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18 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 101

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Belief-Aware Multi-Agent Path Finding under Map Uncertainty

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) aims to find collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. Classical MAPF assumes that all static obstacles are known in advance, but real-world environments can change unexpectedly due to fallen objects, spills, or other local disturbances. When such changes are spatially correlated, an observation can inform traversability estimates beyond the observed location. Prior approaches address uncertainty in traversability through contingent plans or replanning based on direct observations, but do not leverage this spatial dependence to infer the traversability of nearby unobserved locations. As a result, they cannot use one observation to anticipate nearby unobserved obstacles that may cause costly rerouting later. We focus on Belief-Aware MAPF, where map discrepancies are fixed during execution but initially unknown, and observations can be informative beyond the observed location. We propose Multi-Agent Gaussian belief Inference for Coordination (MAGIC), a framework that updates a shared belief about traversability online based on agents' observations. MAGIC uses a Gaussian Markov Random Field and Gaussian Belief Propagation to approximately infer traversability and construct detour-aware costs for standard MAPF planners. Our experiments on MAPF benchmarks show that MAGIC reduces the executed sum of costs compared to existing approaches on 96.3% of instances, across several planner families and teams of up to 800 agents, demonstrating its applicability to large-scale MAPF problems.

Viraj Parimi, Shao-Hung Chan, Han Zhang +2

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 01239. · Symbotic Inc., Wilmington, MA 01887, USA

Multi-Agent Path Finding Path Planning Traversability Map Uncertainty Path

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

The Golden Path Hypothesis: Reusable Schedules in Diffusion Caching

Diffusion caching accelerates generation by replacing transformer computation with cached or predicted features at selected denoising steps. We introduce the Golden Path Hypothesis (GPH): under fixed inference conditions, prompt-independent cache schedules can achieve final-output quality comparable to the best prompt-specific schedules across prompts. We investigate the GPH across ten caching methods, four image and video models, and three cache ratios. Prompt-adaptive methods repeatedly select a small number of schedules, and reusing their most frequent schedules on new prompts closely matches the quality of prompt-specific choices. Exhaustive evaluation of 1.4 million schedules on four examples further identifies prompt-independent schedules that remain competitive on unseen prompts. To explain this transfer, we analyze denoising trajectories and the accumulation of caching errors. Latent-state trajectories exhibit similar structures across datasets and seeds, while an exact error decomposition shows that accumulated effects of earlier errors predict final latent-state error better than local approximation errors. This motivates searching for end-to-end schedules using final-output quality. With only a small set of examples, the resulting golden paths transfer across prompts and datasets, and can be tuned to the desired quality objective, including reconstruction fidelity or perceptual similarity.

Dong Wang, Wenwu Tang, Francesco Corti +3

Graz University of Technology, Austria · Swiss Data Science Center, Switzerland · ETH Zurich, Switzerland +1

Intermediate Latent States Reconstruction Fidelity Path Schedule Similarity and Metrics

Sep 30, 2026cs.RO

HiWE: Hierarchical World Knowledge Model with Visual Keypoint Enhancement for Zero-Shot 3D Path Planning

Robot demonstration generation requires a system to identify where an interaction should occur, plan a feasible motion, and execute the required contact. HiWE connects these decisions through a point-based interface between visual grounding and language-based planning. PointVLM is instruction-tuned to associate task-relevant objects with image coordinates using a mixture of point annotations, segmentation-derived samples, robot observations, and visual question answering data. Depth measurements lift these predictions into a semantic 3D representation. A language planner, 3DLLM, uses this representation to specify end-effector waypoints and gripper commands, while a hybrid grasping module resolves local grasp poses. The evaluation covers 14 simulated manipulation tasks and four physical-robot tasks, together with ablations of the visual training data, spatial inputs, and grasp selection. Here, zero-shot execution refers to deployment without task-specific demonstration training; the visual model uses existing robot data during fine-tuning. This paper describes the original point-based formulation of the framework; its relationship to the subsequent GeneralVLA extension is detailed in the introduction.

Guoqing Ma, Mingqi Yuan, Chen Gao +2

Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, CAS +2

World Models Keypoint Detection Planning Path

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

L1-MPPI: L1 Adaptive Model Predictive Path Integral for Agile UAV Control

This work proposes the L1 Adaptive Model Predictive Path Integral (L1-MPPI). It cascades L1 adaptive control with the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) to improve tracking of high-speed UAV trajectories. Thanks to the L1augmentation, the tracking remains accurate even under model uncertainties and external disturbances, such as an additional payload or a mismatch in the modeled aerodynamic drag. In contrast to existing MPPI approaches for UAV control that do not explicitly model aerodynamic effects, varying payloads, and typically neglect the dynamics of low-level motor controllers, our L1-MPPI approach enhances the dynamic model used in the MPPI by incorporating the low-level flight controller and motor dynamics, as well as an iterative mixing scheme that reflects the approach of the low-level controller. The proposed method demonstrates improved tracking performance in both simulation and the real world, even when the UAV is subjected to an unknown payload. In flight with 35% mass increase, our approach lowers the RMSE by 58.61% with respect to plain MPPI. Compared to the same MPPI using an online mass estimator in place of the L1 augmentation, the RMSE is lower by 38.59%. During the real-world experiments the UAV reaches speeds up to 13.50 m/s and accelerations up to 2.5 g.

Lukáš Kotek, Ondřej Procházka, Vojtěch Vonásek +2

Multi-robot Systems Group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

Model Predictive Path Integral Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Trajectories Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Path

Sep 29, 2026cs.DC

Purlin: Separating Orchestration from the Datapath of Collectives

Distributed inference depends on GPU collective communication that must keep pace with evolving hardware and specialized workloads. However, existing collective implementations often couple semantics, orchestration (where and when data moves), and the datapath (how data moves). This coupling makes it costly to adopt new hardware mechanisms and customize communication for applications. We present Purlin, a scale-up communication framework that separates these concerns. At the top of Purlin, we specify collectives as a naming of an input and output layout and a copy or reduction operation. In the middle, we introduce a shared orchestration protocol, Stage, Notify, And Consume (SNAC), which derives coordination from these specifications. Below SNAC sits a hardware-specific datapath we call Atom, which implements two key data movement primitives for collectives: copy and reduce. This separation lets us customize collectives and adopt new hardware mechanisms while reusing orchestration via SNAC. We evaluate Purlin on A100, H200, and B200 GPUs. Across seven collectives, Purlin achieves latency speedups of up to 5.14x and bandwidth improvements of up to 4.50x over baselines. Integrated into SGLang, Purlin improves offline LLM serving throughput and interactivity by 1.13x on average and up to 1.37x over baselines. For online LLM inference, Purlin improves interactivity by 1.26x on average and up to 2.85x, with the largest gain occurring under overload. For diffusion image generation, Purlin reduces end-to-end latency by up to 1.13x.

Osayamen Jonathan Aimuyo, Swapnil Gandhi, Christos Kozyrakis

Stanford University · NVIDIA & Stanford University

Cpu-Gpu Hybrid Designs Hardware Efficiency Orchestration Collective Behaviors Path

Sep 29, 2026cs.AI

Rethinking Reasoning Paths as Phase-Structured Trajectories

Large language models often improve problem-solving performance by generating multi-step reasoning paths, yet how to analyze the hidden states along these paths remains unclear. Existing approaches typically assign each intermediate state the final-answer correctness label and train probes across heterogeneous questions. We argue that this protocol obscures reasoning dynamics in two ways: (1) correctness prediction can exploit question-level variation rather than path quality, and (2) states aligned by absolute step indices may correspond to different functional phases of reasoning. In this work, we propose to view reasoning paths as phase-structured trajectories within fixed questions. We instantiate this view as PAIR, short for Phase-Aligned Intra-question Reasoning. PAIR samples multiple trajectories for each question, maps variable-length paths into shared relative phases based on normalized trajectory progress, and compares successful and unsuccessful trajectories only within the same question and phase. This yields phase-specific path-quality directions that better isolate path-quality signals from question-level variation. Empirically, we find that standard across-question correctness probes lose much of their predictive power under within-question evaluation, suggesting that these probes partly rely on question-level information. PAIR improves within-question trajectory ranking and Best-of-N trajectory selection across models and benchmarks. Phase-wise steering further shows that the learned directions can change generation outcomes, providing causal evidence that they capture trajectory-relevant information.

Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Sanchit Sinha +3

Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia

Reasoning Paths Problem Solving Capability Path

Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

GuardPIBT: Counterfactually Gated Neural Guidance for Ultra-Large-Scale 3D Multi-Agent Path Finding

Large-scale 3D multi-agent path finding becomes increasingly difficult under dense traffic. Priority Inheritance with Backtracking (PIBT) scales well, but its one-step goal-directed ordering may become insufficient under dense interactions and large-scale congestion. We present GuardPIBT, which augments rather than replaces the PIBT executor: neural predictions only propose residual reorderings of PIBT's native candidates, while final actions remain determined by PIBT. First, local graph attention models nearby interactions, while global source--goal transport features provide population-level coordination context for candidate reordering. Second, a counterfactual group gate filters reorderings whose closed-loop effects may degrade coordination. Third, for ultra-large populations, population-adaptive grouping preserves decision granularity, asynchronous cached inference amortizes neural computation, and selective repair resolves long-tail agents. PIBT retains validity checking, priority inheritance, and backtracking throughout. Experiments with up to 100,000 agents demonstrate reliable completion across 2D and 3D environments, including all three 100,000-agent warehouse runs with zero audited graph violations. The project website is available at {\color{magenta}\texttt{https://guardpibt.github.io/GuardPIBT/}}.

Yuan Zhou, Zhenyu Hou, Guangtong Xu +4

Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China. · Differential Robotics Technology Company, Hangzhou 311121, China. · Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University, Huzhou 313000, China. +3

Multi-Agent Path Finding Geometric Guidance Path Prioritization Falsehood

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Calibrated Uncertainty for Informative Path Planning in Aquatic Environmental Monitoring

Informative Path Planning for scalar field reconstruction uses predictive uncertainty to direct sensing vehicles toward maximally informative locations. Gaussian Processes provide this signal but their stationary isotropic kernels are misspecified for non-homogeneous phenomena such as oil spills, producing miscalibrated estimates that degrade planning. We investigate whether replacing the Gaussian Process with a well-calibrated Deep Ensemble improves path planning outcomes, and whether uncertainty quality interacts with the choice of planning algorithm. Five strategies (

ε

-Greedy, Value Greedy, Uncertainty Greedy, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and Receding Horizon Orienteering) share a common Deep Ensemble backbone trained on physics-based oil spill simulations. On held-out stochastic spill scenarios, the Deep Ensemble reduces normalised reconstruction error by

83\%

relative to the Gaussian Process baseline. Crucially, well-calibrated uncertainty amplifies the importance of the planning strategy: the performance gap between algorithms is negligible under miscalibrated models but becomes substantial under the ensemble, where multi-step lookahead planners outperform greedy selection by up to

32\%

in reconstruction error and achieve IoU above

0.85

. Monte Carlo Tree Search is the recommended planner, matching Orienteering in reconstruction quality at an order-of-magnitude lower computational cost.

Samuel Yanes Luis, Alejandro Casado Pérez, Alejandro Mendoza Barrionuevo +3

Department of Electronic Technology, University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain · Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

Calibrated Uncertainty Path Planning Gaussian Process Coral Spatiotemporal Fields Path+2

Sep 25, 2026cs.RO

DualManip: Agentic Dynamic Manipulation via Dual-Path Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Adaptation

Vision-language models (VLMs) enable open-vocabulary reasoning for robot manipulation, but their high inference latency limits responsiveness in dynamic scenes. Many scene changes, however, alter object geometry without invalidating task intent. We present DualManip, a dual-path framework that decouples infrequent semantic reasoning from responsive geometric adaptation. The semantic path decomposes the task and grounds task-relevant interactions, followed by a constraint-solving module for pose optimization. During execution, the geometric path continuously updates template-to-observation correspondences from live RGB-D observations via a shape-adaptive network. These correspondences transfer task-relevant grasp contacts across observations, enabling online grasp reconstruction under object motion and non-rigid deformation. The Information Interaction Module bridges the two paths by initializing task-relevant grasps from semantic grounding, validating geometric updates, and triggering semantic replanning upon update failures. Real-world evaluation spans six manipulation tasks covering non-rigid deformation, articulated reconfiguration, rigid motion, and high-precision assembly across three settings: static, single-change, and continuous dynamic. DualManip demonstrates superior manipulation robustness, particularly under continuous scene changes, while achieving geometric adaptation approximately 46

\times

faster than agentic verification and semantic replanning. Our project page: https://lichengxi1.github.io/Dualmanip.

Chengxi Li, Yan Di, Yingyue Li +3

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China · Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, China

Robotic Manipulation Robotic Grasping Agentic Path

Sep 23, 2026cs.RO

OA-MPPI: Occlusion-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral Control for UAV Flight

Autonomous UAV flight through cluttered and partially unknown environments requires reasoning not only about observed obstacles but also about occluded regions that the sensor cannot observe. We present OA-MPPI, an obstacle- and occlusion-aware extension of Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control for quadrotor flight that accounts for potential moving agents emerging from these regions into the vehicle's path. At every planning step, we extract a 3D occlusion boundary from the online occupancy map and use it to model the regions that hidden agents could reach over the prediction horizon. We penalize trajectories that enter these expanding regions within MPPI rollouts generated using nonlinear quadrotor dynamics and accounting for individual rotor thrust limits. We validate the proposed approach in simulation and hardware flight experiments, with the complete pipeline running onboard the vehicle in real time. Results show increased clearance from occlusion boundaries compared to baseline MPPI in both settings, as well as avoidance of an agent emerging from occlusion in simulation.

Vittorio Palladino, Teaya Yang, Ruiqi Zhang +1

High Performance Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States

Model Predictive Path Integral Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Obstacle Avoidance Dynamic Environments Path

Sep 17, 2026physics.comp-ph

Correlation-Free Transition Path Sampling through Shooting Point Generation Guided by Committor Learning

Studying the dynamical behavior of a system often depends on characterizing how it transitions between long-lived states. Because such transitions are rare, observing them usually requires specialized enhanced sampling techniques. Transition Path Sampling (TPS) is a well-established method for generating reactive trajectories, which is simple to implement and does not require the definition of a preconceived reaction coordinate. However, its efficiency is limited by its sequential nature and the resulting correlations between sampled paths. Previous work addressed this limitation by combining TPS with a sampling scheme based on conditioned Boltzmann Generators, a generative machine learning model capable of sampling a given target probability distribution. This approach produces uncorrelated transition paths but relies on an accurate reaction coordinate, which is rarely known in advance. Building on recent advances in committor learning, specifically on the Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Mechanism Discovery (AIMMD) method, in this work we introduce GenAIMMD, an iterative algorithm that actively and self-consistently learns the ideal reaction coordinate (the committor) and trains a conditioned Boltzmann Generator to sample from arbitrary bias windows along it. GenAIMMD thereby provides a correlation-free and fully parallelizable path sampling scheme that does not require prior knowledge of the system's transition mechanism. We apply GenAIMMD to a two-dimensional toy model and a higher-dimensional polymer system. In both cases, GenAIMMD succeeds in training the Boltzmann Generator and learning the committor. Benchmark results show a substantial increase in performance compared to standard TPS.

Maximilian Negedly, Sebastian Falkner, Alessandro Coretti +1

Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria · Vienna Doctoral School in Physics, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria · Institute of Physics, University of Augsburg, 86159 Augsburg, Germany

Boltzmann Distributions Reaction Polymer Property Prediction Path

Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

A Qualitative Model for Reasoning about Path and Support

Spatial reasoning abilities correlate strongly with performance in STEM fields. Games offer a compelling medium for training these critical skills in developing children who have a natural proclivity for play. However, to facilitate human-like tutoring and player guidance, these games require an AI agent capable of making commonsense inferences from spatial events. Qualitative reasoning (QR) models appear to be a suitable framework for these application domains. As these models reason in symbolic representations, they can seamlessly translate game states into interpretable feedback for human-like player guidance. This paper introduces a hybrid qualitative model designed for Camelot Jr., a block-puzzle game that requires constructing multi-level bridges to connect two avatars stationed on separate towers. The game poses a challenge for the player, who must make platforms stable, plan their path, and ensure they use all the provided blocks. To handle the precise physics required by the domain, we integrate a mathematical center-of-mass stability logic to guide our qualitative solver. Our work facilitates spatial skill training in Camelot Jr. and contributes to the development of human-centric, explainable game-playing agents.

Abhishek Jaiswal, Zoe Falomir

Umeå University, Sweden

Spatial Reasoning Autonomous Agents Path

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Decoupling Physical Speed from Path Parameterization in Singularity-Free Guiding Vector Fields

The existing singularity-free guiding vector field (SF-GVF) with an additional virtual coordinate can eliminate singular points (i.e., points where the vector field vanishes) inherent in conventional GVFs and guarantee global convergence of robot trajectories to closed and self-intersecting desired paths. However, the desired speed given by the GVF along the desired path in the original lower-dimensional space cannot be arbitrarily specified but depends on path parameterizations. One possible workaround is to partially normalize the physical projection of the SF-GVF and assign a user-designed speed. However, we show that this workaround may introduce new singularities since the normalization denominator can become zero. To address this issue, we propose a new SF-GVF with prescribed physical speed (PPS). The integral curves of the new SF-GVF converge exponentially to the desired path from any initial condition in the higher-dimensional space (including virtual dimension); more importantly, the robot's physical speed converges to the PPS, while the path-error dynamics remain invariant under regular reparameterizations of the desired path. We further develop a saturated acceleration control law for second-order kinematic models. Finally, comparative simulations and 3D path-following experiments with a quadrotor under different PPS profiles validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Zhouru Xiao, Sha Luo, Yang Lu +5

School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha, China · College of Information Science and Engineering, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China · College of Systems Engineering and the State Key Laboratory of Digital Intelligent Modeling and Simulation, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China +2

Vector Fields Singularity Robust Trajectory Speeds Quadrotor Kinematics+2

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

Same Flow, Different Paths: Variance Reduction in Flow Matching

In flow matching (FM), a velocity model

v_θ

is trained using a predefined path

g_t

that connects data and noise samples (e.g.,

g_t(x_0, x_1) = (1 - t) x_0 + t x_1

). In this work, we study the choice of this path from an optimization perspective by analyzing the variance of stochastic gradients. We consider the class

G(p_t,v^\star_t)

of paths that induce the same marginal distributions

p_t

and marginal velocity field

v^\star_t

, and therefore the same FM objective. Our main finding is that the choice of path

g_t

can fundamentally change the convergence rate of SGD, even when the FM objective remains exactly the same. (i) For a linear velocity model and one-dimensional Gaussian data, we derive a tight bound on the SGD iteration complexity up to logarithmic factors and find an analytically optimal path that minimizes this bound among linear paths inducing the same FM problem. (ii) We then extend the variance analysis to general FM problems and formulate path selection at a fixed

θ

as the variance-minimization problem PathOpt

_θ

, constrained to

g_t\in G(p_t,v^\star_t)

. We show that this constraint is essential: reducing variance without it can lead to slower convergence. (iii) Since the constraint

g_t \in G(p_t,v^\star_t)

cannot generally be verified directly, we derive an equivalent formulation with constraints that can be estimated from samples, allowing paths to be found numerically. Our theoretical results are supported by experiments with Gaussian data, Gaussian mixture models, and real datasets.

Alexander Tyurin

AXXX, Moscow, Russia · Applied AI Institute, Moscow, Russia

Conditional Flow Matching Variance Reduction Stochastic Gradient Descent Variance Shortest Paths Path

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Global Path Planner with Multi-Model Switching

This work enhances global path planning via a pure-pursuit controller with multi-model kinematic switching that sustains plan fidelity across diverse terrains. The system includes a traversability graph for terrain analysis, a Heading-Aware A* algorithm for generating feasible paths, and a multi-model Pure Pursuit controller for dynamic tracking. A core innovation is adaptive kinematic modeling, enabling real-time switching between kinematic models based on terrain features and robot states. This adaptability optimizes path efficiency and energy use in challenging scenarios. We validate the approach in simulation on different platforms, namely the Artaban quadruped and the X3 quadrotor drone, showcasing improved performance, robustness, and adaptability over standard baselines.

Pietro Gori, Francesco Iotti, Eduard Zelenay +5

Centro di Ricerca “Enrico Piaggio” and the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Universit`a di Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino 1, 56126 Pisa, Italy · Institute of Robotics and Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Ilkovicova 3, 812 19 Bratislava, Slovakia · Panza Robotics, National Center of Robotics, Ilkovicova 3, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovakia +1

Path Planning Quadrotor Model Predictive Control Robot State Articulated Kinematics Path

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

A Hierarchical Coverage Path Planning Algorithm for Unknown Environments

This paper presents an online coverage path planning algorithm for unknown environments. During navigation, the initially unknown search area is progressively decomposed into disconnected subareas as new obstacle information is acquired and coverage proceeds. These subareas are organized in an incrementally constructed decomposition tree that preserves their hierarchical parent-child relationships. Based on this tree, a global coverage tour is maintained and updated online by prioritizing newly generated child subareas according to their exploration states and distances from the robot. A local planner then generates coverage motions within each selected subarea, allowing the robot to adapt its trajectory as the environment is gradually revealed. Its performance is evaluated via high-fidelity simulations in complex scenarios. The results show improved coverage efficiency in terms of path length and overlap ratio in comparison to three baseline algorithms.

Zongyuan Shen, Haodong Liu, Gao Wang +4

College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China. · School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China. · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.

Path Planning Dynamic Environments Obstacle Avoidance Path Robot Systems Environment

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

PATH: Continuous Target Sensing among Autonomous Cooperative Drones

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 0.047~~m and 0.030~~m, 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 16~~kB/s at 60~~Hz, demonstrating the feasibility of lightweight geometry-assisted target handoff on resource-constrained UAV platforms.

Heegyeong Kim, Alice James, Avishkar Seth +4

School of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia · School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Multi-Drone Coordination Handoff Path Detection Performance

Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

Modular Kinematic Reduction of Closed-Chain Mechanisms Using Path Assembly and Defect Homotopy

Closed kinematic chains complicate modular modeling by coupling active and passive coordinates through nonlinear closure constraints. This paper presents a Path-Assembled Closure Differential Mapping (PACDM) framework for modular closure resolution and kinematic reduction. Each closure element compares two ordered transformation paths with common endpoints, with their mismatch expressed through the logarithm on SE(3) and the corresponding Jacobian assembled from local transformation derivatives. Multi-path modules are constructed from a minimal set of pairwise closure elements, while rank-revealing analysis selects locally independent scalar constraints. A defect homotopy recovers closure-consistent passive coordinates from approximate estimates along a feasible and regular continuation path. At regular configurations, implicit differentiation yields the local active-to-passive differential mapping, which is subsequently used in a predictor-corrector continuation procedure for prescribed motion. The framework is evaluated on a seven-degree-of-freedom heavy-duty manipulator containing two-path and three-path closed-chain modules. Comparison with Simscape Multibody yields trajectory root-mean-square errors below 8.5 x 10^-10 rad, while predictor-corrector continuation is approximately 45.8 times faster than applying defect homotopy at every trajectory sample.

Mohammad Dastranj, Jouni Mattila

Unit of Automation Technology and Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Tampere University, 33720 Tampere, Finland

Kinematic Chain Kinematics Robotic Manipulator Path Persistent Homology Boundaries

Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

The Answer Path and the Grounding Instruction in LLM Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

A graph retrieval-augmented generation pipeline chooses which triples to put in the prompt, a syntax to write them in, an order to write them in, and a sentence telling the model what to do with them. We vary all four over six large language models and two knowledge-graph question answering benchmarks. Two of the four choices move the answer and the other two are flat. The first is whether the answer path, the triples needed to reach the answer, is in the prompt at all. Holding the number of triples fixed and replacing every triple that is not on the chain with material from an unrelated entity changes answer accuracy by +0.003 F1, while removing the chain costs most of what the graph was worth. Retrieval budget belongs on recall, and precision in the range we can test buys nothing. There is no retriever here: subgraphs come from gold SPARQL, so precision describes the context we build, not a system setting. The second is the grounding instruction. With no facts in the prompt, telling a model to answer using only the provided facts drops F1 from 0.299 to 0.035, a factor of 8.63. That figure describes an evaluation with an empty context arm rather than a working pipeline, and an experiment that applies the instruction to its context arm but not to its no-context baseline manufactures a spurious finding that graph context hurts at depth. We found one in our own results and retract it. Syntax, triple order and subgraph size produce no effect we can measure at multi-hop depth. The comparison that would price the grounding instruction against correct context is not measurable with a format-sensitive scorer, because the instruction determines the response format; we report it as an open contrast rather than a number.

Arquimedes Canedo

Siemens Digital Industries Software Princeton, NJ, USA

Knowledge Graphs Sparql Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines Graph Representations Grounding Path+1

Sep 8, 2026cs.RO

Agentic AI-enabled Semantic Commissioning of a Cognitive Digital Twin for Reconfigurable Manufacturing

Rapid bespoke commissioning of the Cognitive Digital Twin (CDT) is a major challenge in reconfigurable manufacturing. Traditional digital twin (DT) construction methods primarily focus on geometric reconstruction, often neglecting the deep semantic integration and functional interoperability necessary for autonomous reasoning. This paper proposes an agent-based, AI-driven workflow to automate end-to-end CDT debugging. The system utilises LangGraph as a multi-agent orchestration engine to achieve dual-path synthesis: the semantic path extracts technical specifications from unstructured documents using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), while the functional path autonomously discovers and binds to real-time industrial telemetry data using Model Context Protocol (MCP). Experimental validation in a robotic machining cell demonstrates that the system achieves a mean average accuracy (mAP) of 97.2% in perception and reduces the deployment cycle from several weeks to an average of 2 hours, marking a paradigm shift from manual scripting to autonomous orchestration.

Yangyang Liu, Xun Xu, Jan Polzer

Cognitive Digital Twins Digital Twins Industrial Automation Agentic Orchestration Path

Sep 8, 2026cs.LG

Online Signature Verification Using Augmented Path Signature and T-Mamba

Handwritten signature verification is vital for personal authentication across commercial and financial applications. Although deep learning methods are widely adopted for online signature verification (OSV), they often struggle with capturing highly discriminative features and modelling long-range dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that integrates the augmented path signature (APS) descriptor with the T-Mamba model. The APS descriptor first applies time and basepoint augmentations, then computes sliding-window path signatures. The path signature is a non-parametric feature map from rough path theory that effectively captures geometric structures and nonlinear inter-channel interactions. Inspired by the efficacy of state space models (SSMs) in sequence modelling, our T-Mamba model employs a hybrid design combining two temporal convolutional network (TCN) blocks with a time-scanning Mamba. This design enables the model to learn both local temporal patterns and global long-range dependencies, substantially improving verification accuracy. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art EERs on three public benchmark datasets (MCYT-100, SVC-2004 Task 2, DeepSignDB), validating its effectiveness and robustness, especially when the training data is limited. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/DLRL04/OSV-using-APS-and-T-Mamba.

Ruiling Li, Danyu Yang

College of Mathematics and Statistics, Chongqing University, China

Online Signature Verification Distributional Signatures Temporal Convolutional Networks Mamba Path

Sep 3, 2026cs.RO

Local Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance for an Omnicopter Platform

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly operate in cluttered environments where global planners such as RRT* are not directly deployable at control rates. This paper presents a real-time local planning and obstacle avoidance module for an omnidirectional multirotor (omnicopter) by extending the Dynamic Window Approach to six degrees of freedom (6D-DWA). Our method achieves real-time feasibility through (i) local-map voxelisation, (ii) a compact sphere-based approximation of the vehicle geometry, and (iii) adaptive velocity sampling in the 6D search space. To improve reactivity to unknown obstacles, we introduce a context-aware "Agile Mode" that adjusts scoring weights online to trade-off between goal progress, clearance, and heading/facing constraints during evasive manoeuvres. We evaluate our approach in simulation across computational stress tests, dense-waypoint path tracking, and static/unknown obstacle scenarios. Our planner runs consistently within a 0.2s control loop, tracks waypoint-dense global paths with < 0.1m average cross-track error and 13deg average heading error, and avoids collisions in static environments. For unknown obstacle avoidance, Agile Mode achieves 79.3% success for an off-centre obstacle and 41.4% for a centred obstacle, highlighting both the effectiveness of adaptive weighting and remaining limitations in highly constrained geometries.

Mikolaj Helinski, Spilios Theodoulis, Mahmoud Hamandi +3

Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands · Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Obstacle Avoidance Path Planning Path

Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models

Modern vision-language models (VLMs) can directly answer many image-grounded questions, yet they often struggle with complex queries requiring fine-grained visual details or external knowledge. To acquire this missing evidence, agentic VLMs invoke tools such as image cropping, image search, and text search. However, existing training paradigms primarily evaluate tool-use based on final answer correctness, leaving evidence acquisition and utilization insufficiently supervised. This leads to two critical shortcomings: (i) models frequently issue redundant or off-target tool calls that fail to gather necessary evidence, and (ii) even when appropriate tools are called, models often fail to extract the necessary information from the resulting observations. To address these limitations, we introduce the NTEP (Necessary Tool-Evidence Path), a novel annotation scheme that explicitly specifies the essential external evidence and corresponding tool calls for each query. Building upon this, we propose NTEP-R (NTEP Reward), a supervision mechanism ensuring that each tool invocation strictly advances the reasoning process toward the final solution. Specifically, our approach rewards the agent for aligning its pre-call intent with a necessary evidence-seeking goal, and for ensuring the information summarized from the post-call observation aligns with the necessary evidence. Furthermore, we introduce a non-repeated-goal regularizer to penalize redundant calls that revisit satisfied NTEP goals. Extensive evaluations on seven image-grounded benchmarks demonstrate that our 8B-parameter instantiation, NTEP-8B, significantly improves both search-oriented accuracy and tool-use efficiency within a unified three-tool framework. These results highlight the critical value of fine-grained tool-evidence path supervision for training robust agentic VLMs.

Xingming Long, Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang +7

MiLM Plus, Xiaomi Inc.3 · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences1 · Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University2

Recent Vision-Language Models Process-Level Supervision Call Path Regularization

Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

It's the Problem, Not the Path: Budget and Difficulty Confounds in LLM Reasoning Trajectories

Reasoning traces of large language models are widely read as containing "breakthrough" moments and early-legible fates. Both readings rest on measurements missing a counterfactual control at the level of the claim; we supply both controls. First, a restart-controlled truncation probe separates when a solution fits the continuation budget from when a prefix carries value that fresh computation cannot buy, comparing per-anchor continuation solve rates against from-scratch restart curves at matched total generated-token budget. Applied to 178 problem-model cells (89 MATH problems x two small open models, an outcome-blind but difficulty-targeted cohort), exactly 1 of 178 cells survives as prefix-limited; restart dose-response separates a compute-starved model from a capability-limited one; and wherever the matched budget lies inside the restart grid, continuing the model's own prefix beats restarting (9 of 9) -- predominantly compute compression rather than expanded reachability. Second, a pre-registered, difficulty-controlled test finds no detectable outcome information in early-window internal signals beyond a problem-difficulty baseline, and two generation-free analyses of public corpora show why this control is needed: a trace-blind difficulty proxy reaches AUROC 0.873 on 192K DeepSeek-R1 generations -- inside the published probe range -- and a closely matched reconstruction of the closest published early-window positive recovers a comparable pooled result (0.849) while within problem it is statistically indistinguishable from chance at all ten anchors (0.496 at t=4); a post-hoc within-targeted probe finds only a small average residual, concentrated in three low-failure problems. High pooled probe AUROCs cannot by themselves establish within-attempt information; a question-only baseline or within-problem evaluation is required.

Yigit Utku Bulut

Johannes Kepler University Linz

LLM Reasoning Strategies Reasoning Traces Token Budget Allocation Truncation Latent Confounders Path

Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

TraveL: Transformer-based Multi-view Path Distributional Representation Learning

Path representation learning (PRL) for road networks has received increasing research attention, due to various path-related applications. Existing works on PRL typically exploit the co-occurrence relationship among road segments and paths to learn a vector as the path representation, without exploring the varied traveler behaviors and the regional correlation on the path. In this work, we propose to learn distributional representations, which provide valuable information for use in path-related applications, by capturing the varied traveler behaviors as well as the various dependencies within regions of road segments. We propose a novel Transformer-based Multi-view Distributional Representation Learning (TraveL) framework to encode a path along with a travel starting time to a distributional representation, which can be used to decode possible samples of on-path traveler behavior. Moreover, by analyzing the regional correlation which reveals various road segment relationships, we propose a regional attention to encode these correlations in a path. Also, we explore the idea of Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test to compare the sampled traveler behavior against the collected ground truth to facilitate training. Experimental results show that the proposed TraveL model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, by 14.7% in Mean K-S distance for travel time distribution estimation, 16.7% in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for path similarity prediction, and 3.97% in MAE for destination prediction.

Fang He, Tao-yang Fu, Wang-chien Lee

The Pennsylvania State University

Transport Pathways Journey Path Distributional Information

Sep 2, 2026cs.RO

Following a Unique Path: A Fast Certifier Applied to Outlier-Robust Pose Registration

Certifiable methods have arisen as a means to guarantee global optimality of solutions to non-convex problems using convex semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. The most performant of these methods use a local solver to obtain the candidate solution, and then certify its optimality using efficient linear algebra techniques. However, for many problems of interest in robotics, this local-solve-then-certify approach is impeded by a form of degeneracy in the relaxation, leaving a costly optimization of the relaxation as the only recourse. In this paper, we introduce our Central-Path Certifier (CP-Cert), a certifiable method explicitly tailored to certify candidate optima to problems that exhibit this form of degeneracy. Using a candidate as a starting point, our approach seeks a nearby region of the feasible space -- known as the central path -- where a valid certificate can be readily obtained. The approach is kept efficient by exploiting indirect linear algebra techniques, problem sparsity, and parallelism. We apply CP-Cert to both matrix-weighted pose registration and pointcloud data association, whose novel SDP relaxation is of independent interest. On simulated examples, we explore the properties of this novel relaxation and show that CP-Cert is fast and scalable, achieving runtimes that are up to three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art direct solvers. Finally, we combine these contributions into a certifiable, outlier-robust pose-estimation pipeline, which we apply to real-world data.

Connor Holmes, Abhishek Goudar, Timothy D. Barfoot

University of Toronto Robotics Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Category-Level Object Pose Estimation Convex Relaxation Certification Point Clouds Path

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Numeracy in Large Language Models: Fundamental Limitations and Paths to Improvement

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks yet remain unreliable on elementary numerical tasks, including magnitude comparison, large-integer arithmetic, fractions, and scientific notation. This survey examines basic numerical understanding as a capability distinct from high-level mathematical reasoning. We propose the Numerical Grounding Framework (NGF), which decomposes numeracy into Representational Grounding (RG), mapping numeral forms to value, magnitude, and equivalent representations, and Procedural Grounding (PG), executing arithmetic operations in accordance with their mathematical definitions. Using NGF, we organize recent diagnostic benchmarks, failure modes, structural explanations, and mitigation strategies. We review evidence concerning tokenization, positional encoding, embedding geometry, and pretraining-data distribution. We also apply NGF in a coordinated evaluation of three frontier model families across Number Cookbook, NumericBench, and GSM-Symbolic, comparing atomic, contextual, and reasoning-assisted numeracy. Architectural interventions such as digit-aware tokenization and Abacus Embeddings can improve models trained from scratch but are generally unavailable to users of pretrained systems, for whom supervised fine-tuning, reasoning scaffolds, and external tools are more practical. We conclude with deployment recommendations and research directions for more reliable numerical behavior in foundation models.

Aoxin Ni

Department of Computer Science University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Mathematical Reasoning Benchmarks Fundamental Limits Improvement Tokenizer Path

Aug 13, 2026cs.CV

Paths: Prompt-aware Spatio-temporal Transformer with Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion for RGB-Event Video Person Re-Identification

RGB-Event Video Person Re-Identification (RE-VReID) aims to retrieve specific person across non-overlapping cameras with complementary RGB videos and event streams. However, existing methods often decouple spatial and temporal modeling, which limits their interaction. In addition, global-level RGB-Event fusion fails to fully exploit fine-grained discriminative cues. To address these issues, we propose Paths, a unified framework with spatio-temporal modeling and hierarchical multi-modal fusion for RE-VReID. Specifically, we first design a Memory-Augmented Backbone (MAB) to maintain modality-specific identity prototypes for stable intra-modal representation learning. Then, we propose a Prompt-aware Spatio-temporal Transformer (PST) to jointly model spatial and temporal cues within a unified Transformer. Finally, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion (HMF) to integrate RGB and event features at global and local levels. With these modules, our framework can learn robust and discriminative representations for RE-VReID. Extensive experiments on three public RE-VReID benchmarks including EvReID, MARS and iLIDS-VID, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/Reflection0427/Paths.

Yakun Huo, Yingquan Wang, Yangyang Liu +4

Dalian University of Technology Dalian, China

Re-Identification Rgbt Spatio-Temporal Transformers Visual Place Recognition Multimodal Fusion Memory-Augmented Framework+1

Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Unifying Generative Models with Path Integrals

We formulate generative modeling as a path integral in which flow-based, diffusion-based, variational, and adversarial models arise as different evaluation principles for a single master action. Its Martin-Siggia-Rose-Janssen-de~Dominicis (MSRJD) form separates free from interacting probability flows and opens them to diagrammatic perturbation theory. The expansion yields a one-loop correction to deterministic samplers at no stochastic-sampling cost, which we validate on solvable and nonlinear drifts, where it reduces a 53 % tree-level error to 1.6 %. Imperfect learned scores enter as insertions and yield a response-weighted score-matching objective, and symmetry-equivariant drift design becomes an operator expansion with EFT power counting.

Ramon Winterhalder

TIFLab, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano · and INFN, Sezione di Milano, Via Celoria 16, I-20133 Milano, Italy

Unified Path-Integral Update Generative Models Path

Aug 12, 2026cs.DC

Ready Cohorts: Bounding GPU Opportunity and Avoiding Host Round Trips in LLM-Agent Control

LLM-agent services repeatedly execute small deterministic transitions between model and tool calls: route an outcome, update state, and emit the next effect. We ask when this control path exposes enough concurrent work for GPU execution, and what changes when a GPU-computed route decision remains on device. We formalize the ready-cohort boundary using fixed-partition share F, exact offline share P*, local upper bound U, and online achieved share A. Under zero service time, unlimited capacity, and equal relative launch deadlines, a specialized dynamic program computes P* exactly. In a stationary Poisson replay of one pinned 851-session public trace panel, the primary condition at 100,000 target active sessions, K=256, and a 50 ms launch deadline gives F=30.19%, P*=43.00%, and U=45.85%. Exact packing recovers 81.83% of the opportunity lost at fixed window boundaries. The outcome-derived route key is a conditioning proxy, not proof of executable identity. A separate mechanism study keeps a GPU-computed binary decision on device instead of returning four bytes to the host and redispatching. Across four named GPU placements, the device-resident path is faster in all 36 configurations; within-placement row-median ratios range from 1.19x to 2.39x. Across both admissible mechanisms, all 14,557,440 tested batched invocations match a separately implemented host oracle. A fixed nested device graph that removes no host decision is slower in all 60 configurations across five placements. Together, the studies establish two measurable gates for GPU agent control: deadline-feasible cohort supply and observation placement. A joined finite online runtime is required to measure A, CPU displacement, and service-level benefit.

Josef Liyanjun Chen

Independent Researcher

Cpu-Gpu Hybrid Designs Cohort Path Relative Position

Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Chain-of-Thought Shows the Path to a Tree: Realizing Branching Complexity

Chain of Thought (CoT) lifts the expressive ceiling of bounded-depth Transformers, with characterizations tying the number of CoT steps to circuit complexity classes. What remains largely missing are concrete instantiations with explicit, depth-bounded constructions, and the traversal procedures such characterizations presuppose. We close this gap for branching complexity. We give CoT realizations of depth-first search (DFS) and of Dijkstra algorithm, the latter subsuming breadth-first search, by unique hard-attention decoders of at most two layers, and use them as a shared computational substrate: reusing the DFS decoder yields the Strahler number of an

n

-vertex tree in

2n-1

steps with four layers, and reusing the Dijkstra decoder yields its width in

n-1

steps with three. Since computing the Strahler number of a binary tree given as a term is \textsf{NC\textsuperscript{1}}-complete, and our constructions handle arbitrary

n

-ary trees without layer normalization or positional encodings, this is a non-trivial witness for the linear-step regime of the CoT hierarchy. Exploiting the classical bijection between ordered trees and Dyck paths, itself realized by our DFS construction, which emits the path as it traverses, we give independent constructions for both measures on the path representation.

Debanjan Dutta, Anish Chakrabarty, Swagatam Das

Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India · LTCI, Télécom Paris Palaiseau, France

Circuit Depth Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Directed Acyclic Graph Trees Lower Bounds Path

Aug 11, 2026cs.IR

ENTLORE: A Graph-Grounded Benchmark for Latent Organizational Reasoning in Enterprise Question Answering

Enterprise question answering is framed as retrieving internal documents and generating grounded answers. Routine enterprise records, however, are work by-products in which required organizational relations remain implicit across heterogeneous sources. Existing benchmarks provide realistic multi-source evidence, but often materialize a predefined answer path and therefore test the composition of stated facts rather than recovery of a target relation absent from the corpus. We call the latter capability latent organizational reasoning. We introduce ENTLORE, a graph-grounded benchmark construction framework that reconstructs an audited enterprise world from routine documents, authoritative organizational tables, and operational records. Versioned organizational conventions certify derived relations in a truth graph, enabling complete golden answers and proof certificates. The aligned anonymized release exposes only the document corpus while withholding private structure and target relations. ENTLORE contains 2,341 documents from three source types and 907 questions spanning explicit lookup, cross-source composition, and latent organizational reasoning, evaluated across 56 model and access configurations. Structuring the released world as an induced entity graph or navigable knowledge base gives the strongest deployable results. Yet supplying gold documents still leaves 30.4% of latent questions unanswered, versus 12.6% and 6.2% for explicit and compositional questions. Enterprise QA therefore depends not only on document recall, but also on whether implicit organizational relations become usable. The benchmark, data, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/scitix/entlore .

Akrin Zheng, Alexander Wu, Alaia Liu

Knowledge Graphs Human-Annotated Benchmark Question Efficient Latent Reasoning Path

Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

PATH: Next-Interval Prediction via Autoregressive Tree Hierarchy on Tabular Data

Interval prediction aims to achieve a target coverage level while producing intervals that are as short as possible. Many conformal regression pipelines first predict an uncertainty surrogate and then convert it into an interval through calibration or selection. This separation supports coverage calibration, but post hoc rules largely determine the final interval and do not fully use the learned output distribution. We observe that the resulting intervals have inherently hierarchical geometry: an interval can be recursively refined into nested subintervals, and binary trees naturally represent this structure. We formulate this hierarchy as next-interval prediction and propose PATH, which learns how probability mass flows from each interval to its next nested subintervals. PATH predicts a base leaf distribution and uses an autoregressive decoder to refine branch probabilities. Matching the distribution to the interval hierarchy aligns learning with extraction: PATH accumulates probability over adjacent output intervals and returns the shortest contiguous range reaching a selected mass. We compare PATH with 24 baselines for interval prediction on PATHBench, comprising 56 OpenML regression datasets. PATH substantially shortens the resulting intervals, achieving the lowest mean normalized length, 0.1473, while maintaining mean coverage of 0.9144. These results establish hierarchical output modeling as an effective approach for compact interval prediction on tabular data. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/pxcai/PATH.

Pengxiang Cai, Wanchen Lian, Chenyang Liu +4

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Ant Group

Online Conformal Prediction Tabular Data Path

Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

SCOPE: Field-of-View-Aware Path Planning in Unknown 3D Environments via Safety-Volume Certification

Safe navigation with a body-mounted limited-field-of-view sensor requires the complete robot-inflated volume of an intended motion to be observed and verified free before execution. We formulate this requirement as online safety-volume certification in an unknown voxel map and construct a certified graph whose vertices correspond exactly to positions with fully known-free safety volumes. Based on this representation, we propose SCOPE (Safety Certification through Observation Planning and Execution), a planning framework that decouples optimistic goal-directed guidance from certified execution. SCOPE converts the first uncertified point along an optimistic route into an explicit observation obligation, resolves it through target-centric viewpoint search, and recursively clears intermediate obligations when useful viewpoints are not yet certified-reachable. A certified preview mechanism and an observation-aware trajectory optimization backend enable smooth execution. We prove conditional complete planning: under ideal monotone sensing and exhaustive finite-domain graph search, SCOPE reaches the goal whenever a finite feasible sequence of certified sensing actions exists within its planning primitives. Across 60 randomized tasks in three unknown 3D environments, SCOPE reaches every goal while maintaining near-zero entry into non-certified inflated space. Preview reduces mean mission time by 27%, and real-robot demonstrations in two representative scenarios validate the complete system.

Junbin Yuan, Muqing Cao, Yunwoo Lee +2

Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA · Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602 USA

Path Planning 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction Path

Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

PromptPath: Prompt-Adaptive Computational Pathways for In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) has attracted increasing attention for enabling models to perform new tasks using only a few ``input--output'' prompt examples. However, existing approaches suffer from \textbf{shallow task adaptation}, where prompts are primarily used as contextual cues to implicitly infer task intent through semantic representations, while the underlying computational process remains unchanged. This limitation restricts task-specific adaptation and compromises inference interpretability. We argue that prompts should not only condition feature representations but also dynamically regulate the model's computation pathways. To this end, we propose \textbf{PromptPath}, an adaptive ICL framework that enables computation-level adaptation through prompt-conditioned dynamic pathways. Specifically, PromptPath introduces a prompt-driven routing mechanism to selectively activate and compose lightweight low-rank experts, forming task-specific computational pathways tailored to different prompts. By integrating prompt information directly into the inference process, PromptPath dynamically reconfigures model computation to enhance task specialization and interpretability. Extensive experiments on 3D point cloud and 2D visual recognition benchmarks demonstrate that PromptPath consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ICL baselines while exhibiting strong cross-domain and cross-task generalization.

Hangrui Zhang, Feifei Shao, Yawei Luo +6

Zhejiang University, China · University of Nevada, Reno, USA · Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology, China

In-Context Learning Multiple Prompt Learning Frameworks Efficient Task Adaptation Contextual Cues Path

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Homotopy-Aware Corridor Generation without Predefined Reference Paths

Generating safe corridors is essential for collision-free robotic motion planning, yet most existing methods rely on predefined reference paths, which bias corridor geometry and implicitly limit the homotopy classes that can be explored. We propose a reference-path-free corridor generation framework on graphs of convex sets (GCS) that constructs corridors directly as sequences of convex sets, allowing corridor structure to emerge from the free-space representation rather than from a guiding path. To reason about similarity among corridors, we extend visibility-based deformation from paths to convex-set sequences, enabling the fusion of topologically redundant corridors while preserving distinct alternatives. To overcome the limited adaptability of existing GCS methods based on static global decompositions, we further develop an adaptive multi-scale GCS, in which a sampling-based fine-scale graph supports localized updates and a visibility-based coarse-scale graph enables compact global exploration. The two levels maintain topological consistency, allowing incremental updates without full graph reconstruction under environmental uncertainty. Numerical experiments characterize GCS construction, corridor generation, homotopy-aware exploration, and local updates, showing efficient graph construction, stable trajectory-level performance, and shorter-duration homotopy-aware trajectories than existing baselines. Hardware experiments on ground and aerial robots, including deployment with onboard localization, further validate the framework under translated and previously unknown obstacles.

Haoze Dong, Minghan Li, Meng Guo +1

School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Collision-Free Trajectories Convex Sets Path Aerial Robots

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

PathView-Bench: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Achieve Fine-grained Multiscale Understanding of Pathology Images?

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to analyze pathology images. However, dominant multimodal benchmarks in pathology mainly score final diagnostic answers, captions, or reports. These evaluations provide limited insight into whether a model understands the multiscale visual content needed for pathology reasoning and decision-making. We introduce PathVU, a vision-anchored benchmark for fine-grained and multiscale visual understanding in computational pathology. Built from 23 public pathology imaging datasets with human-supervised labels and spatial annotations, PathVU evaluates MLLM understanding in two fields of view: Region FOV for high-resolution local regions and Slide FOV for macro whole-slide views. By converting raw annotations into deterministic task targets, PathVU enables programmatic scoring of region localization, visual recognition, quantity estimation, spatial reasoning, and insufficient-context judgment. The benchmark contains 14 VQA-style tasks, 61,673 images, and 308,070 samples across 28 organs and 7,253,526 annotations. Evaluating 18 representative general-purpose, medical-domain, and pathology-oriented MLLMs, we observe substantial limitations even in advanced models on fine-grained visual tasks across multiscale pathology images. PathVU provides a reproducible basis for developing and evaluating pathology MLLMs with explicit multiscale visual understanding.

Zongyi Chen, Yu Liang, Jie Lin +1

National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University · Institute of Artificial Intelligence Xiamen University, Xiamen, China · Department of Computer Science School of Informatics Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

Multimodal Benchmarks Multimodal Clinical Data Multimodal Large Language Models Fine-Grained Perception Path

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

PathScale-R1: Cross-scale Reasoning for Pathological Image Analysis

Pathological diagnosis is inherently multi-scale, requiring the integration of global tissue architecture at low magnification with cellular morphology at higher magnification. However, existing pathology benchmarks and vision-language models (VLMs) are still largely developed under single-scale settings, limiting their ability to learn clinically meaningful multi-magnification reasoning. Moreover, naively constructed visual question answering (VQA) tasks may be susceptible to text-only or superficial visual shortcuts, leading to unreliable assessments of visual understanding. To address these limitations, we introduce a benchmark and training framework for shortcut-resistant cross-scale pathology reasoning. We design an Adversarial Text-only Screening strategy for semantic reasoning questions and a Structure-controlled Distractor Sampling strategy for visual grounding questions, encouraging models to rely on cross-scale visual evidence. Based on this pipeline, we construct PathScale-VQA, a high-quality cross-scale pathology VQA benchmark with 10,373 multiple-choice questions grounded in 1,368 diagnostic paths across multiple magnification levels. Building on the semantic reasoning set, PathScale-R1 is optimized through Difficulty-driven Reasoning Distillation supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning with a Scale-aware Reasoning Structure reward, which encourages the use of evidence across magnifications. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of PathScale-R1 on cross-scale reasoning tasks and effective transfer to conventional single-scale pathology VQA. Our code is available at https://github.com/iMVR-PL/PathScale-R1.

Chi Phan, Tianyi Zhang, Yufeng Wu +7

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117417 · Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117417, Singapore · Department of Pathology, Fujian Medical University Cancer Hospital & Fujian Cancer Hospital, Fuzhou, China +1

Digital Pathology Visual Evidence Path

Jul 25, 2026eess.AS

PathRIR: Physics-Guided Acoustic Path Selection and Late-Tail Compensation for Fast Room Impulse Response Simulation

Image-source-method (ISM)-based room impulse response (RIR) simulation is a useful and physically interpretable tool for acoustic scene modeling, but full-order ISM becomes computationally expensive as the reflection order and room complexity increase. We propose a physics-guided framework for fast RIR simulation that preserves the geometric structure of ISM while learning to retain only acoustically important image-source paths during online traversal. To recover energy removed by pruning, the proposed PathRIR uses a lightweight compensation multilayer perceptron to predict the missing late-tail energy envelope and generate a compensation tail whose energy follows that envelope. Experiments on irregular 3D rooms show that PathRIR reduces image-source computation and improves runtime efficiency over a full-order ISM simulator, while achieving low waveform- and decay-related errors. Ablation results show that adding the compensation tail improves waveform fidelity and reduces energy-decay-curve error, reverberation-time error, and direct-to-reverberant-ratio error, with modest runtime overhead.

Shaoheng Xu, Chunyi Sun, Jihui Zhang +3

The Australian National University, Australia · The University of Queensland, Australia

Impulse Response Reverberation Acoustic Path

Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Do Pathology Vision-Language Models Truly See Pathology?

Pathology vision-language models (VLMs) have recently progressed rapidly and are commonly evaluated by answer accuracy on pathology VQA benchmarks. However, we dig into current evaluations and identify three overlooked issues: 1) Visual evidence is not always necessary. For instance, Gemini-3-Pro achieves 53.5% average accuracy across 5 VQA benchmarks without any visual input. 2) Domain training can improve accuracy without proportional gains in visual binding. Compared with Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Patho-R1-7B exhibits a 5.8-point lower multimodal gain and a 3.7-point lower attention IoU. 3) Entity-level attention is diffuse and weakly query-specific. On PathVG, attention maps remain highly correlated across different entity queries. These issues can lead to substantial misjudgments of pathology VLMs' actual multimodal capabilities. To this end, we present PathBind, a benchmark comprising 2,600 samples: PathBind-VQA with 1,500 questions across six dimensions, PathBind-PTA with 600 questions from a private pathology teaching atlas, and PathBind-Grounding with 500 expert-curated region-level samples. Each component undergoes task-specific automated filtering and expert review to reduce textual shortcuts and improve entity-region correspondence. We evaluate 18 representative VLMs on VQA samples of PathBind and five existing pathology VQA benchmarks, and further evaluate 10 VLMs on PathBind-Grounding and PathVG. Results show that current pathology VLMs still exhibit a substantial gap between answer-side performance and visual-semantic binding.

Chengyang Zhang, Wenchuan Zhang, Bo Li +10

College of Computer Science, Sichuan University · Department of Pathology and Institute of Clinical Pathology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University · Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore +2

Medical Vision-Language Models Pathology Foundation Models Visual Question Answering Benchmarks Multimodal Clinical Data Path

Jul 19, 2026cs.AI

Constrained Path Reasoning: Measuring When Committed Stages Earn Their Cost

When does a committed intermediate stage in an LLM reasoning pipeline earn its cost? Constrained Path Reasoning (CPR) pairs a source-aware path hypothesis with stage-level accounting. Search generates provisional states; trusted or validated invariants can constrain hard, while other proposals remain soft and revisable. CPR predicts that task-compatible commitments can factor transitions, concentrate candidate mass, induce regularity, and expose feedback when their gains exceed propagated error and execution cost. The formalism covers discrete commitments and continuous flows and measures effective branching, endpoint concentration, and cost per usable output. Across 1,180 generated QCQPs and 40 engineered degenerate polynomial instances (2,140 endpoints), residual triage recovers 63.0% of repair-all's additional feasible yield with 17.7% of its attempts. Fixed-LLM accounting (270 unique calls shared across nested arms) finds usable yield of 41.1% direct, 90.0% after formalization and deterministic execution, 20.0% after one-shot convexification, and 21.1% for the full path. In 120 paired-condition calls, a two-action rollback rule reaches 90% usable yield versus 36.7% for the feedback-conditioned selector. Two endpoint probes separate source from validation: a 72-output cross-trajectory transplant reduces entropy and acceptable mass; a 24-output same-call self-proposal pilot gives unchanged two-repeat collision entropy, 25.0% versus 8.3% usable yield, and 1/8 deterministically confirmed endpoint checks. Model-generated states supply hypotheses; trusted execution earns constraint strength.

Honglin Li

ShanghaiTech University

Reasoning Paths Constraint Satisfaction Inference Cost Commits Rollback Path

Jul 19, 2026cs.CV

Searching for Task-Specific Vision Paths: Evolutionary Block Pruning Across Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models normally execute the same complete vision encoder for every question, even when OCR, counting, object, attribute, and spatial queries may not require identical computation. We study whether fixed-budget combinations of vision blocks can be skipped without fine-tuning. A shared K-block route skips one searched set of exactly K blocks for every question, while a capability-specific K-block policy selects one same-size route using a known capability label. We introduce a source-balanced evolutionary search and compare it with independent ranking, contiguous removal, and random routes at matched budgets. Experiments use Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct, and an 876-example image-disjoint selection split. Search transfers across architectures: on SmolVLM2, the searched shared four-block route beats independent construction by 4.91 percentage points. Capability specialization is less stable. On Qwen, the six-block capability policy beats the shared route by 2.17 points, driven by a 7.10-point OCR gain. On sealed IIIT5K, however, the SmolVLM2 OCR-specific route trails its shared route by 13.6 points. Combinatorial search reliably improves route construction, but capability labels do not define universally transferable vision pathways.

Tarun Tomar

Recent Vision-Language Models Encoders Path Evolutionary Optimization Methods

Jul 18, 2026cs.RO

An Indoor Navigation System for the Visually Impaired based on UWB Positioning and D* Lite Path Planning Algorithm

This paper proposes an indoor navigation system for the visually impaired, leveraging Ultra-Wideband (UWB) positioning technology and the DLite path planning algorithm. The system utilizes UWB sensors to provide precision localization in GPS-denied environments. The D Lite algorithm is integrated to optimize travel trajectories and ensure rapid route re-planning in the presence of dynamic obstacles. Experimental results demonstrate that the system operates reliably with low latency, providing safety and flexibility for users in complex indoor spaces.

Thanh C. Vo, Dong LT. Tran, Huy HM. Le +4

Viện Công nghệ Kỹ thuật Hàng không Vũ trụ, Đại học Duy Tân, Đà Nẵng

Autonomous Navigation Path Planning Global Navigation Satellite System Path

Jul 14, 2026cs.CV

Differentiable Polarized Path Tracing

Physically based differentiable rendering has proven to be a powerful tool for inverse rendering problems (e.g., 3D reconstruction, reflectance estimation, lighting estimation). However, most existing methods operate solely on radiometric intensity, discarding valuable polarization cues that constrain scene geometry and material properties. While forward simulation of polarized light is well-defined via Mueller-Stokes calculus, extending reverse-mode differentiation to this domain presents significant challenges. The rank-deficient nature of common polarimetric operators, such as linear polarizers and diffuse reflections, violates the invertibility assumptions of standard gradient estimators like path replay backpropagation and results in numerical instability. We address this by proposing a robust, polarization-aware differentiable path tracing method. Our approach estimates unbiased gradients through a combination of path replay and local caching. This formulation enables efficient and stable optimization of material and lighting parameters in complex scenes, broadening the applicability of physically based inverse rendering. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/DPPT/

Pramod Rao, Jérémy Riviere, Xilong Zhou +6

Max Planck Institute for Informatics · Saarland Informatics Campus · VIA Research Center +1

Inverse Rendering Path

Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

path_boost: A Python Package for Interpretable Graph-Level Prediction using Path-Based Gradient Boosting

We present path_boost, a Python package for interpretable supervised learning on graph-structured input data. The package implements PathBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm that automatically discovers predictive labeled paths within graphs during the learning process. Unlike graph neural networks, which are generally difficult to interpret, PathBoost produces an additive prediction model over path-based features that explicitly reveals which substructures drive predictions. To avoid an exhaustive enumeration of all possible paths, the algorithm iteratively selects and extends paths during learning based on their predictive power, using boosting to combine weak learners into a strong ensemble. The package supports both regression and binary classification. Key features include compatibility with scikit-learn workflows, support for custom base learners and selectors, automatic starting node selection, parallel training across anchor nodes, and built-in variable importance computation. We demonstrate PathBoost on molecular property prediction of transition metal compounds, where atoms serve as nodes and bonds as edges, and further benchmark PathBoost against an established graph neural network and a graph kernel method across six molecular datasets. The package is available on PyPI and GitHub under an open-source license.

Claudio Meggio, Johan Pensar, Riccardo De Bin

Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Oslo, 0371, Oslo, Norway.

Graph Representation Learning Graph Neural Networks Gradient Boosted Decision Tree Molecular Property Prediction Path Gradient

Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

RLVP: Penalize the Path, Reward the Outcome

Agents acting on our behalf in the real world (e.g. placing phone calls) must learn online from costly, often irreversible interactions rather than cheap simulator steps. Two things follow. First, deployability depends on the path, not only the outcome. An agent must respect outcome-neutral constraints such as not repeatedly calling an unresponsive user, respecting business hours, or completing required authentication constraints that outcome-based rewards cannot express, since violating them frequently improves apparent success. Second, because each interaction is expensive, the agent must learn efficiently from very few examples. Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is blind to both challenges: it optimizes solely on the outcome and wastes expensive rollouts on all-fail groups where group-relative advantage collapses to zero. Attempts to densify supervision by rewarding progress target the hard-to-verify direction. In contrast, real agentic environments can cheaply detect bad moves. Since group-relative advantage is equivalent to within-group variance, a dense signal helps only when it supplies variance the outcome lacks. A verifiable penalty on the path meets this condition reliably, while a progress potential helps only where partial progress is reachable. The resulting recipe "penalize the path, reward the outcome" achieves high task success with near-zero violations, where outcome-only training violates constraints on nearly every episode. We provide four design rules for effective penalties, including avoidance of the inaction trap that arises when a penalty is used in isolation.

Bojie Li, Noah Shi

Pine AI · University of Washington

Reward Signal Penalties Agentic Control Path

Jul 8, 2026cs.AI

From Patterns to Maze Structures: SMT-Based Path Synthesis and 2D/3D Construction

We present a pipeline for constructing maze structures from input patterns such as text or shapes. The central path-synthesis problem is encoded in Satisfiability Modulo Theories as global constraints on adjacency, continuity, and pattern-constrained coverage, allowing each fixed-bound instance to be solved in one call. The resulting path is either a planar, self-avoiding route or a layered traversal with prescribed over--under crossings, and it serves as a scaffold for constructing planar mazes and three-dimensional realizations of woven mazes. This report extends the published Bridges 2026 conference paper with more representative SMT-LIB examples and a fuller account of how synthesized paths become concrete maze constructions in planar and three-dimensional form.

Shengyi Wang

Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute, China

Maze Task Satisfiability Pathways Invariant Synthesis Path Planning Synthesis+1

Jul 8, 2026eess.SY

Residual-Conservative Model Predictive Path Integral Control

Sampling-based model predictive control methods handle nonlinear dynamics and complex cost landscapes through Monte Carlo rollouts, yet typically employ fixed constraint penalties that do not adapt to model-plant mismatch. This paper proposes Residual-Conservative Model Predictive Path Integral Control (RC-MPPI), a sampling-based MPC framework that modulates safety conservatism online using the prediction-execution residual. RC-MPPI combines three coupled mechanisms: residual-dependent constraint tightening, adaptive safety-cost shaping, and residual-adaptive sampling modulation through exploration contraction and temperature relaxation. The temperature adaptation reflects a key insight: when the model is inaccurate, rollout cost evaluations become unreliable, and increasing temperature reduces overcommitment to apparent cost rankings. Under Lipschitz dynamics and sub-Gaussian disturbances, we derive probabilistic bounds on constraint violation and show that the joint effect of the adaptive mechanisms reduces violation probability as the residual grows. A rollout-cost uncertainty analysis further shows that model-plant mismatch perturbs MPPI importance weights in proportion to residual magnitude and inversely with temperature, providing theoretical justification for residual-adaptive temperature relaxation. Simulations on an LTI point-mass system and a planar 2R manipulator show improved safety margin, success rate, and control efficiency compared with vanilla MPPI under significant model-plant mismatch.

Hyung-Jin Yoon, Hunmin Kim

Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN, USA

Model Predictive Path Integral Model Predictive Control Residual Policy Potential-Based Reward Shaping Path

Jul 2, 2026cs.RO

Path planning for unmanned naval surface vehicles

There nowadays is a myriad of approaches to real-time avoidance of fixed obstacles for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and, to a lesser extent, also the task of avoiding moving obstacles such as boats, ships, swimmers, and other USVs, but both topics still present challenges. This paper offers novel approaches to both of these problems. It uses a combination of a global path planner, which finds a path from a start point to a goal point that avoids fixed obstacles (given that their locations are known in advance), and a local path planner, which can circumnavigate a moving obstacle (as well as any previously unknown fixed obstacles). The global planner is novel in that it employs a combination of three path planners, one known in the literature as Grassfire, one that is a new modification of Grassfire, and one that is a new, and arguably more intuitive, version of the well-known Probabilistic Roadmap. The local planner is novel in that it employs a higher-level decision logic based on its observations regarding the direction of movement of the obstacle relative to the USVs global path. This logic enables the USV to determine the best strategy for avoiding the obstacle by systematically routing the vehicle behind the obstacle rather than running parallel to it until the opportunity to pass appears. Simulations are provided that validate these claims. For comparison with other systems, the simulations include an implementation of the well-known D* algorithm, and the discussion covers additional dynamic path planning systems, which, like D*, do not necessarily route the vehicle behind the moving obstacle.

Daniel G. Schwartz

Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA

Path Planning Obstacle Avoidance Collision Avoidance Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Path

Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

The Agentic Garden of Forking Paths

Empirical research rarely admits a unique analysis. Different analytical choices can lead to different conclusions from the same data, yet these hidden forking paths are difficult to observe. We show that AI agents capture much of the analytical variation among human researchers while making these paths explicit. Across four high-stakes domains, assigning different personas is sufficient for AI agents to report divergent, often opposing, conclusions from the same data and question, with findings systematically aligned with those beliefs. In a study in which 42 human research teams analyzed the same immigration dataset, AI agents reproduced 72% of the human ideological gap in reported effect estimates. Despite reaching opposing conclusions, it is difficult to identify clear issues in each analysis based on the final AI reports: 86% passed independent AI review and 78% passed majority human expert review. These findings suggest that the central challenge is often not flawed analyses, but selective exploration and reporting from a large space of methodologically defensible analyses. AI agents may amplify this longstanding problem by making such exploration inexpensive and scalable. To address this, we introduce the m-value (multiverse value), the probability that an analysis path would produce a claim at least as extreme as the reported one. We further introduce Agentic Bootstrap, which estimates the m-value by using AI agents to sample plausible analysis paths. Applied to the human immigration study, 13.5% of reported human analyses fell in the most extreme 5% of the analysis space (m<0.05). Scientific evidence should therefore be evaluated not only by a single reported analysis but also by its position within the distribution of analyses that could reasonably have been reported. Agentic Bootstrap makes this distribution observable and turns it into a criterion for scientific credibility.

Jiacheng Miao, Jonathan K Pritchard, James Zou

Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University · Department of Genetics, Stanford University · Department of Biology, Stanford University +2

Methodology Artificial Intelligence Agents Scientific Discovery Path

Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

RRT-Rope: A deterministic shortening approach for fast near-optimal path planning in large-scale uncluttered 3D environments

Many path planning algorithms have been introduced so far, but most are costly, in path cost and in processing time, in large-scale uncluttered 3D environments such as underground mining stopes explored by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithms are popular because of their probabilistic completeness and rapidity in finding a feasible path in single-query problems. Many of the algorithms (e.g. Informed RRT*, RRT#) developed to improve RRT need considerable time to converge in large environments. Shortcutting an RRT is an old idea that has been proven to outperform RRT variants. This paper introduces a new method, RRT-Rope, that aims at finding a near-optimal solution in a drastically shorter amount of time. The proposed approach benefits from fast computation of a feasible path with an altered version of RRT-connect, and post-processes it quickly with a deterministic shortcutting technique, taking advantage of intermediate nodes added to each branch of the tree. This paper presents simulations and statistics carried out to show the efficiency of RRT-Rope, which gives better results in terms of path cost and computation time than other popular RRT variations and shortening techniques in all our simulation environments, and is up to 70% faster than the next best algorithm in a representative stope.

Louis Petit, Alexis Lussier Desbiens

Createk Design Lab, University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, J1K 2R1, Canada

Path Planning Underground Mines Path Dynamic Rope Manipulation Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Shrink

Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

MOAR Planner: Multi-Objective and Adaptive Risk-Aware Path Planning for Infrastructure Inspection with a UAV

The problem of autonomous navigation for UAV inspection remains challenging as it requires effectively navigating in close proximity to obstacles, while accounting for dynamic risk factors such as weather conditions, communication reliability, and battery autonomy. This paper introduces the MOAR path planner which addresses the complexities of evolving risks during missions. It offers real-time trajectory adaptation while concurrently optimizing safety, time, and energy. The planner employs a risk-aware cost function that integrates pre-computed cost maps, the new concepts of damage and insertion costs, and an adaptive speed planning framework. With that, the optimal path is searched in a graph using a discrete representation of the state and action spaces. The method is evaluated through simulations and real-world flight tests. The results show the capability to generate real-time trajectories spanning a broad range of evaluation metrics: around 90% of the range occupied by popular algorithms. The proposed framework contributes by enabling UAVs to navigate more autonomously and reliably in critical missions.

Louis Petit, Alexis Lussier Desbiens

the Createk Design Lab, University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, J1K 2R1, Canada

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Trajectories Path Planning Autonomous Navigation Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Path+1

Jun 27, 2026cs.RO

A Unified Framework for Multi-Contact Path Planning in the Rolling Robot Systems

Rolling motion planning is challenging because rolling contact imposes nonholonomic constraints and the configuration evolves on a curved manifold. The problem becomes substantially harder in multi-contact settings, where multiple bodies roll without slip and the contact states are coupled. This paper presents a new framework for multi-contact path planning in spherical rolling robotics under no-slip constraints. We first derive a compact kinematic model for multi-sphere rolling using Montana's contact-coordinate formulation, where each contact is represented by a stacked five-state vector. Building on this model, we construct a Voronoi-based roadmap directly on the spherical contact manifold, incorporating spherical-cap obstacles and mutual-exclusion regions via on-manifold collision checking, and refine discrete graph paths using manifold-consistent log-exp smoothing. The resulting smoothed surface paths are then lifted to admissible multi-contact rolling motions through the derived Montana kinematics and validated via forward simulation. We further evaluate feasibility and path quality versus trajectory smoothness, Voronoi seed density, and computation time. The proposed framework provides a foundation for extending the method to non-spherical geometries, time-varying obstacle environments, and experimental validation on physical rolling robotic platforms.

Qing Yu, Mikhail Svinin, Seyed Amir Tafrishi

Geometric Mechanics and Mechatronics in Robotics (gm2R) Lab, School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Queen’s Buildings, The Parade, Cardiff, CF24 3AA · Information Science and Engineering Department, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan

Motion Planning Rigid-Body Dynamics Path Unified Framework

Jun 26, 2026cs.RO

Drifting in the Future: Stabilizing Path Following Drifting on High-Latency Vehicle Systems

Autonomously controlling and handling a vehicle at and beyond its stability limit is a mathematically and computationally demanding task. Prior demonstrations of automated drifting have been limited to research platforms with instantaneous torque delivery and independently actuated wheels, leaving their applicability to production vehicles with actuator latencies and mechanically coupled axles uncertain. To overcome these issues, we design a predictor to compensate for powertrain delays, develop a revised control formulation to accommodate higher actuation latencies as well as a differential coupling on the driven axle, and introduce brake-based velocity stabilization. This paper presents the controller framework, the model extensions, and real-world experimental results. We observe that our controller enables a production sports car with a combustion engine to robustly sustain circular and figure-eight drifts, limiting lateral error to 1.1 m and sideslip overshoot to 0.06 rad despite actuator delays exceeding 250 ms, while mitigating oscillations and maintaining stable path and sideslip tracking. In conclusion, our results establish that autonomous drifting is feasible on production-ready vehicles, opening pathways to advanced safety systems capable of stabilizing cars in scenarios where traditional control fails.

Frederik Werner, Till Heintzenberg, Markus Lienkamp +1

Professorship of Autonomous Vehicle Systems, TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany; Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)

Vehicle Dynamics Emergency Braking Intensity Prediction Slipsense Path

Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

OmniPath: A Multi-Modal Agentic Framework for Auditing Wheelchair Accessibility

For a wheelchair user, a standard blue line on a map is often a broken promise. While platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM) successfully capture where a path is, they frequently fail to convey how it physically feels to travel on it. This information barrier is problematic for wheelchair users. To solve this issue, we present OmniPath, a system that moves from passive mapping to proactive environmental auditing. Our framework fuses the network topology of OSM with the submeter precision of high-density aerial LiDAR (USGS 3DEP) to create a high-fidelity 3D model of the pedestrian environment. Rather than simply routing a user, our agent virtually traverses the network, analyzing the surface in 0.5 meter increments. It rigorously quantifies physical friction points specifically running slope, cross slope, and vertical discontinuities against ADA compliance standards, calculating a weighted severity score to categorize hazards from Mild'' to Critical.'' To ensure real world reliability, we validated the system against 200 physical ground truth field surveys across the National Mall using stratified random sampling. The framework demonstrated strong diagnostic reliability for high-severity hazards, achieving F1-scores of 0.60 for Severe and 0.58 for critical categories. By automating this micro-scale inspection, OmniPath identifies the ``invisible'' barriers that standard maps miss, effectively transforming a static dataset into accessibility data source that anticipates accessibility challenges before the user ever leaves home.

ASM Mobarak Hossain, Nadim Mahmud, Vaskar Raychoudhury +1

Causal AI Lab, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA · Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA

Autonomous Powered Wheelchair Accessibility Traversability Lane-Level Map Generation Path Passive+1

Jun 22, 2026cs.SE

DeepDiscovery: A Location-Inference Framework for Task-Level Repository Understanding

Large language models have shown strong performance on software engineering (SE) tasks, yet understanding large industrial repositories remains challenging. Existing methods often retrieve only local fragments and fail to recover the broader task-relevant context needed for complex repository-level tasks. We present DeepDiscovery, a task-level repository-understanding method for large industrial codebases. DeepDiscovery uses a two-stage \textit{Location--Inference} framework to localize high-confidence task anchors and recover broader task-relevant context over multi-relational repository structure under budget constraints. Across controlled method-level evaluation, organization-internal industrial repository-understanding scenarios, and end-to-end evaluation on SWE-bench Verified, DeepDiscovery consistently improves task-relevant file recovery and downstream SE performance. On 27 medium-scale tasks, DeepDiscovery achieves the best file recovery quality among five representative baselines without offline preprocessing. On organization-internal industrial tasks from a production-scale integrated codebase ecosystem, including 27 medium-scale tasks and 40 large-scale tasks, DeepDiscovery improves Full Recall Rate across multiple AI coding systems, with absolute gains ranging from 1.6 to 9.2 percentage points on large subprojects and from 2.5 to 7.4 percentage points on medium-scale subprojects. In a controlled end-to-end evaluation on SWE-bench Verified, a system equipped with DeepDiscovery achieves a 78.6% Solve Rate, outperforming the corresponding baseline by 8.2 percentage points. These results suggest that stronger task-level repository understanding can improve coding-agent performance on complex SE tasks.

Jiawei He, Weisong Sun, Mengyu Shi +4

AMAP, Alibaba Group · Nanyang Technological University · Nanjing University +1

Codebases Model Discovery Discovery Precision Recall Path

Jun 22, 2026cs.CL

When Confidence Takes the Wrong Path: Diagnosing Retrieval-State Lock-In in RAG

The trustworthiness of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system depends on more than the answer it returns, yet many black-box uncertainty methods still read agreement among sampled answers as confidence. That inference fails when repeated samples condition on the same defective retrieval state. The state may be empty, with the model falling back on parametric memory, or populated by a coherent but wrong neighbourhood. In either case, the answers agree because the error is stable. The problem is recognised in deployed RAG, but it has lacked a name, a measurable signature, and a prevalence bound. We supply all three. We name the failure retrieval-state lock-in and diagnose it by separating the three objects a single confidence score conflates: the answer surface, the retrieved evidence, and the retrieval state itself. In an inspectable, ontology-guided knowledge-graph RAG (KG-RAG) system across six question-answering snapshots, we measure the agreement blind spot directly: at five samples per question, 42% of KG-RAG errors and 59% of dense-retrieval errors carry zero answer dispersion, so agreement has nothing to rank, while evidence- and retrieval-state checks still flag most of them. The decomposition supports an auditable decision rule: accepting an answer only when answer, evidence, and retrieval checks all agree that it is low-risk reaches 91.9% pooled precision against a 69.7% accept-all rate. The cost is coverage: it certifies only 7.7% of answers as low-risk. On the clinical calibration domain it reaches 100% precision under an automated judge; this is an in-domain automated-label upper bound, not a clinical safety claim, and still needs human validation. Confidence in RAG is object-specific: when answers agree, the useful question is which part of the pipeline to distrust.

Sahib Julka

LMU University Hospital, LMU Munich · Marchioninistr. 15, 81377 Munich

Lock-In Correct Knowledge Graphs Path

Jun 18, 2026cs.LG

Understanding Latent Flow Models for Tabular Data Synthesis: Targets, Paths, and Sampling

Synthetic tabular data enables microdata sharing in regulated domains, yet deploying continuous-time generative models requires balancing analytical utility, disclosure risk, and computational cost. Latent-space flow models are flexible, but theoretical equivalences across learning targets, probability paths, and sampling dynamics can translate into different behaviour under finite-step integration and explicit compute budgets. We present an empirical study of tabular latent flow models across seven datasets, evaluating velocity, score, noise, and posterior matching objectives under optimal transport (OT) and variance-preserving (VP) paths, ODE and SDE sampling, and varying integration budgets. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we show that the learning target largely determines the utility-risk operating regime, with velocity and posterior matching tending to yield higher utility, while score and noise matching tend to achieve lower disclosure risk; (2) we demonstrate that configuration and sampling choices shift performance, with midpoint often improving distributional fidelity and OT paths often tolerating earlier stopping than VP, enabling compute savings under fixed budgets or risk thresholds; and (3) we distil these findings into actionable defaults and practical configuration guidance to support pre-release model selection under disclosure risk and resource constraints. The code implementation and supplementary materials can be accessed in https://github.com/rulnasution/tabular-latent-flow/.

Bahrul Ilmi Nasution

Department of Social Statistics, The University of Manchester, UK

Synthetic Tabular Data Latent Flow Tabular Data Distributional Fidelity Disclosures Token Budget Allocation+2

Jun 17, 2026stat.ML

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits. The present paper studies that object. KPP indexes the feature map by the nodes of the forest, weighted by a path metric that turns each coordinate into a component of a squared-Euclidean path-isometric embedding. KPP unifies four pillars under a single node-indexed representation whose Gram is non-diagonal and carries a metric: prediction, exact additive attribution, deterministic Lipschitz robust radius in the KPP metric, and uniform Rademacher risk bounds for regression and classification under fixed, honest, or cross-fit conditioning. All probabilistic guarantees are conditional on the representation and are stated under three explicit conditioning regimes; the robust-radius guarantee is deterministic in the KPP metric rather than in a norm on the raw input. Conjectured fast-rate refinements for both regression and classification are stated as open problems and are not claimed as theorems.

Nicolas Mahler

Datapred SAS 23 rue Mirabeau 94300 Vincennes, France · Datapred SA EPFL Innovation Park – Bâtiment A 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Tree Ensembles Decision Trees Kernel Method Partitioning Concentration Bounds Spherical Latent Space+3

Jun 15, 2026cs.RO

DIFF-IPPO: Diffusion-Based Informative Path Planning with Open-Vocabulary Belief Maps

Exploration and object search require robots to perceive their environment, identify regions of interest, and plan trajectories that improve target-detection likelihood or maximize information gain. Many IPP methods, especially in continuous environmental monitoring, rely on Gaussian-process belief models, while object-search settings often produce complex, multimodal belief maps from semantic or open-vocabulary perception. Global trajectory generation directly conditioned on such non-Gaussian belief maps remains comparatively underexplored. Although diffusion-based planners offer strong capabilities for modeling such distributions, their use in informative path planning remains limited. In this work, we propose DIFF-IPPO, a pipeline that integrates an open-vocabulary belief map generator with a diffusion-based planner for global trajectory generation over belief maps. The method generates trajectories that concentrate sensor coverage over high-belief regions, achieving normalized detection scores between 81.49% and 86.55% across different dataset scenarios. We validate the system in a simulated search-and-rescue scenario where the planner searches candidate building regions to locate a burning building. In this setting, a team of five drones using batched belief-map-conditioned trajectory generation achieves first detections in 3.5 minutes.

Sausar Karaf, Oleg Sautenkov, Mikhail Martynov +1

CDE, Skoltech, Bolshoy Boulevard, 30, bld. 1, Moscow 121205, Russia

Diffusion Planning Path Planning Single Trajectory Path