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This study proposes an anomaly-detection framework for monitoring exposure-length variations in submarine free-span cables using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), which is one of the distributed fiber-optic sensing technologies. To address environmental variability and limited training data in offshore environments, a regression-based feature extraction method was introduced to derive low-dimensional latent representations that retain exposure length-dependent vibration characteristics while suppressing environmental influences. The extracted features were used for one-class Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based anomaly detection. The proposed framework was evaluated through wave-tank experiments with exposure lengths ranging from 2 to 10 m. Experimental results showed that anomaly scores decreased approximately monotonically with increasing exposure-length change, exhibiting a strong correlation ($r = -0.83$). The binary classification achieved an F1 score of 0.82 despite training with only small-sample datasets. These findings demonstrate that exposure-length variations can be reliably detected under severe data limitations, supporting the potential of DAS-based cable condition monitoring.

Autonomous AI agents extend large language models into full runtime systems that load skills, ingest external content, maintain memory, plan multi-step actions, and invoke privileged tools. In such systems, security failures rarely remain confined to a single interface; instead, they can propagate across initialization, input processing, memory, decision-making, and execution, often becoming apparent only when harmful effects materialize in the environment. This paper presents AgentWard, a lifecycle-oriented, defense-in-depth architecture that systematically organizes protection across these five stages. AgentWard integrates stage-specific, heterogeneous controls with cross-layer coordination, enabling threats to be intercepted along their propagation paths while safeguarding critical assets. We detail the design rationale and architecture of five coordinated protection layers, and implement a plugin-native prototype on OpenClaw to demonstrate practical feasibility. This perspective provides a concrete blueprint for structuring runtime security controls, managing trust propagation, and enforcing execution containment in autonomous AI agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/FIND-Lab/AgentWard .

Reverse parking maneuvering of a vehicle with trailer system is a difficult task to complete for human drivers due to the multi-body nature of the system and the unintuitive controls required to orientate the trailer properly. The problem is complicated with the presence of other vehicles that the trailer and its connected vehicle must avoid during the reverse parking maneuver. While path planning methods in reverse motion for vehicles with trailers exist, there is a lack of results that also offer collision avoidance as part of the algorithm. This paper hence proposes a modified Hybrid A*-based algorithm that can accommodate the vehicle-trailer system as well as collision avoidance considerations with the other vehicles and obstacles in the parking environment. One of the novelties of this proposed approach is its adaptability to the vehicle with trailer system, where limits of usable steering input that prevent the occurrence of jackknife incidents vary with respect to system configuration. The other contribution is the addition of the collision avoidance functionality which the standard Hybrid A* algorithm lacks. The method is developed and presented first, followed by simulation case studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.

Recent work in hierarchical reinforcement learning has shown success in scaling to billions of timesteps when learning over a set of predefined option reward functions. We show that, instead of using a single reward function per option, the reward functions can be effectively used to induce a space of behaviours, by letting the controller specify linear combinations over reward functions, allowing a more expressive set of policies to be represented. We call this method Hierarchical Behaviour Spaces (HBS). We evaluate HBS on the NetHack Learning Environment, demonstrating strong performance. We conduct a series of experiments and determine that, perhaps going against conventional wisdom, the benefits of hierarchy in our method come from increased exploration rather than long term reasoning.

We consider online learning problems under a partial observability model capturing situations where the information conveyed to the learner is between full information and bandit feedback. In the simplest variant, we assume that in addition to its own loss, the learner also gets to observe losses of some other actions. The revealed losses depend on the learner's action and a directed observation system chosen by the environment. For this setting, we propose the first algorithm that enjoys near-optimal regret guarantees without having to know the observation system before selecting its actions. Along similar lines, we also define a new partial information setting that models online combinatorial optimization problems where the feedback received by the learner is between semi-bandit and full feedback. As the predictions of our first algorithm cannot be always computed efficiently in this setting, we propose another algorithm with similar properties and with the benefit of always being computationally efficient, at the price of a slightly more complicated tuning mechanism. Both algorithms rely on a novel exploration strategy called implicit exploration, which is shown to be more efficient both computationally and information-theoretically than previously studied exploration strategies for the problem.

Coordinating large populations of grid-edge devices requires learning methods that remain fully decentralised in deployment while still respecting three-phase AC distribution-network physics. This paper proposes gradient-based multi-agent proximal learning (GradMAP) to address this challenge. GradMAP trains independent neural-network policies for each agent without any parameter sharing, and each agent uses only its own local observation for online decision-making without communication. During offline training, GradMAP embeds a differentiable three-phase AC power-flow model in a primal-dual learning loop and uses implicit differentiation to propagate exact network-constraint violations to update the policy parameters. To speed up training, GradMAP reuses expensive environment gradients through a proximal surrogate within a trust region defined in the more direct policy-output (action) space, instead of the probability distribution space used in other works, such as PPO. In case studies with 1,000 agents managing batteries, heat pumps, and controllable generators on the IEEE 123-bus feeder, GradMAP learns decentralised policies that minimise three-phase AC load-flow constraint violations within 15 minutes of training on a single workstation-class NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell 48GB GPU. This is a 3--5x training speed-up over gradient-based self-supervised learning benchmarks and substantially better training efficiency than multi-agent reinforcement-learning benchmarks. In out-of-sample tests, GradMAP also delivers among the lowest operating cost and constraint violations.

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach} addresses this by training a single policy network conditioned on preference-weighted rewards. In this paper, we explore a novel algorithmic perspective: leveraging reward-free reinforcement learning (RFRL) for MORL. While RFRL has historically been studied independently of MORL, it learns optimal policies for any possible reward function, making it a natural fit for MORL's challenge of handling unknown user preferences. We propose using the RFRL's training objective as an auxiliary task to enhance MORL, enabling more effective knowledge sharing beyond the multi-objective reward function given at training time. To this end, we adapt a state-of-the-art RFRL algorithm to the MORL setting and introduce a preference-guided exploration strategy that focuses learning on relevant parts of the environment. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MORL methods across diverse MO-Gymnasium tasks, achieving superior performance and data efficiency. This work provides the first systematic adaptation of RFRL to MORL, demonstrating its potential as a scalable and empirically effective solution to multi-objective policy learning.

This review proposes an integrative framework grounded on interoception and embodied AI-termed the interoceptive machine framework-that translates biologically inspired principles of internal-state regulation into computational architectures for adaptive autonomy. Interoception, conceived as the monitoring, integration, and regulation of internal signals, has proven relevant for understanding adaptive behavior in biological systems. The proposed framework organizes interoceptive contributions into three functional principles: homeostatic, allostatic, and enactive, each associated with distinct computational roles: internal viability regulation, anticipatory uncertainty-based re-evaluation, and active data generation through interaction. These principles are not intended as direct neurophysiological mappings, but as abstractions that inform the design of artificial agents with improved self-regulation and context-sensitive behavior. By embedding internal state variables and regulatory loops within these principles, AI systems can achieve more robust decision-making, calibrated uncertainty handling, and adaptive interaction strategies, particularly in uncertain and dynamic environments. This approach provides a concrete and testable pathway toward agents capable of functionally grounded self-regulation, with direct implications for human-computer interaction and assistive technologies. Ultimately, the interoceptive machine framework offers a unifying perspective on how internal-state regulation can enhance autonomy, adaptivity, and robustness in embodied AI systems

This paper presents a unified control framework for robust trajectory tracking and moving obstacle avoidance applicable to a broad class of mobile robots. By formulating a generalized kinematic transformation, we convert diverse vehicle dynamics into a strict feedback form, facilitating the design of a Sliding Mode Control (SMC) strategy for precise and robust reference tracking. To ensure operational safety in dynamic environments, the tracking controller is integrated with a Collision Cone Control Barrier Function (C3BF) based safety filter. The proposed architecture guarantees asymptotic tracking in the presence of external disturbances while strictly enforcing collision avoidance constraints. The novelty of this work lies in designing a sliding mode controller for ground robots like the Ackermann drive, which has not been done before. The efficacy and versatility of the approach are validated through numerical simulations and extensive real-world experiments on three distinct platforms: an Ackermann-steered vehicle, a differential drive robot, and a quadrotor drone. Video of the experiments are available at https://youtu.be/dWcxwum96vk

Robust forecast aggregation combines the predictions of multiple information sources to perform well in the worst case across all possible information structures. Previous work largely focuses on settings with a known binary state space, where the state is either 0 or 1. We study prior-agnostic robust forecast aggregation in which the aggregator observes only experts' reports, yet is ignorant of both the underlying joint information structure and the full prior, including the underlying state space. Unlike the standard model that fixes the binary state space {0, 1}, we allow the (binary) unknown state values to be arbitrary numbers in [0, 1], so the same reported probability may correspond to very different realized outcome frequencies across environments. Our main contribution is a simple, explicit, closed-form log-odds aggregator that linearly pools forecasts in logit space, together with (nearly-)tight minimax-regret guarantees across three knowledge regimes. We first show that under conditionally independent (CI) signals, robust aggregation with an unknown state space is strictly harder than in the known-state setting by establishing a larger lower bound, and our aggregation rule can achieve a worst-case regret of 0.0255. Along the way, we also characterize tight regret bounds for Blackwell-ordered structures and for general information structures. In the classical setting with known state space {0,1}, our aggregator achieves regret strictly below 0.0226 for CI structures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first explicit closed-form aggregator that achieves a regret upper bound strictly less than 0.0226. Finally, we extend the model where the aggregator additionally knows each expert's marginal forecast distribution; in this setting, with the CI structures, we show that a generalized log-odds rule achieves regret of 0.0228, complementing with a lower bound of 0.0225.

Accurate trajectory prediction is fundamentally challenging due to high scene heterogeneity - the severe variance in motion velocity, spatial density, and interaction patterns across different real-world environments. However, most existing approaches typically train a single unified model, expecting a fixed-capacity architecture to generalize universally across all possible scenarios. This conventional model-centric paradigm is fundamentally flawed when confronting such extreme heterogeneity, inevitably leading to a severe generalization gap, degraded accuracy, and massive computational waste. To overcome this bottleneck, rather than refining restricted model-centric architectures, we propose selective learning, a novel scene-centric paradigm. It explicitly analyzes the characteristics of the underlying scene to dynamically route inputs to the most appropriate expert models. As a concrete implementation of this paradigm, we introduce SceneSelect. Specifically, SceneSelect utilizes unsupervised clustering on interpretable geometric and kinematic features to discover a latent scene taxonomy. A highly decoupled classification module is then trained to assign real-time inputs to these scene categories, and a highly extensible, plug-and-play scheduling policy automatically dispatches the trajectory sequence to the optimal expert predictor. Crucially, this decoupled design ensures excellent generalization capabilities, allowing seamless integration with different off-the-shelf models and robust adaptation across new datasets without requiring computationally expensive joint retraining. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks (ETH-UCY, SDD, and NBA) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong single-model and ensemble baselines, achieving an average improvement of 10.5%, showcasing the effectiveness of scene-aware selective learning.

Guiding Vector Fields (GVFs) are a powerful tool for robotic path following. However, classical methods assume smooth, ordered curves and fail when paths are unordered, multi-branch, or generated by probabilistic models. We propose a unified framework, termed the Score-Induced Guiding Vector Field (SGVF), which leverages score-based generative modeling to construct vector fields directly from data distributions. SGVF learns tangent fields from point clouds with unit-norm, orthogonality, and directional-consistency losses, ensuring geometric fidelity and control feasibility. This approach removes the reliance on ad-hoc path segmentation and enables guidance along complex topologies such as branching and pseudo-manifolds. The study establishes a correspondence between score vanishing in diffusion models and GVF singularities and highlights representational capacity near sharp path curvatures. Experiments on robotic navigation in planar environments demonstrate that SGVF achieves reliable path following in scenarios where classical GVFs fail, underscoring its potential as a bridge between generative modeling and geometric control. Code and experiment video are available at https://github.com/czr-gif/Guiding-Vector-Field-Generation-via-Score-based-Diffusion-Model.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are defined by their construction history: a parametric recipe that encodes design intent. However, existing large-scale 3D datasets predominantly consist of boundary representations (B-Reps) or meshes, stripping away this critical procedural information. To address this scarcity, we introduce Zero-to-CAD, a scalable framework for synthesizing executable CAD construction sequences. We frame synthesis as an agentic search problem: by embedding a large language model (LLM) within a feedback-driven CAD environment, our system iteratively generates, executes, and validates code using tools and documentation lookup to promote geometric validity and operation diversity. This agentic approach enables the synthesis of approximately one million executable, readable, editable CAD sequences, covering a rich vocabulary of operations beyond sketch-and-extrude workflows. We also release a curated subset of 100,000 high-quality models selected for geometric diversity. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we fine-tune a vision-language model on our synthetic data to reconstruct editable CAD programs from multi-view images, outperforming strong baselines, including GPT-5.2, and effectively bootstrapping sequence generation capabilities without real construction-history training data. Zero-to-CAD bridges the gap between geometric scale and parametric interpretability, offering a vital resource for the next generation of CAD AI.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has significantly enhanced their collaborative problem-solving capabilities, but it has also expanded their attack surfaces, exposing them to vulnerabilities such as prompt infection and compromised inter-agent communication. While emerging graph-based anomaly detection methods show promise in protecting these networks, the field currently lacks a standardized, reproducible environment to train these models and evaluate their efficacy. To address this gap, we introduce Gammaf (Graph-based Anomaly Monitoring for LLM Multi-Agent systems Framework), an open-source benchmarking platform. Gammaf is not a novel defense mechanism itself, but rather a comprehensive evaluation architecture designed to generate synthetic multi-agent interaction datasets and benchmark the performance of existing and future defense models. The proposed framework operates through two interdependent pipelines: a Training Data Generation stage, which simulates debates across varied network topologies to capture interactions as robust attributed graphs, and a Defense System Benchmarking stage, which actively evaluates defense models by dynamically isolating flagged adversarial nodes during live inference rounds. Through rigorous evaluation using established defense baselines (XG-Guard and BlindGuard) across multiple knowledge tasks (such as MMLU-Pro and GSM8K), we demonstrate Gammaf's high utility, topological scalability, and execution efficiency. Furthermore, our experimental results reveal that equipping an LLM-MAS with effective attack remediation not only recovers system integrity but also substantially reduces overall operational costs by facilitating early consensus and cutting off the extensive token generation typical of adversarial agents.

Robust vehicle detection from fixed CCTV cameras is critical for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Yet existing benchmarks predominantly feature relatively homogeneous, highly organized traffic patterns captured from ego-centric driving perspectives or controlled aerial views. This regional and sensor view bias creates a significant gap. Models trained on datasets such as UA-DETRAC and COCO struggle to generalize to the dense, heterogeneous, disorganized traffic conditions observed in rapidly developing urban centers in emerging economies. To address this limitation, we introduce BMD-45, a large-scale dataset comprising 480K bounding boxes annotated over 45K images captured from over 3.6K operational Safe City CCTV cameras. BMD-45 contains 14 fine-grained vehicle categories, including region-specific modes such as auto-rickshaws and tempo travellers, which are not present in existing benchmarks. The dataset captures real-world deployment challenges, including extreme viewpoint variation, occlusion, and vehicle density . We establish comprehensive baselines using state-of-the-art detectors and reveal a striking domain gap: models fine-tuned on UA-DETRAC achieve only 33.6% mAP@0.50:0.95, compared to 83.8% when trained in-domain on BMD-45, representing a 2.5x improvement that persists even when accounting for novel vehicle classes. This performance gap underscores the critical need for geographically diverse traffic benchmarks and establishes BMD-45 as a baseline for developing robust perception systems in underrepresented urban environments worldwide. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/iisc-aim/BMD-45.

Quantitative analysis of the kinematic chain in sports motion is essential for performance evaluation and injury prevention. Conventional methods such as the kinematic-sequence (KS) and continuous relative phase (CRP) are confined to adjacent joint pairs and lack a unified framework for whole-body coordination, while segmental power-flow analysis requires force plates and inertial parameters that restrict it to laboratory environments. We apply Complex Hilbert Principal Component Analysis (CHPCA) separately to each motion phase (backswing and downswing) on markerless 3D pose estimation data, extracting the dominant whole-body phase pattern as a single complex eigenvector. The pipeline further includes a fully automatic signal-based phase segmentation (no priors on strike count or rest location) and an extension to 1,079 body-surface mesh vertices, so that the kinematic chain is represented as a continuous phase field across the body. On 14 hammer-striking trials of a single subject, the framework reveals (i) a trunk-anchored global phase architecture, (ii) a functional asymmetry between preparation and execution phases quantified by Mode-1 contribution (45.5% vs. 70.5%) and inter-trial Spearman consistency (0.38 vs. 0.58), and (iii) a consistent reorganisation across both skeletal joints and mesh vertices ($p < 10^{-10}$ on 1,079 vertices). As a methodological consistency check, pairwise phase differences from the Mode-1 eigenvector are compared against CRP on all 190 joint pairs by a permutation test ($ρ= 0.473$, $p = 0.0005$). A correspondence analysis between Mode-1 amplitude and kinetic-energy mobilisation variance further shows a strong positive correlation in the downswing ($ρ\approx 0.71$ on both skeleton and mesh) and no correlation in the backswing, indicating that the proposed framework bridges kinematic and kinetic descriptions of coordination through phase structure.

Wearable sensor-based human gait analysis holds great promise in healthcare, rehabilitation, clinical diagnosis and monitoring, and sports activities. Specifically, ground reaction force (GRF) provides essential insights into the body's interaction with the ground during movement and is typically measured using instrumented treadmills equipped with force plates. However, such equipment is expensive and restricted to laboratory environments. To enable a more portable solution, wearable insole sensors have been used to measure GRF. These sensors, however, are prone to noise and external interference, which reduces measurement accuracy. Deep learning methodologies could be adopted to address these issues, but they often require significant computing resources to achieve high accuracy, limiting their applicability for real-time analysis on portable devices. To overcome these limitations, we propose Selective Correlation Based Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) for estimating GRF from data collected by insole sensors. Our proposed method utilizes selected features considering temporal characteristics in the process of extracting correlation maps for knowledge transfer, enhancing interpretability and mitigating issues in high dimensional data processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the compact models generated by our distillation framework through comparison with existing methods. Various configurations of teacher-student architectures and training approaches are examined based on multiple evaluation criteria, utilizing data collected at different walking speeds and with different window sizes. Experimental results confirm that our approach outperforms existing methods in estimating GRF from wearable insole sensor data. Therefore, our approach offers a reliable and resource-efficient solution for human gait analysis.

The evolution of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has shifted the focus from text generation to active behavioral execution, particularly via OS agents navigating complex GUIs. However, the transition of these agents into trustworthy daily partners is hindered by a lack of rigorous evaluation regarding safety, efficiency, and multi-modal robustness. Current benchmarks suffer from narrow safety scenarios, noisy trajectory labeling, and limited robustness metrics. To bridge this gap, we propose OS-SPEAR, a comprehensive toolkit for the systematic analysis of OS agents across four dimensions: Safety, Performance, Efficiency, and Robustness. OS-SPEAR introduces four specialized subsets: (1) a S(afety)-subset encompassing diverse environment- and human-induced hazards; (2) a P(erformance)-subset curated via trajectory value estimation and stratified sampling; (3) an E(fficiency)-subset quantifying performance through the dual lenses of temporal latency and token consumption; and (4) a R(obustness)-subset that applies cross-modal disturbances to both visual and textual inputs. Additionally, we provide an automated analysis tool to generate human-readable diagnostic reports. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 22 popular OS agents using OS-SPEAR. Our empirical results reveal critical insights into the current landscape: notably, a prevalent trade-off between efficiency and safety or robustness, the performance superiority of specialized agents over general-purpose models, and varying robustness vulnerabilities across different modalities. By providing a multidimensional ranking and a standardized evaluation framework, OS-SPEAR offers a foundational resource for developing the next generation of reliable and efficient OS agents. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/OS-SPEAR.

We present a framework using Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (RE-IRL) to recover investor reward functions from observed investment actions and market conditions. Unlike traditional IRL algorithms, RE-IRL is employed to account for environments where transition probabilities are unknown or inaccessible. To address the challenge of data sparsity, we utilize a $K$-nearest neighbor approach to estimate the observed behavior policy. Furthermore, we propose a statistical testing framework to evaluate the validity and robustness of the estimated results.

The technological maturity of in situ inspection and monitoring methods in additive manufacturing is steadily increasing, enabling more efficient and practical qualification procedures. In this context, image segmentation of powder bed images in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) has been investigated by various authors, leveraging both edge detection and machine learning approaches to identify deviations from nominal geometry. Despite these developments, several challenges remain, including the sensitivity of segmentation performance to industrial illumination conditions and layer-to-layer variability in pixel intensity patterns. The study addresses these limitations by proposing a graph-augmented segmentation approach. The underlying principle consists of preserving the geometrical information at a global level rather than at pixel-wise level, modeling dependencies and relational information among spatial regions with a Graph Neural Network bottleneck embedded into a U-Net architecture. This allows enhancing the consistency and accuracy of the geometry reconstruction in the presence of spatial and layer-wise photometric variability systematically faced in real data. The method is evaluated against benchmark techniques for the in situ reconstruction of lattice structures produced by L-PBF, demonstrating its potential as a scalable solution for robust in situ inspection and geometric verification in industrial environments.

Auditing the semantic properties of proprietary data creates a fundamental tension: verification requires transparent access, while proprietary rights demand confidentiality. While Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) ensure privacy, they are typically limited to precise algebraic constraints and are ill-suited for verifying qualitative, unstructured properties, such as the logic within a codebase. We propose {\em Agentic Witnessing}, a framework that moves verification from attested execution to {\em attested reasoning}. The system is composed of three agents: a Verifier (who wants to check properties of a dataset), a Prover (who owns the dataset) and an Auditor (that inspects the dataset). The Verifier is allowed to ask a limited number of simple binary true/false questions to the auditor. By isolating an LLM-based Auditor within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), the system enables the Verifier to query a Prover's private data via simple Boolean queries, without exposing the raw dataset. The Auditor uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically inspect the target dataset, producing a yes/no verdict accompanied by a cryptographic transcript: a signed hash chain binding the reasoning trace to both the original dataset and the TEE's hardware root of trust. We demonstrate this architecture by automating the artifact evaluation process for 21 peer-reviewed computer science papers with released codebases on GitHub (e.g. Does the codebase implement the system described in the paper?). We verified five high-level properties of these codebases described in the corresponding publications, treating the source code as private. Our results show that TEE-enabled agentic auditing provides a mechanism for privacy-preserving oversight, effectively decoupling qualitative verification from the need for data disclosure.

Edge computing environments impose strict constraints on energy consumption and latency, making the deployment of deep neural networks a significant challenge. Therefore, smart and adaptive inference strategies that dynamically balance computational cost or latency with predictive accuracy are critical in edge computing scenarios. In this work, we build on Adaptive Deep Neural Networks (ADNNs) that employ the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) framework. Current literature leverages the first version of the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB1) strategy to dynamically select the optimal confidence threshold, enabling efficient early exits without sacrificing accuracy. However, we introduce four additional Upper Confidence Bound strategies in ADNNs, namely UCB-V, UCB-Tuned, UCB-Bayes, and UCB-BwK, and perform, for the first time, a comparative study of these strategies with respect to trade-offs between accuracy, energy consumption, and latency. The proposed UCB strategies are employed on the ResNet and MobileViT neural networks, and are evaluated on the benchmark datasets of CIFAR-10, CIFAR-10.1, and CIFAR-100. Experimental results demonstrate that all strategies achieve sub-linear cumulative regret, with UCB-Bayes converging the fastest, followed by UCB-Tuned and UCB-V. Finally, UCB-V and UCB-Tuned dominate the Pareto Frontiers of accuracy-latency and accuracy-energy trade-offs. The implementation code is available here: https://github.com/gr3gor1/MAB_UCB

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on end-to-end fine-tuning. While effective, this paradigm compromises the inherent generalization capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and incurs catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose $M^2$-VLA, which demonstrates that a generalized VLM is able to serve as a powerful backbone for robotic manipulation directly. However, it remains a key challenge to bridge the gap between the high-level semantic understanding of VLMs and the precise requirements of robotic control. To overcome this, we introduce the Mixture of Layers (MoL) strategy that selectively extracts task-critical information from dense semantic features. Furthermore, to facilitate efficient trajectory learning under constrained model capacity, we propose a Meta Skill Module (MSM) that integrates strong inductive biases. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, generalization and ablation studies validate the architecture's zero-shot capabilities and confirm the contribution of each key component. Our code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.

Current visual text generation models struggle with the trade-off between text accuracy and overall image coherence. We find that achieving high text accuracy can reduce aesthetic quality and instruction-following capability. Although reinforcement learning approaches can alleviate the problem through aligning with multiple rewards, they are often unstable for text generation, as existing approaches normally optimize multiple rewards in a weighted-sum way. In addition, it is difficult to balance the weight of each reward. Moreover, reinforcement learning requires a set of training instructions. A large number of prompts require more training time and computing resources, while a small set leads to poor performance. Hence, how to select the prompts for efficient training is an unsolved problem. In this study, we propose Pareto-Optimal Curriculum Alignment (POCA), a framework that addresses this issue as a multi-objective problem by: 1) identifying the Pareto-optimal set to avoid simple scalarization and 2) designing an adaptive curriculum alignment strategy to manage a learning sequence of a multi-reward dataset using automatic difficulty assessment, which is crucial for optimal convergence as RL methods explore in a limited data environment. In synergy, POCA finds the Pareto-optimal set in a unified reward space, which eliminates inconsistent signals to find the best trade-off solution from different rewards under an easy-to-hard optimization landscape. The experimental results show that POCA significantly improves all metrics such as CLIP, HPS scores and sentence accuracy.

The success of large language models (LLMs) across diverse NLP tasks has elevated the importance of reasoning chain optimization as a critical step in aligning model behavior with task objectives. Existing reasoning chain tuning methods often rely on black-box heuristics or gradient-free search, which lack interpretability, generalization, and sample efficiency. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Thoughts-as-Planning}, a novel framework that formalizes reasoning chain optimization as a sequential decision-making process over a latent semantic space. We model the LLM as a partially observable environment and learn a latent world model that simulates the effect of reasoning chain edits on downstream outputs. A proximity-preserving embedding space is constructed to encode reasoning chain-response dynamics, enabling planning via gradient descent or reinforcement learning. Our method supports multi-scale abstraction, allowing reasoning chain edits at token, segment, and instruction levels to be integrated into a unified planner. Through extensive experiments on language understanding and generation tasks, we demonstrate that Thoughts-as-Planning outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning chain tuning baselines in efficiency, robustness, and generalization, while offering interpretability through its structured planning trajectory. Our code is available at https://github.com/FastLM/Thoughts-as-Planning.

Federated learning (FL) offers a promising distributed learning paradigm for internet of vehicles (IoV) applications. However, it faces challenges from communication overhead and dynamic environments. Model compression techniques reduce computing and communication burden yet create trade-offs between compression ratios and vehicle participation strategies. In this paper, we propose a lightweight FL algorithm named federated learning with dynamic low-rank adaptation (Fed-DLoRA), which is combined with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to effectively reduce parameters and communication costs while enhancing training efficiency. The convergence analysis of Fed-DLoRA is conducted through stochastic gradient descent optimization coupled with singular value decomposition. This analysis establishes the theoretical relationships among LoRA rank, vehicular scheduling strategies and the model's convergence characteristics. Building on these insights, we formulate a joint optimization problem aimed at maximizing system performance. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive rank, bandwidth and vehicle selection (ARBVS) algorithm that integrates enumeration with greedy optimization strategies. The algorithm provides efficient rank selection and resource scheduling strategies for each FL communication round, thereby achieving effective performance improvements for the FL system. Experimental results demonstrate that Fed-DLoRA achieves superior performance compared to conventional federated learning approaches, exhibiting enhanced accuracy, faster convergence, and improved communication efficiency.

Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a \emph{versioned late materialization} paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

Identifying species in biology among tens of thousands of visually similar taxa while discovering unknown species in open-world environments remains a fundamental challenge in biodiversity research. Current methods treat identification and discovery as separate problems, with classification models assuming closed sets and discovery relying on threshold-based rejection. Here we present DeepTaxon, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework that unifies species identification and discovery through interpretable reasoning over retrieved visual evidence. Given a query image, DeepTaxon retrieves the top-$k$ candidate species with $n$ exemplar images each from a retrieval index and performs chain-of-thought comparative reasoning. Critically, we redefine discovery as an explicit, retrieval-based decision problem rather than an implicit parametric memory problem. A sample is novel if and only if the retrieval index lacks sufficient evidence for identification, so each retrieval naturally yields a classification or discovery label without manual annotation, thereby providing automatic supervision for both tasks. We train the framework via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic retrieval-augmented data, followed by reinforcement learning on hard samples, converting high-recall retrieval into high-precision decisions that scale to massive taxonomic vocabularies. Extensive experiments on a large-scale in-distribution benchmark and six out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in both identification and discovery. Ablation studies further reveal effective test-time scaling with candidate count $k$ and exemplar count $n$, strong zero-shot transfer to unseen domains, and consistent performance across retrieval encoders, establishing an interpretable solution for biodiversity research.

Many bandit systems are deployed with offline historical data, such as past logs from earlier policies. Using these data can reduce early online exploration when they remain informative for the online problem. When the offline and online environments differ, such data can be biased for the online problem. For linear (contextual) bandits, this bias is directional: offline data may be informative in some feature directions and misleading in others. However, prior work typically controls this gap through a known Euclidean bound on the model parameters, which we prove is too coarse: even with the offline parameter known, bias in a single unknown direction can force dimension-dependent regret. To address this challenge, we introduce a directional bias certificate $(M_{\mathrm{bias}},ρ)$ that measures the offline-to-online gap through an $M_{\mathrm{bias}}$-induced norm and assigns different bias budgets to different directions. Building on this certificate, we propose \emph{Ellipsoidal-MINUCB}, which augments the online learning with an offline-pooled branch that safely exploits historical data. When the certificate is known, we show that the algorithm matches the standard SupLinUCB rate in the worst case and improves when offline coverage aligns with low-bias directions. When the certificate is unknown, we estimate it adaptively from offline and accumulated online data and establish a corresponding regret guarantee. Numerical experiments support the theory and show gains in aligned regimes.

Federated learning enables a population of clients to collaboratively train machine learning models without exchanging their raw data, but standard algorithms such as FedAvg suffer from slow convergence and high communication and memory costs in heterogeneous, resource-constrained environments. We introduce FedSLoP, a federated optimization algorithm that combines stochastic low-rank subspace projections of gradients, thereby reducing the dimension of communicated and stored updates while preserving optimization progress. On the theoretical side, we develop a detailed nonconvex convergence analysis under standard smoothness and bounded-variance assumptions, showing that FedSLoP is guaranteed to converge to a first-order stationary point at a rate of $O(1/\sqrt{NT})$. On the empirical side, we conduct extensive experiments on federated MNIST classification with heterogeneous data partitions, showing that FedSLoP substantially reduces communication volume and client-side memory while achieving competitive or better accuracy compared with FedAvg and representative sparse or low-rank baselines. Together, our results demonstrate that random subspace momentum methods such as FedSLoP provide a principled and effective approach to communication- and memory-efficient federated learning. Codes are available at: https://github.com/pkumelon/FedSLoP.git.