Papers

Common policy improvement methods, including TRPO, PPO, and GRPO, estimate policy improvement under the behavioral policy's state-visitation distribution rather than the improved policy's own. The substitution makes the objective estimable from the behavioral policy's rollouts but adds a bias growing with policy divergence, hence the trust region or clip, and hence no reuse of a batch far off-policy. We show that under history-injective dynamics, where each state is reached by exactly one history, the dropped state-visitation ratio equals the product of per-step policy ratios along the sampled prefix, on every trajectory and not only in expectation. The ratio is therefore restored exactly, from log-probabilities PPO already computes. Autoregressive generation and canonical-order constructive optimization are both history-injective. The exact correction pays importance-sampling variance that grows with the horizon, so we generalize it to a one-parameter family with PPO ($\alpha{=}0$) and the full correction ($\alpha{=}1$) as endpoints: a single bias–variance knob. A gradient-level analysis of the unclipped surrogate identifies two channels the correction acts through and three conditions under which it carries signal; an enumerable testbed confirms the conditions' predictions. On hard credit-assignment scheduling tasks, a short corrected warmup with aggressive early sample reuse learns faster than PPO and than the same reuse uncorrected; the marginal gain grows with task difficulty ($+0.02$ to $+0.09$ learning-curve AUC), and the early win over PPO tracks the prefix bias that reuse incurs. A correction held throughout, or applied where clipping already contains the reuse bias, is null to harmful.

Test-time scaling improves language model reasoning by spending additional compute at inference. However, both classes of existing methods often fail to continue improving over long timescales. Parallel methods repeatedly sample independent answers from the model, scaling poorly on problems the model is unlikely to solve in a single attempt. In contrast, sequential methods build on previous answers to access new ideas, yet so far have not been shown to reach answers beyond those found by parallel scaling. First, we show that sequential scaling often stops improving because it becomes prematurely trapped in an attractor: a set of answers that prevents exploration of different answers once entered. Across 27 combinations of scaling methods, models, and benchmarks, we find that 53.8% of sequential scaling trajectories enter an attractor within four iterations. Second, we show that a simple model-mixing intervention helps escape attractors. This reduces the attractor hit rate by 21.2 percentage points on average, expands solution coverage beyond a compute-matched parallel baseline, and improves accuracy of recursive self-aggregation by at least 2.2 percentage points. Our results motivate refocusing long-horizon test-time scaling from parallel methods to sequential methods that improve previous answers.

Modern cloud computing infrastructure relies heavily on virtualization to provide workload isolation and resource efficiency. While containers have become the dominant deployment primitive due to their fast orchestration compared to traditional virtual machines, they still introduce non-trivial overhead. WebAssembly (Wasm) has emerged as an alternative isolation technology, offering a lightweight execution model. Because of compatibility limitations, WebAssembly has mainly been applied to Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) and Edge Computing scenarios, where it has attracted growing research interest. However, recent advances in the WebAssembly ecosystem have significantly matured the technology, raising the question of whether it can serve as a viable replacement for containers in cloud-native workloads. In this paper, we present Kirin, an orchestrator for cloud-native WebAssembly services. It supports core orchestration responsibilities, including resource scheduling, lifecycle management, scaling, and request routing. We evaluate Kirin against container-based deployments for several service workloads and demonstrate promising results, particularly in service lifecycle management. Simultaneously, we confirm known limitations in CPU-intensive workloads. However, for typical service workloads, Kirin demonstrates competitive performance, suggesting that WebAssembly is a viable candidate for broader adoption as a cloud-native deployment technology.

Pretrained tabular generators can reproduce training records even when aggregate utility remains high. When retraining is unavailable or too costly, sampling and release are the remaining intervention points. We present PEG-Tab (Post-Training Energy Guidance for Tabular Synthesis), a post-training repair and release-control framework for frozen tabular generators. For each generated row, a generator-native operator creates two alternatives. A shared calibrated score compares the three candidates, favours lower-risk records, and applies a final release check. We instantiate this interface for GReaT, CTGAN, TVAE, and TabDDPM without updating their parameters. Across five datasets and four generator families, PEG-Tab reduces mean Near Copy from $0.078$ to $0.027$ and lowers aggregate Exact Copy to zero. Relative to a $3\times$ post hoc filter, it retains higher utility in 12 of 16 transfer settings and Pareto-dominates the filter in eight. Gains are concentrated in copy and proximity-related risks.

Differential privacy (DP) in machine learning is typically achieved by adding noise to model parameters (private learning) or to model outputs (private prediction). Recent work uses formal methods, namely abstract interpretation, to provide tighter privacy guarantees, but only for private prediction in classification settings. In this work, we investigate the use of formal methods as a general tool for tighter privacy analysis. First, we generalize the abstract gradient training (AGT) framework to private prediction in continuous, unbounded regression. Second, by reducing learning in parameterized models to a regression problem over the parameter space, we introduce Abstract Gradient Sampling (AGS), an algorithm that enables reachability-based analysis to provide guarantees for private learning. In both private prediction and private learning, we provide tightened privacy accounting for the AGT framework and a theoretical analysis demonstrating when our smooth sensitivity upper-bounds yield favourable privacy-utility trade-off. In practice, we validate that our regression bounds are tighter than global-sensitivity baselines on regression benchmarks, and, notably, yield the first finite privacy guarantees in settings where global prediction sensitivity is a priori unbounded. We also find that under matched conditions, our private learning algorithm can outperform standard private learners.

This paper proposes MIND, a marginal-invariant neural dependency diffusion model for mixed-type tabular data. MIND does not directly learn the joint distribution in the original heterogeneous feature space. Instead, it first maps different variable types into a unified latent dependency space via column-wise marginal transport. A conditional diffusion model then learns cross-column relationships. Copula-tangent denoising separates known marginal components from learnable dependency residuals. Rank projection during the sampling phase further mitigates marginal shift in reverse diffusion. Experiments across nine diverse tabular benchmarks show that MIND consistently improves marginal fidelity and dependency preservation over existing unified approaches. By explicitly isolating marginal modelling from dependency learning, MIND achieves a strong and stable balance among marginal fidelity, joint dependency preservation, and downstream prediction utility. This work supports separating marginal and dependency modelling as a principled and highly effective paradigm for complex mixed-type tabular generation.

This book presents a code-first introduction to computer vision, spanning classical 2D image processing, classical 3D vision, and deep learning. Organized as 44 short chapters across three parts, the book builds each topic from first principles: image arithmetic and morphology; convolution, pyramids, and frequency-domain filtering; feature detection, optical flow, and stereo; projective geometry, camera calibration, and structure from motion; and the full arc of modern deep learning, from a single neuron through convolutional networks, backpropagation, classic architectures, transfer learning, object detection, and semantic and instance segmentation, concluding with engineering considerations like mixed-precision and parallel training. Every technique is implemented directly in Python and NumPy or PyTorch and checked numerically against the corresponding OpenCV or PyTorch library function, so readers see not just the mathematics but its concrete behavior on real and synthetic data. The material was distilled with AI assistance from freely available online course notes, condensing extensive working code into concise mathematical exposition while preserving verified, reproducible results throughout. It is intended as a self-contained reference for students and practitioners who want to understand computer vision algorithms and their Python implementations.

Ensemble smoothers are the most successful and efficient techniques currently available for history matching. However, because these methods rely on Gaussian assumptions, their performance is severely degraded when the prior geology is described in terms of complex facies distributions (non-Gaussian). In this way, for these methods, we need to apply efficient parameterization techniques. Currently, the most efficient methods for performing parameterization are deep learning models. However, given the variety of existing deep learning models, studies have not identified which is most suitable for use with ensemble-based methods, although some important models had already been evaluated. Based on a recent literature review, the most promising models selected were VAE-GAN, Latent Diffusion, and StyleGAN models. As a novel aspect of this work, data assimilation with the second generation of StyleGAN (StyleGAN2) model was performed using the latent z-space and intermediate w-space, separately. They were applied in two 2D case studies: one categorical (three facies) and the other continuous. The results demonstrated that all three models are highly efficient, with the StyleGAN2 model standing out for generating samples with geological realism and achieving excellent data matching in the cases studied. Our findings show that performing data assimilation with StyleGAN2 using the intermediate space (w-space) yielded better results than the traditional application in the latent space (z-space). This is due to the fact that ESMDA uses linear updates and the w-space is much more linear and disentangled than the highly entangled z-space, thereby ensuring that the updated vectors remain close to realistic geological patterns. These results were validated using main geostatistical and history matching metrics.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) reveal visual structure in diffusion transformers (DiTs), but interpreting a feature does not establish whether it can be used to control generation. We introduce D-Scope (Diffusion Scope), a framework that connects feature interpretation to generation control through shared visual evidence. D-Scope aggregates SigLIP~2 embeddings of highly activating image patches into visual centroids. Matching target text descriptions against these visual centroids in the shared image-text embedding space then enables retrieval of individual features without per-feature text annotations. The underlying patches provide evidence for inspecting each selection, while spatially masked interventions test the corresponding decoder direction at varying strengths under fixed generation conditions. We characterize 150 SAEs across two model families and five layers, and introduce a benchmark of 100 target concepts with ten contexts each spanning under-specified and explicit-conflict conditions. Our empirical results show that high reconstruction fidelity can coexist with low dictionary utilization and limited visual-evidence coverage. Under per-case best-of-sweep strength selection, contrastive retrieval yields larger mean regional SigLIP~2 gains than direct retrieval across the tested steering configurations, without consistently improving outside-region preservation. D-Scope provides an inspectable framework for evaluating sparse DiT features through their visual evidence and the effects of their decoder directions on generation. The demo is available at https://jiahaozhang-public.github.io/d-scope/.

Single-image HDR reconstruction requires inferring missing detail while preserving the visible content of an LDR image. Differences in sensor dynamic range and exposure cause LDR images to lose varying amounts of information in shadows and highlights. We present ExpandDiff, a conditional diffusion pipeline that jointly reconstructs clipped shadows and highlights. To account for this variation, we introduce Dynamic Clipping Synthesis (DCS), which randomly samples shadow and highlight clipping percentiles when constructing training inputs from HDR targets. A pixel-space diffusion model guided by spatially-adaptive normalization then predicts perceptually encoded HDR through a bounded output head, reconstructing both clipping directions in one sampling trajectory. On the SI-HDR benchmark, ExpandDiff variants improve HDR reconstruction accuracy by 3.43 dB in PU21-PSNR over the strongest evaluated competing method, and by 7.34 dB under two-sided clipping. The code and supplementary material are available at https://memreandiran.github.io/expanddiff/.

The proliferation of high-fidelity generative editing models has made it possible to inject violent or sexual content into otherwise ordinary images while preserving visual plausibility, with concrete consequences for public discourse and vulnerable populations. We propose a robust semantic watermarking framework that reframes the watermark as a recoverable semantic reference rather than an opaque identifier. Our framework combines a $\beta$-VAE-based binary watermark (CLIP-VAE) with explicit channel-aware training—random bit-flip noise is injected during training so that the decoder learns graceful degradation under the noisy watermarking channel. As a downstream application, a lightweight module SDA-Net uses the recovered semantic embedding to expose not only whether but in which semantic direction an image has been altered. In a 5-way comparison against representative binary hashing baselines (SimHash, ITQ, HashNet, and their robust-MLP variants), CLIP-VAE achieves the highest reconstruction cosine similarity to the original CLIP embedding under realistic InstructPix2Pix bit-error rates, and uniquely supports direction-of-drift detection—a forensic complement to existing content-moderation pipelines.

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are highly promising and have been extensively explored within the field of soft robotics. Under pneumatic pressure loads, an SPA undergoes bending deformation to perform specific tasks. A multi- or omni-directional SPA can bend and move in any direction within a 3D space, leveraging its multiple degrees of freedom to realize various mechanical functions. This work presents a systematic methodology using topology optimization (TO) to achieve an optimized design for a multi-directional SPAs. To ensure manufacturing robustness, a three-field TO formulation considering blueprint, dilated, and eroded designs is implemented. Additionally, Darcy's law, incorporating a drainage term, is used to model the design-dependent nature of the pneumatic loading. A min-max optimization problem is formulated based on the target output deformations of the SPA unit and solved using the Method of Moving Asymptotes. The optimization yields a high-performing, unconventional geometric design. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate that the optimized SPA successfully achieves versatile multi-directional movements.

For an $n$-vertex undirected, unweighted graph $G=(V,E)$ and a positive integer $k$, we present new spanner constructions with $O_k(n^{1+1/k})$ edges that achieve nearly optimal guarantees for all distances $d\le k$. Specifically, we construct a spanner $H\subseteq G$ with $O(n^{1+1/k}+(k+d\log d)n)$ edges, ensuring that any pair at original distance at most $d$ satisfies $\mathrm{dist}_H(u,v)\le 2k+O(d\log d)$. Equivalently, the multiplicative stretch for pairs at distance $d$ is $2k/d+O(\log d)$. In particular, setting $d=k/\log k$ yields an $(O(\log k),O(k))$-spanner with $O(n^{1+1/k}+kn)$ edges. For comparison, Ben-Levy and Parter (SODA'20) obtained, for every fixed $\varepsilon>0$ and sufficiently large $k$, an $(O(k^\varepsilon),O_\varepsilon(k))$-spanner with $O_{\varepsilon,k}(n^{1+1/k})$ edges. Our result improves the multiplicative stretch from $O(k^\varepsilon)$ to $O(\log k)$ while keeping the additive term linear in $k$, bringing us closer to the goal of $(O(1),O(k))$-spanners. Furthermore, Ben-Levy and Parter obtained multiplicative stretch $O_\varepsilon(k/d)$ for distances $d\le k^{1-\varepsilon}$, for every fixed $\varepsilon>0$, and an explicit bound of $7k/d$ for $d\le\sqrt{k}/2$. We achieve $2k/d+O(\log d)$, which is $(2+o(1))k/d$ whenever $d=o(k/\log k)$. Our second result is an improved construction of $k$-hybrid spanners, which guarantee stretch $2k-1$ for adjacent pairs and $k$ for non-adjacent pairs. Parter's original construction uses $O(k^2 n^{1+1/k})$ edges; we achieve the same guarantees with $O(n^{1+1/k}+kn)$ edges, removing the $k^2$ factor from the $n^{1+1/k}$ term. For every fixed $k$, our edge bound is optimal up to a constant factor under Erdős' girth conjecture.

In this paper, we introduce a deep truncated forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE) method for high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) and fully coupled FBSDEs. The proposed method combines gradient-truncated iterative decoupling with fictitious-play averaging to separate the forward and backward processes in a coupled framework. This preserves the coupled dynamics while reducing the unstable feedback induced by parameter-dependent forward paths during optimization. Furthermore, we incorporate a pathwise consistency term to create explicit local gradient shortcuts, thereby providing a structural mechanism that may mitigate gradient vanishing. We also derive a residual-based error estimate and establish conditional convergence of the fully discrete numerical approximations under suitable conditions, in which the pathwise consistency loss is not required. Our approach is particularly effective for convection-dominated equations, where the coupled formulation provides a stable representation of nonlinear transport without introducing singular terms into the BSDE. Numerical experiments demonstrate improved accuracy and stability in both low- and high-dimensional problems and robust performance for strongly coupled problems.

Missing data are a fundamental challenge in statistical analysis and machine learning, as the choice of imputation method substantially impacts downstream inference. In this work, we propose two hybrid imputation methods called NuclearForest and SoftForest, which combine nuclear-norm-based low-rank initialization using Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) and SoftImpute, respectively, with a non-iterative Random Forest refinement. For the SVT-based component, we further introduce an adaptive step-size rule, prove adaptive step-size bounds, and establish convergence for the corresponding zero-initialized iteration. The low-rank initialization provides a structured warm start that captures the global covariance patterns in the data, while the subsequent Random Forest step recovers residual nonlinear signals encoding local dependencies. We conduct an extensive benchmark on diverse datasets from different application domains, comparing the proposed methods with seven established imputation methods under the Missing Completely at Random (MCAR), Missing at Random (MAR), and Missing Not at Random (MNAR) mechanisms across varying missingness rates. Our results demonstrate that NuclearForest and SoftForest match or exceed the imputation fidelity of state-of-the-art iterative methods such as MissForest, while significantly reducing computational cost. In particular, they achieve speedups of approximately 5.81 times and 9.52 times over MissForest by replacing iterative cycles with a single refinement step. Our approach effectively exploits the low-rank structure of real-world tabular data and accommodates mixed-type variables, providing an efficient and robust solution for data imputation in bioinformatics, economics, and beyond.

Agile multi-UAV flight requires accurate and low-latency onboard estimation of the kinematic states of neighboring UAVs for collision avoidance, motion coordination, etc. Most vision-based approaches rely on position-only measurements, inferring velocity and acceleration indirectly from displacement. We show that this introduces a fixed structural delay in the estimation of higher-order states, which limits the achievable agility. To address this, we propose to integrate tilt measurements, provided by a state-of-the-art visual detector, which inform about the thrust direction of co-planar multirotor UAVs. We benchmark four position-only and five pose-aware estimators, including a novel formulation of a linear thrust-constraining Kalman filter, on two real-world and one high-fidelity photorealistic simulated dataset over different levels of agility (3-21 m/s^2). In our setup, pose-aware estimation consistently reduces the average velocity and acceleration estimation errors by 40% and 57% across the three datasets with the proposed KF formulation outperforming the other estimators. Position-only filters exhibit a constant ~300 ms delay in acceleration step response independent of agility, whereas the tilt-constrained estimators operate near the physical response limit given by the camera frame-rate by observing the change in thrust direction before the displacement accumulates. In a closed-loop leader-follower simulated experiment with NMPC control, position-only estimation of the leader's state fails to facilitate stable hovering of the follower, while the proposed estimator enables tracking of lateral maneuvers exceeding 2g of acceleration.

In this paper, the dispersion behavior of periodic cross-shaped unit cells is investigated with emphasis on Dirac-type dispersion using an equivalent circuit modeling approach. Two unit-cell geometries, including a simple cross structure and a modified configuration with a central patch, are analyzed using full-wave eigenmode simulations and scattering-parameter-based dispersion extraction. An equivalent circuit model is developed to capture the dominant coupling mechanisms and accurately reproduce the dispersion characteristics near the $\Gamma$-point. The results demonstrate that the proposed circuit model exhibits good agreement with full-wave simulations and provides a physically intuitive framework for analyzing stopband behavior and mode degeneracy. Furthermore, the limitations of S-parameter-based dispersion extraction in the presence of low-Q radiative modes are highlighted.

Rule-based reasoning, as in eligibility checks and contract reviews, requires language models to assess evidence against individual conditions and combine their judgments under explicit rules. Errors in evidence assessment can leave a decision unchanged, but misinterpreting or overlooking decision-critical evidence can reverse it. Identifying such evidence allows more capable models to focus on checking the corresponding condition judgments, supporting accurate and safe decisions. Recognizing the evidence's criticality requires understanding how evidence affects a condition judgment and how that judgment affects the decision. To achieve the goal, we propose a INTERvention-based imPACT learning framework (InterPact), which enables counterfactual verification of evidence criticality in rule-governed decisions. Specifically, its evidence intervention constructor generates training pairs for a propagation verifier by editing case facts with a frozen language model while holding rules and non-target conditions fixed. Human-reviewed labels record the resulting condition and decision changes, while complete state-to-decision mappings supervise consequences beyond the observed edit. During training, the verifier weights learned conditional decision predictions by evidence-based condition probabilities through a fixed composition operation, propagating decision-change supervision into the base model. At inference, the trained base model directly judges criticality from the original case and target evidence, without human or stronger-model supervision. On single-case evidence criticality verification over adapted rule-governed decision cases, InterPact achieves 68.28% accuracy, outperforming all six baselines. These results support learned decision sensitivity as a basis for prioritizing evidence checks.

Skills extend an agent's capabilities by injecting instructions and information into the context, and are widely used by agents such as OpenClaw and Claude Code. Prior work shows third-party marketplaces host malicious skills that give attackers direct influence over the victim's agent. The emerging defense scans skills before installation, pairing deterministic static checks with an LLM-based semantic judge, as in NVIDIA's SkillSpector. We show that such defenses fall to an attacker who knows the detector. Our white-box LLM attacker, Pretext, iteratively crafts skills that evade detection while still delivering the payload and performing the benign task: moving the payload from code into natural language leaves static analysis inert, while framing it as the skill's legitimate purpose and splitting instructions across files keeps the LLM stage below its blocking threshold. Across three open-source models, Pretext achieves up to 97% and 77% against a frozen detector and a co-adaptive one, respectively, revealing major gaps in current skill scanners.

The rapid advancement of generative video models has enabled the synthesis of increasingly realistic and temporally coherent videos, while also raising concerns about the generation of harmful content. The reliance on large-scale web datasets during training inevitably exposes these models to undesirable material, making concept unlearning an essential mitigation. Existing methods mainly target static visual concepts, such as objects, identities, or unsafe appearance, largely overlooking motion unlearning. Furthermore, these approaches often pay little attention to preserving the surrounding scene. As a result, successful concept removal may unintentionally alter the background, composition, or overall video dynamics. We argue that effective unlearning should ideally change only what is targeted, while minimizing unnecessary changes to the remaining scene. In this work, we introduce FOMO, to the best of our knowledge the first training-based selective video unlearning method that directly treats preservation of the original scene as a priority. We formulate unlearning around two complementary objectives: what to change and what to preserve. Our method localizes concept-related representations and modifies them, while the preservation mechanism maintains non-target scene information without requiring auxiliary data. Beyond simply erasing unwanted concepts, FOMO explicitly redirects the generation toward a specified safe alternative. We further extend this formulation to motion unlearning, where the concept is defined by temporal behavior rather than a fixed spatial region. Our solution achieves effective unlearning across unsafe content, object, and motion concepts, while achieving the best trade-off between concept removal and scene preservation. Code: https://github.com/gmum/FOMO Project Page https://gmum.github.io/FOMO

Although conventional world models - auto-regressive or diffusion models based on transformers or convolutional networks - may learn surface statistics of world dynamics, can they learn the exact world dynamics from its observed history? Leveraging cellular automata as a simple testbed, we find the answer to be no in many cases. Conventional architectures predict most pixels correctly yet rarely complete a rollout: a CNN predicts 96.3% of cells but completes 18.9% of rollouts; a joint diffusion model completes none. We trace the gap to three failure modes of these world models - namely, they fail to exactly capture spatial locality, temporal locality or temporal stability. Simple changes repair each: (1) for spatial locality, two-dimensional rotary positions lift a transformer from 39.1% to 100% on the Game of Life; (2) for temporal locality, handing each token its cell's previous-frame neighbourhood lifts the same transformer from 25.8% to 99.9% on unseen rules; (3) for temporal stability, causal freezing lifts the same diffusion weights from 42.2% to 99.9%. None of the three changes touches the architectural backbone; each only modifies the information flow within it. We also compare joint and ordered sampling on billiards and, in an exploratory study, on a simulated Burgers equation.

Precise grounding matters. It specifies which object is the target and where that object is, even in clutter and for tiny objects, and it has to be fast enough for closed-loop control. Yet vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAMs) take perception from general-purpose vision-language and video-generation backbones, which still fail in these settings. We introduce GroundingPI, a 4B grounding foundation model that generates points and boxes as quantized coordinates in a shared vocabulary. Training combines multimodal and spatial pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with GRPO, using supervision from public datasets and dedicated data engines. Against 44 baselines across 34 grounding benchmarks spanning 11 perceptual capabilities, GroundingPI establishes a new state of the art, averaging 73.68%, above the larger GPT-6 Astra (71.54%). As a downstream visual backbone, GroundingPI improves performance on robotic manipulation and autonomous driving. On RoboTwin 2.0, it outperforms every mainstream backbone we evaluate in all four out-of-distribution settings, by up to 24.8% relative to the strongest backbone. On RoboCasa-GR1, GroundingPI trained with 50% of the demonstrations outperforms those baselines trained with 75%. On nuScenes, used as the visual backbone, GroundingPI attains an average open-loop L2 error of 0.296 m. We systematically analyze GroundingPI's pretraining in scale and data composition. Downstream autonomous driving and robotic manipulation improve as the pretraining is scaled. Analyzing the data recipe across these 11 perceptual capabilities shows dense grounding's substantial benefits for both, and OCR's potential as a catalyst for perceptual learning. These results support grounding as a perceptual foundation, and dedicated perceptual pretraining as a promising direction for foundation models of physical intelligence.

Autoregressive (AR) grounding models serialize spatial predictions, introducing sequential latency and imposing a causal order on output tokens. We view grounding as visual evidence extraction: objects, locations, and spatial relations are jointly constrained by the image and query, yet their dependencies do not imply an intrinsic left-to-right generation order. This distinction makes bidirectional diffusion a natural fit, allowing spatial hypotheses to emerge in parallel and be jointly refined through iterative denoising. We introduce GroundAnything, a 4B-parameter grounding foundation model that reconciles fast parallel decoding with precise localization through blockwise denoising. Training combines grounding pretraining from public datasets and dedicated data engines, direct AR-to-diffusion conversion with joint AR and diffusion objectives, supervised fine-tuning, and GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. Across 30 grounding benchmarks, our autoregressive variant, GroundAnything-VLM, establishes a new overall state of the art among similarly sized models at 72.42%, remaining competitive with GPT-6 Astra (71.35%). With entropy-guided decoding, GroundAnything also surpasses the prior state of the art at this scale, averaging 61.75% versus 53.32% for the fast MTP-based LocateAnything model. We further explore decoding strategies, showing that an optional self-speculative mode achieves a $4.51\times$ speedup over the AR counterpart with a 0.74 percentage-point drop in COCO F1mIoU. Infrastructure experiments show that progressive inference optimizations translate parallel decoding into practical speedups. These support efficient visual grounding in latency-sensitive real-world systems.

3D visuomotor policies provide a strong foundation for spatially precise manipulation, yet current text-to-3D policies struggle to follow unseen fine-grained behavioral specifications beyond those covered by demonstrations. We study this challenge as unseen specification generalization, where language specifies behaviorally significant variations, such as target position, displacement, or articulated state, that are absent from policy training. We find that pretrained language representations and conventional global behavior-language alignment capture coarse task semantics but often blur nearby specifications that require distinct behaviors. We introduce T3DP, a Text-to-3D Policy framework for fine-grained language-behavior alignment. Rather than compressing each instruction and demonstration into a single global embedding, T3DP preserves their local structures and establishes bidirectional token-level correspondence between linguistic elements and behavioral segments. This directly grounds subtle linguistic variations in the behavior components they affect, preventing closely related specifications from collapsing in the representation space. The resulting specification-sensitive language representation conditions a point-cloud-based 3D diffusion policy, enabling more precise control over unseen behavioral specifications without modifying the underlying policy architecture. Across Meta-World, ManiSkill, and RoboTwin, T3DP improves average held-out-specification success over global language-behavior alignment by +11.0-14.2 points, with gains on all 15 task families; on real-robot tasks, it further raises average success from 47.5% to 65.0% (+17.5 points). Representation and action-probe analyses show that fine-grained alignment better preserves specification geometry and action-relevant variation, linking local behavior grounding to downstream control.

Indoor building construction sites are demanding environments for visual SLAM, where variable lighting and repetitive, low-textured structures make the system drift over long trajectories, though structural elements such as walls remain distinguishable despite these conditions. These buildings are constructed according to their as-planned floor plans, available from the design phase, and although the actual as-built site can differ from this design, floor plans still provide a metric reference, both to localize the system in the building and to correct drift. Existing methods often use the floor plan to correct an already-built trajectory offline, and those that instead correct it online typically rely on depth sensors. We instead present MVP-SLAM, an online visual-inertial SLAM on two opposite-facing fisheye cameras that corrects drift from cameras alone by matching walls detected in its map to the floor plan, through a drift-aware policy. A multi-stage integration then turns each matched pair incrementally into a persistent correction, so the trajectory stays corrected and localized within the floor plan as it is built. MVP-SLAM was validated on the multi-floor construction sites of the Hilti-Trimble SLAM Challenge 2026, ranking 2nd of 22 teams in the Localization task (0.29 m mean RMSE) and 5th of 62 teams in the SLAM task (0.24 m), the top-ranked one in both tasks among those that operate online, integrate the floor plan, and localize within it.

Practical Muon maintains momentum and performs a small, fixed number of Newton–Schulz iterations separately for each parameter matrix, often with a Nesterov correction. We analyze these layer-wise finite-step updates jointly on a coupled nonconvex objective, rather than replacing them by exact polar factors or one global orthogonalization. Under gradient-dependent $(\mathcal L_0,\mathcal L_1,q)$-smoothness and conditionally unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded layer-wise variance, we establish an $\mathcal O(T^{-1/4})$ bound on the expected average Frobenius gradient norm. The analysis retains the Nesterov recursion and requires neither bounded stochastic gradients, symmetric noise, nor a uniform positive lower bound on the nonzero output singular values. Its constants contain no explicit matrix-dimension or rank factors when the number of blocks and problem constants are fixed. The proof follows a descent inequality and a decomposition of the momentum tracking error into initialization, noise, and drift. For the original five-step quintic, we verify the required scalar-map bounds analytically; the result also allows step-dependent coefficients satisfying the same bounds. A complementary nuclear-norm result quantifies rank dependence under a stronger spectral condition. The vanishing rate uses coupled learning-rate and momentum schedules, including the standard single-coefficient Nesterov rule.

As robots are increasingly deployed in everyday environments, ensuring their safety has become a central challenge. Existing methods often encode safety requirements as opaque mathematical/logical formulations or dense cost functions. While effective in specific tasks, they remain difficult to interpret, tightly coupled to individual tasks, and offer limited insight into why a robot action is considered safe or unsafe. To address this limitation, we propose “Neuro-Symbolic Predicate Learning for Semantic Safe Robot Control” (NEUPRO), which leverages a differentiable reasoner that can learn reusable safety representations from human-specified safety knowledge. NEUPRO allows practitioners to express task-related safety requirements as transparent symbolic rules, while enabling gradients to propagate through these rules to a feature extractor that maps raw observations to safety-relevant concepts. As a result, the learned feature extractor is (softly) grounded in human-understandable semantics, supports transparent constraint evaluation, and is transferable across tasks. By coupling interpretability with differentiability, NEUPRO moves beyond opaque cost design toward reusable safety reasoning. To evaluate NEUPRO's capability, we collect and release REASON, the first real robot benchmark dataset for interpretable robot safety specification. Experiments on REASON show that NEUPRO learns safety-critical features that generalize across tasks, mitigate the interpretability limitations of conventional black-box cost formulations, and provide explicit explanations of safety violation.

Uncertainty estimation in machine learning typically decomposes uncertainty into aleatoric uncertainty (AU) and epistemic uncertainty (EU) using the standard information-theoretic framework. However, in practice, two critical issues arise: entanglement (AU and EU are highly correlated) and epistemic collapse (EU magnitude shrinks with increasing model capacity). We analyze this framework on a functional level and discover that significant portions of the assumed AU, EU range are infeasible in finite settings, and cannot be attained with any class probabilities. We characterize how this infeasible region scales with the number of classes and Monte Carlo samples $N$ (e.g., from ensembles with $N$ members), revealing it is bounded by $\text{AU} \leq \log(2)/N$. Crucially, the infeasible region's boundary helps explain epistemic collapse: when model confidence is high, $\text{AU} > \text{EU}$ is guaranteed by this fundamental structural limitation. Our findings show that increasing ensemble size mitigates epistemic collapse by reducing the infeasible area. Lastly, we caution against interpreting AU and EU as independent quantities in low AU regimes, since we show they are coupled when $\text{AU} \leq \log(2)/N$.

Compositional 3D scene generation aims to recover complete 3D object shapes and their spatial arrangement from visual observations. Recent image-conditioned 3D generators provide strong priors for producing high-quality object geometry, making the generation of complex scenes increasingly practical. A central challenge is therefore to spatially organize these generated assets into a globally coherent scene while remaining consistent with multi-view observations. Existing approaches either entangle scene layout with object generation or separately estimate spatial placement from view-specific observations, where pose hypotheses may remain ambiguous and inconsistent across views, often resulting in an incoherent object-camera soup. We introduce SPOON, a framework that reformulates multi-view compositional 3D generation as scene-level, geometry-grounded pose reasoning. Rather than treating view-specific object pose hypotheses independently, SPOON coordinates them using reconstruction-derived multi-view geometry through a Guide-Route-Reconcile paradigm. This progressively organizes object poses and camera configurations into a coherent scene-level spatial arrangement. Extensive experiments on ARSG-110K and MIDI-3D-Front demonstrate consistent improvements in object placement and scene composition across varying numbers of input views. On ARSG-110K, SPOON reduces scene-level and object-level Chamfer distances by 12.7% and 17.7%, respectively, compared with a strong baseline.

We construct efficient information-theoretic non-malleable codes for classical messages that are secure against two noncommunicating local quantum tampering operations with arbitrary pre-shared entanglement. For every sufficiently small fixed $\xi>0$ and all sufficiently large first-share lengths $n$, the codes have rate at least $1/5-\xi$, perfect correctness, and error $2^{-n^{\Omega(1)}}$. Security holds for every message, with a single message-independent simulator for each attack. This resolves the constant-rate question for worst-case classical messages in the entangled two-split-state model. Our construction builds on the permutation-based two-split construction of Batra, Boddu, and Jain, which achieves rate approaching $1/5$ for uniformly random messages. We retain their architecture but replace the uniform message input to the permutation with a prescribed message concatenated with fresh uniform padding. Our main contribution is a worst-case security reduction for this modification.