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Environment198 papers Environmental Uncertainty27 papers Urban Environments181 papers Unknown Environments112 papers Real-World Environments68 papers 3D Environments28 papers Indoor Environments28 papers Railway Environments16 papers Harbor Environments14 papers Agentic Control87 papers Sea-Surface Temperature Data45 papers Ocean43 papers

Papers 4,291–4,320 of 6,861

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

HPP: Hierarchical Programmatic Probing for Long Video Understanding by Decoupling Perception and Reasoning

Understanding long videos requires fine-grained perception and multi-step, higher-order reasoning over complex, long-range spatio-temporal dynamics. Vision-language models (VLMs) encode video frames into visual tokens and attempt to perform both perception and multi-step planning latently, within a single forward pass. This coupled formulation, however, is bottlenecked by the LLM's limited capacity to discover and execute multi-step strategies in its latent representations. To address this bottleneck, we propose Hierarchical Programmatic Probing (HPP), a framework that decouples semantic perception from higher-order temporal reasoning by reformulating long video understanding as iterative, programmatic exploration of a hierarchically segmented video. Specifically, a coding-capable LLM plans and executes a multi-step strategy in an interactive coding environment, probing the video for information and invoking a VLM for localized perception on demand. To make probing tractable over long videos, we introduce three components: information-density-aware hierarchical segmentation, late-interaction semantic retrieval, and structured probing functions for coarse-to-fine temporal localization. We validate HPP on LongVideoBench, which requires both fine-grained perception and long-range relational reasoning, and show that decoupling the two via iterative programmatic probing yields substantial gains. Further results on EgoSchema, VideoMME, and MLVU demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse long-video benchmarks.

Awais Rauf, Ahmed Hasssan, Greg Slabaugh

Queen’s University Belfast · United Kingdom · AMD +2

Video Understanding Fine-Grained Perception Perceptual Understanding

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Shape-programmable Magnetic Soft Membranes for Mechanically Active Microchannels

The capability to encode spatially distinct magnetization patterns within soft materials enables remote control over complex deformations. This characteristic is especially important for microfluidic platforms, where limited dynamic control of channel boundaries and laminar flow conditions usually restrict fluid transport and interactions. The present study introduces a shape-programmable magnetic soft membrane actuator as an active microchannel component that can dynamically modulate its shape under magnetic fields and therefore the microfluidic environment. The membrane is magnetically programmed using a template-based approach, which allows it to be controllably deformed in the form of a sinusoid under the influence of an external magnetic field. The membrane's integration into a microchannel converts a passive channel wall into a dynamically changeable interface, allowing active fluid manipulation and enhancing micromixing in laminar flow conditions. The proposed approach establishes a versatile platform for wirelessly controlled deformable interfaces in next-generation microfluidic and lab-on-chip systems.

Direnc Akyildiz, Fatih Kocabas, Xiangyi Tan +1

Bio-integrated Robotics Lab at Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Wisconsin -Madison, Madison, WI 53706 USA · Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London, London, WC1E 7JE UK · Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison, WI 53706 USA +1

Fluidic Transport Soft Pneumatic Actuators Magnetic Tunnel Junction Passive

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Imitation from Heterogeneous Demonstrations using Grounded Latent-Action World Models

Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning visuomotor policies, but its generalisation and stability are limited by the scale and quality of demonstration data needed. A promising direction is to leverage more abundant but heterogeneous data sources, which differ in action space and often lack action labels altogether. Existing co-training approaches that combine heterogeneous data sources rely on heuristic and hand-engineered alignment techniques. In contrast, we argue that action representations should be grounded in prediction: actions that produce the same effect on the environment should share the same representation, regardless of their sources. To this end, we instantiate this principle by using a grounded latent-action world model (GLAM), a pair of generative models with a shared latent action space across data sources that is grounded by predicting future observations consistently across sources. This latent action space is used to train downstream behavioural cloning (BC) policies which map observations to latent actions and decode them back to robot actions, providing a paradigm for learning from heterogeneous data. Empirically, we demonstrate that GLAM successfully learns an aligned latent action space that facilitates action transfer across data sources with and without action labels. Across five manipulation tasks in simulation and in the real world, GLAM-aligned policies significantly outperform BC baselines and prior latent-action methods, achieving an average of +48% improvement in task success rate with the same data-scarce setting. Videos and code are available at https://viccccciv.github.io/glam/.

Tianyou Wang, Anson Lei, Joe Watson +1

University of Oxford

Latent Actions Imitation Learning Visuomotor Policy Latent World Models Action Space Imitation

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

$φ$ -Scene: Physically Grounded Image-to-3D Scene Reconstruction

Reconstructing compositional 3D scenes from a single image is a fundamental challenge in 3D world modeling. Recent methods can recover high-fidelity, complete 3D objects and predict plausible scene arrangements, but most still treat scene reconstruction primarily as a visual and geometric prediction problem. Their outputs may therefore contain floating objects, interpenetrations, or unstable-contact artifacts, limiting their physical validity and downstream usability in simulation, robotics, and interactive environments. We present

φ

-Scene, a physically grounded approach to open-vocabulary and compositional image-to-3D scene reconstruction. The key premise is that a reconstructed scene should not be treated merely as a set of objects with predicted poses, but as a stable physical system. Accordingly,

φ

-Scene formulates reconstruction as topology-driven physical assembly: it infers how objects support one another, orders them accordingly, and progressively settles each object against its already stabilized support context. For each object in topological order, SDF-based optimization first resolves penetrations against the pre-settled support context, and rigid-body simulation then settles the object into a stable contact configuration under real-world physical constraints. Experiments on 3D-Front show that

φ

-Scene achieves the strongest overall performance among out-of-domain methods and remains highly competitive with in-domain baselines. Human and VLM evaluations further show strong preference for

φ

-Scene in visual quality, reference alignment, and physical plausibility. Finally, dedicated physical plausibility metrics covering static contact quality and dynamic stability demonstrate that

φ

-Scene substantially reduces penetration artifacts while producing much lower post-simulation drift, indicating more stable and physically grounded 3D scenes.

Haodong Li, Lulu Shao, Haolin Lu +4

University of California San Diego, USA

3D Reconstruction 3D Scenes 3D World Scene Complexity

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

FAST: A Framework for Aligned Sampling and Training in Parallel Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Deep reinforcement learning is pivotal for closed-loop autonomous driving yet remains constrained by severe bottlenecks in sampling efficiency. Standard parallel sampling mitigates this but suffers from the straggler effect, where the premature termination of a single environment necessitates a synchronized batch re-initialization, leading to suboptimal sample utilization and prohibitive re-initialization latency. To address this, we propose FAST, a synchronous parallel framework tailored for closed-loop simulation. Specifically, FAST employs Dynamic Parallel Sampling Alignment (DPSA) to maintain vectorization synchronization by extending terminated episodes via virtual continuation, thereby decoupling the sampling loop from individual terminations. By dynamically triggering global truncation based on the termination rate of parallel clips, FAST effectively eliminates the bottleneck of premature resets without sacrificing data diversity. Furthermore, to strictly preserve theoretical consistency, we incorporate a Scaled Mask-Padding Optimization (SMPO) that leverages validity masking and adaptive loss normalization to nullify the bias from auxiliary padding data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FAST achieves at least a 1.78 times wall-clock speedup over the single-clip baseline while preserving statistical unbiasedness.

Bonan Wang, Letian Tao, Bin Shuai +7

School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Didi Voyager Labs, DiDi Autonomous Driving · School of Vehicle and Mobility and the College of AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Autonomous Driving Simulation Autonomous Driving Deep Reinforcement Learning Latent Representation Alignment

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Privacy-Preserving Federated Temporal Graph Learning with Digital Twin--Guided Adaptive Deception for Cyber-Resilient IoMT

The rapid proliferation of IoT and IoMT devices introduces critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities in healthcare and industrial environments where resource-constrained devices operate under strict latency and data-privacy regulations. This paper presents the Federated Temporal Graph Convolutional Network with Advantage Actor-Critic (Federated TGCN-A2C), a privacy-preserving defense architecture integrating four mechanisms: a PyG-based Temporal GCN using GCNConv layers with global mean pooling and a learned anomaly gate for flow-level threat classification; LSTM-based Digital Twins generating per-device anomaly scores gating the classifier via learned sigmoid coupling; a Federated A2C agent selecting among ALLOW, ISOLATE, and HONEYPOT-REDIRECT actions based on a seven-dimensional state capturing confidence, entropy, anomaly magnitude, and traffic composition; and an enhanced honeypot layer converting suspicious traffic into threat intelligence with adaptive thresholds. Federated aggregation employs EMA-smoothed per-client validation losses as inverse-weighted FedAvg coefficients to stabilize global model updates under non-IID distributions, with cosine-annealed learning rates per round. Evaluated on CICDDoS 2019 and TON-IoT benchmarks, the framework achieves 99.48% and 99.61% test accuracy with weighted-F1 scores of 0.9948 and 0.9961, converging within 25 and 10 federated rounds, outperforming Fed-Inforce-Fusion by 0.21 percentage points while covering three additional attack categories. All sixteen CICDDoS 2019 classes achieve F1 of at least 0.9237 and all ten TON-IoT classes achieve F1 of at least 0.9488, including the severely imbalanced MITM category. Post-hoc explainability via SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, and counterfactual analysis confirms decisions are grounded in semantically meaningful flow features, supporting regulatory accountability in clinical deployments.

Syed Zeeshan Haider, Anwar Shah, Muneeb Arif +2

FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad, Pakistan

Internet Of Thing Federated Reinforcement Learning Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection Privacy-Preserving Framework Temporal Graph Neural Networks Anomaly Score+1

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Semi-Supervised Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to predict actions directly from visual observations and language instructions, but adapting them to new environments still depends on costly action-labeled demonstrations. To reduce this dependence, we study semi-supervised VLA adaptation under limited supervision signals, where only a small portion of trajectories contain robot actions and the remaining trajectories provide action-unlabeled vision-language observations. Unlike standard semi-supervised learning, the missing supervision is an embodied action signal that must be visually grounded, language-consistent, physically feasible, and temporally stable. To address this problem, we propose SemiVLA, a self-distilled teacher-student framework that learns from reliable pseudo-actions on unlabeled trajectories. SemiVLA introduces a VLA-specific reliability controller to assess vision-language alignment, action feasibility, and temporal transition consistency, and further updates the teacher through a Bottleneck-Projected Alignment Update to avoid noisy feedback contamination. With OpenVLA as the backbone, SemiVLA consistently improves multiple PEFT strategies across LIBERO and CALVIN. Under 10% labeled trajectories, SemiVLA with Selective LoRA achieves 89.0% average success on LIBERO, outperforming supervised LoRA by 8.0 points without extra inference cost.

Hongyang He, Jiuming Liu, Victor Sanchez

University of Warwick · University of Cambridge

Vision-Language-Action Models

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Technical Report for ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Exploring Query-Based Segmentation and Increased Spatial Context for Outdoor Scene Understanding

In this report, we present our submission to the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, organized as part of the Workshop on Field Robotics at ICRA 2026. The challenge combines data from the GOOSE and GOOSE-Ex datasets, which comprise more than 13k images captured from 4 distinct camera setups, annotated using a hierarchical taxonomy of 56 fine-grained classes and 11 broader categories. Starting from SegFormer as a baseline, we progressively improve segmentation performance through increased training crop sizes, a transition to the query-based Mask2Former architecture, and test-time augmentation. Our experiments show that query-based segmentation significantly outperforms the baseline model. Furthermore, increasing the crop size used during training yields substantial gains, highlighting the relevance of preserving scene context for fine-grained semantic disambiguation. Our final submission, using test-time augmentation, achieves an mIoU of 69.6% on the challenge test set, providing a strong baseline for fine-grained semantic segmentation in outdoor environments. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, code and weights will be made publicly available at https://github.com/RoboticsLabURJC/outdoor-fine-grained-segmentation .

David Pascual-Hernández, Roberto Calvo-Palomino, Inmaculada Mora-Jiménez +1

1Authors are with Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Telematics and Computing Systems, Rey Juan Carlos University, Fuenlabrada, 28943, Spain.

Dense Semantic Segmentation

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Temporal logics and formal synthesis for robot planning and control

As robots move from controlled environments into real-world settings, it becomes increasingly crucial to ensure that they perform as expected. A key step toward that goal is a rigorous specification of the desired robot behavior, capturing intricate temporal, spatial, and logical requirements. Complementing this, plan and control synthesis methods are needed to fulfill these specifications with provable guarantees. This manuscript presents temporal logics - particularly linear and signal temporal logic - as expressive specification languages for robot behavior over time. We then discuss principles of formal synthesis, from discrete graph- and game-based approaches to sampling-based motion planning, trajectory optimization, and control-certificate-based synthesis. Finally, we outline challenges in deploying formal synthesis in real-world robotics, emphasizing the interplay between modeling fidelity, computational tractability, and the types of rigorous guarantees that can be achieved.

Jana Tumova, Joris Verhagen, Matti Vahs

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Signal Temporal Logic Robot Planning Robot Systems Feedback Linearization

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Federated Temporal Attention Intelligence for Cyber-Resilient IoMT: Lightweight Digital Twins and PPO-Driven Honeypot Deception

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices introduces critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities in healthcare environments where resource-constrained medical devices operate under strict latency requirements and stringent data-privacy regulations. To address these challenges, this paper presents the Lightweight Digital Twin and Federated Reinforcement Learning (LDT-FRL) framework, a privacy-preserving defense architecture integrating four complementary mechanisms: a Temporal Attention Encoder (TAE) built on a GRU backbone with learned temporal self-attention for flow-level threat classification; lightweight LSTM-based Digital Twins trained on normal-class traffic to generate per-device anomaly scores that gate the TAE classifier through a learned sigmoid coupling; a Federated Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent selecting among ALLOW, ISOLATE, and HONEYPOT_REDIRECT actions based on a seven-dimensional state; and an intelligent honeypot layer that converts redirected suspicious traffic into actionable threat intelligence. A federated aggregation strategy employing EMA-smoothed per-client validation losses as inverse-weighted FedAvg coefficients stabilizes global model updates under non-IID client distributions. Evaluated on CICDDoS 2019 and TON-IoT benchmarks, LDT-FRL achieves 99.66% and 99.95% test accuracy respectively, with macro-F1 scores of 0.9913 and 0.9995, converging 81% faster than the DTFL-CD baseline while attaining perfect F1=1.000 on the severely imbalanced MITM class. Explainability analysis via SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, and counterfactual methods confirms that the TAE focuses on semantically meaningful flow features, providing interpretable evidence for each defense decision.

Syed Zeeshan Haider, Anwar Shah, Muneeb Arif +2

FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad, Pakistan

Internet Of Thing Federated Reinforcement Learning Digital Twins Privacy-Preserving Framework Resource-Constrained Edge Devices Spatial Attention+1

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

One Size does not Fit All: Heterogeneous Latent Space Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain shift remains a major obstacle to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in high-stakes environments such as healthcare. While Domain adaptation aims to mitigate these effects, existing approaches suffer from limited expressiveness of latent representations and a reliance on handcrafted, static augmentations. In this work, we address these limitations by proposing a novel deep learning architecture for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), specifically optimized for medical image segmentation. Our framework, ADualVUOT, integrates a dual-encoder Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs) to increase modeling flexibility and posterior expressiveness. To achieve domain alignment, we leverage Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) through the Gaussian-Gromov-Wasserstein (GGW) distance, which handles structural and topological discrepancies between domains. Furthermore, we incorporate an adversarial augmentation scheme to synthesize worst-case compositions, thus enhancing model robustness. Extensive experiments on medical imaging benchmarks show significant gains over prior OT-based approaches.

Evangelia Koskinioti, Yi Shen, Georgios Stamou +1

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, NC, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Duke University, NC, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece.

Domain Adaptation U-Net Variational Autoencoder Ad

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Predictive Repair Management Using a Multi-Head Attention Transformer and Online Learning

Accurate prediction of repair duration is an important challenge in product maintenance due to its implications for resource allocation, customer satisfaction, and operational performance. This study aims to develop a deep learning framework to help fleet repair shops accurately categorize repair time given product historical data. The study uses an automobile repair and maintenance dataset and creates an end-to-end predictive framework by employing a multi-head attention network designed for tabular data. The developed framework combines categorical information, transformed through embeddings and attention mechanisms, with numerical historical data to facilitate integration and learning from diverse data features. A weighted loss function is introduced to overcome class imbalance issues in large datasets. Moreover, an online learning strategy is used for continuous incremental model updates to maintain predictive accuracy in evolving operational environments. Our empirical findings demonstrate that the multi-head attention mechanism extracts meaningful interactions between vehicle identifiers and repair types compared to a feed-forward neural network and a random forest model. Also, combining historical maintenance data with an online learning strategy facilitates real-time adjustments to changing patterns and increases the model's predictive performance on new data. The model is tested on real-world repair data spanning 2013 to 2020 and achieves an accuracy of 78%, with attention weight analyses illustrating feature interactions.

Xinyao Zhang, Willie Cade, Karl R. Haapala +2

University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA · Graceful Solutions Chicago, IL, USA · Oregon State University Corvallis, OR, USA

Predictive Maintenance Deep Learning Framework Transformer Attention Online Learning

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

A Reward-Petri-Net Interpretation of Temporal Behavior Trees

This paper introduces an interpretation of Temporal Behavior Trees (TBTs) as Reward-Petri-Nets (RPNs) for reinforcement learning (RL). Designing reward functions for complex, long-horizon robotic tasks is notoriously difficult, especially when tasks have hierarchical structure and temporal constraints. TBTs extend conventional behavior trees (BTs) used in robotic applications by incorporating temporal properties into their leaf nodes. This allows TBTs to represents not only the behavioral task structure defined by BT operators such as Sequence, Fallback, and Parallel, but also the task's temporal constraints. In this work, the constraints are specified in the leaf nodes using Linear Temporal Logic. In order to inform RL rewards using TBTs, we provide a translation from TBT into a Petri Net (PN) and show how rewards can be automatically assigned based on the TBT's structure, resulting in a RPN. In a series of increasingly challenging environments, we demonstrate how TBT-based rewards enable learning where vanilla RL fails, improve sample efficiency, and offer flexible, intuitive control over the learning progress. We showcase the learning impact by using different reward distribution schemes and TBT structures.

Till Schmeil, Günther Waxenegger-Wilfing, Sebastian Schirmer

University of Würzburg, Germany · German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany

Reward Modeling Linear Temporal Logics

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Object Pose Estimation with Contrastive Alignment and Pseudo-Label Refinement

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables robust transfer of knowledge from simulated to real environments while exploiting a subset of unlabeled target data to improve real-world performance. Existing UDA methods for Object pose estimation often rely on global feature matching, multi-stage larger frameworks, or image translation pipelines, which tend to overlook the pose-specific information embedded in feature representations. To bridge this limitation, we introduce CAPLR that targets the adaptation of pose-sensitive features in localized regions, ensuring that domain alignment preserves the geometric cues essential for accurate pose estimation. CAPLR achieves UDA with three key components: (1) Efficient Cross-Domain Pairing strategy leveraging intermediate features to identify pose similar image pairs across domains without supervision; (2) Contrastive Alignment to perform feature alignment at localised regions in both intermediate and task-specific representations; and (3) Consistency-Based Pseudo-Label Refinement to improve reliability by encouraging stable target predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPLR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple well-known object pose estimation benchmarks featuring diverse and challenging scenarios.

Nidhal Eddine Chenni, Arunkumar Rathinam, Djamila Aouada

SnT, University of Luxembourg

Category-Level Object Pose Estimation Domain Adaptation Pseudo-Labeling Contrastive Alignment

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Reward-free Pretraining for Reinforcement Learning via Occupancy Coverage Maximization

Sparse rewards pose a central challenge in reinforcement learning, since agents receive no informative signal until they reach their goal. Intrinsic-reward methods address this issue by optimizing non-stationary objectives such as novelty, prediction error, or skill diversity, thereby injecting a supervision signal into the problem. While effective, these methods often require that the extrinsic (sparse) reward can be evaluated -- either online or during offline relabeling of the stored transitions. This limitation is particularly vexing for multi-task, meta-, and continual reinforcement learning, where agents' interactions with the environment are usually reward-free. In this work, we present a method to pre-train transferable exploration policies that rapidly adapt to sparse rewards at downstream task time. Our objective maximizes state-space covering for the occupancy measure, and can be framed in terms of entropy maximization. Its algorithmic implementation, ROVER, leverages recent advances on the operatorial formulation of RL to estimate occupancy with a learned resolvent world model, bypassing common hurdles associated with density and entropy estimation. ROVER further introduces a virtual "sink" state for unexplored regions, balancing coverage of known states with expansion into unseen ones and preventing cyclic expansion-collapse behavior during learning. In tabular and pixel-based sparse navigation tasks, ROVER produces more uniform aggregate coverage and stronger initializations for downstream tasks than standard reward-free baselines.

Marco Pratticò, Pietro Novelli, Massimiliano Pontil +1

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16100 Genova, Italy · 2AI Centre, Computer Science Department, University College London, London, UK.

Sparse Rewards External Reward Models Occupancy Embodied Navigation Model Pretraining

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Wound-Rotor Synchronous Motor Performance Prediction

Wound rotor synchronous motors have emerged as a strong alternative that eliminates dependence on REEs. However, WRSM design requires the simultaneous optimization of numerous geometric and electromagnetic parameters, and the high computational cost of conventional finite element analysis severely limits the rapid exploration of the large parameter space. Although there are machine-learning-based surrogate modeling studies in the literature, they generally compare only a limited number of models, exclude deep learning architectures, and do not provide a comprehensive benchmark specific to WRSM. In this study, the performance of a total of eight machine learning and deep learning models from four different algorithmic families was systematically compared for the prediction of WRSM torque and motor efficiency. On a dataset of 3351 samples generated using Latin Hypercube Sampling in the Motor-CAD simulation environment, each model was trained with 10 different random seed values and tuned via Optuna hyperparameter optimization. Different from the existing literature, this study jointly offers a broad model spectrum including recent deep learning architectures such as FT Transformer, a multi-seed reproducibility protocol, and a Pareto analysis of the computational cost-accuracy trade-off. The results revealed that neural-network-based models systematically outperform tree-based models. The FT-Transformer model achieved the highest single-model accuracy with R^2 = 0.9928, producing predictions in 0.33 milliseconds and thus obtaining several orders of magnitude speedup compared to FEA. Model performances were evaluated in a multidimensional manner using R^2, MAE, RMSE, and MAPE metrics.

Kıvanç Doğan, Ahmet Orhan

Fırat University, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Elazığ

Surrogate Models Machine Learning Deep Learning Muscle Anatomy

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Inverting the Bellman Equation: From $Q$ -Values to World Models

Model-based and model-free reinforcement learning are traditionally viewed as separate paradigms: instead of learning a model of the transition kernel

P

, model-free agents typically estimate value functions tied to a specific policy and reward. In this paper, we challenge this dichotomy by proving that value-based agents trained on a sufficiently rich set of reward functions, e.g. using goal-conditioned RL, implicitly encode a unique and accurate world model. To extract this model in practice, we introduce \textit{

P

-learning}, an inverse analogue to

Q

-learning that samples from an agent's

Q

-values, policies and rewards to decode its internal model of the environment. We then provide sufficient conditions on the type and number of goals for which agents encode the true kernel

P

, covering both stochastic and deterministic MDPs over finite or continuous state spaces. Even when our assumptions are violated, we empirically demonstrate that agents trained on a handful of reward functions encode accurate dynamics in

\texttt{Reacher}

,

\texttt{MountainCar}

and stochastic variants of

\texttt{FourRooms}

. Surprisingly, we find that policies trained exclusively on a \texttt{Reacher} agent's implicit world model are quasi-optimal on out-of-distribution, velocity-based goals despite position-only training -- suggesting that agents contain hidden generalisation capabilities and providing a new lens into the connection between model-based, model-free, and goal-conditioned RL.

Alistair Letcher, Mattie Fellows, Alexander D. Goldie +3

FLAIR, University of Oxford · Google DeepMind · Mila, University of Montreal

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Bellman Equation World Models Inverse Design

Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Trip+: Benchmarking Agents in Personalized Interactive Travel Planning

Interactive travel planning has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are deployed to manage evolving preferences and unexpected disruptions over multiple turns. Such settings require models to make complex, profile-conditioned planning decisions. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate feasibility, personalization, or interaction in relatively isolated settings. We therefore introduce Trip+ to measure the ability of agents to plan travel holistically. In Trip+, given traveler profiles and dynamic interactions, agents must generate and revise minute-level itineraries. End-to-end traveler experiences are evaluated via an LLM-based simulator, enabling the assessment of subjective metrics like fatigue. Our scenarios range from simple request resolutions to complex environment-driven replanning. We evaluate 18 LMs and find a consistent gap in experiential quality. Models favor technically feasible but exhausting itineraries that diverge sharply from profiled traveler preferences.

Junle Chen, Wei Chen, Yehong Xu +6

HKUST · Tencent Hy · HKUST(GZ)

Tour Large Language Model Planning Agentic Benchmarks Large Language Model Routing

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

OmniV2X: A Generative Foundation Planner for Efficient End-to-End Cooperative Driving

We present OmniV2X, a generative foundation model for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) cooperative driving. The model directly interprets independent context sequences comprising multi-modal and multi-agent observations. The new design mitigates the computational cost of dense 3D perception, the vulnerability to data scarcity in cooperative scenarios, and the poor compliance with standardized messaging in existing methods that fuse multi-modal inputs into a shared representation. For training, we present an end-to-end supervised pipeline using a downstream trajectory generation loss, in which a high-capacity generative sequence planner implicitly learns to steer the model and leverage multi-modal inputs via cross-attention injection. As a foundation model, we demonstrate that OmniV2X pre-trained on large-scale single-agent planning datasets can efficiently adapt to cooperative environments by integrating the conditioning context with lightweight, standard-compliant V2X tokens. Evaluated on the DAIR-V2X-Seq dataset, OmniV2X outperforms existing end-to-end cooperative driving baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance with less than 10% of the fine-tune V2X dataset and less than 1% of the communication bandwidth. We conduct comprehensive evaluations to demonstrate its computational efficiency and robustness under real-world constraints.

Juntong Peng, Juanwu Lu, Yupeng Zhou +3

College of Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

V2X Wireless Foundation Models Omnix Planning Methods Cross-Attention

Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Learning Burst-Aware Early Warning Models for Capacity Stress under AI Workload Surges in Hyperscale Data Centers

The rapid growth of large-scale AI workloads, particularly Large Language Model (LLM) training and inference, is fundamentally reshaping the operational dynamics of hyperscale data centers. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI-driven jobs exhibit bursty, high-intensity, and rapidly shifting resource demands, often leading to sudden capacity stress that cannot be effectively handled by reactive threshold-based mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a deployment-oriented, burst-aware early warning framework for proactive capacity stress prediction under AI workload surges. We formulate the problem as a high-recall forecasting task over multivariate telemetry windows, with the explicit goal of enabling operational intervention before system degradation occurs. The proposed framework integrates workload intensity, temporal variation, and system pressure signals, and employs a lightweight tree-based learning model to capture nonlinear interactions in highly imbalanced environments. To evaluate the system under realistic conditions, we introduce an AI workload surge injection methodology that simulates burst-driven demand patterns observed in large-scale AI systems. Our XGBoost-based model achieves an ROC AUC of 0.697 and an AP of 0.670, significantly outperforming baseline methods. Under deployment-oriented threshold selection, the framework achieves a Recall of 0.914, enabling the detection of the majority of stress-prone periods with acceptable false-alarm cost. Beyond predictive performance, we show how the proposed framework can be integrated into operational control loops to support proactive actions such as workload throttling and resource scaling. Our results highlight the practical value of high-recall, learning-based early warning systems in enabling resilient and adaptive data center operations in the era of AI-driven workloads.

Zihan Yu, Xianling Zeng, Zhiming Xue +2

College of Professional Studies Northeastern University Boston, USA · College of Engineering Northeastern University Boston, USA · Khoury College of Computer Sciences Northeastern University Boston, USA

Artificial Intelligence Data Centers Data Centers Early Warning Capacity Retrieval Recall

Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

PulseCX: Breaking the Closed-World Assumption in Real-Time CX

Conversational AI agents in Customer Experience (CX) typically suffer from a Closed-World Constraint, ignoring high-velocity external shifts like viral trends or outages. Ad-hoc web search attempts to bridge this gap but often introduce prohibitive latency and context poisoning. We introduce PulseCX, a framework that decouples knowledge acquisition from consumption. Adopting a structure-first paradigm, PulseCX employs an asynchronous agent to linearize signals into a Decay-Aware Temporal Knowledge Graph (DA-TKG) governed by reinforcement--decay dynamics to actively manage information lifecycles. By coupling this self-evolving memory with hierarchical intent gating, PulseCX removes synchronous search bottlenecks (<10ms overhead) and drives significant gains in Intent Resolution (IRR) and Customer Satisfaction (s-CSAT) in dynamic environments.

Rajat Agarwal, Suvidha Tripathi, Shubham Sharma

Sprinklr AI, Gurugram, India

Conversational Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Assistants Clients Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

MS-rPPG: Multi-spectral State Space Model for Remote Photoplethysmography in Driver Monitoring Systems

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a camera-based technique for measuring physiological signals, particularly cardiac activity. From the remotely measured signals, heart rate can be estimated, which is crucial for health monitoring. In this study, we investigate a driver health monitoring system based on remote heart rate estimation. However, driving environments represent uncontrolled settings where videos are subject to varying illumination conditions and frequent head movements. We introduce MS-rPPG, a multi-spectral framework that combines RGB with near-infrared (NIR) face video to alleviate rPPG estimation under challenging driving conditions. To combine the complementary features from two spectral videos, we propose a cross-spectral linear modulation (CSLM) strategy based on frequency-domain analysis. Moreover, we introduce MS-Mamba, a novel state space model designed to effectively model long-range temporal dependencies while jointly capturing cross-channel interactions between multi-spectral features. We collected a real-world dataset called MS-Drive, which was recorded from 50 participants while driving the vehicle. The proposed method was evaluated on the MR-NIRP Car dataset and MS-Drive datasets. The experimental results indicate that MS-rPPG shows better robustness and heart rate estimation accuracy than previous methods, highlighting its promise for driver health monitoring. The codes are available at github.com/ziiho08/MS-rPPG.

Jiho Choi, Sang Jun Lee

Division of Electronics and Information Engineering, Jeonbuk National University, Republic of Korea

Remote Photoplethysmography Naturalistic Driving Data State Space Models

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

MV-WAM: Manifold-Aware World Action Model with Value Augmentation

Achieving robust and generalizable manipulation across diverse environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied robotics. Recent world action models achieve strong in-domain performance, yet their gains do not extend proportionally to out-of-distribution scenarios. We attribute this to a structural mismatch between visual and action modalities, whose intrinsically heterogeneous manifolds cause joint optimization to disproportionately degrade action robustness under distribution shift. To address this, we propose MV-WAM, a novel end-to-end framework that jointly models visual prediction, action generation, and value estimation designed to effectively leverage video priors during both training and inference for enhanced action generalization. Key to this unification is a cross-modality causal mask that hierarchically grounds actions in predicted video frames and value function tokens in both modalities. To further narrow the generalization gap, MV-WAM adopts a manifold-aware optimization scheme that explicitly accounts for the structural heterogeneity across modalities. Finally, MV-WAM introduces a progress-value regulation mechanism that estimates task completion and detects misalignment between predicted frames and generated actions, enabling the policy to autonomously identify execution deviations and recover through value-guided rollback. On the RoboTwin simulation, MV-WAM achieves a 55.7% mean success rate on random scenarios without any randomized action supervision, outperforming the strongest baseline by 29.3%. MV-WAM achieves a 77.5% mean success rate across four real-world tasks of varying difficulty on a dual-arm robot. Our results demonstrate that manifold-aware cross-modal alignment is essential for robust policy generalization, offering a path toward deployable robotic manipulation.

Jintao Chen, Peidong Jia, Qingpo Wuwu +13

State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics

Efficient World-Action Model Faster-Wam Cross-Modal Alignment

Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

What Context Does a Coding Agent Actually Need to Act?

A modern coding agent can hold an entire repository in its context window. Most of its reading is wasted -- and the interesting question is not how much context an agent can use, but what it actually \emph{needs}. We study that question at the moment it matters most: when the agent must \emph{edit} code. Separating \emph{finding} the work site from \emph{acting} on it, we hold localization fixed with an oracle, vary only how the code is represented, and score context against real issue resolution on SWE-bench Verified. The answer is starkly minimal. The signal lives in the code being edited itself: natural-language summaries of it answer almost none of the behavioral questions that the source answers (

4/45

vs.\

27/45

, held-out repositories, independent judge), and the gap belongs to the representation, not the summarizer -- a frontier model's summaries score exactly as poorly as a 3B model's. The surrounding context hardly matters either: across every multi-file instance in Verified, under a protocol frozen before any data, rendering a file's remainder as UML skeletons and signatures resolves no more issues than deleting that remainder outright (

N{=}70

, exact McNemar

p{=}0.75

). That was our registered hypothesis, and it failed. Compressed context, meanwhile, matches whole files at a third of the tokens: a resolved issue costs

19

K context tokens, not

94

K. The instrument also yielded a finding the field should keep: temperature-0 API inference flips

{\sim}9\%

of per-instance outcomes between byte-identical runs. That is a noise floor under every small effect reported on this benchmark, including ours. We release the instrument -- gold-validated environments, per-instance proof that every reference edit is expressible from every arm's context, deterministic patch construction, and pre-registered hypotheses whose nulls we publish.

Brian Sam-Bodden

Integrallis Software

Coding Agents Repository Outcome

Jun 19, 2026cs.CV

Self-Supervised Dual-Frequency Phase Decomposition for Single-Shot Composite Fringe Projection Profilometry

Single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been actively studied for real-time measurement, dynamic object reconstruction, and motion-sensitive environments. Composite fringe patterns are advantageous in single-shot FPP because multiple frequency components can be encoded in a single pattern, enabling phase ambiguity resolution. Existing approaches mainly rely on Fourier transform-based methods or supervised deep learning methods. However, Fourier transform-based methods often suffer from limited accuracy and degraded performance in complex regions, while supervised methods require dense phase or depth labels, which are costly to obtain. In this work, we propose a self-supervised phase refinement framework for single-shot composite fringe patterns without requiring phase or depth labels. The proposed method exploits the scale and direction relationships between low- and high-frequency phase gradients, improving the reliability of phase separation. We also introduce a soft edge consistency loss to preserve object boundaries and fine geometric structures. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves MAE_z and RMSE_z of 0.367 mm and 1.804 mm, respectively, outperforming the best-performing transform-based baseline, which obtains 0.402 mm and 2.785 mm. The proposed method also improves the valid-pixel ratio from 84.75 % to 95.07 %. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of self-supervised dual-frequency phase refinement for reliable single-shot 3D reconstruction without ground-truth label supervision.

Jin-Hyuk Seok, Yatong An, Jae-Sang Hyun

Fringe Projection Profilometry 3D Reconstruction

Jun 19, 2026cs.SD

LK Jam: System Architecture and Implementation of a Real-Time Human-AI Interactive Music Generation System using Role-Aware GRU

As artificial intelligence advances into the era of Embodied AI, live musical interaction urgently needs to break free from the limitations of offline, unidirectional generation, achieving a "virtual synergy" capable of low-latency, dynamic interplay. To address this, this technical report presents LK_Jam, a real-time, bidirectional human-computer interactive music generation system based on a lightweight Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and a high-performance audio host architecture. In the algorithmic representation layer, this system abandons the computationally expensive fixed time-grid. Instead, it constructs a multi-dimensional sparse event stream integrating time-shifts, continuous harmonic embeddings, and role-aware encoding, enabling the model to accurately capture turn-taking logic and micro-timing in a single-step inference. In the engineering implementation layer, this paper builds a strict multithreaded lock-free communication bridge using C++ and the JUCE framework, incorporating the RTNeural inference engine designed specifically for real-time audio. By utilizing compile-time network topology solidification and a zero-allocation (allocation-free) mechanism, the end-to-end overhead of autoregressive decoding is strictly locked at

O(1)

complexity, structurally mitigating the risk of audio thread dropouts in DAW plugin environments. Furthermore, this study designs a three-stage progressive training strategy, achieving a leap from basic chord harmonization to expert-level interaction. Preliminary observations and architectural analysis demonstrate that while ensuring musical coherence and interactive role-play, the proposed system successfully challenges extreme real-time engineering constraints, offering a highly robust and deployable technical paradigm for next-generation AI co-performers in live music.

Yakun Liu, Zhiyu Jin, Dong Liu +1

Yakun Liu, Dong Liu, and Hai Luan are with the Shenyang Conservatory of Music. · Z. Jin is an independent collaborator.

Music Generation Real-Time Systems Gated Recurrent Unit

Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Agentic Time Machine as an Infrastructure for Future-Event Forecasting

Forecasting future events is a critical challenge for large language model (LLM) agents, spanning domains from elections and monetary policy to financial markets. However, evaluating progress on this task presents a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and environment fidelity. While live evaluation benchmarks suffer from an inherently slow feedback loop, existing retrospective replays typically restrict agents to static, pre-frozen databases that sacrifice the environmental realism of actual deployments. To tackle this issue, we introduce Agentic Time Machine (TM), an infrastructure that approximately reconstructs the web state at any chosen past time by filtering post-cutoff content. Leveraging this evaluation infrastructure, we further propose a planner-solver-aggregator multi-agent framework that breaks each question into diverse analytical angles, gathers evidence in parallel, and combines the results into a single forecast. Experiments show that offline scores under TM correlate strongly with live FutureX scores, validating that TM offers a fast and reliable sandbox for forecasting-agent evaluation. On FutureX-Past and Polymarket evaluated under TM, our framework achieves the highest score among strong closed-book, tool-augmented, and self-consistency baselines. On the official FutureX live leaderboard, our system achieves the best average rank over four consecutive weeks, including 1st place in May Week 1. As of June 17, it also ranks 1st on FutureX's official eight-week overall leaderboard.

Jingyi Chai, Bingyang Zheng, Xiangrui Liu +5

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Leaderboard Infrastructure

Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Duet: Dual-Robot Understanding via Efficient Teaching

Dual-robot collaboration enables tasks that exceed the reach and payload of a single robot, such as collaboratively transporting objects across environments and executing coordinated handovers. Data acquisition is the primary bottleneck for training these systems. To this end, we introduce DUET, a dual-robot learning framework for mobile manipulation. For efficient data collection, we create a unified dual-embodiment synchronized VR-based teleoperation system for in-domain heterogeneous robot data collection. We further develop a complementary tracking pipeline that records human-human coordination and collaborative mobile manipulation priors. To allow efficient learning, we introduce an Action Chunking Transformer based architecture that first pretrains collaborative policies on efficient human-human demonstrations, before finetuning them on a minimal set of real-robot teleoperation trajectories. We develop a benchmark of four collaborative tasks to evaluate our framework using a Unitree G1 humanoid and a Dexmate Vega1 mobile manipulator. The results demonstrate that harnessing human priors not only yields superior task performance compared to baselines trained only on robot data, but also reduces the total human effort required for data collection. Our human data collection pipeline achieves 5.4x acceleration on average from teleoperation, but we perform equally or better than robot-only data trained policies across all tasks. Our project page is available at https://zhaoy37.github.io/Duet/.

Yiqi Zhao, Ruohai Ge, Celina Shiyu Wang +10

University of Southern California · 2Toyota Research Institute · 3Stanford University

Scalable Robot Data Synthesis Teleoperation Cross-Embodiment Transfer Duet

Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

Root Cause Analysis with Latent Confounders using Partial Ancestral Graphs

Finding the source of failures, known as Root Cause Analysis (RCA), is essential for identifying the root causes of anomalies and maintaining the reliability of complex systems. While causal theory has advanced data-driven RCA, existing frameworks assume causal sufficiency, failing to account for the unobserved latent variables prevalent in real-world environments. To address this gap, we propose PAG-RCA. This framework models system failures as parametric interventions over Partial Ancestral Graphs (PAGs) to perform RCA in the presence of latent variables. We use standard causal identification algorithms to find the source of failures by quantifying causal effects over the PAG. When an effect is identifiable, candidate root causes are ranked based on their exact intervention effects. When effects are structurally unidentifiable, our framework (for the first time in the RCA literature) integrates partial identification to evaluate and score candidates using analytical causal bounds. By integrating latent variables and partial identification at once our framework ensures robust RCA even under data scarcity and latent-variable scenarios where traditional methods degrade. Evaluations on synthetic data, microservice anomaly benchmarks and power-grid cascading failures demonstrate that PAG-RCA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven baselines. By improving data-driven RCA performance under data scarcity, this methodology advances reliable automated diagnostics in partially observable complex networks.

Henrique O. Caetano, Rafael Arone, Carlos Dias Maciel

Signal Processing Laboratory, São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil · Guaratinguetá School of Engineering, São Paulo State University, Guaratinguetá, Brazil

Root Cause Analysis Latent Confounders

Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model

Robots operating in open-world environments must seamlessly integrate localization, spatial reasoning, navigation, and long-horizon planning. While specialist models excel at individual tasks, deploying a multi-model stack is computationally expensive and prone to cascading errors. We present Vesta, a unified embodied generalist that consolidates these capabilities into a single foundation model. Our approach combines a diverse and massive curated corpus designed to induce spatial grounding and a simple multimodal memory harness that enables reasoning over extended time horizons. Across diverse benchmarks, Vesta on average beats individual SOTA baselines by >

20\%

and beats an ensemble of per-category-best baselines by

>10\%

-- thus demonstrating that a generalist model can match or exceed specialists. On real-world robotic tasks requiring memory and reasoning, Vesta improves task success by >35%. Our work thus demonstrates that a single generalist is a feasible, scalable, and arguably preferable alternative to combining specialists.

Johan Bjorck, Zhiqi Li, Yunze Man +29

Co-first authors (alphabetical order). · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Core authors (alphabetical order). +8

Spatial Reasoning Multimodal Reasoning Long-Horizon Planning Generalizable Robotic Manipulations