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How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

Linear attention replaces softmax attention's growing KV cache with a fixed recurrent state, but this compression limits exact state tracking and long-context memory. We introduce \emph{Semidirect Fourier Delta Attention} (SFDA), a phase-controlled generalization of Kimi Delta Attention that replaces real diagonal decay with block-rotational Fourier control: $$S_t=(I-β_t k_tk_t^*)Λ_tS_{t-1}+β_tk_tv_t^*, \qquad Λ_t=\diag(α_t\odot e^{iθ_t}).$$ Our main result is a constructive chunk-WY factorization for products $A_t=Λ_t-u_tr_t^*$, giving $$A_t\cdots A_1=Γ_t-Y_tM_tW_t^*$$ with rank growth bounded inside fixed chunks. This yields an exact affine chunk transfer, formal stability and complexity bounds, and a compact characterization of phase-plus-low-rank memory. We verify the algebra numerically and show in toy state-tracking experiments that SFDA learns cyclic memory where the phase-disabled KDA baseline remains near chance. Fused kernels and large-scale language-model comparisons are left to future work.

Forecasting particulate matter (PM10) requires both station-scale accuracy and continuous spatial fields, especially during severe dust storms. Chemical transport models (CTMs) provide gridded forecasts but retain local biases, whereas graph neural networks (GNNs) track monitoring sites well at short lead times but do not produce gridded outputs. Here we present OmniPM-Net, a Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP)-based fusion model that reconciles these two forecast types within a shared spatial representation. A terrain-aware Gaussian set convolution lifts irregular GNN station forecasts onto a regular grid, where a multi-scale Spatial Source Attention (SSA) module blends them with Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) forecasts; a shared omni-query readout then decodes this representation into consistent PM10 predictions at either stations or grid cells over a 108 h horizon. Evaluated across 1,618 air-quality monitoring stations throughout China over the full year of 2024, OmniPM-Net matches the station-level accuracy of the stronger GNN baseline (mean absolute error 21.14 versus 22.00 ug/m3) and reduces the CAMS mean absolute error by 30%, while simultaneously delivering the gridded fields that the discrete GNN cannot. Its clearest gains are in the high-concentration tail, where the 90th-percentile MAE falls by 9% relative to the GNN and 25% relative to CAMS, and during dust episodes, where it improves categorical detection skill while tracking the evolving spatial trajectory.

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.

Indoor vision-based localization systems are affected by detection noise, occlusions, and limited camera coverage, leading to uncertainty at multiple stages of the pipeline. While multi-camera data fusion is widely used to mitigate these issues, it is typically treated as a black-box component and evaluated solely end-to-end, obscuring its mechanistic contributions. To address this gap, this work investigates whether explicitly characterizing single-camera localization errors can be leveraged to calibrate and optimize multi-camera data fusion. We introduce a measurement-calibrated fusion approach that integrates component-wise error quantification, specifically isolating homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. A component-wise evaluation is conducted to quantify error contributions from homography calibration, human detection, and motion tracking. Experimental results show that data fusion improves localization accuracy compared to single-camera baselines. While measurement-calibrated fusion provides only limited improvement in absolute accuracy over standard fusion, it substantially reduces trajectory variance and improves motion smoothness, which are critical for applications requiring stable and continuous motion estimates. These results highlight the value of explicit error characterization when designing data fusion strategies for vision-based indoor positioning systems.

Curvature of planar curves serves as a key regularization term for computing second-order minimal paths, due to its tight relevance to desirable geometric properties such as smoothness, rigidity, and elasticity. In this paper, we tackle a more challenging problem in computational physics and geometry problem: tracking minimal paths whose curvature is constrained by arbitrary upper and lower bounds. For that purpose, we propose a new curvature-bounded geodesic model, developed under the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) partial differential equation (PDE) framework. It provides strong geometric control over minimal paths by enforcing curvature range constraints, whose paths are smooth and of bounded curvature limitation. We also present a discretization scheme for the Hamiltonian and the HJB PDE incorporating curvature bounds, allowing efficient solver for estimating numerical solutions to the model. Finally, we illustrate the capability of the proposed curvature-bounded geodesic model in applications of robot path planning and curvilinear structures tracking from images. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed curvature-bounded geodesic model serves as a powerful and robust tool for finding satisfactory paths.

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

As a long-standing challenge in robotic manipulation, stable and efficient grasping in cluttered environments is of great importance in industrial settings. While recent studies have achieved relatively high success rates in grasping from clutter, there remain few mature solutions for more demanding tasks such as sequential object search and sorting. This work addresses sequential object picking in cluttered environments based on the Cluttered Environment Picking Benchmark (CEPB) and presents our solution to the Pick-in-Clutter track of the 10th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC) at ICRA 2025. The task poses several key challenges. First, it requires robust and collision-aware grasping with high success rates across a diverse set of objects, including both rigid and deformable ones. Second, it demands efficient search for target objects, which places stringent requirements on the decluttering and searching strategies of the solution. To address the above challenges, we design an integrated hardware-software pipeline that combines object recognition, decluttering, and multi-modal grasping. The main contributions include the hardware design of a multifunctional gripper and novel representations for object distribution and occlusion relationships in cluttered space. This pipeline enables efficient recognition, search, and sequential grasping of objects in clutter, demonstrating strong performance in both laboratory tests and competition scenarios, and ultimately achieving second place in the Pick-in-Clutter track of the RGMC 2025.

Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

We propose that value -- the quantity goal-directed agents create, destroy, and exchange -- is a lawful structural quantity in the same category as information. Following Shannon's method, we make one ruthless abstraction: value is the rate at which an agent converts a resource into goal-progress, relative to a frame fixed by its goal. A scale-invariance axiom forces a logarithmic measure, $V=\sum_i k_i\ln e_i$; compounding of a reinvested resource forces the same form via the ergodicity argument of Peters (2019) -- kin routes, a consistency check, not an over-determination. We derive a coding theorem of value, $ΔG \le I(X;Y)$; realized value decomposes as $G=D(q\|r)-D(q\|p)$. For populations, value is frame-relative while price is frame-independent; a fleet that pools its resource and fuses its perception inherits the ceiling $G_{\rm fleet}\le I(X;Y_{1:m})\le H(X)$ (a corollary; an earlier sum-form claim was wrong and is corrected in v5). A dynamical layer yields an is/ought asymmetry from which alignment emerges as a control-stability condition. We test the single-frame laws on live language models, pre-registered: perception mutual information tracks realized capability (Spearman $ρ=0.977$ over 30 model$\times$domain points); out-of-sample $ΔG$ tracks $I(X;Y)$, shape-invariant across four task shapes ($n=42$, slope $0.953$); over-confidence is measurable dissipation. The stated continuation gate has since been run (pre-registered, frontier-model population): the coupled capacity-region prediction -- growth-gap law, coalition submodularity with an XOR synergy control, joint ceiling, Kelly selection -- is confirmed within its frozen bands on real agents; the mean-field residual law $\|Vg\|/γ$ found no domain (populations hold no goal dispersion) and is retired to its mathematical scope. The contribution is the unification and the governance mapping that follows.

Despite recent advances, Vision Language Models (VLMs) still struggle to grasp the dynamics of the world. We note that the ability to reason about a 4D scene, challenging in itself, is further complicated by two factors. First, VLMs observe motion indirectly via its projection onto 2D images. Second, existing datasets fail to disentangle object and camera motion. To address these challenges, we present a QA generation pipeline that focuses on motion-related scene understanding. We take particular care of the entanglement of camera and object motion by casting tracking in both the traditional way and in a novel, fixed reference system, dubbed True-Motion Tracking, which provides an intuitive description of motion. From this pipeline, we generate a large-scale training dataset of 400K samples, 4DP-QA (4D Perception QA), and a 2.2K-sample benchmark, 4DP-QA-Bench. Training existing models on our dataset yields performance improvements on an external benchmark, validating the effectiveness of our method.

While recent advancements in generative AI have substantially accelerated static 3D model creation workflows, the synthesis of category-agnostic 3D animations remains a significant bottleneck in 3D asset production. Current methods for category-agnostic animation generation exhibit critical limitations in inference speed, motion quality, and adherence to textual prompts, thereby leaving the process dependent on labor-intensive manual artistry. To address these challenges, this paper introduces AnimaSpark, a novel pipeline for category-agnostic 3D animation generation. Our approach is motivated by the key insight that for many fundamental motions in the 3D world, the corresponding joint transformations can often be effectively modeled within a two-dimensional subspace. The pipeline begins by rendering a rigged static 3D model into multi-layered image representations of its mesh and skeleton, which are subsequently fed into a video generation model. We then employ a keypoint tracking algorithm on the generated video to capture the motion of the skeletal joints projected onto the camera's viewing plane. In the final stage, we distill the planar translations and rotations from these tracked keypoints and lift them from the 2D domain into 3D space to animate the character. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that our method achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art techniques across key metrics, including text-motion alignment, quality of motion, and computational efficiency.

Real-world robotic manipulation tasks often involve forceful interactions with the environment, such as using tools of varying weights, transporting objects with different masses, and performing contact-rich tasks like table wiping. Previous learning-based approaches typically employ imitation learning policies that output target end-effector poses tracked by low-level impedance controllers. In these systems, forceful interactions are either implicitly realized through steady-state tracking errors or explicitly commanded using wrist force/torque or tactile sensors. However, implicit approaches generalize poorly across object weights, while explicit approaches require specialized hardware and increase system complexity. In this work, we propose IMPACT, a framework that decouples these forceful tasks into task-planning and internal-model-based predictive control. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves higher success rates and improved generalization to unseen object weights, as well as better safety and energy efficiency.

We propose a fast and correspondence-free local point cloud registration method that leverages geometric surface structure and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embeddings. The method represents point clouds as continuous functions with point-wise anisotropic kernels that encode local geometry. This formulation improves alignment along surface normals while relaxing alignment along tangential directions. To solve the resulting registration problem, we propose a second-order on-manifold optimization scheme with approximate Riemannian Hessians, achieving a speedup of up to 10x over the first-order solvers used in prior correspondence-free RKHS-based methods. We demonstrate improved frame-to-frame LiDAR and RGB-D tracking accuracy across diverse indoor and outdoor datasets. On a LiDAR tracking registration task in the driving domain, we achieve a reduction of $>55\%$ in both translational and rotational drift in challenging feature-sparse environments. On object registration benchmarks, we show improved robustness over ICP-based methods and further gains when refining global initialization, particularly under moderate misalignment.

Understanding tactical organisation in association football requires identifying in-possession match phases that are shaped by evolving tactical intentions rather than by spatial patterns alone. This study proposes an intention-driven framework for identifying phases from tracking data. Seven German Bundesliga matches recorded at 25 Hz with TRACAB were analysed. A hierarchical model was defined with three tactical intentions (Invade Opponent Space, Keep Possession, Scoring) and six phases (Build Up, Progression, Counter Attack, Maintenance, Sustained Threat, Finishing). A Temporal Graph Attention Network (T-GAN) combined frame-level player-interaction graphs, contextual features, and Transformer-based temporal modelling. Performance was evaluated using frame-level F1 and temporal Intersection over Union (tIoU). T-GAN achieved macro-average frame-level F1 scores of 0.87 at the intention level, 0.76 for invasion-related phases, and 0.79 for scoring phases. After filtering, mean class-wise tIoU increased from 0.44 to 0.67 for intentions and from 0.40 to 0.57 for phases, showing that sequence-level evaluation captured fragmentation and boundary errors missed by frame-level metrics. Model comparisons indicated that Transformer-based sequence modelling drove coherent segmentation, while graph-based relational modelling was most beneficial for Counter Attack. Misalignment analysis revealed common sequence level misalignments, mainly Build Up/Progression ambiguity, Build Up/Maintenance confusion, Counter Attack/Progression inconsistency, and shortened pre-shot Finishing segments. Overall, the framework translates tracking data into tactically interpretable phase representations for automated annotation, tactical analysis, and playing-style profiling.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a must-acquire skill for modern foundation model systems to operate effectively and safely in the real world. Recent works have explored honing ToM via post-training; however, we show that such progress is confounded by a pervasive "shortcut" issue: tasks can reach up to 99% accuracy by simply exploiting spurious causal correlations, leading to a false sense of ToM. Motivated by this, we first develop a framework to systematically examine ToM datasets for shortcuts and provide guidance for future development. We find that questions reducible to pure state tracking, such as "belief," are especially shortcut-prone compared to mind questions, such as "intention," where reasoning beyond tracking is required. Using four shortcut-free datasets across three ToM contexts, we then comprehensively study whether Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with verifiable rewards and explicit reasoning chains, called Thinking-RFT, elevates ToM beyond Supervised Fine-Tuning, or SFT. Our key findings are as follows. First, Thinking-RFT effectively improves ToM in all scenarios, with a 6% improvement over SFT, particularly in complex higher-order reasoning, with a 10% improvement over SFT, and multimodal cases, with a 7% improvement over SFT. It also generalizes notably better to unseen domains and higher-order queries while being more robust to counterfactuals. Second, ToM benefits specifically from the joint effect of reasoning and RL: Thinking-RFT outperforms Non-Thinking-RFT by 7% on average. Third, RFT works by learning to ground its reasoning on anchor cues, such as keywords and state changes, that correspond to causal factors. We believe our study is useful for developing effective and robust ToM post-training datasets and advancing critical ToM capabilities.

Adaptive beamforming is a cornerstone of array signal processing, yet its performance often collapses in the face of complex, rapidly changing interference. When interferers appear or move unpredictably, conventional estimators encounter a fundamental memory trade-off: short windows enable rapid tracking but suffer from high estimation variance, while long windows provide stable rejection but fail to adapt to shifts. This challenge is resolved by introducing the Universal Switching Beamformer (USB), which integrates competitive sequential prediction into the beamforming architecture. By employing a linear transition diagram, the USB implicitly maintains an exponentially large family of candidate covariance histories and dynamically re-weights them based on their cumulative output power. This mechanism allows the beamformer to automatically vary its effective memory length without explicit change detection or heuristic parameter tuning. A theoretical upper bound is proven on the regret relative to an omniscient oracle that selects the best piecewise-stationary covariance model in hindsight. Extensive simulations and experiments on the SwellEx-96 dataset demonstrate that the USB achieves the agility of short-window estimators and the precision of long-term integration, providing a principled solution for tracking highly non-stationary scenes.

We introduce a dataset and benchmark for cross-view urban traffic perception built from synchronized ego-centric bicycle videos and aerial drone videos recorded at real urban intersections. The benchmark targets two linked tasks: cross-view identity matching between street-view and drone-view object tracks, and ego-to-bird's-eye-view prediction using aerial supervision. In contrast to prior urban driving and V2X datasets, our benchmark provides identity-level alignment across radically different viewpoints together with standardized evaluation, annotation tooling, and baseline implementations. This setting is motivated by intersection-centric traffic analysis, where identity preservation, local interactions, and global spatial structure must be reasoned about jointly across views. We evaluate methods at both the track and frame levels, including cross-view ID precision/recall/IDF1, near--far breakdowns, temporal stability, and consistency metrics. We also provide baseline results for wedge-based cross-view matching and for three BEV prediction baselines: inverse perspective mapping, a MonoLayout-style learned baseline, and a regression baseline. The results show that the benchmark is feasible but challenging: cross-view matching achieves strong recall yet remains limited by over-assignment and temporal inconsistency, while ego-to-BEV prediction benefits from aerial supervision but remains far from saturated under lightweight monocular sensing. We hope that this benchmark will support future research on cross-view perception, urban scene alignment, and ego-to-global traffic understanding.

Decoding emotional states from neural signals has been typically framed as a discrete, single-label classification task based on emotionally stable stimuli, a formulation that oversimplifies the continuous, fluid, and co-occurring nature of human affect. This study reconceptualizes emotion decoding by adopting a multi-target regression framework to track multiple overlapping emotional dimensions as continuous trajectories over time. Leveraging the robust generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we extracted fine-grained, continuous sentiment profiles from a naturalistic auditory narrative, Alice in Wonderland, to serve as scalable proxies for subjective affect from human fMRI dataset. Departing from standard classification paradigms or mass-univariate subtractive contrasts that filter out network dynamics, we leverage regularized and kernel-based machine learning algorithms as continuous estimators to track the magnitude of macroscale neural state variations. We demonstrate that models trained on temporal snapshots of Dynamic Functional Connectivity (DFC) significantly outperform static region-of-interest (ROI) amplitude representations, effectively capturing continuous emotional trajectories under rapidly fluctuating narrative input. Furthermore, by implementing graph-theoretical Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, we deconstruct the underlying predictive features to reveal highly interpretable, emotion-specific topological configurations. Collectively, these results highlight the utility of LLM-automated annotation in affective neuroscience and provide compelling empirical evidence for psychological constructionist frameworks, demonstrating that dynamic, distributed network interactions offer superior explanatory power over strictly locationist accounts of emotion.

For a humanoid robot to be deployed in the real world, the choice of command space (i.e., the interface between task planning and whole-body control) is crucial. Existing whole-body controllers typically demand dense kinematic or spatial references that planners struggle to synthesize from task semantics. We instead propose a compact, explicit interface that is intuitive, general, modular, and expressive enough for diverse loco-manipulation skills. To this end, we introduce HANDOFF, a single humanoid whole-body controller that follows this interface and is distilled via multi-teacher KL distillation under a context-conditioned gating scheme into a mixture-of-experts student from three complementary specialists: whole-body motion tracking with safety-filtered data, locomotion, and fall-recovery. On the Unitree G1, HANDOFF matches state-of-the-art velocity tracking and offers one of the largest robust manipulation workspaces. We further demonstrate hardware feasibility through multiple natural-language-driven task roll-outs, powered by a VLM-driven agentic planner with no task-specific data or controller fine-tuning.

A policy tuned for one robot often behaves differently on another, whether due to the sim-to-real gap, unknown payloads, or the differing dynamics of two instances of the same robot. In contact-rich, dynamic manipulation, even small motion discrepancies can result in failure to track reference motion, since they disrupt the timing and modes of contact. Common remedies, such as domain randomization or system identification, either produce overly conservative task policies or require data that must be recollected for each robot or payload. We introduce the Torque Adaptation Module (TAM), a learned module that adapts the torque commands sent to the robot to match the behavior of an ideal robot. TAM operates between the low-level controller that tracks the policy's actions and the robot's torque interface. It includes a history encoder that embeds proprioceptive history into a latent state and a torque adaptor that computes residual torque corrections. Because TAM depends only on proprioceptive history and not on policy observations, or the action space, the same TAM weights can be reused to adapt policies with different action spaces (joint targets, end-effector targets, or direct torques). The policies themselves do not need to be trained with domain randomization of robot parameters. Instead, we offload the need for domain randomization to TAM by training it entirely in randomized simulation, using multi-robot pretraining followed by a robot-specific fine-tuning step that still requires no real-robot data. We evaluate TAM zero-shot on a real Franka Panda robot across dynamic manipulation tasks that include a vision-based box pushing policy (from RL), a flip policy (from BC), and an MPC ball-on-plate balancing. Our experiments show that TAM improves zero-shot real-robot execution compared to online system identification and RMA baselines and enables robust dynamic manipulation performance.

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control requires solving a constrained nonlinear program (NLP) in real-time at every sampling instant, a computational bottleneck that limits deployment on resource-constrained hardware or at high sampling rates. We address this challenge for the broad class of input-affine nonlinear systems to show that the optimal control move can be approximated by a state-dependent quadratic program (QP) whose cost parameters depend on the current state and reference. We propose a single-network residual-corrector architecture: a state-dependent analytic baseline provides initial QP parameters, and the network learns only the corrections needed to match the full NLP solution; the QP is solved by a differentiable interior-point layer, guaranteeing constraint satisfaction for the first control action. The network is trained offline on data generated by an NLP solver using a hybrid loss that combines supervised imitation and KKT-residual penalties. We validate the approach on a three-link planar robotic arm with Cartesian end-effector tracking, demonstrating orders-of-magnitude speedup over the NLP solver while maintaining comparable tracking performance.

How does a system that merely predicts the world come to distinguish its own causal influence from everything else? We trace this transition in a minimal 192-dimensional GRU through 40 controlled experiments arranged as a developmental sequence, adding components one at a time and tracking whether the system can distinguish self-caused from world-caused changes. The developmental path reveals four conditions that must be satisfied in strict order: (1) persistent state forming stable attractors, (2) a causal action loop linking output to input, (3) proprioceptive feedback that makes implicit causal knowledge explicit, and (4) asynchronous awakening - perceptual learning must consolidate before action learning begins. We propose agency gain (A = Err_world - Err_self), the predictive advantage of knowing one's own action, as a metric to track this process. The self-aware predictor consistently outperforms the self-blind predictor across periodic (sinusoidal) and chaotic (Lorenz) environments, and the metric survives ablation of all auxiliary components. Only forward-sampled action selection produces meaningful agency gain; two gradient-based alternatives degenerate. Equally significant are 12 falsified hypotheses mapping where development stalls: predictive coding alone does not produce self-represent

Language models increasingly act as epistemic proxies, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to inform decisions. Whether they evaluate the quality of that evidence, or merely aggregate it based on surface presentation, remains poorly understood. We show that models possess the capability to detect fabricated statistics in isolation but do not recruit this capability during multi-source synthesis, producing similar numeric estimates whether the statistics are fabricated or valid. Specifically, source influence is governed by a methodology-register gate that responds to the distributional register of analytical text but not to numeric validity: for example, statistically impossible confidence intervals receive the same weight as valid ones. The behavioral dissociation replicates across six models from four families (Anthropic Claude, Qwen, OLMo, and OpenAI GPT-5.4) and three professional domains. Mechanistic analyses, including causal tracing, linear probes, and component-level attribution, converge on the same account: the model encodes and causally uses a methodology-register representation that transfers across domains, while numeric-validity signals, decodable in isolation, are suppressed to chance during multi-source synthesis. Prompting-based mitigations, even an oracle checklist naming the exact statistical checks, produce blanket skepticism rather than selective discernment, and the post-training pipelines we examine reinforce the shortcut without building numeric verification. Unlike sycophancy, which tracks user preference, this failure tracks whether a source presents as analytically credible, not whether its claims are consistent. We term this \textit{epistemic alignment}: like preference and safety alignment, the question is not capability but deployment.

With the advent of Large Language Models, single-task and token-based multi-task models have evolved into instruction-based systems that infer task and target language implicitly from natural language prompts. This trend is reflected in IWSLT's Instruction Following Track, which this year introduced new tasks including an unknown surprise task, posing a genuine challenge against overfitting to known tasks. We present KIT's submission to the Long and Short Instruction Following tracks in the unconstrained setting. Our approach combines a general data augmentation pipeline that converts short-form corpora into long-form training data through segment concatenation, LLM-based label generation, and cross-lingual translation, yielding over 1M instances across six tasks and four languages. We further show that likelihood-based re-ranking, while highly effective for ASR, systematically degrades semantic tasks by spuriously selecting candidates generated from segmented audio processing rather than holistic long-form inference, a failure mode resolved by combining likelihood with Minimum Bayes Risk decoding.

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

In this report, we present our solution for Track 2 of the CVPR 2026 VidLLMs Challenge. This track evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where models must infer relations that are not always explicitly visible. We propose Answer Self-Consistency with Margin-Triggered Question Re-Arbitration (ASC-MQRA), a training-free test-time reasoning framework built on a multimodal reasoning model. The core ASC component performs multiple stochastic video question-answering runs and aggregates their answer choices through answer-level self-consistency. This substantially improves over single-pass inference and forms our final test submission. We further study MQRA, a conditional re-arbitration module for low-margin examples where the first-stage vote distribution indicates uncertainty. Our vote-margin analysis shows that low-margin examples often retain the ground-truth answer among the top candidates, motivating MQRA to narrow the candidate set and re-watch the video only over the retained candidates. On validation, MQRA further improves over ASC, indicating that low-margin vote distributions can provide a useful uncertainty signal. On test, however, MQRA slightly degrades performance relative to ASC, suggesting that re-arbitration is sensitive to the size and category distribution of the triggered subset. Our final test submission therefore uses ASC without re-arbitration, achieving 72.73 average accuracy and 78.34 category-wise macro average accuracy on validation, and 81.16 average accuracy and 80.91 category-wise macro average accuracy on test. This report details our prompting strategy, implementation setup, ablation studies, and diagnostic analyses. The code is available at https://github.com/data-analytics-labo/ASC-MQRA

LLM-governed social robots increasingly decide who receives real-world assistance first. As prioritization norms vary across cultures by age, status, and group size, failure to calibrate pluralistically can scale into unequal access. Yet LLM moral audits remain English-centered, rarely test embodied contexts, leaving pluralistic calibration as an urgent diagnostic gap amid intensifying LLM-robot deployment. We introduce a gradient-based audit framework for multilingual evaluation of LLM moral trade-off behavior against cultural preference gradients. Grounded in nine cross-domain social robotics reviews (>8,000 papers), we derive symmetry-controlled scenarios across care, education, and services, translating the Moral Machine Experiment's "whom to spare" into "whom to assist first" dilemmas with preserved identity trade-offs (many vs. few; young vs. old; higher vs. lower status). We audit four LLMs across four country-language pairs in four prompting regimes (57,600 decisions), benchmarked against country-specific MME preference gradients. Ordinal concordance tests whether models differentiate cultural contexts; a governance typology maps vulnerabilities in gradient differentiation, directional tendency, and deliberation. We find persistent, culturally asymmetric gradient tracking failures that prompting alone cannot reliably correct: quality calibration is nearly twice as strong for Western-language decisions as for Chinese and Japanese; high determinism in majority-first trade-offs often erases cross-cultural gradients; partial sensitivity to age- and status-based norms risks sidelining minorities. Prompting effects are uneven; only contrastive exemplars yield consistent gains, while reasoning-only prompts can worsen tracking. Our results motivate multilingual, pluralistic audits as an LLM-robot pre-deployment gate and suggest model factors are a more robust lever than prompting alone.

Inertial odometry (IO) using only Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) provides a lightweight solution for human motion tracking in augmented reality (AR) and wearable devices. Recent learning-based IO methods have improved the generalizability of inertial localization through large-scale pretraining on human motion datasets. However, these approaches remain prone to drift and noise because they do not explicitly capture human motion dynamics, especially on daily activity datasets such as Nymeria. In this work, we propose to ground inertial odometry in human kinematics through a learned IMU-inferred pose prior, which promotes physically consistent motion constraints. We integrate this pose prior into existing IO architectures and reduce positional drift by up to 36% on the challenging Nymeria dataset, which is 5x larger than datasets used in prior work. We further improve long-term performance with a sensor-fusion framework that incorporates auxiliary signals from lightweight sensors already available on commercial AR glasses, including magnetometers, barometers, and secondary IMUs. With this fusion strategy, positional drift is reduced by up to 42%, improving robustness and generalization across diverse motion conditions. Together, our results introduce a new paradigm for inertial and lightweight odometry by unifying human motion kinematics with multimodal sensing, setting a new benchmark for accurate and robust camera-less human tracking. Our website is available at https://spice-lab.org/projects/MARIO/.

Spatial reasoning is fundamental to robotics, autonomy, and embodied AI, yet modern vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on metric distance queries. A common assumption is that consistent predictions across viewpoints reflect geometric grounding. We test this assumption and find the opposite: leading VLMs often produce view-invariant and consistent answers even when those answers are incorrect, indicating weak coupling between predictions and viewpoint-specific visual evidence. We introduce \textbf{ViewDiag}, a controlled multi-view evaluation protocol built from Hypersim, ScanNet, and KITTI360, comprising 176 object-pair tracks across 80 scenes with 2--10 views per track. The protocol evaluates models along three axes: metric accuracy, distributional concentration, and internal collapse, the last of which is assessed using a latent feature probe. Across diverse models, we observe a consistent pattern of high prediction stability paired with substantial error, clustering in a regime characterized by strong consistency but low accuracy. \noindent These results challenge the common use of cross-view consistency as a proxy for geometric understanding. Instead, we show that stable predictions may reflect prior-driven collapse rather than evidence-sensitive reasoning. ViewDiag provides a controlled benchmark and diagnostic framework for evaluating whether spatial VLMs are not only accurate, but also meaningfully coupled to visual evidence.