Handoff

Continuous target sensing by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is constrained by limited flight endurance, motivating the transfer of tracking responsibility between cooperating UAVs. Such a handoff requires the receiver to identify the same physical target currently tracked by the sender despite differences in viewpoint, scale, and target appearance. Existing approaches based on global target localization or appearance-based cross-view association are limited by positioning uncertainty or ambiguous visual features. This paper presents Perspective Alignment & Tracking Handoff (\textbf{PATH}), a platform-agnostic, geometry-assisted sensing and verification framework for target handoff between two moving UAVs. The sender reconstructs the tracked target as a metric 3D point using RGB-D sensing, while the receiver estimates its relative pose from a fiducial observation and projects the transmitted target point into its own image as a spatial prior for target acquisition. The receiver-generated candidate is then returned to the sender and verified through a cross-view Mutual Agreement Handshake before tracking responsibility is transferred. Real-world UAV experiments show mean relative-position and target-position errors of 0.047m and 0.030m, respectively. Under visually ambiguous conditions, PATH achieves 96.0% frame-level receiver-side target acquisition accuracy, with 2.0% false-positive and 2.0% false-negative rates. A sensor-error sensitivity analysis shows that relative-pose uncertainty is the dominant contributor to receiver-view projection error. The implementation operates at video rate with compact inter-UAV communication below 16kB/s at 60Hz, demonstrating the feasibility of lightweight geometry-assisted target handoff on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Routing and cascades reduce tool-agent cost by transferring control across models, but stateful handoffs must preserve accepted choices, realized effects, and unfinished obligations. We formulate this as commitment-constrained residual completion and introduce Commitment-Frontier Residual Completion (CFRC). CFRC enforces target-before-proposal, whole-proposal-before-authority, and live-evidence-before-success: it freezes a residual contract from accepted progress, closes the successor continuation into an evidence-linked graph, and admits execution only when the remainder is covered, with live receipts discharging obligations. We establish contract-relative partial correctness, which extends to the original residual request under complete contract construction. Across five environments and two same-provider model pairs, CFRC achieves comparable macro accuracy to strong full-task agents at only 22.0%-34.6% of their inference cost, with additional cross-provider results demonstrating broader transfer.

Real-time hold control is a high-leverage mechanism in large-scale ride-hailing systems: by selectively deferring driver-order pairs, the platform can wait for better matching opportunities and improve end-to-end passenger-driver experience. Existing production systems such as EXHOLD learn bandit-based hold policies from handcrafted combinations of trip completion, cancellations, waiting time, and driver effort. However, designing such rewards becomes increasingly difficult as marketplace preferences are heterogeneous and observed passenger-driver behavior can be sparse, noisy, and affected by dynamic supply-demand conditions. We present ALIGN-HOLD, a production-scale experience alignment framework that learns hold policy from implicit marketplace preferences. ALIGN-HOLD constructs complementary preference pairs from order trajectories, driver trajectories, and contemporaneous local matching graphs, and trains an experience Reward Model (RM) using balanced multi-view sampling and model-adaptive hard preference sampling. During simulator-based policy learning, the frozen RM provides a dense, context-dependent reward and supports label-free filtering of low-identifiability interactions whose behavioral feedback is difficult to attribute to matching quality. We deploy ALIGN-HOLD on DiDi's ride-hailing platform and evaluate it in a 28-day randomized A/B experiment, covering approximately 100,000 passenger requests per day. Compared with the deployed production policy, ALIGN-HOLD achieves statistically significant improvements in trip completion rate and driver income, while significantly reducing passenger cancellations before and after driver acceptance. Complementary ablations, RM diagnostics, and behavioral analyses validate the contributions of the proposed components. ALIGN-HOLD has been fully ramped up and is currently serving DiDi's Brazil marketplace.

In multi-robot collaboration, task handovers rely on downstream verifiers performing remote attestation, which inspects sensor telemetry to ensure a robot's physical behavior strictly matches its assigned task. But can this telemetry be trusted? We show that it often cannot. In this paper, we uncover a severe vulnerability in Robot Operating System (ROS) 2: by modifying a single environment variable, an adversary can execute a pre-built hook to covertly intercept and inject both telemetry and control signals before they are published. Consequently, adversaries can hijack a robot to perform dangerous tasks while spoofing downstream verifiers with synthesized fake telemetry. Worse still, by exploiting the widespread reliance on third-party Docker containers and auxiliary tools, attackers can distribute compromised packages embedded with these malicious hooks to launch such attacks easily. On a physical Franka Emika robotic arm running Secure ROS 2, our attack injects fabricated telemetry in real time with only around 3 ms of jitter, preserving temporal synchronization and hardware integrity while achieving an 87% success rate even against an AI-based detector. We have responsibly disclosed these findings to the ROS 2 development team. We prepared a demo video available at https://youtu.be/ExeiGqUrnhQ.

Large-scale industrial robot fleets share constrained physical infrastructure, making vehicle travel times dependent on safety separation, intersection access, downstream blocking, and station contention. We study this problem in overhead hoist transport (OHT) systems, a representative ceiling-mounted material-handling system used in semiconductor fabs. Static shortest-path routing cannot account for these time-varying traffic costs, whereas tabular Q-routing adapts online but learns each destination--node--action value independently, limiting information sharing across sparsely visited routing contexts and making startup behavior sensitive to inaccurate value estimates. We propose Neural Double Q-routing, which replaces destination-indexed tables with a shared state--action value network. The network is warm-started through return-to-go regression on mixed simulator-generated routing trajectories and then refined online using Double-Q updates, local congestion correction, and event-stratified structured replay. Across nine matched fleet-size--arrival-rate settings with 100, 150, and 200 OHTs, the proposed framework reduces mean completion time relative to tabular Double Q-routing by $0.8\%$--$8.8\%$. It achieves the lowest mean completion time among all compared methods in the six 150- and 200-OHT settings, whereas Dijkstra remains best in the three 100-OHT settings. Completed-task counts remain within $1\%$ of tabular Double Q-routing in eight of nine settings, and 95th-percentile completion time decreases in eight settings. In two matched startup scenarios, offline initialization increases the number of completed tasks by up to $23\%$ and reduces tail completion time by up to $15\%$.

Repository exploration is a distinct and costly stage of coding-agent pipelines: before generating a patch, an agent must identify which repository files are likely to matter. We study whether this stage can be delegated to lower-cost models while retaining useful localization quality. Using our IssueLoc-Bench, we evaluate five explorer models under the same read-only interactive interface on 499 SWE-bench Verified-derived tasks and 500 tasks from 153 additional repositories. We measure early candidate discovery, top-three gold-file coverage, strict file-set recovery, agent time, and token usage, with paired instance-level uncertainty and repository-clustered sensitivity analysis. The highest-quality explorer leads across localization metrics, but substantially cheaper operating points emerge: depending on the model and evaluation arm, lower-cost explorers retain approximately 78-94% of the reference Hit@3 and 73-92% of its F1 while reducing mean agent time by 41-88% and token usage by 84-95%. The preferred operating point depends on how localization is consumed downstream: ranking and coverage metrics characterize recoverable candidate handoffs, whereas F1 and exact match characterize restrictive file gates. These results support treating repository exploration as an independently measurable and budgetable stage of modular coding agents, with explorer selection guided by the downstream handoff contract.

Human-to-robot (H2R) object handover is a fundamental capability for human-robot collaboration, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, human-centric datasets and the significant sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand2Bot, an RGB-D video dataset that provides rich contextual information such as body posture and facial expressions, specifically collected for handover scenarios with real-world noise patterns. We further propose PassGen, a generative pipeline that leverages stable video diffusion and an Intention-Aware Temporal Face Encoder to synthesize realistic handover sequences while ensuring hand-object consistency. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a morphology-based depth editing strategy that replicates realistic sensor noise found in physical depth maps. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves high intention identification accuracy and low false trigger rates in both ablation studies and real-world deployment on a physical robot platform. Our results confirm that training on PassGen allows for robust zero-shot transfer and earlier intention anticipation compared to traditional hand-centric baselines, effectively enabling socially aware robotic behavior in shared workspaces.

Compositional reliability bounds for multi-agent systems multiply component reliabilities, a step licensed by a conditional-independence assumption that is routinely stated and rarely tested. We test it. Two instances of one model, in a two-agent handoff, co-fail on 90.0% of the missions on which either fails (log OR 6.66, 95% CI [6.38, 7.00]; phi 0.916), in a preregistered evaluation of 18,000 missions scored by deterministic code with no LLM judge. Substituting a different model reduces the association in six of six contrasts; substituting a different vendor, model already different, does not -- a registered hypothesis reported as a null. The error is signed and runs against the operator: positive dependence inflates joint failure above the independence product, so redundancy is over-credited exactly when components share a model. The assumption-free alternative is often vacuous, and fitting a dependence model is worse: we prove a bootstrap bound on a fitted model's functional loses coverage of the truth as n grows, the identification gap being O(1) while the bootstrap haircut is O(n^{-1/2}). More data makes such a certificate worse, with no visible symptom. We give a finite-sample certificate assuming no dependence structure: a linear program over the joint, over a Bonferroni-Clopper-Pearson box around measured co-execution moments. It is sound, sharp for the information supplied, and monotone in the moment family. Enriching ten moment functionals to fourteen narrows the identified interval by 85.7% and lifts the certified floor from 0.2455 to 0.4116. A companion anytime-valid certificate holds type-I error at 0.0471 under optional stopping. Common dependence statistics are marginal-bounded and can reverse an apparent ordering of conditions when the compared agents fail at different rates. Contracts, scoring code, analysis scripts, and the preregistration are released.

Open-source robotics and foundation models have lowered the barrier to embodied AI, yet language-guided laboratory automation still requires reliable alignment from instructions and observations to safe actions. This field report presents an OpenArm-based mobile manipulation prototype for laboratory-style tasks, built by integrating dual OpenArm manipulators with a mobile base, vertical slide, RGB-D sensing, lidar-based mapping, ROS2/MoveIt execution, and profile-defined skill interfaces. The system is organized around representation handoffs: natural language requests are constrained into registered skill calls, sensor observations are grounded into maps and object poses, object priors provide role and skill constraints, and runtime bindings compile validated skills into executable motion goals. We use dry-run traces and startup checks to evaluate this integration path, showing how the prototype exposes missing calibration, incomplete object assets, and unfinished real-scene visual grounding as explicit deployment blockers. These intermediate representations serve as practical debugging interfaces for integrating language, perception, planning, and robot safety in embodied systems.

Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget. However, existing approaches typically allocate models at the level of individual queries or mutation steps, overlooking that evolutionary search is \textit{stateful}: each generated candidate changes the population from which subsequent mutations are produced. We empirically analyze LLM-driven evolutionary trajectories and find that search progress is strongly front-loaded, early trajectory performance is informative but noisy, and cheap models recover much of the early progress achieved by strong models at lower cost. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textbf{\model}, a training-free framework that shifts budget allocation from individual calls to evolving populations through adaptive \textit{population handoff}. A cheap model explores multiple trajectories in short blocks allocated by a bandit scheduler. Relay Gain, defined as the marginal improvement of a compact, quality-diverse candidate bank constructed for handoff, serves as the scheduler reward and determines when to hand off. The curated candidates initialize a shared strong model population for refinement. Across four benchmarks and three budgets, \model achieves the highest mean score in 11 of 12 settings, outperforming competitive baselines. Our results suggest that in stateful search, budget allocation should be organized around the population, not the individual call.

Maximizing throughput under proportional fairness in dense wireless networks requires jointly managing user association, scheduling, base station (BS) activation, and handover control under hard finite-horizon energy and handover budgets, which induces a fundamental tension between BS-side energy management and user-side handover regulation. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a natural framework for such distributed sequential control, its application here faces two difficulties: finite-horizon budget constraints cannot be evaluated at each time slot, and the nonlinear proportional fairness utility admits no principled per-slot decomposition. We propose HeLyMARL, a Lyapunov-embedded heterogeneous MARL framework that resolves both via drift-plus-penalty decomposition with virtual queues. The energy and handover constraint pressures are internalized directly into a unified per-slot reward, converting the constrained finite-horizon problem into an unconstrained MARL problem. Comparison against two Lagrangian-based alternatives reveals a timescale separation: Lagrangian relaxation regulates constraints only across training episodes, whereas the virtual queues of HeLyMARL bound cumulative budget consumption at every partial horizon within an episode, a pacing guarantee beyond the reach of greedy Lyapunov-based control. Simulations show that HeLyMARL is the only method that sustains the throughput-fairness balance together with uninterrupted service throughout the horizon, outperforming conventional MARL, Lyapunov-based, and constrained MARL benchmarks without premature budget exhaustion.

Collaborative robots are increasingly sharing workspaces with human operators, making tool handover a frequent and safety-critical micro-interaction. However, traditional static handovers often lead to awkward grasps when handling asymmetric industrial tools. This paper presents a receiver-centered voice-driven adaptive handover system for mechanical tools, built on a Franka cobot. Using an LLM for intention recognition and MediaPipe for real-time 3D hand tracking, the framework dynamically adjusts the end-effector's orientation to present tools in an ergonomically optimal, handle-first pose. A within-subjects study compared this adaptive approach with an object-agnostic static baseline. The results demonstrate that the adaptive system reduces the grasp delay for asymmetric tools, improving the fluency of the interaction. Furthermore, the adaptive strategy improved specific trust-related perceptions, particularly motion predictability and perceived task simplicity.

Coordinating payload transfers between subsystems is a critical challenge in lifelong Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD). We study systems where agents are confined to separate regions and must exchange payloads through shared handover stations. These stations, equipped with single docks and finite buffers, are inherently vulnerable to blocking and starvation. We formalize this problem as Multi-Subsystem MAPD with Buffer-limited Handover Stations (MS-MAPD-BHS). We then propose Handover-Aware Reservation and Routing (HARR), an online controller that couples per-subsystem planners. HARR uses a shared dock reservation calendar and a deterministic rolling-horizon projection of buffer occupancy to coordinate actions. A candidate route is accepted only if its dock interval is free and the resulting buffer occupancy projection remains within capacity. Under perfect execution, these checks ensure collision-free dock use and buffer-safe committed operations within the reservation horizon. In simulation, HARR achieves up to 77% higher throughput and 92% lower backlog than a fixed-dock ablation at moderate load, while also reducing planning time relative to a coupled station-aware Token Passing baseline. These results show that explicit interface coordination substantially improves stability in modular multi-subsystem transport.

Logistics systems increasingly mix \emph{autonomous logistic equipment} (ALE) with non-autonomous machinery under a central control system (CS), where the best decision-maker depends on who holds the most current world model, yet authority is fixed at design time. When an ALE's local model and the CS global model diverge, both act on incompatible beliefs and produce deadlocks that resource-based handling neither explains nor prevents. We propose the World-Model-Aware Responsibility Framework (WMARF), which assigns authority dynamically from CS world-model quality and equipment automation level, and classifies deadlocks by the state of authority -- none, in transition, or divergent. In a discrete-event simulation of two ALE converging on a semi-automated transfer point, reproduced over the VDA~5050 interface, a divergence deadlock under static control is prevented by a proximity-triggered handoff. Because authority follows information quality rather than a shared protocol, the scheme stays valid as autonomy grows.

In large-scale ride-hailing, hold control is a critical mechanism for improving passenger-driver experience. By selectively delaying certain driver-order pairs, the system waits for better opportunities, reduces cancellations, and mitigates wasted driver effort. However, existing industrial hold strategies often rely on heuristic thresholding over multiple predictive models, which can be brittle under non-stationary traffic and hard to optimize for multi-objective experience signals. We propose EXHOLD, a deployable two-stage framework decoupling experience-aware pair assessment from hold-time execution. In Stage I, we learn a decision model assigning each driver-order pair to discrete, interpretable experience tiers by optimizing a unified objective that aggregates satisfaction signals across the matching funnel. In Stage II, we solve for a monotone hold-time schedule via constrained optimization over empirical quantiles. This explicitly enforces service guardrails bounding the unnecessary holding of promising matches while maximizing overall experience improvement. We evaluate EXHOLD through randomized A/B experiments in DiDi's production system in Brazil. Results show consistent gains in marketplace efficiency and experience: EXHOLD increases trip completion and driver income, significantly reduces passenger cancellations, and improves funnel efficiency. Ablations and behavioral analyses confirm both stages are essential and that the policy makes calibrated decisions under spatiotemporal heterogeneity. EXHOLD is currently deployed, serving production traffic in Brazil.

Long-horizon household tasks require robots to compose many language-conditioned skills, yet the boundary between consecutive skills is rarely explicit. A skill may satisfy its own postcondition while leaving the robot, objects, or camera views in a state from which the next skill cannot reliably start. We study this semantic handoff problem in BEHAVIOR-1K through an agent-orchestrated vision-language-action execution harness. The harness invokes $π_{0.5}$-based skill checkpoints trained from cleaned BEHAVIOR-1K demonstrations, assigns each skill typed arguments and a step budget, and uses multi-view vision-language model verification to decide whether execution should advance, retry, or replan. To separate isolated skill competence from long-horizon compositional robustness, we evaluate the same checkpoints under two initial-state distributions: clean skill-boundary snapshots and chained terminal states produced by previous skills. Selected navigation, grasping, placement, and door-opening skills achieve 77--100% success from clean snapshots under human-reviewed verification, yet composed rollouts still frequently stall from chained states. The resulting traces attribute failures to next-skill readiness, target grounding, and control execution, turning nearzero task success into actionable diagnostics for what VLA skill libraries must learn next: robustness to the messy chained-state distribution that clean demonstrations underrepresent.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks are highly susceptible to line-of-sight (LoS) blockages. Vision-aided wireless communications (VAWC) enable proactive handovers (PHO) to mitigate such blockages; however, PHO becomes challenging when no nearby base station (BS) is available. In such cases, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can be used to restore connectivity. To ensure timely PHO, the RIS configuration time must be taken into account, as the large number of RIS elements can limit responsiveness in time-sensitive scenarios. This work proposes a novel RIS-assisted PHO approach that optimizes the number of allocated RIS elements to balance signal processing complexity and link quality under handover timing constraints, making the RIS-assisted link more energy-efficient. An optimization problem based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is formulated to determine the optimal end-to-end RIS link setup that runs offline to bypass latency constraints. Results show that reducing the number of RIS elements by 12% leads to a 10% decrease in dissipated energy without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, the RIS-assisted link achieves a 15--30 dB improvement in blocked regions while maintaining accurate PHO timing.

We present R2HandoverSim, a simulation benchmark for robot-to-human (R2H) object handovers. Although R2H handover methods have advanced rapidly, the lack of standardized evaluation protocols impedes objective comparison. Our benchmark enables reproducible evaluation by systematically comparing four baselines on their predicted shared grasp poses. We conduct a user study with 30 participants, analyze baseline performance, and show that simulation results correlate with real-world evaluation outcomes. Crucially, five complementary metrics (planning feasibility, reachability, grasp stability, grasp affordance, and safety) better reflect user-perceived handover quality than overall success rate alone. Website and code: https://robot-future.github.io/r2handoversim/.

Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have driven the rise of Agentic AI, showing promise for medical reasoning. However, open-ended conversational agents remain prone to two critical failure modes: premature diagnostic handoff and silent clinical hallucinations that may go undetected before reaching the patient. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that addresses both issues by replacing ``LLM-as-a-judge'' routing with deterministic orchestration constraints. The framework incorporates two safety mechanisms. First, a neuro-symbolic state-tracking gate enforces completeness of the OLDCARTS clinical protocol (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/Alleviating factors, Radiation, Timing, and Severity) by blocking diagnostic transitions until all required dimensions are collected. Second, an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) gate computes semantic entropy (H) across K=5 independent diagnostic samples to identify and intercept divergent outputs before delivery. We evaluate the system using simulated patient agents powered by the llama-3.1-70b-instruct model on 150 test cases. The full architecture achieves 49.3% diagnostic precision, representing an absolute improvement of 11.3 percentage points over an unconstrained baseline. Additionally, we observe a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.181, p < 0.05) between OLDCARTS completeness (σ) and semantic entropy (H), suggesting that structured information gathering is associated with reduced diagnostic uncertainty.

Modern agent systems can turn uncertainty into overconfidence. Fragile upstream decisions are often exposed to downstream components as clean intermediate artifacts, while the uncertainty behind those decisions is lost at the interface. As a result, local ambiguity can become system-level error amplification. We argue that this reveals an interface bottleneck in agent uncertainty propagation: uncertainty does not propagate simply because a trajectory contains uncertain steps; it propagates only when it survives the handoff between components. We define uncertain decision handoff as the transfer of an intermediate decision made under uncertainty, and identify confidence laundering as a failure mode in which fragile upstream states are repackaged as procedurally valid artifacts that downstream agents over-trust. To address this bottleneck, we propose latent uncertainty as an uncertainty-bearing carrier attached to decision handoffs. Rather than replacing text with hidden states, latent uncertainty aims to preserve pre-commitment fragility in a form that downstream components can use. This position shifts agent uncertainty propagation from step-wise uncertainty estimation toward uncertainty-preserving interface design for more recoverable agent systems.

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

Coding-agent benchmarks evaluate whether a single uninterrupted agent can resolve a repository issue. Real software work is messier: tasks are interrupted, reassigned, reviewed, and resumed from partial states left by another agent or engineer. We study this missing dimension through handoff debt: the rediscovery cost imposed when a predecessor's work is opaque or incomplete. Our takeover protocol interrupts a coding agent at deterministic handoff points, freezes the repository, and evaluates successor agents under four handoff views: repository state only, raw trace, summary notes, and structured notes. Across 75 source tasks, the protocol generates 181 handoff-point tasks and 724 takeover runs per successor model. Across three successor models, context-bearing handoffs reduce median agent events by 20-59% and cumulative prompt tokens by 42-63% relative to repository-only takeover. Solved-rate effects are smaller and model-dependent, but efficiency gains are consistent. These findings suggest that coding-agent evaluation should report not only whether a task is solved, but also how costly that work is for another agent to resume.

Efficient resource allocation is a key challenge in business process management, with direct implications for cost, throughput time, and utilization. While recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches have shown promise in deriving adaptive allocation policies, they typically neglect inter-resource collaboration patterns that can strongly influence real-world task handovers. Recognizing this, this paper introduces the first approach for multi-objective optimization of resource-level decision-making, enabling the recommendation of person-specific handover policies. To achieve this, our work combines an existing Multi-Agent System-based process simulator with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The resulting approach produces Pareto-optimal, resource-specific policies that optimize the process across multiple objectives. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach reduces costs by an average of 37% and waiting time by 58%, consistently outperforming heuristic baselines and demonstrating the potential of leveraging collaboration-aware optimization to improve process performance.

Concept probes extracted from transformer residual streams are only as reliable as the layer from which they are extracted. The common practice of probing at a fixed late layer or at the peak of a separation score function ignores a fundamental structural feature: concept representations undergo substantial directional rotation during their assembly phase, and do not settle into a stable direction until a characteristic handoff layer after the primary Concept Allocation Zone (CAZ). We introduce Geometric Evolution Maps (GEMs), which track the full directional trajectory of a concept through residual stream activations, identify the handoff layer where rotation ceases, and extract the settled probe direction from that layer. Across 23 architectures spanning 70M to 14B parameters and 17 concept types, the entry-to-exit cosine similarity within CAZs has a mean of 0.233, showing that probe direction at CAZ entry does not reliably predict probe direction at exit. Ablation experiments across 391 concept x model pairs (23 models x 17 concepts) show that GEM-extracted probes are at least as precise as peak-layer probes in 268/391 trials (68.5%), and strictly outperform in 259/391 (66.2%). The architecture split is pronounced: MHA models favour the handoff in 173/221 trials (78.3%); GQA models favour the handoff in only 56/119 trials (47.1%). Model-level Wilcoxon: W=214, N=23, p=0.010 (one-sided). An adaptive ablation width rule targets the 79/391 near-final-layer cases: it improves probe quality in 60/79 triggered cases (75.9%), mean gain +7.44pp. A direction-specificity control confirms the ablation effect is concept-direction specific: median 377x suppression rate versus random-direction ablation (99.1% of concept directions beat all 10 random seeds). Reference implementation: rosetta_tools v1.3.1 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.20361433).

This paper presents a learning-augmented trajectory planning framework for cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) handover missions. While centralized trajectory optimization ensures dynamic feasibility and task optimality, its high computational cost limits real-time applicability. We propose a neural surrogate planner utilizing decoupled encoder-decoder long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to generate coordinated handover trajectory predictions from the task specifications. These predictions serve as informed warm starts for the downstream centralized optimizer, thereby accelerating convergence to dynamically feasible solutions. Benchmark evaluations demonstrate that the learning-augmented planning framework achieves more than a threefold speedup and 100% optimization success rate compared to cold start optimization. The results indicate that combining data-driven inference with model-based refinement enables fast and reliable trajectory generation for heterogeneous multi-robot systems.

We study workflow learning in a setting where specialized agents hand off control through a shared artifact, each agent observes only a local function of that artifact and its own private state, and no centralized learner accesses joint trajectories -- the operating regime of multi-agent LLM pipelines that span organizational, vendor, or trust boundaries. We formalize this regime as an interface-constrained semi-Markov decision process (IC-SMDP), whose decision epochs occur at handoff times, and design IC-$Q$, an asynchronous decentralized $Q$-learning algorithm in which cross-agent coordination at every handoff is exactly one scalar. Our main result is a finite-sample bound for neural IC-$Q$ that decomposes into three independently controllable error sources: neural function-approximation error, interface representation gap, and a mixing-time residual, under the random option-duration discount. Establishing this bound requires lifting the approximate information state (AIS) framework from single-agent primitive-step MDPs to multi-agent SMDPs and controlling Markovian noise under random duration, neither of which has been done in prior work. To our knowledge this is the first finite-sample guarantee for neural $Q$-learning under decentralized partial observability. Four experiments: a controlled synthetic IC-SMDP that validates the bound term-by-term, multi-LLM mathematical reasoning, multi-agent routing, and multi-agent CPU programming, show that IC-$Q$ matches a centralized oracle without any agent observing joint trajectories, with each of the three error sources scaling along its corresponding axis as the bound predicts.

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) offers synoptic visibility for traffic monitoring, yet scalable deployment is hindered by trajectory fragmentation, where vehicle identity persistence is lost across multi-UAV Fields of View (FOV). While state-of-the-art frameworks excel in optimizing local trajectory extraction and stability for single-drone imagery, they often function as isolated data silos that generate disjointed trajectories, thereby precluding network-level analysis such as Origin-Destination estimation. This paper presents a real-time Multi-Camera Multi-Vehicle Tracking (MCMT) system designed to handle global identity persistence. Addressing the visual ambiguity and computational cost of appearance-based Re-Identification (Re-ID) in nadir views, we introduce a lightweight Topology-Based Spatiotemporal Handover mechanism. We implement a high-throughput parallel pipeline leveraging YOLO11 and ByteTrack to process concurrent 4K streams. Our core contribution is a deterministic queue-based matching algorithm that utilizes geometric overlaps and virtual lane discretization to predictively manage identity handover via FIFO queues. Experimental results on complex urban environments, including intersections and merging traffic, demonstrate a Handover Success Rate (HOSR) of 99.8% in continuous traffic flows, significantly outperforming Re-ID baselines (74.1%) while validating edge deployment feasibility. The source code is available at https://github.com/JYe9/multi-camera-multi-vehicle-tracking-system.

Virtual Try-On (VTON) aims to synthesize photorealistic images of garments precisely aligned with a person's body and pose. Current diffusion-based methods, however, face a fundamental trade-off between structural integrity and textural fidelity. In this paper, we formalize this challenge as a consequence of complementary inductive biases inherent in prevailing architectures: models heavily reliant on spatial constraints naturally favor geometric alignment but often suppress textures, whereas models dominated by unconstrained generative priors excel at vibrant detail rendering but are prone to structural drift. Based on this diagnosis, we propose LPH-VTON, a new synergistic framework that resolves this tension within a single, continuous denoising process. LPH-VTON strategically decomposes the generation, leveraging a structure-biased model to establish a geometrically consistent latent scaffold in the early stages, before handing over control to a texture-biased model for high-fidelity detail rendering. Extensive experiments validate our approach. Our model achieves a superior Pareto-optimal balance, establishing new benchmarks in perceptual faithfulness while maintaining highly competitive structural alignment across the standard dataset VITON-HD, proving the efficacy of temporal architectural decoupling.

To address the issues of high interruption time and measurement report overhead under user equipment (UE) mobility especially in high speed 5G use cases the use of AI/ML techniques (AI/ML beam management and mobility procedures) have been proposed. These techniques rely heavily on data that are most often simulated for various scenarios and do not accurately reflect real deployment behavior or user traffic patterns. Therefore, there is an utmost need for realistic datasets under various conditions. This work presents a dataset collected from a commercially deployed network across various modes of mobility (pedestrian, bike, car, bus, and train) and at multiple speeds to depict real time UE mobility. When collecting the dataset, we focused primarily on handover (HO) scenarios, with the aim of reducing the HO interruption time and maintaining continuous throughput during and immediately after HO execution. To support this research, the dataset includes timing advance (TA) measurements at various signaling events such as RACH trigger, MAC CE, and PDCCH grant which are typically missing in existing works. We cover a detailed description of the creation of the dataset; experimental setup, data acquisition, and extraction. We also cover an exploratory analysis of the data, with a primary focus on mobility, beam management, and TA. We discuss multiple use cases in which the proposed dataset can facilitate understanding of the inference of the AI/ML model. One such use case is to train and evaluate various AI/ML models for TA prediction.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex networked environments, yet the joint optimization of multi-UAV motion control and connectivity remains a fundamental challenge. In this paper, we study a multi-UAV system operating in an integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial network (ITNTN) comprising terrestrial base stations and high-altitude platform stations (HAPS). We consider a three-dimensional (3D) aerial highway scenario where UAVs must adapt their motion to ensure collision avoidance, efficient traffic flow, and reliable communication under dynamic and partially observable conditions. We first model the problem as a hierarchical multi-objective partially observable Markov decision process (H-MO-POMDP), capturing the coupling between control and communication objectives. Based on this formulation, we propose a large language model (LLM)-driven hierarchical multi-rate control framework. At the global level, an LLM-based controller on the HAPS performs long-term planning for load balancing and handover decisions. At the local level, each UAV employs a hybrid controller that integrates a slow-timescale LLM for high-level spatial reasoning with a reinforcement learning agent for faster UAV-to-infrastructure (U2I) communication and motion control. We further develop a high-fidelity 3D simulation platform by integrating the gym-pybullet-drones environment with 3GPP-compliant RF/THz channel models. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 14% increase in transportation efficiency and a 25% improvement in telecommunication throughput. Additionally, it achieves a 23% reduction in physical collision rates, demonstrating strong handover stability and zero-shot generalization in dynamic scenarios.

This paper introduces a proactive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mobility management xApp for Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Near Real-Time Radio Intelligent Controller (Near-RT RIC) environments, employing Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced with transfer learning to optimise handover decisions for UAVs operating along predetermined flight trajectories. Unlike reactive approaches that respond to signal degradation, the proposed framework anticipates network conditions and minimises both outage probability and handover frequency through predictive optimisation. The system leverages centralised weight averaging to consolidate knowledge from multiple flight scenarios into a global model capable of generalising to previously unseen operational environments without extensive retraining. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves a favourable trade-off between handover frequency and connectivity reliability, reducing handover events by up to 54.6% compared to greedy approaches while maintaining outage probability at practically negligible levels. The results validate the effectiveness of intelligent learning-based approaches for UAV mobility management in next-generation O-RAN architectures, thereby contributing to seamless integration of aerial user equipment into cellular networks.

This position paper argues that the Authorization-Execution Gap (AEG) is a major safety and security problem in open-world agents. The AEG is the divergence between what a principal intends to authorize and what an open-world agent ultimately executes. Because such agents act autonomously across tools, persistent state, and multi-agent handoffs, even small instances of authorization divergence can cause harm that is difficult or impossible to undo. We argue that many observed agent failures can be traced to three structural sources of AEG: delegation-level incompleteness, channel-level corruption, and composition-level fragmentation. The same observed failure may arise from any of these sources. Without identifying the source, a defense targeting the symptom alone cannot address the underlying cause. Agent safety and security should therefore emphasize source-oriented diagnosis and defense. Because the structural sources of AEG arise dynamically during execution, this approach necessarily requires authorization integrity checks applied during execution, rather than relying solely on one-shot upfront filtering or post-hoc audit. For NeurIPS, the implication is that papers on open-world agents should report not only outcome-level metrics such as task success or attack resistance, but also process-level evidence showing where AEG was detected, constrained, and attributed to a structural source during execution.

Many continuous-control problems ship with a competent but suboptimal controller (a tuned PID, a hand-designed gait). A growing family of methods uses such controllers as queryable experts during RL, but each method has been proposed in isolation, on a different benchmark, without imperfect-expert testing. We harmonize the comparison on a shared SAC backbone, common HPO and evaluation protocols, 100/50 seeds per (env, method), and a degradation sweep over expert undertuning, action bias, and observation noise. The comparison surfaces three failure modes single-paper evaluations miss: (F1) a critic blind spot under argmax-plus-bootstrap that drags IBRL below no-expert SAC on experts close to the no-expert-RL ceiling (RL-near-ceiling, distinct from the absolute physical ceiling); (F2) residual saturation on far-from-optimal experts; and (F3) warm-start buffer poisoning that collapses training-time-handoff methods under deployment-time expert undertuning. No single method dominates: each wins on one task-structure regime and fails predictably elsewhere; on RL-near-ceiling experts (FourTank, GlassFurnace) no query-time method clears the expert within our 1M-step budget, leaving open whether this is a fundamental wall or a budget effect. We convert the spread into a testable decision rule keyed on three pre-training observables (expert quality, task termination, perturbation type). The benchmark, taxonomy, and decision rule are the primary contribution; we additionally describe EDGE, a softmax-over-ensemble-LCB design point used to demonstrate that both axes the taxonomy points to (gate form, scoring rule) are individually exploitable.

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm human grasp while ignoring incidental touches. Existing passive-sensing methods struggle to generalize across diverse objects and human behaviors, as they lack informative perturbations to disambiguate different contact conditions, such as firm grasp versus incidental touch. We propose an active sensing approach for robust handovers: the robot applies information-gathering motions and senses the resulting human-applied forces to infer the contact state. A firm grasp produces forces in multiple directions, while an accidental touch does not. To capture this distinction, we model the contact state with a Bayesian linear model: a distribution over piecewise-linear mappings from robot motions to human-applied forces. This model enables firm grasp detection and active information gathering. In experiments with 12 participants and 30 diverse rigid objects, our method achieved a 97.5% success rate -- over 30% higher than two common baselines.

Maintaining robust millimeter-wave (mmWave) connectivity in vehicular networks requires real-time adaptation to environmental dynamics, sensor degradation, and link variability. This paper presents Enwar 3.0, an environment-aware reasoning framework that unifies multi-modal sensing, agentic large language models (LLMs), and context-driven model selection for predictive beamforming, blockage detection, and handover management. Building upon prior iterations of Enwar, the proposed architecture integrates a classifier-driven assessment of sensor health with a primed LLM that orchestrates multiple specialized agents through structured, task-aware prompting. A novel synthetic degradation pipeline enables the training of a sensor degradation classifier that detects real-time impairments across camera, radar, LiDAR, and GPS inputs, achieving over 99% accuracy. The LLM, trained via chain-of-thought (CoT) priming and human-in-the-loop feedback, coordinates agent calls for beam selection, blockage forecasting, and environment perception while dynamically loading sensor-specific models based on environmental context. Extensive evaluations across 15 sensor combinations demonstrate that Enwar 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art performance in both predictive accuracy and interpretability, with beam selection accuracy exceeding 88%, blockage F1-scores surpassing 98%, and reasoning correctness reaching 87% on complex decision prompts. This work establishes a scalable foundation for LLM-integrated wireless systems that reason, perceive, and adapt in real-time.

In this paper, we propose a dueling double deep Q-network (DDQN)-based adaptive multi-objective handover framework for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. The proposed method enables dynamic trade-off learning among throughput, blocking probability, and switching cost under time-varying network conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms conventional baselines, achieving up to 10.3% throughput improvement and near-zero blocking under typical operating conditions.

Medication reconciliation at clinical handoffs is a high-stakes, error-prone process. Large language models are increasingly proposed to assist with this task using FHIR-structured patient records, but a fundamental and largely unstudied variable is how the FHIR data is serialised before being passed to the model. We present the first systematic comparison of four FHIR serialisation strategies (Raw JSON, Markdown Table, Clinical Narrative, and Chronological Timeline) across five open-weight models (Phi-3.5-mini, Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.3-70B) on a controlled benchmark of 200 synthetic patients, totalling 4,000 inference runs. We find that serialisation strategy has a large, statistically significant effect on performance for models up to 8B parameters: Clinical Narrative outperforms Raw JSON by up to 19 F1 points for Mistral-7B (r = 0.617, p < 10^{-10}). This advantage reverses at 70B, where Raw JSON achieves the best mean F1 of 0.9956. In all 20 model and strategy combinations, mean precision exceeds mean recall: omission is the dominant failure mode, with models more often missing an active medication than fabricating one, which changes how clinical safety auditing priorities should be set. Smaller models plateau at roughly 7-10 concurrent active medications, leaving polypharmacy patients, the patients most at risk from reconciliation errors, systematically underserved. BioMistral-7B, a domain-pretrained model without instruction tuning, produces zero usable output in all conditions, showing that domain pretraining alone is not sufficient for structured extraction. These results offer practical, evidence-based format recommendations for clinical LLM deployment: Clinical Narrative for models up to 8B, Raw JSON for 70B and above. The complete pipeline is reproducible on open-source tools running on an AWS g6e.xlarge instance (NVIDIA L40S, 48 GB VRAM).

Serving large language models under latency service-level objectives (SLOs) is a configuration-heavy systems problem with an unusually failure-prone search space: many plausible configurations crash outright or miss user-visible latency targets, and standard black-box optimizers treat these failures as wasted trials. We present SLO-Guard, a crash-aware autotuner for vLLM serving that treats crashes as first-class observations. SLO-Guard combines a feasible-first Thermal Budget Annealing (TBA) exploration phase with a warm-started Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) exploitation phase; the handoff replays all exploration history, including crashes encoded as extreme constraint violations. We additionally contribute a configuration-repair pass, a GPU-aware KV-cache memory guard, and a four-category crash taxonomy. We evaluate SLO-Guard on Qwen2-1.5B served with vLLM 0.19 on an NVIDIA A100 40GB. Across a pre-specified five-seed study, both SLO-Guard and uniform random search attain 75/75 feasibility with zero crashes under the corrected concurrent harness, and are statistically tied on best-achieved latency (Mann-Whitney two-sided p=0.84). SLO-Guard's advantage is in budget consistency: more trials in the fast-serving regime (10.20 vs. 7.40 out of 15; one-sided p=0.014) and higher post-handoff consistency (0.876 vs. 0.539; p=0.010). Under concurrent load, SLO-Guard's cross-seed standard deviation on best latency is 4.4x tighter than random search's (2.26 ms vs. 10.00 ms). A harness-replication analysis shows that the consistency findings survive an independent sequential-dispatch measurement condition. The central claim is not that SLO-Guard finds a better final configuration, but that it spends a fixed tuning budget more predictably once the fast regime has been found.