As REST APIs become an increasingly significant part of software systems, their validation is becoming more critical. Hence, testing and uncovering underlying issues are of utmost importance for improving software quality. However, testing REST APIs is challenging mainly due to the difficulty of assessing whether the output of an API call is correct, i.e., the test oracle problem. Metamorphic testing is a specification-based testing approach for situations where correct outputs are unknown or not specified explicitly. To check the correctness of a system, relations between the different outputs are specified. We present ARMeta, a tool-supported approach that uses an LLM-based multi-agent workflow to support metamorphic testing of REST APIs documented with OpenAPI. The agentic workflow is used to identify metamorphic test scenarios and specify them in the Given-When-Then format. These scenarios are automatically implemented as executable tests and executed against the system under test. We evaluate ARMeta on two publicly available web applications that expose REST interfaces and compare its performance with a scenario-based testing baseline. The results show that ARMeta explores behaviors that serve as a complement to existing scenario-based testing approaches.

This paper addresses the problem of identifying parsimonious explicit piece-wise polynomial relationships that might involve a relatively large number of raw features. The algorithm leverages a recently proposed identification algorithm that yields parsimonious implicit relationships enabling to derive normality characterization in the context of anomaly detection and localization. The algorithm proposed in this paper goes a step further by deriving explicit piece-wise representations that are built using the set of polynomials involved in the implicit representations. The framework is illustrated on the problem of identifying parsimonious explicit representations of the inverse model of a 6-axis manipulator robot. Moreover, further experiments on a 4-axis robot are also shown which are designed to investigate the generalization capability of parsimonious models compared to state-of-the-art DNNs structures, when models face unseen contexts of use.

Neural surrogates promise large speedups over classical solvers for physical dynamics but fail silently at sharp dynamical events such as shocks, fronts, and contact. We present hybrid neural world models for physical dynamics: a recipe for training and deploying multi-horizon surrogates in physical state space, where a single network with continuous horizon conditioning is trained with direct supervision against textbook reference solvers to predict any future state at horizon T in one forward pass. Although no part of the training data, loss function, or architecture supervises discontinuity location, the trained surrogate encodes it implicitly, recoverable from its forward passes alone as a per-trajectory error map that concentrates on shocks, fronts, and contacts, and stays small elsewhere. The map is competitive with or better than standard label-free baselines including deep ensembles, learned error heads, gradient-magnitude indicators, and locally-adaptive conformal prediction, while using only a single trained network and requiring no calibration set or governing-equation knowledge. The recipe supports two operating points. Mode 1 runs the surrogate alone for maximum throughput, with same-hardware CPU speedups of 26x to 72x against textbook solvers on the PDE environments. Mode 2 uses the error map to gate a reference-solver fallback, deferring uncertain trajectories and roughly halving the surrogate's residual error at the default operating point. The recipe applies without modification across reaction-diffusion, compressible Euler, and rigid-body collision dynamics.

General-purpose machine translation benchmarks such as FLORES-200 have reached a saturation regime on Chinese-English pairs, where modern large language models cluster within a narrow band of high scores. Across 22 systems, FLORES-200 zh-en GEMBA scores fall in a 7.87-point range with a standard deviation of 2.29, which compresses the separation between systems on knowledge-intensive domains such as finance, healthcare, law, and science and technology. We introduce HardMTBench, a difficulty-aware diagnostic benchmark for bidirectional Chinese-English domain translation. HardMTBench covers 12 domains and contains 10,000 hand-curated source sentences with reference translations, packaged as 20,000 directional test items. A three-stage construction pipeline builds a domain-balanced candidate pool of 84{,}566 pairs, applies an LLM-based multi-signal judge over knowledge density, translation difficulty, terminology load and reference correctness, and assembles the final test set under a hardness fusion rule with per-domain quotas. Across 22 systems spanning general LLMs, commercial engines and specialised MT models, HardMTBench widens the cross-system GEMBA range by roughly a factor of two over FLORES-200, induces visible rank reorderings, and exposes domain-specific terminology and knowledge weaknesses that quality-only metrics tend to flatten. All data and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/jasonNLP/HardMTBench.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks related to reasoning and judgment. However, assessing the quality of arguments requires a rigorous evaluation. We investigate the extent to which LLMs can effectively perform this task. We tested 12 open-weight LLMs of different sizes and families under zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought to approximate expert pairwise comparisons of argument quality across three dimensions-logical, rhetorical, and dialectic-and used these comparisons in a Bradley-Terry model to infer latent strength scores and derive a ranking of arguments. Our insights show that LLMs have promising but moderate correlation with human expert judgments, with Llama-70B obtaining the strongest alignment, reaching moderate Cohen's $κ$ = 0.493 and moderate correlations with Bradley-Terry scores derived from these annotations (Kendall, Pearson, and Spearman: 0.327-0.477). Other LLMs exhibit weak, moderate, or high alignment with Llama-70B while achieving comparable results against human experts, suggesting partial but complementary understanding of underlying quality dimensions despite differences in model size and family. Moreover, LLM predictions are stable across trial runs, with fewer than 7.75\% of cases yielding different labels. Remaining variability is handled via majority voting and few-shot prompting for large-size models.

Event-based vision sensors offer asynchronous, high-temporal-resolution measurements that are attractive for low-latency robotic perception, but many event-based motion estimation methods are computationally intensive and difficult to map to FPGA hardware. We present a streaming velocity estimator that discretizes asynchronous events into fixed-duration time bins, constructs a 1-bit spatial occupancy grid, and evaluates multiple velocity hypotheses in parallel using only fixed-width integer logic - shift registers, counters, comparators, and small LUT-mapped multiplies - with no dividers and no DSP blocks. It requires no frame reconstruction, no floating-point arithmetic, and no iterative optimization. The method deliberately trades dense sub-pixel optical flow for a sparse, quantized velocity estimate at each active pixel, suited to low-latency tasks such as reactive obstacle avoidance on size-, weight-, and power-constrained platforms. On noisy synthetic data with known ground-truth velocities, the method recovers both magnitude and direction, with magnitude estimates being most challenged when objects of different velocities intersect. On a real event-camera sequence, directional accuracy reaches 99.5% across all four evaluated motion segments, with performance remaining robust across occupancy densities in the 10-40% range. We characterize the algorithm's density-dependent behavior, present a parameter sensitivity analysis, show that the proposed datapath requires less than 2 kB of storage, and implement a single-axis prototype on a low-cost Xilinx Artix-7.

In large-scale benchmarking of stochastic optimization algorithms, the key challenge is no longer whether repeated runs are needed for reliability, but how to determine when sufficient evidence has been collected without incurring unnecessary computational cost. We study a learning-based extension of a recent empirical online heuristic that adaptively estimates the required number of runs using outlier handling and skewness-based symmetry checks. Using annotated outcomes from 132{,}000 Nevergrad runs on COCO (24 problems in 20 dimensions, 10 instances each, 11 optimizers), we train classifiers on 23 statistical, energy-free, and shape and stability features to predict whether a run-number estimate is reliable, prioritizing detection of incorrect estimates via minority-class recall. We evaluate reliability prediction using a within-configuration learning setup, where models are trained and tested on data sharing the same optimizer. The results show that run-number reliability can be learned in a within-configuration scenario, enabling detection of unreliable estimates with high minority-class recall, although performance remains limited by the restricted data diversity within fixed configurations.

Entity Alignment (EA) is essential for knowledge graph (KG) fusion, but existing benchmarks often allow models to exploit name overlap rather than relational structure. This makes it difficult to evaluate whether models can reject same-name entities that refer to different real-world objects. Our primary contribution is a same-name hard-negative augmentation strategy that simultaneously yields quality-controlled evaluation benchmarks (DW-HN29K, DY-HN27K) and augmented training corpora (DW-Train, DY-Train), by mining same-name but distinct entity pairs from KG name-collision groups. We further introduce HELEA, a two-stage framework integrating (i) entity encoder retrieval trained on hard-negative-augmented training corpora with 1-hop KG context, and (ii) LLM-based reranking without additional training. Experiments show that name-dependent baselines collapse to near-random performance on our hard-negative benchmarks, while HELEA achieves F1 0.967 on DW-HN29K while maintaining Hit@1 0.993 on standard DW-15K.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a dominant paradigm for efficient LLM scaling, yet adapting them to non-English downstream tasks remains challenging. Existing fine-tuning approaches treat MoE models as monolithic learners, ignoring the heterogeneous routing structure that develops during pretraining. We validate across multiple MoE models and downstream tasks that middle layers form a language-universal alignment zone where routing divergence strongly predicts per-language task performance gaps. Building on this observation, we propose RA-MoE (Routing-Aligned MoE Fine-Tuning), a three-stage framework that categorizes parallel task examples into a four-way taxonomy (cc/ci/ic/ii) based on correctness in English and the target language, identifies task-relevant experts in the middle layers, and augments standard SFT with a routing alignment loss that encourages target-language routing on ci-type examples to follow the English task-expert activation pattern. Experiments across three MoE models, three tasks, and six target languages demonstrate that RA-MoE consistently outperforms standard SFT and strong baselines including Routing Steering and RISE, with the ci proportion of a task-language pair serving as a reliable predictor of alignment benefit.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce explicit reflective traces during complex reasoning, accompanied by anthropomorphic markers such as wait, hmm, and alternatively. Although these markers are commonly used as visible indicators of reflection, their mechanisms remain unclear, which leaves the risk of overthinking associated with redundant and repetitive reflection markers. In this work, we revisit anthropomorphic reflection markers, examining their necessity for reasoning and role in the reflection. We suppress these markers through prompt-level and token-level interventions, and analyze their effects on task performance across four benchmarks and two model scales. Our results show that anthropomorphic markers are not uniformly necessary for reasoning performance: suppressing them can preserve or improve performance in several settings, especially under larger sampling budgets. Meanwhile, marker suppression does not necessarily remove reflection behavior, as models can still perform marker-free verification. These suggest that anthropomorphic markers tend to be surface cues rather than reliable proxies for reflection itself, and motivate future research on reasoning mechanisms beyond explicit marker patterns.

Composing autoregressive models remains a core challenge in understanding how large language models can combine behaviors or skills learned across tasks. We introduce a new and principled composition strategy for autoregressive systems, inspired by composition methods developed for diffusion models. Under a factorized-conditionals assumption, we show that the resulting composition is projective: each component model preserves control over its own designated subspace of the output distribution avoiding interference between models. This property is further preserved under smooth reparameterizations of the output space, yielding a feature-space theorem. Finally, we show that composition preserves length-generalizing behavior when the factorization assumptions and component guarantees hold uniformly at the target length. These results provide a principled understanding of when model composition and merging succeed in autoregressive systems and identify conditions under which their interactions remain stable.

While Knowledge Editing (KE) enables efficient updates, its dominant Static Fact Overwriting paradigm treats LLMs as discrete databases, forcibly injecting isolated facts. Fracturing pre-trained logical topologies, this triggers Epistemic Dissonance -- a pathology where un-evolved legacy priors force the model to explicitly negate the injected update. Idealized interventions reveal that this is an inherent structural flaw rather than mere algorithmic noise, with a zero-distortion proxy yielding a catastrophic 95.6% self-refutation rate. Given the causally driven nature of real-world knowledge, grounding updates in explicit causal narratives effectively collapses this conflict rate to just 6.6%, underscoring the imperative for a paradigm shift toward Causal Editing. To internalize this evolution, we propose CODE (Causal On-policy Distillation for Editing). By coupling causal bootstrapping with asymmetric on-policy distillation, CODE engraves causal transition logic directly into parametric memory. Experiments on LLaMA-3.1 and Qwen-2.5 show CODE drastically suppresses self-refutation to 1.8% while securing robust multi-hop accuracy (up to 83.5%), seamlessly transforming discrete fact injection into coherent knowledge evolution. Code is available at https://github.com/CrashBugger/CODE.

Modern large language model (LLM) inference has progressively disaggregated to keep pace with growing model sizes and tight TTFT and TPOT service-level objectives: from chunked-prefill aggregation, to prefill-decode (P/D) disaggregation, and most recently to operator-level Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD). This trend is especially important for mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, where memory-bound attention, compute-intensive expert FFNs, and MoE dispatch/combine communication create distinct resource demands. AFD further exposes this heterogeneity by placing attention and MoE-FFN execution on separate GPU groups. Each level of disaggregation deepens the scheduling design space across workload characteristics, resource allocation, and interconnect topology, raising the central question: when does each level actually pay off? We systematically characterize this trade-off for MoE inference across realistic workloads spanning input/output sequence lengths, prefix-KV reuse, and per-user latency constraints. Using chunked-prefill and P/D disaggregation as baselines, we study the benefits and limits of AFD at scale through a framework that fuses on-device kernel measurements with high-fidelity network simulation. Under strict TTFT/TPOT SLOs, AFD sustains around 4k tokens/s of system throughput on DeepSeek-V3.2 across chat, coding, and agentic-coding workloads, where non-AFD deployments are infeasible. We distill concrete takeaways for jointly optimizing throughput and interactivity, including how to partition attention and FFN across GPUs as a function of workload and model architecture, providing design principles for current rack- and cluster-scale deployments as well as future disaggregated AI infrastructure.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation trains a smaller model to imitate a teacher's reasoning trace, but it is typically evaluated by final-answer metrics including accuracy. We ask whether gains in answer quality are accompanied by improvements in the trace. In medical QA, where short answer options can leave a richer clinical justification under-specified, a Qwen3-8B student distilled from a DeepSeek-V3-family teacher improves on MedQA-USMLE answer metrics (SC@64 74.7% to 84.4%; expected calibration error (ECE) 0.096 to 0.034). Yet under a Kimi-K2.6 style-blind LLM-judge audit, its error rate over non-abstained steps rises from 30.6% to 50.3%. In this primary medical setting, answer quality and trace factuality move in opposite directions. This before--after pattern persists across evaluators, teacher strengths, student scales and families, medical benchmarks, and style, segmentation, and answer-correctness controls. A 150-step blinded audit by a clinical expert reproduces the same ordering. Boundary checks narrow the scope of the claim: the risk appears when a compact answer under-constrains the rationale and a capable student can imitate expert-like form without reliably grounding each local claim. Standard answer metrics and aggregate hedging rates do not reveal the shift. When such traces are released or reused, answer-level metrics alone are insufficient.

Traditional network analysis focuses on single-layer networks, real-world systems often form multilayer networks with multiple relationship types. However, existing methods typically fail to capture complex inter-layer dependencies by treating layers independently or aggregating them. To address this, we propose T-GINEE (Tensor-Based Generalized Multilayer-graph Estimating Equation), a statistical regularization framework combining tensor-based generalized estimating equations with task-specific loss to model cross-network correlations explicitly. Key innovations include: (1) CP tensor decomposition capturing structural dependencies via shared latent factors; (2) a generalized estimating equation framework modeling inter-layer correlations through working covariance matrices; and (3) a flexible link function accommodating characteristics like sparsity. Our theoretical analysis establishes consistency and asymptotic normality under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate T-GINEE's effectiveness for multilayer network analysis.

In real-world scenarios of linguistic steganalysis, tested texts usually come from unseen domains with different vocabularies, topics, writing styles, and steganographic generation patterns, which can significantly degrade the detection performance. Although existing cross-domain steganalysis methods can effectively alleviate this problem through distribution alignment, domain-invariant feature learning, etc., the detection performance is not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a post-training representation editing method for cross-domain linguistic steganalysis. Specifically, the detector is first trained on source-domain data, and then the feature extractor and classifier are kept frozen, and the intermediate representations are deterministically edited before classification. For domain adaptation, we construct a domain-offset vector from marginal source and target representations. For domain generalization, we derive a source-domain cover-to-stego direction to guide sample-specific editing. Experimental results show that compared with the advanced methods, the proposed method can achieve high cross-domain detection performance, especially in terms of F1-score, while requiring no architecture modification or parameter updates after source-domain training.

In modern nuclear physics experiments, identifying events of interest is challenging for nuclear reaction studies with the active target Time Projection Chamber (TPC). In this work, machine learning techniques are employed to analyze the complex data of the 12C + 12C fusion reaction from a TPC named MATE (multi-purpose active-target time projection chamber for nuclear experiments). Specifically, we successfully applied Residual Neural Network (ResNet-50, ResNet-34 and ResNet-18) and Visual Geometry Group (VGG-19) to classify elastic scattering and fusion reaction events from the 12C + 12C reaction. The classification results of the four models are nearly identical, with accuracies of approximately 97% for the simulated data and 90% for the experimental data. Moreover, these approaches successfully identify some events that are misclassified by traditional methods. These models are also applied to classify events from different fusion reaction channels, with classification accuracies of approximately 95% on simulated data. In addition, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is developed to reconstruct the reaction vertex, providing an alternative strategy for vertex reconstruction. These results indicate that machine learning techniques can effectively classify reaction events from different channels and reconstruct the reaction vertex, thereby paving the way for future analyses of complex nuclear reaction data.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) trains reasoning models without labeled trajectories, relying on grouped rollouts to expose the policy to alternative reasoning paths and a verifier to score them. Rollout diversity has accordingly emerged as a central bottleneck in RLVR, with most existing methods broadening exploration through temperature, prefix, or rollout-selection adjustments. We identify a structurally distinguished but overlooked position for broadening this diversity: the first token after the reasoning marker. The policy's first-token distribution exhibits a sharply peaked yet correctness-decoupled phenomenon, and this first token position can broaden the regions a rollout group covers without altering the correctness signal. We introduce REFT (Rollout Exploration with First-Token Diversification), a light addition to the RLVR pipeline that samples first tokens uniformly from the policy's own top-$N$ candidates and allocates rollouts evenly, leaving every other component unchanged. Trained on the resulting diversified rollouts, REFT improves aggregate Pass@1, Pass@8, and Pass@64 over DAPO and GRPO baselines across four base models (0.5B-7B) and three difficulty regimes.

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reduces the inference cost of large language models by internalizing the explicit rationales. However, existing approaches typically lack alignment with explicit rationales and adaptivity to example complexity. In this work, we propose CIRF (\textit{\underline{C}hain-of-thoughts \underline{I}nto \underline{R}eusable \underline{F}unctional units}), an implicit CoT framework that performs reasoning as a dynamic sequence of discrete functional tokens. CIRF assigns a functional token to each semantically coherent reasoning unit in explicit CoT traces. The model is then fine-tuned to autoregressively generate functional tokens and their optional results, followed by the final answer. This design aligns latent reasoning with a sequence of functional units, facilitating parallel training, explicit rationale alignment, and adaptive reasoning. Extensive experiments on mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that CIRF provides a favorable accuracy-latency trade-off compared with state-of-the-art implicit CoT methods. Further analyses demonstrate that CIRF constructs distinct, interpretable functional tokens, leading to consistent performance improvements.

We study bandit learning in matching markets, where players and arms constitute the two market sides, and the players' utilities are linear in the arm contexts. In each round, new arms arrive with observable contexts. Then, the algorithm matches them to players, aiming to minimize each player's regret against a stable matching benchmark. This contextual structure creates significant complexity: subtle context shifts can slightly alter one player's utility while completely reconfiguring the underlying benchmark, causing large regret spikes for others. We address this in two settings: stochastic contexts, drawn from a latent distribution, and adversarial contexts, which may be arbitrary. For the stochastic case, we introduce a novel minimum preference gap to capture learning difficulty and provide a fully adaptive algorithm with an instance-dependent poly-logarithmic regret upper bound. We also establish matching instance-independent regret upper and lower bounds under a mild distributional assumption. For the adversarial setting, we propose a tractable regret notion that remains valid under arbitrary contexts and achieves an instance-independent sublinear regret bound via an adaptive algorithm.

Discovering novel stable molecules without training data remains a grand scientific challenge. Current molecular generative models are trained on large, pre-curated datasets, which introduce biases and limit exploration of novel chemistry. In contrast, we propose a new paradigm: autonomous, generalized agents capable of mapping vast, unknown chemical spaces without any pretraining. For the first time, we present AtomComposer, a self-guided agent that autonomously constructs valid 3D isomers under stoichiometric constraints and is trained exclusively online using reinforcement learning. Unlike existing approaches that generally overfit to a specific chemical formula, we establish a multi-composition training scheme that enables a broad generalization across diverse chemistry, guided by energy- and validity-based rewards. Our agent can discover up to an order of magnitude more valid isomers on unseen test formulas than existing single-composition reinforcement-learning baselines trained with per-step energy rewards. These results fulfill the promise of online reinforcement learning as a powerful paradigm for scalable, from-scratch exploration of chemical configuration space.

Feed-forward networks (FFNs) dominate the parameter count and computation of modern language models, yet existing pruning methods often struggle to convert sparsity into hardware-friendly inference efficiency gains. We introduce \textbf{PrunePath}, a budget-adaptive structured sparsification framework for FFN layers. Built on MoEfication, PrunePath replaces independent expert-wise thresholding with a softmax-normalized routing distribution and activates important experts under a cumulative-mass threshold. This formulation imposes a token-level probability budget, enabling adaptive expert counts and a direct inference-time sparsity knob from a single checkpoint. Across NLU, NLG, and instruction-tuning evaluations, PrunePath achieves a favorable sparsity--performance trade-off compared with existing static pruning and MoEfication-based methods. We further implement Triton kernels for KV-cache decoding to translate the resulting structured sparsity into practical memory savings and measurable decoding-speed improvements. These results demonstrate the superior performance of PrunePath for building highly sparse, deployment-friendly large language models.

AI-assisted research compresses ideation, implementation, evaluation, and manuscript writing into a single interactive loop. This compression is useful, but it also creates a publication risk: paper claims can become easier to state than to audit. We present ResearchLoop, an evidence-gated control plane for AI-assisted computational research. ResearchLoop treats research questions, task contracts, evidence objects, claim ledgers, closeouts, and paper bindings as durable project state, realized here as a repository-backed runtime. This technical report provides the complete protocol specification, state model, transition rules, claim-admission algorithm, and insight-compounding mechanism. It also reports the full experimental record spanning nine versions (V0--V9), including a self-hosting case study, a controlled task-suite study with component ablations, a mathematical olympiad evaluation, and a supplementary SciCode boundary experiment evaluated with the official generated-code harness. All artifacts, manifests, and verification reports are preserved in the project repository.

IMU preintegration is widely used in factor-graph-based visual--inertial, lidar--inertial, and radar--inertial state estimation, yet it is often treated as a specialized implementation separate from conventional IMU propagation. This note shows that IMU preintegration and propagation are equivalent realizations of the same underlying computation. We present a convention-agnostic view in which the preintegrated measurement, bias Jacobians, and covariance can be obtained by wrapping an existing IMU propagation routine, while a preintegration module can conversely recover state-transition matrices and propagated covariances. This perspective simplifies the reuse of existing propagation code, supports translation across different error-state definitions, and provides practical consistency checks for preintegration implementations. Experiments with random IMU sequences demonstrate close agreement between an RK4-based propagation implementation and GTSAM's tangent and manifold preintegration modules in the recovered Jacobians, covariances, and transition matrices.

Whether large language models (LLMs) construct internal spatial world models from pure-text descriptions remains contested, and whether such capabilities transfer across languages has not been systematically studied. We introduce MentalMap, a multilingual diagnostic benchmark with a six-level capability hierarchy (L0-L5) spanning atomic spatial facts to generative world-graph construction, together with four diagnostic axes probing frame of reference, reading-direction bias, reasoning-effort allocation, and hallucination. MentalMap is built from 100 ProcTHOR household scenes, covers eight typologically diverse languages plus a structured-text control, and contains 39 task families across 1,950 evaluation cells. Evaluating thirteen LLMs across scales and model families, we identify a universal L3 reasoning cliff: no model retains even half of its L0 performance on viewpoint reasoning once baseline atomic accuracy exceeds 40%. The cliff persists across languages, scales, and prompting strategies, while structured-output failures and reasoning patterns vary substantially across models. Human evaluation under the identical pure-text protocol reproduces the same failure pattern, suggesting that the bottleneck arises from text-only working memory constraints rather than being specific to current LLM architectures. Our findings reframe pure-text spatial reasoning as a multi-axis world-modeling problem and motivate multimodal and scratchpad-augmented reasoning as future directions.

Reinforcement learning algorithms are commonly analyzed (and designed) under the Markov assumption. This is unrealistic, as most environments encountered in practice are either partially observable, or require function approximation that restricts the agent to access non-Markovian state features. We consider the problem of learning an optimal reactive policy in a finite environment with deterministic observations (or equivalently, hard state aggregation). We introduce a new algorithm, Committed Q-learning, and prove almost-sure convergence to the optimal reactive policy under an intuitive assumption we call rewire-robustness. This assumption is strictly weaker than the $q_\star$-realizability condition used in prior work. Our algorithm is a variant of classical Q-learning in which the behavior policy commits to a single action upon entering a feature, and only resamples actions when the observed feature changes. A crucial part of our analysis is the introduction of quasi-Markov environments.

The Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) framework scales equilibrium computation to large zero-sum games by iteratively expanding a restricted strategy set using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). A central challenge is to construct, under limited computational budgets, a small strategy population whose induced game well approximates the full game. Existing PSRO variants typically expand the population using best responses to meta-strategies computed from restricted-game payoffs, which can lead to inefficient expansions that provide limited global improvement. We propose to guide population expansion by directly evaluating the post-expansion population quality. Specifically, we adopt Population Exploitability (PE) to measure how well a restricted strategy set represents the full game, and introduce a two-phase exploration--selection framework that explicitly minimizes PE during expansion. We instantiate this framework as Global PSRO, a practical DRL-based algorithm that efficiently generates candidate responses and estimates PE via parameter-sharing conditional neural networks. Experiments across multiple two-player zero-sum games show that Global PSRO achieves lower exploitability and approximates Nash equilibria with significantly fewer policy iterations than prior PSRO methods.

Real-time synthesis of high-fidelity 3D character motion from audio is a pivotal component for next-generation interactive avatars and virtual assistants. However, most existing approaches are limited to offline processing of complete audio sequences or are constrained to specific domains, rarely handling both speech and music effectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework designed to generate continuous, coherent full-body motion from streaming speech and music with low latency. Central to our approach is a unified streaming architecture capable of synthesizing continuous motion from incremental audio inputs. We employ a robust training strategy that enforces strong audio dependency, allowing the model to seamlessly generalize across conversational speech and rhythmic music without requiring explicit domain labels or mode switching. Additionally, we explored Reinforcement Learning to refine the quality of online generation. Furthermore, we bridge reactive animation with intent-driven behavior via a tool-call interface that allows upstream Large Language Models to inject explicit semantic control. By combining this controllability with stream audio-driven synthesis, our framework serves as a plug-and-play solution for transforming voice agents into interactive humanoid avatars. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art realtime baselines in motion quality and synchronization while maintaining the flexibility required for live deployment. Our code, pre-trained models, and videos are available at https://robinwitch.github.io/EchoAvatar-Page.

Object detection is an important task in computer vision, which aims to detect the objects of interest. through the given category list or query images. In this work, we propose a new problem of language-visual-complementary open-set object detection (LV-OSD), i.e., using the flexible text-based and/or image-based prompts to specify the desired object categories. This setting is more common and practical in real-world applications. For this purpose, we design a dual-branch detection framework, LVDor, which can simultaneously accept both text and image prompts. Specifically, we first build the Multi-modal Prompts (MPr) containing various text descriptions and image samples for each category. Subsequently, to bridge the semantic gap among the input image, text prompts, and image prompts, we design a Target-guided Prompt Dynamic Weighting (TPDW) module. Guided by the prior information of the target image, this module dynamically produces the text and image prompts that best align with the target semantics, achieving precise alignment and effectively reducing the discrepancy between the two modalities, thereby accommodating the LV-OSD setting. We also propose a simple Prompt Random Masking (PRM) mechanism during training to simulate the arbitrary combination of text and/or image prompts in testing. Extensive experimental results verify our problem formulation's reasonability and our method's effectiveness. Prompts and code will be released publicly.

Estimating the 9D pose of everyday objects from a single real-world image remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of large-scale supervision. Most existing datasets either rely heavily on synthetic renderings or provide limited coverage of real-world objects: the largest real-world 9D pose dataset to date contains only 17K annotated objects across 9 categories. We address this gap with Every9D-21M, a dataset of 9D pose annotations for 21.8M real-world images from 109K object- centric videos spanning 700 everyday object categories - two orders of magnitude larger than prior real-world 9D pose benchmarks in both image and category count. To achieve this scale, we leverage object-centric videos by reconstructing object- level point clouds via multi-view geometry and aligning similar instances into a shared canonical coordinate frame. Canonical poses are manually annotated for only a small set of reference objects (fewer than 0.01% of all images) and propagated to the remaining instances via cross-instance alignment. All propagated canonical poses are then verified from multiple viewpoints. We further introduce cross-category orientation rules that induce category-level symmetries, enabling symmetry-aware evaluation. Beyond establishing dedicated training and evaluation splits as a benchmark for 9D pose foundation models, we show that training on Every9D-21M improves performance on ImageNet3D and PASCAL3D+, and generalizes to HANDAL substantially better than training on ImageNet3D. Data and code are available at https://github.com/GenIntel/Every9D.