Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

Anomaly detection plays a critical role in identifying unusual patterns across domains such as fraud detection, network intrusion, and system fault diagnosis. Recently, Christoffel function-based methods, rooted in polynomial optimization, have emerged as promising alternatives to deep learning due to their strong mathematical foundations and computational frugality. However, their practical applicability is hindered by the need to invert a matrix whose size grows exponentially with the data dimension, rendering the method intractable even for moderate-dimensional datasets. This paper addresses the dimensionality limitations of Christoffel function-based anomaly detection while preserving its key theoretical properties, i.e., the on-off support dichotomy behavior and the accurate support shape capture. We introduce UCF, a univariate Christoffel function which is based on the squared distance between the query point and the support points. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark demonstrate that UCF consistently outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Average Precision. By resolving the scalability bottleneck of the Christoffel Function, this work expands the toolkit of anomaly detection methods with a robust, theoretically grounded, and universally applicable approach.

Question decomposition, i.e. breaking a complex query into simpler sub-queries whose answers are composed to produce a final answer, is a widely used strategy for improving LLM reasoning, yet it currently lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation. In this paper, we propose operads, mathematical structures that model many-in, one-out operations and compositions thereof, as a natural framework for describing question decomposition. We define the questions operad $Q$, in which operations correspond to question templates and composition corresponds to substitution of sub-answers, and show how QA models can be interpreted as algebras over $Q$. Beyond reframing existing practice, this operadic perspective points toward new methods, in particular a notion of operadic consistency, which measures whether a QA model's answers agree across the partial collapses of a question decomposition tree. Empirical evaluation of operadic consistency is reported in our companion paper (Bottman, Liu, and Richardson, 2026), which finds it strongly correlated with accuracy across twelve LLMs and four multi-hop QA datasets and outperforming standard temperature-based self-consistency baselines. We argue that operads are the natural mathematical home for question decomposition, and that invariants such as operadic consistency open new directions for analyzing and improving the reliability of multi-step reasoning.

Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(ε)\sim\log(1/ε)/λ_j$. The horizon is two-sided -- a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited -- and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot -- with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy -- calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting -- a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum -- the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.

Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

We present a Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network (DDE-GAN) for multimodal CT-PET image synthesis. Traditional GAN-based approaches often operate solely in the spatial domain and ignore geometric consistency, resulting in limited structural fidelity. DDE-GAN addresses these challenges by jointly learning from both spatial and frequency (Fourier) domains, capturing complementary anatomical and spectral information. Furthermore, rotational equivariance embedded in the physics of the CT and PET measurements are integrated into the loss of both the generator and discriminator to ensure consistent responses under rotations, improving anatomical accuracy. A hierarchical dual-domain training strategy enforces intra- and inter-domain consistency through multi-stage loss functions. Evaluated on the HECKTOR 2022 CT-PET dataset, DDE-GAN achieves superior synthesis quality over baseline models for CT-PET image synthesis. The results demonstrate that combining dual-domain learning with geometric equivariance substantially enhances multimodal image synthesis accuracy and robustness, enabling practical applications in PET completion and data augmentation.

Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

The design of reinforced concrete highway barriers is a safety-critical process that requires strict compliance with regulatory provisions such as the AASHTO-LRFD bridge design guidelines. Current engineering practice relies heavily on manual, iterative, and heuristic calculations to satisfy complex nonlinear material and mechanics constraints. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their direct application to structural engineering remains limited by hallucination risks and insufficient physical grounding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel "generation-evaluation-optimization" closed-loop framework for automated concrete barrier design using the multi-agent orchestration capabilities of AutoGen. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed agentic framework achieves over 98% design accuracy, significantly outperforming standalone general-purpose LLMs. More importantly, the study reveals that design performance is not necessarily correlated with model scale, where an 8B-parameter lightweight model could outperform unconstrained 631B-parameter flagship models. This finding highlights the potential to substantially reduce computational costs while improving the accessibility of AI-assisted engineering tools for industry applications. The source code for the proposed multi-agent design framework is available at the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/MXY820/barrier-design. Keywords: Structural Engineering; Multi-Agent Systems; Large Language Models; Concrete Barrier Design; AutoGen; Design Automation.

Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

We investigate limitations of learning $\tanh$ neural networks from point evaluations under finite-precision computations and $L^p$ accuracy guarantees, building on Berner, Grohs, and Voigtländer (2023). Our approach is based on a novel construction of sharply localized bump functions via iterated $\tanh$ activations. Using this mechanism, we show that, in a finite-precision setting, no adaptive randomized algorithm based on $m$ samples can achieve a convergence rate higher than the Monte Carlo rate $O(m^{-1/p})$ in the $L^p$ norm, unless the sampling budget grows exponentially with the size of the network parameters and architecture. The results reveal fundamental limitations imposed by finite precision on the learnability of classes containing localized bump functions, extending previous results for ReLU networks to the $\tanh$ setting.

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements. Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned through large-scale post-training to ensure fair and reliable behavior. In this work, we investigate how easily such guardrails can be broken by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We show that one-shot GRPO training on a single biased example is sufficient to induce systematic bias, with stereotype-driven reasoning generalizing across attributes, categories, and benchmarks. We further find that models differ in their susceptibility based on the initial likelihood of producing biased outputs. Our results reveal a critical vulnerability in post-training: alignment can be overridden by a single example.

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is bottlenecked by reward hacking, where the policy exploits errors in a proxy reward model (RM) and produces high RM scores without genuine quality gains. A natural mitigation is pessimism: lowering rewards in regions where the RM is uncertain. However, standard scalar RMs provide no principled notion of uncertainty. We argue that the right object is a distributional reward model $p(r\mid x,y)$. Under either a Bayesian inference or a KL-distributionally robust optimization (KL-DRO) lens, the KL-regularized RLHF objective admits a closed-form effective reward $\tilde r(x,y) = \pmβ\log\mathbb{E}_p[e^{\pm r/β}]$. The pessimistic branch unifies the prior heuristics for RM ensemble aggregation: mean aggregation, worst-case optimization (WCO), and uncertainty-weighted optimization (UWO) all emerge as limits or truncations of this single expression. This also clarifies the implicit assumptions of each existing rule.

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

Diffusion MRI enables non-invasive probing of tissue microstructure, but accurate parameter estimation is challenged by noise-related effects. In supervised machine learning frameworks trained on simulated data, discrepancies between the noise characteristics of simulated and acquired signals introduce a form of covariate shift, whereby the input signal distribution differs between training and inference. We investigated the impact of this mismatch on microstructure parameter estimation and propose a realistic noise synthesis (RNS) framework to mitigate it. RNS incorporates both the Rician expectation and the effective post-processing noise variance into simulated training signals. The Rician expectation was modelled using a noise standard deviation estimated with MPPCA, while the effective standard deviation was derived from spherical harmonic residuals of preprocessed data. The method was evaluated using the cylinder-zeppelin and the SANDI models on simulated datasets across multiple SNR levels and on in vivo diffusion data with repeated acquisitions. Sensitivity to noise misestimation was also assessed. Ignoring magnitude-induced noise effects during training produced systematic, SNR-dependent parameter bias, particularly at low SNR. Incorporating the Rician expectation substantially reduced bias to the level of noise-aware nonlinear least-squares fitting. Modelling the effective standard deviation further improved precision. Performance was largely independent of regression architecture but sensitive to accurate noise estimation. These findings demonstrate that realistic noise modelling in simulated training data mitigates signal-domain covariate shift and is essential for unbiased supervised microstructure estimation, particularly in low-SNR regimes associated with high b-values or high spatial resolution.

The rapid spread of fake news on social media has become a major challenge, particularly in multilingual and under-resourced contexts such as North Africa. In this paper, we introduce BOUTEF, a large-scale multilingual corpus designed to study the propagation, characteristics, and impact of fake news in Algeria and Tunisia. The corpus integrates three complementary components: fake narratives, genuine narratives, and associated user-generated comments, along with verified debunking information. It covers a wide range of languages and linguistic varieties, including MSA, Algerian and Tunisian dialects, Arabizi, French, English, and code-switched language. Building on this resource, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. We examine thematic distributions, linguistic and rhetorical strategies, sentiment patterns, and social engagement dynamics. Statistical analyses reveal significant associations between thematic categories and message veracity, as well as strong correlations between user engagement and the visibility of fake content. Our findings show that fake news relies heavily on emotionally charged narratives, sensational framing, and hybrid linguistic practices that enhance virality and audience engagement. In contrast, debunking content adopts a more factual and verification-oriented style. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between Algeria and Tunisia highlights both shared dynamics and country-specific characteristics shaped by sociopolitical contexts. The results emphasize the role of informal language practices in the diffusion and reception of misinformation. By providing a rich, annotated, and publicly available dataset, this work contributes to advancing research on fake news detection, low-resource language processing, and the understanding of information disorders in complex linguistic environments.

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

As autonomous and agentic AI systems scale in robotic and human-machine environments, managing hallucination and persistent but unjustified action remains an open challenge. Rather than attributing these failures solely to model or alignment limitations, this paper explores the architectural vulnerability of unbounded autonomy - the presumption that an agent should continue operating regardless of rising uncertainty. It introduces a theory of managed autonomy that defines intelligent behavior through the formal capacity to detect epistemic drift, suspend reasoning, attempt recovery, and ultimately surrender control when reliability diminishes. We instantiate this theory via the SMARt (Self-Managing Multi-tier Autonomous Reasoning with Regulated/Revoked transitions) model, a four-layer framework featuring Stable, Meta-cognitive, Assisted, and Regulated states. By developing a timed, guarded Petri net formulation, we establish theoretically bounded properties for the system, demonstrating how architecture can formally mandate escalation, constrain invalid outputs, and ensure governance reachability under specified conditions. We further analyze how incorporating domain-specific trigger sets across varied operational settings (e.g., healthcare, robotics, etc.) can systematically preserve safety, assuming completeness and soundness criteria are met. Because these triggers are designed to be adaptive, the SMARt model accommodates the safe, controlled expansion of an agent's operational scope over time. We conclude that formalizing failure management within the autonomy lifecycle is a crucial step toward realizing reliable and governed artificial intelligence.

Online conformal prediction must balance fast adaptation to distribution shift against stable coverage: feedback-driven methods react quickly but become volatile, while strongly discounted Bayesian methods lag and inflate intervals at tight coverage. We introduce \textbf{State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP)}, which forms the predictive quantile as a gated convex combination of long-term temporal inertia and local spatial evidence from a kernel density estimate, controlled by a single interpretable evidence threshold $K$. We establish three results: (i) asymptotic marginal validity of the resulting intervals; (ii) a closed-form expression for the MSE-optimal threshold, $K^*_{\mathrm{MSE}}=α(1-α)/M^{\mathcal{T}}$, trading the coverage-indicator (Bernoulli) variance against the temporal structural bias $M^{\mathcal{T}}$; and (iii) a rolling-origin procedure for selecting $K$ online -- consistent under stationarity, with $O(\sqrt{T\log N})$ regret against the best fixed $K$ and, for a segmented variant, a sublinear dynamic-regret bound under bounded drift. Across four financial-volatility and weather datasets, three target coverage levels, and eight baselines (including the strongest recent conditional-quantile methods, SPCI and KOWCPI), SA-BCP attains at-or-above-nominal coverage in most settings while producing substantially sharper intervals -- up to roughly $3\times$ lower Winkler score than discounted Bayesian CP at the tightest coverage -- and a coverage-matched audit confirms these efficiency gains are not an artifact of under-coverage. We disclose one principal limitation: a volatility-specialized conformal-GARCH competitor remains more efficient on its home volatility-base series, though it does not transfer across domains.

Motion planning for autonomous vehicles often requires satisfying multiple conditionally conflicting specifications. In situations where not all specifications can be met simultaneously, minimum-violation motion planning maintains system operation by minimizing violations of specifications in accordance with their priorities. Signal temporal logic (STL) provides a formal language for rigorously defining these specifications and enables the quantitative evaluation of their violations. However, a total ordering of specifications yields a lexicographic optimization problem, which is typically computationally expensive to solve using standard methods. We address this problem by transforming the multi-objective lexicographic optimization problem into a single-objective scalar optimization problem using non-uniform quantization and bit-shifting. Specifically, we extend a deterministic model predictive path integral (MPPI) solver to efficiently solve optimization problems without quadratic input cost. Additionally, a novel predicate-robustness measure that combines spatial and temporal violations is introduced. Our results show that the proposed method offers an interpretable and scalable solution for lexicographic STL minimum-violation motion planning within a single-objective solver framework.

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .