Intelligence

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27 papers in the last 28 days · 0.4% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

14 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Intelligence.

Period ending 2026-09-14

6 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Intelligence.

Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Intelligence.

287 papers

Latest in Intelligence

May 5, 2026cs.LG

QuIDE: Mastering the Quantized Intelligence Trade-off via Active Optimization

There is currently no unified metric for evaluating the efficiency of quantized neural networks. We propose QuIDE, built around the Intelligence Index I = (C x P)/log_2(T+1), which collapses the compression-accuracy-latency trade-off into a single score. Experiments across six settings -- SimpleCNN (MNIST, CIFAR), ResNet-18 (ImageNet-1K), and Llama-3-8B -- show a task-dependent Pareto Knee. 4-bit quantization is optimal for MNIST and large LLMs, while 8-bit is the sweet spot for complex CNN tasks (ResNet-18 on ImageNet), where 4-bit PTQ collapses accuracy catastrophically. The accuracy-gated variant I' correctly flags these non-viable configurations that the raw I would reward. QuIDE provides a reproducible evaluation protocol and a ready-to-use fitness function for mixed-precision search.
Xiantao Jiang
May 5, 2026cs.PL

Governed Metaprogramming for Intelligent Systems: Reclassifying Eval as a Governed Effect

AI systems increasingly synthesize executable structure at runtime: LLMs generate programs, agents construct workflows,self-improving systems modify their own behavior. In classical homoiconic and staged languages, the transition from code representation to execution is unrestricted. eval is a language primitive, not a governed operation. We argue that in governed intelligent systems, this transition is an authority amplification: it converts symbolic structure into executable authority and must be mediated like any other effect. We present governed metaprogramming, a language design where program representations (machine forms) are first-class values, form manipulation is pure computation, and materialization (the transition from form to executable machine) is a governed effect subject to structural inspection. The governance system analyzes the proposed program's capability requirements, policy compliance, and resource estimates before permitting execution. We formalize two judgments: pure form evaluation (which emits no directives) and governed materialization (which emits exactly one governed directive). We prove three properties: purity of form manipulation, the no-bypass theorem, and boundary preservation. We implement the design in mashinTalk, a DSL for AI workflows compiling to BEAM byte code, and report on integration with 454 existing machine-checked Rocq theorems. The central contribution is reclassifying eval from a language primitive into a governed effect.
Alan L. McCann
May 4, 2026cs.AI

Intervention Complexity as a Canonical Reward and a Measure of Intelligence

The Legg--Hutter universal intelligence measure provides a rigorous scalar assessment of general intelligence as expected reward across all computable environments, weighted by simplicity. However, the measure presupposes an externally specified reward function, raising the question of whether the reward primitive is inherently arbitrary or whether a canonical choice exists. We propose a new measure, called intervention complexity, that has five natural properties: environment-derivedness, universality, minimality, sensitivity, and achievement preference. Given a resource function rho encoding an inductive bias (such as program length, execution time, or energy), rho-intervention complexity is a universal reward. The result yields a family of canonical rewards indexed by resource bias, providing a principled completion of the Legg--Hutter framework that does not require external normative input. We further propose a two-dimensional characterisation of intelligence: agent competence (how well the agent performs relative to the oracle optimum) and learning efficiency (how quickly this competence improves with experience). A separation theorem establishes that the choice of resource bias determines the computability of the resulting measure: action-count IC is computable in polynomial time, while program-length IC without oracle access is uncomputable, with the gap between oracle and bare IC precisely quantifying the information-theoretic content of learning. We discuss implications for superintelligence and for pre-training universal agents.
Brendan McCane
May 4, 2026cs.CV

From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs

Human-level agentic intelligence extends beyond low-level geometric perception, evolving from recognizing where things are to understanding what they are for. While existing benchmarks effectively evaluate the geometric perception capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), they fall short of probing the higher-order cognitive abilities required for grounded intelligence. To address this gap, we introduce the Spatial-Functional Intelligence Benchmark (SFI-Bench), a video-based benchmark with over 1,500 expert-annotated questions derived from diverse egocentric indoor video scans. SFI-Bench systematically evaluates two complementary dimensions of advanced reasoning: (1) Structured Spatial Reasoning, which requires understanding complex layouts and forming coherent spatial representations, and (2) Functional Reasoning, which involves inferring object affordances and their context-dependent utility. The benchmark includes tasks such as conditional counting, multi-hop relational reasoning, functional pairing, and knowledge-grounded troubleshooting, directly challenging models to integrate perception, memory, and inference. Our experiments reveal that current MLLMs consistently struggle to combine spatial memory with functional reasoning and external knowledge, highlighting a critical bottleneck in achieving grounded intelligence. SFI-Bench therefore provides a diagnostic tool for measuring progress toward more cognitively capable and truly grounded multimodal agents.
Le Zhang, Jihan Yang, Soundarya Krishnan +11
May 3, 2026cs.RO

Anticipation-VLA: Solving Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks via Anticipation-based Subgoal Generation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling robots to perform tasks based on natural language instructions and current visual input. However, existing VLA models struggle with long-horizon tasks due to compounding errors. Prior methods decompose tasks into subtasks of fixed granularity, which cannot adapt to the varying complexity of execution states, limiting their robustness in long-horizon tasks. To overcome this, we introduce Anticipation Model, which adaptively and recursively generates future subgoals. This model continuously adapts as the task unfolds, adjusting future subgoals in response to evolving dynamics, facilitating more reliable planning paths. Building on this concept, we propose Anticipation-VLA, a hierarchical VLA model that leverages the anticipation model to generate actionable subgoals that guide VLA policy execution. We implement Anticipation-VLA with finetuning a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM) for high-level subgoal generation and a goal-conditioned VLA policy for low-level action execution. Experiments in both simulated and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Anticipation-VLA, highlighting the importance of adaptive and recursive subgoal generation for robust policy execution.
Zhilong Zhang, Wenyu Luo, Haonan Wang +9
May 2, 2026cs.CL

MemORAI: Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence for LLM Conversational Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) lack persistent memory for long-term personalized conversations. Existing graph-based memory systems suffer from information dilution, absent provenance tracking, and uniform retrieval that ignores query context. We introduce MemORAI (Memory Organization and Retrieval via Adaptive Graph Intelligence), a framework that integrates three innovations: selective memory filtering with dual-layer compression to retain user-persona-relevant content, a provenance-enriched multi-relational graph tracking factual origins at the turn level, and query-adaptive subgraph retrieval with Dynamic Weighted PageRank that applies query-conditioned edge weighting. Evaluated on LOCOMO and LongMemEval benchmarks, MemORAI achieves state-of-the-art performance in memory retrieval and personalized response generation, demonstrating that selective storage, enriched representation, and adaptive retrieval are essential for coherent, personalized LLM agents.
Hung Pham Van, Nguyen Manh Hieu, Khang Pham Tran Tuan +4
May 2, 2026cs.OS

VUDA: Breaking CUDA-Vulkan Isolation for Spatial Sharing of Compute and Graphics on the Same GPU

GPU-based simulation environments for embodied AI interleave physics simulation (CUDA) and photorealistic rendering (Vulkan) on a single device. We observe that two foundational scenarios -- simulation data generation and RL training -- can be naturally adapted to execute their simulation and rendering phases concurrently, presenting a significant opportunity to improve GPU utilization through spatial multiplexing. However, a fundamental obstacle we term execution isolation prevents this: CUDA and Vulkan create separate GPU contexts whose channels are bound to different scheduling groups, confining compute and graphics to mutually exclusive time slices. Existing spatial-sharing techniques are limited to the CUDA ecosystem, while temporal-sharing approaches underutilize available resources. This paper presents VUDA, a system that breaks execution isolation to enable spatial parallelism between CUDA compute and Vulkan graphics workloads. VUDA is built on two key observations: although CUDA and Vulkan expose different programming abstractions, their execution paths converge to a common channel primitive at the driver and hardware level; meanwhile, their virtual-address spaces are inherently disjoint, making safe page-table merging feasible without remapping. VUDA exposes a thin API for developers to annotate co-schedulable CUDA streams, and realizes spatial sharing through channel redirection into Vulkan's scheduling domain and page-table grafting to unify address spaces, eliminating all data copying on the critical path. Experiments on representative embodied-AI workloads show that VUDA delivers up to 85% higher throughput than temporal-sharing baselines, while improving GPU utilization and reducing end-to-end latency.
Bin Xu, Pengfei Hu, Wenxin Zheng +2
May 1, 2026cs.DC

Adaptation of AI-accelerated CFD Simulations to the IPU platform

Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) have proven useful for many AI applications. In this paper, we evaluate them within the emerging field of \emph{AI for simulation}, where traditional numerical simulations are supported by artificial intelligence approaches. We focus specifically on a program for training machine learning models supporting a \emph{computational fluid dynamics} application. We use custom TensorFlow provided by the Poplar SDK to adapt the program for the IPU-POD16 platform and investigate its ease of use and performance scalability. Training a model on data from OpenFOAM simulations allows us to get accurate simulation state predictions in test time. We show how to utilize the \emph{popdist} library to overcome a performance bottleneck in feeding training data to the IPU on the host side, achieving up to 34% speedup. Due to communication overheads, using data parallelism to utilize two IPUs instead of one does not improve the throughput. However, once the intra-IPU costs have been paid, the hardware capabilities for inter-IPU communication allow for good scalability. Increasing the number of IPUs from 2 to 16 improves the throughput from 560.8 to 2805.8 samples/s.
P. Rosciszewski, A. Krzywaniak, S. Iserte +2
May 1, 2026cs.AI

Physically Native World Models: A Hamiltonian Perspective on Generative World Modeling

World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose \emph{Hamiltonian World Models} as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.
Sen Cui, Jingheng Ma
Apr 30, 2026cs.RO

Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey

A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing attention in recent years, driven by the abundance of human activity videos and advances in computer vision. This line of research promises to enable robots to acquire skills passively from the vast and readily available resource of human demonstrations, substantially favoring scalable learning for generalist robotic systems. Therefore, we present this survey to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of human-video-based learning techniques in robotics, focusing on both human-robot skill transfer and data foundations. We first review the policy learning foundations in robotics, and then describe the fundamental interfaces to incorporate human videos. Subsequently, we introduce a hierarchical taxonomy of transferring human videos to robot skills, covering task-, observation-, and action-oriented pathways, along with a cross-family analysis of their couplings with different data configurations and learning paradigms. In addition, we investigate the data foundations including widely-used human video datasets and video generation schemes, and provide large-scale statistical trends in dataset development and utilization. Ultimately, we emphasize the challenges and limitations intrinsic to this field, and delineate potential avenues for future research. The paper list of our survey is available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/awesome-robot-learning-from-human-videos.
Junyi Ma, Erhang Zhang, Haoran Yang +4
Apr 30, 2026cs.CV

World2Minecraft: Occupancy-Driven Simulated Scenes Construction

Embodied intelligence requires high-fidelity simulation environments to support perception and decision-making, yet existing platforms often suffer from data contamination and limited flexibility. To mitigate this, we propose World2Minecraft to convert real-world scenes into structured Minecraft environments based on 3D semantic occupancy prediction. In the reconstructed scenes, we can effortlessly perform downstream tasks such as Vision-Language Navigation(VLN). However, we observe that reconstruction quality heavily depends on accurate occupancy prediction, which remains limited by data scarcity and poor generalization in existing models. We introduce a low-cost, automated, and scalable data acquisition pipeline for creating customized occupancy datasets, and demonstrate its effectiveness through MinecraftOcc, a large-scale dataset featuring 100,165 images from 156 richly detailed indoor scenes. Extensive experiments show that our dataset provides a critical complement to existing datasets and poses a significant challenge to current SOTA methods. These findings contribute to improving occupancy prediction and highlight the value of World2Minecraft in providing a customizable and editable platform for personalized embodied AI research. Project page:https://world2minecraft.github.io/.
Lechao Zhang, Haoran Xu, Jingyu Gong +3
Apr 30, 2026cs.AI

SpatialGrammar: A Domain-Specific Language for LLM-Based 3D Indoor Scene Generation

Automatically generating interactive 3D indoor scenes from natural language is crucial for virtual reality, gaming, and embodied AI. However, existing LLM-based approaches often suffer from spatial errors and collisions, in part because common scene representations-raw coordinates or verbose code-are difficult for models to reason about 3D spatial relationships and physical constraints. We propose SpatialGrammar, a domain-specific language that represents gravity-aligned indoor layouts as BEV grid placements with deterministic compilation to valid 3D geometry, enabling verifiable constraint checking. Building on this representation, we develop (1) SG-Agent, a closed-loop system that uses compiler feedback to iteratively refine scenes and enforce collision constraints, and (2) SG-Mini, a 104M-parameter model trained entirely on compiler-validated synthetic data. Across 159 test scenes spanning five scenarios of different complexity, SG-Agent improves spatial fidelity and physical plausibility over prior methods, while SG-Mini performs competitively against larger LLM-based baselines on single-shot generation scenarios.
Song Tang, Kaiyong Zhao, Yuliang Li +5
Apr 29, 2026cs.RO

3D Generation for Embodied AI and Robotic Simulation: A Survey

Embodied AI and robotic systems increasingly depend on scalable, diverse, and physically grounded 3D content for simulation-based training and real-world deployment. While 3D generative modeling has advanced rapidly, embodied applications impose requirements far beyond visual realism: generated objects must carry kinematic structure and material properties, scenes must support interaction and task execution, and the resulting content must bridge the gap between simulation and reality. This survey reviews 3D generation for embodied AI and organizes the literature around three roles that 3D generation plays in embodied systems. In Data Generator, 3D generation produces simulation-ready objects and assets, including articulated, physically grounded, and deformable content for downstream interaction; in Simulation Environments, it constructs interactive and task-oriented worlds, spanning structure-aware, controllable, and agentic scene generation; and in Sim2Real Bridge, it supports digital twin reconstruction, data augmentation, and synthetic demonstrations for downstream robot learning and real-world transfer. We also show that the field is shifting from visual realism toward interaction readiness, and we identify the main bottlenecks, including limited physical annotations, the gap between geometric quality and physical validity, fragmented evaluation, and the persistent sim-to-real divide, that must be addressed for 3D generation to become a dependable foundation for embodied intelligence. Our project page is at https://3dgen4robot.github.io.
Tianwei Ye, Yifan Mao, Minwen Liao +6
Apr 28, 2026cs.RO

GS-Playground: A High-Throughput Photorealistic Simulator for Vision-Informed Robot Learning

Embodied AI research is undergoing a shift toward vision-centric perceptual paradigms. While massively parallel simulators have catalyzed breakthroughs in proprioception-based locomotion, their potential remains largely untapped for vision-informed tasks due to the prohibitive computational overhead of large-scale photorealistic rendering. Furthermore, the creation of simulation-ready 3D assets heavily relies on labor-intensive manual modeling, while the significant sim-to-real physical gap hinders the transfer of contact-rich manipulation policies. To address these bottlenecks, we propose GS-Playground, a multi-modal simulation framework designed to accelerate end-to-end perceptual learning. We develop a novel high-performance parallel physics engine, specifically designed to integrate with a batch 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering pipeline to ensure high-fidelity synchronization. Our system achieves a breakthrough throughput of 10^4 FPS at 640x480 resolution, significantly lowering the barrier for large-scale visual RL. Additionally, we introduce an automated Real2Sim workflow that reconstructs photorealistic, physically consistent, and memory-efficient environments, streamlining the generation of complex simulation-ready scenes. Extensive experiments on locomotion, navigation, and manipulation demonstrate that GS-Playground effectively bridges the perceptual and physical gaps across diverse embodied tasks. Project homepage: https://gsplayground.github.io.
Yufei Jia, Heng Zhang, Ziheng Zhang +39
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

CiteRadar: A Citation Intelligence Platform for Researcher Profiling and Geographic Visualization

Understanding the geographic reach and community structure of one's scholarly citations is increasingly valuable for career development, grant applications, and collaboration discovery -- yet accessible tools for answering these questions remain scarce. Existing bibliometric platforms either require costly institutional subscriptions or expose only aggregate citation counts without granular per-author metadata. We present CiteRadar, an open-source system that accepts a single Google Scholar user identifier and automatically produces a structured output folder containing: the author's complete publication list, all retrieved citing papers with enriched author metadata, two ranked author tables (by citation frequency and by h-index), a plain-text statistical summary, and a self-contained interactive HTML world map -- all from a single command-line invocation. CiteRadar integrates five heterogeneous data sources -- Google Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim -- through a carefully engineered five-stage pipeline. Key technical contributions include: (1) a Scholar meta-string parser resilient to Unicode non-breaking-space separators, a pervasive but undocumented quirk in Scholar's HTML that silently corrupts venue and year fields when unhandled; (2) a two-stage author disambiguation system using stop-word-filtered institution name similarity to guard against the well-known same-name entity-merging failure mode in bibliometric databases, demonstrated to eliminate h-index attribution errors of up to 9x the correct value; (3) an OpenAlex web-URL to API-URL conversion fix that raises the fraction of author records with city-level location data from 0% to ~60%; and (4) a logarithmically-scaled interactive Folium world map with per-city researcher popups, rendered as a fully self-contained HTML file.
Chenxu Niu, Yiming Sun
Apr 27, 2026cs.AI

Toward a Science of Intent: Closure Gaps and Delegation Envelopes for Open-World AI Agents

Recent work has framed intelligence in verifiable tasks as reducing time-to-solution through learned structure and test-time search, while systems work has explored learned runtimes in which computation, memory and I/O migrate into model state. These perspectives do not explain why capable models remain difficult to deploy in open institutions. We propose intent compilation: the transformation of partially specified human purpose into inspectable artifacts that bind execution. The relevant deployment distinction is closed-world solver versus open-world agent. In closed worlds, a checker is largely given; in open worlds, verification is distributed across semantic, evidentiary, procedural and institutional dimensions. Weformalize this residual openness as a closure-gap vector, define delegation envelopes as pre-authorized regions of action space, distinguish misclosure from undersearch, and outline benchmark metrics for testing when closure interventions outperform additional inference-time search.
Maximiliano Armesto, Christophe Kolb
Apr 27, 2026cs.SE

Large Language Models for Multilingual Code Intelligence: A Survey

Large language models have transformed AI-assisted software engineering, but current research remains biased toward high-resource languages such as Python, with weaker performance in languages like Rust and OCaml. Since real-world systems are inherently polyglot, robust multilingual code intelligence is crucial. This survey focuses on two key tasks: multilingual code generation from shared natural-language requirements, and multilingual code translation that preserves semantics across languages. It reviews representative methods, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and highlights challenges and opportunities for trustworthy cross-language generalization.
Chao Jiang, Dugang Liu, Cheng Wen +6
Apr 26, 2026cs.RO

Vision-Language-Action Safety: Threats, Challenges, Evaluations, and Mechanisms

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a unified substrate for embodied intelligence. This shift raises a new class of safety challenges, stemming from the embodied nature of VLA systems, including irreversible physical consequences, a multimodal attack surface across vision, language, and state, real-time latency constraints on defense, error propagation over long-horizon trajectories, and vulnerabilities in the data supply chain. Yet the literature remains fragmented across robotic learning, adversarial machine learning, AI alignment, and autonomous systems safety. This survey provides a unified and up-to-date overview of safety in Vision-Language-Action models. We organize the field along two parallel timing axes, attack timing (training-time vs. inference-time and defense timing (training-time vs. inference-time, linking each class of threat to the stage at which it can be mitigated. We first define the scope of VLA safety, distinguishing it from text-only LLM safety and classical robotic safety, and review the foundations of VLA models, including architectures, training paradigms, and inference mechanisms. We then examine the literature through four lenses: Attacks, Defenses, Evaluation, and Deployment. We survey training-time threats such as data poisoning and backdoors, as well as inference-time attacks including adversarial patches, cross-modal perturbations, semantic jailbreaks, and freezing attacks. We review training-time and runtime defenses, analyze existing benchmarks and metrics, and discuss safety challenges across six deployment domains. Finally, we highlight key open problems, including certified robustness for embodied trajectories, physically realizable defenses, safety-aware training, unified runtime safety architectures, and standardized evaluation.
Qi Li, Bo Yin, Weiqi Huang +6
Apr 26, 2026cs.AI

Non-Stationarity Breaks Permutation Surrogates in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Diagnosis and Remedies

Reporting guidance for information-theoretic measures is rarely tested against ground truth. We test one guardrail in two multi-agent reinforcement learning games, a social dilemma and a coordination race, where directed influence between selected agent pairs is zero by construction, over 100 seeds. Omitting one precondition, exclusion of the non-stationary training transient, gives false-positive rates of 100.00% and 99.95%: agents annealing exploration independently, in runs that never met, are flagged as influencing one another. Excluding the transient reaches 3.0% in the social dilemma but 11.8% in the coordination game, which stationarity tests explain: 95.7% of social-dilemma series are stationary afterwards against 56.8% of coordination series. So the non-stationarity must be treated, and exclusion is neither the only way nor sufficient. What we recommend instead changes the null model rather than the data: permuting the source within blocks of training time reaches 5.25% and 5.50%, the only one of four constructions at the size of the test in both games, leaving series, statistic and estimand untouched. Titrating injected links of known strength in both games shows it is also the most sensitive of the three, detecting 89.0% in the coordination game where conditioning detects 61.0% on identical pairs, while the ablated test reports 100% with or without a link, so its apparent sensitivity is uninformative. The block count is not critical: every setting from 16 to 256 lands in the nominal region, and a partition derived from the stationarity test removes the parameter, though less sensitively. Code and data are released.
Nikolaos Al. Papadopoulos, Konstantinos E. Psannis
Apr 24, 2026econ.GN

The Security Cost of Intelligence: AI Capability, Cyber Risk, and Deployment Paradox

Firms are deploying more capable AI systems, but organizational controls often have not kept pace. These systems can generate greater productivity gains, but high-value uses require broader authority exposure -- data access, workflow integration, and delegated authority -- when governance controls have not yet decoupled capability from authority exposure. We develop an analytical model in which a firm jointly chooses AI deployment and cybersecurity investment under this governance-capability gap. The central result shows a deployment paradox: in high-loss environments, better AI can lead a firm to deploy less when capability is deployed through broader authority exposure under weak governance. Optimal deployment also falls below the no-risk benchmark, and this shortfall widens with breach-loss magnitude and with the authority exposure attached to more capable systems. Governance investment that reduces breach-loss magnitude shrinks the paradox region itself, while breach externalities expand the range of environments in which deployment is socially constrained. Governance maturity is therefore not merely a constraint on AI adoption. It is a condition that shapes whether capability improvements translate into productive deployment.
Sukwoong Choi
Apr 24, 2026cs.CV

AmaraSpatial-10K: A Spatially and Semantically Aligned 3D Dataset for Spatial Computing and Embodied AI

Web-scale 3D asset collections are abundant but rarely deployment-ready, suffering from arbitrary metric scaling, incorrect pivots, brittle geometry, and incomplete textures, defects that limit their use in embodied AI, robotics, and spatial computing. We present AmaraSpatial-10K, a dataset of over 10,000 synthetic 3D assets optimised for zero-shot deployment. Each asset ships as a metric-scaled, deterministically anchored .glb with separated PBR maps, a convex collision hull, a paired reference image, and multi-sentence text metadata. Alongside the dataset we introduce a reusable evaluation suite for 3D asset banks, a continuous Scale Plausibility Score (SPS), an LLM Concept Density metric, anchor-error auditing, and a cross-modal CLIP coherence protocol, and apply it to AmaraSpatial-10K alongside matched subsets of Objaverse, HSSD, ABO, and GSO. AmaraSpatial-10K improves CLIP Recall@5 by 3.4×3.4\times over Objaverse (0.6120.612 vs. 0.1810.181, median rank 267→3267 \rightarrow 3), achieves a 99.1%99.1\% physics-stability rate under Habitat-Sim with ∼20×\sim 20\times wall-time speed-up, and produces zero-overlap scenes when used as a drop-in asset bank for Holodeck. Controlled ablations on the same asset bank attribute the retrieval gain to description richness.
Mohammad Sadegh Salehi, Alex Perkins, Igor Maurell +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.RO

From Noise to Intent: Anchoring Generative VLA Policies with Residual Bridges

Bridging high-level semantic understanding with low-level physical control remains a persistent challenge in embodied intelligence, stemming from the fundamental spatiotemporal scale mismatch between cognition and action. Existing generative VLA policies typically adopt a "Generation-from-Noise" paradigm, which disregards this disparity, leading to representation inefficiency and weak condition alignment during optimization. In this work, we propose ResVLA, an architecture that shifts the paradigm to "Refinement-from-Intent." Recognizing that robotic motion naturally decomposes into global intent and local dynamics, ResVLA utilizes spectral analysis to decouple control into a deterministic low-frequency anchor and a stochastic high-frequency residual. By anchoring the generative process on the predicted intent, our model focuses strictly on refining local dynamics via a residual diffusion bridge. Extensive simulation experiments show that ResVLA achieves competitive performance, strong robustness to language and robot embodiment perturbations, and faster convergence than standard generative baselines. ResVLA also demonstrates strong performance in real-world robot experiments.
Yiming Zhong, Yaoyu He, Zemin Yang +5
Apr 23, 2026cs.RO

A Deployable Embodied Vision-Language Navigation System with Hierarchical Cognition and Context-Aware Exploration

Bridging the gap between embodied intelligence and embedded deployment remains a key challenge in intelligent robotic systems, where perception, reasoning, and planning must operate under strict constraints on computation, memory, energy, and real-time execution. In vision-and-language navigation (VLN), existing approaches often face a trade-off between reasoning capability and deployment efficiency on real-world platforms. In this paper, we present a deployable embodied VLN system that achieves both high efficiency and strong high-level reasoning on real-world robots. The system is decomposed into a fast perception-action layer and a deep reasoning layer running asynchronously at different time scales, with a shared memory layer enabling efficient interaction between them. To support long-horizon reasoning, we incrementally construct a compact memory graph and progressively feed decomposed subgraphs into a vision-language model (VLM). Furthermore, we formulate exploration as a Weighted Traveling Repairman Problem (WTRP) by jointly considering reasoning outcomes and the spatial distribution of candidate regions. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate improved navigation success and efficiency over existing VLN approaches while maintaining real-time performance on resource-constrained hardware. Code and additional real-world experiments are available at https://github.com/xukuanHIT/HiCo-Nav.
Kuan Xu, Ruimeng Liu, Yizhuo Yang +5
Apr 22, 2026cs.SD

ONOTE: Benchmarking Omnimodal Notation Processing for Expert-level Music Intelligence

Omnimodal Notation Processing (ONP) represents a unique frontier for omnimodal AI due to the rigorous, multi-dimensional alignment required across auditory, visual, and symbolic domains. Current research remains fragmented, focusing on isolated transcription tasks that fail to bridge the gap between superficial pattern recognition and the underlying musical logic. This landscape is further complicated by severe notation biases toward Western staff and the inherent unreliability of "LLM-as-a-judge" metrics, which often mask structural reasoning failures with systemic hallucinations. To establish a more rigorous standard, we introduce ONOTE, a multi-format benchmark that utilizes a deterministic pipeline--grounded in canonical pitch projection--to eliminate subjective scoring biases across diverse notation systems. Our evaluation of leading omnimodal models exposes a fundamental disconnect between perceptual accuracy and music-theoretic comprehension, providing a necessary framework for diagnosing reasoning vulnerabilities in complex, rule-constrained domains.
Menghe Ma, Siqing Wei, Yuecheng Xing +5
Apr 22, 2026cs.RO

VTouch++: A Multimodal Dataset with Vision-Based Tactile Enhancement for Bimanual Manipulation

Embodied intelligence has advanced rapidly in recent years; however, bimanual manipulation-especially in contact-rich tasks remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of datasets with rich physical interaction signals, systematic task organization, and sufficient scale. To address these limitations, we introduce the VTOUCH dataset. It leverages vision based tactile sensing to provide high-fidelity physical interaction signals, adopts a matrix-style task design to enable systematic learning, and employs automated data collection pipelines covering real-world, demand-driven scenarios to ensure scalability. To further validate the effectiveness of the dataset, we conduct extensive quantitative experiments on cross-modal retrieval as well as real-robot evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate real-world performance through generalizable inference across multiple robots, policies, and tasks.
Qianxi Hua, Xinyue Li, Zheng Yan +4
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

EgoDyn-Bench: Evaluating Ego-Motion Understanding in Vision-Centric Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced high-level reasoning in autonomous driving, their ability to ground this reasoning in the underlying physics of ego-motion remains poorly understood. We introduce EgoDyn-Bench [Project page: (https://tum-avs.github.io/EgoDyn-Bench-Website/), Code: (https://github.com/TUM-AVS/EgoDyn-Bench), Dataset: (https://huggingface.co/datasets/fnc1901/EgoDyn-Bench)], a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating the semantic ego-motion understanding of vision-centric foundation models. By mapping continuous vehicle kinematics to discrete motion concepts via a deterministic oracle, we decouple a model's internal physical logic from its visual perception. Our large-scale empirical audit spanning 20++ models, including closed-source MLLMs, open-source VLMs across multiple scales, and specialized VLAs, identifies a significant Perception Bottleneck: while models exhibit logical physical concepts, they consistently fail to accurately align them with visual observations, frequently underperforming classical non-learned geometric baselines. This failure persists across model scales and domain-specific training, indicating a structural deficit in how current architectures couple visual perception with physical reasoning. We demonstrate that providing explicit trajectory encodings substantially restores physical consistency across all evaluated models, revealing a functional disentanglement between vision and language: ego-motion logic is derived almost exclusively from the language modality, while visual observations contribute negligible temporal signal. This structural finding provides a standardized diagnostic framework and a practical pathway toward physically aligned embodied AI. Ego-motion - Physical Reasoning - Foundation Models
Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Yuan Gao, Dingrui Wang +5
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Wan-Image: Pushing the Boundaries of Generative Visual Intelligence

We present Wan-Image, a unified visual generation system explicitly engineered to paradigm-shift image generation models from casual synthesizers into professional-grade productivity tools. While contemporary diffusion models excel at aesthetic generation, they frequently encounter critical bottlenecks in rigorous design workflows that demand absolute controllability, complex typography rendering, and strict identity preservation. To address these challenges, Wan-Image features a natively unified multi-modal architecture by synergizing the cognitive capabilities of large language models with the high-fidelity pixel synthesis of diffusion transformers, which seamlessly translates highly nuanced user intents into precise visual outputs. It is fundamentally powered by large-scale multi-modal data scaling, a systematic fine-grained annotation engine, and curated reinforcement learning data to surpass basic instruction following and unlock expert-level professional capabilities. These include ultra-long complex text rendering, hyper-diverse portrait generation, palette-guided generation, multi-subject identity preservation, coherent sequential visual generation, precise multi-modal interactive editing, native alpha-channel generation, and high-efficiency 4K synthesis. Across diverse human evaluations, Wan-Image exceeds Seedream 5.0 Lite and GPT Image 1.5 in overall performance, reaching parity with Nano Banana Pro in challenging tasks. Ultimately, Wan-Image revolutionizes visual content creation across e-commerce, entertainment, education, and personal productivity, redefining the boundaries of professional visual synthesis.
Chaojie Mao, Chen-Wei Xie, Chongyang Zhong +55
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

EgoMotion: Hierarchical Reasoning and Diffusion for Egocentric Vision-Language Motion Generation

Faithfully modeling human behavior in dynamic environments is a foundational challenge for embodied intelligence. While conditional motion synthesis has achieved significant advances, egocentric motion generation remains largely underexplored due to the inherent complexity of first-person perception. In this work, we investigate Egocentric Vision-Language (Ego-VL) motion generation. This task requires synthesizing 3D human motion conditioned jointly on first-person visual observations and natural language instructions. We identify a critical \textit{reasoning-generation entanglement} challenge: the simultaneous optimization of semantic reasoning and kinematic modeling introduces gradient conflicts. These conflicts systematically degrade the fidelity of multimodal grounding and motion quality. To address this challenge, we propose a hierarchical generative framework \textbf{EgoMotion}. Inspired by the biological decoupling of cognitive reasoning and motor control, EgoMotion operates in two stages. In the Cognitive Reasoning stage, A vision-language model (VLM) projects multimodal inputs into a structured space of discrete motion primitives. This forces the VLM to acquire goal-consistent representations, effectively bridging the semantic gap between high-level perceptual understanding and low-level action execution. In the Motion Generation stage, these learned representations serve as expressive conditioning signals for a diffusion-based motion generator. By performing iterative denoising within a continuous latent space, the generator synthesizes physically plausible and temporally coherent trajectories. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EgoMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance, and produces motion sequences that are both semantically grounded and kinematically superior to existing approaches.
Ruibing Hou, Mingyue Zhou, Yuwei Gui +5
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

StableIDM: Stabilizing Inverse Dynamics Model against Manipulator Truncation via Spatio-Temporal Refinement

Inverse Dynamics Models (IDMs) map visual observations to low-level action commands, serving as central components for data labeling and policy execution in embodied AI. However, their performance degrades severely under manipulator truncation, a common failure mode that makes state recovery ill-posed and leads to unstable control. We present StableIDM, a spatio-temporal framework that refines features from visual inputs to stabilize action predictions under such partial observability. StableIDM integrates three complementary components: (1) auxiliary robot-centric masking to suppress background clutter, (2) Directional Feature Aggregation (DFA) for geometry-aware spatial reasoning, which extracts anisotropic features along directions inferred from the visible arm and (3) Temporal Dynamics Refinement (TDR) to smooth and correct predictions via motion continuity. Extensive evaluations validate our approach: StableIDM improves strict action accuracy by 12.1% under severe truncation on the AgiBot benchmark, and increases average task success by 9.7% in real-robot replay. Moreover, it boosts end-to-end grasp success by 11.5% when decoding video-generated plans, and improves downstream VLA real-robot success by 17.6% when functioning as an automatic annotator. These results demonstrate that StableIDM provides a robust and scalable backbone for both policy execution and data generation in embodied artificial intelligence.
Kerui Li, Zhe Jing, Xiaofeng Wang +6
Apr 19, 2026cs.AI

The Continuity Layer: Why Intelligence Needs an Architecture for What It Carries Forward

The most important architectural problem in AI is not the size of the model but the absence of a layer that carries forward what the model has come to understand. Sessions end. Context windows fill. Memory APIs return flat facts that the model has to reinterpret from scratch on every read. The result is intelligence that is powerful per session and amnesiac across time. This position paper argues that the layer which fixes this, the continuity layer, is the most consequential piece of infrastructure the field has not yet built, and that the engineering work to build it has begun in public. The formal evaluation framework for the property described here is the ATANT benchmark (arXiv:2604.06710), published separately with evaluation results on a 250-story corpus; a companion paper (arXiv:2604.10981) positions this framework against existing memory, long-context, and agentic-memory benchmarks. The paper defines continuity as a system property with seven required characteristics, distinct from memory and from retrieval; describes a storage primitive (Decomposed Trace Convergence Memory) whose write-time decomposition and read-time reconstruction produce that property; maps the engineering architecture to the theological pattern of kenosis and the symbolic pattern of Alpha and Omega, and argues this mapping is structural rather than metaphorical; proposes a four-layer development arc from external SDK to hardware node to long-horizon human infrastructure; examines why the physics limits now constraining the model layer make the continuity layer newly consequential; and argues that the governance architecture (privacy implemented as physics rather than policy, founder-controlled class shares on non-negotiable architectural commitments) is inseparable from the product itself.
Samuel Sameer Tanguturi
Apr 18, 2026cs.RO

Web-Gewu: A Browser-Based Interactive Playground for Robot Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of embodied intelligence, robotics education faces a dual challenge: high computational barriers and cumbersome environment configuration. Existing centralized cloud simulation solutions incur substantial GPU and bandwidth costs that preclude large-scale deployment, while pure local computing is severely constrained by learners' hardware limitations. To address these issues, we propose \href{http://47.76.242.88:8080/receiver/index.html}{Web-Gewu}, an interactive robotics education platform built on a WebRTC cloud-edge-client collaborative architecture. The system offloads all physics simulation and reinforcement learning (RL) training to the edge node, while the cloud server acts exclusively as a lightweight signaling relay, enabling extremely low-cost browser-based peer-to-peer (P2P) real-time streaming. Learners can interact with multi-form robots at low end-to-end latency directly in a web browser without any local installation, and simultaneously observe real-time visualization of multi-dimensional monitoring data, including reinforcement learning reward curves. Combined with a predefined robust command communication protocol, Web-Gewu provides a highly scalable, out-of-the-box, and barrier-free teaching infrastructure for embodied intelligence, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for cutting-edge robotics technology.
Kaixuan Chen, Linqi Ye
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

TSM-Pose: Topology-Aware Learning with Semantic Mamba for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Category-level object pose estimation is fundamental for embodied intelligence, yet achieving robust generalization to unseen instances remains challenging. However, existing methods mainly rely on simple feature extraction and aggregation, which struggle to capture category-shared topological structures and conduct semantic keypoint modeling, limiting their generalization. To address these, we propose a \textbf{T}opology-Aware Learning with \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{M}amba for Category-Level \textbf{P}ose Estimation framework (TSM-Pose). Specifically, we introduce a Topology Extractor to capture the global topological representation of the point cloud, which is integrated into local geometry features and enables robust category-level structural representation. Simultaneously, we propose a Mamba-based Global Semantic Aggregator that injects semantics priors into keypoints to enhance their expressiveness and leverages multiple TwinMamba blocks to model long-range dependencies for more effective global feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (REAL275, CAMERA25, and HouseCat6D) demonstrate that TSM-Pose outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Jinshuo Liu, Bingtao Ma, Junlin Su +6
Apr 18, 2026cs.CV

Unified Ultrasound Intelligence Toward an End-to-End Agentic System

Clinical ultrasound analysis demands models that generalize across heterogeneous organs, views, and devices, while supporting interpretable workflow-level analysis. Existing methods often rely on task-wise adaptation, and joint learning may be unstable due to cross-task interference, making it hard to deliver workflow-level outputs in practice. To address these challenges, we present USTri, a tri-stage ultrasound intelligence pipeline for unified multi-organ, multi-task analysis. Stage I trains a universal generalist USGen on different domains to learn broad, transferable priors that are robust to device and protocol variability. To better handle domain shifts and reach task-aligned performance while preserving ultrasound shared knowledge, Stage II builds USpec by keeping USGen frozen and finetuning dataset-specific heads. Stage III introduces USAgent, which mimics clinician workflows by orchestrating USpec specialists for multi-step inference and deterministic structured reports. On the FMC_UIA validation set, our model achieves the best overall performance across 4 task types and 27 datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, qualitative results show that USAgent produces clinically structured reports with high accuracy and interpretability. Our study suggests a scalable path to ultrasound intelligence that generalizes across heterogeneous ultrasound tasks and supports consistent end-to-end clinical workflows. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/MacDunno/USTri.
Chen Ma, Yunshu Li, Junhu Fu +3
Apr 18, 2026cs.RO

Leveraging VR Robot Games to Facilitate Data Collection for Embodied Intelligence Tasks

Collecting embodied interaction data at scale remains costly and difficult due to the limited accessibility of conventional interfaces. We present a gamified data collection framework based on Unity that combines procedural scene generation, VR-based humanoid robot control, automatic task evaluation, and trajectory logging. A trash pick-and-place task prototype is developed to validate the full workflow.Experimental results indicate that the collected demonstrations exhibit broad coverage of the state-action space, and that increasing task difficulty leads to higher motion intensity as well as more extensive exploration of the arm's workspace. The proposed framework demonstrates that game-oriented virtual environments can serve as an effective and extensible solution for embodied data collection.
Yihan Zhang, Ziyun Huang, Linqi Ye
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

The Possibility of Artificial Intelligence Becoming a Subject and the Alignment Problem

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is increasingly being discussed not only as a tool, but also as a potential subject with personal and therefore moral status. In our opinion, the currently dominant alignment strategies, which focus on human control and containment of AI, therefore fall short. Building on Turing's analogy of "child machines", we are developing a vision of the possibility of autonomy-supporting parenting of AI, in which human control over a developing AGI is gradually reduced, allowing AI to become an independent, autonomous subject. Rather than viewing AGI, as is currently prevalent, as a dangerous creature that needs to be locked up and controlled, we should approach potential AGI with respect for a possible developing subject on the one hand, and with full confidence in our human capabilities on the other. Such a perspective opens up the possibility of cooperative coexistence and co-evolution between humans and AGIs. The relationship between humans and AGIs will thus have to be newly determined, which will change our self-image as humans. It will be crucial that humans not only claim control over potential AGIs, but also engage with AGIs through surprise, creativity, and other specifically human qualities, thereby offering them motivating incentives for cooperation.
Till Mossakowski, Helena Esther Grass
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

WavAlign: Enhancing Intelligence and Expressiveness in Spoken Dialogue Models via Adaptive Hybrid Post-Training

End-to-end spoken dialogue models have garnered significant attention because they offer a higher potential ceiling in expressiveness and perceptual ability than cascaded systems. However, the intelligence and expressiveness of current open-source spoken dialogue models often remain below expectations. Motivated by the success of online reinforcement learning(RL) in other domains, one might attempt to directly apply preference optimization to spoken dialogue models, yet this transfer is non-trivial. We analyze these obstacles from the perspectives of reward modeling and rollout sampling, focusing on how sparse preference supervision interacts with dense speech generation under shared-parameter updates. Based on the analysis, we propose a modality-aware adaptive post-training recipe that makes RL practical for spoken dialogue: it constrains preference updates to the semantic channel and improves acoustic behavior via explicit anchoring, while dynamically regulating their mixture from rollout statistics to avoid unreliable preference gradients. We evaluate the method across multiple spoken dialogue benchmarks and representative architectures, and observe consistent improvements in semantic quality and speech expressiveness.
Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen +9
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

MirrorBench: Evaluating Self-centric Intelligence in MLLMs by Introducing a Mirror

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has demonstrated remarkable advances in perception and reasoning, suggesting their potential for embodied intelligence. While recent studies have evaluated embodied MLLMs in interactive settings, current benchmarks mainly target capabilities to perceive, understand, and interact with external objects, lacking a systematic evaluation of self-centric intelligence. To address this, we introduce MirrorBench, a simulation-based benchmark inspired by the classical Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test in psychology. MirrorBench extends this paradigm to embodied MLLMs through a tiered framework of progressively challenging tasks, assessing agents from basic visual perception to high-level self-representation. Experiments on leading MLLMs show that even at the lowest level, their performance remains substantially inferior to human performance, revealing fundamental limitations in self-referential understanding. Our study bridges psychological paradigms and embodied intelligence, offering a principled framework for evaluating the emergence of general intelligence in large models. Project page: https://fflahm.github.io/mirror-bench-page/.
Shengyu Guo, Tongrui Ye, Jianbo Zhang +3
Apr 11, 2026cs.AI

Zero-shot World Models Are Developmentally Efficient Learners

Young children demonstrate early abilities to understand their physical world, estimating depth, motion, object coherence, interactions, and many other aspects of physical scene understanding. Children are both data-efficient and flexible cognitive systems, creating competence despite extremely limited training data, while generalizing to myriad untrained tasks -- a major challenge even for today's best AI systems. Here we introduce a novel computational hypothesis for these abilities, the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). ZWM is based on three principles: a sparse temporally-factored predictor that decouples appearance from dynamics; zero-shot estimation through approximate causal inference; and composition of inferences to build more complex abilities. We show that ZWM can be learned from the first-person experience of a single child, rapidly generating competence across multiple physical understanding benchmarks. It also shows progressive, staged emergence of capacities during learning and builds brain-like internal representations. Our work presents a blueprint for efficient and flexible learning from human-scale data, advancing both a computational account of children's early physical understanding and a path toward data-efficient AI systems.
Khai Loong Aw, Klemen Kotar, Wanhee Lee +6
Feb 27, 2026cs.AI

SleepLM: Natural-Language Intelligence for Human Sleep

We present SleepLM, a family of sleep-language foundation models that enable human sleep alignment, interpretation, and interaction with natural language. Despite the critical role of sleep, learning-based sleep analysis systems operate in closed label spaces (e.g., predefined stages or events) and fail to describe, query, or generalize to novel sleep phenomena. SleepLM bridges natural language and multimodal polysomnography, enabling language-grounded representations of sleep physiology. To support this alignment, we introduce a multilevel sleep caption generation pipeline that enables the curation of the first large-scale sleep-text dataset, comprising over 100K hours of data from more than 10,000 individuals. Furthermore, we present a unified pretraining objective that combines contrastive alignment, caption generation, and signal reconstruction to better capture physiological fidelity and cross-modal interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world sleep understanding tasks verify that SleepLM outperforms state-of-the-art in zero-shot and few-shot learning, cross-modal retrieval, and sleep captioning. Importantly, SleepLM also exhibits intriguing capabilities including language-guided event localization, targeted insight generation, and zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks. All code and data will be open-sourced.
Zongzhe Xu, Zitao Shuai, Eideen Mozaffari +3
Feb 16, 2026cs.CV

pFedNavi: Structure-Aware Personalized Federated Vision-Language Navigation for Embodied AI

Vision-Language Navigation VLN requires large-scale trajectory instruction data from private indoor environments, raising significant privacy concerns. Federated Learning FL mitigates this by keeping data on-device, but vanilla FL struggles under VLNs' extreme cross-client heterogeneity in environments and instruction styles, making a single global model suboptimal. This paper proposes pFedNavi, a structure-aware and dynamically adaptive personalized federated learning framework tailored for VLN. Our key idea is to personalize where it matters: pFedNavi adaptively identifies client-specific layers via layer-wise mixing coefficients, and performs fine-grained parameter fusion on the selected components (e.g., the encoder-decoder projection and environment-sensitive decoder layers) to balance global knowledge sharing with local specialization. We evaluate pFedNavi on two standard VLN benchmarks, R2R and RxR, using both ResNet and CLIP visual representations. Across all metrics, pFedNavi consistently outperforms the FedAvg-based VLN baseline, achieving up to 7.5% improvement in navigation success rate and up to 7.8% gain in trajectory fidelity, while converging 1.38x faster under non-IID conditions.
Qingqian Yang, Hao Wang, Sai Qian Zhang +6
Feb 8, 2026cs.RO

RLinf-USER: A Unified and Extensible System for Real-World Online Policy Learning in Embodied AI

Online policy learning directly in the physical world is a promising yet challenging direction for embodied intelligence. Unlike simulation, real-world systems cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, cheaply reset, or massively replicated, suggesting that real-world policy learning is not merely an algorithmic problem, but inherently a systems problem. We present USER, a \underline{U}nified and extensible \underline{S}yst\underline{E}m for real-world online policy lea\underline{R}ning. On the systems side, USER introduces a hardware abstraction layer for unified robot management and an adaptive communication plane that enables efficient cloud-edge training. On the learning side, USER adopts a fully asynchronous training framework, designs a persistent and cache-aware replay buffer, and provides extensible abstractions for rewards, algorithms, and policies. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that USER supports multi-robot coordination, heterogeneous manipulators, cloud-edge training with large models, and long-running asynchronous training. Together, these capabilities establish USER as a unified and extensible systems foundation for real-world online policy learning.
Hongzhi Zang, Shu'ang Yu, Hao Lin +14
Dec 7, 2025cs.RO

MIND-V: Hierarchical World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment

Scalable embodied intelligence is constrained by the scarcity of diverse, long-horizon robotic manipulation data. Existing video world models in this domain are limited to synthesizing short clips of simple actions and often rely on manually defined trajectories. To this end, we introduce MIND-V, a cognitive hierarchical world model designed to synthesize physically plausible and logically coherent videos of long-horizon robotic manipulation. Inspired by cognitive science, MIND-V bridges high-level reasoning with pixel-level synthesis through three core components: a Semantic Reasoning Hub (SRH) that leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for task planning; a Behavioral Semantic Bridge (BSB) that translates abstract instructions into domain-invariant representations; and a Motor Video Generator (MVG) for conditional video rendering. MIND-V employs Staged Visual Future Rollouts, a test-time optimization strategy to enhance long-horizon robustness. To enforce adherence to physical laws, we introduce a GRPO reinforcement learning post-training phase guided by a novel Physical Foresight Coherence (PFC) reward. PFC leverages the V-JEPA2 world model as a physics referee to penalize implausible dynamics in the latent feature space. Experiments confirm MIND-V's SOTA performance in long-horizon simulation and its significant value for policy learning, introducing a scalable and fully autonomous framework for embodied data synthesis.
Ruicheng Zhang, Mingyang Zhang, Jun Zhou +6
Oct 19, 2025cs.CV

A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI requires agents that perceive, act, and anticipate how actions reshape future world states. World models serve as internal simulators that capture environment dynamics, enabling forward and counterfactual rollouts to support perception, prediction, and decision making. This survey presents a unified framework for world models in embodied AI. Specifically, we formalize the problem setting and learning objectives, and propose a three-axis taxonomy encompassing: (1) Functionality, Decision-Coupled vs. General-Purpose; (2) Temporal Modeling, Sequential Simulation and Inference vs. Global Difference Prediction; (3) Spatial Representation, Global Latent Vector, Token Feature Sequence, Spatial Latent Grid, and Decomposed Rendering Representation. We systematize data resources and metrics across robotics, autonomous driving, and general video settings, covering pixel prediction quality, state-level understanding, and task performance. Furthermore, we offer a quantitative comparison of state-of-the-art models and distill key open challenges, including the scarcity of unified datasets and the need for evaluation metrics that assess physical consistency over pixel fidelity, the trade-off between model performance and the computational efficiency required for real-time control, and the core modeling difficulty of achieving long-horizon temporal consistency while mitigating error accumulation. Finally, we maintain a curated bibliography at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/AwesomeWorldModels.
Xinqing Li, Xin He, Le Zhang +3
Mar 7, 2023cs.LG

Computation, Condensation, and the Incompleteness Between Them: A Coupled Foundation of Intelligence

The theory of computation was built to answer Turing's question: what is effectively calculable by an unbounded, immortal, disembodied agent following rules? Intelligence answers a different question (nature's): what can a \emph{finite}, mortal, energy-limited agent do quickly enough to survive in a non-stationary world? We argue that a complete answer requires two operators: \emph{computation} and \emph{memorizaion}. Computation, \dpar\dpar, transforms structure toward closure; memorization, \kap\kap, condenses a validated closed cycle into a reusable token. Turing formalized \dpar\dpar and abstracted \kap\kap away, because his agent had infinite time and never needed to amortize. The new insight of our position paper is that the coupling of the two is not optional but \emph{forced}, and forced by a precise mathematical fact: \textbf{neither operator alone can be complete}. We prove that symbolic computation confined to a discrete sector suffers Gödel's diagonalization incompleteness, that geometric descent confined to a continuous sector suffers a Morse forced-saddle incompleteness, and that these two are not analogies but the parity-conjugate faces of a single obstruction on a coherent complex with \dpar2=0\dpar^2=0 - the even face realized by diagonalization, the odd by the topologically forced saddle, and no resolution confined to one parity able to come full circle. Intelligence must therefore couple both modes. We then locate the price of the coupling: its hinge operation, context-identification (the recognize-versus-discover decision), is exactly where the two incompletenesses coincide, hence undecidable and carrying an irreducible error floor. Finally we argue that the coupling is a universal law, realized, in the emergent sense of Anderson's ``more is different,'' at every scale from genes to thoughts to cultures, and give its falsifiable core and honest scope.
Xin Li
Date pendingcs.CY

The Biggest Risk of Embodied AI is Governance Lag

Embodied AI is widely discussed as a job-displacement problem. The deeper risk, however, is governance lag: the time and capability gap between a measurable change in technology deployment and an institutional response able to address its consequences. Building on the established pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma, this article argues that embodied AI intensifies that gap through scalable models and platforms, task-level reorganization, and the separation of upstream technological control from downstream social impact. We distinguish three mutually reinforcing forms of lag, observational, institutional, and distributive, and propose a compliance architecture based on deployment visibility, stack-level accountability, trigger-based adjustment, and automatic distributional response. The central policy challenge is not automation alone, but whether governance systems can become observable, responsive, and adaptive before disruption becomes entrenched.
Shaoshan Liu
Date pendingcs.CV

EgoFun3D: Modeling Interactive Objects from Egocentric Videos using Function Templates

We present EgoFun3D, a coordinated task formulation, dataset, and benchmark for modeling interactive 3D objects from egocentric videos. Interactive objects are of high interest for embodied AI but scarce, making modeling from readily available real-world videos valuable. Our task focuses on obtaining simulation-ready interactive 3D objects from egocentric video input. While prior work largely focuses on articulations, we capture general cross-part functional mappings (e.g., rotation of stove knob controls stove burner temperature) through function templates, a structured computational representation. Function templates enable precise evaluation and direct compilation into executable code across simulation platforms. To enable comprehensive benchmarking, we introduce a dataset of 517 egocentric videos featuring challenging real-world interactions with paired 3D geometry, segmentation over 2D and 3D, articulation and function template annotations. To tackle the task, we propose a 4-stage pipeline consisting of: 2D part segmentation, reconstruction, articulation estimation, and function template inference. Comprehensive benchmarking shows that the task is challenging for off-the-shelf methods, highlighting avenues for future work.
Weikun Peng, Denys Iliash, Manolis Savva
Date pendingcs.CV

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

Action-conditioned world models are a key component of embodied AI, serving as scalable policy evaluators that reduce reliance on expensive real-world rollouts. To accurately capture diverse action-induced dynamics, such models should satisfy three key objectives-Physical Plausibility (P), Action Adherence (A), and Visual Fidelity (V), collectively referred to as PAV-while remaining robust to both in-distribution (ID) expert demonstrations and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID action-video pairs and pixel-level reconstruction losses, which do not explicitly optimize PAV objectives and generalize poorly beyond expert data. To address this, we propose PAVXploreRL, a reinforcement learning framework built on a pretrained latent world model that explicitly optimizes PAV objectives through reward-driven training. To improve action generalization, our method jointly leverages ID trajectories and noise-driven OOD action exploration, without paired video supervision. Experiments show that PAVXploreRL consistently outperforms pretrained baselines, achieving a 5.6% average gain across benchmarks and producing higher-quality PAV properties. As a policy evaluator, it also yields more reliable performance estimates and reduces the overestimation bias of prior expert-only world models such as Ctrl-World. Code: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/PAVXploreRL
Han Wang, Zijun Wang, Shuoshuo Xue +4