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Long-horizon agentic tasks require an agent to modify an environment through a sequence of tool calls, with success determined by the final state. The standard recipe assigns a single outcome reward at the end and compares trajectories sampled for the same task. As a result, a group with no successful trajectory yields no training signal, failed attempts cannot be told apart by how close they came to completion, and turns that advance the task receive the same credit as turns that only query the environment. Prior work refines the unit of comparison from the trajectory to the step, or trains a reward model to supply intermediate signal: the former still derives its signal from final success alone, and the latter estimates it with a model. We observe that the acceptance checks that decide success can also be run on intermediate states, so progress is as verifiable as the outcome. We propose ProCredit, which turns this verified progress into credit: it reruns the acceptance checks after each turn, rewards the turn by its change in progress, and uses these rewards to assign credit both across attempts at the same task and across the turns within a trajectory. Starting from Qwen3.5 base models at three scales on AppWorld, ProCredit outperforms outcome-reward baselines and progress-based baselines in task completion rate at every scale on both test sets, exceeding the strongest outcome-reward baseline by 4.1 percentage points at 4B, and results in a second environment show the same direction of improvement. Ablations show that adding the final progress to the trajectory score alone does not improve performance: the gain comes from crediting progress to the turn where it occurs.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model action generation and environment dynamics and are mostly built on pretrained Video Diffusion Models (VDMs). In VDM-based WAMs, observations are first encoded by a VAE, and the resulting compressed latents are then processed by large video diffusion backbones to extract effective features for action generation. However, this paradigm ties WAM performance and training cost to large-scale video generation pretraining, limiting WAM efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically investigate how visual representations affect action generation in WAMs. Our results show that predictive embeddings from Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) encoders better support action generation than compressed VAE latents, with I-JEPA performing best in our encoder comparison. Based on these findings, we propose LeWAM, which conditions action generation on JEPA embeddings and models environment evolution by predicting future embeddings in the same space, without relying on a video diffusion backbone. We further find that imitation learning matches demonstrated actions but does not distinguish better actions from worse ones, even though small action deviations can greatly affect task success. To address this limitation without additional environment interaction or the human oversight required for resets and safety, we introduce Demonstration-Guided DPO (DemoDPO), an offline preference refinement stage that derives preference supervision directly from demonstrations. With only 0.4B trainable parameters, LeWAM achieves an average success rate of 92.28% on RoboTwin 2.0, comparable to that of state-of-the-art VLAs and WAMs, and maintains practical effectiveness on real-world manipulation tasks.

Web agents are usually evaluated in live environments, where environment state and judge models drift between runs, so the same checkpoint rarely reproduces the same score, making controlled studies of training phenomena impractical. We present WebMRE, an offline benchmark of 541 tasks and 5,293 steps derived from successful WebArena trajectories, with fully audited test labels and a deterministic protocol that scores a checkpoint identically on every run without any environment. Each step pairs a human oriented guide sentence with a grounded action, enabling the first study of the mutual reinforcement effect between them in web agents. Averaged over three seeds the effect holds for both models in both decoding orders and grows with scale: jointly decoding a guide lifts element selection over an action only reference by 0.9 and 0.2 points for Qwen3.5-4B and by 1.7 and 2.2 points for Qwen3.5-9B. A mediation analysis shows that the guide is a causal channel rather than commentary: forcing the gold guide as a decoding prefix lifts action accuracy from .422 to .684, another step's guide collapses it to .055, and a paraphrase that renames the target still recovers half of the gain, so the channel carries instruction meaning and not only the label string. The same channel yields an offline reward that only a replayable protocol makes computable, though optimizing it from a strong checkpoint brings no gain yet. Our fine tuned models outperform GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Gemini 3.5 Flash, run zero shot, on every offline metric.

Humanoid robots require diverse embodied experiences to acquire complex loco-manipulation and collaborative skills. However, existing humanoid data pipelines primarily focus on individual agents, while physical multi-robot collaboration remains difficult to scale due to costly hardware, dedicated spaces, and repeated resets. In this work, we introduce MATE, a Multi-Agent virtual TEleoperation platform for humanoid collaboration data collection that enables multiple geographically distributed operators to simultaneously control whole-body humanoids in a shared physics-based environment. MATE removes the need for multiple physical robots and co-located operation while preserving physically coupled interactions among humanoids, objects, and environments. Using MATE, we construct a multi-humanoid collaboration dataset comprising 24.1 hours of coordinated behavior across 2,500 joint episodes and five long-horizon tasks, including object handover, relay delivery, environment interaction, and cooperative transport. To improve learning from these interaction-rich demonstrations, we introduce EAIS, an Execution-Aligned Interaction Sampling strategy that computes sampling signals within an execution-aligned prefix and prioritizes task-progressing and interaction-critical behaviors. We evaluate MATE with representative imitation learning and vision-language-action policies across diverse collaboration tasks. Experiments demonstrate efficient data collection, effective policy learning, and zero-shot transfer from virtual demonstrations to a physical humanoid without real-world fine-tuning. Project page: https://yerik-yu.github.io/MATE/

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires an agent to explore a previously unseen environment, gather relevant information, and answer questions about the scene. Recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) together with semantic maps or scene graphs to guide exploration. However, exploration is typically driven only by local observations, while structural priors about the environment remain largely unused. We propose HFLEX-EQA, a hierarchical EQA framework that combines online scene graph construction, VLM- based planning, semantic frontier exploration, and floorplan priors. The system incrementally builds a hierarchical scene graph and an open-vocabulary occupancy map from RGB-D observations, enabling a VLM to jointly reason over the scene graph, task-relevant visual observations, exploration history, and an estimated topological floorplan. Furthermore, we introduce a room-discovery strategy that leverages the floorplan and open-vocabulary frontier semantics to guide exploration toward semantically relevant yet currently unobserved room types. We evaluate HFLEX-EQA on the OpenEQA and ExploreEQA benchmarks and demonstrate deployment on a quadruped robot in real indoor environments. Our results demonstrate the benefit of combining VLM-based hierarchical planning with structural floorplan priors for the EQA task.

We present and tackle two problems associated with deploying Foundation Models (FMs) on Embodied Agents performing navigation: 1) Training bias in FMs leading to poor personalization in unseen environments, and 2) Limited FM context length hindering success, especially on long horizon tasks. Our solution for the former involves priming the FM with human-habit data mined from the scene and our solution for the latter involves active memory management via a novel `memory head' augmentation. We first present a taxonomy of existing literature on FM-based Embodied Navigation, and highlight these limitations. We then present our approaches, Transit-Aware Planning (TAP) and MemCtrl to address the limitations. With TAP, we present real-world results in a lab environment with a Turtlebot for personalized target finding that shows an average improvement of 18% over a non-TAP baseline. On MemCtrl, we report a 6% average improvement across various embodied tasks, with 20% on long instruction subsets, all while using nearly half the context used in the baseline model. Motivated by these result, we present our stance the deployability of FM-based embodied agents in real-world environments, and highlight open research directions.

LiDAR point clouds acquired in underground environments exhibit severe geometric incompleteness due to occlusions and limited sensor viewpoints, making reliable point cloud completion challenging without large supervised datasets. We propose ZVeC, a zero-shot, instance-driven framework that reformulates scene-level completion as compositional object-level reconstruction. By decomposing a scene into semantic object instances, ZVeC reduces reconstruction ambiguity in cluttered environments while eliminating the need for scenario-specific training. Each segmented vehicle is completed independently using a depth- and 3D Gaussian-conditioned diffusion model that exploits generalized geometric priors before the reconstructed instances are recomposed into the original scene. To evaluate our approach, we construct a real-world dense LiDAR benchmark of underground parking environments. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over representative scene-level baselines in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The completed point cloud differs substantially from the measured input (average KL divergence ~ 2.1), yet reducing the input to only 1% of the original LiDAR measurements changes the completed reconstruction only marginally (KL divergence < 0.50). This demonstrates that ZVeC produces geometrically consistent completions even under extreme input sparsity.

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can struggle with manipulation tasks with complex obstacle geometries due to partial observability. These complex geometries can lead to similar visual observations or robot configurations requiring qualitatively different actions, a distinction that can be quantified using topological signatures. While motion planners with full knowledge of environment geometries and object states can reason about these signatures in planning, this information is often not known at deployment. To address this issue, we present a topology-guided visual-prompting framework that uses simulation-based planning to augment a nominal demonstration dataset and provides vision-based guidance at deployment. Our method uses a Gauss-Linking-Integral topological signature representation to capture important topological properties of the environment. Using privileged geometry information from a simulation approximation of our environment, we augment a VLA fine-tuning dataset with trajectories that move the system to a demonstrated signature and, from the new configuration, resume task execution. A vision-language model (VLM) is fine-tuned on the same dataset to both predict signatures from live camera observations and predict end-effector waypoints, which are rendered as visual prompts on the observations to guide the VLA. Across three simulated bimanual tasks and a real-world box pickup task, our method outperforms a VLA fine-tuned only on nominal demonstrations and a VLM-prompting baseline that can remove topology-relevant information from observations. On hardware, it exceeds the strongest baseline by 40% in task success. Project website: https://topology-vla.github.io.

Reward-based reinforcement learning for language models, exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), collapses an entire stochastic trajectory into a single scalar reward. This is clean and scalable, but it explores and allocates reward inefficiently: a trajectory may contain many causal decisions, recovery attempts, and environment-randomness events, yet every token or action inherits one trajectory-level advantage. We study tree-based rollout construction as a compute-allocation problem for policy-gradient estimation. Our central claim is that branches should be placed not where the policy is merely uncertain, but where an additional branch most reduces uncertainty about the policy gradient per unit of compute. From a law-of-total-variance decomposition of the local policy-gradient random variable, we derive two allocation laws: new branches reduce decision uncertainty, while repeated suffix rollouts reduce continuation uncertainty. The resulting EPIG-Tree score allocates branches using the already computed rollouts. It estimates occupancy- and score-weighted value uncertainty, along with a suffix law $n_e \propto w_e \|\nabla_θ\log π(a_e|h_e)\| σ_e / \sqrt{c_e}$. Empirically, EPIG reduces gradient MSE in cloned-state control, winning in all nine dense continuous-control environments of a 13-environment sweep and recovering the reference gradient direction near-perfectly, and it improves frozen-LLM gradient calibration relative to entropy branching. In online single-turn math, tree-local credit beats flat GRPO, while branch placement is secondary to token-level credit assignment. In online multi-turn Wordle, EPIG attains the highest final win rate (0.850), overtaking flat GRPO, which saturates early at 0.790, and entropy branching as training proceeds, confirming that the gradient-estimation advantage transfers to a stateful, large-action setting.

Radar-based navigation is appealing for its robustness to adverse conditions involving airborne particles, such as precipitation, dust, fog, and smoke, that can cause lidar-based systems to fail. Recently, direct methods that retain and use the entire radar scan rather than sparse points have improved on-road global localization performance. However, they have yet to be deployed in off-road environments or in closed-loop systems. Additionally, even direct global maps may lose information: their global nature leads to a smoothing out of viewpoint-dependent radar artifacts, which can provide pose information when mapping and localization occur along similar trajectories. This paper introduces Direct Radar Teach & Repeat (DRT&R): a direct spinning radar-based navigation stack that maximizes the amount of retained information by combining direct radar processing with local mapping. DRT&R yields state-of-the-art (SOTA) localization performance in both on-road and off-road environments. Using 344 km of on-road data and 20 km of off-road data, DRT&R is able to localize to within 4 cm in most on-road and off-road conditions, and 12 cm in geometrically degenerate and sparse environments. DRT&R is also evaluated autonomously in closed loop with an MPC controller for more than 10 km using a Clearpath Warthog off-road vehicle, demonstrating that it runs in real time and achieves SOTA tracking performance for off-road radar navigation.

Integrated deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and model predictive control (MPC) methods are increasingly used to control autonomous systems by combining their complementary capabilities. DRL learns control policies through interaction with the environment. MPC uses a system model to optimize control inputs while accounting for constraints. In DRL-MPC frameworks with shared control authority, both the DRL agent and the MPC controller each determine part of the control inputs. However, common learning formulations treat MPC as part of the environment and therefore do not explicitly account for MPC's contribution to control or its interaction with the DRL agent. This paper proposes a novel composite-gradient learning (CGL) method that integrates the MPC controller into the learning process by representing the DRL and MPC control inputs as a joint action and accounting for their interaction when updating the DRL agent during training. CGL is evaluated on two multi-class freeway traffic networks with different strengths of interaction between the DRL and MPC control inputs and it is compared with alternative methods that treat MPC as part of the environment or that only partially incorporate MPC into learning. The results show that CGL offers limited benefit under weak interaction, but learns higher-performing control policies than the alternative methods in a subset of training runs under strong interaction, although the average control-performance gains remain modest.

Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability prediction, these methods often fail to adapt to novel terrains. Even when adaptation is achieved, retaining experience from previously trained environments remains a challenge, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose a continual learning framework for traversability prediction that incrementally adapts to new terrains using a generative experience recall model. A key virtue of the proposed framework is two folds: i) retain prior experience without storing past data; and ii) incorporate the uncertainty of the generated samples from the recall model, enabling uncertainty-aware adaptation. Real-world experiments with a skid-steering robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating its ability to adapt across a series of diverse environments while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Industrial IoT environments increasingly deploy autonomous mobile robots for tasks such as material handling, product assembly, or infrastructure inspection. In such deployments, collaborative perception enables robots to share LiDAR observations and collectively construct a richer model of their environment than an individual agent could produce alone. However, industrial environments are dynamic spaces where robot positions shift continuously, network bandwidth fluctuates, and the marginal contribution of robots to perception quality varies at runtime. Existing collaborative perception approaches are designed for static participation assumptions and cannot adapt to these dynamics without sacrificing either detection precision or communication efficiency. This paper presents CoAdapt, an adaptive collaborative perception framework for IIoT robotic swarms in which a Large Language Model (LLM) serves as a runtime fusion controller, jointly deciding which robots participate in the fusion process and which fusion algorithm to apply based on the current spatial configuration and network state. The LLM reasons over structured natural language descriptions of the scene derived from raw LiDAR point clouds, requiring no taskspecific training and generalizing to unseen swarm topologies. Evaluated on the OPV2V benchmark across 25 scenarios, our approach achieves a 38% reduction in communication cost while maintaining detection precision comparable to static baseline approaches.

Humanoid robots often execute motion commands through whole-body controllers (WBCs) that track targets while maintaining balance and stability. However, most WBCs are blind to scene geometry, which can lead to collisions from imperfect target motions that are geometrically unsafe due to perception, planning, or teleoperation errors. We propose RECAL, a Robot--Environment Cross-Attention Layer that wraps a blind WBC to trade off target tracking against collision avoidance using external scene geometry. RECAL supports collision-aware tracking of floating-base and end-effector commands, including collision avoidance for held objects. It represents the robot, held objects, and environment as point clouds, using cross-attention between robot/object points and the environment to produce geometry-aware control features. In simulation, RECAL improves collision avoidance while preserving target-tracking performance across frozen-arm and adaptive-arm locomotion, object-carrying, and standing-manipulation scenarios relative to alternative geometry-aware WBC architectures. We further demonstrate the controller on a real Digit V3 humanoid robot.

Planning in complex environments requires task specifications grounded in representations that capture objects, relations, and affordances; scene graphs meet this need, but their size in large environments hinders efficient planning. While task-aware pruning and hierarchical abstractions have been explored, a general, task-centric formalization of what constitutes a sufficient scene graph for planning remains open. This paper provides such a formalization by modeling planning over scene graphs within an information-spaces framework through the definition of scene graph transition systems and relevant action semantics for navigation and manipulation. We then introduce derived scene graphs via information mappings that merge and prune nodes and induce quotient transition systems augmented with motion primitives to capture higher-level actions over merged graph nodes. Sufficiency is characterized by two conditions: (i) the information mapping yields a deterministic quotient, and (ii) the task is well-posed over derived traces, ensuring plans found on the derived model are feasible on the maximal system. We illustrate the framework using a task over an example environment, showing both sufficient and insufficient reduced scene graphs.

Software development follows an implementation-verification loop in which developers or agents iteratively revise an implementation until an evaluator, such as a test suite, accepts it. The evaluator checks the implementation against a set of requirements under a model of the deployment environment. Yet even a formal proof that the implementation satisfies the requirements under the model cannot guarantee acceptable behavior after deployment. Requirements only approximate stakeholder intent, and the model only approximates the real deployment environment. We call these together - requirement gap and model gap - the two-gap framework, which unifies the main failure modes of agentic software engineer-ing: reward hacking exploits omissions in the requirements or model, while hallucination widens the gaps by fabricating requirements or environment assumptions. Because neither gap can generally be certified closed in an open, changing world, the goal shifts from closing them to continuously narrowing them. We therefore propose an assurance-revision loop that uses deployment evidence to revise the requirements, model, or evaluator when stakeholders reject the resulting behavior. We then cast assured agentic development as a resource-allocation problem over human judgment, agent capability, and compute. The two principal bottlenecks mirror the two gaps: human judgment for the requirement gap and faithful, costly evaluation for the model gap. Reality remains the final verifier: acceptable behavior under actual deployment conditions is the ultimate test, while predeployment evaluations remain proxies for it.

The integration of graphs with Goal-Conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (GCHRL) has received increasing attention, as graphs naturally encode task hierarchies for effective subgoal sampling. However, existing methods often overlook intrinsic connectivity information, failing to fully leverage the underlying topology for efficient learning. Most graph-based GCHRL methods use the graph as a stochastic sampling tool rather than as an environmental model that encodes connectivity and state-accessibility information. This limitation is particularly acute in quasimetric environments, where the inherent asymmetry of state transitions poses a fundamental challenge to stable policy learning and robust path planning. In this paper, we address these problems by introducing a state connectivity model designed to predict pairwise state connectivity strength in asymmetric environments. We transform these connectivity strengths into scalar auxiliary dense rewards, providing continuous guidance across multiple hierarchical levels. We demonstrate that our proposed framework, Graph-Guided Quasimetric Dense Reward (G2QDR), can theoretically be integrated into any existing GCHRL architecture, and the state connectivity model is efficiently implemented via a neural network trained on a directed state graph generated during exploration. Empirical results across a wide range of sparse reward environments indicate that, in general, G2QDR can enhance the performance of baseline GCHRL approaches with acceptable computational overhead.

Diffusion-based robot policies have become widely used in robotic manipulation, where they are typically trained with behavior cloning. However, policies trained purely from demonstrations are limited by the quality and coverage of the available data. Reinforcement learning can further improve the performance of these pretrained policies through interaction. A common approach is to use policy-gradient methods that formulate diffusion-policy fine-tuning as an outer environment MDP together with an inner denoising MDP. However, existing methods typically assign the same environment-level credit to all denoising steps used to construct an action chunk, without distinguishing which intermediate decisions contributed most to the final return. We introduce Denoising Intermediate Advantage (DIA), a policy-gradient method that learns a value function over partially denoised actions and uses it to construct a denoising level advantage for each step of the generative process. DIA combines this inner credit signal with the standard environment-level PPO advantage, providing state-dependent credit throughout the denoising chain. Across Robomimic, FurnitureBench, Franka Kitchen, and D3IL, DIA consistently improves final performance over existing diffusion-policy fine-tuning methods. Beyond final reward, DIA reaches successful states more efficiently and can shift farther from the pretrained behavior distribution, enabling it to discover more effective and efficient task-level strategies and subtask sequences that baseline methods fail to reach.

Physical-layer authentication (PLA) in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) is challenged by severe Doppler shifts, long delays, and fast channel variations, which cause distribution shifts and degrade conventional learning methods. Existing PLA schemes often rely on single features or generalize poorly to unseen environments. This paper proposes a secure adaptive framework for authentication in multi-zone networks (SAFA-MZ), a causal meta-learning framework for distributed PLA (DPLA) in NTNs. First, we design a multi-feature fingerprint that combines spatial, angular, combiner, subspace, and Doppler-delay features. The fingerprint is adaptive and distributed, as it fuses heterogeneous physical-layer features and measurements from multiple aerial nodes. Second, we formulate a structural causal model (SCM) to capture the relations among design choices, environmental factors, extracted features, and authentication outcomes. Third, we develop a model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) strategy with invariant risk minimization (IRM) and causal consistency regularization for fast adaptation to unseen NTN environments with few labeled samples. Fourth, we propose a two-stage authentication scheme that performs local recognition and activates time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) localization with a graph attention (GAT) network only when needed, which reduces backhaul overhead. Simulations show that SAFA-MZ achieves 92% accuracy and 96% AUC, outperforming centralized deep learning and single-feature baselines across diverse environments.

World models are increasingly used as policy-in-the-loop imagination environments, where reliable rollouts require fine-grained controllability with respect to low-level robot actions. A key obstacle to scaling such models in robotics is that actions are not a universal language in pixel space: changes in visual environment, camera view, robot placement, or embodiment alter how the same numerical action manifests visually, leading to conflicting supervision under mixed training and brittle generalization at deployment. We introduce SyncWorld, an action-conditioned world model that serves as a zero-shot simulator across unseen environments without any additional training. SyncWorld leverages a visual calibration episode---paired frames and actions that showcase all the controllable degrees of freedom---to specify the setup-specific Action--Visual Mapping in context. Training with visual calibration contexts teaches the model to interpret actions through visual evidence and to leverage interaction history when explicit calibration is unavailable. Experiments show that SyncWorld can accurately simulate action outcomes in previously unseen settings, and that its capability of simulating rollouts enables test-time policy improvement without training.

How can vision-language-action (VLA) models adapt to new environments where world dynamics shift? While recent research has combined world modeling and action prediction to improve VLA performance, existing methods largely rely on pretraining on static datasets, without mechanisms for active adaptation at deployment time. As a result, these models often fail to generalize when deployed in unseen scenarios with novel object configurations or dynamics. We present WorldAgen, a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction while enabling Test-Time Training (TTT) to adapt to new environments. WorldAgen employs a shared Transformer backbone with two heads: (1) a world model head that predicts future states from past state-action trajectories, and (2) an agent model head that predicts actions conditioned on task instructions. We design a Mixed Unidirectional Attention Mask to separate these two models. During test time, WorldAgen samples exploratory actions, collects ground-truth state transitions, and performs lightweight TTT updates to refine its world model. This adaptation improves the model's understanding of the environment and leads to more accurate action predictions. Experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks demonstrate that our baseline model achieves comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to current state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, with TTT on a small number of samples, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art models, highlighting the effectiveness of adapting world models at inference time.

We present FrogNano, a 4B coding agent designed to tackle software engineering (SWE) tasks efficiently and effectively, even under resource-constrained environments. It is post-trained exclusively via RL on around 1,500 SWE environments with synthetic tasks. A key ingredient for improving performance is an online task synthesis pipeline that creates tasks calibrated to the frontier of learnability for the current checkpoint. This report provides evidence that competitive small coding agents can be trained with synthetic tasks alone, without traditional distillation from larger models, and that generating tasks at the learnability frontier of the current agent is important. We report details on the training methodology, evaluations across diverse environments, and in-depth analyses, serving as a foundation for our ongoing exploration of lightweight yet capable coding agents that can run on minimal hardware.

This work introduces an alternative view of efficient exploration and studies its theoretical and empirical implications in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Specifically, we define efficient explorers as agents that prioritize generating generalizable experience, i.e., data that supports learning models capable of predicting and adapting across the environment. This allows us to analyze efficient exploration through the lens of prediction and generalization. Theoretically, we demonstrate that optimally efficient explorers naturally schedule their trajectories to visit the most informative and learnable regions first. Empirically, we show that optimizing for these agents gives rise to an automatic curriculum of progressively more complex behaviors, even in relatively simple environments. These results indicate that pursuing this purely intrinsic objective alone is enough to drive the emergence of highly sophisticated behaviors. We believe that this new framework provides a principled mechanism by which agent-environment systems may sustain an open-ended process of increasingly complex behavior without external rewards, tasks, or objectives.

Flying humanoids are expected to perform tasks in diverse environments, while their existing locomotion is mainly limited to aerial flight and ground walking. The capability to move in complex three-dimensional space can greatly expand their application range. For such walking motion on ceilings and similar anti-gravity environments, whole-body MPC is effective. However, the discontinuous changes in dynamic structure accompanying contact switching during walking can induce thrust spikes, resulting in control instability. Therefore, in this work, we propose and implement a real-time whole-body MPC framework for anti-gravity bipedal walking. First, we formulate whole-body MPC using the time derivative of thrust, namely thrust-rate, as the control input. This formulation guarantees continuity of the thrust trajectory during contact switching while preserving the sparse structure of the optimal control problem for fast computation. Second, we address the lack of natural support forces in anti-gravity environments. We introduce lower bounds on the foot-normal component of the contact force, and smoothly transfer them during the doublesupport phase. Finally, we implement the proposed framework and demonstrate anti-gravity walking by a flying humanoid through simulation and a hardware experiment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of multi-contact whole-body MPC for a transformable aerial robot and walking by a flying humanoid beyond the ground.

In numerical signal processing for electroacoustic composition, the progressive loss of specific development and research environments caused by the increasing use of digital market tools has favoured the dominance of the closed-architecture audio processor model. This model, while powerful, envisions the possibility of describing output data about its perceived characteristics, but at the cost of ignoring its internal process and interacting systems, which become complex, powerful environments but closed in an inscrutable black box, a loss we must consider. Any digital signal processing technique tells a story. Just as the words of a language incorporate social, historical and technical polysemic layers, a signal processor has its own story of implementation, a gradual technological achievement with its inevitable aesthetic consequences. Through the looking-glass of literature, one can access those environments with renewed awareness by reestablishing a scientific method and an attitude to research. In this specific case, starting from the case study of Manfred Schroeder's historical reverbs, we illustrate the process of building analytical evaluation tools, as well as practical implementation, at the basis of a conscious study path.

Accurate cloud resource forecasting is essential for proactive resource provisioning, maintaining Quality of Service (QoS), and reducing operational costs in dynamic cloud environments. The existing forecasting approaches predominantly estimate future CPU workload directly from historical resource traces, which often overlook the relationship between customer service demand and subsequent resource consumption. This study proposes a two-stage integrated forecasting model that explicitly models this dependency by first forecasting customer service requests, expressed as Transactions Per Second (TPS), and subsequently estimating future CPU workload from the TPS forecast. Both the forecasting component and resource prediction component employed the XGBoost model within a cascaded learning architecture, complemented by adaptive online retraining using an expanding-window strategy to address concept drift in continuously evolving cloud workloads. The proposed work was evaluated using real-world traces collected from a private cloud environment comprising ten applications. Experimental results demonstrate robust forecasting performance by achieving Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE) below $7\%$ for most applications, with the best-performing application achieving an MAE of $0.7372$, RMSE of $1.1866$, SMAPE of $3.57\%$, and an R2 of $0.9185$. Horizon-wise drift analysis confirmed stable recursive forecasting behavior with controlled error accumulation across a 60-step prediction horizon. Compared with the conventional direct CPU forecasting method, the proposed two-stage integrated model gives improved forecasting robustness, computational efficiency, and interpretability, making it well-suited for proactive resource management and intelligent auto-scaling in cloud computing environments.

World models are an emerging paradigm in representation learning in which an agent jointly learns state-action dynamics and observation models from offline trajectory data, enabling multi-step planning and trajectory prediction with uncertainty estimates. They have shown strong results in robotics and game environments, but, to the best of our knowledge, have not previously been applied to the space domain. This paper introduces a world model-based approach to cooperative and non-cooperative spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations. First, we introduce an open-source, JAX-based International Space Station (ISS) docking environment supporting parallel GPU simulation of spacecraft orbit and attitude dynamics, generating the thousands of state-action transitions that world model training requires. Second, we introduce Out-of-this-World-Model, a transformer-based world model that encodes relative kinematic states and body-fixed camera imagery into a latent state and predicts its evolution under commanded thrusts and torques using one-step flow matching. It produces a distribution over future observations, capturing stochastic dynamics and per-timestep uncertainty, and outperforms DreamerV3-style posterior-correction baselines with fewer trainable parameters and hyperparameters. Third, we apply the approach to a capsule autonomously docking with the ISS under keep-out-zone constraints, demonstrating improved sample efficiency and task performance over reinforcement learning baselines (53% versus 29% docking success across ports), better out-of-distribution generalization (on held-out ports the world model more than doubles baseline success, 40% versus 17%), and detection of anomalous objects encountered during approach with 98% classification accuracy. We open-source the simulation environment and model architecture to enable further study of this paradigm.

The performance of an LLM agent depends on the scaffold around a frozen model. A common way to improve that scaffold is to use a coding agent as an optimizer: it reads current scores and traces and iteratively edits the source, producing a new candidate each round. Each edit is chosen according to a belief about how the environment will respond: what went wrong, and which change should help. That belief is typically implicit. It lives in the coding agent's reasoning on the current call, or remains latent in its parameters, rather than as something written down. Later calls therefore see scores and traces, but they do not use that belief. We introduce Belief-Calibrated Optimization (BCO), a method that writes that belief down as a persistent in-context document and continually revises that document as new candidates are evaluated. The resulting document is a world model: the current account of how the environment responds to edits. Added to an otherwise standard loop, BCO reaches a higher train passrate than a matched control that lacks only the world model, on five benchmarks spanning memory QA, tool-use QA, code-as-action app agents, and terminal agents. The gap remains on every held-out split, which is not used to select the candidate. After a target-model swap, in which the frozen model is replaced and the scaffold is not, the selected BCO scaffold leads on the tasks we test, except where context-window overruns leave it unfinished. An offline ablation then asks whether that gap comes from what the world model says. A fresh predictor given the accumulated document forecasts how the environment will respond more accurately than predictors given either no document or a same-form copy whose content has been falsified. The comparison indicates that the document carries reusable information in its content, not only in its form.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide useful priors for interactive decision-making, but using them directly as policies is expensive and brittle: they must be queried at every step, do not improve from environment interaction, and can repeat systematic errors. We study how to learn a cheap autonomous policy from an online, expensive, and imperfect but informative VLM teacher. We propose SAGE (Selective Agent Guidance via Entropy), a framework that queries a VLM only when the learner is uncertain, executes the suggested action during training, and distills guidance into a lightweight Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy. Because VLM advice is not always reliable, SAGE can weight teacher-action distillation using environment-derived advantages rather than treating all suggestions as equally useful. Across sparse-reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks, SAGE learns policies that act without VLM guidance at evaluation time and improves over unguided RL in several environments, including settings where the learned policy exceeds its VLM teacher. The results show that selective guidance is most beneficial when the VLM can help the agent discover high-reward trajectories, and less useful when unguided exploration already succeeds or teacher actions do not lead to informative experience. SAGE also reduces VLM usage by prompting the teacher only on a fraction of training steps and requiring no VLM calls at deployment. Overall, our results suggest that VLMs don't need to be used as fixed policies to be useful; they can instead act as temporary, imperfect sources of guidance whose value is tested and internalized through interaction.

Vision Language Models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in interpreting static visual artifacts, but modern data analysis is inherently dynamic, requiring the active interrogation of interactive environments. Existing benchmarks are predominantly constrained to static imagery and one-shot question answering and fail to capture the epistemic demands of this domain, where evidence is frequently occluded, distributed across linked views, or conditionally revealed through user agency. In this paper, we introduce InSight, a benchmark for agentic claim verification over interactive visualizations. The dataset consists of 21,349 claims derived from human-authored analytical narratives and grounded in fully interactive web-based environments. Agents must navigate these environments to determine whether a natural language claim is supported, refuted or not verifiable given the available evidence. Unlike traditional evaluations, InSight treats interaction traces as intrinsic proxies for reasoning, enabling a rigorous audit of how models seek and synthesize visual evidence. We evaluate state-of-the-art models, revealing that interactive verification remains a non-trivial challenge. We release InSight at https://github.com/maevehutch/insight.