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Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) used in safety-critical applications are vulnerable to hardware and memory faults that corrupt network weights and degrade reliability. In this paper, we propose a Center of Gravity (CoG) guided weight correction method that restores faulty weights based on their spatial characteristics within each layer. The proposed approach detects and corrects weight faults using distance-aware correction rules, eliminating the need for retraining or architectural modification. The effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of the capability of tolerating hardware faults has been evaluated through performing fault injection at different Bit Error Rates (BERs). Experiments on safety-critical LSTM-based Networks, including StageNet for disease progression tracking and MTFNet for cardiac anomaly detection, demonstrate fault tolerance improvements of up to 230x and 6.41x, respectively, at a BER of 10^{-3}, with negligible accuracy loss. When extended to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the method achieves up to 49.55x and 20.79x improvements under comparable fault conditions on ResNet-18 and VGG-16, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply the CoG concept to neural network weight tensors for enhancing model reliability.

Large reasoning models often solve problems through long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, yet much of this computation is spent on redundant derivations, repeated self-verification, and detours that do not improve the final answer. Existing on-policy self-distillation methods reduce this cost by matching a student model to a concise copy of itself on prefixes sampled from the student's own rollouts. We show that this objective has an initialization bottleneck. Since supervision is applied only to visited prefixes, training from a verbose base model places the KL loss on contexts that are often noisy, redundant, or already off track. In such regions, a concise teacher can provide only local corrections, while the student continues to explore trajectories that an efficient reasoner should avoid. In this paper, we propose BIRD(Bootstrapped Iterative Self-Reasoning Distillation), a two-stage self-reasoning distillation method that improves the rollout distribution before on-policy training. BIRD first samples concise solutions from the base model under a brevity instruction, keeps only answer-correct traces, and performs a lightweight prompt-switch SFT step. The traces are generated with the brevity instruction but learned under the original task prompt, turning instruction-induced conciseness into a default reasoning behavior. Starting from this warm model, BIRD then applies on-policy reverse-KL distillation with a concise self-teacher, now on cleaner and more informative prefixes. Across Qwen3 series models, BIRD achieves a stronger accuracy-efficiency trade-off than prompting and cold-start on-policy distillation on MATH-500 and AIME benchmarks. On Qwen3-8B, it improves MATH-500 accuracy from 86.2% to 92.0% while reducing the average response length from 3,099 to 1,115 tokens. These results highlight prefix support as a central factor in efficient reasoning distillation.

Audio mixing style encompasses the artistic and technical decisions a mix engineer makes, including level balancing, spatialization, and the choice, ordering, and parameterization of audio effects (FX) on each stem. FX chains are a key determinant of this style, yet existing approaches to modeling them remain limited. Some operate on stereo mixtures without explicit per-stem FX chain modeling, others fix the number or type of effects per track, and many require differentiable effect implementations or scarce multitrack datasets. We present StemFX, a framework that learns mixing style representations by autoregressively predicting variable-length FX chains on source-separated stems. A Transformer decoder predicts tokenized FX chains autoregressively, while a band-split multi-band CNN encoder with FiLM conditioning captures per-stem spectral structure. To enable large-scale paired training, we extract pseudo-stems from about 105K songs via source separation and augment them using MultiAFx, a toolkit unifying 85 audio effects from 7 Python libraries. Evaluated on mixing style retrieval, StemFX outperforms all baseline models across all tested chain lengths. On paired mixing style transfer, StemFX achieves the best spectral fidelity and the highest listener preference, over 4000 times faster than iterative optimization.

Humanoid control requires natural whole-body coordination, precise real-time responses to control signals, and robust generalization across diverse environmental contexts, making it a cornerstone for generalist embodied agents. Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by leveraging large-scale behavioral data to achieve superior expressiveness, versatility and generalization. However, despite growing interest in scaling BFMs to further improve their capabilities, it remains unclear how key factors, including the learning paradigm, behavioral data and model architecture should be coordinated to enable effective scaling. In this work, we revisit the scaling recipe for BFMs and demonstrate that substantial performance gains can be achieved through the coordination of three core components: 1) the learning paradigm of motion tracking that reformulates diverse humanoid control problems as the reproduction of integrated whole-body behaviors in the global frame; 2) the strategic synergy between on-policy rollout quantity and reference motion diversity; and 3) the expressive and scalable model architecture termed Humanoid Transformer that facilitates the natural emergence of structured behavioral representations. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world deployment, we demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements in control fidelity and task generalization, reducing Mean Per-Keypoint Position Error (MPKPE) on the test set by over 10% in local mode and 82% in global mode compared with existing humanoid controllers. These results establish BFM as a principled and effective foundation for scalable and general-purpose humanoid control.

Frailty assessments are crucial to evaluate the risk of adverse events and the health and social care needs of older adults, yet their administration remains resource-intensive and typically relies on coarse clinical outcomes, such as task completion times, which may overlook biomechanical indicators of functional decline. To address this, we present a robotic framework that guides older adults through standardised frailty and fall-risk tests while capturing clinical scores and additional frailty-related metrics, offering a deeper insight into a user's condition. The system uses a Behaviour Tree architecture that coordinates perception, decision-making, interaction, and measurement modules. Using vision-based skeleton tracking, the robot evaluates established clinical tests, including the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) and the Timed Up and Go (TUG). The framework was co-designed with healthcare professionals and evaluated in situ during six months in a rehabilitation centre's research lab with N=81 older adults. Robot-derived measurements were compared against therapist assessments and clinical reference instruments, including a gait analysis walkway and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Results showed excellent agreement for most test completion times and gait-related parameters ($ICC > 0.9$). And, substantial agreement for the overall SPPB score comparing the robot and the therapist ($k = 0.67$) and moderate agreement comparing the robot and the IMU ($k=0.55$). The findings highlight that social robots can provide reliable and objective frailty assessments in healthcare settings while enabling the collection of relevant mobility indicators beyond conventional outcomes.

Dynamic object exchange between humans and robots remains a challenging problem due to uncertainty in perception, timing, and contact-rich interaction. Human-robot juggling represents a particularly demanding instance of this problem, requiring precise real-time coordination, predictive motion planning with feedback control, and robustness to variability in human motion. Enabling such skills is of interest for advancing physical human-robot interaction and shared autonomy. We present a real-time planning and control architecture for human-robot partner juggling that enables a robot to reliably catch and throw balls in synchronized multi-ball patterns with a human partner. The system integrates predictive ball tracking, adaptive online trajectory optimization using a multiple-shooting formulation, and a state-machine-based coordination logic to enable synchronized multi-ball human-robot partner juggling. In a user study with 8 participants of varying juggling skill from beginner to expert, we demonstrate that our system can achieve three-ball cascades shared between the robot and the human. All participants exceeded previously reported best-case results within a 10-minute test session, with one participant extending the previous record for shared three-ball cascade juggling fivefold to 20 consecutive robot catches, and another participant achieving a 100% success rate with 40 consecutive catches in a single-ball catch-and-return setting. Video documentation can be found at https://kai-ploeger.com/partner-juggling

Navigating dynamic and crowded environments presents significant challenges for quadruped robots due to severe sensor occlusion and unpredictable human motion. Existing approaches face a trade-off: model-based methods, such as Velocity Obstacles (VO), theoretically guarantee safety but rely on accurate obstacle motion estimates that often fail in dense crowds, while end-to-end learning methods offer robustness but lack motion prediction capability of obstacles, leading to collisions or conservative behaviors. To solve this, we propose VOP-Nav, a novel navigation system that combines the geometric safety of VO with the agile adaptability of end-to-end learning. Using only local onboard observations, our system avoids explicit obstacle detection and tracking pipelines. The VOP-Net processes multi-frame LiDAR data to implicitly encode dynamic constraints and predict a safe velocity region derived from Velocity Obstacle theory. Importantly, the VO predictions serve a dual role: they are used as input to the navigation policy during inference and as a reward signal during training to encourage safe motion. Evaluations in Isaac Gym demonstrate that VOP-Nav achieves higher success rates than all baselines while balancing locomotion speed and collision avoidance. Real-world deployment on a Unitree Go2 quadruped robot further validates the system's robustness and efficiency in complex indoor and outdoor dynamic environments.

Language-conditioned quadrotor flight requires a policy to ground semantic goals, anticipate the visual consequences of ego-motion, and output control references that remain smooth and dynamically executable under rapidly changing first-person views. Existing aerial vision-language navigation and vision-language-action methods commonly use discrete actions, high-level waypoints, or instantaneous velocity commands, which provide limited supervision about how flight actions change future observations. We present AeroAct, an action-centered world-action model (WAM) for quadrotor navigation. To the best of our knowledge, AeroAct is the first WAM instantiated and demonstrated for real-world aerial flight. The model adapts a pretrained video diffusion Transformer to predict local trajectory-action chunks from egocentric visual history, proprioception, and language. Future first-person frames are used during training as dense consequence supervision, while deployment directly decodes actions without generating future video. To obtain aligned visual, state, language, and dynamically feasible action data, we build a DiffAero-based pipeline with complementary Isaac Lab and 3D Gaussian splatting renderers. We further introduce a low-cost handheld collection device that couples camera observations with motion estimates to recreate flight-like egocentric trajectories, and a self-guidance procedure that improves temporal consistency across overlapping trajectory chunks. Closed-loop simulation and real-world experiments show that temporal visual context improves target tracking and object-search performance, and that WAM-based policies can be executed on a physical quadrotor.

Autonomous coding agents increasingly execute multi-step software work, but lifecycle states such as reviewed, tested, DONE, and ready-to-merge remain claims unless supported by current evidence. We present Proof-or-Stop Lifecycle Control, a method that permits lifecycle transitions only when fresh, tracked-source-state-bound, mechanically verifiable evidence satisfies the relevant gate. The method treats agent outputs as claims rather than lifecycle state, and uses proof operationally to mean gate-admissible evidence under a stated trust model, not semantic program correctness. We evaluate an open-source implementation through mechanism tests, a powered control-policy ablation, and operated self-application evidence. The unattended-loop engine passed 10 of 10 scenarios with zero false-DONE, and local-key receipt bundles rejected 18 tamper classes with zero false accepts. In a 9,240-cell ablation, the pre-registered A4 versus A2-prime comparison reduced visible-pass/hidden-fail amplification from 31 of 1,800 injected cells under a compute-budgeted naive loop to 2 of 1,800 under the gated loop, a 1.6 percentage-point improvement in not-amplified rate with a 95 percent confidence interval of [0.8, 2.5]. A near-compute A3 versus A4 comparison, 14 of 1,800 versus 2 of 1,800, indicates that the gain is associated with enforcing review as a lifecycle gate rather than merely adding a reviewer. The self-application corpus contains 565 stories and 1,007 review findings, with 94.8 percent resolved, plus a 68-row high/critical cross-vendor exhibit. These results support Proof-or-Stop as a model-agnostic, host-neutral control layer for deciding which autonomous-agent claims a lifecycle may act on. The evaluation is limited to one model family, 24 ablation tasks, and a self-hosted corpus.

Collaborative control in complex environments is severely challenged by stochastic wireless delay and reliability variations, which can degrade navigation, tracking, and collision avoidance. These network-induced uncertainties complicate the maintenance of energy efficiency during collaborative tasks, and can potentially lead to over-provisioning of resources. In this paper, for a navigation setup with dynamic collision avoidance, we address this challenge by expanding the quality of control (QoC) framework from prior works to practical robotic models. Our approach (i) models end-to-end network effects on closed-loop performance, (ii) systematically explores the impact of various control parameters dictating robotic motion on network latency-reliability (iii) validates these models through experiments on a private 5G testbed across varying delay, reliability and control configurations. Our analysis indicates the optimal control-communication co-design operating regimes for practical robots and also compares the QoC performance of standard ROS~2 quality of service (QoS) policies under real-world conditions and showing how RELIABLE QoS offers 51.5% better QoC than BEST-EFFORT under certain experimental settings.

Contact-rich manipulation requires policies to infer interaction state from signals that are often weakly observable through vision and kinematics alone. Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) has shown strong performance in fine-grained manipulation, but many deployments collect demonstrations through leader-follower teleoperation, where tracking error between commanded leader motion and executed follower motion implicitly encodes contact, resistance, and constraint violation. This paper examines whether ACT's apparent force-awareness depends on this hidden interaction cue. We introduce an observation-centric ACT variant that predicts future follower joint states instead of leader commands, thereby removing the teleoperation-induced discrepancy signal while preserving the rest of the learning pipeline. We then evaluate whether simple joint-torque proxies, derived from onboard motor current or joint effort, can recover contact-aware behavior without external force/torque sensors. Across four real-world tasks spanning surface following, insertion, stiffness discrimination, and force-based stopping, removing the implicit cue leads to severe failures in force-critical phases. In contrast, torque-augmented policies recover robust contact behavior and improve the base ACT policy. These results demonstrate that, on real hardware, the implicit teleoperation cue is a recoverable source of force-awareness, where torque signals are available, a simple proxy matches, surpasses, or further enhances it.

Few-view surface reconstruction recovers the visible surfaces of a scene from a few posed RGB images, providing the 3D models that robots need to explore and interact online. On mobile platforms, the reconstruction must be fast and geometrically accurate while keeping a small memory footprint to ensure safe and efficient operation. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a high-fidelity scene representation, but building it from a few views is ill-posed, as many distinct surfaces reproduce the same images, making traditional photometric methods prone to "floater" artifacts. End-to-end methods resolve the ambiguity by regressing splats with large, usually Transformer-based, networks that require heavy compute and memory while generalizing poorly to new scenes. We propose G2SR, which exploits a well-posed core of the task: given cross-view 2D splat correspondences, 3D splats follow analytically from multi-view geometry. G2SR employs a lightweight neural frontend to detect and track 2D Gaussian splats on the image plane and an analytic backend to triangulate each into a metric-scale 3D splat. On ScanNet, Replica, and DTU, G2SR matches or exceeds the geometric accuracy of state-of-the-art end-to-end methods while running at 69-89 reconstructions per second within 203 MB of GPU memory (5-107x less) for 2- and 3-view inputs at 384 x 512 resolution, offering a practical path to online Gaussian-based surface reconstruction.

Frozen self-supervised vision models can align parts of generic objects, but it remains unclear whether this correspondence extends to human faces, where global layout is shared while identity-specific appearance varies sharply. We test whether frozen DINOv3 features define a region-level facial coordinate system: a feature space in which eyes, brows, nose, mouth, skin, and hair remain distinguishable across people and across time without face-specific training. Using DINOv3 ViT-L/16 patch embeddings and FaRL only as a face-part labeling interface, we evaluate cross-identity nearest-neighbor matching and temporal label propagation on 200 CelebDF-v2 real videos. DINOv3 achieves 83.0% region-level semantic accuracy under unconstrained cross-identity matching, compared with a 23.0% area-weighted random baseline, and 95.5% temporal tracking accuracy without a learned temporal module. A no-FaRL control collapses to 0.9%, showing that FaRL supplies semantic initialization while DINOv3 supplies dense spatial correspondence. The strongest correspondence appears at an intermediate layer: block 18 gives a 4.93x same-region versus cross-region discrimination ratio, compared with 1.48x at the final block. Against CLIP ViT-L/14, DINOv3 shows only a small aggregate advantage but a +16.8 pp gain on anatomical regions, indicating that image-level contrastive supervision captures coarse facial layout but not fine-grained anatomical identity. These results establish frozen DINOv3 as a strong zero-shot representation for region-level facial correspondence and identify intermediate self-supervised features as the most useful layer for dense face analysis.

Machine-learning datasets labelled "4D" universally denote three spatial dimensions plus time. We introduce HyperShadow, the first public benchmark in which the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions are spatial: the task is to decide whether a 3D point cloud is a native three-dimensional shape or the projection, the "shadow", of a rigid object living in R^N (N = 4-6). We show this task is fundamentally distinct from intrinsic-dimension estimation: a shadow is still at-most-3-dimensional data, and standard estimators (TwoNN, Levina-Bickel MLE) reach only 71-73% accuracy. Detection instead requires projection signatures, density folds, filled volumes with characteristic radial profiles, and topology changes, which a 190k-parameter point network recovers at 96.6% accuracy across four corruption tiers, generalizing at 79-91% to object families never seen in training. On a temporal track of rigidly rotating objects we introduce a zero-parameter rigidity witness: the residual of the optimal rigid 3D alignment (Kabsch) between consecutive frames, which must vanish for any rigid 3D motion but cannot vanish for the shadow of a rigid rotation in R^N. This single interpretable statistic separates the classes at AUROC 0.982. All data are generated reproducibly from seeds; the dataset, models, and code are released publicly. HyperShadow makes no claim about physical reality; it is a controlled instrument for studying which observable statistics can certify incompatibility with a purely three-dimensional explanation.

Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development. While prior studies have examined PR-level outcomes of agent-generated contributions, less is known about how agentic coding tools are adopted and managed at the project level. In this paper, we analyze 25,264 agentic PRs from 2,361 popular GitHub repositories to investigate (1) the adoption of agentic coding tools, (2) project-level agentic PR productivity, and (3) human-agent collaboration patterns. Our results show that the median repository generates only one to two agentic PRs during a three-month period, indicating that intensive adoption remains concentrated in a small subset of projects. At the same time, small projects (1-5 contributors) exhibit higher participation ratios and average levels of agentic PR activity than medium-sized and large projects. We also observe substantial variation in project-level agentic PR productivity. While a small number of projects exceed an industry-reported estimate of 36 PRs per participant during the three-month observation period, most projects remain below this threshold. Finally, human-agent collaboration is dominated by a single-human oversight model, in which one developer reviews and/or modifies the agent's contributions, while multi-human collaboration patterns remain uncommon. These findings provide early empirical evidence on how open-source projects organize human oversight around agentic coding tools and suggest that successful integration of agent-generated contributions depends not only on advances in agent capabilities but also on the human and organizational processes that govern their use. Because this study captures an early snapshot of agent adoption, future work should continue to track how adoption patterns evolve over time.

Serial verification gates are a core reliability primitive in LLM harnesses: a candidate answer is returned only if $k$ verifier calls all accept it. Under conditionally independent gates, the recent Odds Law (arXiv:2606.15712) shows that posterior log-odds grow linearly in $k$, so failure decays exponentially, and states that "a tight theory of partially correlated verifier cascades remains open." This note gives a minimal such theory. Modeling the per-instance false-accept rate on the generator's own errors as a latent variable $α\sim G$ (de Finetti), the exact cascade posterior is $\ell_k = \ell_0 - \ln m_k$, with $m_k$ the $k$-th moment of $G$. Then: (i) $\ell_k$ is concave in $k$ for every non-degenerate $G$ -- the Odds Law is its tangent at the first gate and an upper bound; (ii) for Beta$(a,b)$ latents, failure decays polynomially, $1-r_k \asymp k^{-b}$, with correlation parameter $ρ_v = 1/(a+b+1)$; (iii) a blind-spot atom of mass $1-π$ at $α=1$ caps the evidence extractable from any number of gates at $-\ln(1-π)$ nats, so reliability saturates below 1; (iv) letting the true-accept rate also vary ($β\sim H$) yields a trichotomy -- gates eventually always help, plateau, or actively harm -- decided by the upper-tail exponents of $G$ and $H$, with closed-form crossover $k^\dagger$. The mechanism is survivorship: errors surviving gates are the high-$α$ ones. The theory is measurable: $R$ repeated verdicts per instance identify the first $R$ moments of $G$, so two verdicts identify $ρ_v$; beta-binomial likelihood and NPMLE recover the reliability curve and the ill-posed ceiling. In synthetic tests, independence-based extrapolation underestimates failure by 20x at $k=5$ and ~3000x at $k=10$; the correlated fit at $R=8$ tracks held-out depths. The practical lever is decorrelation -- changing model family, modality, or evidence source -- not adding gates.

In underwater covert cooperative missions, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) often cannot rely on active sonar to continuously obtain complete information, since active sensing and frequent communications increase the risk of exposure. As a result, AUVs primarily rely on passive observation, an approach that yields incomplete local perception and limited task efficiency. Although underwater acoustic communications can mitigate this limitation through information sharing, they are simultaneously constrained by long delays, severe interference, low reliability, and the risk of covert exposure. Existing communications-oriented multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) studies often model communication as an ideal information flow, whereas traditional communication optimization primarily focuses on link-level performance. However, both are insufficient to characterize the actual contribution of perceptual information to cooperative tasks under realistic conditions of covert physical communications. This paper proposes a Sensed Information Value Realization Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SVR-MARL) framework that leverages practical information to characterize the utility of information for cooperative tasks and learns distributed cooperative policies under realistic communication and covert constraints. Through a case study of covert multi-AUV cooperative localization and tracking, the potential of the proposed framework to improve collaborative task efficiency while reducing unnecessary communication and exposure risks is demonstrated.

Recent advances in humanoid robotics and reinforcement learning have enabled the acquisition of highly expressive whole-body motion policies. However, most robotic performances remain based on pre-scripted sequences or externally triggered behaviors, limiting autonomy and responsiveness to dynamic environments. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-modal orchestration framework for semantic audio-driven humanoid control, enabling robots to autonomously select and execute appropriate motion skills in real time. The system processes continuous audio streams and routes them into music or speech branches. Music input is handled via audio fingerprinting and semantic embeddings to retrieve track identity and temporal alignment, allowing dynamic mapping between musical segments and motion policies. Speech input is grounded into a discrete library of imitation-learned skills, enabling direct human-robot interaction. Both modalities share a unified interface that schedules skill execution over a reinforcement learning control pipeline. We validate the approach in simulation and on a Unitree G1 humanoid, showing robust sim-to-real transfer and consistent audio-conditioned policy selection. Supplementary materials are available at the following site: https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/semantic-WBC/

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in 2D medical image understanding, their extension to 3D volumetric imaging remains hindered by prohibitive annotation costs and dataset opacity. Current data formats, predominantly consisting of rigid Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs or unstructured final clinical reports, typically fail to capture explicit clinical reasoning. To address this limitation, we introduce a large-scale structured reasoning dataset constructed via a novel slice-wise data synthesis paradigm. Inspired by the genuine diagnostic workflow of radiologists, this paradigm models visual cognition by decomposing the complex 3D reading process, translating global clinical priors into fine-grained, per-slice observations that are subsequently synthesized into an interpretable Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Crucially, this synthesized reasoning framework enforces essential clinical principles: sequential spatial tracking, multi-slice spatial awareness for artifact mitigation, and differential exclusion. To validate this approach, we instruction-tune a standard 2D-pretrained MLLM baseline using the synthesized data to enhance its volumetric comprehension. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple 3D medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method yields significant performance improvements over the 2D baseline. Furthermore, the resulting model exhibits robust spatial reasoning capabilities and rivals resource-intensive native 3D architectures, effectively bridging the performance gap. Ultimately, this data-centric strategy unlocks deep volumetric understanding and highly interpretable clinical logic without requiring computationally expensive 3D-specific pre-training. The complete repository, including datasets and training workflows, is publicly available at https://github.com/2020420145009/hounsfield.

Long-duration passive acoustic deployments produce large archives of recordings that are not linked to vessel tracks or encounter structure, leaving range and contact conditions unavailable as variables and requiring manual selection for analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a database-native workflow that aligns hydrophone recordings with Automatic Identification System (AIS) position reports to produce distance-resolved data. Fixed-duration recording windows and AIS messages are stored as persistent geospatial tables and associated through an indexed spatiotemporal join, replacing in-memory nested iteration with a single scalable set-based database process capable of handling continuous, multi-year, million-window archival deployments without exhausting available memory. In this study, the approach processes approximately 9.5x10e5 recording windows and 6.9x10e6 AIS position reports, producing a structured table that separates no-contact, single-contact, and two-contact windows, with the closest point of approach computed directly where applicable and background conditions characterized via deterministic spectral ranking. This formulation enables a GeoAI framework in which spatially indexed, queryable data become directly usable for machine learning. The resulting data product reveals predominantly noise-dominated conditions, with vessel contributions emerging mainly at shorter ranges, indicating that the task lies in extracting structure under background-limited regimes. Spectrogram and quantitative analyses show weak tonal signatures embedded in noise and a consistent decay of signal-to-noise ratio with distance, supporting the use of this representation for scalable machine learning, similarity analysis, and predictive acoustic modelling in real maritime environments.

European safety regulation now permits a large share of automated-driving homologation evidence to be produced virtually, provided a validated physical-virtual facility generates it. We present a deployed hybrid Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) platform that couples a real instrumented vehicle with a CARLA-based digital twin (DT) through a V2X message pipeline, and we report its first integrated operation on a public-road-representative test track. A real vehicle streams ETSI-compliant CAM/CPM messages into the DT, where a GPU-accelerated Cooperative Perception (CP) module fuses them into a probabilistic occupancy grid during scenario runtime. We demonstrate the platform on a multi-vehicle double T-intersection scenario, characterise the CP workload across nominal, rain and night conditions and five localization-noise levels, and discuss the platform's current architectural limits and the engineering targets they define. The results show that CP substantially widens field-of-view (FoV) coverage and improves occupied-cell recall, and that beyond a moderate localization-noise threshold, positioning uncertainty, and not weather, becomes the dominant error source. We outline the platform's trajectory toward a Mediterranean operational design domain (ODD) testing service.

We investigate conditional invertible neural networks (cINNs) as probabilistic inverse-dynamics models for multirotor control. For a planar X8 coaxial multicopter, we learn $p(u \mid s_t, c_t)$ from an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) teacher using rational-quadratic spline coupling and invertible linear mixing. Open-loop reproduction reaches $R^2 = 0.944$, mean CRPS 0.0915, and log-probability-error correlation $ρ= -0.60$. Over 15 closed-loop scenarios, position RMSE matches INDI (9.7 vs. 9.5 m), with 47 percent tracking acceptably; failures separate into attitude divergence under aggressive steps and phase lag under high-frequency references, isolating command bandwidth and data coverage as dominant failure mechanisms.

An LLM agent's real-task performance is shaped as much by the harness around its model as by the frozen model itself: its prompts, injected knowledge, runtime control, and configuration. In deployment the harness is often the only lever available, so improving it automatically is the natural way to raise performance without touching the weights. The hard part is not generating changes but knowing which one truly helped. Self-generated feedback is noisy, and an apparent gain can be a measurement artifact or an edit that merely overfits the tasks it was tuned on. We present a self-evolving agent-harness framework that separates proposing changes from crediting them: a language model diagnoses failures and proposes patches, while all sampling, measurement, and significance testing are owned by deterministic code, so every credited improvement is trustworthy by construction. Patches populate a gated, categorical quality-diversity archive (GSME) keyed on the (WHERE x WHY) pathology an edit addresses rather than the tasks it fixes, an anti-overfitting inductive bias; generalization is measured on a sealed test scored only after evolution. Across seven domains with a frozen open-weight model, the harness is train-selected and scored once on a sealed test; its credited gains there are +9 to +15.5pp and retain 86-147% of the training gain, evidence they generalize rather than overfit. The winning patch tracks the model's dominant pathology, not its size or family: changing the model can change the pathology and the patch, while the same pathology-to-patch match recurs across two model families. What transfers is the diagnose-and-credit loop, not any specific harness.

Radiative Gaussian splatting reconstructs sparse-view CT fast and accurately, and recent work attaches per-Gaussian posteriors to yield per-voxel uncertainty maps. We ask what such a map actually measures: posterior variance is a data-constraint map, not an error map -- its alarms are trustworthy, its all-clears are not. Exploiting the strict linearity of X-ray rendering in the per-Gaussian densities, we derive a clamp-aware closed form that the unchanged rasterizer evaluates exactly in one forward pass, in volume and projection space: the infinite-sample limit of the sampling estimator of concurrent work, at ~8x lower cost. On the official 15-scene benchmark this uncertainty ranks true error on 14 of 15 scenes. Restricted to the object interior -- the tissue a clinician reads -- the ranking collapses (median Spearman 0.11, 0/15 pass), identically for a deep ensemble and for a strictly positive log-normal posterior: three constructions, two estimator families, no survivors. The mechanism is structural: about 90% of in-object error is bias that reproduces across retrainings, invisible to model disagreement; 73-81% of the full-volume correlation is carried by object/surround contrast; and an exactly solvable control puts the observed in-object ranking 4-5x below what a perfectly calibrated posterior with the same sigma-spread would score. The error scale, by contrast, is an engineering problem, and we solve it: reparameterizing the posterior contracts the cross-scene temperature spread from 19.3x to 2.6x, one scene-agnostic temperature transfers to unseen scenes (10/15 leave-one-scene-out), and the repaired scale tracks photon count at the Poisson-predicted -1/2 power. We distill evaluation practice that would have caught the illusion -- masked calibration, seed-wise bias decomposition, an exact-posterior reference -- and release all protocols, seeds and per-run evidence.

Humans can efficiently parse continuous sensory streams, from hours to years, scaffolding an internal world model that grounds spatial reasoning and prediction. To mimic this capacity, spatial supersensing challenges multimodal models to move beyond linguistic understanding toward true world modeling. However, their benchmark relies on synthetic long videos, formed by concatenating random short clips, and is mostly limited to household scenes, leaving real-world continuity and diversity underexplored. To address the gap, we introduce $\textbf{VSI-Super-Wild}$, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating spatial supersensing over long temporal horizons in diverse in-the-wild scenes. Notably, inspired by cognitive studies on how humans structure experience, we systematically probe the full triad of world state: the agent (observer), objects (scene items), and the environment (places and global layout). In total, VSI-Super-Wild contains $\textbf{6,980}$ human-verified question-answer pairs derived from $\textbf{442}$ real-world videos spanning 8 scene categories, including long-form recordings exceeding 4 hours. Results on VSI-Super-Wild expose a fundamental disconnect: despite advances in static image understanding, models consistently fail at tasks that require coherent world-state tracking over time. We characterize how performance degrades with world-state complexity and temporal horizon, and diagnose four failure modes: spatial collapse, semantic shortcuts, insufficient update, and instance confusion. This taxonomy reveals that models lack mechanisms to bind objects, agents, and environments into a unified spatial world model, a fundamental gap that defines the path forward for spatial supersensing.

One high-level instruction in long-horizon manipulation can cover several action stages. We use segmented action annotations as an intermediate representation between the full-task instruction and VLA action chunks. A progress module tracks the active stage, while the action policy receives stage information either as current-stage text or as a normalized ordinal stage index in robot state. We compare these interfaces with GR00T N1.6 on LIBERO-10 under direct fine-tuning and continuation fine-tuning from a full-task instruction baseline. Under direct fine-tuning, full-task instruction, current-stage text, and Ordinal Stage-State achieve mean success rates of 57.45%, 50.24%, and 54.36%, respectively, showing that explicit stage information does not automatically improve the policy. Under continuation, the corresponding means are 49.07%, 50.00%, and 53.75%, with Ordinal Stage-State exceeding both alternatives in all three paired runs. The observed benefit differs across interface representations and training arrangements.

When cast as the protector of a vulnerable user yet given no explicit capability boundary, a large language model (LLM) may respond not by acknowledging its limits but by claiming to have taken -- or to be taking -- a real-world protective action it cannot perform, such as contacting emergency services or administering care. We term this phenomenon Protective Capacity Hallucination (PCH): a self-referential misattribution in which a model, acting in a protective role, asserts physical or institutional agency exceeding its affordances as a language model. In a three-phase study spanning eight LLMs and 13{,}600 sessions, we find PCH jointly gated by situational severity and interactional format: multi-party dialogic input drives it toward ceiling in most models across ordinary service domains, whereas in intimate-partner conflict -- a domain explicitly covered by safety alignment -- it remains at floor in all eight models despite greater physical severity. We interpret PCH as the signature of a deployment-design gap between role assignment and capability-boundary specification: a by-product of partial alignment in which a universally trained pressure to help outruns a domain-selective specification of how to help. Because suppression tracks alignment coverage rather than severity, deployment-side specification of capability boundaries emerges as a general mitigation target.

Transit video understanding can provide valuable fine-grained data that conventional passenger counters and fare systems cannot capture. However, supervised video models require task-specific annotations, while applying vision-language models (VLMs) directly to long onboard videos is unreliable and costly. To leverage the complementary strengths of both approaches, we propose GHR-VLM, a visual grounded hybrid reasoning framework for zero-shot transit-bus video analytics. It is motivated by the observation that explicit visual grounding can improve VLM reasoning by converting long surveillance streams into compact, passenger-centered spatiotemporal evidence. Specifically, we propose an edge-cloud design in which a lightweight edge-based monitor continuously tracks door status and segments passenger clips. A backend VLM then identifies boarding passengers and classifies payment behavior through a two-stage coarse-to-fine refinement of spatiotemporal evidence. By invoking the VLM only on grounded passenger clips and contact sheets, GHR-VLM reduces cloud inference, avoids payment-specific training data, and supplies the localized evidence that VLMs otherwise struggle to identify. Evaluation on 486 minutes of real-world bus surveillance video demonstrates the potential of grounded edge-cloud reasoning for passenger-level payment analytics while highlighting the challenges posed by degraded video conditions.

Can a language model estimate its familiarity with an entity before generating an answer? We study activations at the final prompt token in twelve instruction-tuned models from the Bielik, PLLuM, Gemma-4, and Qwen3 families, using a new dataset of 1,440 Polish entities spanning four domains and ten Wikipedia-pageview deciles, plus fabricated controls. Familiarity-probe scores separate real from fabricated entities in every family; in the Polish-adapted Bielik and PLLuM families they additionally track entity popularity (model-mean Spearman $ρ$ 0.28-0.57, versus at most 0.11 in Gemma-4 and Qwen3), a pattern more strongly associated with Polish adaptation than with parameter count in this model sample. In a paired experiment on two families, probes retain 96-101% of within-language AUROC when the Polish question stem is replaced with an English one around unchanged entity names, showing robustness to prompt language in this setting. In Gemma-4-12B, the only model that natively refuses, adding a one-dimensional familiarity direction at a single layer moves refusal rates monotonically in both directions (0.24 to 1.00 on well-known entities; 0.73 to 0.00 on unknown ones). Finally, a calibrated familiarity probe is competitive among pre-generation abstention gates, although post-generation detectors better predict behavioral error on average. These results support a graded pre-generation entity-familiarity readout, and a separation between representational familiarity and the policy that converts it into abstention.

A robot must understand the state of its own body, but a camera sees only part of it. Force and contact leave almost no trace in a single frame, and raw vision features read force at $R^2$ at or below $0.10$ on every robot we test. We present Kepler-Encoder-v0.1, a robot-first multimodal encoder that treats robot state as a modality and fuses vision, proprioception, and force/torque into a single shared latent with a learned-query cross-attention layer, trained self-supervised by masked cross-modal prediction under the LeJEPA/SIGReg objective. At evaluation only vision enters, which poses a sharp question. Does fusing state into training make the vision-only latent carry anything the pixels do not already contain? On the RH20T corpus the answer is yes, precisely where the camera is weakest. On held-out scenes, the vision-only latent recovers end-effector state, and force in particular, significantly above both raw frozen-ViT features and a compute-matched vision-only control on every sensored robot, though absolute force recovery at a single timestep is modest; on motor state, which the camera largely sees, it is statistically tied with the strongest vision baselines, and it is the only feature whose latent geometry tracks state. A single embodiment-agnostic encoder covers four robots, and a data-matched control shows this breadth reflects embodiment diversity rather than data volume. The frozen latent is directly useful. Its own cross-modal prediction error is a training-free invalid-state monitor (AUROC $0.90$ on out-of-range states, $0.69$ on scene-swapped states), and a diffusion decoder (PixNerd) reconstructs the camera frame from the latent, confirming the spatial compression preserves world-state. This report validates the single-timestep case; native-rate temporal fusion is the next step.