 degrees with the given foot geometry. Beyond these limits, the ZMP leaves the support polygon, and either the foot dimensions or the trajectory parameters must be modified. The results also show that ZMP stability is governed by the mass distribution among the links rather than the total mass of the robot.

The goal-oriented communication paradigm is poised to enable novel real-time applications by easing the burden on communication networks while still delivering task-relevant information. However, efforts so far have focused on the encoding problem, while the design of medium access schemes is still in the early stages of development, especially when connectivity is to be provided to a massive number of devices, e.g., for remote monitoring. In this respect, existing goal-oriented approaches are often centralized or based on simplified underlying mechanisms, requiring unrealistic assumptions. In this work, we present the Goal-oriented Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA (GO-IRSA) scheme, which combines modern random access techniques with belief-based policies. GO-IRSA does not impose significant computing loads on the sensors or require frequent feedback, and it can reduce the average and worst-case error of the estimate of a distributed Wiener process by over 30% with respect to the optimal centralized solution in a network with thousands of sensors, and is robust to imperfect interference cancellation and inaccurate process knowledge.

Animal demonstrations provide quadruped robots with natural and distinctive gait styles that are difficult to specify through hand-crafted rewards. However, their narrow directional coverage leaves little style-consistent supervision for backward, lateral, and turning commands. We present OmniMimic, a training framework that turns directionally limited animal demonstrations into a single multi-gait policy over target per-axis velocity ranges. OmniMimic first combines temporal reversal, constrained dynamics completion, and sagittal reflection to construct robot-specific kinematic and physical supervision beyond the observed directions. It then expands commands progressively from the demonstrated velocity distribution toward the target per-axis bounds, and uses a shared actor with soft-gated, gait-specialized residual experts to balance reusable locomotion skills with gait-specific corrections. Across four gaits in simulation, OmniMimic reduces mean foot-position RMSE at forward and backward reference velocities by 12.9% and velocity-tracking RMSE on a uniform Cartesian command grid by 63.1%, compared with the matched APEX baseline. The project page is at https://OmniMimic.github.io.

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized the field of psychological counseling, especially in the context of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While the success of CBT relies heavily on dynamic decision-making informed by the client's real-time mental state, this aspect has often been overlooked in current research, limiting both flexibility and therapeutic outcomes. In this paper, we introduce StratCBT, a dataset specifically designed for psychological counseling conversations with CBT Strategies, consisting of 9,688 sessions and around 256K utterances, with each counselor's response aligned with one of eight distinct strategies. The creation of StratCBT involves modeling clients based on their negative thoughts and generating high-quality counseling conversations through self-chat, incorporating realistic sessions as guidance, thereby significantly surpassing existing datasets in both general counseling and CBT-specific skills. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of strategy-aligned generation and evaluate its efficacy in delivering professional and effective counseling with LLM-simulated clients to reflect real-world scenarios. The dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/zimuwangnlp/StratCBT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for producing context-rich text embeddings for retrieval. Most existing methods either treat embedding learning as passive feature extraction or exploit LLM reasoning through instruction following for better embedding optimization. However, specialization toward embedding objectives can suppress useful reasoning generation or produce retrieval-irrelevant text. We refer to these two forms of degradation as reasoning collapse. To address this issue, we propose CoFree (Collapse-Free Reasoning Embedding), a two-stage framework that progressively integrates LLM reasoning into query and document embedding optimization while preserving reasoning quality. At the first stage, CoFree applies reference-guided supervised fine-tuning to restore the reasoning ability and retain representational strength of the foundation embedding model. At the second stage, we introduce dual rewards, an embedding-oriented reward and a reasoning-oriented reward, to guarantee fine-grained reasoning of the relevance toward the embedding goal in reinforcement learning. This endpoint-coupled optimization transforms embedding learning from static alignment into a high-quality reasoning-guided search process for retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CoFree, with CoFree-4B achieving an average absolute improvement of 2.8 nDCG@10 points over Qwen3-Embedding-4B across 22 datasets from MTEB and BRIGHT. Online experiments in a real-world retrieval system further show consistent gains. Code, RTED, and model checkpoints will be made publicly available.

Automated quality assessment, enhancement, and segmentation of multiple structures in $0.064\,\mathrm{T}$ ultra-low-field pediatric MRI are limited by a low signal-to-noise ratio, weak anatomical boundaries, and frequent artifacts. We present a unified framework for the LISA 2026 Challenge that performs all three tasks together within one inference pipeline. A network with two coupled streams, built on a 3D U-Net, first reconstructs an enhanced uLF volume and then combines the original and enhanced images for subcortical segmentation. To improve boundary stability, we add an auxiliary class covering brain tissue outside the target structures, derived from whole brain masks. A head conditioned on an artifact graph predicts the seven artifact ratings from reconstruction residuals and frozen segmentation features. We address the scarcity of dense annotations using diffeomorphic registration from atlas to target for label propagation and to regularize anatomical reconstruction. We report validation results across all three tasks.

Differential Privacy (DP) relies on carefully calibrated random noise to protect individual privacy in statistical analyses. While theoretical work has analyzed DP under weakened randomness assumptions, the practical consequences of entropy degradation remain poorly understood. We present a systematic empirical investigation of how randomness quality affects differential privacy mechanisms using IBM's DiffPrivLib. We introduce progressively degraded entropy sources characterized by established test suites, starting from high-quality quantum True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) and cryptographically secure Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNGs) down to systematically manipulated sources with controlled entropy degradation. Through repeated experiments over one million queries on a reference database and complementary statistical tests, we directly analyze empirical Privacy Loss Random Variable distributions. Our results demonstrate that DP mechanisms reliably detect deviations when approximately 1 bit in every 8 to 16 is manipulated, with detection sensitivity varying significantly between bit-level biases and temporal correlations. We demonstrate that statistical detection of distributional anomalies does not necessarily correspond to actual privacy guarantee violations.

Roofing requires workers to coordinate locomotion, balance, and work-related body motions on pitched surfaces, creating a challenging application for humanoid robots. Directly retargeted human demonstrations, however, may preserve motion appearance while placing the robot's feet or hands incorrectly relative to the roof. This study presents a task-semantic scene-grounded framework for learning roofer-style whole-body motions on a Unitree G1. Human demonstrations are captured using a tracking system and retargeted to the robot, while a metric roof model supplies the spatial reference unavailable from the tracking system. A trajectory-level optimization grounds inferred support contacts and annotated work relations to the roof, and execution-aware reinforcement learning encourages the resulting policy to preserve these relations under dynamic tracking errors. The framework is evaluated through a multi-motion tracking study, a roof-pitch coverage matrix, a five-way nailgun ablation, cross-task experiments on hammering and lateral pushing, and comparisons with pure reinforcement learning and zero-shot teleoperation. Our method enables the robot to satisfy support, work-clearance, and nonpenetration criteria across all evaluated seeds. Across nailgun, hammering, and pushing, it achieves work-clearance errors between 0.256 and 0.531 cm and 3/3 successful evaluations per task. Physical experiments reproduce uphill walking, nailgun, hammering, and bending motions with mean base-frame motion errors below 80 mm. These findings establish scene-grounded human motion learning as a promising basis for construction-oriented humanoid motion primitives.

Column subset selection aims to seek a small set of representative columns that accurately approximates a given matrix. We study this problem from the perspective of determinantal point processes (DPPs) and their relation to several existing algorithms. To support incremental column selection, we introduce conditional DPPs, which can be applied to any column selection strategy. In particular, we combine it with adaptive randomized pivoting(ARP), and develop a multi-stage ARP (MSARP) algorithm. We establish theoretical guarantees on the expected Frobenius-norm approximation errors for these methods. In addition, we propose a fixed-precision variant of ARP that adaptively determines the number of selected columns. Numerical experiments on column subset selection and Nyström approximation show that MSARP achieves accuracy comparable to standard ARP while enabling incremental selection.

Reinforcement learning agents trained to maximize their own reward in repeated interactions can converge to supra-competitive outcomes resembling explicit collusion, without communication or shared design. Existing mitigation approaches are largely tied to specific economic settings, like two-sided platforms and auctions, leaving open how to design interventions for general repeated games. We address this gap by formalizing the connection between empirical observations from prior work on Q-learning collusion and classical theory of Simple Penal Codes (SPCs). We show any non-trivial SPC induces a quantifiable conditional dependence in agents' policies, detectable via the total variation distance between an agent's action distributions across cooperation and defection histories. Building on this connection, we propose CURB (Collusion Unwinding via Reward shaping and Belief injection), a reward-shaping framework that penalizes this Total Variation (TV) distance signal during Q-learning and is guaranteed to convert any SPC fixed point of the dynamics into a trivial one, thus precluding collusive equilibria sustained by punishment threats. Empirically, CURB substantially reduces collusion by Q-learning agents in both Bertrand and Cournot Competition Repeated Games. We further demonstrate that CURB extends to deep Q-network agents in Bertrand competition, suggesting the mechanism generalizes beyond tabular Q-learning.

Full-consensus rates are often treated as indicators of collective cognition, yet depend on how participation and final states are operationalized. We replayed 100 held-out human Wason groups with matched large language model (LLM) agent groups, seeding one belief-anchored agent per participant's pre-discussion answer and scoring agents and people with the same code. Across human scoring definitions, estimates ranged from 24.0% to 57.0%; about one fifth of participants never posted, whereas agents almost always did. Agent groups remained more consensual in two post-unblinding sensitivity analyses: the submit-based comparison (n = 98) yielded gaps of 34.0 and 43.9 percentage points for chat and reasoning modes, and the participation-matched comparison (n = 45) yielded gaps of 34.1 and 44.4 points. These complementary routes reduced different measurement asymmetries yet converged within 0.5 percentage points. The gap persisted without early stopping and under a reparameterization removing the memorizable answer; reasoning-mode groups then agreed nearly unanimously, mostly on incorrect answers. Simulated consensus did not track collective accuracy, and belief-anchored agent groups were biased estimators of the human group-outcome distribution in this setting. These analyses provide a scoring-explicit basis for assessing simulated-group estimates of human deliberative outcomes.

Large language models can report a numerical confidence together with generated content, but it is unclear whether this report is more than calibrated rhetoric. We analyze three training-free signals: confidence verbalized with the answer, post-hoc $P(\mathrm{True})$, and agreement with three additional generations on the same 100 TriviaQA questions for two model families. Direct verbalization is a surprisingly strong baseline: after auditing benchmark errors, it reaches AUROC 0.956 and 0.937 for correctness prediction. Three-sample agreement is substantially weaker (0.765 and 0.790), and a fixed interpolation with verbalized confidence has no statistically reliable benefit. Four of nine errors from one model and two of eight from the other receive unanimous sample support, showing that self-consistency can amplify shared misconceptions. Re-eliciting confidence for the same fixed answers with equivalent prompts changes scores by 0.043 to 0.084 on average and flips 4% to 9% of decisions at a 0.8 threshold. An exploratory audit of 100 confidence-tagged biography claims further finds only a modest confidence gap between supported and contradicted claims. These results argue that useful self-reports remain sensitive to elicitation, correlated errors, and benchmark noise.

Autonomous recovery of a small multirotor onto a hovering multirotor carrier differs from recovery onto ground or shipborne platforms because the recovery surface is itself an actively controlled, thrust-limited aerial vehicle. This paper presents a field-validated autonomy framework for a heterogeneous rover-mothership-child system executing rover supervision, mothership transit, child deployment and sortie, autonomous return, aerial recovery, and synchronized descent. The recovery stack combines jerk-bounded reference generation, disturbance-observer-augmented planar tracking, feasibility-aware vertical control, a discrete-time barrier-based safety filter for relative vertical geometry, and communication-aware carrier-state prediction. The contribution is the coordinated system-level integration of these methods for recovery onto a hovering multirotor and its full-scale outdoor validation. The framework is implemented on a PX4-ROS 2 architecture using RTK-enabled GNSS, IMU, and barometric fusion, with mothership-side 1D lidar used only as an auxiliary near-contact cue. RTK-fixed positioning was maintained throughout testing. Across 20 outdoor cooperative missions, 17 successfully completed deployment, sortie, and recovery, giving an observed mission success rate of 85%. For successful recoveries, mean terminal-alignment time was 6.3 s, mean planar alignment error at acceptance was 0.18 m, maximum terminal planar deviation was 0.32 m within a 0.40 m capture radius, and minimum logged relative vertical separation during coupled descent was 0.41 m. Mothership planar station-keeping RMS error was 0.25 m. The three unsuccessful trials occurred at different mission stages and are analyzed separately. Results demonstrate practical autonomous aerial recovery within the tested outdoor operating envelope.

A popular selling point of diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is their capacity for parallelism: the ability to generate sequences of text far more efficiently than autoregressive models, which require one forward pass per token. Yet among the many competing paradigms for dLLMs, from masked to uniform to Gaussian diffusion, principled understanding of how these different proposals compare in parallelism remains limited. In this work, we initiate a fine-grained comparison of the capacity for parallelism among these three leading approaches and prove the following: - Uniform and Gaussian diffusion can sample in a number of forward passes which scales with the dual total correlation of the underlying distribution, a measure of intrinsic complexity which can be much smaller than the context length. Previously, it was only known how to achieve this using masked diffusion. - For a certain family of random empirical measures, we show that $\widetilde{\Theta}(\sqrt{d})$ forward passes are necessary and sufficient to sample using uniform or Gaussian diffusion, yet there exist approximate score oracles for which $\widetilde{\Omega}(d)$ forward passes are needed for masked diffusion. This establishes the first provable separation in parallelism between the three prevailing dLLM paradigms. Contrary to popular intuition that masked diffusions are harder to parallelize because they must commit to token values, the latter separation instead comes from the fact that the critical windows in masked diffusion sampling are asymptotically narrower than those in uniform and Gaussian diffusion sampling.