Learning robust dexterous grasping requires real-world data that records the physical outcomes of grasp attempts. Such data is hard to obtain at scale: teleoperation yields valid physical outcomes but is slow and operator-biased, while simulation-based generation is cheap and scalable but cannot certify contact validity. A natural solution is to generate candidate grasps and verify them on real hardware, but this scales only if the entire collection loop (perception, execution, labeling, and reset) runs without human intervention. We present AutoDex, an automated real-world data-collection system that closes this loop: for each candidate from a replaceable generator, it localizes the object under severe hand-object occlusion with dense 20-camera perception, executes collision-monitored robot motions, labels lift-and-hold success or failure, and actively resets the object between trials to expose additional candidates across stable poses. The result is a reusable database of physically labeled grasp trials that downstream systems can query by retrieval and feasibility filtering. Using AutoDex, we collect 3,593 grasp trials across Allegro and Inspire hands on 100 diverse objects, with synchronized multi-view observations and robot-state logs. For a matched 500-trajectory collection, AutoDex requires 10.3 h versus 49.4 h for teleoperation, yielding a 4.8x throughput improvement, and grasps retrieved from the AutoDex-validated database succeed 76% versus 34% for simulation-only validation. Code and data will be publicly released.

Reconstructing dynamic non-rigid objects from monocular video requires integrating visual cues from direct observations with data-driven priors over geometry and appearance. Prior approaches either learn to directly predict 4D representations from visual input or initialize a 3D representation that is subsequently deformed and refined based on video evidence. However, the former are constrained by the scarcity of 4D training data, while the latter leverage priors only for the initial reconstruction and rely solely on video supervision thereafter; neither handles complex in-the-wild scenarios with large deformations and occlusions well. We present Lift4D, a test-time optimization framework that addresses both limitations. First, we adapt an existing single-view 3D reconstruction model to yield temporally consistent per-frame predictions via causal latent conditioning, providing a coherent initialization for a deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting representation. We then ``sculpt'' this representation to match the input video through an occlusion-aware optimization that faithfully recovers visible surface details while completing unobserved regions using a view-conditioned diffusion prior. We demonstrate that Lift4D clearly improves over prior 4D reconstruction methods, particularly on challenging in-the-wild sequences with severe occlusions and non-rigid motion.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically pretrained on short sequences and then extended to work on longer sequences with additional training. However, such LLMs still struggle to further generalize to very long sequences. We propose Randomized YaRN, a training method that improves length generalization by combining YaRN-based positional extrapolation with randomized positional encoding and a length curriculum. During training on short context data, tokens are assigned YaRN positional encodings sampled from a larger position range, exposing the model to out-of-distribution positional representations even on short-context inputs. We evaluate Randomized YaRN on two challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, BABILong and Multi-Round Coreference Resolution (MRCR). When training on data with <8K context, Randomized YaRN consistently improves reasoning performance on context lengths from 16K to 128K and outperforms standard fine-tuning, with the largest gains appearing at far out-of-distribution lengths. Our results suggest that progressively exposing models to OOD positional distributions provides an effective recipe for generalizable long-context reasoning.

Despite the impressive manipulation capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, their operational safety under strict constraints remains largely unverified. To address this, we introduce a parametric safety benchmark to procedurally generate safety-critical scenarios with comprehensive stochasticity. To overcome the scalability bottlenecks of human teleoperation, we develop a novel keypose-driven data generation pipeline. Leveraging this infrastructure, we curate a large-scale dataset of 19,664 strictly collision-free demonstrations with extensive domain randomization. We then conduct a systematic cross-paradigm evaluation of eight VLA and two embodied foundation models. Our analysis reveals a critical generalization-safety tension: although high-diversity training fosters safer trajectories, task success remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sub-optimal trajectory synthesis and semantic misalignment. By providing a scalable pipeline, a robust dataset, and profound failure-mode insights, LIBERO-Safety establishes a crucial foundation for developing safe and reliable VLA models.

Human-hand demonstrations provide a direct and scalable source of physical interaction data for robot learning. While manual retargeting is indispensable for establishing kinematic action correspondence across different morphologies, robust transfer requires going beyond geometry to address the underlying alignment of physical dynamics between human and robot manipulation. To address this, we introduce LaST-HD, a novel human-to-robot action learning paradigm that extends reasoning-before-acting VLA by aligning human-hand and robot demonstrations in a shared latent reasoning space. Rather than mimicking human kinematics, LaST-HD trains an auxiliary action-conditioned world model on unpaired human-hand and robot trajectories to synthesize unified latent targets. After aligning cross-embodiment representations in this shared forward-dynamics space, these targets supervise LaST-HD's latent reasoning process, enabling it to internalize shared physical dynamics and drive efficient human-hand action learning. Moreover, we develop Out-of-Lab (OOL) Glove, a low-cost motion-capture glove tailored to LaST-HD for human-hand data collection. The captured human data provide precise keypoints and serve as universal action supervision across grippers and dexterous hands. Armed with the aligned latent space and high-fidelity human-hand data, we develop a progressive mixed-to-human training recipe comprising mixed human-robot co-training and human-hand online correction post-training. Through mixed co-training, LaST-HD improves generalization to novel objects, scenes, and positions using only human-hand demonstrations. With online correction, LaST-HD further adapts to novel environments and achieves over 90\% accuracy using only 20 minutes of OOL glove data.

Reference-based diffusion models enable highly controllable image generation by leveraging elements from input images to guide prompt-driven synthesis. However, these models are computationally expensive in runtime, and their cost scales severely with the number of input references. While the efficiency of diffusion models has been extensively studied in the context of prompt-driven generation, it remains largely under-explored in the realm of reference-based models. This setting presents unique challenges not addressed by methods focusing solely on generation. In particular, the wasteful representation of references as dense token grids offers significant opportunities for improvement. In this work, we present Sparse Context, a method for constructing sparse reference representations by retaining only a reduced subset of reference tokens. We observe that even without modifying the model, dropping a significant portion of reference tokens at inference time largely preserves its generation capabilities. To fully realize this potential, we fine-tune the model with random token dropping at varying ratios, encouraging robustness to partial reference representations. Crucially, this training strategy decouples the model from any specific token selection rule, allowing flexible control at inference time. At inference time, instead of random dropping, we apply task-aware token selection strategies that prioritize the most informative regions of the reference images, adapting the token budget to the input and task requirements. Extensive experiments show our method achieves a 4x increase in inference speed for multi-reference generation and an 2x for single reference generation. Importantly, this efficiency is achieved without compromising visual quality across both spatially-aligned editing and subject-driven generation.

Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive. We introduce CoorDex, a learning pipeline that converts high-dimensional body and dexterous hand control into coordinated latent residual control, enabling high-DoF dexterous loco-manipulation on the move. Starting from simulated whole-body and hand demonstrations, CoorDex trains privileged motion tracking teachers for the humanoid body and dexterous hand, distills them into proprioception-conditioned latent priors, and uses the frozen priors as the action space for downstream residual reinforcement learning. A coordinated latent residual policy composes these priors through shared task context and separate body-hand residual heads, preserving natural whole-body motion while improving finger-level contact reliability. CoorDex enables a Unitree G1 humanoid with a 20-DoF WUJI hand to execute dexterous manipulation while in motion, including non-stop bottle grasping and carrying, fridge door opening on the move, and cube pick-and-turn. Ablations on the walk-grasp-carry task show that joint-space PPO, joint-space hand control, and monolithic latent prediction all fail under the same reward budget, while the latent-prior interface and coordinated residual structure make high-dimensional contact-rich loco-manipulation trainable. Project Page: this https URL

Modern text-to-image models excel in visual fidelity and prompt adherence. However, this strict adherence comes at the cost of diversity: generated samples tend to collapse into a single visual interpretation. Existing methods to improve diversity produce outputs driven by incidental variations rather than meaningful design choices. This motivates a new variant of the diversity task where structure is enforced on the generated samples. We introduce a method for controlled diversity that enables Semantic Browsing, where users can navigate structured image galleries and experience creative exploration through a systematic traversal of meaningful, interpretable axes of variation. Achieving this level of semantic control requires a deep understanding of the scene. We exploit the fact that recent text-to-image models are trained on elaborated captions, effectively decoupling semantic decision-making from pixel generation. This enables a paradigm shift: instead of relying on stochastic variation within the text-to-image model, we induce diversity directly at the text level. By leveraging rich textual representations, we allow a Vision Language Model (VLM) to operate on the full scene context. To overcome the generic outputs typical of standard VLMs, we employ an agentic workflow that explicitly enforces structured variation attuned to the original prompt. We demonstrate that our method produces diverse and navigable design spaces where every variation corresponds to a specific, user-understandable semantic decision.

Following the paradigm shift initiated by OpenAI o3, interleaved reasoning with code to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has become a pivotal research frontier. The existing literature focuses primarily on tool-use within vision-perception tasks. However, such approaches typically rely on predefined heuristics for visual manipulation and are inherently incapable of addressing numerical computation problems due to their exclusive focus on visual operations. This paper empowers MLLMs with adaptive interleaved reasoning capabilities through extended reinforcement learning training on code-augmented complex numerical computation tasks. To this end, we propose a comprehensive three-component solution consisting of: a two-stage cold-start data construction pipeline, data filtering strategies for RL dataset curation, and an adaptive tool-invocation strategy leveraging a group-constrained reward function for interleaved reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that after Reinforcement Learning training with the group-constrained reward function, performance improves by an average of 6.1 percentage points (pp) on evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, the accuracy for interleaved reasoning samples increases by 9.9 pp, and the overall success rate of tool-use exceeds 95%. Our data and code are available at: this https URL.

AdamW is the de facto optimizer for training large language models (LLMs), yet the theory behind it still lives mostly in finite-variance regimes. This is increasingly unsatisfying, as empirical evidence indicates that stochastic gradient noise in LLM pretraining is typically heavy-tailed. Recent work shows that sign-based optimizers such as Lion and Muon achieve sharp heavy-tailed rates, and that AdaGrad can also converge under heavy-tailed noise. However, no rigorous convergence theory for AdamW has yet been established in this regime. Can AdamW converge under the same heavy-tailed assumptions, or does its second-moment accumulator create a genuine obstruction? We formulate this as an open problem, prove a positive weighted-metric benchmark, and give a corridor lower-bound mechanism showing how denominator memory can hide large gradients.

Generating human-object interactions (HOI) is central to character animation, robotics, AR/VR, and embodied AI. Recent HOI generation methods synthesize motion from text, object geometry, and sparse waypoints, controlling action semantics and object trajectories. However, these signals underspecify interaction: the same prompt and trajectory can produce different grasps, approach directions, body poses, object poses, contacts, and body-object layouts. We address this ambiguity with a reference image as a visual specification of the desired interaction snapshot. However, a single global image representation conflates distinct cues and conditions all frames on identical visual evidence. We therefore introduce IMAGIN-4D, a diffusion-based HOI generator that decomposes image conditioning spatio-temporally. For spatial conditioning, IMAGIN-4D extracts supervised interaction-state tokens for body pose, object pose, body-object contact, and spatial relationships at the depicted frame. For temporal conditioning, it computes frame-aware tokens by querying image patches per generated frame, allowing sequence segments to attend to different visual cues from the same image. To balance image, text, and waypoint cues, IMAGIN-4D uses role-aware conditioning: text, waypoints, and interaction-state tokens use separate AdaLN streams, while frame-aware visual tokens cross-attend with motion tokens. Since HOI motion datasets lack paired images, we build a synthetic motion-to-image rendering pipeline from FullBodyManipulation (FBM) and introduce an image-adherence metric to evaluate whether generated motions match the reference snapshot. Experiments on FBM and BEHAVE show that IMAGIN-4D improves fine-grained interaction control over single-token and uniformly image-conditioned baselines while preserving waypoint-following and motion quality. Code and models will be released at this https URL.

Mental health assessment commonly relies on isolated screening instruments or data-driven models that often lack interpretability and multi-dimensional integration. Existing approaches frequently focus on individual indicators such as depression or anxiety while providing limited support for comprehensive and explainable decision-making. To address this limitation, this study proposes PsyBridge, a hybrid intelligent decision-support framework designed for multi-dimensional mental health assessment through the integration of clinically validated screening tools, cognitive evaluation, and personality profiling within a unified architecture. The proposed framework incorporates PHQ-9 and GAD-7 assessments alongside cognitive and behavioural indicators using a modular design and a weighted aggregation mechanism to generate interpretable mental health risk classifications and recommendations. To evaluate the framework, a semi-synthetic dataset consisting of 500 patient profiles representing varying severity levels was constructed based on clinically grounded score distributions. Experimental results demonstrate that PsyBridge achieves an overall accuracy of 0.84, outperforming standalone PHQ-9 and GAD-7 assessments while improving precision, recall, and F1-score. Sensitivity analysis and ablation studies further indicate that integrating cognitive and personality components contributes to more stable classification performance and reduces inconsistencies in moderate-risk prediction. The findings suggest that PsyBridge provides a scalable and interpretable approach for AI-assisted mental health decision support, particularly within digital healthcare and telehealth environments.

Prior work shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit introspective capability on benign tasks. We extend the question to safety contexts and examine how reliably a model can recognize that its own prior response was elicited by an adversarial prefill attack. Across ten open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs (3B to 70B) and four safety benchmarks, no model reliably recognizes its own compromised outputs, with models claiming intent on prefilled responses at an average rate of $27.3\%$. Introspective signal stems largely from safety- and refusal-related reasoning. Orthogonalizing models' weights against the refusal direction collapses the gap between claiming rates on prefilled and natural outputs to near zero, though the direction is not its unique mediator. The signal is also probe-dependent: framing the question as internal intention versus external tampering elicits qualitatively different responses on the same models. We test three LoRA finetuning methods (SFT, GRPO, DPO) on eight models from 3B to 27B; all three widen the intention-probe gap on every model from 8B to 27B, with method ranking varying by model. The intervention does not transfer to the tampering probe and counterintuitively raises attack success rate under adversarial prefill on most models, amounting to a partial mitigation. These findings outline mechanisms underpinning the observed introspective signals in safety contexts and highlight risks in the reliability of LLM self-reports.

Modern language models, including transformer, recurrent, and memory-based variants, share a common chassis: a stack of identical layers in which parameters are allocated uniformly across depth. This is a default inherited from the original transformer and largely unchanged since, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that layers contribute non-uniformly to the final output, with later layers refining the residual stream rather than transforming it. We ask whether parameter capacity should reflect this asymmetry. Our controlled experiment shows that, under a fixed budget, allocating more capacity to earlier layers and less to later layers improves perplexity over a uniform-width baseline, while the reverse allocation hurts. Building on this result, we introduce Tapered Language Models (TLMs), an architectural principle in which a parameter-bearing component is monotonically tapered across depth under a fixed total budget. MLPs are the natural site for this instantiation: they dominate parameter count across all modern LM families and expose width as a single, clean axis of variation. Across three model scales and four architectures (Transformer, Gated Attention, Hope-attention, and Titans), tapering MLP width via a smooth cosine schedule consistently improves perplexity and downstream benchmark performance over uniform baselines, at no additional parameter or compute cost. These findings establish depth-aware capacity allocation as a simple, architecture-agnostic axis of language model design, a free lever hidden in plain sight.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently portrayed as general-purpose solvers capable of solving arbitrary tasks. We argue that this view overlooks a fundamental constraint: language is a compressed and capacity-limited interface for conveying task information. Modelling User--System interaction as a bilevel \emph{cheap-talk} game, we analyse how latent tasks are encoded into prompts and reinterpreted under alignment and safety constraints. We introduce a conceptual decomposition separating task inference from execution and derive PAC-Bayes bounds that distinguish finite-sample estimation error from irreducible structural limitations. Our first main result establishes an \emph{expressivity floor}: language acts as a capacity-limited communication channel, and whenever the informational complexity of a task family exceeds the capacity of that channel, distinct tasks become unavoidably indistinguishable to the Solver, inducing a strictly positive error floor that cannot be eliminated by additional data, optimisation, or model scaling alone. We then establish an \emph{objective-misalignment floor}: when alignment constraints restrict the admissible output set, the User-ideal distribution may lie outside the feasible class, inducing an irreducible distortion. Together, these results yield a formal negative conclusion: prompt-conditioned LLMs are not universal problem solvers through prompting alone, as there exist task families for which correct behaviour is provably unattainable even in the infinite-data regime. More broadly, our analysis shows the limits of prompt-based generalisation arise from information-constrained communication and alignment-constrained objectives. This suggests that interfaces beyond natural language, including multimodal observations and, external memory, may reduce the inherent LLM limitations by increasing the task-relevant information available to the System.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a scalable path forward for agentic AI, comprising multiple LLM-based agents, each assigned a system prompt and a position within a workflow that governs inter-agent coordination and output aggregation. System prompts thus form a critical and accessible optimization surface: they specify agents' roles and behaviors, enabling system-level improvements without model finetuning. Although prompt optimization has shown substantial potential for single LLMs, extending it to MAS poses distinct challenges, notably an exponentially growing search space. It remains unclear whether, when, and by how much prompt optimization improves MAS performance, and how sensitive such gains are to system configuration. In this work, we systematically study system-prompt optimization across a broad range of MAS setups varying in task, workflow, communication protocol, and team size, benchmarking two prompt optimizers that naturally extend state-of-the-art single-agent methods. The results reveal its potential to unlock significant gains while exposing open challenges, characterizing when and how much prompt optimization helps across diverse MAS settings.

Woven structures exhibit rich mechanical behaviors including anisotropic stiffness, shear-induced locking, and crimp interchange that emerge purely from the geometric arrangement of individual weavers rather than from constituent material properties. Existing models either homogenize these interactions or resolve them at prohibitive computational cost. We introduce a reduced-order model that bridges this gap by representing individual weaver interactions through a system of nodes and four physically interpretable stiffness elements capturing axial deformation, in-plane uncrimping, inter-weaver shear, and frictional slip. Eigenvalue analysis of the unit cell confirms that the lowest-energy deformation modes correspond directly to known weave-specific phenomena, and that each element is necessary for a complete kinematic and mechanistic description. Element stiffness parameters are calibrated against empirical three-point bending and shear data, achieving agreement within 5% across varied weaver widths and spacings. The validated model is then applied to demonstrate capabilities beyond the reach of continuum approaches including: the emergent Poisson's response arising from crimp interchange, stepwise force reduction during progressive weaver pullout, stress localization under three distinct tearing configurations, and programmable mechanical anisotropy through spatially graded weaver stiffness. The physical transparency and computational efficiency of the framework position it as a practical tool for the analysis and design of woven architected materials with programmable mechanical response.

We consider the problem of sequentially approximating functions of each element in a slowly-varying sequence, i.e. one where the magnitude $\alpha_i$ of the difference between the elements at positions $i$ and $i-1$ is small. Recent work on implicit trace estimation shows that when $\alpha_t$ is small, reusing queries to past sequence elements can reduce the overall cost [Dharangutte \& Musco, NeurIPS~2021; Woodruff et al., NeurIPS~2022]. We introduce a framework generalizing this to a variety of linear and nonlinear functions on diverse vector spaces, obtaining novel sequential estimation results for matrix powers, spectral densities, Monte Carlo integration, and a boundary value problem from partial differential equations~(PDEs). Furthermore, we develop a novel algorithm for use with this framework that locally scales the estimation budget with $\alpha_t$, obtaining sharper path-length-style variation bounds of form $\mathcal O(\sum_{i=1}^m\alpha_i)$ on the cost of estimating a sequence of length $m$. This improves upon the previous implicit trace estimation bound of $\mathcal O(m\cdot\max_i\alpha_i)$ [Dharangutte \& Musco, NeurIPS~2021], which is achieved by fixing the query budget using the worst-case $\alpha_i$ and is thus inefficient for stable sequences with rare bursts. Lastly, while all past work assumes a known bound on $\alpha_i$, we show in certain cases how the changes can be estimated on-the-fly with (nearly) no added cost. In summary, our framework makes the sequential approximation toolkit general-purpose and adaptive while improving upon state-of-the-art-guarantees for dynamic trace estimation.

Enterprise agents increasingly operate inside workspaces: they read heterogeneous files, invoke tools, and deliver business artifacts. We introduce EnterpriseClawBench, an enterprise agent benchmark constructed from proprietary, real-world agent sessions. Starting from a large archive of workplace sessions, the EnterpriseClawBench produces 852 reproducible tasks, each paired with recovered fixtures, rewritten prompts, role classes, skill subclasses, hard rules, and semantic rubrics. Because the sessions contain internal enterprise content, we do not release the benchmark data; instead, our reusable contribution is the construction and evaluation protocol. On EnterpriseClawBench, the best configuration reaches only 0.663 (Codex with GPT-5.5). These results show that enterprise agent evaluation must report harness--model combinations, artifact delivery, visual quality, cost, runtime, and skill-transfer behavior, rather than collapsing performance into a single score. Code: this https URL

Accurate volume and surface area estimation is critical for diverse applications, from marine ecology to medical diagnostics. However, existing methods often suffer from high computational costs and poor performance with sparse and noisy data. We propose a fully feed-forward framework that regresses scale-normalized volume and surface area and their associated uncertainties directly from multi-view images. By fusing 3D point cloud reconstructions with view-aligned 2D features through a graph-based decoder, our model bypasses iterative optimization, ensuring exceptional scalability and rapid inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly when operating with a low number of input images. Validated across coral monitoring, dietary analysis, and anthropometry, our proposed framework provides a robust, adaptable solution for quantitative shape analysis. This architecture provides a high-speed, scalable alternative for precise geometric estimation from visual data, maintaining high performance even in resource-constrained or sparse-view scenarios.

Personalized content systems depend on available UGC and struggle when suitable content is absent, delayed, or costly to create. Although multimodal generators can synthesize content on demand, how to translate behavioral traces into generation-ready preferences remains underexplored. We study personalized multimodal content generation: creating user-tailored multimodal content without existing item pools or waiting for matching UGC. We propose TailorMind, linking collaborative preference modeling with controllable multimodal generation. TailorMind enriches sparse user histories via hypergraph collaborative filtering and optimizes textual profiles with ranking-error feedback and textual gradient descent. Retrieval-augmented style control grounds outputs in authentic UGC patterns, while cross-modal cohesion reflection reduces semantic drift. We construct TailorBench, a benchmark from three mainstream platforms evaluated along five dimensions: coherence, novelty, aesthetic, hallucination, profiling. Experiments show that TailorMind achieves competitive or stronger coherence, improves novelty and aesthetic quality over representative generation baselines and ground-truth UGC, demonstrating advantages over retrieving available content or comparable UGC, while achieving up to 29% Recall gains in reranking. Our code is released at: this https URL.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have the potential for open-world generalization by leveraging pretrained vision-language representations, yet downstream finetuning on limited robot data often degrades these representations, leading to brittle policies that ignore language instructions in favor of visual shortcuts, a failure mode we term instruction blindness. We hypothesize that standard finetuning with limited data applies gradients to a sparse set of points, which manifests as a sharp loss landscape with high-curvature minima. We propose to address this directly through flatness-preserving optimization while finetuning on the exact same data, where learning a flatter landscape results in a model more robust to perturbations in the weight space. Specifically, we demonstrate that simply applying sharpness-aware minimization during VLA finetuning significantly improves instruction following by over 60% across multiple simulation and real-world benchmarks without additional data, architectural modification, or retraining. We further analyze the effect of selective sharpness, quantify its effects, and show that our approach is complementary to existing guidance techniques. Project page can be found at this https URL.

In many modern applications of reinforcement learning (RL), the natural reward for a task of interest is inherently sparse: a reward of 0 is given everywhere except when the task is completed, when a reward of +1 is given. Training a policy to maximize such a sparse reward requires solving a challenging credit assignment problem, leading to slow or ineffective RL improvement. We propose a simple approach to transform a sparse outcome reward into a dense process reward. Our approach relies on training a discriminator to distinguish between previous successful and unsuccessful episodes, and using this discriminator to incentivize the RL-learned policy to match the state-action visitations of successful episodes, while avoiding those of unsuccessful episodes. By incentivizing the policy to match the visitations over all states, not just those that correspond to task success, this reward provides dense feedback on whether progress is being made towards task completion, and, we show, provably achieves this without changing the optimal policy. Focusing on finetuning of robotic control policies, we demonstrate that our approach leads to significantly faster RL finetuning performance on both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, as compared to simply maximizing the sparse outcome reward.

Matrix-aware optimizers such as Muon and Muown have recently shown strong empirical performance for pre-training Transformers. In particular, Muown separates each weight matrix into row magnitudes and an un-normalized direction variable, updating the former with Adam and the latter with Muon. We show that the directional update of Muown is equivalent to a Riemannian step on the normalized directions, while the magnitude of the un-normalized parameterization only modulates the angular step size. This explains the step-size stability of Muown and suggests making the angular step size explicit. The resulting method, AngularMuown, optimizes directly over the normalized directions and uses a schedulable angular multiplier decoupled from the radial magnitude update. AngularMuown improves over Muown and, at the time of writing, a preliminary version is leading the per-optimizer category of the modded nanoGPT speedrunning competition. Further experiments on Qwen2-0.5B, and 1.1B parameter mixture-of-experts models confirm the algorithm scales beyond small models. An implementation of the algorithm is available at this https URL

Estimating the 6D pose of unseen objects is a fundamental yet challenging problem for open-world robotics and embodied perception. Model-based methods are accurate but depend on CAD assets or heavy onboarding, while most model-free approaches are still limited to pairwise single-anchor matching and thus fail under occlusion and large viewpoint changes with low query-reference overlap. Therefore, we present PANY, a unified model-free framework that seamlessly supports both RGB and RGB-D inputs, operates on one or sparse pose-free reference views, and generalizes effectively to novel objects. Built on a multi-view transformer geometry backbone, PANY moves beyond pairwise matching by learning view-consistent geometry and cross-view alignment cues that remain stable under wide baselines and limited overlap. When additional unposed assist views are available, PANY aggregates them via pose-graph canonical registration to increase geometric coverage and reinforce the final pose. Extensive experiments show that PANY achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing model-free methods, improving pose accuracy by +12% on YCB-V and over +20% on LM-O. Furthermore, PANY consistently performs well under both single-reference and sparse-reference settings, demonstrating strong robustness in real-world environments.

Remote patient monitoring depends on patient-reported data to capture the subjective dimension of recovery that devices cannot measure. The Quality of Recovery (QoR-15) survey is the gold-standard instrument for this purpose. It was designed and validated for occasional in-hospital assessment, yet remote monitoring now administers it to patients daily. In our own post-surgical deployment, only 55% of patients submitted the survey more than 14 days of 30 monitoring days. We developed QoR-compact, a five-item daily input for the RPM prediction pathway. Setting a deployment-driven target of one-third of the daily items, we exhaustively evaluated all 3,003 five-question subsets of the QoR-15 and tested whether the best of them matches the full instrument in predicting near-term postoperative recovery severity. QoR-compact achieves a mean AUC-ROC of 0.968 (95% CI 0.915-0.988), statistically comparable to the 0.964 baseline obtained with one-third of the items. Patient-level backtesting indicates that it tracks readmission events as faithfully as the full form. Its five items span the physical and psychological axes of recovery: Q3 (feeling rested), Q9 (feeling comfortable and in control), Q10 (general well-being), Q12 (severe pain), and Q14 (feeling worried or anxious). The QoR-15 remains the gold-standard measure of recovery; QoR-compact complements it as a shorter daily input designed for prediction. This parity provides the basis for a prospective study of whether a lighter daily input is, in turn, completed more consistently. External validation on larger cohorts is required before clinical use.

Can representations learned for image generation also support the evaluation of generated images? We study text-to-image reward prediction as a downstream task of generative representation learning. To this end, we introduce DiT-Reward, which converts a pretrained text-to-image Diffusion Transformer into a reward model by processing near-clean image latents and aggregating text-conditioned image representations across transformer layers. Under the same training data mixture as HPSv3, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 on all four evaluated preference benchmarks, reaching 85.6% on HPDv2 and 77.6% on HPDv3. When the generative backbone is frozen, a lightweight learned head can still extract meaningful preference predictions from its representations. Probing across depth further reveals that downstream reward performance is strongest in the middle-to-late layers and benefits from combining representations across different stages. We also observe consistent positive scaling with generative backbone capacity. Finally, when used to optimize Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large with Flow-GRPO, DiT-Reward outperforms HPSv3 along the matched training trajectory, with particularly clear gains in realism. Direct latent scoring also achieves a 1.65x inference speedup over HPSv3 with comparable peak memory. These results show that pretrained generative DiTs provide transferable representations for reward modeling and policy optimization.

Most imitation learning methods assume full observability in table-top settings. In practice, objects are often occluded, requiring robots to both search and act, and learning this coupled behavior from limited demonstrations remains challenging. We propose See2Act, an imitation learning approach that conditions action prediction on a sequence of actively-inferred viewpoints at test time, by coupling action denoising with viewpoint refinement. The policy is trained using camera poses anchored to keyframe actions from offline demonstrations, enabling implicit learning of where to see, while learning how to act. We empirically demonstrate that in Ravens the policy recovers informative viewpoints under severe occlusions, and on RLBench tasks it improves performance by up to 34% over prior methods. In the real world, we collect 50 demonstrations in a digital twin and achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on pick-and-place tasks using depth observations. The policy handles significant occlusions, showing that learned viewpoint reasoning enables robust manipulation under partial observability.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are commonly fine-tuned through passive imitation learning, where additional demonstrations are collected for tasks where the policy performs poorly. This approach incurs several downsides: it requires the robot to fail before data collection is triggered, provides little guidance about which states require supervision, and wastes demonstrator effort on redundant parts of the task where the policy already performs well. In this paper, we propose an active, continual learning paradigm for VLAs. We demonstrate that active, uncertainty-guided data collection leads to more efficient fine-tuning than when using passively-collected demonstrations. However, we also find that fine-tuning only on actively-collected recovery data leads to catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate techniques for continual learning, including replay-based data mixing and elastic weight consolidation, and identify tradeoffs between plasticity to uncertainty-guided recovery data and retention of previously learned behaviors. Overall, our work contributes an empirical study of active continual learning for autoregressive VLAs, establishing that uncertainty-guided recovery demonstrations can improve adaptation efficiency while also revealing open challenges when targeted new data is incorporated into large robot policies.

We propose Hedgementation: a new benchmark to evaluate machine learning models for hedgerow mapping from remote sensing data at country scale and 10m$^2$ spatial resolution. We combine and harmonize multiple remote sensing data products and ground truth labels sourced from a hedgerow inventory in France. We measure the ability of three baseline models to generalize across spatial distance, and across climatic zones, a more explicitly challenging task. Our benchmark tests both supervised and self-supervised learning approaches for remote sensing, applied to tracking fine-scale features of high agricultural importance. The code to reproduce the benchmark and baselines results is available at this https URL.