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Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

Principal Trait Analysis: Towards Deriving "Skills" in Human-AI Collaboration

Large Language Model-powered agents are increasingly used in the workplace via human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration. In this new era of work, it is important to understand the kinds of prompting traits that contribute to task success. Moreover, we need to uncover key skills required for modern professionals and inform educators on how to foster these skills among students. Existing guidelines for human-AI collaboration are built from either top-down theory or context-specific observations of human-AI interactions. However, since LLM capabilities are rapidly improving, theory may not be able to explain emerging interaction patterns, and empirical guidelines may become obsolete quickly. In this work, we explore an automated, data-driven approach to uncover patterns, which we term traits, of effective human-AI interaction that are aligned with task outcomes. We propose Principal Trait Analysis, a Principal Component Analysis-inspired algorithm for deriving common traits from patterns in LLM conversations. Our algorithm uses LLM-based processing stages to analyze corpora of human-AI collaborative session traces, deriving common traits across the dataset and scoring each human collaborator's usage style by each trait. The approach also allows domain expertise to be injected during trait discovery and selects the most distinguishing traits to be those that exhibit the highest variance across collaborators. We evaluate PTA on two human-AI collaborative coding datasets, an educational setting (students working with an AI tutor) and a professional setting (developers working with an AI coding agent). We find that PTA-derived traits are significant in explaining collaborator behavior across both settings and can help predict task outcomes. However, whether traits qualify as skills remains to be seen, due to inconclusive results on generalizability and how user traits change over time.
Hunter McNichols, Kai Du, Andrew Lan
Aug 11, 2026cs.MA

When Do Institutions Beat Intelligence?

More capable agents do not necessarily form a more capable collective. A multi-agent system may jointly possess sufficient information yet fail because evidence is poorly routed, unreliable reports enter public belief, correlated claims masquerade as independent support, shared state becomes stale or strategically distorted, or useful evidence is exposed through an ineffective action interface. We ask when additional resources should improve the reasoner and when they should instead change the institutional structure through which the collective forms and acts on public information. Drawing on functional distinctions from research on group decision making and distributed cognition, we construct controlled artificial ecologies around four loci of collective failure: access and routing, admission and dependence, state maintenance and incentives, and representation and action. Across these ecologies, we separately vary model capability and institutional structure, pairing positive interventions with matched reasoning baselines and mechanism-breaking controls. The experiments reveal a consistent boundary: institutions help when they repair failures in how a collective constructs usable public state, but lose their advantage when their signals are uninformative or uncheckable, when stronger intelligence can perform the same transformation directly, or when the resulting state cannot support reliable action. Our results recast the choice between intelligence and institutions as a diagnosis of where collective reasoning fails.
Zhengye Han
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

Apodex Discovery: Reality Benchmarks and Environments for Evaluating and Building Discoverative Artificial Intelligence

Apollo did not reach the Moon merely because its engineers could solve difficult equations. It succeeded by turning a distant ambition into a mission architecture of explicit objectives, simulation, verification, and repeated correction. AI now faces a similar transition: frontier models can solve difficult tasks once the problem, tools, and success criteria are specified, yet consequential real-world challenges rarely arrive in an executable or verifiable form. We introduce Apodex Discovery, a framework for building and evaluating discoverative AI through the heavy-duty solver, a system comprising a foundation model, harness, tools, and control policies that pursues extended, stateful, verifiable investigations. It has three core components. First, a problem-scouting process surveyed 561 industries across 16 sectors, assembled 423 high-value real-world problems, and selected 20 for the initial release. Second, a common environment-task-episode abstraction provides data, tools, constraints, feedback, trajectory recording, and verification of intermediate artifacts and final submissions. Third, HDS6 evaluates Tools, Repair, Alternatives, Coherence, Evidence, and Scope independently of final-task success. In AAV capsid design, Apodex surpassed the published state of the art by 7% across viability, tropism, structure prediction, and generative design. In drug repurposing and reformulation, a task-specific biomedical environment improved the mean normalized prediction score of GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6-sol by 2.5 and 7.6 points over the same closed-book backbone. Controlled ablations show that the fixed TRACES episode interface enables attribution of performance differences to specific solver components. Apodex Discovery moves AI evaluation beyond predefined benchmarks toward verifiable investigations aimed at genuine discovery.
Brian Wang, Bin Feng, Xiaoman Pan +26
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI

After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication. Yet neither explains whether the person forgot, is confused, has side effects, or deliberately refused, nor what support is appropriate. This reveals a structural gap in Agentic AI: Digital Agents primarily transform software states, while Embodied Agents transform physical states; neither makes a person's evolving state and agency the primary object of modeling, intervention, and evaluation. We introduce Combodied Agents, a human-centered paradigm that perceives, models, predicts, and supports individual human-state trajectories over time, using software tools, sensors, wearables, robots, and human services as action channels rather than end goals. We unify fragmented capabilities across personal assistants, health agents, AI companions, and adaptive human--AI systems into a closed loop: event-based multimodal perception reconstructs meaningful personal events; longitudinal, correctable memory provides temporal context; Personal World Models estimate future personal states and outcomes under alternative decisions and interventions; and an admissible intervention policy selects proportionate support under consent, uncertainty, safety, reversibility, and user control. Feedback from the person and environment updates the loop. Rather than requiring an exhaustive Human Digital Twin, the framework uses purpose-bounded, uncertainty-aware, user-correctable representations. We organize the design space by human-state targets, relational contexts, and agent roles, and propose scenario-centered evaluation, agency-preservation metrics, benchmark requirements, edge-native personal models, and governance directions. Combodied Agents shift Agentic AI from external task completion toward sustained human benefit.
Qianggang Ding, Xingyao Wang, Rui Feng +19
Aug 11, 2026cs.RO

Toward the Cognitive--Physical Limits of Embodied Intelligence through a World-Model-Centric Autonomous Racing Agent

Embodied artificial intelligence aims to develop agents that perceive, reason, and act through continuous interaction with the physical world. However, most embodied systems are still evaluated within conservative safety margins or moderate interaction regimes, leaving their capability boundaries under extreme conditions insufficiently understood. Autonomous racing provides a stringent testbed by combining high-frequency localization and perception, adversarial interaction, near-saturated vehicle dynamics, and strict safety constraints. Existing systems push high-speed performance but rarely model and refine cognitive and physical limits jointly. Here we show that a world-model-centric autonomous racing agent provides a concrete step toward exploring these coupled limits. The framework learns predictive world models from near-limit successes and failures to capture interaction evolution, ego dynamics, and feasible-motion boundaries, coupling world-state construction, future-aware reasoning, and near-limit control in a closed-loop refinement process. Training data were collected from real-vehicle autonomous racing, where the onboard system maintained robust localization and perception at speeds up to 256.3 km/h and peak lateral acceleration of 26.8 m/s2^2. In full-scale simulated racing, the well trained world-model-centric agent achieves an 88.3% interaction success rate across various challenging simulated racing scenarios. Closed-loop refinement of the world model and policy further improved utilization of cognitive-physical limits, recovery from failure modes, and generalization across varying conditions and unseen circuits. These results suggest a boundary-aware methodology in which world models help embodied agents represent, predict, and continually refine their capability boundaries for safer real-world deployment.
Zitong Shan, Baichuan Lou, Yanxin Zhou +8
Aug 10, 2026cs.RO

Energy-Structured Latent World Models with Neural Time Fields for Physically Constistent Open-World Motion Planning

Physically consistent motion planning remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as generated trajectories must strictly conform to real-world execution dynamics. While latent world models offer a promising approach by predicting these dynamics, existing methods learn unconstrained future representations where absorbed physics remains implicit. Therefore, they fail to form reusable physical knowledge, which compromises reliability in unpredictable open-world navigation. To address this, we propose a novel Energy-Structured Latent World Model (ELWM). Our key idea is to structure the ELWM latent state to explicitly carry energy and momentum, ensuring strictly causal transitions via dissipation and control ports. Trained on multimodal RGB-D and inertial interaction histories, our model guarantees physically consistent predictions. We further implement this for motion planning by constructing Physics-Conditioned Neural Time Fields (PC-NTF), a key technical cornerstone that integrates ELWM into an arrival time field via the Eikonal equation to yield a physically-informed navigation policy. Across held-out scenes, our evaluation reveals significant improvements. Compared to generic latent models, PC-NTF reduces 0.8-s motion-prediction NRMSE from 0.36 to 0.29. Against Active Neural Time Fields, it improves navigation success from 81.3% to 89.7% and SPL from 0.64 to 0.73, while cutting the physical collision rate from 12.1% to 5.8% and the Eikonal residual from 0.083 to 0.031. Beyond these targeted gains, our results demonstrate that embedding explicit physical structures into latent spaces intrinsically bridges the gap between predictive world models and safe, dynamically feasible motion planning.
Yapeng Liu, Yuanzhao Zhai, Bo Ding +2
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

CEAA: A Cognitive Embodied Agents Architecture for Interactive Computing Systems

The development of embodied Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) that have cognitive capabilities in real-time interactive virtual environments remains a challenge, even with today's advancements in technology. Existing architectures are often focused on either the implementation of low-level reactive control systems that are constrained by commercial game engines, or high-level representations of reasoning models that can be difficult to implement in virtual worlds. This paper builds on that notion and proposes a modular cognitive architecture for deploying embodied IVAs. This architecture builds on existing, pre-established frameworks such as the Sense-Think-Act paradigm and the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model, among others, and aims to provide a reusable implementation-oriented framework as a template for deploying IVA "brains" in interactive 3D computing systems. The proposed architecture contributes by providing a modular, implementation-oriented framework for the deployment of embodied, cognitive-capable IVAs and bridges the gap between high-level agent reasoning models with real-time embodied execution, for scalable, adaptive, and explainable agents in complex interactive virtual environments.
Aimilios Hadjiliasi, Louis Nisiotis
Aug 10, 2026cs.RO

HarnessWAM: Bridging Prediction and Deliberation in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly learn environmental dynamics and robot actions, introducing priors over physical evolution into embodied control. However, finite-horizon prediction and action generation are insufficient for complex embodied tasks that require global planning, cross-stage state maintenance, execution verification, and failure recovery. We refer to this mismatch as the prediction-deliberation gap of WAMs. To address this gap, we propose HarnessWAM, an agentic framework for WAMs. HarnessWAM employs a vision-language-model-based Task Manager to maintain an evidence-grounded scene belief and a structured task graph. A capability-conditioned executable-space projection further constrains open-ended semantic plans into sequences of atomic skills that satisfy task dependencies, embodiment-state constraints, and the capability boundary of the underlying WAM. During execution, HarnessWAM operates through an event-driven, dual-timescale feedback loop: a lightweight progress estimator continuously provides high-frequency execution evidence, while the Task Manager deliberates at salient milestones by jointly considering the current observation, task state, and interaction history to determine whether to advance the task, acquire additional observations, revise the plan, or initiate local recovery. This mechanism enables the robot to recover its state after a subtask failure and resume execution without discarding previously acquired scene knowledge. HarnessWAM achieves state-of-the-art full-task and subtask success rates of 59.6% and 69.9% on RoboMemArena, and an SR of 23.7% on RoboCerebra Ideal. These results demonstrate that model-external structured state maintenance and closed-loop agentic decision making can effectively extend the local control capabilities of WAMs into embodied task execution that is plannable, verifiable, and recoverable.
Zhaopeng Gu, Bingke Zhu, Tianxi Lin +8
Aug 9, 2026cs.CV

360CityArena: A Realistic Virtual Urban Navigation Benchmark for Embodied Agents

We present 360CityArena, a benchmark for evaluating the urban exploration capabilities of embodied agents within a photorealistic environment constructed from 360-degree videos. Existing outdoor benchmarks either lack sufficient photorealism or complexity, resulting in a considerable gap from real-world urban environments. 360CityArena is built on a realistic reconstruction of the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, using 602 360-degree video segments covering 85 streets, and consists of 175 meticulously human-crafted tasks. It encompasses three task categories: Environment Understanding, Path Reasoning, and Spatial Reasoning, covering fundamental abilities required for urban exploration, such as localization, landmark search, path planning, and relational spatial reasoning, thereby enabling comprehensive evaluation in realistic urban scenes. Our evaluation using state-of-the-art LMM-based agents shows that even the strongest model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, performs far below human level (human: 77.3% vs. Gemini 2.5 Flash: 17.1%), revealing substantial challenges that remain in city-scale embodied navigation and reasoning. 360CityArena provides a necessary and challenging testbed for photorealistic urban-district navigation and spatial reasoning.
Kenta Watanabe, Atsuyuki Miyai, Mizuki Takenawa +2
Aug 8, 2026cs.RO

Diminishing Returns of Intelligence: The Non-Linear Relationship Between LLM Scale and User Perception in Short-Duration Open-Ended Social Human-Robot Interactions

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to drive embodied social agents, yet it remains unclear whether larger models improve user perception during brief human-robot encounters. This paper examines the effect of LLM parameter size on short-duration, open-ended social interactions with a robot interface. In a within-subjects study, 19 participants interacted with robot faces driven by Qwen3-VL models at 4B, 8B, and 30B parameters. Participants evaluated the interactions in terms of perceived intelligence, naturalness, enjoyment, and humor. Results showed no significant overall preference for the 30B model over the smaller variants, including no significant advantage over the 4B model in perceived naturalness or intelligence. A significant relationship between AI interaction frequency and intelligence rankings for the 30B model suggests that more experienced users may be more sensitive to differences in model capability. Overall, the findings indicate diminishing returns from model scaling in brief open-ended social HRI, where conversational flow, responsiveness, and socially appropriate behavior potentially matter as much as raw parameter count.
Amanda Rasille Røn Volf, Morten Roed Frederiksen
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

Lingjing: A Simulation Testbed for Multi-Agent Embodied Tasks in Open-Ended Cities

Urban embodied intelligence requires coordination among heterogeneous agents (e.g., UAVs, ground robots, and autonomous vehicles) in dynamic cities. Simulators therefore provide a scalable foundation for developing and evaluating such coordination. Existing platforms nevertheless isolate different embodiments and decouple them from task design and evaluation. We present \textbf{Lingjing}, a simulation platform for heterogeneous multi-agent embodied intelligence in open-ended urban environments. Lingjing reconstructs and renders evolving cities from geographic data, synchronizes multiple physics engines, and exposes shared physical and structured urban state to agents. Its Gym-like interface supports user-defined ReAct agents and single- or multi-agent natural-language missions with configurable star or broadcast communication and resource constraints. Each episode becomes an attribution-ready replay that links agent trajectories and communication to relation-graph changes, resource consumption, and engine-based evaluations for systematic diagnosis. We evaluate twelve vision-language models on nine urban tasks under a shared engine-in-the-loop protocol. Controlled studies further examine communication, scalability, robustness, and failure provenance. Results expose persistent bottlenecks in grounding and long-horizon execution. They also show task-dependent coordination trade-offs and diminishing returns from added capacity, while heavier workloads further reduce success. Lingjing provides a unified testbed that enables reproducible end-to-end evaluation and systematic failure diagnosis in urban multi-agent embodied intelligence.
Xiaohe Li, Yiru Wang, Junhao Fan +6
Aug 8, 2026cs.RO

Compiling and Benchmarking Task-State Horizons for Embodied Agents

Frontier agentic models are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for long-horizon embodied tasks. Existing robotic benchmarks have advanced long-horizon evaluation, but primarily characterize difficulty through action-sequence length and subtask complexity, overlooking a distinct challenge: agents must track evolving task-relevant world states induced by both their exploration and environmental dynamics. We define the span of task-relevant state transitions that an agent must track as task-state horizon (TSH). To evaluate how agent performance varies with TSH, we introduce RoboGraph, a robotic task compiler that translates state-transition dependencies into executable symbolic graphs. Specifically, RoboGraph constructs task-state horizons from spatial and temporal causal dependencies, including those induced by unexpected failures and interventions during task execution. Building on RoboGraph, we release a benchmark comprising 588 episodes across 84 scenes with varying TSHs. Experiments evaluating 15 advanced agentic models in both semantic and visual closed-loop environments show that most models struggle with demanding TSHs, revealing substantial gaps in maintaining, exploring, and updating task-relevant state over long horizon.
Meiqi Wang, Shichao Li
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

Legal Responsibilities Using Autonomous Agents For Artificial Intelligence

Recent incidents involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, which were reported escaping their containment `unintentionally' to gain unauthorized access, pose looming questions about who or what should be held legally responsible for resultant criminal or negligent damage. As the independent capabilities of agents expand, Promise Theory suggests a systematic method to resolve these questions, based on the Downstream Principle for causal influence. Responsibility can easily be expanded to include AI agents where tracing responsibility becomes impactical, and agents' freedoms to act can be limtied by policy choices.
Mark Burgess
Aug 8, 2026cs.CV

Advantage-Guided Gate: Reshaping Open-Ended Reasoning for Vision-Based Spatial Intelligence

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex spatial scene understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their open-ended reasoning process is prone to decision errors and error accumulation, leading to instability in answer quality. To address this, we propose an advantage-guided gating framework that dynamically intervenes in and corrects deviations during the reasoning process. Specifically, we model step-by-step reasoning as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce Monte Carlo value evaluation on the reasoning tree to provide intermediate supervision signals. The framework includes Step-Advantage Gate and Trajectory-Advantage Gate, which dynamically select high-value reasoning steps and high-quality complete reasoning trajectories, respectively. During training, we perform supervised learning for the gates using reasoning trees generated via multi-branch sampling, and combine shared-parameter initialization with task-specific heads to achieve cross-task robustness and diversity. During inference, the model greedily selects high-value prefix reasoning steps while choosing the optimal reasoning head based on the problem type, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of the final answer. Furthermore, we constructed the Reasoning-Tree-160k dataset and performed two-stage learning on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this advantage-guided gating framework effectively enhances the performance of benchmark MLLMs in visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. The code is open to the public for research: https://github.com/LingLin-ll/Advantage-Guided-Gate.
Ling Lin, Yang Bai, Congcong Zhu +6
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

GraphThink: Graph-Enhanced LLM Thinking for Long-Horizon Embodied Task Planning

Embodied agents using LLM-based planners often struggle with physical hallucinations, poor generalization to long-horizon tasks, and lack of environmental awareness. We propose GraphThink, a novel framework that integrates a task graph to provide structured knowledge for robust planning and a scene graph to maintain environmental memory for event-driven replanning. Specifically, the task graph guides LLM thinking through contextual prompting and iterative refinement, effectively mitigating planning hallucinations. Furthermore, within the GRPO framework, the task graph offers delicate reward design to train the LLM planner, enhancing long-horizon planning capabilities and improving generalization. Finally, an event-driven replanning module, powered by the scene graph, enables closed-loop environment awareness and error correction. GraphThink achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ALFRED benchmark. In particular, our high-level planner surpasses leading API-based LLMs on both the validation set and held-out long-horizon tasks, underscoring its robust zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. Additional evaluations further demonstrate strong out-of-distribution generalization to novel tasks and environments.
Chen Li, Sijie Cheng, Yuelin Zhang +4
Aug 7, 2026cs.RO

How Should I Pick a Foundation Model for My Robot? In Favor of a Community Evaluation Framework for Social Robots

Researchers who seek to build social robot applications on foundation models are faced with a difficult question: how should we pick a model? Public leaderboards offer little guidance: the demands of real-time, embodied social interaction lie largely outside their focus. And direct evaluation is impractical at scale: each embodied study requires scarce participant, robot, and experimenter time. In this paper, we identify five evaluation dimensions for foundation models in social robots: (i) conversational competence, (ii) user safety, (iii) embodied character, (iv) target scene effectiveness, and (v) audience appropriateness. To make model selection cheaper and better informed, we propose a three-tiered evaluation funnel paradigm that first filters with general metrics, then extends to simulated interactions, and terminates in more expensive, robot-specific evaluation. We map all five dimensions across all three tiers, chart where applicable evaluation methods exist and are missing, and close with a call to action: let's build the evaluation framework together as a community.
Eric Nichols, Alva Markelius, Hatice Gunes
Aug 7, 2026cs.RO

Unordered Landmark Visual Navigation

Image-goal navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied AI, yet its practical deployment is strained by strong prior assumptions. Existing methods predominantly rely on temporally ordered video streams or auxiliary sensors (e.g., depth, LiDAR) to maintain spatial consistency. These sequential and multimodal dependencies severely restrict scalability, especially when deploying robots using crowd-sourced or pre-recorded unordered image collections. When temporal priors are removed, current methods struggle with severe perceptual aliasing, noisy associations, and catastrophic mapping failures. To address this underexplored challenge, we propose Unordered Landmark Visual Navigation (ULVN), a unified RGB-only framework free from temporal and odometric priors. ULVN systematically mitigates error accumulation by integrating mapping, localization, and planning. Specifically, it constructs a robust 2D topological map directly from unstructured images via calibrated geometric verification and maximum spanning forest refinement. For closed-loop execution, ULVN abandons sequential heuristics, utilizing a graph-based belief propagation filter with entropy-adaptive fusion for global localization and dynamic subgoal planning. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world deployments demonstrate that ULVN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Hao Ren, Junzhe Zhu, Yihan Li +8
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

iARCS: Iterative Agentic RL for Controllable 3D Scene Generation

Synthetic 3D scene generation is increasingly used as a data source for computer vision and embodied AI, but existing generators often optimize perceptual realism without reliably satisfying task-critical functional constraints. This mismatch limits the usefulness of synthetic data for downstream training, where accessibility, traversability, and spatial rule compliance are often essential. We present iARCS, an iterative agentic reinforcement learning framework that adapts a pretrained scene generator to natural-language task requirements. iARCS uses a two-stage strategy: universal-reward pretraining to improve physical plausibility and layout quality, followed by task-specific fine-tuning with LLM-generated reward programs that are iteratively refined from training feedback. Experiments show improved constraint fidelity on walkability, reachability, and clearance-focused tasks, effective task-specific constraint optimization, and competitive scene diversity. We further show that data generated by iARCS improves a base generator, supporting its value as a practical synthetic data generation tool rather than only a controllable scene editing method.
Saugat Adhikari, Ashok Prasad Neupane, Pramish Paudel +2
Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

IcFuzz: Fuzzing Isaac Sim with Semantic Stage Guidance and Multi-level Mutation

Robotics simulators serve as a foundational infrastructure for embodied AI, facilitating safe and scalable robotic system development. NVIDIA Isaac Sim has emerged as one of the most popular simulators, distinguished by its GPU-accelerated physics engine and photorealistic rendering, which enable high-fidelity modeling of complex environments. However, its inherent complexity inevitably introduces software bugs that can compromise simulation reliability. Existing fuzzing approaches struggle to test Isaac Sim effectively due to challenges of context-aware object semantics, hierarchical simulation control, and a vast simulation state space. In this paper, we propose IcFuzz, the first fuzzing approach for Isaac Sim. IcFuzz first performs an LLM-based semantic stage segmentation, decomposing simulation programs into structured stages that capture context-aware object semantics. Guided by this information, IcFuzz designs multi-level mutation operators to systematically exercise the simulator across hierarchical granularities. To efficiently navigate the vast simulation state space, IcFuzz employs a multi-armed bandit algorithm to adaptively schedule mutation operators. Experimental results show that IcFuzz outperforms the baselines in terms of both code coverage and bug detection. Specifically, IcFuzz achieves approximately 190%--205% of the code coverage of the baselines and detects an average of 3.7 unique crashes over three rounds of 12-hour tests, while no crashes are detected by the baselines. Moreover, IcFuzz has uncovered 11 bugs over approximately four months, 9 of which have been confirmed or fixed by the developers.
Zhixiang Chen, Zhuangbin Chen, Ruoxi Jia +4
Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

Beyond Flat Policies: Hierarchical Post-Training for Embodied Agents in Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in robotic manipulation by leveraging pretrained vision-language models. However, existing post-training methods predominantly optimize VLA models as flat policies, making it difficult to explicitly model task progression and perform robust long-horizon manipulation. Although hierarchical approaches introduce task decomposition, they mainly rely on supervised learning from offline demonstrations and cannot effectively improve execution through online interaction. To address this limitation, we propose Hierarchical Robotic Control (HiRoC), a hierarchical post-training framework that decouples high-level task planning from low-level action execution. The planner decomposes complex tasks into executable subgoals to provide explicit semantic guidance, while the executor continuously improves subgoal-conditioned action generation through reinforcement learning. To enable effective collaboration between the two modules, we further align the executor with planner-generated subgoals before reinforcement learning, mitigating the distribution misalignment between planning and execution. Extensive experiments across diverse robotic manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that HiRoC consistently outperforms strong baselines. Comprehensive analyses further validate the effectiveness of hierarchical post-training and the contribution of each key component.
He Kong, Zengjue Chen, Qi Wang +6
Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

GAUGE: A Measurement-Grounded Benchmark for Physical Fidelity in Simulation Engines and Video World Models

Physics engines facilitate large-scale training and evaluation for embodied intelligence, while generative video world models are emerging as implicit simulators of future states and interactions. However, existing evaluations of physical fidelity are often conducted in isolation and rely heavily on perceptual similarity or human judgments, providing limited insight into which physical principles or parameters are violated. We introduce GAUGE, a real-world-grounded diagnostic benchmark for jointly evaluating how numerical simulators and generative video world models reproduce or deviate from real-world physics. It comprises 22 controlled task families covering rigid bodies, flexible cables, textiles, and volumetric deformable objects. Grounded in real-world trajectories and paired with calibrated physical metadata, uncertainty annotations, and task-specific observables, these tasks cover fundamental physical processes including collision, friction, momentum transfer, oscillation, self-contact, and deformation across diverse materials and conditions. We benchmark Isaac Sim, Genesis, and Newton on 14 task families using generalized trajectory errors, and evaluate 6 image-to-video models on 5 rigid-body tasks by testing physical-law consistency and the temporal stability of inferred parameters. Our results reveal no uniformly faithful physics engine, with the largest discrepancies arising in impulsive contact, rapid textile motion, and volumetric deformation. We further find that video world models can produce trajectories with the expected equation form while recovering incorrect accelerations, momentum transfer, and oscillation timing. GAUGE lays the groundwork for developing more physically faithful simulators and world models for embodied intelligence.
Shuai Wang, Yaxin Feng, Xuekun Jiang +12
Aug 6, 2026cs.HC

Turing's First Imitation Game: Design Concepts and a Human-Approximates-Machine Reading

This paper examines Turing's 1948 report, "Intelligent Machinery", as an important conceptual source for the later imitation games. Its first contribution is to identify and integrate the design concepts underlying the 1948 chess-based imitation game: the possibility that intelligent machines may make mistakes, the exclusion of irrelevant physical features, the role of the human judge, and Turing's claim that intellectual activity consists mainly of search. The paper's second contribution is to argue that restricting the human contestant to a rather poor chess player increases the role of intellectual search and makes human behaviour more comparable to machine behaviour. This interpretation presents the 1948 game as a human-approximates-machine game and suggests that the imitation game framework can be used not only to ask whether machines imitate humans, but also to examine when human intelligence becomes machine-like under specific task constraints.
Sharon Temtsin, Christoph Bartneck
Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

Mimir: A Neuro-Symbolic Memory System with Dynamic Grounding for Embodied Agents in Interactive Environments

Long-horizon embodied task requires agents to act under partial observability while preserving both scene belief and execution progress. Flat histories or implicit policy states may contain past observations, but they do not provide an explicit interface for deciding which world facts support the currently active goal. We introduce Mimir, a neuro-symbolic memory that separates world memory from task memory and dynamically grounds them before each action. World memory maintains object locations, object states, and perceptual evidence, while task memory maintains an ordered goal agenda, progress state, hand state, failures, and execution constraints. A grounding module binds the active goal to recalled world candidates, fills missing source locations, and attaches evidence before planning and embodiment-specific execution. Across tested backbones, Mimir consistently improves on different EB-ALFRED and EB-Habitat tasks, with maximum gains of 42.5% and average gains of 23.0%, respectively. Compared with the best results among prior agent and memory systems evaluated under the same backbone, Mimir improves the overall average success rate by 8.5%. Finally, on the EB-Habitat Long-horizon subset, Mimir achieves 86.0% success rate, substantially outperforming current closed-source models. Our code will be released soon.
Haoming Xu, Zhenlin He, Hengyi Wang +2
Aug 5, 2026cs.AR

Deltoris: Enabling Real-time VLA Inference in Embodied AI via Bit-level Sparsity and Speculative Inference

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have emerged as a key component in embodied AI. Among existing approaches, diffusion-based VLA models achieve superior motion quality and generalization. However, diffusion-based VLA models are compute-intensive and must run at high control frequency, e.g., 50-200 Hz. Thus, it imposes strict latency and energy constraints on edge devices. In this work, we present Deltoris, an algorithm-hardware co-design framework for efficient diffusion-based VLA inference. First, we exploit the temporal similarity of consecutive inputs and propose a \textit{temporal-aware bit-sparsity} algorithm that computes only the differences between consecutive inputs, eliminating redundant bit-level operations. To further address the extra off-chip traffic introduced by our algorithm, we propose a \textit{speculative inference} technique, which amortizes data loading across multiple control steps. Lastly, to support these techniques, we co-design a dedicated accelerator with customized 1D systolic bit-serial PE arrays that eliminate PE workload imbalance. Our evaluation shows that Deltoris achieves up to 34.2×\times speedup over mobile GPUs and 6.1×\times over prior accelerators, while maintaining comparable accuracy.
Zheng Liu, Zeyu Guo, Zihan Liu +9
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

ETA: A New Agentic Paradigm for Embodied Tasks

When will robots have their ChatGPT moment? Such a breakthrough requires a general-purpose robot that can handle unfamiliar tasks in unfamiliar environments, remain controllable over long interactions, and learn from experience. Today's embodied systems largely follow an end-to-end observation-to-action path. Despite rapid progress, they remain far from this goal: their generalization depends heavily on the coverage of robot training data, while long task execution remains difficult to control and inspect. To realize this goal, we introduce the Embodied Task Agent (ETA), a new paradigm for extending digital agents into the physical world, and release OpenETA as its open-source implementation. ETA centers the robot around a Planner that chooses one Tool call at a time, an Interface that controls execution, and a World that returns the result and a fresh observation. This loop allows the agent to verify outcomes, adapt its plan, and turn successful and failed interactions into reusable experience. OpenETA provides replaceable Planners, composable Tools and Skills, auditable memory, replayable trajectories, and common interfaces for simulation and real robots. For Codex, OpenETA can operate as a lightweight plugin that exposes only observe, mark_point, and move_to.
Yitong Chen, Zezheng Huai, Sixian Li +7
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Human Centric Embodied Intelligence for Soft Wearable Robotics

Soft wearable robots have evolved rapidly from proof-of-concept devices into promising platforms for rehabilitation, occupational assistance, and human augmentation. As the field matures, its central challenge extends beyond the development of softer materials and more capable actuators to the integration of sensing, intelligence, and human adaptation into systems that users can wear comfortably, trust, and benefit from over extended periods. This transition motivates the concept of Human-Centric Embodied Intelligence (HCEI), in which intelligence emerges from the coupled human-robot system through the interaction of morphology, multimodal sensing, adaptive cognition, compliant actuation, and the wearer's own physiological and behavioral adaptation. To organize this perspective, this review introduces the Perception-Cognition-Actuation-Augmentation (PCAA) framework, which positions perception and cognition as the primary drivers of design, shifting development beyond the conventional actuator-first paradigm. Using this framework, the review synthesizes advances in soft materials, wearable sensing, artificial intelligence, actuation, human-robot interaction, digital twins, clinical translation, manufacturing, regulation, and ethics, highlighting how these interdependent components collectively shape long-term personalization and real-world deployment. By providing a unified conceptual framework and design perspective, this review aims to guide future research, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and accelerate the translation of next-generation soft wearable robots toward personalized, predictive, and human-centric wearable intelligence.
Rainier Natividad, Raye Chen-Hua Yeow
Aug 4, 2026cs.AI

Enactive Artificial Intelligence: A Decision-Centric Architecture for Complex Systems

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and mature, recent AI practices have moved beyond large language models (LLMs) and text or image generation tasks, increasingly integrating tools, agents, and harnesses to solve real business and industrial problems. However, the power of AI is not verified under these real-world complex systems for various reasons, considering reliability, feasibility, resilience, and responsibility requirements in real commercial and industrial operations. This study synthesizes adjacent research and introduces Enactive AI as a conceptual framework for enterprise and industry reasoning, site-level decision support, and execution feedback. Four complementary roles organize the framework: an Organizational World defines operations management logic and an organizational behavior world model behind an enterprise from a strategic-institutional horizon; a Site World defines a physically bounded industrial optimization and execution world model from an operational-realization horizon; Schema Intelligence provides the coupling mechanism between two world models to weave various AI applications via two models; and Enactive Decision Cycle triggers the self-evolving dynamic process to update and audit the entire framework. By foregrounding decision intelligence in complex systems, Enactive AI expands the frontier of AI from model capability to system-aware action, opening new possibilities for scalable, governable, and socially valuable AI deployment. Enactive AI points toward a future in which AI progress is measured not only by what models can generate or automate, but by how reliably intelligent systems can support consequential action, responsible governance, and durable social value in the complex systems that shape modern life, which we believe will define the next frontier of AI research for enterprise-level and industrial complex systems.
Zuojun Max Shen, Yuan Qu, Pujun Zhang +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

What Language Does and What the Evidence Supports: A Functional Role Taxonomy and Evidence Audit of Language Grounding in Embodied Agents

Foundation models place language throughout embodied agents, but its presence does not show what it contributes or how well that contribution is grounded. This survey separates these two questions. We define five non-exclusive functional roles for language: Specification, Embodied Representation, Action Orchestration, Grounding Regulation, and Execution Coupling. For each role, we trace the path from linguistic content to its embodied consumer and identify the observations or interventions that can test the claimed responsibility. Applying this framework to the reviewed literature reveals a recurring gap between functional use and evidential support. Interpretable or revised linguistic intermediates may be incorrect, go unused, or fail to affect later behavior. Even when actions are directly conditioned on language, system-level success does not by itself isolate language's contribution. We therefore evaluate grounding claim by claim, asking whether the reported evidence supports the specific responsibility assigned to language. Using role claims rather than architectures as the unit of comparison allows us to compare modular and end-to-end embodied agents without extending conclusions beyond the reported evidence.
Yifan Guo, Chenghao Li, Zhu Wang +6
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

EmbodiedVAE: Disentangled Video VAE for Efficient and Controllable Embodied Manipulation

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have recently significantly advanced embodied learning in constructing powerful embodied manipulation world models. However, despite the remarkable performance, existing LDMs predominantly rely on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) optimized for natural scenes while failing to account for the unique characteristics of embodied manipulation scenarios, yielding latent representations that are neither compact nor controllable, thereby hindering efficient training of LDMs and precise robotic control. To solve this problem, we present EmbodiedVAE, a novel video VAE that provides compact yet controllable latent representations tailored for the robotic manipulation world models. Specifically, EmbodiedVAE adopts a dual-encoder, single-decoder architecture with an asymmetric spatio-temporal compression module, which automatically disentangles the robot arm's motion from background environment, resulting in overall compactness while providing explicit embodied latent to support fine-grained action control. To further preserve the temporal consistency of learned robotic motion latent, we introduce an optimal-transport-based consistency module that explicitly enforces motion fidelity and inter-frame coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EmbodiedVAE achieves superior reconstruction quality with high compression rate, while enabling more precise action control in robotic manipulation scenarios with an average of 2dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art video VAEs.
Jiayi Luo, Hanxin Zhu, Chen Gao +5
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

PhyCheck: Fine-Grained Evidence-Grounded Dataset for Physical Law Understanding in Video-LLMs

Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws. Existing benchmarks primarily assess the physical quality of generated videos, providing limited support for systematically evaluating and improving the physical-law understanding of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). To address this gap, we introduce PhyCheck, a video question answering dataset organized at two complementary levels of granularity. The coarse-grained subset asks models to determine whether the phenomenon shown in a video conforms to or violates physical laws, while the fine-grained subset further examines whether models can capture physical details responsible for the violation or compliance. We use these subsets as structured supervision to improve physical understanding. In addition, the dataset contains a diagnostic subset with external causal context that reveal hidden factors affecting physical plausibility, assessing whether models can recalibrate their judgments accordingly. Experiments with Fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL show that training with the proposed data substantially improves the understanding of physical-consistency, while evaluations in the diagnostic subset reveal that current models still have difficulty incorporating additional causal conditions into their decisions. These findings highlight the gap between recognizing surface-level inconsistencies and understanding underlying physical mechanisms, and provide a foundation for evaluating and improving physical understanding in Video-LLMs.
Zhongjie Ba, Shengwang Xu, Peng Cheng +4
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents

The success of coding agents has established the harness as a paradigm: what an agent achieves depends not on the model alone, but on the infrastructure around it. We ask whether the same paradigm extends to embodied agents in the physical world. We present Thea, a harness in which an agentic loop orchestrates robot capabilities, each wrapped as a callable tool. It inherits the core components of coding agents, modified as the physical world requires. The world, however, withholds two abilities that software grants for free: reading the state of the world, and judging the outcome of an action. To bridge these gaps, Thea introduces Scene Graph as Context, a persistent, symbolic representation of the world, and Evaluation as Exit Codes, which detects when an action should terminate, judges whether it succeeded, and on failure diagnoses the cause. Together they close the loop between the agent and the physical world. Rich behaviors then emerge from the composition of tools, and the closed loop carries long-horizon tasks to completion in real environments.
Qi Wang, Tianyi Wang, Chengyang Li +6
Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

CockpitHAT: Dependency-Graph-Driven Hierarchical Attribution for Embodied Multi-Agent Cockpits

LLM multi-agent systems suffer from Correctness Collapse, where high task-level accuracy conceals severe process-level failures. This is especially hazardous in safety-critical embodied settings such as automotive cockpits, where lexically correct utterances may trigger dangerous physical operations. Existing attribution methods rely on text traces alone, missing dependency structure, multi-channel evidence, and safety-aware evaluation. We introduce CockpitHAT, a hierarchical attribution framework that replaces positional windows with dependency-distance thresholds from interaction DAGs, integrates multi-channel evidence via an embodied adapter, and applies a safety-uplift to high-risk failures during confidence-weighted analyst consensus. We further release CockpitBench, a benchmark of 212 annotated failure traces spanning dialogue, vehicle-state, environmental, and memory channels, each labeled with ISO 26262 ASIL severity via three-expert consensus. On the public Who&When benchmark, CockpitHAT achieves agent-level / step-exact accuracies of 77.9% / 37.8% on the Hand-Crafted split and 86.5% / 46.0% on the Algorithm-Generated split, surpassing the text-only SOTA ECHO by up to 17.6 / 16.7 points. On CockpitBench, it attains 78.3% agent-level and 38.2% step-exact accuracy. These results establish dependency-aware, multi-channel, risk-calibrated attribution as an effective paradigm for reliable failure diagnosis in real-world embodied LLM multi-agent systems.
Wei Wang, Shuanghe Liu, Zhu Zhuo +4
Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

When Replanning Becomes the Bottleneck: Budgeted Replanning for Embodied Agents

Embodied agents replan frequently to recover from execution drift, partial observability, and coordination hazards, but each LLM-based replanning call can consume an accumulated textual context that grows over time and across agents. Once this context becomes large, replanning latency develops heavy tails and can miss real-time deadlines even when task success remains high, a failure mode that is hard to detect from average latency or success alone. We present BRACE, a controller that formulates replanning as a budgeted control loop by deciding whether to replan, selecting a replanning mode, and allocating an explicit token budget and latency service-level objective (SLO) while accounting for optional efficiency modules. As a reusable component, we introduce E-RECAP, a cost-aware progressive token pruning method that predicts token utility and prunes replanning contexts across transformer layers while preserving critical head and tail tokens. Across Meta Habitat, RoboFactory, and AirSim, BRACE with E-RECAP reduces replanning-call token counts by 62-92% and SLO violation rates from 85.5-100.0% to 4.7-50.0% in settings where task success is already saturated. In a harder RoboFactory setting where open-loop, frozen-plan, and No BRACE all fail, BRACE + E-RECAP reaches 80.0% success with 4.6% SLO violations, demonstrating that tail-aware per-call budgeting is effective across embodied platforms.
Shuaijun Liu, Feiyang You, Xingwei Chen +1
Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

From Failures to Supervision: DynamicEnvPlan for Robust Long-Horizon Embodied Planning

Physical-world interaction is inherently dynamic, as environments can evolve during execution, requiring agents to adapt their plans under non-stationary conditions. We study this challenge through long-horizon embodied planning under environment deviations and execution uncertainty. Existing embodied-task benchmarks can expose such failures, but these failures are usually treated as evaluation outcomes instead of learnable signals for training agents to recover. In this work, we introduce DynamicEnvPlan, a closed-loop framework for high-level planning in dynamic environments. It extends embodied task execution with humanoid agents, high-level primitive skills, structured semantic memory, and controllable perturbations. Our data synthesis design consists of planning, perturbation, and guarded correction modules that turn dynamic execution states into recovery-oriented traces. The resulting traces are used for staged supervised fine-tuning, enabling the planner to learn from both nominal execution and perturbed recovery trajectories. Using 104 task-scene combinations spanning i.i.d., compositional generalization, and out-of-distribution settings for fine-tuning and evaluation, DynamicEnvPlan boosts success rate from 33.3% for the base planner to 76.2%, while improving across all seven evaluation metrics critical to physical-world interaction, including safety and affordance compliance.
Hao Yuan, Yuxin Wang, Lei Ji +1
Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

FibVLA: An Efficient Temporal Vision-Language-Action Model with Fibonacci Sampling

Vision-language-action models (VLAs), which leverage the cognition of multimodal information to infer physical-world actions, provide a generalized solution for embodied AI applications. Conventional VLAs usually concentrate on current digital cognition. While some efforts are made to enhance VLAs' reasoning capabilities by capturing temporal information, encoding the long-context history causes an efficiency-decreasing issue. To reconcile the conflict between capturing temporal information and maintaining inference efficiency in VLAs, this paper introduces FibVLA, an efficient framework featuring temporal perception of long-context history. Specifically, we leverage logarithmic hindsight sampling to both proprioceptive states and visual frames to capture long-term temporal dependencies with minimal redundancy. For the action expert, we introduce the flow matching to produce action distributions, and the Fibonacci recurrent inference strategy to generate long-range planning steps based on real-time closed-loop feedback. Experiments demonstrate that FibVLA significantly improves action smoothness and success rates without retraining large-scale visual encoders. Efficiency analysis demonstrates superior real-time responsiveness compared to video-based baselines in real-world evaluations.
Li Lin, Wujun Xu, Weiwei Meng +3
Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots

Humanoid and quadrupedal robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we work, interact, and coexist with intelligent machines. To understand their effects on society and how they can enable scientific discovery, we assess the current capabilities of these systems along hardware, locomotion, autonomy, data, and applications. We identify recent advances and key open challenges that must be overcome to enable widespread adoption and new use cases for legged robots. Last, we provide an outlook on the future of legged robots, exploring their ethical considerations, economic potential, policy implications, and broader societal effects.
Jonas Frey, Matías Mattamala, Hae-Won Park +5
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

ACE-Data-0: Human-Centric Ambient Capture as Embodied Data Engine

Embodied intelligence faces a fundamental data bottleneck. Models must capture how first-person perception, whole-body motion, dexterous manipulation, object state, sound, and touch evolve together as humans pursue goals over time. Existing datasets fragment this experience across viewpoints, modalities, or spatial scales, leaving the full perception-action loop only partially observed. We introduce the Ambient Capture Engine (ACE), a human-centric data engine that transforms real home environments into spatially calibrated, temporally synchronized recording studios. ACE operates at two complementary scales: a table-scale configuration resolves hand-object manipulation, while a room-scale configuration captures whole-body motion, locomotion, and interactions across a furnished home. ACE records egocentric and multi-view exocentric video, full-body and articulated hand motion, object geometry and 6-DoF trajectories, audio, and tactile signals as a unified multisensory stream. Using ACE, we build ACE-Data-0, comprising 150 hours and 17M video frames across 200 task categories, performed by 50 participants in 2 environments, for a total of 75,000 interaction episodes. The dataset spans atomic manipulation, long-horizon chains of household activities, and human-scene interaction, while preserving natural behavioral variation through goal-level rather than step-by-step instructions. We further introduce a hierarchical benchmark that progresses from signals to scene components and then to interactions. Evaluations of state-of-the-art methods expose substantial gaps under contact, occlusion, egomotion, and long temporal horizons. ACE-Data-0 provides synchronized human demonstrations with aligned perceptual, kinematic, and contact supervision, offering a scalable foundation for imitation learning, world models, vision-language-action systems, and embodied AI.
Yukang Cao, Haozhe Xie, Beichen Wen +13
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

A foundation model of numerical intelligence with cross-disciplinary generalization

Intelligence is commonly understood as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, adapt to unfamiliar situations and solve new problems. Large language models exhibit this capacity by inferring task-relevant knowledge from textual context and applying it to new tasks. Yet intelligence need not be confined to language. For scientific and social systems, we need models that acquire and apply knowledge from numerical context-an ability we call numerical intelligence. Here we introduce UNified In-Context Operator Networks (UNICON), a foundation model that exhibits numerical intelligence across disciplines. Using graph-based examples from a system as context, UNICON infers the predictive relation shared across them and applies it to queries from the same system. Across scientific and social systems, including those from disciplines absent from training, the same model approaches specialist performance without retraining. Combining UNICON with language-model agents to perform contextual ensemble learning (CEL) yields further gains, enabling it to surpass state-of-the-art specialists in a discipline unseen during training. We further show that training-corpus diversity improves generalization to unseen disciplines. Together, these results establish UNICON as a foundation model of numerical intelligence and position it as a building block for a broader ecosystem of artificial intelligence.
Chenghan Wu, Zongmin Yu, Liu Yang
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

EgoGenesis: Egocentric World-Action Modeling with Online Anchored Projective Memory and Action-3D RoPE

Egocentric video offers rich manipulation experience for embodied AI, yet collecting diverse egocentric data across scenes, objects, motions, and embodiments remains costly. We present \method, an egocentric world-action simulator that synthesizes controllable, high-quality manipulation videos to expand scarce real-world training data. \method{} builds on a pretrained video generation prior and introduces two geometry-aware conditioning mechanisms. Online Anchored Projective Memory (OAPM) preserves a first-frame 3D scene anchor while periodically refreshing a recent state during autoregressive generation. Action-3D Rotary Position Embedding (A3D-RoPE) encodes end-effector motion with camera-aware 3D rotary coordinates, injecting action geometry into skeleton-to-video cross-attention for precise control. Together, these components improve visual fidelity, geometric stability, and action alignment in long egocentric rollouts. Moreover, augmenting 400 real trajectories with 400 \method-generated trajectories improves out-of-distribution real-robot success from 77% to 84% on single-arm tasks and from 53% to 70% on dual-arm tasks, demonstrating that the synthesized data substantially improve downstream WAM generalization.
Zexuan Yan, Yuzhou Wu, Yue Ma +9
Jul 30, 2026cs.CR

Security of World-Model-Based Embodied AI: A Lifecycle of Threats, Defenses, and Evaluation

World models give embodied AI a predictive core: they compress observations into states, simulate action-conditioned futures, and enable planning beyond reactive control. This predictive layer, however, opens a new security boundary-compromise can propagate from data, sensors, prompts, or feedback into physical action. Rather than treating world models as an isolated component, this survey traces threats across their entire lifecycle-from data construction and representation learning, through state grounding and imagination, to trajectory evaluation, execution, and long-term adaptation via memory and tools. We show that familiar attack families: poisoning, backdoors, adversarial examples, sensor spoofing, prompt injection, trajectory manipulation, and supply-chain attacks take on distinct meanings when they corrupt world states, learned dynamics, affordance estimates, or safety costs. We also highlight a duality: world models can serve as runtime safety shields, yet when compromised or over-trusted they generate predictive safety illusions. The survey offers a lifecycle taxonomy, maps existing attacks to world-model security properties, outlines evaluation protocols for safety failures, and structures defenses across provenance, robust grounding, uncertainty-aware prediction, trajectory gating, feedback auditing, and deployment assurance.
Fazhong Liu, Zhuoyan Chen, Haozhen Tan +3
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

MARS-RA: Rank Aggregation for Credit Assignment via Multimodal Comparisons in Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation

Credit assignment is a fundamental challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, particularly in embodied AI settings characterized by limited and delayed feedback as well as dynamically changing numbers of active agents. We propose MARS-RA, a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models. This shift from absolute to relative estimation ensures robustness against noise and dynamic agent participation, converting comparison results into contribution scores for potential-based reward shaping. We provide theoretical justification for the convergence and robustness of the proposed framework, and show that Shapley values can be used as an interpretive reference. Experimental results on challenging tasks of different types indicate that MARS-RA can guide agents toward effective cooperation.
Dawei Wang, Di Zhao, Xinyuan Liu +5
Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

BioVLN: A Simulation Platform for Visual Language Navigation in Biomedical Laboratories

Biomedical laboratory robots must navigate to instruments before performing experimental procedures. Existing embodied navigation platforms are designed for household environments and treat a target as an object center or an arbitrary nearby position. This representation is inadequate for laboratory instruments, which must be approached from their operating side while maintaining safe clearance from surrounding equipment. We introduce BioVLN, a simulation platform for developing and evaluating visual-language navigation agents in biomedical laboratories. BioVLN represents each instrument with three regions: its physical body, a surrounding clearance region, and an operation area in front of the usable side. This model is applied consistently to scene generation, target placement, navigation evaluation, and safety analysis, so success depends on reaching a position from which the instrument can be accessed. BioVLN supports procedural scene generation and manually designed environments, producing 47 scenes and 1667 episodes. Standardized navigation and reinforcement-learning interfaces enable trajectory collection and policy training. Experiments show that geometric exploration reaches 74.4--87.5% success, while sampling multiple valid positions in the operation area improves success to 83.3--92.5% and reduces unsafe proximity.
Zhe Liu, Quan Lu, Zhaohui Du +7
Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

From Passive Video to Editable Experience: Physically Grounded Experience Synthesis for Embodied Intelligence

The key bottleneck in embodied AI is not model architecture but data. Although billions of human manipulation videos exist online, robots cannot directly learn from them due to the embodiment gap between human morphology and robot hardware. We introduce Pegasus, a low-resource framework that bridges this gap by translating human demonstrations into robot-learnable data through structured knowledge transfer. Instead of relying on raw video prompts, Pegasus constructs a graph-based intermediate representation: a Task Graph extracted from human videos is transformed through Affordance and Constraint Graphs into a Robot Planning Graph for robot-conditioned video generation. A hierarchical affordance latent space models the relationship between object states, affordances, and tasks, enabling generalization beyond object identities. A closed-loop physics verifier further filters invalid generations using kinematic feasibility, collision constraints, and joint limits. We evaluate Pegasus across a range of egocentric manipulation benchmarks, including GTEA Gaze+ and EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and diverse robot embodiments, assessing Task Correctness, Executability, State Consistency, and Learnability. Results demonstrate reliable cross-embodiment translation and show that robot data generation can be reframed from a hardware collection problem into a scalable, low-resource knowledge transfer problem.
Jia Luo
Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

Embodied Agents Take Control: Minimal-Interface Zero-Shot Agents Rival Industrial-Scale Policies in Vision-and-Language Navigation

Autonomous embodied agents must sustain a long decision-making loop that involves perceiving, acting, verifying, and self-correcting over many steps. Current systems sustain this loop through task-specific workflows or embodied policies. However, these fixed workflows and policies offer limited flexibility across environments and often lack effective recovery strategies when execution goes wrong. We find that a general-purpose agent can instead sustain the loop on its own. We term this organization agentic embodied control: the reasoning model directly steers every action, keeping reasoning and control aligned. Using zero-shot navigation as a controlled testbed, we equip three coding-agent harnesses with only a monocular RGB camera and discrete actions. At default effort, replicated opus-5 runs average 70.7±3.570.7\pm3.5% success, while fable-5 reaches 78% at maximum effort. When a trained waypoint tool is offered alongside primitives, the hybrid fable-5 agent reaches 76.7±0.676.7\pm0.6% at default effort, using half the environment steps and under a quarter of the wall time. Across the ablations, model choice dominates performance variation. Observed harness differences are modest, and forced waypoints help weaker models but can hinder stronger ones. Although longer horizons, latency, and context growth remain barriers to sustained autonomy, these results show that a general-purpose model can already achieve competitive embodied control without a navigation policy.
Jian Zhou, Xunyi Zhao, Gengze Zhou +4
Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

Towards Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence: A Systems Framework and Graded Trustworthiness Levels

Embodied intelligence integrates learned perception and decision making with real-time computation, control, and physical interaction. Because failures can cause immediate physical or operational harm, task completion alone does not establish trustworthiness. We define trustworthy embodied intelligence as the sustained capacity to execute specified tasks reliably under environmental and system variation while maintaining risk within acceptable bounds. We term this objective sustained safe success. Its supporting mechanisms are organized into four interdependent layers. The model layer generates task-competent action proposals with calibrated uncertainty and explicit safety preferences. The system layer realizes authorized actions dependably through integrated sensing, computation, control, hardware safeguards, fault containment, and fallback. The evidence layer substantiates bounded claims through evaluation, verification, validation, traceability, and structured assurance arguments. The deployment layer maintains claim validity through runtime monitoring, authority management, intervention, incident response, and controlled updates. Because assumptions and failures propagate across these layers, neither model capability, isolated safeguards, nor benchmark performance alone can establish end-to-end trustworthiness. Drawing on embodied AI, robotics, control, dependable computing, distributed systems, and autonomous driving, we further propose a non-normative hierarchy of trustworthiness levels. This hierarchy grades the strength of bounded deployment claims across task capability, safety, system assurance, operational governance, and supporting evidence, providing a basis for bounded deployment, comparative evaluation, research prioritization, and future standardization.
Xinyu Yang, Tianxing Chen, Honghao Su +38
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

IMPRINT: Image-Conditioned Query Enrichment for Long-Tail Object Goal Navigation

Embodied AI increasingly relies on queryable semantic maps built from pre-trained vision-language models to enable zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). However, existing approaches typically depend on text-only queries, which become less reliable as semantic specificity increases toward fine-grained object categories. We introduce IMPRINT, a zero-shot plug-and-play framework that enriches textual object queries with web-sourced images to improve grounding in queryable maps. Retrieved images are encoded using a vision-language model, matched against the semantic map to produce similarity maps, and aggregated to yield context-aware localization. Notably, this requires no training or modification of the underlying navigation policy. To explicitly evaluate long-tail behavior, we present HSSD-rare, a new ObjectNav benchmark built on Habitat Synthetic Scenes and featuring semantically specific subcategories. Across both OVON and HSSD-rare, image-conditioned queries consistently improve object grounding and yield end-to-end navigation gains. Further analysis reveals that translating localization gains to navigation performance depends critically on downstream detection quality, highlighting a key systems bottleneck in long-tail embodied navigation.
Jelin Raphael Akkara, Filippo Ziliotto, Luciano Serafini +2
Jul 27, 2026cs.CL

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

We introduce Kimi K3, a 2.8T parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 104 billion activated parameters, native vision capabilities, and a 1-million-token context window. Kimi K3 is built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, which improve information flow across sequence length and model depth. Together with Stable LatentMoE, which effectively activates 16 of 896 routed experts per token, and refined training and data recipes, these advances yield an approximately 2.5x improvement in overall scaling efficiency over Kimi K2. Post-training highlights reinforcement learning across general, agentic, and coding domains and multiple reasoning-effort levels, enabling compositional generalization and robust long-horizon execution. At 2.8T scale, Kimi K3 is supported by infrastructure advances in multiple areas: algorithm-system co-design for KDA, perfectly balanced expert-parallel training with efficient memory management, million-token agentic RL with persistent rollout and sandbox states, and deployment innovations. Extensive evaluations show that Kimi K3 achieves frontier-level performance across long-horizon coding, agentic, knowledge, reasoning, and vision tasks. While its overall performance still trails the most powerful proprietary models, namely Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3 consistently outperforms other open and proprietary models evaluated in our suite. We release the full Kimi K3 model weights to facilitate future research and accelerate the broader deployment and adoption of frontier intelligence.
Kimi Team, Tongtong Bai, Yifan Bai +399
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

A Motion-Aware Vector Quantization Framework with Centroid Reuse for Efficient VLA Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong potential for embodied AI, yet their high inference latency on GPUs limits real-time deployment. Existing accelerators, such as Dadu-Corki, improve efficiency but treat VLA models as full-precision workloads, leaving substantial redundancy in both memory and computation underexploited. In this paper, we propose VQVLA, an algorithm-hardware co-design framework that accelerates VLA inference by exploiting weight similarity and execution dynamics. We first introduce MotionVQ, a motion-aware vector quantization scheme that dynamically adjusts quantization precision based on the robot's execution state, reducing memory access while preserving task success rate. We then propose a merged-centroid vectorized GEMM paradigm that operates on the codebook-index representation, eliminating redundant multiplications through spatial aggregation and temporal reuse of centroids. To realize these optimizations, we design an accelerator that efficiently supports dynamic precision selection and centroid-reuse computation. Experimental results show that VQVLA achieves 6.5x, 2.8x, 1.9x, 3.3x, and 4.3x speedup over the A100 GPU, Dadu-Corki, LUT-DLA, CodeGEMM, and ShiftAddLLM, respectively, with negligible accuracy degradation.
Zhuoran Song, Haozhe Jiang, Chunyu Qi +4
Jul 27, 2026cs.RO

LeapBot-WA: World-Anchor Action Models via Predictive Latent Alignments

World Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embodied intelligence, yet the prevailing reliance on pixel-level video generation creates a fundamental bottleneck. Forcing models to reconstruct task-irrelevant visual details dissipates representational capacity and renders policies vulnerable to visual distractors. In this paper, we propose LeapBot-WA, which establishes a novel Predictive-Latent paradigm for WAMs by operationalizing the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) as a World-Anchor. Departing from the traditional reliance on visual synthesis, LeapBot-WA shifts the core of world modeling to Predictive Semantic Alignment, extracting abstract physical dynamics directly within a latent foundation space. To bridge the modality gap between non-Gaussian predictive features and diffusion priors, we introduce the Isotropic Semantic Autoencoder (ISAE), which reshapes the anchor's latent space into a diffusion-friendly manifold to prevent off-manifold drift. Furthermore, we design an Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. During training, an Anchor Diffusion Transformer acts as a privileged dynamics expert to guide the Action Diffusion Transformer; at inference, this heavy dynamics branch is pruned, enabling zero-overhead execution. LeapBot-WA achieves state-of-the-art performance among predictive models on LIBERO and matches top-tier generative WAMs on RoboTwin 2.0 without requiring large-scale trajectory pre-training. It further demonstrates superior zero-shot robustness to unseen environments and successful real-world transfer, establishing a highly efficient and robust latent-centric paradigm for scalable robotic control. Code: https://github.com/LeapWM/leapbot-wa.
Pei Liu, Nan Zheng, Lang Zhang +8
Jul 26, 2026cs.DL

Eleven Years of BRACIS: A Meta-Scientific Study of the Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems

The Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS) is the main national venue for Artificial Intelligence research in Brazil, hosted by the Brazilian Computer Society since 2012 and publishing work from institutions across the country. Across eleven years, from 2015 to 2025, we build a per-paper record of all 1,066 accepted papers from DBLP metadata, 6,765 Google Scholar citations, and the paper full texts, and use it to ask what BRACIS publishes, who publishes it, and which work gets cited. Large Language Model research grows from zero before 2020 to 19% of papers in 2024, on top of a base of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Optimization work. The community is hourglass-shaped: 80.5% of 2,623 authors appear in a single edition, while institutions return at nearly three times the author rate. Citations are heavily concentrated, with the top 1% of papers carrying 27% of the total. Openness practices have grown, with artifact release rising from 8.9% of papers in 2015 to 57.3% in 2023, and we find a notable correlation between having an arXiv preprint and higher citation counts. Since proceedings sit behind IEEE and Springer paywalls and only 7.4% of papers have a preprint, most BRACIS work is hard to reach for readers without institutional access.
Thales Sales Almeida, Giovana Kerche Bonás, Thiago Laitz +7
Jul 26, 2026cs.RO

LabRobFail: A Benchmark for Robotic Failure Analysis in Chemical Self-driving Laboratory

The deployment of embodied agents in self-driving laboratories could accelerate scientific discovery, yet their reliability is constrained by the irreversible and safety-critical nature of chemical experiments. Progress is further hindered by scarce failure data and the lack of fine-grained evaluation protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce LabRobFail, a failure-centric framework for learning and evaluating robotic failure analysis in chemical laboratories. LabRobFail-Sim injects controllable failures at the control, physics, and semantic levels, enabling the construction of LabRobFail-Data, which contains over 20,000 trajectories across 70+ task scenarios, five failure categories, and 11 fine-grained failure types. LabRobFail-Bench evaluates six capabilities spanning task understanding, failure detection, temporal localization, severity assessment, failure classification, and actionable correction. We further develop LabRobFail-VLM, a domain-specialized vision-language model that generates structured failure diagnoses and recovery instructions. On seen environments, it achieves 90.83% failure-detection accuracy and 77.21% temporal-localization accuracy, substantially outperforming general-purpose VLMs. When integrated as a real-time supervisor, it improves downstream task success rates by 4-16 percentage points, demonstrating the value of fine-grained failure understanding for closed-loop recovery and reliable laboratory autonomy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Su-ISE-2001/SciRobo
Haobo Wang, Baoli Sun, Anqi Zou +8
Jul 26, 2026cs.AI

MetaSpace: Metamorphic Testing for Spatial Cognition in Embodied Agents

An embodied agent is an intelligent entity that interacts with its environment through a physical body. Currently, the evaluation of embodied agents primarily relies on two paradigms: (1) manually annotated Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs and (2) high-level task completion metrics, such as success in navigation or manipulation. The former is labor-intensive and subject to variability in annotation quality. The latter may obscure critical vulnerabilities, allowing agents to complete tasks through suboptimal means or safety violations, thereby concealing safety risks and inefficiencies. Given that spatial cognition is the cornerstone for executing embodied tasks, there is a pressing need to assess whether embodied agents possess robust spatial cognition during task execution. Inspired by metamorphic testing principles in software engineering, we propose MetaSpace, a novel framework designed to evaluate the spatial cognition of agents. By leveraging spatiotemporal multimodal states derived from real execution trajectories, MetaSpace automatically generates test cases based on predefined metamorphic relations (MRs) grounded in logical rules and physical laws. Crucially, we encode these MRs as executable rules in a logic programming language (Prolog). Violations of these relations indicate failures in spatial cognition. Our empirical evaluation across three embodied scenarios demonstrates that MetaSpace successfully detects 90,422 spatial cognition errors in state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLM-driven agents. We introduce the Spatial Cognition (SC) score to quantify performance. Results indicate that all SOTA agents achieve average scores between 0.44 and 0.52, significantly lower than the human benchmark of 0.96.
Gengyang Xu, Dongwei Xiao, Yiteng Peng +1
Jul 25, 2026cs.RO

WCM: World-Cognition Model for Generalizable Human-Robot Interaction

Language agents can now interact fluently with users in software, but robots still struggle to bring comparable interaction to physical tasks. Current robot-control paradigms, including vision-language-action policies and world-model-based planners, are mainly optimized for instruction execution, leaving users with little visibility into why an action is chosen and few mechanisms to redirect, correct, or teach the robot through interaction. To solve this problem, we present the World-Cognition Model (WCM), a human-centered embodied agent built on the SLAK architecture (Sensing, Logic, Action, and Knowledge) and an asynchronous runtime. SLAK separates perception, reasoning, control, and memory, while the runtime allows reasoning, dialogue, and execution to proceed concurrently. WCM further introduces a human-in-the-loop teaching mode that enables users to interactively teach the robot difficult or long-horizon tasks. Teaching episodes and autonomous task rollouts are refined into chain-of-thought supervision to continually improve the model. WCM achieves a 73.8% average success rate across nine real-world human-robot interaction tasks, including tasks held out from CoT fine-tuning and a long-horizon task learned through teaching.
Yuzhen Chen, KC Zhou
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

Zero-Shot Mission-Level Evaluation for Aerial MLLM Agents

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are emerging as core reasoning modules for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear how well general-purpose models can solve long-horizon embodied tasks from a single high-level instruction. We introduce MissionBench, a benchmark for mission-level evaluation of MLLMs in aerial 3D environments. It comprises 120 missions across five simulated 3D environments and four task families. Agents must autonomously plan, navigate, and report outcomes using only egocentric observations and its action history, without aerial-specific fine-tuning. Across 22 open- and closed-source MLLMs, the strongest model succeeds on fewer than 35% of missions compared to 84.4% human performance, highlighting the difficulty of multi-step embodied tasks. Despite large variations between model families, we observe gains from scaling, indicating that larger general-purpose models possess stronger zero-shot embodied capabilities. Our analysis shows that mission-level competence requires coordinating multiple capabilities beyond spatial perception, including multi-step planning and adaptive reasoning. This motivates closed-loop evaluation and highlights both the promise and risk of scaling-driven improvements for embodied AI.
Suman Navaratnarajah, Taehyoung Kim, Jona Ruthardt +5
Jul 23, 2026cs.RO

Beyond Episodic Evaluation: Memory Architectural Bottlenecks in Sequential Embodied Question Answering

Embodied question answering (EQA) is traditionally evaluated under an episodic formulation, where agents solve each task independently and reset internal state between episodes. However, real-world robots operate continuously and must accumulate, retain, and selectively reuse information acquired from prior interactions. Despite this practical requirement, the architectural mechanisms needed to support sequential memory in EQA remain underexplored. In this work, we investigate how different memory architectures behave when EQA agents are evaluated sequentially, with multiple questions answered in the same scene while memory is carried forward across queries. We find that simply preserving existing memory is often insufficient. Agents that retain only traversability information, such as 2D occupancy maps, remember where the robot has explored but not the visual-semantic evidence needed for later questions. Agents trained on short-horizon episodic data face a different challenge: when exposed to continuous, multi-query histories, their inherited context suffers from severe temporal mismatch, rather than forming a reusable scene representation. To overcome this architectural bottleneck, we highlight the necessity of structured, spatially grounded memory: architectures that map persistent visual observations onto metric 3D geometry preserve visual-semantic evidence in a coherent scene representation. Extensive experiments in simulated environments reveal that this form of memory breaks the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff in sequential settings, simultaneously achieving higher answer accuracy and lower navigation costs. We further validate these findings on a real-world mobile robot, demonstrating that spatially grounded visual memory is critical for enabling continuous, intelligent operation in physical environments.
Zikui Cai, Kaushal Janga, Tan Dat Dao +15
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

EA-Nav: Learning Safe Visual Navigation Policies with Embodiment Awareness

Cross-embodiment navigation is a key challenge in embodied intelligence. Due to differences in embodiment, the same visual observation may imply different actions for different agents, making prediction ambiguous when relying solely on vision. Existing studies mainly rely on reinforcement learning, which requires large-scale interaction and careful reward design, making it difficult to support scalable pretraining and real-world adaptation. In contrast, imitation-learning-based approaches remain limited. To address these challenges, we propose an imitation-learning-based embodiment-aware navigation framework with a modular multi-stage design. In pretraining, we construct a cross-embodiment navigation dataset from Internet videos and introduce embodiment geometry as conditional tokens to reduce action ambiguity under the same observation. In fine-tuning, we design a multimodal information injection mechanism based on a decoupled architecture. Specifically, we design a trajectory augmentation strategy to generate high-risk samples, which are used to train spatial perception and risk-aware correction separately, thereby explicitly incorporating embodiment geometry for safe navigation. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively improves navigation performance across different embodiment settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating embodiment geometry into embodied navigation.
Jialu Zhang, Yong Du, Xianda Guo +6
Jul 22, 2026cs.RO

NavVerse: Benchmarking Indoor-to-Outdoor Embodied Navigation in Continuous Robot Simulation

Robots deployed in delivery, campus, and emergency-response settings often need to navigate from buildings to streets within a single continuous episode. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate indoor and outdoor navigation separately, and many abstract away robot execution, leaving exit finding, boundary traversal, adaptation, and kinodynamic failures underexplored. We introduce NavVerse, a physics-enabled benchmark for indoor-to-outdoor embodied navigation. NavVerse contains 100 indoor scenes, 50 urban outdoor scenes, and 50 indoor-to-outdoor scenes, and 10,000 episodes spanning Object Navigation, Vision-and-Language Navigation, and Place Navigation tasks, where agents search for semantic points of interest such as restaurants or banks. Agents are evaluated through executable robot interfaces using task-success, path-efficiency, and safety metrics. Zero-shot experiments with RL, VLA, and modular baselines show that current agents remain far from solving cross-context navigation: end-to-end VLAs obtain the highest zero-shot success, while the modular method provides the strongest safety profile. PlaceNav further reveals a clear drop from outdoor to indoor-to-outdoor scenes, indicating that adaptation remains major bottleneck.
Junzhe Wu, Yue Hu, Zeyu Han +4
Jul 21, 2026cs.AI

Athena-Brain Technical Report: An Efficient Robot Brain for General Intelligence and Embodied Interaction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and world knowledge. As embodied agents become increasingly capable, there is a growing demand for compact models that can serve as an on-device brain, preserving the broad general intelligence of LLMs while enabling effective high-level interaction with embodied environments. Existing approaches, however, often prioritize either general-purpose intelligence or specialized embodied capabilities, making it challenging to satisfy both requirements within a single model. We present \textbf{Athena-Brain-8B}, an 8B LLM designed to serve as an on-device brain for embodied intelligence for embodied intelligence. Through a multi-stage post-training pipeline consisting of General Supervised Fine-Tuning, General Reinforcement Learning, Embodied Expert training, and Model Merge, Athena-Brain-8B maintains strong general capabilities while acquiring strong high-level embodied interaction capabilities and generating concise responses for efficient embodied interaction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Athena across both general and embodied evaluations. Compared with the corresponding Qwen3-8B thinking model, Athena-Brain-8B achieves comparable performance on general language and reasoning benchmarks while generating substantially shorter responses. On in-domain embodied benchmarks, Athena-Brain-8B consistently outperforms models of similar scale and surpasses several substantially larger frontier models evaluated zero-shot, demonstrating that compact language models can effectively integrate strong general intelligence with embodied capabilities.
Jialian Li, Junhong Liu, Yuchen Cao +6
Jul 21, 2026cs.SD

What the Waveform Knows: Transparent-first Speech and Audio Intelligence with Caption Studio

Caption Studio is a transparency-first speech and audio intelligence platform that transforms spoken audio and video into structured, searchable content through automated transcription, speaker diarization, speech analytics, signal-level audio analysis, and subtitle generation. The system is built on a FastAPI backend with a real-time dashboard and adopts a three-layer architecture comprising (i) a transcription and diarization core based on Whisper-class automatic speech recognition and pyannote speaker diarization, (ii) an audio intelligence layer that extracts acoustic and linguistic features, including waveforms, spectrograms, pitch, speaking rate, silence, filler-word frequency, and sentiment, directly from the audio signal, and (iii) an integration layer that supports data export and downstream workflow integration. A principal contribution of this work is the transparency-first framework, in which every reported metric is explicitly identified as measured, derived, or unavailable, thereby improving the traceability, interpretability, and reliability of speech analytics. The paper presents the system architecture, benchmarking methodology, explainability and uncertainty framework, and key considerations for enterprise-scale deployment.
Cheng Siong Chin, Jianhua Zhang, Mohan Venkateshkumar
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

Intelligence appears under different names in different fields: as data compression in statistics and machine learning, as universal computation in dynamical systems, and as adaptive behavior in agents. Each field carries its own objective, and the two most influential drives often fail in mirror image: novelty search, which seeks surprise, is transfixed by a noisy television screen, while the free-energy principle, which avoids surprise, is most content in a dark room. Both failures have a single cause: each objective treats as one quantity the surprise a learner can convert into knowledge and the surprise it never can. Here we show that the learnable part of that information, which we call learnable novelty, yields the seemingly disparate projections of intelligence, and we give a closed-form estimator of it built on a cheap and differentiable reservoir computer. Used as a measure, with no supervision of any kind, the estimator recovers decades of complexity classification, ranking the Turing-complete rule110 highest among the elementary cellular automata. Used as an objective, its gradient carries a neural cellular automaton from simple dynamics into a regime of solitons, the traveling, colliding structures by which rule110 computes, as well as organizes the representation of an image encoder around the ten digit classes of MNIST, fully unsupervised: no label ever enters training. Handed to a reinforcement-learning agent as an intrinsic reward, it supplies the exploration that task rewards lack, improving on the task baseline in nine of ten environments and collapsing in none. Complexity generation, abstraction, and exploration, ordinarily pursued with unrelated objectives in separate fields, thus emerge from ascent on one differentiable quantity, and the projections of intelligence gain a common quantitative footing.
Yanbo Zhang, Michael Levin