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Designing proteins that satisfy natural language functional requirements is a central goal in protein engineering. A straightforward baseline is to fine-tune generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators, but this is data- and compute-hungry. With limited supervision, LLMs can produce coherent plans in text yet fail to reliably realize them as sequences. This plan-execute gap motivates ProtoCycle, an agentic framework for protein design that uses LLMs primarily to drive a multi-round, feedback-driven decision cycle. ProtoCycle couples an LLM planner with a lightweight tool environment designed to emulate the iterative workflow of human protein engineering and uses LLM-driven reflection on tool feedback to revise plans. Trained with supervised trajectories and online reinforcement learning, ProtoCycle achieves strong language alignment while maintaining competitive foldability, and ablations show that reflection substantially improves sequence quality.

Existing feature-interpretation pipelines typically operate on uniformly sampled units or exhaustive feature sets, incurring massive costs on units irrelevant to target behaviors. To address this, we introduce the first CLT-native end-to-end pruning framework, PIE, which pioneers the paradigm of pruning first and interpreting later. PIE connects Pruning, automatic Interpretation, and interpretation Evaluation, establishing a comprehensive benchmarking environment to systematically measure behavioral fidelity and downstream interpretability under pruning. Within this framework, we adapt strong relevance baselines and propose Feature Attribution Patching (FAP), a patch-grounded attribution method that scores CLT features by aggregating gradient-weighted write contributions. Furthermore, we introduce FAP-Synergy, a systematic synergy-aware reranking procedure. We evaluate pruning using KL-divergence behavior retention and assess interpretation quality with FADE-style metrics across IOI and Doc-String datasets. Across budget constraints of K in {50, 100, 200, 400, 800}, our rigorous benchmarking reveals distinct operational regimes: while base FAP and adapted baselines perform robustly at relaxed budgets, FAP-Synergy excels in highly constrained, strict-budget regimes. Crucially, we demonstrate a practical "Effective Budget" advantage: on the IOI task for both Llama-3.2-1B and Gemma-2-2B, FAP-Synergy at K=50 functionally matches the behavioral fidelity of baseline circuits at K=75. Because downstream evaluation costs scale linearly per feature, Synergy effectively grants the pipeline 25 "free" features, achieving K=75 fidelity while reducing interpretation costs by 33%.

Generalist embodied agents must perform interactive, causally-dependent reasoning, continually interacting with the environment, acquiring information, and updating plans to solve long-horizon tasks before they could be adopted in real-life scenarios. For instance, retrieving an apple from a cabinet may require opening multiple doors and drawers before the apple becomes visible and reachable, demanding sequential interaction under partial observability. However, existing benchmarks fail to systematically evaluate this essential capability. We introduce COIN, a benchmark designed to assess interactive reasoning in realistic robotic manipulation through three key contributions. First, we construct COIN-50: 50 interactive tasks in daily scenarios, and create COIN-Primitive required by causally-dependent tasks, and COIN-Composition with mid-term complexity for skill learning and generalization evaluation. Second, we develop a low-cost mobile AR teleoperation system and collect the COIN-Primitive Dataset with 50 demonstrations per primitive task (1,000 in total). Third, we develop systematic evaluation metrics about execution stability and generalization robustness to evaluate CodeAsPolicy, VLA, and language-conditioned H-VLA approaches. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals critical limitations in current methods: models struggle with interactive reasoning tasks due to significant gaps between visual understanding and motor execution. We provide fine-grained analysis of these limitations.

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to segment targets that share extreme textural and structural similarities with their complex environments. Leveraging their capacity for long-range dependency modeling, Transformer-based detectors have become the mainstream approach and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) accuracy, yet their substantial computational overhead severely limits practical deployment. To address this, we propose a hierarchical Confidence-Aware Token Pruning framework (CATP) tailored for COD. Our approach hierarchically identifies and discards easily distinguishable tokens from both background and object interiors, focusing computations on critical boundary tokens. To compensate for information loss from pruning, we introduce a dual-path feature compensation mechanism that aggregates contextual knowledge from pruned tokens into enriched features. Extensive experiments on multiple COD benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy, offering a promising research direction for the efficient deployment of COD models in real-world scenarios. The code will be released.

Modern AI agents routinely depend on secrets such as API keys and SSH credentials, yet the dominant deployment model still exposes those secrets directly to the agent process through environment variables, local files, or forwarding sockets. This design fails against prompt injection, tool misuse, and model-controlled exfiltration because the agent can both use and reveal the same bearer credential. We present CapSeal, a capability-sealed secret mediation architecture that replaces direct secret access with constrained invocations through a local trusted broker. CapSeal combines capability issuance, schema-constrained HTTP execution, broker-executed SSH actions, anti-replay session binding, policy evaluation, and tamper-evident audit trails. We describe a Rust prototype integrated with an MCP-facing adapter, formulate conditional security goals for non-disclosure, constrained use, replay resistance, and auditability, and define an evaluation plan spanning prompt injection, tool misuse, and SSH abuse. The resulting system reframes secret handling for agentic systems from handing the model a key to granting the model a narrowly scoped, non-exportable action capability.

Prompt-induced cognitive biases are changes in a general-purpose AI (GPAI) system's decisions caused solely by biased wording in the input (e.g., framing, anchors), not task logic. In software engineering (SE) decision support (where problem statements and requirements are natural language) small phrasing shifts (e.g., popularity hints or outcome reveals) can push GPAI models toward suboptimal decisions. We study this with PROBE-SWE, a dynamic benchmark for SE that pairs biased and unbiased versions of the same SE dilemmas, controls for logic and difficulty, and targets eight SE-relevant biases (anchoring, availability, bandwagon, confirmation, framing, hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, overconfidence). We ask whether prompt engineering mitigates bias sensitivity in practice, focusing on actionable techniques that practitioners can apply off-the-shelf in real environments. Testing common strategies (e.g., chain-of-thought, self-debiasing) on cost-effective GPAI systems, we find no statistically significant reductions in bias sensitivity on a per-bias basis. We then adopt a Prolog-style view of the reasoning process: solving SE dilemmas requires making explicit any background axioms and inference assumptions (i.e., SE best practices) that are usually implicit in the prompt. So, we hypothesize that bias-inducing features short-circuit assumption elicitation, pushing GPAI models toward biased shortcuts. Building on this, we introduce an end-to-end method that elicits best practices and injects axiomatic reasoning cues into the prompt before answering, reducing overall bias sensitivity by 51% on average (p < .001). Finally, we report a thematic analysis that surfaces linguistic patterns associated with heightened bias sensitivity, clarifying when GPAI use is less advisable for SE decision support and where to focus future countermeasures.

Predicting full-field physics through the real-time virtual sensing of engineering systems can enhance limited physical sensors but often requires sparse-to-dense reconstruction, complex multiphysics, and highly irregular geometries as well as strict latency and energy constraints for edge-deployability. Neural operators have been presented as a potential candidate for such applications but few architectures exist that explicitly address power consumption. Spiking neuron integration can provide a potential solution when integrated on neuromorphic hardware but the current existing neuron models result in severe performance degradation towards regression-based virtual sensing. To address the performance concerns and edge-constraints, we present the Variable Spiking Graph Neural Operator (VS-GNO) which integrates a sophisticated spectral-spatial convolutional analysis and a previously developed Variable Spiking Neuron (VSN) and energy-error balance loss function. With a non-spiking $L_2$ error baseline of $0.4\%$, VS-GNO can provide a reconstruction error of $0.71\%$ with $15\%$ average spiking in its spectral-only form and $1.04\%$ with $24.5\%$ spiking in its entire form. These results position VS-GNO as a promising step towards energy-efficient, edge-deployable neural operators for real-time sparse-to-dense virtual sensing in complex, highly irregular engineering environments.

Due to the increasing frequency and severity of storm events, driven by the escalation of anthropogenic climate change and urban expansion, there is a requirement for increasingly efficient flood risk management strategies. While Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) offers a sustainable solution for managing flood risk, optimal implementation is challenging. To help overcome this challenge, this study presents a novel multi-objective optimisation tool that couples a state-of-the-art hydrodynamic model with a bespoke evolutionary algorithm. The use of a fully dynamic hydrodynamic model enables the tool to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of proposed BGI features with respect to property scale flood vulnerability and hazard analysis. This contrasts with alternative approaches which utilise simplified models, which can only reliably predict inundation extents, thus the proposed optimisation tool provides greater certainty regarding the optimality of the solutions. As a hydrodynamic simulation is required to evaluate each candidate solution, the bespoke evolutionary algorithm is specifically designed to minimise the number of simulations required, ensuring the tool is computationally practical. The effectiveness of the tool in this regard is validated via the derivation of exact convergence measures, for a tractable search space, and via comparisons with benchmark algorithms, for an intractable search space. Compared with traditional design practices, the proposed tool offers an automated approach capable of efficiently exploring a wide range of solutions, providing decision-makers with a set of optimal solutions from which they can make informed investment decisions. The presented methods provide a robust framework for optimising a variety of BGI features in complex urban environments.

We introduce C-GenReg, a training-free framework for 3D point cloud registration that leverages the complementary strengths of world-scale generative priors and registration-oriented Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Current learning-based 3D point cloud registration methods struggle to generalize across sensing modalities, sampling differences, and environments. Hence, C-GenReg augments the geometric point cloud registration branch by transferring the matching problem into an auxiliary image domain, where VFMs excel, using a World Foundation Model to synthesize multi-view-consistent RGB representations from the input geometry. This generative transfer, preserves spatial coherence across source and target views without any fine-tuning. From these generated views, a VFM pretrained for finding dense correspondences extracts matches. The resulting pixel correspondences are lifted back to 3D via the original depth maps. To further enhance robustness, we introduce a "Match-then-Fuse" probabilistic cold-fusion scheme that combines two independent correspondence posteriors, that of the generated-RGB branch with that of the raw geometric branch. This principled fusion preserves each modality inductive bias and provides calibrated confidence without any additional learning. C-GenReg is zero-shot and plug-and-play: all modules are pretrained and operate without fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on indoor (3DMatch, ScanNet) and outdoor (Waymo) benchmarks demonstrate strong zero-shot performance and superior cross-domain generalization. For the first time, we demonstrate a generative registration framework that operates successfully on real outdoor LiDAR data, where no imagery data is available.

Academic integrity continues to face the persistent challenge of examination cheating. Traditional invigilation relies on human observation, which is inefficient, costly, and prone to errors at scale. Although some existing AI-powered monitoring systems have been deployed and trusted, many lack transparency or require multi-layered architectures to achieve the desired performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose an improvement over a simple two-stage framework for exam cheating detection that integrates object detection and behavioral analysis using well-known technologies. First, the state-of-the-art YOLOv8n model is used to localize students in exam-room images. Each detected region is cropped and preprocessed, then classified by a fine-tuned RexNet-150 model as either normal or cheating behavior. The system is trained on a dataset compiled from 10 independent sources with a total of 273,897 samples, achieving 0.95 accuracy, 0.94 recall, 0.96 precision, and 0.95 F1-score - a 13% increase over a baseline accuracy of 0.82 in video-based cheating detection. In addition, with an average inference time of 13.9 ms per sample, the proposed approach demonstrates robustness and scalability for deployment in large-scale environments. Beyond the technical contribution, the AI-assisted monitoring system also addresses ethical concerns by ensuring that final outcomes are delivered privately to individual students after the examination, for example, via personal email. This prevents public exposure or shaming and offers students an opportunity to reflect on their behavior. For further improvement, it is possible to incorporate additional factors, such as audio data and consecutive frames, to achieve greater accuracy. This study provides a foundation for developing real-time, scalable, ethical, and open-source solutions.

Understanding affective dynamics in real-world social systems is fundamental to modeling and analyzing human-human interactions in complex environments. Group affect emerges from intertwined human-human interactions, contextual influences, and behavioral cues, making its quantitative modeling a challenging computational social systems problem. However, computational modeling of group affect in in-the-wild scenarios remains challenging due to limited large-scale annotated datasets and the inherent complexity of multimodal social interactions shaped by contextual and behavioral variability. The lack of comprehensive datasets annotated with multimodal and contextual information further limits advances in the field. To address this, we introduce the Group Affect from ViDeos (GAViD) dataset, comprising 5091 video clips with multimodal data (video, audio and context), annotated with ternary valence and discrete emotion labels and enriched with VideoGPT-generated contextual metadata and human-annotated action cues. We also present Context-Aware Group Affect Recognition Network (CAGNet) for multimodal context-aware group affect recognition. CAGNet achieves 63.20% test accuracy on GAViD, comparable to state-of-the-art performance. The dataset and code are available at github.com/deepakkumar-iitr/GAViD.

Computational X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) is widely used to interpret local coordination environments, oxidation states, and electronic structure in chemically complex systems. In practice, routine computational XANES at scale is often constrained by workflow complexity rather than by the simulation method. We present ChemGraph-XANES, a large-language-model (LLM)-based agentic framework for XANES simulation and analysis that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-assisted parameter selection from documentation, schema-constrained tool execution, deterministic FDMNES input generation, and provenance-aware data curation. The framework supports both direct scripted execution and natural-language orchestration, with both modes routed through a deterministic backend for structure handling, absorber and edge specification, input generation, execution, spectral extraction, and post-processing. We demonstrate three proof-of-capability use cases: RAG-assisted selection and propagation of FDMNES input parameters, structure-file-based execution, and chemistry-level natural-language specification of absorber and composition requests. In a recorded trace, a simulation parameter is retrieved from the FDMNES manual by the RAG-enabled agent and propagated into a schema-validated tool call, illustrating traceable parameter selection. We further show that the same execution pathway supports both explicit local structures and chemistry-level user inputs. Because XANES calculations are independent once inputs are defined, ChemGraph-XANES is designed to support task-parallel execution and the creation of structure-linked XANES collections. ChemGraph-XANES therefore serves as a practical agentic framework for computational spectroscopy and data generation, emphasizing constrained orchestration, reproducibility, and traceable outputs.

This paper presents SWNet, a bimodal end-to-end cross-spectral network specifically engineered for the detection of camouflaged weeds in dense agricultural environments. Plant camouflage, characterized by homochromatic blending where invasive species mimic the phenotypic traits of primary crops, poses a significant challenge for traditional computer vision systems. To overcome these limitations, SWNet utilizes a Pyramid Vision Transformer v2 backbone to capture long-range dependencies and a Bimodal Gated Fusion Module to dynamically integrate Visible and Near-Infrared information. By leveraging the physiological differences in chlorophyll reflectance captured in the NIR spectrum, the proposed architecture effectively discriminates targets that are otherwise indistinguishable in the visible range. Furthermore, an Edge-Aware Refinement module is employed to produce sharper object boundaries and reduce structural ambiguity. Experimental results on the Weeds-Banana dataset indicate that SWNet outperforms ten state-of-the-art methods. The study demonstrates that the integration of cross-spectral data and boundary-guided refinement is essential for high segmentation accuracy in complex crop canopies. The code is available on GitHub: https://cod-espol.github.io/SWNet/

We present the Global Neural World Model (GNWM), a self-stabilizing framework that achieves topological quantization through balanced continuous entropy constraints. Operating as a continuous, action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), the GNWM maps environments onto a discrete 2D grid, enforcing translational equivariance without pixel-level reconstruction. Our results show this architecture prevents manifold drift during autoregressive rollouts by using grid ``snapping'' as a native error-correction mechanism. Furthermore, by training via maximum entropy exploration (random walks), the model learns generalized transition dynamics rather than memorizing specific expert trajectories. We validate the GNWM across passive observation, active agent control, and abstract sequence regimes, demonstrating its capacity to act not just as a spatial physics simulator, but as a causal discovery model capable of organizing continuous, predictable concepts into structured topological maps.

Practice and extensive exercises are essential in programming education. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are a viable option to provide individualized hints and advice to programming students even when human tutors are not available. However, prior ITS for programming rarely support the Python programming language, mostly focus on introductory programming, and rarely take recent developments in generative models into account. We aim to establish a novel ITS for Python programming that is highly adaptable, serves both as a teaching and research platform, provides interfaces to plug in hint mechanisms (e.g.\ via large language models), and works inside the particularly challenging regulatory environment of Germany, that is, conforming to the European data protection regulation, the European AI act, and ethical framework of the German Research Foundation. In this paper, we present the description of the current state of the ITS along with future development directions, as well as discuss the challenges and opportunities for improving the system.

Probabilistic Synchronous Parallel (PSP) is a technique in distributed learning systems to reduce synchronization bottlenecks by sampling a subset of participating nodes per round. In Federated Learning (FL), where edge devices are often unreliable due to factors including mobility, power constraints, and user activity, PSP helps improve system throughput. However, PSP has a key limitation: it assumes device behavior is static and different devices are independent. This can lead to unfair distributed synchronization, due to highly available nodes dominating training while those that are often unavailable rarely participate and so their data may be missed. If both data distribution and node availability are simultaneously correlated with the device, then both PSP and standard FL algorithms will suffer from persistent under-representation of certain classes or groups resulting in inefficient or ineffective learning of certain features. We introduce Availability-Weighted PSP (AW-PSP), an extension to PSP that addresses the issue of co-correlation of unfair sampling and data availability by dynamically adjusting node sampling probabilities using real-time availability predictions, historical behavior, and failure correlation metrics. A Markov-based availability predictor distinguishes transient \emph{vs} chronic failures, while a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) layer decentralizes metadata, including latency, freshness, and utility scores. We implement AW-PSP and trace-driven evaluation shows that it improves robustness to both independent and correlated failures, increases label coverage, and reduces fairness variance compared to standard PSP. AW-PSP thus provides an availability-aware, and fairness-conscious node sampling protocol for FL deployments that will scale to large numbers of nodes even in heterogeneous and failure-prone environments.

This paper examines whether students are entering the generative AI era with sufficiently strong educational foundations, focusing on the relationship between learning environments and changes in ICT related career aspirations across countries. The analysis uses country-level data from PISA 2018 and 2022, combining indicators of student autonomy, digital skills and teacher support. A mixed-method approach is applied, including descriptive statistics, regression analysis, clustering, latent representation learning (using Variational Autoencoder-VAE), discriminant analysis and probabilistic modeling to capture both observable and latent dimensions of educational readiness. Unlike prior research that treats learning loss, digital skills and career expectations separately, our analysis integrates them within a comparative longitudinal framework. It shifts the focus from short-term post-pandemic effects to the structural capacity of education systems to prepare students for digital and AI-driven labor markets. Results show a global but uneven increase in ICT career aspirations. Digital skills emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictor, while teacher support plays a complementary role. Autonomy shows weaker, context-dependent effects. Educational readiness is multidimensional, and ICT aspirations evolve relatively independently from other career domains.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from text processors to autonomous agents, evaluating their social reasoning in embodied multi-agent settings becomes critical. We introduce SocialGrid, an embodied multi-agent environment inspired by Among Us that evaluates LLM agents on planning, task execution, and social reasoning. Our evaluations reveal that even the strongest open model (GPT-OSS-120B) achieves below 60% accuracy in task completion and planning, with agents getting stuck in repetitive behaviors or failing to navigate basic obstacles. Since poor navigation confounds evaluation of social intelligence, SocialGrid offers an optional Planning Oracle to isolate social reasoning from planning deficits. While planning assistance improves task completion, social reasoning remains a bottleneck: agents fail to detect deception at near-random chance regardless of scale, relying on shallow heuristics rather than accumulating behavioral evidence. SocialGrid provides automatic failure analysis and fine-grained metrics, enabling developers to diagnose and improve their agents. We also establish a competitive leaderboard using Elo ratings from adversarial league play.

Wireless radiance field (WRF) reconstruction aims to learn a continuous, queryable representation of radio frequency characteristics over 3D space and direction, from which specific quantities, such as the spatial power spectrum (SPS) at a receiver given a transmitter position, can be predicted. While Gaussian splatting (GS)-based method has surpassed Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based method for this task, existing adaptations largely transplant vision pipelines, limiting physical interpretability and accuracy. We introduce BiSplat-WRF, a planar GS framework that retains the expressiveness of 3D GS while removing unnecessary projections and incorporating global EM coupling and mutual scattering among primitives. Each primitive is a 2D planar Gaussian with 3D coordinates, rendered directly on the angular domain of the SPS. A bilinear spatial transformer (BST) aggregates inter-primitive relations on an angular grid and, via attention, captures long-range electromagnetic dependencies, thereby enforcing globally aware EM interactions that reflect the complex physics of the wireless environment. On spatial spectrum synthesis task, BiSplat-WRF surpasses NeRF-based and prior GS-based baselines with respect to the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM); comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of BST. We also provide a larger BiSplat-WRF+ variant that further increases SSIM at a higher computation cost, serving as a strong reference for future studies.

Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) enables device-free human activity recognition, but existing multi-user approaches assume a fixed set of known users during both training and inference. This closed-set assumption limits deployment, as models trained on a specific user set degrade when applied to new individuals or environments. We reformulate multi-user activity recognition as activity counting, estimating how many users perform each activity type at a given time, without associating actions with specific individuals. We propose a pipeline that converts CSI measurements into spatial projections and extracts features using a pretrained convolutional backbone. Two formulations are evaluated on the WiMANS dataset: a conventional identity-dependent model that assigns activities to fixed user slots, and an identity-agnostic model that estimates scene-level activity composition through regression. Under standard evaluation, the identity-agnostic model achieves a mean absolute error of 0.1081 on a 0-5 count scale. Under unseen-user evaluation, the identity-dependent model's macro-F1 drops from 80.38 to 32.61, while the identity-agnostic model's counting error remains stable. Feature space analysis confirms that identity-agnostic representations are more user-invariant, which explains their stronger generalization. These results suggest that activity counting provides a more practical and generalizable alternative to identity-dependent formulations for multi-user WiFi sensing.

Robotic systems are moving from isolated platforms to interconnected multi-agent ecosystems that operate in human environments. This shift raises a governance problem that existing frameworks do not address: how does consent propagate, degrade, and break down across chains of delegation between embodied autonomous agents? The AI ethics community has begun to study consent for digital software agents, and the HRI community has examined consent in dyadic human-robot encounters. Neither body of work covers what happens when physical robots delegate tasks to other robots in ways that affect humans. This paper introduces consent chain degradation (CCD), a conceptual framework for analyzing how the specificity, validity, and scope of human consent erodes as authority passes through multi-robot delegation chains. We propose a three-layer governance architecture, the Consent Runtime Verification Framework for Embodied Agents (CoRVE), which integrates consent scope modeling, delegation chain tracking, and physical irreversibility assessment. Three scenarios in healthcare, domestic, and industrial robotics show how CCD arises in practice, including a worked numerical example. A regulatory gap analysis covering the EU AI Act, the GDPR, the Machinery Regulation, and the Revised Product Liability Directive shows that all four instruments leave core CCD dimensions unaddressed.

Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models, increasingly integrates graph-based representations to enhance reasoning, retrieval, and structured decision-making. Despite rapid advances, there remains limited clarity regarding when, why, where, and what types of graph-LLM integrations are most appropriate across applications. This survey provides a concise, structured overview of the design choices underlying the integration of graphs with LLMs. We categorize existing methods based on their purpose (reasoning, retrieval, generation, recommendation), graph modality (knowledge graphs, scene graphs, interaction graphs, causal graphs, dependency graphs), and integration strategies (prompting, augmentation, training, or agent-based use). By mapping representative works across domains such as cybersecurity, healthcare, materials science, finance, robotics, and multimodal environments, we highlight the strengths, limitations, and best-fit scenarios for each technique. This survey aims to offer researchers a practical guide for selecting the most suitable graph-LLM approach depending on task requirements, data characteristics, and reasoning complexity.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation enables models to segment objects or image regions beyond fixed class sets, offering flexibility in dynamic environments. However, existing methods often rely on single-view images and struggle with spatial precision, especially under occlusions and near object boundaries. We propose SENSE, the first work on Stereo OpEN Vocabulary SEmantic Segmentation, which leverages stereo vision and vision-language models to enhance open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. By incorporating stereo image pairs, we introduce geometric cues that improve spatial reasoning and segmentation accuracy. Trained on the PhraseStereo dataset, our approach achieves strong performance in phrase-grounded tasks and demonstrates generalization in zero-shot settings. On PhraseStereo, we show a +2.9% improvement in Average Precision over the baseline method and +0.76% over the best competing method. SENSE also provides a relative improvement of +3.5% mIoU on Cityscapes and +18% on KITTI compared to the baseline work. By jointly reasoning over semantics and geometry, SENSE supports accurate scene understanding from natural language, essential for autonomous robots and Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Hand-eye calibration through visual localization is a critical capability for robotic manipulation in open-world environments. However, most deep learning-based calibration models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapting into unseen data amongst open-world scene changes, while simple rehearsal-based continual learning strategy cannot well mitigate this issue. To overcome this challenge, we propose a continual hand-eye calibration framework, enabling robots to adapt to sequentially encountered open-world manipulation scenes through spatially replay strategy and structure-preserving distillation. Specifically, a Spatial-Aware Replay Strategy (SARS) constructs a geometrically uniform replay buffer that ensures comprehensive coverage of each scene pose space, replacing redundant adjacent frames with maximally informative viewpoints. Meanwhile, a Structure-Preserving Dual Distillation (SPDD) is proposed to decompose localization knowledge into coarse scene layout and fine pose precision, and distills them separately to alleviate both types of forgetting during continual adaptation. As a new manipulation scene arrives, SARS provides geometrically representative replay samples from all prior scenes, and SPDD applies structured distillation on these samples to retain previously learned knowledge. After training on the new scene, SARS incorporates selected samples from the new scene into the replay buffer for future rehearsal, allowing the model to continuously accumulate multi-scene calibration capability. Experiments on multiple public datasets show significant anti scene forgetting performance, maintaining accuracy on past scenes while preserving adaptation to new scenes, confirming the effectiveness of the framework.

Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with persistent memory enhances interaction continuity and personalization but introduces new safety risks. Specifically, contaminated or biased memory accumulation can trigger abnormal agent behaviors. Existing evaluation methods have not yet established a standardized framework for measuring memory misevolution. This phenomenon refers to the gradual behavioral drift resulting from repeated exposure to misleading information. To address this gap, we introduce MemEvoBench, the first benchmark evaluating long-horizon memory safety in LLM agents against adversarial memory injection, noisy tool outputs, and biased feedback. The framework consists of QA-style tasks across 7 domains and 36 risk types, complemented by workflow-style tasks adapted from 20 Agent-SafetyBench environments with noisy tool returns. Both settings employ mixed benign and misleading memory pools within multi-round interactions to simulate memory evolution. Experiments on representative models reveal substantial safety degradation under biased memory updates. Our analysis suggests that memory evolution is a significant contributor to these failures. Furthermore, static prompt-based defenses prove insufficient, underscoring the urgency of securing memory evolution in LLM agents.

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper presents a fuzzy logic based reward shaping method that integrates human intuition into RL reward design. By encoding expert knowledge into adaptive and interpreable terms, fuzzy rules promote stable learning and reduce sensitivity to hyperparameters. The proposed method leverages these properties to adapt reward contributions based on the agent state, enabling smoother transitions between fast motion and precise control in challenging navigation tasks. Extensive simulation results on autonomous drone racing benchmarks show stable learning behavior and consistent task performance across scenarios of increasing difficulty. The proposed method achieves faster convergence and reduced performance variability across training seeds in more challenging environments, with success rates improving by up to approximately 5 percent compared to non fuzzy reward formulations.

This research note identifies a previously overlooked distinction between multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), and more conventional single-objective reinforcement learning (RL). It has previously been noted that the optimal policy for an MORL agent with a non-linear utility function is required to be conditioned on both the current environmental state and on some measure of the previously accrued reward. This is generally implemented by concatenating the observed state of the environment with the discounted sum of previous rewards to create an augmented state. While augmented states have been widely-used in the MORL literature, one implication of their use has not previously been reported -- namely that they require the agent to have continued access to the reward signal (or a proxy thereof) after deployment, even if no further learning is required. This note explains why this is the case, and considers the practical repercussions of this requirement.

Cooperative equilibria are fragile. When agents learn alongside each other rather than in a fixed environment, the process of learning destabilizes the cooperation they are trying to sustain: every gradient step an agent takes shifts the distribution of actions its partner will play, turning a cooperative partner into a source of stochastic noise precisely where the cooperation decision is most sensitive. We study how this co-learning noise propagates through the structure of coordination games, and find that the cooperative equilibrium, even when strongly Pareto-dominant, is exponentially unstable under standard risk-neutral learning, collapsing irreversibly once partner noise crosses the game's critical cooperation threshold. The natural response to apply distributional robustness to hedge against partner uncertainty makes things strictly worse: risk-averse return objectives penalize the high-variance cooperative action relative to defection, widening the instability region rather than shrinking it, a paradox that reveals a fundamental mismatch between the domains where robustness is applied and instability originates. We resolve this by showing that robustness should target the policy gradient update variance induced by partner uncertainty, not the return distribution. This distinction yields an algorithm whose gradient updates are modulated by an online measure of partner unpredictability, provably expanding the cooperation basin in symmetric coordination games. To unify stability, sample complexity, and welfare consequences of this approach, we introduce the Price of Paranoia as the structural dual of the Price of Anarchy. Together with a novel Cooperation Window, it precisely characterizes how much welfare learning algorithms can recover under partner noise, pinning down the optimal degree of robustness as a closed-form balance between equilibrium stability and sample efficiency.

Markerless 3D movement analysis from monocular video enables accessible biomechanical assessment in clinical and sports settings. However, most research-grade pipelines rely on GPU acceleration, limiting deployment on consumer-grade hardware and in low-resource environments. In this work, we optimize a monocular 3D biomechanics pipeline derived from the MonocularBiomechanics framework for efficient CPU-only execution. Through profiling-driven system optimization, including model initialization restructuring, elimination of disk I/O serialization, and improved CPU parallelization. Experiments on a consumer workstation (AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU) show a 2.47x increase in processing throughput and a 59.6% reduction in total runtime, with initialization latency reduced by 4.6x. Despite these changes, biomechanical outputs remain highly consistent with the baseline implementation (mean joint-angle deviation 0.35$^\circ$, $r=0.998$). These results demonstrate that research-grade vision-based biomechanics pipelines can be deployed on commodity CPU hardware for scalable movement assessment.

Modern datacenters schedule heterogeneous workloads across geo-distributed sites with diverse compute capacities, electricity prices, and thermal conditions. Compute utilization, heat generation, cooling demand, and energy consumption are tightly coupled, yet most existing schedulers abstract these effects and treat them independently. We present \textit{DataCenterGym}, a physics-grounded simulation environment for job scheduling in geo-distributed data centers, designed as a reusable testbed for future research. The simulator integrates compute queueing, building thermal dynamics, localized HVAC behavior, and temperature-dependent service degradation within a Gymnasium-compatible interface. We also develop a Hierarchical Model Predictive Control (H-MPC) scheduling algorithm that performs distributed job placement while explicitly accounting for thermal and power dynamics. Through experiments on nominal operation and workload sensitivity, we demonstrate how H-MPC improves scheduling performance relative to baseline schedulers.