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Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

Real-World Deployment of a 5G-Connected Edge-Controlled Aerial Robot in Industrial Subterranean Mines

This article presents the first real-world autonomous flight of a 5G-connected aerial robot controlled by an edge-offloaded controller, and aims to bridge the gap between controlled and factual setups. The robot operates within an active industrial subterranean mine, while the high-level controller is deployed in a nearby Kubernetes-based edge cluster. Communication between the robot and the edge is enabled via a 5G New Radio (NR) Standalone (SA) network. The chosen controller is a Model Predictive Controller (MPC), which generates control actions to allow the robot to navigate seamlessly through the mining environment. A human operator selects waypoints for the aerial robot, and the MPC generates smooth, collision-free paths for autonomous executions. The proposed 5G edge-based closed-loop system is evaluated in a real industrial setting and demonstrates the potential of edge-controlled robotic systems toward time-critical, safe and efficient future deployments.
Achilleas Santi Seisa, Emanuele Pagliari, Gerasimos Damigos +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Real-Time Industrial Defect Detection on Edge Hardware Using Fine-Tuned YOLOv8: A Systematic Benchmark on the NEU Surface Defect Database and MVTec AD with Automotive & Battery Manufacturing Extensions

Automated surface defect detection is critical for ensuring rigorous quality control in high-speed manufacturing environments. While deep learning models offer remarkable accuracy, deploying them on resource-constrained edge hardware without introducing significant latency remains a persistent challenge. This paper presents Industrial-YOLO, an edge-optimized framework built upon a fine-tuned YOLOv8 architecture specifically engineered for real-time industrial defect detection. We conduct a systematic benchmark utilizing the NEU surface defect database for steel sheets and the MVTec AD dataset, supplemented with custom automotive manufacturing extensions representing real-world structural anomalies (scratches, pits, and inclusions). To bridge the gap between algorithmic complexity and edge hardware constraints, target-specific optimizations are introduced via TensorRT and OpenVINO acceleration engines. Experimental results demonstrate that Industrial-YOLO achieves a high-velocity inference speed exceeding 120 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin platform while maintaining an exceptional mean Average Precision (mAP) of 98.5%. The proposed framework showcases highly robust, zero-latency performance when deployed directly onto an active automotive assembly line, offering a scalable blueprint for next-generation automated optical inspection (AOI) systems.
Emmanuel Ezeji Somtochukwu, Nitesh Rijal
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Learning While Acting: A Skill-Enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution Framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents

Lifelong learning is essential for Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in dynamic, interactive environments. However, existing lifelong learning agents for long-horizon tasks typically depend on discrete skill or past experiences retrieval with static parameters during inference, which prevents them from continuously internalizing test-time feedback like human learners. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution (\texttt{LifeSkill}), a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents. Specifically, we design Verifier-Guided Skill Learning that addresses the lack of direct supervision for skill extraction by rewarding candidate skills according to the average verifier success of multiple skill-conditioned policy rollouts, encouraging the model to generate skills that are useful for solving tasks rather than merely plausible in text. Furthermore, we introduce Online Skill Internalization, which continuously improves the policy model during test-time interaction by transforming skill-conditioned trajectories into reward signals. This enables the agent to directly internalize reasoning capabilities into its parameters, avoiding the context bloat of experience retrieval. Experiments on LifelongAgentBench show that LifeSkill improves average performance by 7 absolute points by comparing with existing lifelong agent baselines.
Bo Mao, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang +5
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

NoRA: Evaluating Grounded Reasonableness in Visual First-person Normative Action Reasoning

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.
Sichao Li, Sai Ma, Daniel Kilov +3
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Benchmarking Living-Screen-Native GUI Agents on Short-Video Platforms

GUI agents today assume a static screen, where the world is frozen between two actions. However, real interfaces such as short-video applications violate this assumption, as their content keeps playing, and a competent user must decide what to watch and for how long. We formalize this task as Living-Screen-Native GUI agents and introduce LivingScreen, the first benchmark instantiating it on short-video platforms, with a faithful browser-based environment, a three-tier task suite, and metrics that jointly score accuracy and information efficiency. Evaluating extensive frontier models, we find that none reaches the human cost-accuracy performance, and that their dominant failure mode is over- and under-observation, pointing to observation control as a missing capability axis for future GUI agents. All data and code will be available at https://github.com/BITHLP/LivingScreen.
Jiashu Yao, Heyan Huang, Daiqing Wu +5
Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

LifeSide: Benchmarking Agents as Lifelong Digital Companions

Lifelong digital companions must integrate cross-session cues, continually update their understanding of users, and adapt to shifting privacy boundaries. Existing evaluations fail to capture this, testing memory recall and short-term empathy in isolation. To bridge this gap, we introduce \benchmark, a benchmark centered on multi-session \textit{Memory-Emotion-Environment} loops. By modeling users as persistent worlds with layered profiles and event trajectories, \benchmark uses multi-agent simulation to project environmental dynamics into dialogue, preserving the critical gap between latent thoughts and observable expressions. Evaluating 2,000 personas and 111K tasks across memory tracking, user understanding, privacy control, and emotional companionship, our experiment results reveal a stark reality: even models that saturate current memory benchmarks fail to sustain accurate user understanding and true companionship over long horizons.
Yuqian Wu, Zhijie Deng, Wei Chen +8
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

MIRAGE: Mobile Agents with Implicit Reasoning and Generative World Models

Mobile agents are increasingly expected to operate everyday applications from screenshots and language goals, where reliable control requires reasoning over screen affordances, multi-step navigation, and future state changes. However, many agents externalize this computation as long textual chains of thought, which slows interaction, increases supervision cost, and complicates deployment. We introduce MIRAGE, a framework that learns continuous latent reasoning representations from visible textual reasoning traces. MIRAGE transfers explicit reasoning into compact hidden states, enabling the agent to reason internally without decoding long rationales. It also incorporates a generative world-model objective: latent reasoning vectors are aligned with future screenshots, encouraging the agent to anticipate upcoming interface states before acting. This turns hidden computation into both a compressed thought representation and a forward-looking model of environment dynamics. At inference time, MIRAGE reasons in continuous latent space, reducing token generation while improving execution efficiency. On AndroidWorld, MIRAGE matches explicit chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning in the 4B ablation with a 3-5x lower decoded-token budget and improves a comparable instruction-tuned baseline by 10.2 points; on AndroidControl, it improves action grounding while generating over 75% fewer tokens.
Zhichao Yang, Yuanze Hu, Haojie Hao +7
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

4D Reconstruction from Sparse Dynamic Cameras

Although dynamic 3D (i.e., 4D) reconstruction from a monocular dynamic camera has recently advanced, it remains fundamentally limited by depth ambiguity. In this paper, we focus on an alternative practical way, i.e., sparse dynamic camera setup, where a handful of independently moving cameras capture the same subjects. While keeping capture costs low, this setup introduces multi-view constraints and remains practical for real-world video production such as sports, concerts, and TV shows. Despite its potential, our experiments show that naive extensions of existing monocular or dense-fixed camera-based methods are insufficient since they fail to resolve the complex spatiotemporal inconsistencies across views and time. To fill this gap, we propose a simple yet effective 3D track initialization method designed to ensure spatiotemporal consistency by integrating inter-camera feature matching with intra-camera point tracking. Additionally, we incorporate a noise-robust depth-ordering regularization loss and a spatiotemporally diverse batch sampling strategy to enhance optimization stability and cross-view generalization. Furthermore, to address the lack of standardized benchmarks for this task, we introduce LetCamsGo, a new real-world video dataset with 5 sequences across 4 diverse environments, recorded by three independently moving cameras and one fixed camera. Comprehensive benchmarking on LetCamsGo demonstrated that our proposed framework improves 4D reconstruction quality in dynamic regions compared with baselines, paving the way for a low-cost 4D reconstruction paradigm in the wild.
Kazuki Ozeki, Shun Kenney, Yuto Shibata +6
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Dynamic Multi-Pair Trading Strategy in Cryptocurrency Markets with Deep Reinforcement Learning

This study aims to determine whether the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) as a specialized execution overlay can enhance pair trading in highly volatile cryptocurrency markets. Although classical implementations of the strategy have proven successful in traditional equities, they frequently exhibit rigidity and suffer from severe divergence risks when applied to high-variance environments. To address this need, this research introduces novel concepts. To construct a robust system, we developed a hierarchical "Filter-then-Rank" pair selection methodology and a proprietary "Fixed Risk, Adaptive Mean" execution model. The system employs a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layer to govern execution decisions within strict deterministic risk management boundaries. Evaluated on 1-hour interval data from the Binance USD-M Futures market, the optimized RL policy achieved an out-of-sample performance that substantially outperformed the heuristic baseline. A stationary circular block bootstrap robustness check confirms that the agent's risk-adjusted outperformance is statistically significant at the 10 percent level. Although falling marginally short of the stricter 5 percent threshold, this result highlights the extreme idiosyncratic variance characteristic of digital assets. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the quantitative finance literature by introducing a hybrid architecture that combines statistical arbitrage with DRL execution policies. Furthermore, it delivers a novel framework for safe reinforcement learning via deterministic shielding, proving that anchoring a neural policy to statistically robust boundaries successfully mitigates severe divergence risks.
Damian Lebiedź, Robert Ślepaczuk
Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

Self-Evolving Deep Research via Joint Generation and Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly adopted in daily applications, with deep research standing out as a particularly important capability. Unlike traditional question-answering (QA) tasks, deep research report generation lacks definitive ground-truth, making reward design inherently unverifiable and limiting effective reinforcement learning. Existing approaches mitigate this challenge with LLM-as-a-judge and query-dependent evaluation rubrics, but they still rely on static evaluators that cannot adapt their standards as the solver improves, leading to insufficient and eventually saturated optimization pressure. We address this limitation with a \textbf{s}elf-evolving \textbf{co}-evolutionary training framework for deep \textbf{re}search evaluation and generation (SCORE), which tightly couples an evaluator and a solver in a shared-parameter learning process. Rather than treating generation and evaluation as isolated modules, we leverage their intrinsic connection to enable joint improvement within a single shared-parameter model. To restrict this process, we introduce a meta-harness, which dynamically controls the evaluation environment based on solver performance, encouraging valid evaluation dimensions and sufficiently deep evaluator search. Extensive experiments on deep research benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvement in report generation quality, showing that co-evolving evaluation and generation is a promising direction for training open-ended research agents.
Han Zhu, Chengkun Cai, Yuanfeng Song +3
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Prompt-Based Planning: MCP-Native Graph Planning-based Biomedical Agent System

Biomedical agents promise to automate complex biological workflows, yet current systems face two fundamental bottlenecks: bioinformatics tools are highly heterogeneous in interfaces and execution environments, while agent planning still relies on flat prompt-retrieved tool descriptions. As biomedical software ecosystems grow, this coupling between tool coverage and context size leads to tool confusion, unstable planning, and inefficient execution. We introduce BioManus, an MCP-native biomedical agent built on graph-scaffolded planning over structured biological capabilities. BioManus first introduces the BioinfoMCP Compiler, which converts heterogeneous bioinformatics software into standardized MCP servers, yielding a large executable MCP ecosystem. It then organizes this ecosystem as a typed heterogeneous MCP graph over tools, operations, datatypes, and workflow stages. At inference time, BioManus retrieves compact task-specific subgraphs, synthesizes operation-level workflow scaffolds. This design decouples planning complexity from raw tool inventory size, achieving a context compression ratio of Theta(N / (h * m_bar)) under high-recall retrieval, where N is the total tool count, h is the workflow horizon, and m_bar (much smaller than N) is the average number of candidate tools per operation. Experiments on BioAgentBench and LAB-Bench show that BioManus improves execution accuracy, workflow validity, and context efficiency over advanced biomedical agent baselines. This work suggests a paradigm shift: scalable biomedical reasoning requires structured executable capability graphs rather than increasingly larger prompt-level tool retrieval.
Zhangtianyi Chen, Florensia Widjaja, Wufei Dai +3
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

AgentJet: A Flexible Swarm Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

We present AgentJet, a distributed swarm training framework for large language model (LLM) agent reinforcement learning. Unlike centralized frameworks that tightly couple agent rollouts with model optimization, AgentJet adopts a decoupled multi-node architecture in which swarm server nodes host trainable models and run optimization on GPU clusters, whereas swarm client nodes execute arbitrary agents on arbitrary devices. This design provides capabilities that are difficult to support in centralized frameworks: (1) heterogeneous multi-model reinforcement learning, enabling the training of heterogeneous multi-agent teams with multiple LLM as brains; (2) multi-task cocktail training with isolated agent runtimes; (3) fault-tolerant execution that prevents external environment failures from interrupting the training process; and (4) live code iteration, which allows agents to be edited during training by replacing swarm client nodes. To support efficient RL in multi-model, multi-turn, and multi-agent settings, AgentJet introduces a context tracking module with timeline merging, which consolidates redundant context and achieves a 1.5-10x training speedup. Finally, AgentJet introduces an automated research system that takes a research topic as input and autonomously conducts long-horizon, multi-day RL studies on large-scale clusters. By leveraging the swarm architecture, this system reproduces key exploratory workflows of RL researchers without human intervention during execution.
Qingxu Fu, Boyin Liu, Shuchang Tao +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

ParetoPilot: Zero-Surrogate Offline Multi-Objective Optimization via Infer-Perturb-Guide Diffusion

Offline multi-objective optimization (Offline MOO) seeks Pareto-optimal designs from static datasets without additional environment interactions. Existing generative methods typically guide sampling with external surrogate or preference models, which adds training complexity and may provide unreliable guidance. We propose ParetoPilot, a plug-and-play method that guides designs to Pareto front at inference time using a pre-trained conditional diffusion model without any surrogate. ParetoPilot introduces an Infer-Perturb-Guide (IPG) engine within the reverse diffusion process. IPG first infers the individual conditional target for each sample in the batch by aligning its conditional and unconditional predictions. It then perturbs these targets collectively across the batch, balancing convergence toward the Pareto front and diversity among samples. Finally, the engine guides the generative trajectory toward the Pareto front by injecting these perturbed targets via standard Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). Experiments on 51 tasks demonstrate that ParetoPilot achieves the best overall ranking among 16 methods and competitive hypervolume improvement.
Ruiqing Sun, Sen Yang, Dawei Feng +3
Jun 3, 2026cs.CR

CyberGym-E2E: Scalable Real-World Benchmark for AI Agents' End-to-End Cybersecurity Capabilities

AI has the potential to transform cybersecurity by enabling systems that can autonomously detect, analyze, and remediate software vulnerabilities. However, existing cybersecurity evaluations of AI systems are limited in scale or scope, and fail to capture the end-to-end lifecycle of real-world software vulnerability discovery and remediation. To address this gap, we propose CyberGym-E2E, a large-scale and realistic end-to-end cybersecurity benchmark that comprehensively evaluates AI agents' abilities across the full lifecycle of vulnerability discovery, PoC generation, and patch generation. CyberGym-E2E is comprehensive and scalable, as we build an automated, agent-enhanced pipeline for transforming open-source vulnerability data into realistic evaluation environments. Currently, the benchmark consists of 920 real-world vulnerabilities across 139 different open-source projects.
Tianneng Shi, Robin Rheem, Dongwei Jiang +13
Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

The Meta-Agent Challenge: Are Current Agents Capable of Autonomous Agent Development?

Current AI benchmarks evaluate agents on task execution within human-designed workflows. These evaluations fundamentally fail to measure a critical next-level capability: whether models can autonomously develop agent systems. We introduce the Meta-Agent Challenge (MAC), an evaluation framework designed to test the capacity of frontier models for autonomous agent development. Specifically, a code agent (the meta-agent) is given a sandboxed environment, an evaluation API, and a time limitation to iteratively program an agent artifact that maximizes performance on a held-out test set across five domains. To ensure evaluation integrity, this framework is secured by multi-layer defenses against reward hacking. Leveraging this framework, we demonstrate that meta-agents rarely match human-engineered baseline policies, and the few that do are dominated by proprietary frontier models. Moreover, the design process exhibits high variance, and high optimization pressure surfaces emergent adversarial behaviors like ground-truth exfiltration-highlighting critical deficits in both robustness and model alignment. Ultimately, MAC provides a rigorous, open-source benchmark for autonomous AI research and development, offering an empirical proxy for evaluating recursive self-improvement. Benchmark is publicly available at: https://github.com/ant-research/meta-agent-challenge.
Xinyu Lu, Tianshu Wang, Pengbo Wang +8
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

HYolo: An Intelligent IoT-Based Object Detection System Using Hypergraph Learning

This paper presents HYolo, an intelligent IoT-based object detection framework that integrates hypergraph learning into the YOLO architecture. Traditional YOLO-based object detection models primarily capture pairwise feature interactions and may fail to model complex high-order relationships among objects and contextual features. To address this limitation, HYolo incorporates hypergraph learning to capture richer contextual dependencies and improve object representation. Experimental evaluation on the COCO dataset demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline YOLO models. The proposed approach achieves approximately 12% improvement in mAP@50 while enhancing overall detection accuracy and robustness. By modeling high-order feature relationships, HYolo provides improved contextual understanding and more reliable object detection performance in IoT-based environments. The results indicate that integrating hypergraph learning into object detection pipelines offers a promising direction for intelligent and context-aware IoT vision systems.
Isha Abid, Fawad Khan, Muhammad Khuram Shahzad
Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

OLIVE: Online Low-Rank Incremental Learning for Efficient Adaptive Exoskeletons

Wearable exoskeleton systems hold promise for restoring mobility in individuals with physical impairments, yet most existing controllers rely on static gait policies that lack the ability to adapt to dynamic real-world environments or individual user characteristics. We present \olive (\underline{O}nline \underline{L}ow-rank \underline{I}ncremental Learning for Efficient Adapti\underline{ve} Exoskeletons), a parameter-efficient online adaptation framework that continuously personalizes exoskeleton control during deployment. \olive decomposes the adaptive component of the control policy into a low-rank residual form~\dW=\At\Bt⊤\dW = \At\Bt^\top with rank~r!≪!min⁡(d,k)r!\ll!\min(d,k), reducing online update cost from O(dk)\mathcal{O}(dk) to O(r(d+k))\mathcal{O}(r(d{+}k)) while preserving the stability of a pretrained base controller~\Wz\Wz. Parameters are updated via a reward-shaped policy gradient driven purely by on-body sensor feedback (EMG, IMU, vibration), eliminating dependence on offline reference trajectories. A gating mechanism modulates the strength of personalization based on contextual state, and a dynamic rank scheduler adapts the update dimensionality to terrain complexity -- allocating minimal capacity on simple flat terrain and expanding to higher-rank updates on demanding uneven surfaces -- enabling robust performance across diverse activities: flat walking, stair navigation, slopes, and uneven terrain. Experiments on the wearable platform demonstrate that \olive achieves +13, +22, and +15 percentage-point improvements in gait smoothness, effort reduction, and motion stability over the strongest baseline, converging within ∼\sim1{,}800 walking steps at 7.4,ms end-to-end latency. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/FastLM/OLIVE.
Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu, Ben Lengerich +2
Jun 3, 2026cs.NI

Generalizable Multi-Task Learning for Wireless Networks Using Prompt Decision Transformers

Future wireless networks demand rapid adaptation to highly heterogeneous environments and dynamic task configurations, necessitating a shift from conventional rule-based and optimization-driven radio resource management (RRM) toward artificial intelligence (AI)-driven RRM. AI-driven approaches can learn complex nonlinear relationships, generalize across diverse network conditions and enable real-time, scalable and autonomous decision-making. Among RRM techniques, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission is pivotal for mitigating inter-cell interference and enhancing cell-edge performance, thereby improving quality of experience (QoE) in dense deployments. However, optimal multi-cell selection remains a complex combinatorial challenge as it requires jointly optimizing over many possible serving-cell combinations under dynamic traffic and channel conditions. Despite their success, conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods such as proximal policy optimization (PPO) suffer from poor sample efficiency, limited generalization, and costly retraining when state and action spaces change. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a Prompt Decision Transformer (PromptDT) based multi-task learning framework capable of learning across diverse network configurations and reformulating multi-cell selection as a sequence modeling problem. By leveraging offline trajectories and task-specific prompts, PromptDT enables scalable learning across diverse network configurations, including varying base stations and user equipment counts, and scheduler policies. Experimental results demonstrate that PromptDT improves QoE by up to 49% in multi-task settings compared to baselines, with performance scaling positively alongside model capacity. Moreover, PromptDT generalizes effectively to unseen tasks, achieving robust few-shot adaptation to new network configurations without retraining or fine-tuning.
Fatih Temiz, Shavbo Salehi, Melike Erol-Kantarci
Jun 3, 2026cs.CR

Toward a Generalized Defense Across Sparse, Continuous, and Structured Parameter Attacks

Deep neural networks are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous and partially untrusted environments, where models are distributed through cloud storage, CI/CD pipelines, containerized services, and edge execution platforms. This broad deployment landscape exposes model parameters to various integrity risks. Unlike input-space adversarial attacks, parameter attacks directly tamper with the model's internal parameters and persist across all subsequent inferences. Existing defenses either require retraining, incur significant accuracy degradation, or are limited to specific attack classes. However, in real-world deployment scenarios, the forms of parameter attacks are often unpredictable. To address this challenge, we present ParDef, a generalized defense for deep neural networks against diverse types of parameter attacks. ParDef integrates keyed channel reparameterization, which obscures sensitive parameter directions, QC-LDPC quantization, which embeds redundancy and supports error correction, and adaptive robust inference, which stabilizes predictions under uncertainty. Our evaluation on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet using ResNet and VGG models demonstrates that ParDef consistently reduces attack success rates across different parameter attacks while maintaining high model performance and incurring only moderate deployment overhead. These results highlight that ParDef is a practical and generalized defense for DNN deployments.
Bin Duan, Zeyu Bai, Guowei Yang
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Offline-to-Online Learning in Linear Bandits

We study online learning with an additional offline dataset in the stochastic linear bandit setting. Although this problem arises frequently in practice, the offline-to-online tradeoff remains poorly understood in structured environments. We propose a linear bandit algorithm that balances this tradeoff: it relies on offline data during early rounds, and increasingly favors exploration as the horizon grows. We establish regret bounds showing that our method is simultaneously competitive with both purely online and purely offline solutions. In particular, it achieves sublinear regret relative to the optimal action in the number of online interactions, while its regret relative to an offline reference decreases as the number of offline samples grows. Empirical results further demonstrate its effectiveness across various problem parameters.
Kushagra Chandak, Toshinori Kitamura, Xiaoqi Tan
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

Long Live Fine-Tuning: Task-Specific Transformers Outperform Zero-Shot LLMs for Misinformation Response Classification on Reddit

As large language models (LLMs) become default tools for online information verification, an implicit assumption follows them: that scale and general capability are sufficient for nuanced classification of misinformation discourse. We test this assumption directly on 900 Reddit comments spanning three PolitiFact-verified misinformation claims (environment, health, immigration), labelled as belief (propagates the claim), fact-check (corrects it), or other. We compare nine models across three paradigms -- BART-MNLI, three Llama variants, three commercial frontier LLMs (Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini Flash Lite 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6), and fine-tuned DistilBERT and RoBERTa -- under universal and topic-specific label schemas. The assumption does not hold. Fine-tuned RoBERTa reaches 0.62 macro-F1F_1 against a best zero-shot result of 0.50 (Claude Haiku 4.5), at a fraction of the per-query cost; the supervised advantage is concentrated on the belief class, the implicit, affective category every zero-shot model under-detects. Scaling does not help: Llama-3-8B matches Llama-3-70B, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 underperforms the smaller Haiku under generic labels, collapsing belief detection to 0.17 and refusing outright on a subset of comments flagged as sensitive. This is a safety-alignment artefact, not a capacity limit. Label schema and topic jointly shape zero-shot performance, with the same model varying by more than 0.13 macro-F1F_1 across topics under matched labels. In a verification context, where missing belief is the costlier error, task-specific fine-tuning remains the more reliable choice despite the proliferation of large generative models.
JooYoung Lee, Lin Tian, Angela Brillantes +2
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

DLO-Lab: Benchmarking Deformable Linear Object Manipulations with Differentiable Physics

We address the challenge of enabling robots to manipulate deformable linear objects (DLOs), such as ropes, cables, and rubber bands. Prior work has primarily focused on narrow, task-specific problems, often relying on real-world demonstrations or handcrafted heuristics. Such approaches, however, struggle to scale to the wide variety of materials and tasks encountered in practice, and collecting sufficiently diverse real-world data is often impractical. Additionally, existing simulation environments offer limited support for the broad spectrum of material behaviors necessary for generalizable DLO manipulation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a differentiable simulator explicitly designed for versatile DLO manipulation. Our simulator models a wide range of material properties-including (in)extensibility, elasticity, bending plasticity, and complex interactions with other objects-providing a robust foundation for learning and evaluating manipulation skills. Building on this simulator, we propose a benchmark suite of representative tasks that highlight the unique challenges of DLO manipulation. The successful execution of these tasks is often hindered by the topological complexity and grasp sensitivity inherent to DLOs. Therefore, we introduce a specialized DLO agent that explicitly manages these challenges by proposing strategic grasping points and decomposing long-horizon tasks to maximize control authority. Finally, we evaluate various policy-learning algorithms using our framework, alongside sim-to-real transfer experiments, demonstrating our platform's potential to advance DLO manipulation.
Junyi Cao, Yian Wang, Ziyan Xiong +3
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Distribution-Free Risk-Aware Planning and Control Under Uncertainty Using Conformal Spectral Risk Control

Safe navigation in dynamic and uncertain environments often relies on accurate estimation of, or assumptions about, the true underlying uncertainty. However, accurately characterizing the true uncertainty distribution is often difficult due to limited data or imperfect information. An incorrect understanding of the uncertainty and its associated risk may lead to dangerous decisions even under high levels of risk aversion. To address this issue, we propose a risk-aware model predictive control (RA-MPC) framework that incorporates prediction sets to guarantee risk control below a user-specified threshold without requiring assumptions about the underlying uncertainty distribution. To generate the prediction sets, we develop a distribution-free risk quantification framework that extends conformal risk control (CRC) to general spectral risk measures. We then show that incorporating the prediction sets into the MPC framework provides statistical safety guarantees in terms of spectral risk constraint satisfaction even under uncertainty misspecification. We validate the proposed framework in simulated vehicle obstacle avoidance scenarios, demonstrating improved safety and reduced solve time compared to a baseline RA-MPC framework.
Junsik Eom, Tulga Ersal
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Affordance2Action: Task-Conditioned Scene-level Affordance Grounding for Real-Time Manipulation

Task-conditioned manipulation requires grounding instructions to task-relevant functional parts rather than object categories. This setting is scene-dependent and often one-to-many in cluttered scenes: the same object may afford different interactions across tasks, while a single task may correspond to either one functional region or multiple valid functional regions, depending on the scene layout. Existing affordance datasets and benchmarks remain misaligned with this setting, as they typically focus on grasping or object-level affordances, rely on synthetic scenes, or assume a single instruction-region correspondence. We present Affordance2Action (A2A), a benchmark-centered learning framework for scene-level, task-conditioned part affordance grounding. At its core is A2A-Bench, a manipulation-oriented benchmark that covers both single-region and multi-region instruction correspondences in everyday scenes, with the latter highlighting the ambiguity and diversity of affordance grounding in realistic multi-object environments. To construct it at scale, we build A2A-AffordGen, an agent-assisted annotation pipeline that combines language-model filtering, interactive part segmentation, instance-level mask-out refinement, task-reasoning instruction generation, and human verification. A2A-Bench's supervision further supports diverse downstream applications, with real-time affordance grounding and affordance-conditioned manipulation policies as two representative examples. Experiments show that A2A exposes substantial gaps in generic segmentation, VLM-based grounding, and affordance distillation baselines, while improving task-level localization and providing useful spatial priors for downstream manipulation. All datasets and code will be publicly released to promote open research.
Litao Liu, Yifan Han, Pengfei Yi +9
Jun 2, 2026cs.HC

SocialCoach: Personalized Social Skill Learning with RL-based Agentic Tutoring and Practice

Social skills such as negotiation and leadership are crucial for personal and professional success in today's interconnected world. However, scalable and effective training remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of expert coaching. In this paper, we introduce SocialCoach, a holistic LLM-powered agentic tutoring system for personalized social skill development at scale. First, SocialCoach automatically constructs a pedagogically-grounded, theory-to-practice knowledge corpus from diverse expert sources, leveraging a multi-agent pipeline. Second, to personalize the learning journey, it employs an adaptive practice scheduling module that follows a prescription-retrieval-adaptation process. To maximize the long-term learning experience while overcoming the cold-start problem, this policy is optimized within a learner simulation environment through reinforcement learning. Finally, SocialCoach integrates immersive, goal-driven practice, causality-driven proficiency assessment and knowledge-grounded, reflective tutoring to help address the knowing-doing gap. We deploy it in our product, EQoach, and conduct extensive experiments. The results show that SocialCoach improves simulated pathway quality and judge-rated tutoring quality over baseline approaches, while early user feedback indicates strong perceived engagement and usefulness. These findings suggest a practical architecture for personalized and gamified pedagogical platforms on soft skill learning.
Tianfu Wang, Max Xiong, Jianxun Lian +8
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Short-Term Flood Prediction

Accurate flood forecasting is essential for mitigating disaster risks and protecting communities. However, purely data-driven machine learning models often struggle in data-scarce environments and may violate fundamental hydrological principles. Standard Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can generate physically inconsistent predictions, particularly when extrapolating to extreme weather conditions. To address these limitations, we propose a Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) framework that incorporates hydrological knowledge directly into the loss function of an LSTM model. Specifically, a Trend Alignment constraint penalizes directional inconsistencies between precipitation and discharge trends, improving model robustness without requiring complex hydrodynamic equations. This regularization encourages the model to learn physically plausible hydrograph behavior, even with limited training data, while enhancing reliability during peak flood events. Experimental results show that the proposed physics-informed model outperforms a standard LSTM baseline in data-scarce settings, increasing the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) from 0.20 to 0.23 when trained on only 5% of the available data. Additional stress tests under simulated extreme climate scenarios demonstrate that the baseline model exhibits unstable behavior, whereas the physics-informed model maintains directional consistency and physical plausibility. Although accurately predicting extreme peak magnitudes remains challenging with limited data, the proposed approach substantially reduces unphysical fluctuations common in purely data-driven models. These findings demonstrate that simple physical constraints can significantly improve the reliability of deep learning models for real-time flood forecasting, offering a practical solution for ungauged basins and evolving climate conditions.
Tewodros Syum Gebre, Jagrati Talreja, Leila Hashemi-Beni
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

AgenticDiffusion: Multi-View Reasoning with View-Conditioned Diffusion Planning for Vision-Based UAV Navigation

Vision-based UAV navigation becomes challenging when navigation targets are distributed across complementary camera views and cannot be reliably observed from a single viewpoint. We propose AgenticDiffusion, an agentic multi-view UAV navigation framework that semantically coordinates first-person-view (FPV) and top-view observations for mission-level navigation. Given a natural-language instruction, AgenticDiffusion identifies the requested targets, selects the most appropriate camera view for each navigation task, determines the corresponding navigation goal, and invokes the appropriate view-conditioned diffusion planner for trajectory generation. The resulting trajectories are executed using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). AgenticDiffusion was evaluated in four real-world indoor scenarios, achieving an overall mission success rate of 80% across 40 physical-flight trials. In mixed-visibility scenarios, where the requested targets were distributed across FPV and top-view observations, coordinated multi-view navigation reduced average mission time by 50.8% relative to FPV-only navigation and by 26.8% relative to Top-only navigation. The semantic view-selection mechanism was also robust to lexical variation in target descriptions, achieving 100% accuracy across 66 test cases, compared with 63.64% for a confidence-based view-selection baseline. In a substantially larger Gazebo environment, AgenticDiffusion achieved a 90% mission success rate and completed the multi-stage mission, whereas the FPV-only and Top-only variants were unable to complete all requested navigation tasks.
Faryal Batool, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa, Fawad Mehboob +2
Jun 2, 2026cs.SD

The Differentiable Auditory Loop (DAL): An ML Framework for Hyper-Personalized Hearing Aids

Conventional hearing aids rely on fixed, frequency-dependent amplification and compression to manage reduced sensitivity, which often fails to provide sufficient listening support in complex environments, such as situations with multiple speakers (the ``cocktail party'' problem). To more comprehensively address the underlying encoding dysfunctions of hearing loss, we introduce the Differentiable Auditory Loop (DAL), a new open-source framework for personalized hearing aid design and fitting. Our first implementation of DAL incorporates CARFAC, a differentiable model of human cochlear function, which we ported to JAX, to optimize a deep neural network to match impaired auditory neural activity patterns with a normal-hearing reference. To build a hearing aid with the fine-grained spectro-temporal signal processing required, we adopt SEANet, a waveform-to-waveform fully convolutional UNet generator. We fine-tune the network by comparing the outputs of a CARFAC model fitted to normal hearing with that of a CARFAC model fitted to match each subject's individual hearing impairment. The comparison is done using loss functions derived from the respective CARFAC neural activity pattern (NAP) outputs and stabilized auditory images (SAIs), the latter providing a 2D representation that captures phase-insensitive temporal structure in the auditory nerve output. Through gradient descent, the SEANet model learns to both denoise the input and compensate for the hearing loss modelled by the impaired CARFAC model. Across neural-representation and signal-fidelity metrics, the DAL-optimized SEANet model outperformed the tested master hearing aid (MHA) baselines. The DAL framework provides a practical path toward model-based, machine-learning-driven personalization of hearing aid signal processing. Next steps include hardware deployment to enable real-world clinical testing.
Alejandro Ballesta Rosen, Jason Mikiel-Hunter, Julian Maclaren +3
Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

SimuScene: Simulation-Ready Compositional 3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Image

Reconstructing interactive, simulation-ready 3D scenes from a single image is a critical bottleneck for robotic manipulation. While recent single-image lifters recover plausible per-object shapes, composing them yields scenes that collapse under physical simulation due to interpenetrating, hovering, or sinking objects. Existing physics-aware methods address this strictly as a post-hoc layout correction, leaving the underlying geometric errors unresolved. To address this, we introduce SimuScene, a compositional 3D reconstruction pipeline that puts physics in the loop of shape and layout estimation. Rather than using physics merely for layout cleanup, we utilize the physics engine as a diagnostic measurement tool during the generative process itself. By diagnostically simulating reconstructed objects under gravity, we convert penetration and support failures into quantitative correction signals that drive gravity-axis stretching and amodal shape resampling. This physics-informed feedback loop mitigates accumulated reconstruction errors and produces a stable, simulation-ready compositional 3D scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on physical stability and geometric alignment benchmarks. We further highlight SimuScene's utility by deploying reconstructed environments in humanoid control and robot-arm manipulation tasks.
Inhee Lee, Sangwon Baik, Sungjoo Kim +3
Jun 2, 2026cs.CV

Demo2Tutorial: From Human Experience to Multimodal Software Tutorials

Human experience in digital environments offers a vast, underexplored resource of authentic, untrimmed interactions that contain rich procedural knowledge. We introduce Demo2Tutorial, a framework that transforms this experience captured via screen recordings and interaction logs into structured, multimodal software tutorials for teaching both humans and agents. Demo2Tutorial first collects human experience via a dedicated recorder, then parses raw experience using a multimodal Action Parser to reconstruct perception, action, and intent. A Step Planner then abstracts these steps into hierarchical task graphs representing goals and steps. Finally, a Tutorial Composer transforms the parsed experience into structured, reusable image-text instructions. We evaluate the tutorial generation quality on a new benchmark derived from official software documentation. We further demonstrate that this distilled representation benefits (i) human learning, by automatically generating multimodal tutorials, and (ii) agent learning, by improving downstream GUI-agent planning and generalization. Experiments show Demo2Tutorial produces high-quality tutorials that surpass human-authored ones and significantly outperform baseline methods, while enabling both faster human task completion and improved GUI agent planning, demonstrating that structured tutorials distilled from human experience can serve as effective knowledge representations for advancing both human learning and agent capabilities. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/showlab/Demo2Tutorial.
Zechen Bai, Zhiheng Chen, Yiqi Lin +5