Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models excel at generating high-quality images through iterative denoising steps, but serving them under strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is challenging due to their high computational cost, particularly at larger resolutions. Existing serving systems use fixed-degree sequence parallelism, which is inefficient for heterogeneous workloads with mixed resolutions and deadlines, leading to poor GPU utilization and low SLO attainment. In this paper, we propose step-level sequence parallelism to dynamically adjust the degree of parallelism of individual requests according to their deadlines. We present TetriServe, a DiT serving system that implements this strategy for highly efficient image generation. Specifically, TetriServe introduces a novel round-based scheduling mechanism that improves SLO attainment by (1) discretizing time into fixed rounds to make deadline-aware scheduling tractable, (2) adapting parallelism at the step level and minimizing GPU hour consumption, and (3) jointly packing requests to minimize late completions. Extensive evaluation on state-of-the-art DiT models shows that TetriServe achieves up to 32% higher SLO attainment compared to existing solutions without degrading image quality.

Robotic cutting is a challenging, contact-rich manipulation task where the robot must simultaneously negotiate unknown object mechanics, large contact forces, and precise motion requirements. Our hypothesis is that this complexity can be alleviated through the design of a physically structured virtual-model controller that uses switched virtual mechanisms to generate a robust, rhythmic rock-chop motion for robotic cutting, without requiring pre-planned trajectories or precise environmental information. Motion is generated by the interaction between the environment, the robot's dynamics, and the virtual forces of the switching virtual mechanism, ultimately realized through the available actuation. Through theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we demonstrate that the controlled robot behavior settles into a stable periodic motion. Experiments with a Franka manipulator demonstrate robust cuts across five different vegetables, achieving sub-millimeter slice accuracy for thicknesses from 1 mm to 6 mm at a rate of nearly one cut per second. The controller maintains high performance despite changes in knife shape or cutting board height, and successfully adapts to a different humanoid manipulator, demonstrating robustness and platform independence.

A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements. The GESD dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Generative AI is likely to transform terminology work by creating new opportunities for automation. At the same time, it raises concerns about the future of terminologists and terminological resources, as efficiency pressures may encourage excessive automation based on the perception that human expertise can be replaced by AI. However, large language models remain unreliable for terminological purposes due to errors, hallucinations, and various forms of bias, making terminologists indispensable for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of terminological data. This paper argues that human-centered AI, an approach that emphasizes that AI's primary goal should be to contribute to human well-being, provides a framework for maximizing the benefits of generative AI while mitigating its risks. It contends that high levels of automation and meaningful human control are compatible and desirable, and that AI should enhance terminologists' capabilities while preserving their agency and decision-making authority. The implications of AI-assisted terminology work are examined through three interrelated dimensions: the augmented terminologist, ethical AI, and human-centered design. In particular, the paper examines how AI integration reshapes the role of the terminologist, affects professional values and working conditions, requires the management of AI-generated bias, and calls for the design of AI tools around the terminologist's needs. The paper concludes that a human-centered orientation is necessary to ensure that AI strengthens, rather than undermines, the essential role of terminology work in supporting specialized communication and the accurate transmission of knowledge across languages and cultures.

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies -- codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.

Retrieving fine-grained visual content based on user intent remains a challenge in multimodal systems. Although current Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) methods combine reference images with retrieval texts, they are constrained to image-level matching and cannot localize specific objects. To this end, we propose Composed Object Retrieval (COR), a new object-level retrieval task that retrieves target object(s) from candidate objects in a target image and grounds the retrieved result with pixel-level masks. Given a reference object, its mask, a target image, and a retrieval text describing the desired modification, COR requires models to perform composed visual-textual reasoning rather than relying on explicit category names. This setting introduces several challenges, including fine-grained compositional matching, negative-object filtering under visually similar distractors, and flexible single- or multi-object retrieval. We construct COR125K, the first large-scale COR benchmark, containing 125,541 retrieval triplets across 408 categories with base/novel splits for evaluating category-level generalization. We also present CORE, a unified end-to-end model that integrates reference region encoding, adaptive vision-text interaction, and region-level contrastive learning to align composed representations with target objects while suppressing background and distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CORE significantly outperforms existing CIR-based pipelines and strong baselines in both base and novel categories, establishing a simple and effective foundation for fine-grained object-level multimodal retrieval. Code will be released publicly at https://github.com/wangtong627/COR.

The growing sophistication of synthetic image and deepfake generation models has turned source attribution and authenticity verification into a critical challenge for modern computer vision systems. Recent studies suggest that diffusion pipelines unintentionally imprint persistent statistical traces, known as signal-leaks, within their outputs, particularly in latent representations. Building on this observation, we propose Proto-LeakNet, a signal-leak-aware and interpretable attribution framework that integrates Closed-set classification with a density-based Open-set evaluation on the learned embeddings, enabling analysis of unseen generators without retraining. Acting in the latent domain of diffusion models, our method re-simulates partial forward diffusion to expose residual generator-specific cues. A temporal attention encoder aggregates multi-step latent features, while a feature-weighted prototype head structures the embedding space and enables transparent attribution. Trained solely on closed data and achieving a Macro AUC of 98.13\%, Proto-LeakNet learns a latent geometry that remains robust under post-processing, surpassing state-of-the-art methods, and achieves strong separability both between real images and known generators, and between known and unseen ones. The codebase is available at the following link: https://github.com/claudiunderthehood/Proto-LeakNet .

Despite significant work on low-bit quantization-aware training (QAT), there is still an accuracy gap between such techniques and native training. To address this, we introduce CAGE (Curvature-Aware Gradient Estimation), a new QAT method that augments the straight-through estimator (STE) gradient with a curvature-aware correction designed to counteract the loss increase induced by quantization. CAGE is derived from a multi-objective view of QAT that balances loss minimization with the quantization constraints, yielding a principled correction term that depends on local curvature information. On the theoretical side, we introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal solutions for quantized optimization, and establish that CAGE yields strong convergence guarantees in the smooth non-convex setting. In terms of implementation, our approach is optimizer-agnostic, but we provide a highly-efficient implementation that leverages Adam statistics. CAGE significantly improves upon the prior state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, for similar computational cost: for QAT fine-tuning, it halves the compression accuracy loss relative to the prior best method, while for QAT pre-training of Llama models, its accuracy for 3-bit weights-and-activations (W3A3) matches the accuracy achieved at 4-bits (W4A4) with the prior best method. The official implementation can be found over https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CAGE .

Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing Support Boundary Data (SBD), generated via differential-privacy-inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to generate support boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet1K demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, 14%, 2%, respectively.

Concept erasure aims to selectively unlearning undesirable content in diffusion models (DMs) to reduce the risk of sensitive content generation. As a novel paradigm in concept erasure, most existing methods employ adversarial training to identify and suppress target concepts, thus reducing the likelihood of sensitive outputs. However, these methods often neglect the specificity of adversarial training in DMs, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this work, we investigate and quantify this specificity from the perspective of concept space, i.e., can adversarial samples truly fit the target concept space? We observe that existing methods neglect the role of conceptual semantics when generating adversarial samples, resulting in ineffective fitting of concept spaces. This oversight leads to the following issues: 1) when there are few adversarial samples, they fail to comprehensively cover the object concept; 2) conversely, they will disrupt other target concept spaces. Motivated by the analysis of these findings, we introduce S-GRACE (Semantics-Guided Robust Adversarial Concept Erasure), which grace leveraging semantic guidance within the concept space to generate adversarial samples and perform erasure training. Experiments conducted with seven state-of-the-art methods and three adversarial prompt generation strategies across various DM unlearning scenarios demonstrate that S-GRACE significantly improves erasure performance 26%, better preserves non-target concepts, and reduces training time by 90%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qhong-522/S-GRACE.

The phenomenon of linear mode connectivity (LMC) links several aspects of deep learning, including training stability under noisy stochastic gradients, the smoothness and generalization of local minima (basins), the similarity and functional diversity of sampled models, and architectural effects on data processing. In this work, we experimentally study LMC under data shifts and identify conditions that mitigate their impact. We interpret data shifts as an additional source of stochastic gradient noise, which can be reduced through small learning rates and large batch sizes. These parameters influence whether models converge to the same local minimum or to regions of the loss landscape with varying smoothness and generalization. Although models sampled via LMC tend to make similar errors more frequently than those converging to different basins, the benefit of LMC lies in balancing training efficiency against the gains achieved from larger, more diverse ensembles. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/DLR-KI/LMC. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. Our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.214 Brier score) forecasts competitively with established rating systems such as Weighted Elo. Although it does not improve on the baseline in unconditional accuracy, a forecast-encompassing test shows that it carries complementary information. A combined forecast significantly outperforms Weighted Elo, and there is some indication that the gain grows more strongly on the intransitive matchups our model targets. A graph-based representation of player interactions thus captures a forecasting signal that transitive rating systems discard, even between players who share no common opponents.

Medical AI systems demonstrated impressive diagnostic performance, yet they routinely show uneven accuracy across demographic groups, disadvantaging underrepresented populations. Although multimodal reasoning foundation models have pushed clinical diagnosis forward, reinforcement learning-based post-training tends to absorb and magnify the biases present in majority-dominated training corpora. We propose Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization (EQPO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning method that encourages balanced learning across heterogeneous clinical populations by adaptively reweighting samples according to subgroup representation, task difficulty, and data source. As demographic annotations are frequently missing in real-world clinical data, EQPO additionally applies unsupervised clustering to recover latent subpopulations when they are unavailable. On 7 diagnostic benchmarks covering 5 modalities (X-ray, CT, dermoscopy, mammography, ultrasound), EQPO reduces F1 standard deviation by 43.9% and the maximum cross-group F1 gap by 42.7% on QoQ-Med3-8B over vanilla GRPO, and narrows predictive parity gaps by 27.2% on MedGemma-4B over bias-mitigated RL baselines while raising F1 by 12.5% even without any demographic labels. Examining the training trajectory shows that EQPO steadily improves fairness over the course of optimization, in contrast to baseline methods whose fairness degrades as training proceeds, and the discovered implicit groups remain stable and align with masked demographic attributes. We further release EquiMedGemma-4B and EquiQoQ-Med3-8B, equitability-aware clinical VLLMs that attain state-of-the-art accuracy with markedly smaller demographic gaps.

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting consistent representations from graphs, independent of labeled information. However, existing methods predominantly focus on undirected graphs, disregarding the pivotal directional information that is fundamental and indispensable in real-world networks (e.g., social networks and recommendations).In this paper, we introduce S2-DiGCL, a novel framework that emphasizes spatial insights from complex and real domain perspectives for directed graph (digraph) contrastive learning. From the complex-domain perspective, S2-DiGCL introduces personalized perturbations into the magnetic Laplacian to adaptively modulate edge phases and directional semantics. From the real-domain perspective, it employs a path-based subgraph augmentation strategy to capture fine-grained local asymmetries and topological dependencies. By jointly leveraging these two complementary spatial views, S2-DiGCL constructs high-quality positive and negative samples, leading to more general and robust digraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world digraph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving SOTA performance with 4.41% improvement in node classification and 4.34% in link prediction under both supervised and unsupervised settings.

From loco-motion to dextrous manipulation, humanoid robots have made remarkable strides in demonstrating complex full-body capabilities. However, the majority of current robot learning datasets and benchmarks mainly focus on stationary robot arms, and the few existing humanoid datasets are either confined to fixed environments or limited in task diversity, often lacking human-humanoid interaction and lower-body locomotion. Moreover, there are a few standardized evaluation platforms for benchmarking learning-based policies on humanoid data. In this work, we present Humanoid Everyday, a large-scale and diverse humanoid manipulation dataset characterized by extensive task variety involving dextrous object manipulation, human-humanoid interaction, locomotion-integrated actions, and more. Leveraging a highly efficient human-supervised teleoperation pipeline, Humanoid Everyday aggregates high-quality multimodal sensory data, including RGB, depth, LiDAR, and tactile inputs, together with natural language annotations, comprising 10.3k trajectories and over 3 million frames of data across 260 tasks across 7 broad categories. In addition, we conduct an analysis of representative policy learning methods on our dataset, providing insights into their strengths and limitations across different task categories. For standardized evaluation, we introduce a cloud-based evaluation platform that allows researchers to seamlessly deploy their policies in our controlled setting and receive performance feedback. By releasing Humanoid Everyday along with our policy learning analysis and a standardized cloud-based evaluation platform, we intend to advance research in general-purpose humanoid manipulation and lay the groundwork for more capable and embodied robotic agents in real-world scenarios. Our dataset, data collection code, and cloud evaluation website are made publicly available on our project website.

Monitoring building construction sites requires comparing the as-planned design with the as-built state, which can be estimated in real time using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques. However, visual SLAM is prone to trajectory drift in construction environments, producing maps that are geometrically inaccurate with the actual environment. To address this limitation, we augment an existing RGB-D SLAM system with structural priors derived from the Building Information Model (BIM). The system associates detected walls with their BIM counterparts and includes these correspondences as geometric constraints in the back-end optimization, reducing drift and enhancing global consistency. The proposed method operates in real time and is validated on multiple real construction sites, achieving an average trajectory error reduction of 25.23% and a 7.14% improvement in map accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Robustness analyses further demonstrate resilience to incomplete BIM data and geometric discrepancies between as-planned models and the as-built environment.

The increasing complexity of modern power systems, driven by the integration of inverter-based and distributed energy resources, challenges the reliability of conventional protection schemes and motivates the use of machine learning for protection tasks. However, published results are often difficult to compare because datasets, sensing assumptions, and decision horizons vary across studies. This paper presents a controlled comparison of machine learning models for fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) under identical sensing, timing, and validation conditions on a common electromagnetic transient dataset, using decision windows of 10-50 ms to reflect protection-relevant time scales. For FC, the best-performing nonlinear models achieve F1 scores above 0.98 already at 10 ms, while lower-capacity models degrade at shorter horizons but improve with longer windows, indicating that relevant fault-type information is already present in the earliest transient. For FL, the top-performing models reach a stable localization error of about 10 % of normalized line length across all evaluated horizons, while weaker models form a clearly separated second performance tier. Line-resolved analysis shows that localization accuracy varies across grid segments, indicating topology-dependent difficulty rather than insufficient temporal context alone. These findings provide a controlled reference for comparing machine learning models across two protection tasks with fundamentally different information requirements.

Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback. SFT provides a useful behavioral anchor but can overfit to static demonstrations, whereas RL encourages exploration but may drift from expert behavior or exploit imperfect rewards. We propose \textbf{AAPA} (\emph{Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment}), a plug-in framework that augments existing post-training objectives with a sentence-level adversarial anchoring signal. AAPA compares policy rollouts with offline, pre-collected expert responses using a fixed lightweight discriminator, and therefore requires neither online teacher inference nor discriminator co-training during policy optimization. The same anchoring term can be added to SFT, GRPO, and CHORD while preserving their original training pipelines. Experiments on instruction-following benchmarks show that AAPA consistently improves the corresponding base objectives across model scales. In particular, the staged AAPA configuration improves over a strong GRPO baseline by 5.77\% on \texttt{Qwen3-0.6B} and 3.75\% on \texttt{Qwen3-4B}. Further analyses on response length, log-probability distributions, and discriminator variants suggest that adversarial anchoring provides a stable semantic grounding signal for preference optimization. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IsFaqq/AAPA}.

In-context imitation learning (ICIL) enables robots to learn tasks from prompts consisting of just a handful of demonstrations. By eliminating the need for parameter updates at deployment time, this paradigm supports few-shot adaptation to novel tasks. However, recent ICIL methods rely on Transformers, which have computational limitations and tend to underperform when handling longer prompts than those seen during training. In this work, we introduce RoboSSM, a scalable recipe for in-context imitation learning based on state-space models (SSM). Specifically, RoboSSM replaces Transformers with Longhorn -- a state-of-the-art SSM that provides linear-time inference and strong extrapolation capabilities, making it well-suited for long-context prompts. Through diverse experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of applying SSMs to ICIL, achieving improved generalization to both unseen and long-horizon tasks than Transformer-based ICIL methods by handling longer contexts at test-time. These results show for the first time that SSMs are an efficient and scalable backbone for ICIL. Our code is available at https://github.com/youngjuY/RoboSSM.

We present TASC, a Task-Aware Shared Control framework for relational telemanipulation that infers task-level user intent and provides assistance from motion-only input. To support prehensile relational tasks without predefined templates, TASC constructs an open-vocabulary interaction graph from visual input to represent functional object relationships, and infers user intent accordingly. A shared control policy then provides assistance during both grasping and object interaction, guided by spatial constraints predicted by a vision-language model. Our method addresses two key challenges in relational telemanipulation under shared control: (1) task-level intent inference from low-level motion commands, and (2) generalizable assistance across diverse objects and tasks. Experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that TASC improves task efficiency and reduces user input effort compared to prior methods, while enabling zero-shot generalization across diverse relational telemanipulation tasks. The code that supports our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/fitz0401/tasc.

We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) -- the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output -- and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

Benchmarks play a central role in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet their computational constraints often shape what is studied. Despite the motivation of lifelong learning, most continual RL papers consider only 3-10 sequential tasks, as CPU-bound environments make longer sequences impractical. Meanwhile, continual learning in cooperative multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce MEAL (Multi-agent Environments for Adaptive Learning), the first benchmark for continual multi-agent RL. By leveraging JAX and GPU acceleration, MEAL enables training on sequences of 100 tasks in a few hours on a single GPU. We find that long task sequences reveal failure modes that do not appear at smaller scales.

We introduce a novel History-Aware VErifier (HAVE) to disambiguate uncertain scenarios online by leveraging past interactions. Robots frequently encounter visually ambiguous objects whose manipulation outcomes remain uncertain until physically interacted with. While generative models alone could theoretically adapt to such ambiguity, in practice they obtain suboptimal performance in ambiguous cases, even when conditioned on action history. To address this, we propose explicitly decoupling action generation from verification: we use an unconditional diffusion-based generator to propose multiple candidate actions and employ our history-aware verifier to select the most promising action by reasoning about past interactions. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that employing a verifier significantly improves expected action quality. Empirical evaluations and analysis across multiple simulated and real-world environments including articulated objects, multi-modal doors, and uneven object pick-up confirm the effectiveness of our method and improvements over baselines. Our project website is available at: https://liy1shu.github.io/HAVE_CoRL25/