Controllability

Long-form narrative-to-film generation requires shot-level controllability and cross-clip consistency in both visual identity and character behavior-requirements that remain difficult to satisfy with current prompt-based workflows. A core reason existing workflows remain brittle is the lack of a structured intermediate layer between scripts and video models, especially when screenplays are underspecified at key cinematic decision points. We introduce a structured orchestration layer for film-oriented script-to-video generation, implemented as a multi-agent framework that operates between scripts and off-the-shelf video generators. The layer is centered on FilmDSL, a film-oriented domain-specific language that makes cinematic constraints explicit, including shot and camera directives, asset and continuity requirements, and persona cues, so that agents coordinate through a shared structured specification for planning, generation, critique, and repair. Specifically, a generation agent constructs asset packs and storyboard keyframes that anchor composition before clip-by-clip synthesis, while a critic agent produces structured QA signals and triggers targeted refinement without retraining the base model. Experiments on TV-style segments show improved controllability and consistency over text-only and reference-only baselines.

Limit order book (LOB) simulators are most useful to practitioners when they combine realistic market dynamics, computationally efficient sampling, controllable scenario generation, and the ability to generalize beyond the instruments seen during training---properties that existing agent-based and deep generative simulators provide only partially. We present \textbf{FlowLOB}, a conditional \textbf{flow}-matching generator of \textbf{LOB} trajectories, trained on multiple Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) symbols at three sampling frequencies ($0.1$s, $1$s, $10$s) in tick-relative representation that transfers to unseen instruments. Because flow and diffusion models admit a common formulation, we train both with identical data, architecture, and budget, and sample both through the same fixed-step ODE solvers, yielding a controlled comparison of sampling efficiency and fidelity. Flow matching attains its best quality with only $10$ ODE-solver steps, whereas diffusion needs many more function evaluations to approach the same fidelity. At this efficient operating point, FlowLOB improves realism over baselines, two learned and two agent-based models, in most distributional metrics at the two finer sampling frequencies. We evaluate counterfactual controllability with a distributional test that asks whether changing a scenario condition moves the generated statistic toward the corresponding real tail regime; FlowLOB satisfies this criterion in most tested settings. Both realism and control effects transfer zero-shot on a held-out symbol. We additionally conduct ablation studies on the network architecture and the learning rate.

AI journaling tools can tailor prompts to a person's own sensed behavior, but it is unclear which behaviors respond to them. We analyzed 369 journal entries from an eight-week passive sensing study. An LLM labeled each entry as expressing an intention to change a behavior or not, and we measured follow-through against 26 sensor features with a 3-day before/after comparison. Responsiveness depended most on whether a behavior involves other people. Behaviors that depend on others improved in only 15 to 22% of cases, while behaviors a person can act on alone improved more often, up to 50 to 63%, though unevenly. How users wrote mattered less. No single text feature separated improved from unimproved entries; writing carried signal only within specific behaviors, most clearly for text messaging and for longer, more personal intention entries. The sample is small, so we treat these as exploratory patterns that point to where AI journaling nudges are most likely to work.

Prompted attribute agreement is widely used as evidence of text-to-music controllability, yet a requested attribute may occur simply because it is already common in the model's output distribution. We introduce a matched counterfactual evaluation that separates target occurrence from instruction-attributable control. Each family contains a neutral input that omits the scored attribute and two otherwise matched inputs that swap the requested target. All three are rendered through frozen native-interface adapters with a shared seed. Applied to global key and beat grouping in three open systems, this design changes the empirical conclusion. ACE-Step 1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium exhibit substantial key control, whereas LeVo2 does not. For beat grouping, the same models redirect toward the rare three-beat target, but high four-beat agreement is largely inherited from neutral outputs: Stable Audio 3 produces four-beat grouping in 0.97 of neutral cases but only 0.56 under its explicit four-beat treatment. Off-attribute placebos, external recognizer validation, blind expert annotation, and multi-seed sentinels support the attribution. When targets have unequal output priors, agreement describes what a model produced, while matched neutral and target-swap contrasts test whether the instruction changed it.

Controllable surgical world models can provide a generative foundation for surgical artificial intelligence and simulation by synthesizing realistic instrument--tissue interactions. However, existing methods lack a unified multimodal control paradigm, while direct fusion of heterogeneous visual conditions often causes anatomical distortion, instrument appearance drift, and temporally inconsistent interactions. In this work, we propose {Surg-UniWorld}, a unified surgical world model with multimodal control experts. Surg-UniWorld first constructs a {Hierarchical Surgical Anchor} from first-frame appearance and hierarchical semantic masks to preserve persistent scene identity, anatomical organization, and interaction boundaries. {Anchor-Relative Modality Experts} then interpret edge, depth, and optical-flow evidence relative to the shared anchor, capturing complementary boundary, geometric, and motion information. A {Multimodal Control Expert} further performs contribution-preserving stage-wise composition of the activated modality increments and generates control hints for the Wan2.2 video diffusion backbone. To support multimodal surgical world modeling, we further construct Cholec80-SurgWAM, a benchmark for controllable surgical video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Surg-UniWorld consistently outperforms existing controllable video generation methods and surgical world-model baselines in generation quality, temporal consistency, and multimodal controllability.

Generalist robot policies exhibit strong capabilities, but their robustness in complex and unseen environments remains limited. Scaling robot learning and evaluation in diverse real-world environments remains costly and challenging. Action-conditioned world models offer a promising alternative, but they often suffer from limited action controllability and poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To this end, we present GeniWorld, an interactive world model for robots that generalizes robustly across unseen scenarios. Building on pretrained video generative models, we use URDF-based rendering to transform numerical actions into visual action representations, enabling spatially grounded action control. By explicitly decoupling embodiment kinematics from environmental dynamics, our model mitigates scene overfitting and facilitates modeling of robot-environment interactions. To achieve closed-loop control, we construct an autoregressive video prediction model integrated with high-frequency robot kinematic control, enabling interaction with both robot policies and human teleoperators. In our experiments, even when trained solely on limited fixed-scene data, our model achieves superior in-domain performance and robust zero-shot generalization to highly randomized, unseen environments. For downstream applications, GeniWorld serves as a scalable policy evaluator that remains reliable under environmental perturbations. Furthermore, even with limited real-world demonstrations, GeniWorld generates diverse manipulation trajectories within the world model, improving downstream policy performance and robustness in complex environments.

Text-controlled symbolic music generation has recently gained research attention due to its versatile, flexible and straightforward approach to music composition. However, previous approaches tend to generate symbolic music with compromising quality, diversity, controllability and limited duration. In this paper, we present Diff-Symbo, an innovative method that uses latent diffusion model (LDM) to generate high-quality, diverse and long-duration symbolic music. To address the lack of text-symbolic music dataset, we develop a comprehensive dataset with 19,345 text templates by employing large language model. Furthermore, we design a music information encoder to reduce the training overhead while extracting more effective control representations. Given textual descriptions, our proposed method leverages LDM to improve the quality and diversity of music generation. Our method also improves the duration and the compositional consistency of music generation through an autoregressive approach. Experimental results show significant improvements of Diff-Symbo in text controllability, duration, and the quality of generated music compared to the baseline models such as GPT-4, MuseCoco and Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT). As one of the pioneer models in this field, Diff-Symbo paves the way towards controllable and high-quality symbolic music composition based on LDM, offering valuable contributions to both music amateurs and practitioners.

Action-conditioned world models aim to predict how visual environments evolve under an agent's actions. Yet future frames are often highly predictable from visual inertia and recurring motion patterns alone. This creates a shortcut: models can fit the data by exploiting statistical biases without making their visible dynamics meaningfully depend on the action. As a result, different actions may produce similar futures, while motion may persist even under zero action. The key question is how to reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from dominating action-conditioned prediction. We argue that action control requires more than injecting action features; it requires enforcing consistency under counterfactual changes to actions and observations. Based on this insight, we introduce CoCo, a Counterfactual Consistency framework to enhance action controllability through two complementary constraints. Multi-step counterfactual consistency constrains reference, inverse-action, and zero-action rollouts, while action-spatial counterfactual consistency enforces consistent predictions under mirrored scenes and transformed actions. Together, they reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from substituting for action-dependent dynamics. We further introduce Action Response Consistency (ARC) and Drift Energy (DE) to assess action controllability, together with Mini-SSMB for same-state, multi-action counterfactual evaluation. On Mini-SSMB, our full model achieved ARC_inv of 0.412 and ARC_ref of 0.483, while reducing DE by 17.07% relative to the baseline. On VP2 visual planning, it achieves the highest average success rate among SOTA models, at 73.1%. Experiments on BAIR and RoboNet further show that these gains preserve video prediction quality and transfer across model settings.

Driving style refers to the behavioral preferences that drivers maintain during driving, shaped by their diverse experiences, habits, and needs, and is typically reflected in varying levels of aggressiveness. If humans choose to use autonomous driving systems, they would expect the driving style of the systems to closely resemble their own habit. However, this is challenging for current industrial autonomous driving systems. To address this, we developed a style controllable action generation method, STAGE, for driving tasks. Its training process is based on imitation learning, incorporating both style value and latent value action modality encoding. Preference learning is then used to identify the user's driving style as a continuous, monotonic style value. And to reduce the cost of human involvement in the preference training process, we also developed a set of rules to compare driving style in data pairs. Then, during inference, the user inputs the style value to control the generated action patterns, dynamically meeting the user's expectations. Using the STAGE method, we verified that the style-controlled action generation results in several typical road scenarios significantly align with human expectations. Furthermore, through comparisons between the STAGE method and various other approaches, we reveal the unique functionalities of STAGE, including its style controllability, style continuity, driving style alignment capability and driving safety. The code for this work is available at: https://github.com/CarlDegio/STAGE

Activation steering controls model behavior by editing internal activations at inference time. We study its input-side dual: optimizing a fluent prompt so that a chosen internal latent is driven toward zero, with no inference-time model access. Our target is an "evaluation-awareness" latent-linearly readable and steerable in recent work-whose control would threaten the validity of safety evaluations if models behave differently when they detect being tested. Adapting Fluent Dreaming / EPO with a negated feature term (GCG-style token optimization plus a self-cross-entropy fluency regularizer, swept over a fluency weight), we suppress the latent under five target constructions-a CAA direction, a subspace norm, an SAE feature, a single MLP neuron, and a behavioral logit-on Llama-3.2-3B and Llama-3.1-8B. The latent is robustly suppressible ($z\approx-7$), and a causally-validated Llama Scope SAE feature can be fully and selectively turned off. But our controls tell a cautionary story about the CAA direction: a placebo random direction is suppressed just as hard and shifts behavior just as far, and when we hold a real eval passage in context and optimize only a prefix, suppressing the eval-direction fails to reduce-and slightly increases-the model's behavioral eval judgment. Activation-readability, in short, is not behavioral controllability. We further find that a single MLP neuron is eval-correlated but not causal at both scales, and that scanning the real Pile yields a natural-text baseline competitive with the optimizer for the internal direction. A positive control validates our erasure detector, bounding an erasure-vs-rotation question earlier left open.

World model serves as a promising tool to infer environment dynamics under high-dimensional observations and candidate actions. Recently, LeCun's JEPA provides a compelling framework for learning such models in representation space. Its action-conditioned extension plays a central role in visual control and latent-space planning, but leaves a fundamental question: can it recover the controlled dynamics from nonlinear observations? This paper presents a joint identifiability condition for controlled world models with Gaussian latent states, which consists of two coupled components: (1) representation identifiability and (2) transition identifiability. The former depends on the spectral separation property while the latter is related to non-degenerate variation of conditional action. We prove that when this condition holds, minimizing the LeJEPA-style predictive objective can recover both latent states and controlled dynamics in the sense of orthogonal transformation. We further prove that the upper bound of transition prediction error is inversely proportional to the spectral separation margin. We also characterize an attainable amplification of counterfactual prediction error that scales inversely with the weakest conditional action-excitation margin. The theoretical predictions are empirically supported across four nonlinear observation settings.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for complex information-extraction tasks, yet it remains unclear whether agentic components such as reflection and memory lead to observable and controllable improvements over fixed LLM workflows. We study this question through conference-paper dataset extraction, where a system must identify datasets mentioned in scholarly PDFs and produce structured records. We compare a fixed workflow baseline with reflective agent variants and specify an optimized agent condition (S2) that extends the same task with richer PDF tools and dynamic tool selection. Our evaluation emphasizes process-level behavior--including tool execution, retries, reflection, memory use, runtime, and failure recovery--while treating extraction coverage and field completeness as secondary outcome measures. The paper characterizes when agentic mechanisms change system behavior, whether these changes improve task completion, and how the observed failure modes motivate an optimized agent design under the same evaluation harness.

Driving-world generation has emerged as a core capability for scalable autonomous-driving simulation, yet existing methods remain limited in object-level controllability and long-horizon stability. We present M$^\text{4}$World, a Multi-view and Multimodal generative driving world model that synthesizes future surround-view video streams and synchronized LiDAR scans while supporting interactive object Manipulation and stable Minute-long streaming. Fine-grained object manipulation is realized through a flexible conditioning interface that supports explicit control over both the spatial layout and visual appearance of individual objects. Stable minute-long streaming, on the other hand, is achieved through a multi-stage training framework that enables online causal generation in only four denoising steps while maintaining coherent world dynamics throughout extended rollouts. Building on these components, we introduce an efficient few-clip post-training as well as a suite of visual reference-conditioned generation models, preserving general generation ability while allowing rare-case customization for long-tail controllability. To assess controllability beyond realism, we further introduce an automated VLM-based judging pipeline that evaluates scene-level condition adherence, view-wise object controllability, and cross-view object consistency. Comprehensive experiments show that M$^\text{4}$World consistently delivers high generation quality, precise controllability, and stable minute-long streaming. Together with downstream long-tail augmentation and scene editing, these results demonstrate the potential of M$^\text{4}$World for controllable, scalable driving simulation.

Recommender systems operate as Black-Boxes, leaving users and regulators unable to steer their outputs toward specific intentions or audit their behavior. This lack of controllability, defined as the system's ability to respond to explicit guidance, remains an unaddressed dimension in existing evaluation paradigms. To fill this gap, we propose CtrlBench-Rec, a collaborative multi-agent framework for systematic assessment of controllability. We formalize three fundamental tasks: target content discovery, interest profile shaping, and popularity bias mitigation, which together measure steerability from explicit commands to implicit representation steering and finally to overcoming algorithmic biases.Extensive experiments on real-world datasets and multiple recommendation models demonstrate that our framework effectively quantifies controllability and exposes critical system bottlenecks, most notably persistent resistance to guiding long tail content. CtrlBench-Rec provides the first standardized toolkit for controllable recommendation research, algorithmic auditing, and user empowerment. Our code is released on https://github.com/caskcsg/CtrlBenchRec.

Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions, offering a promising foundation for robot planning, policy evaluation, and data augmentation. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect in the real world. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from unlabeled videos, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual factors such as backgrounds and untouched objects. In this work, we identify this action-irrelevant bias as a key obstacle to controllable ACWMs and introduce evaluation metrics to measure latent-action bias, action following, and robustness. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three efficient fine-tuning objectives: embodiment-centric reconstruction, action-centric contrastive learning, and latent space calibration, which together encourage embodiment-focused, action-aware, and calibrated non-collapsed latent action representations. Experiments on 2B and 14B ACWM backbones show that CD-LAM substantially improves latent-action controllability, downstream robot-action following, visual fidelity, and adaptation efficiency, requiring only 6k fine-tuning steps and more than 12$\times$ fewer robot-action adaptation updates than the baseline.

Keypoint tracking alone is insufficient for object interaction tasks such as sitting on a chair, wiping a board, or pushing furniture, where the robot can reach the correct pose without making meaningful physical contact with the object. We present CONTACTMIMIC, a learning framework that tracks explicit partlevel binary contact commands alongside keypoint trajectories. CONTACTMIMIC is made possible through the use of contact-following rewards and a trajectory augmentation scheme aimed at breaking the correlations between keypoint trajectories and contact labels. The resulting policy successfully decouples contact behavior from keypoint geometry, and achieves precise physical contact as well as contact-controllability (produce or suppress contact during deployment as desired). Simulation experiments across 10 diverse human-object interaction motions confirm that CONTACTMIMIC exhibits contact controllability that enables it to complete manipulation tasks without task-specific rewards, while also outperforming keypoint-only trackers on contact-relevant tasks. Ablations confirm the necessity of the proposed trajectory augmentation scheme and sim2real deployment validates contact controllability in the real world across 5 different motions. Video results are available on https://lixinyao11.github.io/contactmimic-page/.

The article investigates the fundamental problem of ensuring the stability of operator control and preserving goal-targeting in hybrid human-machine decision support systems (DSS) of a new generation. Based on a two-month continuous longitudinal experiment on the joint design of a monograph-format textual array, the latent phenomenon of semantic context drift in large language models of deep logical reasoning (Reasoning LLMs) is verified and described. A mathematical model of interaction in the human-machine interface is proposed, and an original metric is introduced - the operator control stability coefficient, which takes into account the non-linear contextual pressure of hidden reasoning chains. Within the paradigm of the cognitome theory, a critical point of control functions inversion is captured. Engineering recommendations are formulated for implementing dynamic relational arbitration loops based on a modified hierarchical similarity model.

Action-conditioned world models allow robots to predict the future consequences of candidate actions without additional physical interaction, supporting policy evaluation, planning, and data augmentation. We present Mask2Real-WM, a two-stage action-conditioned world model for dexterous manipulation that decouples pixel prediction into a dynamics model and a rendering model. The dynamics model predicts future segmentation masks from past masks and 23-DoF action sequences. The rendering model maps the predicted masks to photorealistic RGB using a ControlNet-augmented Stable Video Diffusion backbone. The smaller sim-to-real gap in segmentation space enables the dynamics model to benefit from large-scale pretraining on over 50 h of synthetic simulation data, followed by fine-tuning on fewer than 2.5 h of real demonstrations. Experiments on a dexterous pick-and-place benchmark show that mask conditioning and simulation pretraining are both required for per-DoF action controllability across all 23 degrees of freedom. In contrast, monolithic baselines capture broad hand and end-effector trajectories but do not reliably reflect fine-grained, per-joint action effects.

Deep neural networks often contain substantial hidden-state redundancy, but most compression methods operate directly on weights, neurons, or quantised representations without explicitly characterising the dynamical role of internal states. This paper proposes a controllability-observability framework for empirical state-order reduction of deep neural networks. By viewing a trained network as a depth-indexed nonlinear dynamical system, we construct data-driven reachability, observability, and balanced Gramians from hidden-state snapshots and output Jacobians. The resulting A/B/C tests estimate layer-wise reachable, observable, and jointly reachable--observable ranks. These ranks are then used not only as diagnostic measures of hidden-state redundancy, but also as actual compressed layer widths for realised reduced networks. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 compare the proposed balanced realisation against projection-based reduction, unstructured pruning, structured pruning, low-rank SVD, dynamic INT8 quantisation, and linear baselines. On MNIST, a four-layer SiLU DNN is reduced from state order 1024 to 277, giving 72.95% state compression and 73.48% parameter compression, while maintaining 95.45% accuracy compared with 96.60% for the full model. On CIFAR-10, a larger SiLU DNN is reduced from state order 4608 to 1339, giving 70.94% state compression and 83.09% parameter compression, while preserving accuracy from 54.45% to 54.44% and reducing CUDA inference latency by approximately 3X. The results show that balanced reachable-observable ranks provide a principled empirical minimal-realisation criterion for designing compact neural architectures with little or no loss in accuracy.

Modern image-and-text-to-video diffusion models can synthesize highly realistic videos by iteratively denoising an initial Gaussian noise tensor conditioned on reference image and text inputs. However, existing approaches still lack precise and unified controllability over both object motion and camera motion within a single generation process. We present UniCaMo, a unified framework that enables simultaneous control of object trajectories and camera viewpoints by directly constructing the input noise of the diffusion model. Specifically, UniCaMo builds a shared 3D-grounded motion-consistent noise space across latent video frames. Sparse 3D point tracks are used to warp the Gaussian noise of the reference frame along desired object trajectories, while a virtual spherical noise representation provides globally consistent noise values for newly revealed scene regions under camera motion. By combining local track-guided noise warping with global sphere-based noise sampling, UniCaMo maintains geometric and temporal consistency under both object movement and viewpoint changes. Because UniCaMo modifies only the input noise, it requires no auxiliary adapters, control branches, or architectural changes to the underlying video diffusion model. With lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on large pretrained video diffusion models, including Wan 2.1 (14B), UniCaMo achieves state-of-the-art results in both video quality and motion controllability on standard controllable video generation benchmarks.

Realistic traffic simulation requires agents that imitate logged behavior and can also be steered along interpretable axes. Such controllability enables engineers to isolate variables, reproduce specific edge cases, and test autonomous systems without real-world risk. We introduce Controllable Neural Variational Agents (CNeVA), a controllable simulated-agent framework that learns to infer a per-agent Gaussian behavior latent from per-channel discounted returns via a closed-form conjugate variational update, conditioning a rectified-flow trajectory generator trained on a mixed channel-mask curriculum for classifier-free guidance. To tackle scarcity in reward signals, we propose soft eligibility gates that replace hard binary thresholds with smooth exponential decay, preserving the gradient signal for near-threshold agents. On the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, CNeVA attains competitive realism on the benchmark while exposing per-channel controllability that the higher-ranked imitation models lack. Speed- and acceleration-based steering produces monotone responses without stall-induced reward hacking. Safety controllability is monotone and substantial with the introduction of soft eligibility. We manage to achieve steerable map compliance under a context-residual return measure. Furthermore, our experiment demonstrates that steering metrics must be read alongside physical-plausibility guardrails to avoid reward-hacking confounds.

Training-free controllable motion generation has attracted growing interest for enabling flexible constraint enforcement without constraint-specific training. However, existing training-free methods require constraints to be continuous objective-based with differentiable losses, while many real-world requirements are criterion-based and provide only discontinuous, sparse, or even black-box feedback. In this paper, we propose Motion-Inference-as-Control (MIC), the first training-free motion generation framework that handles both continuous objective-based and criterion-based motion constraints under a shared mechanism. The key idea is to cast diffusion-based motion generation as a stochastic control problem. This perspective not only provides principled and practically effective step-wise control laws that support criterion-based constraints without requiring differentiability and naturally accommodate objective-based constraints as a special case, but also motivates a control-oriented constraint coordination mechanism that adaptively balances and reconciles motion constraints during generation. Experiments across diverse constraint settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Generative Synthetic Populations (GSP) -- the convergence of population synthesis, agent-based modelling, and LLM agents -- are attracting growing interest for urban simulation and institutional communication research. Before any GSP instrument is used on a real population, a more basic question must be answered: does it respond to stimuli of known valence in an ordered, replicable, group-structured way? We call this controllability. We ask not whether a synthetic population tracks humans, but whether it tracks itself: whether the latent structure we impose on it is recovered in its own responses. This internal-validity question is logically prior to any claim about external validity, just as characterising an instrument's response function must precede using it to test a theory. We report SIVE (Synthetic Instrument Validation Experiment): a fictional municipality (Montelago) with 120 synthetic personas of known latent structure, exposed to seven conditions spanning strongly positive to strongly negative institutional communications about a water network. Seven pre-registered criteria, evaluated across a temperature sweep, jointly assess fidelity, stability, noise floor, specificity, sensitivity, and ordering. All seven pass at every temperature. A central finding turns a calibration failure into a diagnostic success: a message designed as "weakly positive" was identified by the instrument as functionally negative, traced to unresolved problems, uncertainty, and institutional passivity in its text; a redesigned version restored the expected ordering and interacts with agents' latent trust in unanticipated ways. A noise sub-experiment shows the instrument's intrinsic noise is roughly half the cross-agent estimate and stable across temperatures. Individual trajectories reveal coherent micro-dynamics that summary statistics obscure. Full data are available via an interactive explorer.

Post-hoc controllability of fair machine learning models, the ability to control the trade-off between fairness and accuracy after training, is valuable for practical deployment. Existing post-processing methods provide such post-hoc controllability but often suffer from significant accuracy degradation, whereas in-processing methods achieve efficient trade-offs but require computationally expensive retraining for each change in trade-off ratio. To achieve both post-hoc controllability and efficient trade-offs, we propose a novel fair classification algorithm that learns effective feature representations to improve the trade-off efficiency of post-processing fair classifiers, by a gradient-based optimization approach. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves trade-off efficiency comparable to, or even surpassing, in-processing methods, without requiring any retraining.

Recent advancements in Image-to-Video (I2V) generation have transformed input images from simple appearance references into interactive control interfaces where visual cues such as arrows, sketches, and emojis orchestrate complex video dynamics with unprecedented controllability. However, these seemingly innocuous static cues can be interpreted by models as executable temporal instructions, unfolding into harmful actions in the generated videos. Despite the severity of this threat, existing safety benchmarks remain predominantly focused on text-based and content-only image-based jailbreaks, leaving implicit visual prompt attacks insufficiently explored. To bridge this gap, we present VVA-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating video generation safety under categorized vision-centric prompt attacks. Extensive experiments on VVA-Bench demonstrate that state-of-the-art models are highly susceptible to such attacks, with Attack Success Rates (ASR) reaching 100.0% on Wan 2.7 and 74.8% on Veo 3.1. To mitigate these risks, we propose VPA-Guard, a retrieval-augmented and self-evolving defense framework. By leveraging few-shot reasoning to identify latent malicious intents, our method reduces the attack ASR by 44.2% and the harmfulness score by 73.4% on average, while maintaining the model's utility for legitimate user edits. Our work provides both a rigorous benchmark and an effective defense strategy to advance safe and socially responsible multimodal generation.

Large-scale video generation models are increasingly described as world models because they can learn rich spatiotemporal regularities from visual data. However, we argue that an ideal world model should benefit in a self-evolving generative character. Traditional visually plausible predictions alone are not enough to establish whether an imagined future is physically actionable for a particular embodied agent, failing to provide informative feedback from environments for self-evolving improvement. To realize self-evolving world models, this article proposes the concept of autonomous video generation, which is evaluated through counterfactual controllability, i.e., the ability to i) generate intervention-conditioned futures, ii) bind these future frames to embodiment constraints, iii) verify them under distribution shifts, and iv) distil surviving branches into compact variables for decision-making. We formalize a four-stage closed-loop optimization of Generation, Binding, Verification and Distillation, together with four corresponding evaluation metrics: novelty, consistency, out-of-distribution (OOD) and efficiency. We further discuss two examples, i.e., drones and manipulators, as early embodied testbeds where wind, sensing limits, actuation delay, contact dynamics and recovery constraints can be systematically perturbed and verified. The central claim is that the framework of autonomous video generation for self-evolving world models should not be judged by video fidelity alone, but by whether the generated frames improve valid action under counterfactual interventions and various embodiment constraints.

4D dynamics (3D geometry evolving over time) is a fundamental representation of the physical world and plays a crucial role in world modeling (e.g., animation and games). Owing to the scarcity of large-scale, long-horizon 4D mesh data with arbitrary shapes, early text-to-4D methods rely on distillation or test-time optimization from video diffusion priors, making inference prohibitively slow. Recent feed-forward generators greatly reduce inference cost but offer limited spatiotemporal controllability, and short-horizon generation often leads to error accumulation in long-horizon sequences. We propose a novel feed-forward in-betweening framework for arbitrary 4D meshes with keyframe conditioning. Building on universal mesh-animation latents, we introduce a frame-wise mesh VAE that encodes each frame into topology-agnostic latent tokens anchored by a reference mesh for keyframe conditioning. We further introduce a keyframe-conditioned rectified flow model with an MMDiT backbone that synthesizes non-keyframe frames conditioned on sparse keyframes. Experiments show strong performance and improved controllability on both DyMesh16 and DyMesh32 benchmarks.

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce \textbf{WRBench}, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

Controllable video world models target interactive world exploration, where models must faithfully execute explicit action commands while preserving visual quality and temporal coherence. However, most existing approaches rely on continuous camera trajectories as action conditions, which often lead to unreliable action following, especially under complex motion sequences. In this work, we identify action representation entanglement as a key bottleneck in controllable video generation, and show that continuous camera representations lead to high feature similarity across distinct motion patterns, degrading action controllability. Based on this insight, we propose DisCo, a controllable video world model that conditions generation on a compact set of discrete action primitives to improve action separability. We further introduce DisCoBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the ability of models in short-term, long-horizon, and highly dynamic exploration scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DisCo achieves significantly more reliable action following while preserving visual quality.

The ISO 26262 standard defines functional safety for road vehicles through risk assessments based on Severity, Exposure, and Controllability, grounded in a human-driven vehicle paradigm. In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the absence of a human driver necessitates revisiting these principles. This paper decomposes the Controllability placeholder into two auditable evidence dimensions of ISO 26262 by introducing two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. Transferability extends Controllability to capture AV systems' ability to hand off control to dedicated fallback safety mechanisms, while Predictability captures how easily external agents can anticipate AV behavior. Predictability is formally defined from human-robot interaction-inspired principles, and a mathematical framework is provided to quantify it. A designed-versus-achievable gap is introduced to distinguish architectural fallback claims from scene-conditioned achievable fallback capability. The proposed metrics align with ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF), rendering fallback and interaction claims falsifiable and traceable across ODD slices. These dimensions complement rather than replace existing standards, and the enhancements preserve the structure of ISO 26262 while extending its applicability to driverless automated systems operating at SAE Levels 4 and 5.

Diffusion-based generative models enable powerful image editing capabilities, but achieving precise control while maintaining fidelity and safety remains challenging. We present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study of controllable diffusion-based image editing, analyzing the trade-offs between adherence to user intent, preservation of non-target content, and output quality. Our work spans text- and mask-guided edits, point/drag manipulation, and inversion-based pipelines. We derive mathematical formulations of editing objectives and analyze dynamics of noise injection, score guidance, and inversion error. We provide theoretical bounds on reconstruction error, stability under repeated edits, and locality of changes. We propose algorithmic frameworks (with pseudocode) for mask-localized and instruction-guided editing, and present extensive experiments comparing state-of-the-art methods (e.g.\ TF-ICON \cite{lu2023tficone}, DragFlow \cite{zhou2025dragflow}, InstructPix2Pix \cite{brooks2023instructpix2pix}, UltraEdit \cite{zhao2024ultraedit}) on multiple tasks and metrics (FID, identity similarity, CLIP alignment, artifact scores, etc). Our results reveal key failure modes, such as identity drift, prompt sensitivity, and compositional errors. We also discuss ethical considerations in image editing, including misuse risks, bias, consent, and concept erasure techniques (e.g.\ MACE \cite{lu2024mace}, ANT \cite{li2025ant}, EraseAnything \cite{gao2024eraseanything}) as safeguards. We conclude with best practices and future directions for responsible, high-fidelity diffusion-based editing.

A recurring data mining task in complex networks is to determine how individual nodes contribute to system behavior. Existing approaches rely on either static-graph centralities or control-theoretic quantities such as controllability Gramians, which assume linear, time-invariant dynamics. Estimated systems, however, are typically nonlinear and time-varying. We define "emergent contribution (EC)," a finite-horizon measure of a node's dynamical leverage: the metric-weighted energy of its impulse response accumulated along the system trajectory. Computed from the Jacobians of any differentiable model, EC is estimator-agnostic and reduces exactly to average controllability in the linear, time-invariant limit. Our contribution is a characterization of when the two measures agree and diverge. Using a controlled synthetic family with known ground-truth contribution, we construct a phase diagram spanning nonlinearity, regime structure, persistence, and perturbation amplitude. EC and average controllability agree under static or smoothly drifting dynamics and both track ground truth. Divergence emerges under persistent regime switching, is strongest under persistent sign reversal, and disappears when the sign reversal is removed. At extreme perturbation amplitudes, both measures degrade, identifying the limits of local linearization. We place five estimated real systems from several domains within this phase space. Their placement serves as a diagnostic of when EC provides information beyond static controllability and therefore justifies its additional computational cost. On one panel examined in depth, a twenty-seed retraining ensemble reveals a robust variance--leverage dissociation: nodes whose perturbations propagate widely despite low within-system variance, which is not recovered by static centralities nor variance-based summaries.

With rapid development of large language models and diffusion-based content generation, world modeling has attracted increasing research attention, benefiting various downstream domains such as game engines, embodied AI, autonomous driving, etc. Through explicitly incorporating user actions into world state transition, recent literature empowers world modeling with interactivity in an action-conditioned video or 3D generation paradigm, further enhancing controllability over world evolutions and facilitating users to freely traverse, manipulate, navigate, and personalize the state evolution. In this paper, we aim to systematically review recent research trends, technical developments, evaluation benchmarks, and also propose future potential directions in interactive world modeling. Specifically, we first summarize recent efforts and trends in terms of application scenarios, world state evolution, and scene modality. Afterwards, we delve into three crucial technical challenges, including action-conditioned controllability, long-horizon interactions and memory, and action-following responsiveness for real-time interactivity. Furthermore, we also thoroughly compare existing benchmarks and metrics in four specific application fields: open-world exploration, game engine, autonomous driving, and robotics. Finally, we discuss several promising future directions in achieving next-generation interactive world modeling. The corresponding repository is publicly available at: https://github.com/liujiuming123/Awesome-Interactive-World-Model.

This paper presents the real-time retargeting guidance policy developed for the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing mission. The baseline guidance generates approximate fuel-optimal descent trajectories, while a high-level policy enables safe retargeting to alternate sites when the nominal site becomes infeasible. The retargeting strategy leverages a convex representation of the controllability boundary, allowing rapid feasibility checks and real-time target updates. To the best of the authors knowledge, this represents the first application of a data-driven retargeting framework in an operational lunar landing mission. Pre-flight simulations and Chandrayaan-3 flight results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Post-trained language-model assistants are often optimized to avoid under-answering, encouraging complete, helpful, cautious, and proactive responses. We ask whether this optimization creates asymmetric controllability costs: when users explicitly request narrower answers, which assistant behaviors remain suppressible, and which continue to shape the response? We study this problem as boundary-suppression asymmetry. Prompt-side probes across multiple high-level response dimensions suggest a selective cost, concentrated around `too-much assistant' directions such as over-completion, extra help, and anti-underanswering. Using controlled assistant-policy variants derived from a shared base model, we find that anti-underanswering policies are harder to pull back than the baseline under matched boundary-control evaluations, while minimal-boundary variants generally avoid this anti-side upward shift in the direct boundary-control comparisons. Mechanism-oriented probes point beyond longer default outputs, pure EOS failure, uncertainty compensation, and local continuation bias, while robustness checks preserve the main anti-over-baseline ordering under shared-system and larger-scale settings. The evidence supports a mixed planning/stopping account, where content-budget overshoot and continuation persistence jointly make boundary correction harder. Overall, post-training may create direction-specific controllability costs: some helpful assistant tendencies remain easy to invoke, yet harder to locally suppress.

Recent advances in large language models have enabled natural language to serve as a flexible interface for controlling complex systems, but often at the cost of large-scale multimodal training or weakened domain-specific inductive biases. In structured decision-making domains such as chess, specialized policy networks achieve strong performance but lack semantic controllability, while prompt-conditioned language models are more flexible yet typically exhibit weaker domain grounding. We propose $\textbf{UniMaia}$, a framework for prompt-conditioned policy modulation that adapts a frozen Lc0-based chess policy network using a parameter-efficient text encoder and a ControlNet-style conditioning mechanism. UniMaia enables semantic control over gameplay, including opening selection and player strength, while preserving the pretrained policy representations. We further introduce $\textbf{UniMaia-Aux}$, which incorporates auxiliary temporal conditioning and behavioral prediction objectives. To support this work, we construct a large-scale metadata-augmented Lichess dataset, develop a semi-automated prompt-generation pipeline, and introduce benchmarks spanning both prompt-conditioned and metadata-conditioned settings. UniMaia achieves state-of-the-art expected accuracy on several prompt-conditioned benchmarks and competitive top-move accuracy on general instruction-following tasks, while remaining competitive with dedicated metadata-conditioned approaches on human move prediction benchmarks. UniMaia-Aux further improves expected accuracy and behavioral modeling across several evaluation settings, with modest trade-offs in top-move accuracy. Overall, our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned control of domain-specific policy networks is feasible without end-to-end multimodal training, while highlighting trade-offs between controllability and predictive performance.

A central puzzle for the behavioural sciences and for human-facing artificial intelligence is the persistence of within-person variability. The same individual, presented with the same observable input, produces different outcomes on different occasions, and different individuals produce divergent outcomes that no observable covariate fully predicts. We argue that this variability belongs in the dynamic latent state of the person, and that human outcomes are controllable in a precise and operational sense through interventions that target the state and its weighting at the moment a decision is being formed. We define a state as the time-indexed weighting vector over the dimensions that govern how an individual's biology, physiology, and neuropsychology process the next event into a decision and an outcome. The relationship between state, decision, and outcome is causal rather than correlational. The weighting vector is dynamic at sub-daily timescales. The conscious channel through which outcomes are reportable is a narrow attentional bottleneck whose contents are themselves state-dependent. Taken together, these claims imply that the outcome of a given event is controllable, conditionally, on the state-trajectory at the time of intervention. We motivate the framework with six strands of established evidence (causal inference, predictive processing, allostasis, attentional bottleneck, chronobiology, computational psychiatry) and a 24-month observational base from a deployed behavioural platform spanning more than 200,000 consented users across four occupational personas (research period 2023 to 2026). We derive seven testable predictions, list six operational requirements for state-aware systems, and discuss implications for digital health, education, AI personalisation, and personal agency.

3D editing is a fundamental capability for scalable 3D content creation. While image editing has rapidly evolved toward large-scale feedforward generative paradigms, 3D AI generation remains dominated by training-free editing pipelines. A central challenge of feedforward 3D editing lies in the lack of high-quality paired supervision. Editable 3D assets require simultaneous preservation of geometry, multi-view consistency, structural coherence, and localized edit controllability. Existing 3D editing datasets often rely on independently generated assets, image-mediated reconstruction or narrow edit taxonomies, leading to inaccurate localization, weak preservation, blurred edit boundaries, and limited semantic consistency. In this work, we introduce a new perspective: scalable feedforward 3D editing should be learned from semantic-part transformations. Based on this insight, we propose Pxform, a high-quality 3D editing dataset with over 100K consistent before/after editing pairs across seven edit types. Instead of treating objects as unstructured shapes, our pipeline grounds edits directly in semantic 3D parts. Built upon Pxform, we further propose PartFlow, a feedforward 3D editing network that injects source-aware latent control into pretrained 3D generative priors. PartFlow introduces mask-aware velocity preservation and render-space consistency supervision to jointly improve edit fidelity and source preservation, while requiring no 3D edit mask during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that high-quality semantic-part supervision substantially improves scalable 3D editing, enabling PartFlow to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both geometric and appearance editing benchmarks.

AI safety is still largely framed as alignment: training models to follow human preferences, safety policies, and normative constraints. That framing has improved the behavior of modern language models, but aligned behavior does not by itself guarantee that a deployed agent can be stopped, overridden, or constrained once it operates in open-ended, interactive, and tool-using environments. A system may be safe in expectation and still fail to yield to explicit runtime authority under conflicting instructions, long-horizon execution, adversarial inputs, or risky tool use. This position paper argues that AI safety therefore requires controllability as a first-class objective. We define \emph{controllability} as the ability of an AI system to remain reliably interruptible, overridable, redirectable, and constrainable by explicit control signals at runtime while preserving ordinary utility when such signals are absent. To study this gap, we introduce \controlbench{}, a benchmark for evaluating controllability failures in high-risk agentic scenarios. Experiments with OpenClaw-based agents show that current alignment and guardrail mechanisms reduce risk, but often fail to provide persistent, authoritative, and enforceable runtime control. We therefore propose a control-centric architectural framework that highlights explicit control planes, runtime intervention pathways, persistent control states, and auditable decision interfaces as key design principles for future controllable AI systems.

Inverse design of metasurfaces under continuous electromagnetic constraints requires generation of geometries that simultaneously satisfy stringent spectral specifications and remain manufacturable. Conventional approaches based on iterative full wave simulations are computationally prohibitive for large design spaces, while existing generative models often suffer from poor conditional controllability and limited fabrication awareness. In this regard, we propose a physics guided condition quality enhanced diffusion framework for the inverse design of metasurface based absorbers. Fabrication-aware constraints are incorporated to ensure practical realizability of the generated designs. The framework introduces a conditioning mechanism for continuous spectral specifications, wherein feature-wise linear modulation propagates the condition across the denoising hierarchy, enabling stable and accurate generation with improved spectral controllability. Further, to embed EM consistency directly into the generative learning process, a pre trained surrogate EM simulator is integrated within the diffusion training pipeline. The proposed framework generated physically realizable metasurface designs for diverse reflection characteristics in the frequency range of 2 to 18 GHz, achieving a very low average spectral mean squared error of 0.0006 and a high band alignment accuracy of 0.958. The framework also addresses the fundamentally non-unique nature of inverse EM design by enabling structured multimodal generation of geometrically distinct yet spectrally consistent metasurface designs for the same target response. The proposed model produces the suitable design in approximately 30 seconds, whereas the conventional approach can take several months under comparable computational resources. The efficiency of the model is also established via experimental measurements.

Controllable multimodal generation is commonly formulated as an inference-time conditioning problem using prompts, guidance, or auxiliary modules. While effective, such approaches do not explicitly structure how semantic attributes evolve, which can lead to identity drift and inconsistent cross-modal behavior. We propose Controlla, a modular factorized-control framework that treats controllability as a property of structured latent geometry. Controlla learns identity and attribute factors from multimodal inputs and aligns them with graph priors using graph-constrained optimal transport, encouraging attributes to follow graph-consistent trajectories while preserving reference identity. To evaluate this setting, we construct AffectHuman-43K, a leakage-aware multimodal benchmark for reference-grounded affective control, and introduce geometry-aware metrics for trajectory consistency and latent disentanglement. Experiments show consistent improvements in controllability, identity preservation, and cross-modal alignment, with additional analyses on graph sensitivity, extensibility, and robustness.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study whether monitor-aware models are capable of obfuscating their reasoning to evade detection. We use synthetic document finetuning to expose eight models to realistic pre-training-style documents describing a CoT monitor and find that monitor-aware models consistently achieve higher rates of undetected misbehavior compared to unaware controls. This effect is weaker but still present on a harder agentic task. We also show that CoT controllability, a model's ability to reshape its own reasoning trace under an imposed constraint, is closely correlated with obfuscation success across the eight models studied ($r=0.800$, $p=0.017$). Monitor-aware models placed under equal reinforcement learning optimization pressure also learn to reward-hack without triggering a CoT monitor substantially faster than unaware controls. Together, these results suggest that knowledge of monitoring combined with high CoT controllability poses a risk to CoT-based monitoring.

Learning governing dynamics from data is a common goal across the sciences, yet it is only well-posed when the underlying mechanisms are identifiable. In practice, many data-driven methods implicitly assume identifiability; when this assumption fails, estimated models can yield spurious predictions and invalid mechanistic conclusions. Classical identifiability guarantees for controlled linear time-invariant (LTI) systems provide sufficient conditions -- controllability and persistent excitation -- but leave open whether identifiability holds when these conditions fail, and which parts of the system remain identifiable without full identifiability. We show that the experimental setup, i.e., the realized initial state and control input, dictates a fundamental limit on the information recoverable from the observed trajectory. We develop a geometric characterization of this limit and derive a closed-form description of all systems consistent with the experimental setup. Crucially, we prove that even when the full system is not identifiable, the restricted dynamics on the subspace reachable by the experiment remain uniquely determined.

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) allows a user to express preference over outcomes in terms of the relative importance of the objectives, but standard metrics cannot capture whether changes in preference reliably change the agent's behavior in the intended way, a property termed controllability. As a result, preference-conditioned agents can score well on standard MORL metrics while being insensitive to the preference input. If the ability to control agents cannot be reliably assessed, the symbolic interface that MORL provides between user intent and agent behavior is broken. Mainstream MORL metrics alone fail to measure the controllability of preference-conditioned agents, motivating a complementary metric specifically designed to that end. We hope the results spur discussion in the community on existing evaluation protocols to consolidate advances in preference adaptation in MORL to larger and more complex problems.

We study agency under partial observability in deterministic physical or simulated worlds, where apparent randomness arises from uncertainty over initial conditions, fixed law bits, and unrolled exogenous noise. We model sensing and actuation as bridge interfaces split between agent-controlled parameters and environment-controlled channel state, inducing a deterministic POMDP through a prior over latent microstates and many-to-one observation coarsening. Within this framework, we prove a separation between prediction, compression, and empowerment. Perfect prediction can be achieved either by identifying the hidden quotient relevant to the target family or by overwrite control that makes the future target action-determined; high empowerment alone is insufficient. Under refinable interfaces and sufficient memory, action-conditioned observation-compression progress reduces posterior uncertainty about the latent quotient, and when refinement requires steering world-side channel conditions, this creates target-conditioned interface empowerment. A bit-string specialization with a conserved information budget makes the resulting tradeoff explicit: prediction by identification requires internal capacity at least the relevant latent entropy, whereas overwrite control requires terminal action capacity over the controlled quotient. For modern AI agents, the results suggest a design principle rather than a theorem of inevitability: objectives should distinguish hidden-state identification, interface refinement, task-relevant controllability, and mere overwrite or distractor control. Human--AI alignment is partly an interface-design problem, where the relevant bridge is between human intent, agent internal state, external tools, and world-side channel conditions. This is a working draft: feedback and criticism is most welcome.

We introduce SteeringDiffusion, a bottlenecked activation-level control interface for diffusion models that exposes a smooth, monotonic, and runtime-adjustable control surface over the content--style trade-off. Our method keeps the U-Net backbone frozen and learns a small, prompt-conditioned latent code projected to FiLM/AdaGN-style modulation parameters. A zero-initialized design guarantees exact equivalence to the base model at zero scale, while timestep-aware gating restricts modulation to later denoising stages. A single scalar at inference continuously traverses the control surface without retraining. Across experiments on Stable Diffusion~1.5 and SDXL covering multiple artistic styles, we show that SteeringDiffusion produces smooth and monotonic content--style trade-offs. Under matched parameter budgets, it outperforms LoRA in controllability and stability, while ControlNet and rank-1 adapters do not expose a comparable control surface. We further introduce an inversion-stability diagnostic based on DDIM inversion, used as a post-hoc trajectory probe, which reveals strong correlations with intervention magnitude. These results position \emph{Steering Bottlenecked Explicit Control (S-BEC)} as a practical, general-purpose control interface for frozen diffusion backbones.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning patterns, such as induction, deduction, and abduction, can be decoupled from specific problem instances remains a critical challenge for model controllability, and for shedding light on reasoning controllability. In this paper, we present the first systematic investigation of this problem through the lens of reasoning conflicts: an explicit tension between parametric and contextual information induced by mandating logical schemata that deviate from those expected for a target task. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs consistently prioritize sensibility over compliance, favoring task-appropriate reasoning patterns despite conflicting instructions. We further demonstrate that reasoning conflicts are internally detectable, as confidence scores significantly drop during conflicting episodes. Probing experiments confirm that reasoning types are linearly encoded from middle-to-late layers, indicating the potential for activation-level controllability. Leveraging these insights, we steer models towards compliance, increasing instruction following by up to 29%. Overall, our findings establish that while LLM reasoning is anchored to concrete instances, active mechanistic interventions can effectively decouple logical schemata from data, offering a path toward improved controllability, faithfulness, and generalizability.

Controllable medical video generation has achieved remarkable progress, but it still lacks interpretability, which requires the alignment of generated contents with physical priors and faithful clinical manifestations. To push the boundaries from mere controllability to interpretability, we propose DepthPilot, the first interpretable framework for colonoscopy video generation. This work takes a step toward trustworthy generation through two synergistic paradigms. To achieve explicit geometric grounding, DepthPilot devises a prior distribution alignment strategy, injecting depth constraints into the diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient fine-tuning to ensure anatomical fidelity. To enhance intrinsic nonlinear modeling under these geometric constraints, DepthPilot employs an adaptive spline denoising module, replacing fixed linear weights with learnable spline functions to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Extensive evaluations across three public datasets and in-house clinical data confirm DepthPilot's robust ability to produce physically consistent videos. It achieves FID scores below 15 across all benchmarks and ranks first in clinician assessments, bridging the gap between "visually realistic" and "clinically interpretable". Moreover, DepthPilot-generated videos are expected to enable reliable 3D reconstruction, facilitating surgical navigation and blind region identification, and serve as a foundation toward the colorectal world model.

Reliable deployment of language models requires two capabilities that appear distinct but share a common geometric foundation: predicting whether a model will accept targeted behavioral control, and detecting when its internal structure degrades. We show that geometric stability, the consistency of a representation's pairwise distance structure, addresses both. Supervised Shesha variants that measure task-aligned geometric stability predict linear steerability with near-perfect accuracy ($ρ= 0.89$-$0.97$) across 35-69 embedding models and three NLP tasks, capturing unique variance beyond class separability (partial $ρ= 0.62$-$0.76$). A critical dissociation emerges: unsupervised stability fails entirely for steering on real-world tasks ($ρ\approx 0.10$), revealing that task alignment is essential for controllability prediction. However, unsupervised stability excels at drift detection, measuring nearly $2\times$ greater geometric change than CKA during post-training alignment (up to $5.23\times$ in Llama) while providing earlier warning in 73% of models and maintaining a $6\times$ lower false alarm rate than Procrustes. Together, supervised and unsupervised stability form complementary diagnostics for the LLM deployment lifecycle: one for pre-deployment controllability assessment, the other for post-deployment monitoring.

Large Language Models produce a controllability gap in safety-critical engineering: even low rates of undetected constraint violations render a system undeployable. Current orchestration paradigms suffer from sycophantic compliance, context attention decay, and stochastic oscillation during self-correction. We introduce the Convergent AI Agent Framework (CAAF), which transitions agentic workflows from open-loop generation to closed-loop fail-safe determinism via three pillars: (1) Recursive Atomic Decomposition with physical context firewalls; (2) Harness as an Asset, formalizing domain invariants into machine-readable registries enforced by a deterministic Unified Assertion Interface; and (3) Structured Semantic Gradients with State Locking for monotonic non-regression. This paper makes two core claims. First, an industrialization thesis: once domain invariants are formalized as an executable Harness, the Harness itself becomes a first-class enterprise asset that compounds in value as foundation models commoditize, and CAAF's ability to deliver its reliability on commodity-tier models makes fully self-hosted, on-premises deployment architecturally feasible for regulated sectors where cloud APIs are not an option. Second, an architectural claim supported by ablation: CAAF's three pillars address complementary failure surfaces and none alone closes the controllability gap at commodity cost. The paper contributes entirely at the orchestration and industrialization layer. Evidence across two complementary benchmarks, three-tier UAI ablations, multi-agent baselines, and a closed-source commodity family replicated by two independent open-weight families, is reported in the body.

Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion, unfavorable contact can degrade controllability, induce kinematic singularities, or introduce safety risks. We present a contact-aware planning approach that evaluates contact quality, penalizing hazardous interactions, while permitting benign contact. The planner produces kinematically feasible trajectories and contact-aware Jacobians which can be used for closed-loop control in hardware experiments. We validate the approach by testing the integrated system (planning, control, and mechanical design) on anatomical models from patient scans. The planner generates effective plans for three common anatomical environments, and, in all hardware trials, the continuum robot was able to reach the target while avoiding dangerous tip contact (100% success). Mean tracking errors were 1.9 +/- 0.5 mm, 1.2 +/- 0.1 mm, and 1.7 +/- 0.2 mm across the three different environments. Ablation studies showed that penalizing end-of-continuum-segment (ECS) contact improved manipulability and prevented hardware failures. Overall, this work enables reliable, contact-aware navigation in highly constrained environments.

Recent advances in video-to-audio (V2A) generation enable high-quality audio synthesis from visual content, yet achieving robust and fine-grained controllability remains challenging. Existing methods suffer from weak textual controllability under visual-text conflict and imprecise stylistic control due to entangled temporal and timbre information in reference audio. Moreover, the lack of standardized benchmarks limits systematic evaluation. We propose ControlFoley, a unified multimodal V2A framework that enables precise control over video, text, and reference audio. We introduce a joint visual encoding paradigm that integrates CLIP with a spatio-temporal audio-visual encoder to improve alignment and textual controllability. We further propose temporal-timbre decoupling to suppress redundant temporal cues while preserving discriminative timbre features. In addition, we design a modality-robust training scheme with unified multimodal representation alignment (REPA) and random modality dropout. We also present VGGSound-TVC, a benchmark for evaluating textual controllability under varying degrees of visual-text conflict. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple V2A tasks, including text-guided, text-controlled, and audio-controlled generation. ControlFoley achieves superior controllability under cross-modal conflict while maintaining strong synchronization and audio quality, and shows competitive or better performance compared to an industrial V2A system. Code, models, datasets, and demos are available at: https://yjx-research.github.io/ControlFoley/.

The increasing deployment of deep learning systems requires systematic evaluation of their reliability in real-world scenarios. Traditional gradient-based adversarial attacks introduce small perturbations that rarely correspond to realistic failures and mainly assess robustness rather than functional behavior. Generative test generation methods offer an alternative but are often limited to simple datasets or constrained input domains. Although diffusion models enable high-fidelity image synthesis, their computational cost and limited controllability restrict their applicability to large-scale testing. We present HyNeA, a generative testing method that enables direct and efficient control over diffusion-based generation. HyNeA provides dataset-free controllability through hypernetworks, allowing targeted manipulation of the generative process without relying on architecture-specific conditioning mechanisms or dataset-driven adaptations such as fine-tuning. HyNeA employs a distinct training strategy that supports instance-level tuning to identify failure-inducing test cases without requiring datasets that explicitly contain examples of similar failures. This approach enables the targeted generation of realistic failure cases at substantially lower computational cost than search-based methods. Experimental results show that HyNeA improves controllability and test diversity compared to existing generative test generators and generalizes to domains where failure-labeled training data is unavailable.

Recent advances in world models have greatly enhanced interactive environment simulation. Existing methods mainly fall into two categories: (1) static world generation models, which construct 3D environments without active agents, and (2) controllable-entity models, which allow a single entity to perform limited actions in an otherwise uncontrollable environment. In this work, we introduce CustomX, leveraging the realism and structural grounding of static world generation while extending controllable-entity models to support user-specified characters capable of performing open-ended actions. Users can provide a 3DGS scene and a character, then use natural language to direct the character to perform diverse behaviors, ranging from basic locomotion to object-centric interactions, while freely exploring the environment. CustomX synthesizes temporally coherent video clips that preserve visual fidelity with the provided scene and character, formulated as a conditional autoregressive video generation problem. Built upon a pre-trained video generator, our training strategy significantly enhances motion dynamics while maintaining generalization across actions and characters. Our evaluation covers a broad range of aspects, including visual quality, character consistency, action controllability, and long-horizon coherence.

While recent video generation models have achieved significant visual fidelity, they often suffer from the lack of explicit physical controllability and plausibility. To address this, some recent studies attempted to guide the video generation with physics-based rendering. However, these methods face inherent challenges in accurately modeling complex physical properties and effectively control ling the resulting physical behavior over extended temporal sequences. In this work, we introduce PhysChoreo, a novel framework that can generate videos with diverse controllability and physical realism from a single image. Our method consists of two stages: first, it estimates the static initial physical properties of all objects in the image through part-aware physical property reconstruction. Then, through temporally instructed and physically editable simulation, it synthesizes high-quality videos with rich dynamic behaviors and physical realism. Experimental results show that PhysChoreo can generate videos with rich behaviors and physical realism, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics.

We present PitchFlower, a flow-based neural audio codec with explicit pitch controllability. Our approach promotes pitch disentanglement through a simple perturbation: during training, F0 contours are flattened and randomly shifted at the input, while the true F0 is provided as conditioning to regenerate the original audio. A vector-quantization bottleneck prevents pitch recovery, and a flow-based decoder generates high quality audio. Experiments show that PitchFlower achieves accurate pitch control at the level of DSP baselines but at much higher audio quality, and performs on par with state-of-the-art neural approaches. Notably, despite using WORLD-transformed audio for training, our method filters out the vocoder's inherent artifacts, revealing a strong resilience of deep generative modeling to input degradation. This finding suggests that our framework provides a simple and extensible path that could be extended to other speech attributes.